Soviet Jewry

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jewish thought and the classical texts

Andrey Murashko (Moscow)
Zechariah 1-8 in the context of the Mesopotamian New Year myth

Anna Volynets (Minsk)
The status of the town of Mizpa in Judea during the Persian period

Mikhail Vogman (Moscow)
Confrontation with the Angels in Judaism and Gnosticism:
the philosophical interpretation of the motive

Mark Gondelman (Jerusalem)
Problematic aristotelism in «Derush a Iqqarim»
of Abraham Michael Cardoso

Sergiy Grygoryshyn (Nizhyn)
Between Oppenheim and Kramer: the role of scientific
adjustment in the study of the Middle East mythology

Jewish languages and literature

Ekaterina Vologina (Moscow)
«The Testament of Levi» in Slavonic Book Tradition:
The History of the Text

Denis Kiryanov, Elena Luchina, Tatiana Panova, Maria Tagabileva (Moscow)
Corpus of Modern Yiddish: theory and practice

Ekaterina Kuznetsova (Moscow)
Interpretation of Biblical scenes in Songs
of the Pentateuch by Itzik Manger

East European Jewry

Evgenia Pevzner (St.Petersburg)
The activity of Society of for spread of enlightenment
between Jews in Russia (OPE) in the field of rendering
assistance to teachers during the First World War

Valentina Viktorovskaya (Irkutsk)
Zionism in Kolchak’s Siberia: attempts
of unite from the East

Olga Alekseeva (Riga)
Investigation files of Jews arrested in the Latvian SSR
after the Second World War

Karina Barkane (Riga)
Supply of matzoth to the Jewish religious communities
in Latvian SSR (1946–1964)

Ekaterina Akav (Kharkov)
«I am the last Karaite artist of the 20th century»:
the life and work of Anatoly Asaba

The State of Israel: history and modernity

Kseniya Tserkovskaya (Moscow)
Lexical policy of the Hebrew Language Committee:
Theory and practice of introducing neologisms

Ivan Pribegin (Odessa)
Theory and practice of Jewish integral nationalism
in 1914–1925

Nikita Arkin (Moscow)
The left religious Zionism in modern Israel

Elizaveta Iakimova (Nizhni Novgorod)
Extradition from Israel: features of legislation
and law enforcement practice

About the authors

The incredibly inspiring, and in the end unbearably crushing, experience of the great, symbolist Soviet Yiddish writer "Der Nister" after taking up the case for Soviet Jewish National Autonomy in the forsaken, far-eastern, region of Birobidzhan.

The unifying thread of the interdisciplinary volume Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context is the fact that Jewish spaces are almost always generated in relation to non-Jewish spaces; they determine and influence each other.

This general phenomenon will be scrutinized and put to the test again and again in a varied collection of articles by international experienced researchers as well as junior scholars using various urban contexts and discourses as data. From the viewpoints of different temporal and regional research traditions and disciplines the contribu­tors deal with the question of how Jewish and non-Jewish spaces are imagined, constructed, negotiated and intertwined. All examples and case studies together create a mosaic of possibilities for the construction of Jewish and non-Jewish spaces in different settings.

The list of examined topics ranges from synagogues to ghettos, from urban neighborhoods to cafés and festivals, from art to literature. This diversity makes the volume a challenging effort of giving an overview of the current academic discussion in Europe and beyond. Although the majority of the contributions are focused on Central and Eastern Europe, a more general tendency becomes apparent in all articles: the negotiation of urban spaces seems to be a complex and ambivalent process in which a large number of participants are involved. In this regard, the volume would also like to contribute to trans-disciplinary urban studies and critical research on spatial relations.