JSMA (263293)

  https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/263293

  FP7 (2007-2013)

  Jews and Slavs in the Middle Ages: Interaction and Cross-Fertilization

  ERC Starting Grant - The study of the human past (ERC-SG-SH6)

  medieval history  ·  archaeology

  2010-11-01 Start Date (YY-MM-DD)

  2016-10-31 End Date (YY-MM-DD)

  € 1,043,999 Total Cost

  Description

The central purpose of this project is to bring down interdisciplinary barriers by showing how the Slavic and the Jewish heritage can each be approached as a unique repository of the unknown texts, traditions, and sensibilities of the other. By focusing on previously unexplored or under-explored medieval texts, I aim to reconstruct the Jewish and Slavic legacies, some of whose materials have been considered lost, while others were misinterpreted or neglected. This research project will resort to historical and philological techniques hitherto considered mutually incompatible in this field. The study intends to use methods of cultural archaeology to explore medieval Judeo-Slavic transparency. By cultural transparency we understand the mutual permeability of different cultures, which facilitates the exchange of ideas and genres of creativity between them. Cultural archeology involves methods of multi-disciplinary research based on the assumption that Eastern Europe constituted a melting pot characterized by an intensive cross-fertilization of cultural legacies. Cultural archaeology studies different historical, religious, and literary texts by looking at them as a palimpsest in which earlier texts and types of discourse come to the fore as shaped by their contemporary socio-cultural settings. The proposed theme has far-reaching methodological implications beyond the Judeo-Slavic cultural realm. This project will build a model of cross-cultural interaction to achieve a better understanding of the situations in which different faith-based ethnic cultures cohabit.

  Complicit Organisations

1 Israeli organisation participates in JSMA.