Scholarship for Master's Students — Margarita Gorbacheva
Project by Margarita Gorbacheva, Master's student at the Institute of Asian and African Countries of Lomonosov Moscow State University: "Modernization of Jewish Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe at the Turn of the 19th-20th Centuries: Ideology and Hermeneutics." As a result of the work, a Master's thesis has been successfully defended.
At the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, a segment of traditional Jewry in Eastern Europe engaged in polemics with modernizing movements, primarily Zionism, in the process of which it itself underwent modernization. The rabbinate's methods of interpreting the Torah and Talmud increasingly approximated those practiced by proponents of secularism. The struggle against Zionists led to the organization of Orthodoxy itself along party lines, the development of journalism, the emergence of publishing houses, and the creation of Orthodox political parties. This paradox is revealed in the study through the analysis of Orthodox sources in Hebrew: collections of journalistic articles published at the turn of the century ("Or la-Yesharim", "Mahzikei ha-Dat"), and others.
Image: Hovevei Zion at the conference in Katowice, Poland, 1884. Source: YIVO Encyclopedia.org
The research was carried out with the financial support of A. Klyachin.
Work on the project has been completed.