East European History

When king Ladislaus III took the Hungarian throne, Poland inherited the problem of the Turkish expansion in the Balkans. The young king was eager to undertake a new crusade against the Turks. Did it stand a chance? Was it still possible to dislodge the Turks from the Balkans, and drive them back to Asia Minor? Was it at least possible to check the expansion and development of the Ottoman state in the Balkans? The answer to these questions is not easy. Certainly, on the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, the Ottoman state was not yet an established power. It was an empire in making. Although the Turks had already become a permanent ethnic element in the Balkans, their political and military expansion could be stopped. Looking at the problem from the military point of view, it must be noted that the Turks could be defeated.

This study examines the role of political factors in attitudes toward World War II in contemporary Ukraine. The question under examination is which factors determine public views of the principal warring sides and their leaders in Ukraine. This paper uses a representative national survey specifically designed for this research project and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2012. It analyzes the roles of regionalism, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, age, and sex in attitudes toward the Red Army, Soviet partisans, the German Army (Wehrmacht), and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the war, as well as toward the wartime leaders of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the UPA. The analysis of the survey data shows that regional values, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, and age have significant effects on views of the Soviet Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war and attitudes toward the wartime activities of Joseph Stalin and Roman Shukhevych. Public perceptions of the German Army and Adolf Hitler in Ukraine do not vary much across regions, political parties, and ethnic, language, age, and sex groups.

The 311 Vörösmarty scout troop, a Hungarian Jewish scout troop which survived the banning of Jewish scouts in Hungary in 1940, has a unique identity which has held it together from the time of its founding in 1924 to the present day. The teaching, discipline, and training from its young leaders helped the scouts to build up a tough resistance to survive as an illegal troop through the war years, and brought it back to life one year after the German invasion in spring of 1945.  Rebuilding the troop from survivors of the Holocaust, the troop became the only co-ed scout troop in the world of scouting. It continued its activities until 1948 and the Communist ban on all non-communist youth groups. In 2000, former members were reunited on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Mihály Vörösmarty. Their annual meeting attracts former scouts from Hungary and countries around the world. The fate of the Vörösmarty troop in many ways mirrors the state of the Hungarian Jewish population in Hungary throughout much of the 20th century.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of research on Lithuanian Kabbalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the point that some scholars speak of a defined and delineated stream of Kabbalah, a school unto itself dubbed "Lithuanian Kabbalah." Such scholars include within this stream all those who saw the Vilna Gaon as their teacher in Kabbalah (parallel to the position of the Baal Shem Tov in Hasidism) and they ascribe to it such fixed categories as its "Articles of Faith." In their conception, this stream was part and parcel of the broader and well-known nationalist-messianic current that had its source, supposedly, in the Vilna Gaon himself; this current reached its full fruition in the twentieth century, and so too has the smaller stream within it, now a clearly defined "school," developed in various ways until the present. As if this were not enough, scholars have joined the later ideological trend which seeks to revise the history of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a decidedly messianic way, presenting it in a continuous line from the Vilna Gaon to the emergence of Zionism and then to the founding of the State of Israel. Again, the Vilna Gaon is not merely presented as a "herald" of Zionism but as one who encoded within his Torah the secret of redemption, the beginning of which, apparently, we are witnessing today. The article conducts a critical analysis of the concept of "Lithuanian Kabbalah," and uses as its case study the life and teachings of Rabbi Shimon Tsvi Horowitz.


בשנים האחרונות צומח ועולה מחקר סביב למקובלים בני ליטא במאות התשע עשרה והעשרים, עד שיש כאלו המדברים על זרם מוגדר ומובחן, אסכולה בפני עצמה, המכונה 'קבלה ליטאית'. בתוך זרם זה כוללים את כל אלו שראו בגר"א את מורם בקבלה, כמעין בעש"ט לחסידות, ומונים קטגוריות מקובעות של 'עיקרי אמונה' של אותו זרם הרוכב על מהלך משיחי ולאומי ידוע שמקורו כביכול בגר"א עצמו והגיע לגמר בישולו במאה העשרים. עד שנוצר בעיני כמה חוקרים מעין 'חוג' ברור ומוגדר שמתגלגל באופנים שונים עד לימינו. אם לא די בכך, הרי שהמדברים על אותו זרם קבלי רוכבים למעשה על קו אידיאולוגי מאוחר שבא לפרש מחדש את ההיסטוריה של היישוב היהודי בארץ ישראל במאה התשע עשרה ברוח משיחית וליצור מעין המשכיות מימי הגר"א עד להופעתה של הציונות ולמאורעות שהתרחשו עם הקמת מדינת ישראל. שוב אין הגר"א מצטייר רק כ'מבשר' הציונות אלא כמי שצפן בתורתו את סוד הגאולה שאנו עומדים לכאורה בפתחה. המאמר עוסק בניתוח ביקורתי של המשוג "קבלת ליטאית" וכמקרה מבחן יש כאן דיון בדרכו של ר' שמעון צבי הורביץ

"Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), ed. Jonatan Meir, Three volumes, Mosad Bialik, Jerusalem

Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.


The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origins and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.


Contents

Volume 1  - Critical Edition

Concerning this edition
Key personalities
Sefer Megale Temirin – Critical Edition


Volume 2 - Appendixes:
1. Glossary, Abbreviations, Acronyms
2. Explanation of the Speaking Names
3. Perl’s Hasidic Sources
4. Manuscripts of Sefer Megale Temirin
5. Yiddish Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin
Bibliographic Abbreviations

-------------------------------
Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl Blog, http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/

How was heritage understood and implemented in European socialist states after World War II? By exploring national and regional specificities within the broader context of internationalization, this volume enriches the conceptual, methodological and empirical scope of heritage studies through a series of fascinating case studies. Its transnational approach highlights the socialist world’s diverse interpretations of heritage and the ways in which they have shaped the trajectories of present-day preservation practices.

In 1938, on the eve of what would mark the beginning of the Second World War during the international crisis, Eastern Europe was divided – in every sense of the word. New governments, which were generally regarded as national states, rose from the ashes of the old pre-modern Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. However, civic nations were not formed within them; the titular ethnic groups were far from being the only representing populations in these states. The new states in Eastern Europe were the offspring of wars and revolutions. Their borders were initially determined by the rights of the powerful. New borders divided entire peoples, having created the very foundation for inter-state conflicts as well as the desire to revise the established order in the region. One of the consequence of the Second World War was the revision of Eastern European borders. Still today, historians have yet to agree upon a single assessment of the eastern European events in the 1930s and 1940s.

Researchers from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Moldavia, Israel, Germany and the USA have all contributed articles featured in this collection. The book is focused on national border changes in Eastern Europe during the period from 1938 to 1947: population transfer as a result of foreign and domestic political considerations, interethnic relationships and ethnic purges of paramilitary units; the concept of self- perception of people living on frontiers forced to change their national and civil status; the problems of modern East European borders.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Maskilic journals increased their publication of anti-Hasidic satires. From the eighteen-sixties onward, this literature came primarily as a response to the revival in the publishing of Hasidic hagiography and to the spread of Hasidism into new territory. To this point, no complete review or even general survey has been performed on this extensive polemical literature, despite the fact that it has much to teach us about Hasidism and the Haskalah in those years. We are not speaking of an insignificant bibliographical lacuna, but of a disregard for an entire field of research which would shed light not only on a forgotten chapter of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature but also on an important chapter in the relationships between Maskilim and Hasidim in that period and the genesis and development of the different streams of Hasidism. This Maskilic literature intended to do more than eradicate Hasidism; it aimed to strengthen the self-consciousness of the individual Maskilim who found themselves alone in Hasidic territory. Paradoxically, the literature documented the very movement it intended to eradicate from the world. The distorted reflection displayed in the anti-Hasidic literature does more than present a caricature of its subject -- it conceals hitherto unknown elements about the nature and development of the Hasidic movement. The present article deals with one such case, a satire on Bratslav Hasidism from 1863, which has at its core a Maskilic satirical text written by Yehiel Meller on pilgrimage to the grave of R. Nahman of Bratslav in Uman.





