CC BY
0Preface
DOI: 10.31168/2658-3356.2024.2
This volume of the annual series Slavic & Jewish Cultures: Dialogue, Similarities, Differences is entitled The Concept of Border in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions. It includes proceedings from the international conference The Concept of Border in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions held in Moscow on December 6-8, 2023. The conference was the twenty-seventh annual meeting of scholars whose research interests focus on Jewish-Christian cultural contacts, ethno-confessional dialogue, and the mutual influence of Jewish and Slavic traditions. The project, which includes conferences and publication, is being conducted by the Center for Slavic-Judaic Studies of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Autonomous non-profit organization for Academic Research and Humanitarian Purposes Center "Sefer". The conference featured 55 speakers from Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Israel, Poland, and the USA. The speakers presented a total of 43 papers.
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in researchers' interest in linguistic, ethnocultural, ethno-confessional, and sociological processes characteristic of "border" regions, trends in the transformation of linguistic and mental stereotypes reflecting centuries of coexistence, the frontier mentality and the linguistic means of expressing it, as well as the linguistic, ethnographic, and sociological aspects of interaction among different cultural traditions. In cultural texts, borders serve not only as spatial markers but also as crucial elements associated with the concepts of "native" and "alien" spaces. Considering the centuries-old experience of ethnocul-tural coexistence between Slavs and Jews, conference participants discussed issues related to the exploration of geographical, linguistic, cultural, and social spaces, challenges in overcoming cultural, linguistic, and mental boundaries, and mechanisms for forming or dismantling these boundaries (both physical and symbolic).
The proceedings of the 2023 conference constitute the 26th volume in a series that has gained recognition among academic communities in Russia and abroad, and, over the years, acquired its own audience. Since 1998, this series has published volumes dedicated to analyzing historical, philosophical, linguistic, folkloristic-ethnographic, cultural mechanisms of interaction between Slavic and Jewish cultural traditions. Since 2017, the series Slavic & Jewish Cultures: Dialogue, Similarities, Differences has reached a new level by becoming a peer-reviewed continuous (annual) publication. In June 2023, the annual was included into the international scientific indexing and citation system Scopus (encompassing all volumes from 2019 onwards).
The volume The Concept of Border in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Tradition includes 23 articles by scholars from Russia and Israel. The article address a broad range of issues. These include borders as elements of linguistic and mental worldviews; the phenomenon of the "open" border that increasingly serves as a vector of cultural attraction between neighboring traditions rather than a demarcation line; forms of cultural contact and antagonism of traditions at the cultural frontier; the formation of boundaries within a society (including communities, "island traditions", subcultural and religious groups, as well as boundaries between the religious and the secular); symbolic borders between this world and the other (such as temporal boundaries in folk calendars and traditional rituals, the world of people and the otherworldly space, the dangerous "foreign" space) as elements of cultural codes, their materialization in cultural symbols, and their reflection in the language of culture; the crossing of the boundaries of "one's own" space and ways of mastering "foreign" spaces (including the breaking and transformation of cultural stereotypes, adaptation of elements from another culture, etc.); mechanisms for dealing with violators of established boundaries (such as prohibitions and prescriptions, traditional rituals of condemnation and reproach); genres of literature and folklore from antiquity to modernity that reflect the concept of borders and its perception in different eras (for example, travel narratives, pilgrimages, visions, legends, mythological prose, etc.); speech genres that articulate the concept of borders in cultural texts (including oaths, curses, proverbs, expulsion and intimidation formulas against enemies, diseases, mythological characters, harmful beings, etc.).
The volume opens with a block of articles that investigate the concept of "border" in literary texts from antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the modes of interaction between written and oral cultures in biblical literature. For the
first time, the annual features articles that deal with traditions of Ethiopian and Iranian Jews.
Several articles address the issues of ethno-confessional contacts in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Karaite community of Crimea, and in a contemporary Israeli counterculture of Mizrahi Jews.
The linguistic section features articles on topics related to the concepts of borders and borderlands as applied to Slavic dialects and minority language communities - from the Balkan area to the Western Caucasus.
Next comes a block of articles in which authors examine the phenomenology of borders in literary and folklore texts, as well as narratives of "oral history" belonging to Russian, Polish, Jewish, and Modern Greek traditions.
The book concludes with an article highlighting the problem of "borders" between religious and secular media (by using the experience of the Russian Orthodox Church as an example).
Like previous publications in the series, this book features a substantial volume of field and archival materials made available to a wider academic audience for the first time. The editors hope that this latest release in the series that has already gained popularity among specialists and established its own dedicated audience will attract interest from a broad range of researchers who work in the fields of Slavic and Jewish studies.
The editorial board:
Olga Belova
Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia ORCID: 0000-0001-5221-9424 DSc in Philology, Chief Researcher,
Department of Ethnolinguistics and Folklore, Institute of Slavic Studies RAS
119334, Moscow Leninsky Avenue, 32 A E-mail: [email protected]
Irina Kopchenova
Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
ORCID: 0000-0002-7268-2608
Researcher,
Slavic-Judaic Center, Institute for Slavic Studies, RAS 119334, Moscow Leninsky Avenue, 32 A E-mail: [email protected]
Aleksandra Ippolitova
Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia ORCID: 0000-0001-8008-2330 PhD, Senior Researcher,
Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics, Center for Linguocultural Studies BALCANICA, Institute of Slavic Studies RAS 119334, Moscow Leninsky Avenue, 32 A E-mail: [email protected]
Victoria Mochalova
Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia ORCID: 0000-0002-3429-222X
PhD, Head of Slavic-Judaic Center, Institute for Slavic Studies, RAS 119334, Moscow Leninsky Avenue, 32 A E-mail: [email protected]
Svetlana Amosova
Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
ORCID: 0000-0001-7614-6549
Researcher,
Slavic-Judaic Center, Institute for Slavic Studies, RAS 119334, Moscow Leninsky Avenue, 32 A E-mail: [email protected]
