These texts were chosen in order to illustrate the implications of the growth in Jewish population in Poland's larger towns during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the number of Jews grew faster than the non-Jewish authorities would allow the Jewish quarters to expand.  This led to an increasing degree of crowding in the Jewish quarter as a whole as well as in individual houses. To illustrate this, some demographic data on the situation in the Jewish quarter of Poznan may be seen in the presentation.

The first text is drawn from the Pinkas (Record Book) of the Jewish community of Poznan in 1686 and deals with the community's attempt to make optimum use of the housing stock in the Jewish quarter. In order to ensure that as many families as possible were able to have their own apartment, the community cancelled the halakhic right of Bar metzera (see: Shulkhan Arukh, Hoshen Mishpat, #165), which gives neighbors first option on purchasing property when put on the market.  It also forbad homeowners to knock down adjoining walls to turn two small apartments into one larger one and ordered them to rent out all empty apartments.  The community also capped rental charges which tended to rise due to increased demand.  Once again, this was aimed at allowing more families to rent their own apartments.  Some idea of the expense involved in renting an apartment is given in a comparison with the Rabbi's salary and expenses from 1638.

The term used here to indicate an apartment, "Heated Room", is found in all the relevant languages of the period: Bet horef in Hebrew, izba in Polish, and Stube in German and Yiddish.  The heated room formed the center of social life in the apartment, with the other rooms (often little more than alcoves) serving only as auxiliary spaces.

The following texts, drawn from the 1595 constitution of the Jewish community in Krakow, shed light on cultural attitudes to communal living.  The first stipulation seems to indicate low expectations of privacy: if women in a room did not open the door immediately on its being knocked, they were to be punished for an infraction of the prohibition on playing cards.  The second regulations which dealt with socio-economic regimentation regarding the size of wedding feasts for the different strata of Jewish society, set strict limits on the number of guests to be invited.  However, in each case, neighbors living in the same house (or sharing the same apartment) were exempted.  This might seem to indicate that, in Krakow at least, neighborly ties were understood as being particularly close – more important than friends, and possibly even than family, who were not included in the exemption.

The third text is a rabbinical responsum composed by Rabbi Yitzhak ben Avraham "Hagadol" of Poznan (1610s-1685, rabbi of Poznan, 1667-1685).  Dealing with a case of adultery in the town of Labiszyn, not far from Poznan, the responsum's halakhic issue was that of Edei Kiur (see: Shulkhan Arukh, Even Ha'ezer, #11); the problem being that despite all kinds of partial testimony, no single witness had actually seen an act of adulterous intercourse taking place between two clearly identifiable individuals.  From the graphic testimonies, it seems that in the living conditions of the period it was difficult, not to say impossible, to achieve intimacy in privacy.  From the response, which indicated that failure to report such an incident to the local rabbi cast doubt upon the veracity of the witness, it would seem that the crowded living conditions could also act as a form of social control, in which any form of behavior outside accepted norms would immediately be noticed and reported to the authorities.

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