The Social World of a Catholic Woman and Her Jewish Family in Fin-de-Siècle Europe: Polish Culture, National Identity, and Religious Change

This article examines how evolving conceptions of national belonging affected the everyday lives of assimilating Jewish families in turn-of-the-century Warsaw by reconstructing the social world of a prominent Polish Jewish publisher’s family. Drawing on a diary written by the publisher’s daughter from 1895 to 1902, the article examines factors in both public and private life that influenced the family’s assimilation and conversion to Catholicism. Her chronicle is a window onto how European societies understood conceptions of ethnicity, nation, and race; indistinct boundaries between these conceptions; and contradictions in the role of religion and culture in notions of national belonging. This case study of assimilation and conversion casts in sharp relief how evolving ideas about national belonging and ethnicity in public realms of political ideology and cultural life were experienced in the private realms of social life and the home. The diary brings to the surface the effects of these political ideas on individual identifications as reflected in cultural practices, reading habits, marriage patterns, and religious change. The life paths of the diary’s author and her family reflected constricting possibilities for Jews to straddle the divide between Jewish and Catholic societies in the Polish lands by the turn of the twentieth century. The family’s history underscores the impact of exclusionary political ideologies on the everyday lives of individuals whom these ideologies defined as the “other.”