כתבי עת של משכילים לאורך המאה התשע עשרה הרבו לפרסם סאטירות בגנותה של החסידות. משנות הששים ואילך באה ספרות זו בעיקר כתגובה להתעוררות הדפסת ספרות השבחים החסידית ולהתפשטות החסידות במרחבים חדשים. לא קיימת עד עתה סקירה שלימה, ואף לא מיפוי כללי, של אותה ספרות פולמוסית ענפה, על אף שיש בה ללמד הרבה על דרכי החסידות וההשכלה באותן שנים.  לא מדובר רק בחסרון ביבליוגרפי שאין לו משמעות, אלא בהתעלמות משדה מחקר רב עניין שעשוי להאיר לא רק על פרק נשכח בספרות עברית ויידיש החדשה אלא גם על פרק חשוב ביחסים בין משכילים לחסידים באותה תקופה, ועל דרכי צמיחתם, פיצולם והתפתחותם של זרמים שונים בחסידות. הייתה זו ספרות שיותר מאשר נועדה לבער את החסידות נועדה לחזק את תודעתם העצמית של המשכילים הבודדים במרחבים החסידיים; ספרות שבאופן פרדוקסלי תיעדה תנועה אותה חפצו לבער מן העולם. הבבואה המעוותת בה התהדרה הסאטירה האנטי חסידית לא רק הציגה דימוי – אלא טומנת בחובה הצבעה על אלמנטים חדשים ועל התפתחויות בחסידות. במקרה אחד ממין זה הנוגע לחסידות ברסלב בשנות השישים של המאה התשע עשרה עוסק המאמר. שלפנינו - שעיקרו מהדורה של טקסט משכילי שכתב יחיאל מלר - בשנת 1863 - על העלייה לקבר ר' נחמן מברסלב באומן
"""

"Although present-day Ukraine has only been in existence for something over two decades, its recorded history reaches much further back for more than a thousand years to Kyivan Rus’. Over that time, it has usually been under control of invaders like the Turks and Tatars, or neighbors like Russia and Poland, and indeed it was part of the Soviet Union until it gained its independence in 1991. Today it is drawn between its huge neighbor to the east and the European Union, and is still struggling to choose its own path… although it remains uncertain of which way to turn. Nonetheless, as one of the largest European states, with considerable economic potential, it is not a place that can be readily overlooked.

The problem is, or at least was, where to find information on this huge modern Ukraine, and since 2005 the answer has been the Historical Dictionary of Ukraine in its first edition, and now even more so with this second edition. It now boasts a dictionary section of about 725 entries, these covering the thousand years of history but particularly the recent past, and focusing on significant persons, places and events, political parties and institutions as well as more broadly international relations, the economy, society and culture. The chronology permits readers to follow this history and the introduction is there to make sense of it. It also features the most extensive and up-to-date bibliography of English-language writing on Ukraine."

This study analyzes policies and public attitudes concerning the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) after the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine. The issue of the political rehabilitation of these nationalist organizations, which relied on terrorism and were involved in Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing of Poles during World War Two, became one of central political issues in this post-Soviet state. The question is which factors determine attitudes towards the OUN and the UPA in contemporary Ukraine. The hypothesis is that regional factors are the main determinants of the public opinion concerning these organizations. This paper uses analysis of historical studies and archival data to examine policies and controversies concerning the OUN and the UPA. It employs comparative and regression analyses of the 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey to determine effects of regional factors, compared to other factors, such as ethnicity, language, and age, on attitudes towards the Stepan Bandera faction of the OUN and the UPA. The paper shows that that regional factors and perceptions of the involvement of the Bandera faction of the OUN and the UPA in mass murder are strongest predictors of views concerning these nationalist organizations.

"on: Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement 1755-1816 (Jewish Culture and contexts), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 376 pp.

The article includes a review of developments in research of late Sabbateanism, especially research concerning the ‘wondrous charlatan’, Jacob Frank. Histories of Frank, and those who joined his movement in various countries until his conversion have long been a subject of great interest for modern historiography and they provide a touchstone for discerning the religious and ethical boundaries of the historians themselves. The first to write critically about Frank came from the Haskalah and had a negative attitude toward him. They saw Frank as the last and necessary chain in the unfolding of Sabbatean heresies. A real change in perspective came about in studies from the beginning of the twentieth century, written with a romantic and nationalistic orientation by authors who found the sparks of nationalism in Sabbatean literature. The studies of Gershom Scholem, Aaron Zeev Eshkoli and others who continued this trend, but who were more nuanced and historically accurate, offered a fuller picture of the phenomenon. Against this background it is possible to better appreciate the
publication of the new book by Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude, which presents the history of late Sabbateanism in very different light and in various ways changes the accepted understanding of its history."

Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.

