Annie Nicolette Josephus Jitta was born in Amsterdam in 1904. Her Jewish family originated in Bamberg in Bavaria, but moved to Amsterdam in 1812, where her ancestor Nathan Joseph adopted the surname Jitta in response to Louis Bonaparte's edict that all inhabitants of the Low Countries should be registered with a family name. She attended schools in Amsterdam (Meisjeslyceum), Utrecht and The Hague, before taking an art history degree at the University of Leiden. She gained her PhD in 1932 under the supervision of Professor G. A. S. Snijder. It formed the basis for her book Ancestral portraiture in Rome and the art of the last century of the Republic.
