In 1577, a petty pawnbroker named Ester lost a clasp belonging to a Prague noblewoman, Lady Juliana the Fifth. Having been traded repeatedly between anonymous pawnbrokers, the clasp was eventually tracked down in the Polish city of Poznań, by which time Ester had already fled Prague and taken refuge in Cracow. In this essay, I use the subsequent criminal court case to explore this illuminating episode in the history of the city's Jewish Quarter. Taking place in the late Renaissance, during what has often been referred to as the Jewish “Golden Age,” I argue that this dramatic event provides access to the realities of an era often characterized as harmonious. I position pawnbroking as an industry that invited intimate and regular cross-confessional contact, and one that therefore offers up new opportunities to consider the nature of coexistence. By following the movement of both Ester and the pawned clasp from Prague to Poland, I also show how attention to pawnbroking can illuminate a constellation of transregional connections that stretched from Bohemia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to its east, revealing the otherwise unrecorded ways in which Prague's Jews were connected to the Ashkenazi diaspora.

1577年，一个名叫埃斯特（Ester）的小卒子失去了一个属于布拉格贵族朱莉安娜五世（Lady Juliana the Fifth）的扣子。经过多次在匿名典当行之间的交易，最终在波兰的波兹南市找到了这个扣子，那时埃斯特已经逃离了布拉格，避难了克拉科夫。在本文中，我将使用随后的刑事法院案件来探讨这座城市的犹太区历史上的这一启发性事件。我认为这发生在文艺复兴后期，通常被称为犹太人的“黄金时代”，这一戏剧性事件使人们能够进入通常被称为和谐时代的现实。我将典当行定位为邀请亲密且定期的跨cross悔接触的行业，因此该行业提供了新的机会来考虑共存的性质。