The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origins and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Contents


Introduction                                                                                     
Scholarship on the anti-Hasidic writings of Josef Perl • Hasidic hagiography and the emergence of satire • Two-fold reading of Perl’s writings and the gematriyot • Satire, literature, and history • ‘Holy Books’ and subversive books

Chapter 1: Josef Perl, Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov, and the ‘Holy Books’
Prayer of the fall of Hasidism and the expungement of their books • Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht and the critique of hagiography • Sefer Sipurey Ma‘asiyot and the parodic response to it • Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov, ‘heretical books’ and the ‘Holy Books’ • In praise of the true Tsaddikim • ‘Laughter of the heretics’: testimonies about the polemics against Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • ‘Holy Books’, ‘sacredness of hagiography’, and parodies of hagiography • Appendix: Parodic manuscript about an opponent of the ‘Holy Books’ who was reborn as a horse

Chapter 2: Speaking Names in Sefer Megale Temirin                             
Time of the composition of Megale Temirin, censorship, and a note on the Buch • Hasidic books and the emergence of parody • Structure of Sefer Megale Temirin • The Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin • Main Hasidic courts • The court in Żołyń (Łożne) and the peregrinations of the Buch • The court of Dishpal (Międzyboż), moneyboxes of the Besht, the holy relics • The court in Aklo (Olika) and the ritualized reading of Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • Function of the footnotes and the parodic hagiography • History of the rabbis – clandestine opponents of Hasidism • The Besht in Tarnopol • Rabbi Meir Jacob of Zasław and the letters from Galicja  • Zaddikim in Galicja • Ciphered stories • ‘Holy Places’: reincarnations of a praise from Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • The revelation of the Buch and the death of the secretary • ‘Gang of criminals’: another death and an escape to the Land of Israel • The End: Ovadia Ben Petahia and the rabbi of Opatów

Chapter 3: Joseph Perl, Hirsh of Zydaczów, and the Polemics of Gematriyot
Reb Zevi Hirsh of Zydaczów and Hasidism in Galicja • Maskilic opposition to the Zydaczówer • Letters concealed in Sefer Megale Temirin • A manuscript about the misdeeds of the Hasidim • Books, education, and a note on Reb Nathan of Nemirov • Zydaczówer’s ban on the Maskilim and the first Gematria • Parodic letter of Perl and the second Gematria • About the parodic letter and the jumble of gematriyot • Denunciation and expulsions of R Zevi Hirsh • ‘Father of impurity’: Joseph Perl and the writings of the rabbi of Komarno • Final note • Appendix: Parodic letter against the Zydaczówer

Chapter 4: Speaking Names in the Book of Sefer Bohen Zaddik               
The manuscript of Sefer Bohen Zaddik and the difficulties with its publication • Structure of the book • In search for the true Zaddik and the rabbi of Opatów • Travels of Ovadia Ben Petahia between the towns of Galicja • Kromcza Ruska (Zaleszczyki) or the entrance to Galicja • ‘Briks’ (Tarnopol): Rabbi Jehoshua Heschel Babad and the school • ‘Bicik’ (Lemberg) Rabbi Jacob Orenstein and a ban on the Maskilim • ‘Abdera’ (Brody) Rabbi Ephraim Zalman Margaliot and Sefer ha-Zoref • The explanation of the names of the rabbis • Utopia and dystopia • The hidden butcher and his kabbalistic writings • The discovery of the colonies • The image of the disciples of the Gaon and the ‘true Hasid’ • ‘The solution for the East’ or heterotopia •  The will to flee and the emissary

Chapter 5: The Imaginary Influence of Sefer Megale Temirin                     
The myth about the success of the book • Pamphlet Megale Sod • The manuscript about the misdeeds of the Hasidim • Dialogues about Sefer Megale Temirin • For whom Sefer Megale Temirin was intended and who read it • Note concerning Sefer Megale Temirin in Yiddish • Influence real and imagined • Was Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht written by a parodist? • Temerl Bergson and Sefer Megale Temirin • Writ of defense of Hasidism • Sefer Megale Temirin and the Hebrew literature • Appendix: writ of defense of Joseph Judah Lob Sossnitz

Afterword: Note on the Anti-Hasidic Outlook                                       

Bibliographic Abbreviations   

Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/
(9) Ariel Evan Mayse, 'Review', Jewish History (2015)ת  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10835-015-9245-2
(10) Review - Gal-Ed

Gershom Scholem in Deutschland
Zwischen Seelenverwandtschaft und Sprachlosigkeit
Hrsg. v. Gerold Necker, Elke Morlok u. Matthias Morgenstern

Die Biographie des in Berlin geborenen und ab 1923 in Jerusalem lebenden Kabbala-Forschers Gershom Gerhard Scholem ist von den Katastrophen und Umbrüchen des 20. Jahrhunderts geprägt. Im Horizont des für Scholem ambivalenten deutsch-jüdischen Verhältnisses nehmen die Autoren des Bandes seinen Werdegang im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik in den Blick sowie die Bedeutung, die er als israelischer Gesprächspartner für die Zeitgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland hatte. Die Beziehungen zu Walter Benjamin und Hannah Arendt, zu dem Theologen Otto Michel und dem Verleger Siegfried Unseld dokumentieren auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen Scholems Verbindung zu Deutschland, die ihn auch bei persönlicher Lyrik und sogar bei seiner wissenschaftlichen Prosa zur jüdischen Mystik begleitete.

תוכן העניינים
פתח דבר
                     
מבוא: הערה על מבטים
         
פרק ראשון: שבחי רודקינסון          
רודקינסון כמו"ל חסידי: טשרנוביץ ולבוב • בין חסידות להשכלה: ז'יטומיר וּורשה • "בצוארו כפתור בלי פרח": ימי פטרבורג • תולדות החסידות ופעילות עיתונאית: קניגסברג • "מחזיקי ומפיצי שפת עבר בכל העולם": ברלין והמבורג • על האנטישמיות החדשה והתיקונים בדת: לונדון • המאבק באנטישמיות: ברלין • עוללות מתנגדי רודקינסון: וינה • פעילות בארץ החדשה: ניו יורק, שיקגו ובוסטון

פרק שני: ספרות השבחים החסידית           
ה"שתיקה" וקדושת הספר • ספרות השבחים בשנות השישים • הערות על גורמי ה"התעוררות • על כמה ממהלכי התקופה • ספרות השבחים מעשה ידי רודקינסון • מקורות ונאמנותם • סיפור שבעל פה, סיפור שבכתב ותיקון מסורות • תגובה לספרות ההשכלה • אמונת חכמים, סיפורי צדיקים ומוסר • רודקינסון כמחבר חסידי, קהל היעד שלו והתקבלות ספריו

פרק שלישי: בין חסידות להשכלה            
הדפסות חוזרות של ספרות השבחים • "תולדות בעלי שם טוב" • הרקע  לכתיבת "תולדות בעלי שם טוב" • מבואות היסטוריים והיחס ליעקב פראנק • מקורות לתיאור החסידות וביקורת על ספרות השבחים • ביקורת על ספרות ההשכלה • הגר"א והחסידות • רודקינסון ה"מאוחר", קהל היעד שלו והתקבלות ספריו • על גורל ספרי "תולדות בעל השם" • קבלה, חסידות ותיקונים בדת • חסידות, פילוסופיה ונצרות

נעילה: רודקינסון והספרות הניאו-חסידית
           
קיצורים ביבליוגרפיים
                                                       
מפתחות

After the Second World War, the Polish landowners lost their properties as a result of the land reform. Some of them decided to emigrate, while others, despite everything, stayed in the country and tried to cope with a new reality. The latter group was perceived as the enemies of the socialist system by the People’s Poland authorities. Therefore, it was put under the surveillance of the security apparatus. This article not only illustrates the actions performed by the Security Service officers towards particular Greater Poland landowners until 1957, but also the reactions of the representatives of this social group in the face of repression.

Jonatan Meir, “The Politics of Printing the Book Sefer Likutei Tefilot"

This essay discusses one of the more astounding books produced by Bratslav Hasidism – Likutei Tefilot, composed by R. Nathan Sternharz of Nemirov between 1822 and 1827. Notable enough for its content alone, the book also established a whole new genre in Bratslav literature, a fact requiring examination of the book’s genesis, the context of its printing, and its primary goals, as well as the controversy that erupted around it. The new Bratslav theology that emerged upon the death of Rabbi Nahman at the end of 1810[, and which was articulated in Likutei Tefilot,] carried with it a number of ramifications for the small group that had begun to gather around the tsadik, including the eruption of disputes, both internal and external, over [the role and character of] Rabbi Natan of Nemirov. This is a particularly obscure chapter in the history of Bratslav Hasidism, which as a whole remains under-explored by modern scholars; a careful examination of the initiation and crystallization of Bratslav Hasidism in its early stages will shed light on the movement as it exists today in all its diversity, both ideological and social.

