Studia Judaeoslavica - Böcker

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