Materials relating to East European Jewish history and culture in the archives of the former Soviet Union

The Kiev Institute of Jewish (from the early 1930s “Proletarian”) Culture (Institut Evreiskoi Proletarskoi Kul'tury, IEPK), based at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAS), was one of two such organisations in the inter-war period. This article discusses the fate of its archive, a rich source that included material from Leningrad and elsewhere, in the wake of two interventions; firstly, its sudden closure in 1936 by the Soviet authorities and, secondly, the Nazi occupation of Kiev in the Second World War. As a consequence, the archive was scattered to the winds, ending up in two continents.     

Images of Jewish identities in Lithuanian literature of the twentieth century: Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris

This paper deals with the identity concept of two Lithuanian Jewish writers, Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris. Kanovich, as a member of the Holocaust generation, writing in Russian, depicts his protagonists as spiritual and hardworking people with strong self‐confidence, resting on religion and custom. By means of the narrative technique of memory, Kanovich creates a literary resurrection of the Lithuanian Jews as a people which was almost completely exterminated during the Holocaust. Omnipresent pictures of cemetery and grave transform the Lithuanian space into a metonymy of death and, grotesquely, to the only place of home, being the “shelter” for the killed bodies of the Lithuanian Jewry. Markas Zingeris, growing up in post‐war Soviet Lithuania, represents the concept of open identities, changeable in time and place. Calling himself a Lithuanian writer who has been raised within a Lithuanian, Jewish, and, not least, Soviet milieu, Zingeris depicts his protagonists in in‐between situations. Writing in Lithuanian, speaking several languages fluently and working as translator, Zingeris embodies the cosmopolite. At the same time, though, he is a writer of collective memory. He comments on the apparent loss of the great utopia of an autonomous identity with ironic melancholy, pointing instead to the rich variety of hybrid identities.     

宗教信仰与现实国际冲突和斗争述评

宗教信仰是人类文明的一种重要现象。它深深扎根于民间,又对人类的社会生活产生了巨大影响。在当今世界上,国家与国家、民族与民族、部落与部落、社团与社团之间所产生的冲突和斗争,几乎都可以直接或间接找到宗教信仰方面的因素。因此,宗教信仰是人类社会的重大问题之一,是考验各级负责人政绩十分重要的试金石。     

Marginality and its directions

The concept of marginality articulated by Robert Park in Migration and the Marginal Man is reconstructed in order to yield a more complex general theory of marginality. Park believed marginality results when individuals in migrant groups are barred by prejudice from complete acceptance into a dominant culture. Here it is argued that the marginal person, having taken on elements of the dominant culture, also is unable to return unchanged to his or her original group. Thus, the marginal person is caught in a structure of double ambivalence: unable either to leave or to return to the original group; unable either to merge with the new group or to slough it off. Marginal persons typically react to this field of cross-cutting pressures in four directions, here termed assimilation, return, poise, and transcendence. German Jewry of the Wilhelmine era serves as a test case of the general theory of marginality. Application of the theory resolves some of the salient difficulties attending efforts to understand postemancipation German Jewry.     

生死边缘的希望——伊尔莎·艾兴格小说《更大的希望》解读

《更大的希望》以极尽诗意化的写作手法,描述了一群惨遭纳粹迫害的犹太儿童在二战中经历的一段充满恐惧与不安、希望与绝望交织的悲惨生活。作家自身的创伤经历对小说的创作有着深刻的影响。通过小说独特的双重视角与带有神秘色彩和象征意义的语言,可探寻小说深刻的思想意蕴。     

哈尔滨犹太人墓地考察研究

在近代,哈尔滨曾是东亚犹太人最大的聚集中心和宗教中心。犹太人在哈尔滨所进行的政治、宗教、经济和文化活动,对哈尔滨的经济繁荣、城市建设曾起过一定作用。目前在哈尔滨仍保存着东亚最大的犹太人墓地。保护和利用这一文化遗存,深入研究哈尔滨犹太人史和散居于世界各地的哈尔滨犹太人及其后裔的生活状况,有利于加强中国与以色列,中国与世界各国犹太人的文化交流与经济合作。     

Contemporary Anglo-Jewish community leadership: coping with multiculturalism

In this article, drawing on qualitative interviews and documentary analysis, we argue that the Jewish community in Britain has undergone a fundamental shift since 1990 from a 'strategy of security', a strategy of communal leadership based on emphasizing the secure British citizenship and belonging of the UK's Jews, to a 'strategy of insecurity', where the communal leadership instead stresses an excess of security among Anglo-Jewry. We demonstrate this based on two case studies: of the Jewish renewal movement in the 1990s and the 'new antisemitism' phenomenon of the 2000s. We conclude that this shift is tied to the shift from a monocultural Britain to an officially multicultural one, and that therefore there are lessons that can be taken from it for the study of British and other multiculturalisms.     

论伊甸神话对卡夫卡创作的影响

卡夫卡是一位有着较强宗教意识的犹太作家,我们不从宗教角度出发将难以读懂他的作品。《圣经》中的伊甸神话对卡夫卡有着深刻影响,其小说即是对亚当夏娃被上帝逐出伊甸园后人类命运的思考。这可以从小说人物所犯错误、对罪的感受以及受到的驱逐、死亡等惩罚中得到印证。上帝与人的关系问题一直是卡夫卡思考的重心。在上帝与人之间存有鸿沟的情况下,卡夫卡推崇信仰方式的个性化,这也是走向上帝的救赎之路。写作是卡夫卡的"生命之树"。     

一个神奇的民族和一个神奇的民系——犹太精神与客家精神之比较

犹太民族和我国的客家民系同样经历了历代迁徙、天涯飘泊、客居异乡的过程,其精神特质形成的动因,团结互助、崇文重教、反抗强暴、求真务实、精于理财、返本回归等是犹太民族和客家民系共同特点。     

The concept of yikhes and its transformation during the Soviet period (based on field materials collected in the town of Tulchin,Ukraine)

It is commonly thought that the concept of yikhes (Hebrew, yikhus) refers largely or even solely to the notion of noble descent. As late as 1959, the Standard Jewish Encyclopedia defined yikhes in these terms; and a similar understanding of the term can be found in other leading sources. Using extensive field materials collected under the auspices of the St Petersburg Judaica Centre, this essay demonstrates, however, that yikhes has a wide variety of meanings in the present‐day Jewish community of Tulchin (Ukraine), which is not limited to genealogical implications and may completely ignore them. The range of meanings associated with yikhes includes secular learning, “honorable” (non‐manual) profession, “respect” on the part of other community members, ethical qualities, etc. Due to a partial or complete loss of Yiddish, many residents of the town know the word yikhes solely from expressions such as “yikhes in the bathhouse,” where this word has lost its independent meaning. Through an anthropological analysis of yikhes as a reflection of social ideas and practices within a small and relatively circumscribed society, the paper demonstrates both the breadth of tradition the concept reflects and the limitations of the ways it is generally presented and understood in the literature.