At the boundary of cultures

This is how dr Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała talks about the project:

“In Jewish culture, the body has always been the subject of lively discussions, disputes and rabbinic treatises. Unlike Christianity, despite the control exercised, especially over the female body, through a series of various rituals, it was not a taboo subject and, as one scholar noted, the nation of the book was in fact a nation of the body. From the 1880s onwards, with increasing industrialisation, migration, modernisation, secularisation, the emergence of new political movements within and outside Jewish culture, until the outbreak of the Second World War, discourses about corporeality in Jewish culture began to undergo significant changes.

The aim of the project is to analyse the nature of these changes made visible in the press, literature, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, autobiographies, and political pamphlets in five languages – Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian – used by Jews living in the Polish lands covering the former territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and pre-war Poland; and in art (photography, film, press illustrations, magazine covers, painting, sculpture, and drawing) depicting the Jewish body.

The iconographic materials were not an addition, an illustration, to the content presented, but co-shaped the discourses on the body. The influence of photography and emerging cinematography on the perceptions of their own corporeality by the authors of autobiographical texts is mentioned more than once in the autobiographical sources. Therefore, iconographic sources are treated as a “sixth” language in the project. Importantly, each of the aforementioned languages served a different function: Yiddish, often referred to as the language of women, provides an intimate perspective; Hebrew, on the other hand, is the language of men’s treatises on the female body, so it provides a masculine perspective, which, with the emergence of Zionism, turns into a propagator of the cult of the new Jewish body (male and female) – muscular, healthy, and athletic; Polish, German, and Russian, on the other hand, provide access to the non-Jewish reader, so the sources in these languages are more autoethnographic in nature. In addition, Polish provided a hearing for many acculturated Jewish women at the turn of the century. Moving beyond the traditional chronology, the timeframe aims to examine in detail the impact of the First World War, which shook up hitherto known social norms, as reflected in fashion, in religious women’s abandonment of the custom of purifying themselves in the mikveh, in the emergence of mutilated, deformed bodies, reminding us of human frailty, on discourses of corporeality.

The project aims to analyse and confront one another with the changes taking place in the discourses on corporeality up to the outbreak of the Second World War, which introduced a completely new paradigm in thinking about the Jewish body and permanently changed the social structure in the Polish lands. What were the mechanisms shaping these discourses? What was the relationship between them? To what extent were the new models of Jewish corporeality linked to different variants of Jewish identity? How did new ideas about corporeality spread? These are just some of the questions that a team of seven philologists, historians, and art historians will try to answer.

The project, which builds on previous research on discourses of corporeality in Polish-Jewish writing, is innovative in its nature due to its very broad take on a topic that has not been the subject of major research to date. The results of the study of discourses on corporeality in five languages, in four different fields of creativity (literature, press, autobiography, visual arts) and in two different perspectives (male and female) will considerably broaden the existing knowledge not only of Jewish culture and history in Polish lands, but also of Polish social history and culture between 1880 and 1939. Clearly, the study of corporeality is linked to reproductive rights, sexuality, social norms, hygiene, healthy lifestyles and the development of sport, and therefore the results of the research will be of use to researchers from various fields of the humanities, such as historians, sociologists, social psychologists, theologians, cultural scholars, art historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, Germanists, Ruthenians, Polish scholars, Yiddish scholars and Hebrew scholars. Because of its transdisciplinarity, the project involves the use of a variety of research methods used in different academic disciplines, including: discourse analysis, gender theory and criticism, archival and literary analysis, and source criticism. As, in addition to anthologies of sources, monographs, popular science, and scholarly articles, one of the outcomes of the project will be the creation of a virtual map showing the spread of ideas about corporeality, the project will also make use of machine-learning methods and the process of automatic recognition of naming units. The source text base for the creation of this map will be the Jewish press published in five languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian) in the Polish lands between 1880 and 1939.”

Dr Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała mainly deals with 19th century Polish-Jewish literature and press, and is interested in the boundary of cultures. Currently, she is fascinated by how the Polish-Jewish cultural boundary reveals itself in discourses on corporeality and sexuality. She is invariably curious about the non-obvious relations between Jewish and non-Jewish social actors at the turn of the 20th century. She will carry out a project worth PLN 3,175,540 at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław.

Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała is a graduate of the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw (2009) and the Institute of Polish Literature at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw (2007). In 2013, at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw, she defended (with distinction) her PhD thesis, which is a monograph of the weekly newspaper “Izraelita”, which was published in print by the Jagiellonian University Publishing House in 2014.

In 2015-2018 – head of the research project Polish-Jewish Literature 1861-1918 conducted at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University within the Sonata grant (NCN). In 2011-2014, she was a member of the research team of the Cultural and Literary Polish-Jewish Contacts. History and contemporaneity within the framework of a professorial grant to prof. dr hab. Eugenia Prokop-Janiec (FNP Master Programme). From 2020 to 2023, at the Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw and in collaboration with the UCL Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies (Prof. François Guesnet), she directed the project Discourses on the Body and Sexuality in Polish-Jewish Women’s Writing 1890-1918 carried out under the Opus grant (NCN).

Major publications:

1. Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała, “Reflection on the female body in Polish-Jewish ego-documents of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – challenges and opportunities,” Jewish Culture and History, vol. 24, issue 2 (2023): 157-179. DOI: 10.1080/1462169X.2023.2198874

1. Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała, „Female Body and Sexuality Reflected in Ego-documents of Acculturating Jewish Women in the Partitioned Territory of Poland at the Beginning of the 20th Century,” Nordost-Archiv Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte. Begehren macht Akteur*innen. Praktiken der Subjektivierung im 20. Jahrhundert/Desire Creates Involvement. Practices of Subjectification during the 20th Century, ed. Dietlind Hüchtker, Claudia Kraft, Katrin Steffen, 29. Jahrgang 2020, Lüneburg 2023, 35-59. 
2. Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała, “Polish-Jewish Female Writers and the Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Aspasia vol. 16 (2022): 110-129. DOI: 10.3167/asp.2022.160108
3. Literatura polsko-żydowska 1861-1918. Studia i szkice, red. Z. Kołodziejska-Smagała, M. Antosik-Piela, Kraków 2018.
4. Literatura polsko-żydowska 1861-1918. Antologia, red. Z. Kołodziejska-Smagała, M. Antosik-Piela, Kraków 2017.
5. „Izraelita” (1866-1915). Znaczenie kulturowe i literackie czasopisma, Kraków 2014.