Studia Judaeoslavica – serie

The book focuses on the history, ethnography, and convoluted ethnic identity of the Karaites, an ethnoreligious group in Eastern Galicia (modern Ukraine). The small community of the Karaite Jews, a non-Talmudic Turkic-speaking minority, who had been living in Eastern Europe since the late Middle Ages, developed a unique ethnographic culture and religious tradition. The book offers the first comprehensive study of the Galician Karaite community from its earliest days until today with the main emphasis placed on the period from 1772 until 1945. Especially important is the analysis of the twentieth-century dejudaization (or Turkicization) of the community, which saved the Karaites from the horrors of the Holocaust.

New Perspectives on 2 Enoch: No Longer Slavonic Only presents a collection of papers from the fifth conference of the Enoch Seminar. The conference re-examines 2 Enoch, an early Jewish apocalyptic text previously known to scholars only in its Slavonic translation, in light of recently identified Coptic fragments. This approach helps to advance the understanding of many key issues of this enigmatic and less explored Enochic text. One of the important methodological lessons of the current volume lies in the recognition that the Adamic and Melchizedek traditions, the mediatorial currents which play an important role in the apocalypse, are central for understanding the symbolic universe of the text. The volume also contains the recently identified Coptic fragments of 2 Enoch, introduced to scholars for the first time during the conference.

The Veil of Moses describes the creation of Russian romantic literary stereotypes which shaped the opinion of the Russian public on the Jews. These stereotypes in turn generated long-lasting habits of dealing with Jews and Jewish themes in Russian culture and politics. This volume introduces a formidable corpus of previously neglected evidence into the scholarship, namely, journalism and second- and third-rank prose. Journalism, influenced by more humane Western attitudes, reflected changes and presented a more objective picture of the Jews. It was the romantic prose, full of mythology and appealing to dark instincts that created the most odious anti-semitic clichés.

In The Slavonic Texts of 2 Enoch, Grant Macaskill publishes the manuscript evidence for this important pseudepigraphon in a format that, for the first time, allows synoptic comparison of the variants encountered. With the long and short recensions represented on facing pages, and variants listed against two exemplars (J and A), readers will be able to weigh the textual and linguistic evidence in a way that has previously been hindered by the available publications of 2 Enoch. The book also includes an introductory discussion of the manuscripts and the problems associated with text-critical work on them, and a translation of the neglected manuscript B, with notes on the significance of its readings for the reconstruction of an ur-text.

Jewishness in Russian Culture is devoted to new approaches and methods for the study of Jewish acculturation in Russian literature and its effects. It attempts to redefine criteria and borders of a discipline situated roughly between Judaica Rossica and Rossica Judaica. The monograph describes a series of important literary Russian-Jewish cultural events and figures belonging synchronically or diachronically to both disciplines. Thus it unites within a new conceptual framework the data accumulated by scholars and disciplines that exist separately in different research spaces that do not overlap, Jewish Studies and the history of Russian culture. The emerging picture shows the development of a historical plot along the axis of acculturation and anti-Semitism, accepting and/or trying to be accepted, being rejected and/or rejecting, and being within or without.

An urban biography, Brody: A Galician Border City in the Long Nineteenth Century reconciles 150 years of the town’s socioeconomic history with its cultural memory. The first comprehensive study of this city under Habsburg-Austrian rule, Börries Kuzmany advises against reading urban history solely through the national lens. Besides exploring Brody’s extraordinary ethno-confessional structure—Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians—Kuzmany examines the interrelation between the city’s geographical location at the imperial border, its standing as a key commercial hub in East-Central Europe, and its position as a major springboard for the dissemination of the Haskalah in Galicia and the Russian Empire. After delving into the contradictory perceptions of Brody in travelogues, fiction and memory books, Kuzmany uses contemporary and historical photographs to provide an illustrated walking tour of this now Ukrainian town.

This volume contains selected papers from an international conference held in 2009 in Varna, Bulgaria. The papers represent major trends and developments in current research on the medieval Slavonic biblical tradition, primarily in comparison with Greek and Hebrew texts. The volume covers the translation of the canonical, apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books of the Old and New Testaments and its development over the ninth to sixteenth centuries. Another focus is on issues relating to Cyril and Methodius, the creators of the first Slavonic alphabet in the ninth century and the first translators of biblical books into Slavonic. The analytical approach in the volume is interdisciplinary, applying methodologies from textual criticism, philology, cultural and political history, and theology. It should be of value to Slavists, Hebraists and Byzantinists.

Can studying an artist’s migration enable the reconfiguration of art history in a new and “global” mode? Michail Grobman’s odyssey in search of a contemporary idiom of Jewish art led him to cross the borders of political blocs and to observe, absorb, and confront different patterns of modernism in his work. His provocative art, his rich archives and collections, his essays and personal diaries all reveal this complexity and open up a new perspective on post-World War II twentieth-century modernism – and on the interconnected functioning of its local models.

This book is the only comprehensive treatment in any language of a rather “exotic” Balkan Jewish community. It places the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the context of the Jewish world, but also of the world within which it existed for around five hundred years under various empires and regimes. The Bosnian Jews might have remained a mostly unknown community to the rest of the world had it not played a unique role within the Bosnian Wars of the early 1990s, providing humanitarian aid to its neighbor Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.Watch Francine Friedman's presentation on The Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina