Alexander Kulik
Research interests: cross-cultural transmission of texts and ideas; tradition criticism; thematic studies; Slavic studies (palaeoslavica, medieval and modern Judeo-Slavica, Russian modernism, cultural history); Jewish studies (early Judaism, medieval history of East European Jewry). Ph.D., Hebrew University, 2000. Postdoc, Harvard, 1999-2000. Twelve books (five monographs and seven edited volumes), incl. with Oxford and Harvard UP, 2005-2020. ERC grant, 2010. Research Group Co-director, IIAS, 2011. Editor-in-Chief, Brill book series, since 2008. Editor-in-Chief, Oxford Guide, 2019. Research grants: ERC; GIF; ISF (three times). Organizer of twelve international conferences. Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Russian and Slavic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Visiting research or teaching positions at Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, UC London, FU Berlin, Lausanne, Ca’ Foscari, Moscow SU, St. Petersburg SU, HSE Moscow.
less
InterestsView All (24)
Uploads
Books by Alexander Kulik
Although these Slavonic texts themselves date from a relatively late period, they are translations or reworkings of far earlier texts and traditions, many of them arguably going back to late biblical or early postbiblical times. The material in these works can contribute significantly to a better understanding of the roots of postbiblical mysticism, rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity, ancient and medieval dualistic movements, as well as the beginnings of the Slavonic literary tradition.
The volume provides a collection of the minor biblical pseudepigrapha preserved solely in Slavonic; at the same time, it is also the first collection of Slavonic pseudepigrapha translated into a western European language. It includes the original texts, their translations, and commentaries focusing on the history of motifs and based on the study of parallel material in ancient and medieval Jewish and Christian literature.
The aim of the volume is to to bridge the gap between the textual study of this corpus and its contextualization in early Jewish, early Christian, rabbinic, Byzantine, and other traditions, as well as to introduce these texts into the interdisciplinary discussion of the intercultural transmission of ideas and motifs.
Books Edited by Alexander Kulik
The thematic focus of the research includes various aspects of Bible translation in the Slavic Glagolitic and Cyrillic traditions beginning in the ninth century. The analyses mostly cover aspects of Slavic Bible translations during the Middle Ages that have not been studied or that have been the object of insufficient scholarly research, both in the canonical Old and New Testament and in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. An important place has been given to the first trans- lations of the books of the Bible from Greek into Slavonic by SS. Cyril and Methodius, creators of the first Slavonic alphabet in the ninth century, and to the development of these translations during the Middle Ages, on the basis of research into medieval Slavic manuscripts from the tenth to the sixteenth century. The papers present analyses of Exodus, the Psalms, the Book of Jeremiah, the Book of Job, the Book of Jesus Son of Sirach, the Story of Adam, and the Story of Melchizedek. Attention has also been paid to later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century translations of Old Testament books into Slavonic, not only from Greek texts, but also from the Hebrew Massoretic text (the Song of Songs, the Proverbs of Solomon). Several of the articles discuss issues in translation of the New Testament, mainly of the Gospels, and its textual tradition during the Middle Ages, elucidating the links between the Slavonic translation and the Greek textual radition. The articles also raise theoretical questions concerning the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, the source of the oldest translation into Slavonic by SS. Cyril and Methodius.
The volume also includes several articles on key issues concerning the work of Cyril and Methodius that are closely linked to the interpretation of their Bible translations, such as the Church Council at Preslav in 893, which provided a strong impetus for the development of the Cyrillo-Methodian translations in medieval Slavdom; the main primary Slavonic sources for the work and lives of SS. Cyril and Methodius, including Vita Constantini and its critical edition, and other previously unstudied issues.
The articles are informed by methodologies from various fields of research, and their analytical approach is frequently interdisciplinary, applying approaches from the standpoints of textual criticism, philo- logy (linguistics, literary history, palaeography), cultural and political history, and theology (biblical studies and exegesis) to issues in Heb- raic, Byzantine, and Slavic studies.
Papers by Alexander Kulik
("Such explanations are very pretty in general, but are the inventions of a very clever and laborious and not altogether enviable man, for no other reason than because after this he must explain the forms of the Centaurs, and then that of the Chimaera, and there presses in upon him a whole crowd of such creatures, Gorgons and Pegas, and multitudes of strange, inconceivable, portentous natures. If anyone disbelieves in these, and with a rustic sort of wisdom, undertakes to explain each in accordance with probability, he will need a great deal of leisure." [Phaedrus 229d-e])
The emerging picture may impact different fields of knowledge and prompt a reevaluation of many historical and linguistic problems. Slavic linguistics should take into account early East Slavic forms documented in Hebrew transliterations which sometimes provide earlier attestations of these forms than the ones preserved in the Slavic written sources. The issue of an early Slavic substratum is also of crucial importance for the history of Yiddish. The very existence of an East Slavic-speaking Jewry may provide an additional argument in favor of the existence of Jewish communities in this region, who either were not of German descent or else treated their German legacy in a way very different from later Yiddish-speaking communities.
This situation contrasts strikingly with what we know of the linguistic insolubility of Yiddish-speaking Jews in their Slavic environment in the early modern and modern periods up to the beginning of the assimilation processes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only then do we once again encounter East European Jews who speak only Russian or Polish, or who play a leading role in the teaching of these lan- guages in the West. The linguistic situation reflected in our early sources may indicate a peculiar type of coexistence between Jews and their Slavic neighbors, one that differs from later models of either extreme isolationism or no less extreme assimilation attested in this region. What I am suggesting is a model in which the boundaries between the two groups could take shape along confessional rather than ethno-cultural lines.