The aim of the group is to bring together historians, philogists and scholars of comparative religion to help bring down disciplinary barriers and to show how the Slavic and the Jewish cultures can be revealed, each one of them respectively, as unique repositories of the lost texts, sensibilities, and traditions of the other's culture. It seeks to examine, on the one hand, unique data which Slavic cultures preserve on Medieval and Early Modern East European Jews, and on the other hand, key elements of Slavic cultural traditions preserved by Medieval and Early Modern East European Jews.

We will explore cultural exchange within the Khazarian-Slavic, Judeo-Greek-Church Slavonic, Old Russian-Jewish, early modern Polish-Jewish, and other cultural realms from the late 9th - early 10th celturies to late 17th - ealry 18th centuries. The topics are not limited to direct Judeo-Slavic contacts, but include, inter alia, issues such as Slavic reception of ancient Jewish sources, Slavonic Bible and pseudepigrapha, Slavonic Josephus, Biblical iconography, etc.

 

The tension between pan-Mediterranean tendencies in history and archaeology as opposed to perspectives more oriented to the uniqueness of each regional narrative has seldom been discussed in relation to the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Eastern Mediterranean. Our research group will tackle key questions of trade, migration and other interactions in the eastern Mediterranean, ca. 1700-700 BCE, by reconciling insights from both studies that concentrate on regional archaeologies, with those dealing with intercultural contacts such as trade, migration, emulation, military conflicts and diplomacy.