Table Of ContentPROPOSAL # 5
Cultural Archaeology of Jews And Slavs:
Medieval and Early Modern Judeo-Slavic
Interaction and Cross-Fertilization
Prof. Moshe Taube - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Alexander Kulik - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Cultural Archaeology of Jews And Slavs:
Medieval and Early Modern Judeo-Slavic
Interaction and Cross-Fertilization
Research group proposal submitted by
Prof. Moshe Taube
Department of Linguistics
Department of Central and Eastern European Cultures
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
[email protected] i.ac.il )
Dr. Alexander Kulik
Department of Central and Eastern European Cultures
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
[email protected] )
CULTURAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF JEWS AND SLAVS:
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN JUDEO-SLAVIC
INTERACTION AND CROSS-FERTILIZATION
Research group proposal
for a six-month research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies,
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
March-August, 2011
ABSTRACT
Bringing together scholars of comparative history, philology, and religion, the proposed
research group will use methods of cultural archaeology to explore Medieval and Early Modern
Judeo-Slavic transparency. The participants understand cultural transparency as the
permeability of the two cultures, which facilitates the exchange of ideas and genres between
them. What is cultural archeology? It implies methods of multi-disciplinary research based on
the assumption that East Europe represented a melting pot characterized by an intensive
cross-fertilization of diverse ethnic, linguistic, scientific, and confessional legacies. Cultural
archaeology analyzes various historical, religious, and literary texts by looking at them as at a
palimpsest which reveals earlier texts and discourses shaped by their contemporary
socio-cultural context. The group calls it archaeology since it helps uncover earlier layers of
culture and reconstruct the unknown context by digging into the existing historical texts. The
group defines it as cultural because they use an array of methods characteristic to various fields
of humanities, from history and sociology to philology and linguistics.
The proposed theme has wide methodological ramifications reaching beyond the
Judeo-Slavic cultural realm. Whereas Jews and Slavs often appeared in scholarly discourse as
separate and essentially incongruent entities, this group proposes to build a model of
cross-cultural interaction in order to better understand other situations where different
faith-based ethnic cultures cohabit. The group will seek to reconstruct ways, methods, and forms
of Judeo-Slavic cross-fertilization using historical and philological techniques previously
brought together in Biblical studies (f. e., by Richard Friedman) but almost never used as part of
cultural studies. These techniques engulf but are not limited to the reconstruction of an accurate
context, a key method in historical studies; a comparative analysis of theological discourses,
characterizing the religious studies; and the discussion of socio-linguistic aspects of verbal
usage, crucial for a philologist. The group will define a corpus of East European Slavic and
Jewish texts through which one can see earlier layers of Slavic-Judaic interaction.
Focusing on previously ignored or under-explored Medieval and Early Modern texts and
documents, the group will seek to investigate the Jewish and Slavic historical and cultural
legacies—texts, traditions, and sensibilities—some considered irretrievably lost, some
misinterpreted or not integrated into discussion, and some regretfully neglected. In the course of
its work, the group will organize a two-day international conference on cultural archeology. It
will share the results of its research in a collection of thematically and methodologically closely
linked essays to be published in the journal Jewish History, with the organizers of the research
group as guest editors. This publication will be followed by a volume summarizing the results of
the research work to be included in the series Studia Judaeoslavica.
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CULTURAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF JEWS AND SLAVS:
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN JUDEO-SLAVIC
INTERACTION AND CROSS-FERTILIZATION
Research group proposal
for a six-month research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies,
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
March-August, 2011
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
While previous studies dedicated to Judeo-Slavic dialogue considered Jews and Slavs as
two separate entities divided by religious, social, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic barriers, this
research group will operate on an opposite assumption—that the barriers between Jews and
Slavs were porous, that religious differences quite often enhanced the exchange, and that some
subfields such as elite and popular cultures were more susceptible to cross-fertilization than for
example political discourse, therefore similarities between them overran the differences.
Furthermore, this group seeks to complicate the assumption that Judeo-Slavic interaction was
based predominantly on Slavic borrowings from Jewish literary legacy. The studies by the
group participants will demonstrate that interaction depended not only and not necessarily on
direct borrowings, but also on transparency of a variety of East European cultures, which shared
the common pool of ideas, images, and genres. This emphasis on a common inventory of texts,
feelings, and ideas (used by cultural historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis) will help the group
to elaborate an innovative methodology of studying cultural interactions that makes even both
participants, Slavs and Jews, in the dialogue and exchange. At the same time the hypothesis of a
shared pool of meanings and feelings (used by Jean-Christophe Agnew) will help avoid the
methodological trap which usually privileges one of the cultures at the expense of the other.
