At the Conference, Scholars Will Take a People-To-People, Micro-Historical Approach to the History of Eastern European Jewry
On 4–5 July, historians of different generations from Lithuania, Poland, Israel, the USA, and Japan will gather at the Faculty of History of Vilnius University (Room 211) for the international scientific conference "History from Below: a Micro-historical Approach to the Studies of the Eastern European Jewry".
This conference will aim to present and discuss the ways in which the expanding array of historical sources adds to and expands, or perhaps complicates and even challenges, the historical studies of the Jewish past in Eastern Europe, their presentation as well as the emergence of new promising avenues of research.
"The conference will focus on the micro-historical approach, which has given rise not only to the historical representation and broader contextualization of local everyday phenomena, but also to a deeper understanding of hitherto little-studied exceptional phenomena such as people's behaviours, habits, skills, emotions, living environments, childhood, education, and travel experiences. Micro-history tells the small stories of ordinary people and provides insight into the everyday life of most of society. At the same time, it provides a methodological framework for combining approaches, focusing on well-documented cases and their wider conceptualization. This approach is suitable and can be applied to the research of the social and cultural history of different chronological periods", says Professor Jurgita Verbickienė, one of the organizers of the conference.
Micro-history gravitates towards studies of particular cases – a story of one person's life and emotions, representing the experiences or choices of a particular social group. By analyzing the details of a single localized event, it delves into the behaviour of groups of people and the motives behind their actions.
Micro-historical research is not a new field of research in the world or in Lithuania. For decades, scholars who have been conducting these studies have been highlighting the potential of the micro-historical approach: micro-level research can reveal new aspects of a phenomenon, and it is much more productive than case studies, as it can often provide answers to the "big questions of history". It also emphasizes agency and makes an individual an important object of historical narrative. Another clear advantage of the micro-historical approach (research practice) is that it reveals the limits of cognition and, much better than macro-process analysis, it can show how much we don't know.
The micro-historical approach is not new in Jewish historical research, but there are still few such studies in Lithuania. And the small number of such studies is natural because in general, Jewish issues have been little explored in Lithuanian historiography (the only exception would be Holocaust studies). Therefore, the arrival of the world's best specialists to the conference in Vilnius and the sharing of their experience would make an important contribution to the development of research on this issue in Lithuania.
The organizers and partners of the conference are Vilnius University, the Lithuanian Institute of History, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.