Jewish-Christian Relations in Poland: How One Town Overcame Its Past

The Podbrodzer Lecture is made possible by support from the Podbrodzer Progressive Benevolent Association. This lecture was established to honor the Jewish Community of Podbrodz, now named Padbrade.

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In a small Polish town, over 300 years ago, Jews were accused of killing a Christian child. The lengthy and complicated trial pitted Jews' enemies and supporters against each other, agitated courts and royal and church authorities. Despite efforts to defend the Jews, the trial ended with a loss of Jewish life, a distraught community, and a legacy, preserved in iconographic representations of the trial that would come to haunt the town centuries later. But today, after decades of trying to come to terms with its past, the town has succeeded in facing it. This talk explores how the history, memory, and art about this event has impacted contemporary Jewish-Christian relations.

About the Speaker

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Director of the Jewish and Israel Studies Program at Wesleyan University. She specializes in early modern religious and cultural history, with an emphasis on Jewish-Christian relations in Eastern Europe, the politics of religion, and transmission of culture among Jews and Christians across Europe in the early modern period. Teter is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland, Sinners on Trial (Cambridge University Press), and a co-editor of and contributor to Social and Cultural Boundaries in Pre-modern Poland (Littman). Teter's work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2012), the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (in 2007 and 2012), the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation (Israel), among others. In 2002, she was a Harry Starr Fellow in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, and in 2007-2008, an Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies also at Harvard University.