Digging through the layers of Medieval and Early Modern texts the group will also seek to
reconstruct common pool of ideas, rites, and traditions, fertilizing both Jewish and Slavic
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cultures in Eastern Europe.
Starting with Abraham Harkavy, the founder of Judeo-Slavic studies and the custodian
of the Imperial Oriental collection in St. Petersburg, Judeo-Slavic discourse has been the focus
of scholars interested in mutual influences between these peoples. At its early stages the field
was dominated by historians on the one hand and linguists on the other. While linguists, e.g.
Max Weinreich, pointed out the amazing level of Slavic influence on the linguistic behavior of
their Jewish neighbors, evidenced by borrowings and calquing—for example, in field of
Yiddish-Slavic sociolinguistics—historians such as Simon Dubnow repeatedly emphasized the
insurmountable differences between Jews and Slavs and pointed to victimization as the key
element of Jewish-Slavic interaction. Philologists like Moshe Altbauer, Horace Lunt, Nikita
Mescherskij and their successors in Israel and Russia achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in
our understanding of the cultural contacts between Jews and Eastern Slavs in the Middle Ages.
Drawing from the Cairo Genizah findings, medievalist historians from Solomon Schechter to
Norman Golb-and Omeljan Pritsak, made a remarkable effort to go beyond the previously
unchallenged perceived patterns of Judeo-Slavic exchange and suggested new ways to assess,
for example, the impact of the Khazars on Kievan Rus. In specific subfields, particularly in
Early Modern Jewish-Polish relations, scholars such as Gershon Hundert, Moshe Rosman, and
Adam Teller advanced a brand new model of a productive socio-cultural exchange. The interest
in the field began to grow significantly in late 1980s and 1990s with a revival of Judeo-Slavic
studies in Eastern Europe. Promising works providing textual proof to intensive contacts
between Jews and Slavs in Medieval and Early Modern times appeared in the multi-volume
series Jews and Slavs established at the Hebrew University in 1991. The new book series Studia
Judaeoslavica started by Brill Publishers this year (2008) aims to provide a forum for the
growing interest and research in the field across disciplines.
These and other works cemented the field of Judeo-Slavic studies and shaped key
questions for the agenda of the proposed research group. First, how to define the “texts”
reflecting Judeo-Slavic transparency and how to circumscribe a corpus of such texts? Second,
what are the methodological grounds uniting the efforts of scholars in various field of
humanities engaged with the study of Judeo-Slavic interaction? Third, what problems were
created or left by this previous work? Fourth, what are the remaining lacunae?
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The participants of this research group share some basic approaches to these questions.
They have seen that the absence of clearly defined methodological grounds and of a defined
corpus of texts marked by an intensive Judeo-Slavic cross-fertilization triggered the emergence
of entirely mythological and yet quite popular theories—ranging from Mikhail Artamonov and
Lev Gumilev to Mark Zborowski, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yurii Slezkine Their popular
theories depicted Judeo-Slavic interaction as a non-stop fight of the rising Slavs against the
ever-oppressing Jews in guise of Khazars or their further historical reincarnations. They either
portrayed Jews as a “people apart” sharing next to nothing with the surrounding gentiles or
characterized Slavs as having almost no impact on East European Jews, except negative. And
most recently they presented Jews as service nomads invading the heart of a Slavic sedentary
civilization. Quite misleading, these theories point to an urgent need to offer a well-grounded
scholarly model of Jewish-Slavic interaction that does not privilege one culture at the expense
of the other, takes into consideration historical and literary/philological aspects of the problem,
provides an accurate contextualization of the texts and events under consideration, and lays a
foundation for new developments in the domain of study of Slavic-Judaic interaction based on
cultural transparency and cross-fertilization.
