Entanglements of Jews and non-Jews in Private Spaces

In this project, I study personal encounters between Jews and non-Jews in Budapest and Vienna around 1900, despite historiography about Jews in the emergence of modernity remaining characterized by a narrative of private isolation. Jewish history has thus been conceived as particular and not as part of a general history. The absence of research on private everyday life in the historiography about Jews in the Habsburg Empire has resulted in a Jewish history of cultural participation but not of private involvement. Without an adequate elaboration of non-exclusive narratives of the Jews in Budapest and Vienna, we undervalue the impact of Jewish and non-Jewish relations, particularly in daily routines. My project remedies this gap by analyzing multifarious encounters between Jews and non- Jews in the private spaces of everyday life. I aim at examining and comparing housing and working sites in Budapest and Vienna as spaces that connected Jews and non-Jews in their historic past. Where and how did Jews and non-Jews in Budapest and Vienna come into contact with one another in private rooms around 1900? What kind of contacts existed between Jews and non-Jews outside public places? What areas of daily life can be defined as Jewish and non-Jewish spaces of interaction and interethnic exchange? What effect did such meetings have on prejudices? To realize the project, which stands at the intersection of Jewish studies, cultural studies and historiographyand is equally relevant to gender studies and to perspectives on interethnic relations in societies shaped by migrationI apply approaches of everyday history. By investigating identifications based on both similarity and difference within the spaces I label "private non-spaces," I aim to gain new insights about intimacy in housing spheres. As private-non-spaces I explore spaces that have been in the focus of research on Jewish and non-Jewish relations only rarely: Living and sleeping spaces (including bed lodgers, subtenants, house and apartment communities, domestic workers living in their own households), spaces for work at home (production of factory goods in private apartments in production communities), and forced accommodation spaces (spaces of forced living to which the state has access such as prisons and borstals, as well as institutions for handicapped people).

Around 1900, Jews and non-Jews in Budapest and Vienna did not live side by side without contact, but often literally door to door. The project shows that private spaces such as sublet rooms, staircases, home-work workshops and holiday lodgings gave rise to diverse, everyday relationships. These have received little attention so far, because historians long described Jewish life as a closed-off world. Starting Point of the Research Project Previous research has tended to narrate Jewish history as a history of culture, politics and public life, for instance in coffeehouses, theatres or universities. How people met in kitchens, sleeping quarters and hallways went unnoticed. The project examined precisely these spaces: subletting and bed lodging, shared housing communities, domestic workers, home-based work, and places of communal living under state control. The summer retreat, which shifted city life into the countryside, was part of this as well. Key Research Findings Private encounters were numerous, diverse and formative. They can be traced from shared living to working to leisure. Closeness could foster friendship, help and affection, but it could also intensify tension, mistrust and prejudice. For this kind of coexistence, we developed the concept of "conviviality" further, that is, everyday togetherness with all its frictions. The results raise new questions: how antisemitism developed in everyday life, how immigration and modernization changed cities, and what role cramped living conditions played in the sexual socialization and social networks of young people. The project offers a counter-image to the notion that societies always lived in separate groups. Living together is learned, negotiated and sometimes refused, on a small scale, in everyday life. This is also relevant for today's cities, where people of different backgrounds live in close quarters. Urban planning, housing policy and educational work can learn from this that shared places in the house and neighborhood can reduce prejudice, but can also entrench it. Dissemination of Results to Date The findings have fed into numerous publications and events. An article on encounters in corridors and staircases (Jewish Culture and History, 2024) examined the fleeting in-between spaces of the house. The special issue "Urban Encounters" appeared in the European Journal of Jewish Studies (2024), and the edited volume "Jewish Cultures of Rest and Recreation" will follow in 2027 with Berghahn. Conferences in Bad Aussee (2023) and Graz (2026), as well as workshops in Graz, Warsaw and Vienna, brought international research together. Two further special issues are currently forthcoming: on "Shared Housing" in the Journal of Social History and on "Textures of Conviviality" in Jewish Culture and History. An open-access issue (Mobile Culture Studies, 2024) and an Erasmus+ exchange on the visibility of Jewish history make the results accessible beyond the academic world.