Episcopal Justice Nikolaj Leskov s Life Jewish Question

Russian Review, 2000

Nasza Przeszłość

The State of Israel awarded the Greek Catholic Bishop Pavel Gojdič the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 2007. In the critical years 1939-1945, he publicallyly stood up for the persecuted Jews and saved many from death. The study focuses on the analysis of his personality and attitudes to the Slovak Jewish community. It reveals his way of thinking and the specific examples which show us how it was manifested in relation to the persecuted. The study also contains the attitude of the Slovak elites towards the bishop and his activities in Slovakia.

2016

This paper examines the reflection of the ecclesiosocial processes of the 1860s in a literary text – the story Laughter and Grief by Nikolai Leskov – where one can find multiple references to the issues discussed in the newspapers and journals of the mid-nineteenth century. It includes a brief sketch of the historical context, with special attention given to Church reforms and related discussions in ecclesial and secular periodicals of the 1860s and 1870s. The paper then goes on to analyze the text, highlighting the interconnection between Leskov’s views on the Orthodox Church as expressed explicitly in his articles and as represented in a literary text. It also juxtaposes the writer’s vision of reforms with the opinions of other publicists and Church activists and concludes that Church reforms are described in the story as a component of a chaotic set of changes which, instead of modernizing society, lead to confusion and animosity.

Religions , 2022

This article is a piece of microhistorical research of a court case investigating religious conversion in Russia in the 1820s. It presents the story of an Orthodox Christian girl who adopted ”Jewish law” and married a Jewish man. The article attempts to define the background and peculiarities of the conversion and clarify the context in which this was taking place. The work uses various methods: narrative, comparative, contextual analysis, text interpretation, etc. Analysis of the court case establishes that the girl’s change of faith was the result of: (1) close contacts with the Jews and lack of social ties within the Christian community; (2) poverty and extremely low social status; (3) lack of “religious capital”. Jewish social assistance practices, ways to legalize a new status, finding a job, and personal freedom turned out to be attractive to the serf woman. The novelty of this study involves the introduction of a previously unknown archival source representing a very rare phenomenon of conversion to Judaism in imperial Russia. In addition, the article presents the paradoxical case of an attempt at re-socialization by transitioning from the dominant confession to the faith of a religious minority and integration into a community whose rights in Russia were heavily curtailed.

1984

Studi Slavistici. 2021. Is. 18(1), p. 35-50, 2021

The Russian writer Nikolaj Leskov is widely renowned as a portrayer of the everyday life of the Orthodox clergy; his literary works depict God’s righteous servants as well as the greedy, selfish priests. Notwithstanding being a significant part of his work and effective way to express his views, Leskov’s activity as a book reviewer is not as well-known. Leskov wrote numerous book reviews, mostly on novels featuring clergymen and the ordinary aspects of clerical life, where he analyses the artistic merit and ideological perspective expressed in a work; literary-aesthetic values were, however, at the centre of his critical evaluation and interest. This paper examines Leskov’s book reviews by focusing on their content, structure linguistic style, and the evaluation framework employed by the author for book critical assessment. The aim of the present investigation is to shed some light on Leskov’s critical strategies and compare his critical arguments as a reviewer with the way he describes clergymen in his own works.

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

This essay responds to chapter 8, "The Orthodox World and Jewish-Christian Dialogue," which concludes Karma Ben-Johanan's exploration and analysis of developments in Christian-Jewish dialogue following the Second Vatican Council. Just as the first half of the book focused on Catholic Christians and their contributions to interreligious understanding in this period, the second half of the book focuses on Orthodox Jews and, for the most part, the teachings that lead to their avoidance of dialogue. After her review in chapter 5 of "Christianity in the Jewish Tradition," Ben-Johanan provides two chapters that cover sources previously published only in Hebrew and Yiddish. Chapter 6, entitled "Christianity in Contemporary Halakhic Literature," is on contemporary ḥaredi (ultra-Orthodox) teachings about Christianity. 1 Chapter 7, entitled "Christianity in Religious Zionist Thought," deals with teachings of the religious Zionist followers of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. The materials in these chapters constitute "difficult texts" 2 for me and many other Jews engaged in dialogue with Christians, but, as Ben-Johanan points out, for the groups she studies here Christianity "is more an image than a reality" (229). Thus, while they constitute important (and, as of this writing, politically 2 I discuss this technical term in my Cursing the Christians?: A History of the Birkat HaMinim (New York: Oxford, 2012), 11-12. The question of the limits of such publication of "difficult texts" is a topic worthy of discussion in the period covered by this book which has seen much recovery of precensored versions of Jewish texts. For example, the controversy over Ariel Toaff's 2007 study of the blood libel, Pasque di sangue: Ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali, aroused so much controversy that it was withdrawn for revisions.

Almost all bishops in Poland risked their lives in order to save Jewish People at the time of the Holocaust. This paper presents the newest research on this subject.

Jewish Conscience of the Church, 2017

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