The proposed research group will use ideas stemming from recent theories in sociology,
philology, Biblical studies, and cultural history. The participants will explore the applicability of
Jean-Christophe Agnew’s theory of shared cultural “meanings and feelings” to Medieval and
Early Modern Jewish-Slavic interaction juxtaposing it with the theory of Rogers Brubaker that
ethnicities are “epistemological” rather than “ontological” entities, namely that they are
“perspectives on the world” rather than “things in the world.” These theories will frame the
understanding of commonalities of cultural reactions of Jews and Slavs to certain events or texts
and will show to what extent the historical differences between Jews and Slavs generated from
corresponding social, religious, and political institutions rather than from grass-roots realities
such as an intensive interaction between Jewish and Slavonic theologians in Kievan Rus, a
millennia-long Jewish economic and trade dealings with the Russian Orthodox peasantry, a
complex and highly productive relationship between Polish nobility and Jewish elite throughout
the medieval period, Polish Catholic Church regular dealings with Jewish converts and
sectarians, and multiple contacts between Jewish Kabbalists, Polish pharmacists, and eastern
Slavic popular healers in early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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This group brings together scholars of comparative religion, historians, philologists and
linguists to help bring down disciplinary barriers and to show how the Slavic and the Jewish
cultures can be revealed, each of them respectively, as unique repositories of the lost texts,
sensibilities, and traditions of the other’s culture. It seeks to examine whether and to what extent
Slavic cultures preserve unique data on Medieval and Early Modern East European Jews while
Medieval and Early Modern East European Jews preserve key elements of the Slavic cultural
traditions previously considered irretrievably vanished. Each of the scholars will work in his/her
corresponding subfield circumscribing cultural exchange within Khazarian-Slavic,
Judeo-Greek-Church Slavonic, Old Russian-Jewish, early modern Polish-Jewish, and other
cultural realms. The group will explore the period of Jewish-Slavic contacts ranging from the
late 9th-early 10th centuries to late 17th -early 18th centuries.
The group will focus on an array of texts broadly defined: Eastern European Jewish
and Karaite epigraphics, Slavic Bible versions, ancient Jewish pseudepigrapha and medieval
midrash preserved exclusively in Slavic, Hebrew medieval scientific texts in East Slavic
translation, Slavic historiography and Church Slavonic literature, witnessing medieval and early
modern Jewish history and Judeo-Slavic contacts in the Slavic lands influenced by Jewish texts
or containing anti-Judaic polemics, literature of the Muscovite Judaizers, Jewish halachic works
referring to Slavic realia, Jewish and Slavic documentary sources, etc. The group will scrutinize
a variety of texts, including, but not limited to the Slavonic Book of Enoch, Apocalypse of
Abraham, Life of Adam and Eve and Ladder of Jacob; Codex Vilensis; Sermon of the Blessed
Zarubavel; Story of Three Captures of Jerusalem; Vita of Moses; The Sermon on Law and Grace
by Metropolitan Ilarion; Patericon of the Kievan Caves Monastery; Old Russian civil and
Church legislation such as Ustiuzhskaia Kormchaia Book; Explanatory Palaea; Correspondence
of Gennadij, archbishop of Novgorod; Epistle of Savva Against Jews and Heretics; The
Enlightener by Iosif Volotski; Diplomatic Correspondence of Ivan III; Lithuanian gramoty of
15-17th cents.; the pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets with interpolations in Slavic from
Maimonides’ On Poisons and Antidotes, from his On Intercourse and from his Book of Asthma
(chpt. 13), as well from Rhazes’ Almansuri; Rabbinic Responsa of 12-17th centuries such as Or
Zarua and Practical Kabbalah and magical/medical books and manuscripts such as Mifa’alot
elohim, Toldot adam, Medyk domowy, Vademecum medicum and Sefer ha-heshek.
Each of the participants will study his or her own set of texts while sharing with other
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participants methodological concerns and innovative approaches. Some of the common
questions to be considered follow:
How to define the corpus of Medieval and Early Modern texts characterized by an
intensive Jewish-Slavic interaction? Is it possible to canonize this corpus as Judeo-Slavic
or entitle it Judeo-Slavic subculture? Are the parameters defining this corpus applicable
to other groups of texts outside the East European world—for example, to Judeo-Greek
or Judeo-Arabic literatures?
Is there an internal dynamic within the loosely defined field tentatively entitled the
Judeo-Slavic subculture—or is it too sporadic to allow any discussion of periodical
intensity and cadence? What is the relationship between the dynamics of
cross-fertilization and a concrete historical context or cultural environment? In general,
can one measure the dynamics and intensity within such subfields as Judeo-Slavonic,
Judeo-Ukrainian, Judeo-Polish, and Judeo-Russian?
