Jews in Old Rus'
Date and Time
Location
Book launch and discussion of Jews in Old Rus' with author Alexander Kulik
In conversation with:
- Michael Flier, Emeritus Professor of Ukrainian Philology at Harvard University
- Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Jewish History at Northwestern University
- Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Program at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw
- Michelle Viise, Monographs Editor at HURI Books
Moderated by Oleh Kotsyuba, Director of Print and Digital Publications at HURI. Books are available for purchase on the HURI Books website.
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies public event series and HURI Books Program, and co-sponsored by the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies.
About the Book
This unique collection makes available for the first time a comprehensive record of the earliest Jewish presence in eastern Europe, assembling all known evidence for Jews in Old Rus' and providing the original texts in Hebrew, Slavonic, Latin, and Arabic with English translations and commentaries. Bringing together sources from Rus, Khazaria, Byzantium, western Europe, and the Middle East, this collection realigns the position of early East European Jewry within the wider Jewish diasporas and meticulously portrays legal rulings, religious customs, linguistic acculturation, and everyday life, offering new perspectives on early Slavic contexts and Slavic-Jewish relations.
About the Author
Alexander Kulik is a professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the cross-cultural transmission of texts and ideas in the fields of Slavic and Jewish studies.
In addition to this volume, Kulik has authored three other books: Retroverting Slavonic Pseudepigrapha (Society of Biblical Literature, 2004; Brill, 2005); 3 Baruch: Greek-Slavonic Apocalypse of Baruch (de Gruyter, 2009); and, with Sergey Minov, Biblical Pseudepigrapha in Slavonic Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2015).
He edited History of the Jews in Russia: From Antiquity to the Early Modern Period in the bilingual series published by the Zalman Shazar Center (Jerusalem) and Gesharim (Moscow), and served as editor-in-chief of A Guide to Early Jewish Texts and Traditions in Christian Transmission (Oxford University Press, 2019). Kulik founded and has headed the Brill book series Studia Judaeoslavica.