cercetări despre istoria legăturilor economice româno-germane. În Germania, tonul a fost dat la 1895 de economistul Moritz Ströll 5 , urmat în 1902 de Ludwig Metzler 6 . Aproape concomitent, tema a trezit şi interesul unor autori din România, ale căror lucrări au fost publicate fie în ţară, fie în Germania. Mulţi români studiau în epocă la universităţi germane, unii susţinând doctorate legate de tema relaţiilor româno-germane. Dintre aceştia, Ion I. Răducanu 7 şi Lar Iliescu 8 au abordat schimburile comerciale dintre cele două părţi. Dar atât autorii români amintiţi, cât şi cei germani, s-au concentrat asupra stărilor de lucruri contemporane lor, analizele coborând doar cu două-trei decenii în urmă. Aceleiaşi perioade îi corespunde şi începutul preocupărilor de istorie a comunităţilor germane din România, prin contribuţiile preotului protestant din Bucureşti, Wilibald Stefan Teutschlaender 9 şi ale profesorului din Cernăuţi, Reimund Friedrich Keindl 10 .

Sefer shivḥei ha-Besht is considered the central collection of hagiographic tales regarding Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (c. 1700–1760). It was first printed in Hebrew in Kopys in the latter part of 1814 and includes hundreds of stories which circulated orally and were heard by the author. The work was soon translated into Yiddish, with significant changes, and three such translations have survived, each one very different to the others. The first translation, published in Ostróg in 1815, was believed lost. This paper offers a brief description of the recently discovered edition, discussing its uniqueness in the context of the work's printing history and on the background of Jewish publishing in Eastern Europe.
המהדורות האבודות של ספר שבחי הבעש"ט ביידיש, 1817-1815
(כולל דיון ראשוני במהדורת אוסטרהא תקע"ה - שנמצאה לאחרונה - לאחר שנחשבה לאבודה)

The article applies Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism to the research of the media portrayals of Ukraine and India in the Russian newspapers Trud and Izvestiya and Britain’s The Times and The Sun. The research based mainly on quantitative content analysis locates differences and similarities in the ways media deal with formerly dependent countries. Their portrayals are found out to be characterized by postcolonial condition significantly, and in Russia more so than in the UK.

With Chernivtsi as the object and framework of her scholarly inquiry, Svitlana Frunchak sets out to dismantle the fallacy of “historical Ukrainian lands.” This myth came into existence during Stalin’s annexation of Northern Bukovina, with Czernowitz as its capital, and vaulted into prominence during the Soviet period when the town became retitled Chernivtsi, a Ukrainian stand-in for the previous German toponym. This fallacy is important: both the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the independent post-1991 Ukrainian nation-state have constructed their own narratives while deliberately forcing Bukovina’s prewar and postwar multiethnic pasts into a state of oblivion. At present, however, as there is no Soviet power to maintain monopoly over the means of ars oblivionalis (art of oblivion), in the words of philosopher Umberto Eco, the author presents a non-Soviet, more or less liberal, and, above all, a more personal and evocative story of this Bukovina town. Frunchak goes non-nationalist, too, as she works outside of the Ukrainian academic establishment where the Ukrainian nationalist narrative dominates such discourse.

Письменные источники - это документы, с которыми связана история как наука. Документы истории и история документов тесно переплетены. Автоматический контент-анализ и компьютерная обработка исторических текстов обрели свое собственное место в мире методов источниковедения и конкретно-исторического анализа.

The integration of the countries of eastern and southeastern Europe into global flows of migration has become a major issue not only in migration policy debates , but also in analysing longer term social change in the region. Changes in the magnitudes of migrant remittances can be of crucial social and political importance. In this study, I link a conceptual contribution with a three-step empirical inquiry. First, I conceptualize migrant remittances as a form of external economic dependency. Next, I describe recent changes in the strength of the empirical relationship between migrant remittances as percentages of the GDP and per capita GDP for all societies of the world utilizing data from two online data sets. Employing what Charles Tilly (1984) called " variation-finding comparison, " I examine, next, the – as it turns out, quite sizeable – residual variation in the relative magnitude of remittances that remains after controlling for per capita GDP, and interpret it as a marker for patterns of remittance dependency. Finally, I trace the recent trajectories of the societies that had, until one generation ago, constituted the Soviet " bloc " against the backdrop of the global distribution in remittance dependency. The data have been adopted from two sources: Estimates for migrant remittances as percentages of the GDP of their home country come from the online World Develop

Since 1919, consecutive anniversaries of the declaration of the constitution on 3 May 1791 by the Four-Years Sejm have been celebrated as a national holiday of Poland. What else can better testify to the importance of the Government Act, especially that its provisions never became a binding law? It has been a peculiar homage to the "last will" of the agonizing country, a recollection of its independence prior to the partitions, and a voice of protest against its bondage. From this point of view, the date was definitely picked properly, and is not a subject of discussion. The problem is that with time, the first Polish constitutional act lost its symbolical meaning, and became deified as a testimony to how the Poles went (again!) ahead of the other nations on their path of civilizational development. With the obviously implied conclusion that the Poles do not need lessons in democracy from the foreigners, because they already in 1791... etc., etc., etc.

