On Monday, 28th of May, SICSA held a research seminar titled: "NEHMEN NEKOME": Jewish Responses to Catholic Violence in Cracow after the Reformation.
The event was chaird by Prof. Israel Jacob Yuval of the Hebrew Unversity, and featured a lecture by SICSA's Posen Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Anat Vaturi.
The lecture discussed the reactions of Jewish community to Catholic violence in Cracow in the first half of the 17th century. In her analysis of the steps taken by the leaders of Jewish community in order to cope with the trauma of tumults and return to a peaceful coexistence with Christian neighbors, Dr. Vaturi outlined two main types of reaction: (1) inner-communal (based on Jewish liturgy and rituals yet with elements oriented at the Catholic surroundings) (2) 'civil reaction' - based on the Polish law system and Jewish legal status - aiming at legal punishing of the attackers and compensation. While focusing on post-trauma coping strategies of Jewish communities and the local Jewish-Christian reconciliation process Dr. Vaturi presented a pioneering approach that challenges "the lachrymose concept of history" and targets to fill one of the lacunae in Polish-Jewish historiography.
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