Maria Cieśla

Maria Cieśla has studied history and Jewish Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; she completed her PhD at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw ( in 2010), where she has been working as an assistant professor since 2011. She was a post–doc fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Theology of Conversion Project), the University of Southampton, the Herder Institute in Marburg, the Lithuanian Institute of History, and the Israeli Academy of Sciences. From 2015 to 2019, she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (Project Region and Regionality). She specializes in the history of Christian-Jewish relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the early modern period.

Academia: https://ihpan.academia.edu/MariaCie%C5%9Bla

https://ihpan.edu.pl/en/employees/researcher/maria-ciesla/

Microhistory of coexistence. Jews and Christians in a premodern town. The case of Slutsk(Słuck)

The project presents a case study of the town of Slutsk (Słuck) in the 17th century. With around 7,000 - 9,000 inhabitants, Slutsk was one of the largest and most important private (noble) towns in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 17th and 18th centuries. Slutsk was a multiethnic and multireligious town. The project aims to answer how local, multireligious urban communities were formed in Poland-Lithuania in the 17th century and what role the Jews played in forming the urban community.
The project uses microhistory as a research method, focusing on single actors and their activities. I assume that the relationship between Jews and Christians was created in everyday life in daily (reciprocal) actions determined contextually in specific spaces in the town. Using an actor-oriented perspective allows me to transcend the estate and religious division in the analysis of pre-modern society and thus to link the attention to social processes often overlooked in previous research. To illustrate the diversity of possible relationships between Jews and Christians, I use the concept of "social space." Inspired by sociological and anthropological studies, I understand "space" as a social product that is produced through the activities of social actors (Jews and Christians). Common Christian-Jewish spaces such as living (neighbourhood), work, leisure, local politics, courts, religion, and conflict will be analyzed in more detail.