Jews and East Slavs have lived co-territorially for more than a millennium – and much longer in the case of the Balkans, where the Jewish presence preceded Slavic settlement^[1] – in which time their cultures not only transformed one another, but became multifariously interwoven in ways that, despite a growing literature on the encounter, are only beginning to be appreciated – hence the appropriately posed thematic question “svoi ili chuzhoi?” Yet from the second half of the twentieth century until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the study of Jewish themes was a taboo subject and consequently familiarity with Jewish traditions receded from the collective conscience, creating a further dimension of estrangement.^[2] Meanwhile, out-migration, partial extermination, and assimilation of Jews have further reduced the visibility of the cultural nexus. Taking as its point of departure the semantic opposition Slav-Jew, the volume under review promises to illuminate these cultures in the framework of the mutual observation of the other, though the majority of the observations are, perhaps for understandable reasons, Slav > Jew. Moreover, the scope is somewhat narrower than promised by the title, insofar as the Slavs in question are largely East Slavs and Poles.
The book contains twenty-nine papers^[3] delivered by trans-CIS participants at a conference of the same title, held in Moscow on November 26-28, 2002, the volume being the fifth installment in the publications of a project of Judeo-Christian intercultural dialogue begun in 1995. The majority of the papers treat historical topics beginning with the Byzantine Empire and running through the modern period, with emphases on medieval and early modern periods and a particular focus on the critical period of Jewish integration into central and eastern Slavic societies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This temporal framework contrasts with the range usually covered in American studies of Judeo-Slavic relations, the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, not coincidentally the formative years of the emigrants ancestral to many American scholars with East European Jewish backgrounds. A few of the articles bring forth new material from recent ethnographic expeditions in relic shtetls (mestechki) in the former Pale. Of particular interest are three articles on subbotniki, ethnic Russians who accepted the Old Testament as their central text and joined – or at least identified themselves with – the Jewish community proprie dictu. A few papers discuss musical influences, language issues per se, and political discourse, including an analysis of lexemes referring to Jews in right-wing extremist Russian-language Internet pages. Although the articles are easily categorized thematically, a felicitous interdisciplinary approach is evident through many of the contributions. As an examination of each article would be impossible in such a short space, I shall discuss just a few representative items.
A fine example of interdisciplinary work and a markedly creative approach to teasing out meaning of the opposition Slav-Jew is Natalia Starchenko’s “Evrei na Volyni v XVI – pervoi treti XVII v.: nekotorye nabliudeniia nad neprostym sosedstvom” (pp. 92-104). Examining legal disputes between Slavs and Jews in Volhynian legal transcripts from the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, the author illuminates the discourse surrounding minor crises between Jews and Gentiles. From this interaction it is possible to glean multilayered information about the system of values that held between the two groups at this moment in time. For example, in a case involving the beating of a Jew by a nobleman, a dispute breaks out over who should be required to take an oath – the accuser or the accused – when the judge failed to take into consideration of witnesses’ testimony, asserting the impossibility that a nobleman could have undertaken the alleged violent act. Despite the prevailing view of the presumption of innocence, the oath is assigned to the Jew, who in turn won the case. The noble complains that “daleko est’ vazhneishaia prisiaga shliakhetskaia, do kotoroe sia beru, nizhli vsi dovody zhidovskie… bo iako ikh vira zlaia, tak” i prisiaga ne vazh”naia.” (pp. 96-97). As the example demonstrates, while individuals may have held polarized views of the other, neither the state’s nor its subjects’ views and behavior can be characterized monochromatically. Starchenko rightly, in my view, warns not to dramatize the conflicts that these documents reveal, nor to distort their power to illuminate, by confusing their reflections on everyday life with (contemporary) stereotypes and ideology (p. 102).
A more typologically oriented approach is taken by Olga Belova, who attempts in a well-crafted paper to determine the distinctive features marking the notion “Jew” in the peasant mindset of East Slavs in the nineteenth century (pp. 160-175). Examining ethnographic material, including dialect transcripts taken from ethnographic archives, as well as (in part, photographic) evidence from her own expeditions, in Belarus and western Ukraine, she demonstrates the often fuzzy conceptualizations of Jews that East Slavic peasants held, conflating them with Catholics or Muslims or others, e.g., “Evrei zheniatsia na mnogikh zhonakh i kak tatary ne iidiat svininu…”; “Nemtsy ne viriat vo Khrista…” (p. 161), or naively reinterpreting the theological underpinnings of estrangement, “Iz ikhnova roda proizoidet sam Antikhrist” (loc. cit.). Moreover, faith is the defining element of “self” and becomes therefore the diacritic element for “other.” The same conflation of Jews with others derives also from the reinterpretation of plastic form. In an eye-opening account of her fieldwork in Poless’e, Belova recounts her informants’ contention that the bolvan and koloda type grave markers are perceived as signs of different (non-Slavic, non-Orthodox) confessions – Baptists, Jews – when in fact these types are characteristic of archaic Slavic grave markers. She provides excellent photos to illustrate the point (Pp. 168-171). Her evidence points her to the conclusion that the Slavic conceptualization of “Jew” does not necessarily entail “Judaism” as a defining feature, but rather any of a variety of cultural or confessional types at the periphery (p. 173). I would add that her evidence also points tantalizingly toward the possibility of earlier cultural cross-pollination.
In my view, language is the litmus test of identity and the repository of all cultural information that historical narratives as such or material assemblages fail to preserve. For this reason, I had high hopes for the linguistics articles in the collection. Anna Sorokina’s article on Slavic lexical borrowings and calques in Yiddish (pp. 187-199) offers a promising attempt at categorizing Slavic elements in Yiddish, including an insightful, if brief, reference to early Slavic borrowings into Yiddish as recorded in France in the early twelfth century (p. 187). She does not indicate awareness of recent work in this field (her most recent source, Fal’kovich’s Russian-Yiddish dictionary, is dated 1984) and thus fails to engage in a discussion of the deeper implications of contact phenomena, i.e., whether and to what extent Slavic borrowings in Yiddish indicate garden-variety borrowing or more profound interaction of the communities that made use of Slavic and Yiddish. The answer to this question, to judge by Wexler’s work, is that, possibly, Slavs themselves made up a substantial part of the community and that, in any event, East Yiddish speakers forged a new identity through their transformation of language that became Slavic in structure but Germanic in substance.^[4] This deeper discussion would have dovetailed appropriately with the immanent sub-theme of the volume, concerning the absence of boundaries between svoi and chuzhoi. While Sorokina’s article misses an opportunity, Elena Storgunova’s “Svoi? Chuzhoi! V russkikh poslovitsakh” misses the point—her minor catalogue of phrases containing references to Jews in Dal’’s dictionary and the small encyclopedic dictionary of Brokgauz and Efron (pp. 176-186) is improvisatory and impressionistic, providing no analysis that might have illuminated the linguistic habits of nineteenth-century Russian speakers with respect to their perception of Jews.^[5]
Minor shortcomings aside, this is a very useful book with a coherent theme and many solid, thoughtful, and thought-provoking articles. Nearly all of the papers address a facet of the Slav-Jew svoi-chuzhoi encounter in a way that is aware of the constructivist paradigm and, following from this, the evolving nature of culture. It also refreshingly abstains from discourses of pity and self-flagellation. The volume should serve as a point of departure for further research on the Slavic-Jewish cultural encounter and itself serve as a model for cross-cultural studies of and in the post-Soviet space and beyond.