The main sources for my article are the files concerning dispensations for mixed marriages held in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Holy Office). My article analyses the tension between two Roman Catholic attitudes toward Catholic women in mixed marriages: the hope that they would serve a missionary role, on the one hand, and the fear that they would succumb to heresy, on the other. Debates within the Holy Office over granting these dispensations show that both conceptions had ancient roots, the first going back to the Roman era, the second to the twelfth century, and then particularly emphasised after the Council of Trent. Studies of mixed marriages in Protestant end Orthodox regions suggest many similarities to the Catholic policies examined here, both regarding the woman’s missionary function and especially regarding the risk of the woman’s apostasy and the meth-ods developed to avoid this.

Key words: The Möbius loop, Hinterwelt, Genius loci Scholae Provincialis Portensis, Nietzsche, Glagolitic, Cyrillic, the Petrinian reform, Lenin´s cultural revolution, the collapse of metaphysics in Slavonic writing

Both August Möbius (1790–1868) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) attended Pforta Abbey´s Landesschule. Whereas Möbius as a mathematician discovered a non-orientable two-dimensional surface, the so-called Möbius strip or loop, i.e. a surface with only one side and one boundary, Nietzsche tried to overcome the so-called Hinterwelt, the metaphysical realm beyond the physical one or the other side of being. Just as the Eleatic sphere symbolised the idea of the unity and the unchangeability of all being, just as the invisible hand reflected Scottish deism, just as dodecaphony underscored musically the Vienna Circle´s logical positvism, so the Nietzschean overcoming of the beyond along with the eternal recurrence of the same can be depicted by the Möbius loop.

In this context we might also regard the Moebius loop as a figure eventuating from the collapse of ontological systems. If the functioning of ontological and vital systems is characterised by a tension between two poles (the earthly and the other world, the life of this world and of the world to come, the above and the below, the masculine and the feminine principle, the temporal and the spiritual power, physics and metaphysics), it follows that, as a consequence of the annihilation of this vital tension and of the abolition of the difference between two opposing principles –  as a result of a short-circuit as it were –,  life is vanishing and death is occurring. Just such a process may be observed in the development of Slavonic writing.

This article attempts to illustrate the cultural and historical significance of the graphematic changes of the more than thousand-year-old Slavonic writing. Emphasis lies on its development from the Petrinian reform up to the Leninist cultural revolution. With its revolutionary aspects, the transformation of the Slavonic script conveys a profound philosophical connotation. It reflects a process of secularisation depriving the script of its metaphysical symbolism.

Slavonic writing historically departs from the glagolitsa developed by St. Cyril of Thessaloniki (ca. 826/27-869) in the 9th c. Into this alphabet designed for missionary purposes among the Slavs he introduced letters fraught with Christian religious symbolism: the Slavonic az (i. e. Cyril´s substitute for alpha) was depicted by the sign of a cross, the letters i (the first letter in the name “Isous” for Jesus) and slovo (i.e. word – “In the beginning was the Word”, invented as a substitute for sigma) were depicted by a combination of a circle, the symbol of eternity, and a triangle, the symbol of the Trinity.

In a further step, the cyrilitsa ascribed to St. Clement of Ohrid (ca. 840 – 916) contained the extended diacritic titlo ( ҃ ) symbol to mark the nomina sacra, e.g. the titlo crowning the word angel (’άгг҃лъ) served to distinguish the angel of the heavenly realm from the fallen angel (’άгглъ). The Cyrillic alphabet, a.k.a. azbuka, was made up of letters conveying the connection of literacy and the Gospel.