What is the place, weight, and function of archival research—and of paleographical
studies for the Judeo-Slavic field that the research group considers a must for this field?
What do we gain looking for new sources or using philological techniques to uncover
historical meanings? How one can bring together methods of historical, comparative
religious, socio-cultural, and philological analysis—and make them work toward one
end?
What is the place of religion—and its social institutions—in preventing or facilitating
cultural cross-fertilization and transparency? How are Catholic Slavs different in their
interaction from East and South Slavic Orthodox?
How did specific features of Judaic fusion cultures such as those of the Khazars and
Karaites facilitate cultural transparency within a larger context and shaped unique forms
of the civilization dialogue?
What are the immediate ramifications of the applicability of the theory of cultural
transparency and cross-fertilization to Jews and Slavs? How may this theory change our
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perspective on cultures and peoples routinely defined as antagonistic, for example Early
Modern Poles (Catholics) and Ukrainians (Russian Orthodox), Jews and Ukrainians
within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire, Turks and
Armenians on the eve of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and others.
The proposed research group provides a unique opportunity to scholars in different
fields, namely in Slavic, Jewish, and Oriental studies, comparative linguistics, Biblical
philology, comparative religion, Medieval and Early Modern East European history and culture
to define and elaborate a new scholarly methodology. It is advisable to compare this
methodology to that of an archeologist, who seeks to reconstruct a vanished cultural layer.
However, unlike the traditional archeologist, the proposed research group will dig into texts, not
into soil, so as to yield results related to history broadly conceived, not limited only to material
culture. The group will discuss the possible application of the models of cultural transparency
and cross-fertilization to other cultural discourses such as ancient Judeo-Greek, Medieval
Judeo-Arabic, Early Modern Christian-Jewish. Members of the group share an understanding
that historians deal with texts, either verbal or visual,—hence they feel the necessity to
incorporate rigorous philological and comparative methods into the study of history broadly
defined. The group will join together to create a fusion of philological and historical approaches,
so far—with minor yet significant exceptions—considered incompatible in Medieval and Early
Modern East European, Slavic and Jewish studies. This methodological fusion, part of cultural
archaeology, will help make a broader historical sense of specific socio- and ethno-linguistic
analyses. It will enable the philologists, members of the group, to contextualize their specific
findings against a clearly defined historical backdrop and reconstruct their intellectual
ramifications. Simultaneously it will encourage the participating historians to create a more
nuanced vision of their subject matter linking it to rigorous textual analysis of the historical
documents they are dealing with.
Thus centering its attention on previously unexplored and under-explored Medieval and
Early Modern texts and documents, the group will seek to reconstruct Judaic and Slavic
historical and cultural legacies—texts, traditions, and sensibilities—some of which were
hitherto considered irretrievably lost, such as Judeo-Church Slavonic theological discourse,
some misinterpreted or not integrated into discussion, and some regretfully neglected. The much
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debated but still unresolved issues of identifying the primary intended recipients of the
translated body of knowledge and of explaining the motives of both sides, the Jewish and the
Christian-Slavic, for drawing precisely these and not other texts and to translate them in order to
make them available for the other side will have a better chance of being resolved in this
multidisciplinary environment of scholars working in adjacent fields.
In course of its work, the group plans to organize a two-day international conference on
cultural archeology. It will share the results of its research in a collection of thematically and
methodologically closely linked essays to be published in the journal Jewish History, with the
organizers of the research group as guest editors followed. This publication will be followed by
a volume summarizing the results of the research work to appear in the Brill Publishers series
Studia Judaeoslavica.
Fellows: Anatolii A. Alekseev, St. Petersburg State University
Judith Kalik, Independent Researcher, Jerusalem
Alexander Kulik, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Andrei Orlov, Marquette University, Milwaukee
Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath, Royal Swedish Academy of Letters,
History and Antiquities
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Northwestern University, Chicago
Dan Shapira, Bar-Ilan University
Moshe Taube, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Possible Visitors:
Edward L. Keenan, Emeritus Professor of History, Harvard University
Vladimir Petrukhin, Institute of Slavic Studies, Moscow
Sergius Temchinas, Vilnius University
William F. Ryan, The Warburg Institute, University of London
Robert Romanchuk, Florida State University
Hanna W^gzynek, Warsaw University
Victor Zhivov, Univerity of California, Berkeley
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