The Ballad in Eastern European Jewish Folklore: Origins, Poetics, Music

Analysis of the poetics and music of Yiddish folk ballads reveals that the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe did not preserve German songs,widely popular among them up to the beginning of their gradual migration to the east, but instead developed a ballad repertoire of their own.The group of songs, designated as “medieval” by Sophia Magid, the author of a monumental study on the Yiddish ballad, includes both old ballads and those borrowed from the Germans towards the end of the 18th century and later. While the borrowed songs carried a similarity to the German originals as shown in their melodic contours, vocabulary, and plots, the old Yiddish ballads, though generally echoing both Slavic and Western European balladry, differed significantly. The article attempts to identify and characterize this older layer. It apparently first came into being in Central and Eastern Europe in the 15th 16th centuries and continued to develop until the new“urban” ballad emerged in the mid 1800s.The poetics and music of the Yiddish ballad reflect the genre’s hallmark – ballad-singing as a form of communication – which distinguished it from the Yiddish lyric song, performed “for oneself”. The ballad melodies lack melismatic embellishments and dramatic shifts; their tempo is usually moderate; some of them frequently feature the “Ionic minor” rhythmic pattern; many others resemble Klezmer dance music. These features reflect Yiddish ballad aesthetics: music is an ostensibly neutral frame for revealing a narrative that evokes emotions without referring to them directly.Two features of the international ballad canon – readiness to draw material from diverse sources, and a focus on the collective emotional response to key moments of everyday life–stimulated the formation of the indigenous Yiddish tradition. Its character also reflected the remoteness of Eastern Ashkenazi folk culture from rural Slavic folklore, and the lack of a permanent social function of balladsinging in the Ashkenazi tradition.

The Mountain Jews, the Uryms, the Cherkesohays: the North- Western Caucasus Non-Muslim Groups Typology in the middle of 19th century

The article describes three the North-Western Caucasus minor groups – The Mountain Jews, the Uryms (Mountain Greeks), the Cherkesohays (Mountain Armenians). These groups analyzed by non-subethnic, but as “network communities”. They had to tendency to consolidation, but had disappeared in result (grouping). The author explored the Typology of their communication with aboriginal peoples and the process of cultural landscape creation in the context of Russian Imperial Paradigm.

Ilya Anisimov — Researcher Mountain Jew's Community

The published article by the late Israeli scientist is dedicated to the legacy of Ilya Sherbetovich Anisimov (1862 - 1928), the first researcher of the Mountain Jews community.

Sacred, Desecrated and the Struggle for Religious Boundaries in the Сities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th-17th Centuries

The article provides a historiographical overview of the problem of religious tolerance and interfaith relations in the Middle Ages and early Modern times. While studying both Jewish-Christian relations and Catholic-Protestant interactions, the popularity of new approaches of social and cultural anthropology is shown.Religious bounders deserve special attention here, especially David Nirenberg’s discussion of practices that kept religious groups separate, yet integrated them into communities.Author tries to involve new approaches to analyze the conflicts between Jews and Christians in the second half of the XVII century,when Jewish settlement in the towns of Poland-Lithuania was being greatly increased.

Shmuel Zygielbojm (1895–1943) as a Figure in Polish Historical Discourse

Szmul Zygielbojm, activist of the socialist Bund, member of the National Council of the Republic of Poland in London, on the night of May 11-12, 1943, committed suicide. It was a deliberate act of protest against „the inaction with which the world is staring and allowing the Jewish people to exterminate.“Quite early this universal act of opposition to evil became an argument showing Polish merits and non-Polish faults in informing the world about the Holocaust. How did historians and publicists talk about Zygielbojm? What role was assigned to him in the discourse about the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations? Why has the Bundist figure returned in contemporary debate?