As part of Peter the Great´s efforts to modernise Russia by Europeanising his realm in all aspects of life the Cyrillic script was to resemble Latin alphabets current in Western Europe in the early 18th c. The new script introduced by decree in 1708 became known as the civil or Amsterdam script (grazhdansky shrift or amsterdamskaya azbuka). Aiming at Latin simplicity, the Petrinian reform stripped the cyrilitsa of its medieval calligraphic ornaments and its religious connotations. The Slavonic ideographic names were replaced by phonetic initials, i.e. the azbuka was transformed into the abevega. The titla were eliminated.

Right after the Bolshevik Revolution, Dec. 23, 1917 (Jan. 5, 1918) Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first People´s Commissar of Enlightenment, proclaimed the “Decree on the Introduction of a New Orthography”. The reform intended to promote rapid alphabetisation on the one hand and to break with pre-revolutionary culture, in particular with religious traditions, on the other. The elemination of the “superfluous” letters prefigurated the liquidation of the “parasitic” classes. The Bolshevik reform deprived the Tsarist alphabet of the remaining Greek letters (such as theta (ѳ)). By removing the Slavonic letters yat (ѣ), the final yer (ъ) and the decimal i (і desyaterichnoe) as well as distinctive female personal pronouns and adjective endings the reform deprived the Russian language of precision in expression. Simplification brought about a reduction of semantic clarity.

The most striking example of this reduction is found in the merger of world and peace in mir. In traditional eschatology the identity of world and peace was to be expected only at the end of times. In an chiliastic effort  Bolshevism intended to realise the kingdom to come in the revolutionary present. Not by chance the Leninist language reform reflects this turn from traditional metaphysics to secular religion. The Möbius loop had locked.

reziume

sakvanZo sityvebi: mobiusis maryuJi, nicSe, leninis kulturuli revolucia,
metafizikis kolafsi slavur mwerlobaSi.

orive august mobiusi (1790-1868) da fridrix nicSe (1844-1900) daeswro
„Pforta Abbey’s Landesschule“-s. maSin roca mobiusma, rogorc maTematikosma
aRmoaCina araorientirebuli organzomilebiani zedapiri, e.w. mobiusis
zolebi, magaliTad, zedapiri mxolod erT mxariT da erTi sazRvriT,
nicSe cdilobda daZleva e.w. Hinterwelt – metafizikuri sfero yofnis
erTi an meore fizikuri mxariss miRma. iseve, rogorc eleatikur (Eleatic)
sfero yvela arsebis erTianobisa da ucvlelobis ideas simbolo iyo.
am konteqstSi, Cven SeiZleba aseve miviCnioT mobiusis maryuJi, rogorc
figura, romelic warmoiqmneba ontologiuri sistemebis kolafsis
Sedegad. Tu ontologiuri da sasicocxlo sistemebis funqcionirebas
axasiaTebs daZabuloba or poluss Soris (am samyaros cxovreba da im
samyarosi, zemoT da qvemoT, mamakacuri da qaluri principi, droebiTi
da sulieri Zala, fizika da metafizika), aqedan gamomdinare, am vitaluri
daZabulobis ganadgurebis Sedegad da or sapirispiro princips Soris
arsebuli gansxvavebis gauqmebis Semdeg, sicocxle qreba da sikvdili
ibadeba. zustad amgvari procesi SeiZleba iyos dafiqsirebuli slavur
mwerlobaSi.
statia cdilobs asaxos kulturuli da istoriuli mniSvnelobis
grafematuli cvlilebebi aTasze meti wlis slavuri mwerlobisa. aqcenti
keTdeba mis ganviTarebis petrinianuli reformidan leninur kulturul
revoluciamde. revoluciuri aspeqtebiT slavuri damwerlobis
transformacia gadmoscems Rrma filosofiur konotacias. igi asaxavs
sekularizaciis process, romelic xelnawers metafizikur simbolizms
arTmevs.

http://sjani.ge/sjani-17/%E1%83%A4%E1%83%98%E1%83%9A%E1%83%98%E1%83%9E%E1%83%9E%20%E1%83%90%E1%83%9B%E1%83%9D%E1%83%9C%E1%83%98.pdf

Previous pages: Map 4: Probably the first appearance of Gammalsvenskby ("Schwedszkaja Kolonija") on a map. Kezikermen, the nearest hamlet, was renamed Berislav ("Beriszlaw") circa 1789-1805, Krigsarkivet 0403/31/A/037 18a. Map 5: Swedes and their neighbours. "Old Swedish" [colony] is now accompanied by the villages of Mühlhausendorf and Klosterdorf to the south, and along the road Berislav. Special map of the western part of the Russian Empire ("Spets. Karta Zap.