The Ethnoarchaeology of Russians in the Syro-Palestinian Region (18th–19th Centuries)

Postcolonial Voices from Down Under: Aboriginal and Migrant Roots, Religions, and Readings, edited by Jione Havea., 2015

Palestine has experienced wave after wave of conquest and colonization, with the current occupation by Israel being both the latest and the most systematic. In the land where the Bible was formed we find a complex interaction of politics, scriptures and religion. This paper will focus on Russian interests in Palestine as one significant historical expression of the desire to possess Jerusalem that has shaped Jewish identities, motivated the Crusaders, and remains at the heart of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. This ‘lust for Zion’ has a complex relationship with the Bible, which has itself been repeatedly occupied by those seeking to colonize the land and drive out the indigenous peoples.

Palestinian Exploration Quarterly, 2018

This paper offers a reappraisal of the Levantine prehistoric chronological sequence constructed by Pyotr Petrovich Efimenko (1884–1969). As a young Russian prehistorian, Efimenko visited Palestine in 1913, collected material from several sites and, in 1915, published a synthesis in which he compared the prehistory of Europe with that of the Near East. This was part of his comprehensive monograph on the Prehistory of Eurasia which was also based on his work at the sites of Mezin and Kostenki and the Palaeolithic of Russia. The current paper also attempts to evaluate the career of Efimenko particularly in light of the unfamiliarity of his work among prehistorians working in the southern Levant.

The paper will discuss the Russian involvement in the Holy Land that started from informal actions to evolve into formal activities of religious, trading and scientific institutions related to the Russian authorities.

Cultural Diplomacy and Arabs Christians in Palestine, 1918-1948. Between Contention and Connection, 2021

2020

The aim of this essay is to present a comprehensive review of the collective monograph Evrei (The Jews), published in 2018 in the series Narody i kul’tury (Peoples and Culture). The authors give an overview of the modern developments in Jewish studies to acquaint the reader with the background of the reviewed monograph. Every chapter of the monograph is analyzed in detail, taking into account the most recently gathered ethnographic materials, such as the data recorded by Alexander Novik in Priazovye and Crimea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the newest publications on the subject, such as a paper by Evgeniya Khazdan on Jewish traditional culture, published in 2018.

Choice Reviews Online, 2014

not an isolated theory, but a position that can only be understood as part of a rich and variegated conversation. This work will be of use to students of medieval philosophy, theology, and law.

2005

2002

This essay examines the roots of Jewish revival in Russia from the late Brezhnev period to the present. The development of the various institutions existing in today's Jewish community in Russia is surveyed and their strengths and weaknesses are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of a stable indigenous community leadership. The essay looks at the internal social and political relations within the Jewish community as well as the relations of the community with the changing post-Soviet Russian regimes.

Mikhail Kizilov. “Crimean Museum Collections as a Source of Information on Jewish History, Religion, Culture, and Everyday Life.” In Moreshet Israel: A Journal for the Study of Judaism, Zionism and Eretz Israel 16 (2018): 67-92.

2012

Herald of an archivist, 2021

While the Jewish studies in Russia include many publications devoted to the history of Jewish population beyond the Pale of Settlement, the historiography on the Jewish cantonists is rather limited. Most studies are based almost exclusively on the negative experiences and sad memories of the cantonists themselves. This article aims to reconstruct the environment in which the Jewish soldiers lived when serving in the Orenburg Line Battalion No. 8 housed in Yekaterinburg between 1843 and 1858. We have based our research on administrative records of the battalion stored in the State Archive of the Sverdlovsk Region. Thorough analyses of the newly discovered documents permits quite balanced view on the Jewish conscripts’ fate in the Urals. The newly discovered and analyzed documents have allowed us to reconstruct the soldiers’ everyday life: what they were doing; what they ate; what opportunities they had for maintaining Judaism and how they adapted to the new conditions. The study has ...

This article investigates the Russian Orthodox presence and activities in Christianity's sacred historical center of the Holy Land from the 1840s, when Russia expanded its consular activities in Palestine and began its first spiritual missions to this region, through the end of the nineteenth century. The article particularly centers on the active leadership of Archimandrite Antonin (Kapustin), who served as the leader of the Russian Ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem from 1865 to 1894. A prodigious scholar of the Orthodox East, Antonin resourcefully developed a respected Russian presence in Palestine, raised prodigious funds for the assistance of Russian pilgrims and for the accumulation of properties throughout the Holy Land, and continued his intensive studies and publications on the region's history, archeology, and human geography. Frary illustrates how the archimandrite in these pursuits exhibited an impressive ability for flexible and sensitive adaptation to a non-Russian, non-Orthodox environment that was revealed in his own scholarly work and in his successes in constructing new regional centers of Orthodoxy in Palestine.

"This article argues that the post-Soviet perspective on Russians in Israel allows a deeper understanding of this collective’s extreme socio-cultural heterogeneity and opens up the meanings of its ‘Russianness’ often taken for granted in research literature. Empirical examples in the article trace the meanings of key cultural and sociological categories – intelligentsia and ethnicity – in the post-Soviet context, and their implementation in the Russian-Israeli field. The article stresses the potency and dominance of these categories, as well as their pragmatic usage and modification within local political and ideological contexts. The contemporary manifestation of these categories preserves the ‘civilizational’ aspect of Russian-Soviet identity, allowing their creative use by this diasporic group. Keywords: Russian immigrants; post-Soviet cultural space; ethnic identity; Israel"

Journal of Modern History, 2012

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Vestnik Drevnei Istorii 82/4, 911-940, 2022

The authors publish a hitherto unknown squeeze made from a North West Semitic inscription. The squeeze originally belonged to the Russian Archeological Institute in Constantinople and is now hosted by the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The inscription, performed in relief, may have been made on a large ornamented stone vessel. Paleographic features of the letters point to the mid‑9th century BC as its approximate date. Both paleographic and linguistic features of the text suggest that its origin is to be sought in Southern Canaan (Palestine).