The bibliocentrism of traditional Jewish culture is well known, and its various manifestations—the foundational role of the Tanakh for all Jewish literature, the place of Tanakh studies in religious education, the significance of education and bibliophilism in society, and the image and functions of the Torah scroll in ritual practice, among others—are well studied. This article seeks to consider the place of the Tanakh, religious books, and books in general in the culture of Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry from the end of the 1910s to the start of the 2000s. This was the culture of a declining, nearly moribund and then re-emergent Judaism; simultaneously, it was a culture that, even if only in part, formed and established the Soviet intelligentsia; finally, it was the culture of a doleful and proud national minority that, though keeping a low profile, forgot nothing levitra 20 mg online. The sources used here are of personal provenance and include memoirs, and, above all, oral histories: several hundred interviews with Soviet Jews born between 1910 and 1940 (principally Ukrainian, but also Russian, Belarusian, Moldavian, and Baltic), which were recorded in the 1990s and the 2000s. The interviews are drawn from the archive of the Kyiv Ju daica Institute, specifically the collections “Witnesses of the Jewish Century” and “Jewish Fates in Ukraine,” as well as portions of other collections. For context, Zelenina has incorporated ethnographic interviews conducted at the end of the 2000s and the start of the 2010s housed in the archive of the Center for Biblical and Judaic Studies of the Russian State University for the Humanities.
