Drawing on sources in original languages, the book offers the first comprehensive study of the history, ethnography and convoluted ethnic identity of the Galician Karaites, a non-Talmudic Turkic-speaking minority of Jewish scripturalists.

The study explores the eschatological reinterpretation of the Yom Kippur ritual found in the Apocalypse of Abraham where the protagonist of the story, the patriarch Abraham, takes on the role of a celestial goat for YHWH, while the text's antagonist, the fallen angel Azazel, is envisioned as the demonic scapegoat. The study treats the application of the two goats typology to human and otherworldly figures in its full historical and interpretive complexity through a broad variety of Jewish and Christian sources, from the patriarchical narratives of the Hebrew Bible to early Christian materials...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In Akim Volynsky: A Hidden Russian-Jewish Prophet Helen Tolstoy goes far beyond the accepted image of Akim Volynsky as a controversial literary critic of the 1890s who ran the first journal of Russian Symbolists, promoted philosophic idealism and proposed the first modernist reading of Dostoevsky. This book, through the study of periodicals and archive materials, offers a new view of Volynsky as a champion of Symbolist theater, supporter of Jewish playwrights, an ardent partisan of Habima theater and finally, a theoretician of Jewish theater. Throughout his life, Volynsky was a seeker...

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, Borries 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...