This talk will explore economic exchange as one of the registers through which Polish Jews encountered Jews of North Africa and the Middle East. Although the interwar period brought new borders, regimes, and passports, Polish-Jewish mobility built upon older commercial geographies that linked Eastern Europe with Mediterranean markets. Drawing on press accounts and archival traces of entrepreneurs and commercial intermediaries, I will show how trade brought Polish Jews into contact with Mediterranean Jewish agents, brokers, merchants, and professionals. By examining these interactions, the talk will ask how commerce shaped Polish-Jewish perceptions of Jews from Islamic lands in the interwar period.

Magdalena Kozłowska is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on the social history of Jews in the interwar period. She authored Świetlana przyszłość? Żydowski Związek Młodzieżowy Cukunft wobec wyzwań międzywojennej Polski (A Bright Future: The Jewish Youth Association Tsukunft Faces the Challenges of Interwar Poland, 2016), edited and translated from Yiddish of Wojna w Hiszpanii. Reportaż z głębi kraju (The Spanish Civil War: Report from the Hinterlands/Krig in Shpanien: Hinterland) by S. L. Shneiderman (2021), and edited a volume The World beyond the West: Perspectives from Eastern Europe (2022, with Mariusz Kałczewiak). Her publications include articles in East European Politics and Societies, Aspasia, Quest, Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Jewish Culture and History. Currently she is working on a book under the provisional title: Easterners: Polish Jews Looking at Middle Eastern Jews in the Interwar Period.

Sponsor: Jewish Studies Program

Co-sponsors: Departments of Comparative Literature, History, and Near Eastern Studies