• Jews and Slavs

August 2008

The 20th volume in the "Jews and Slavs" series - The Holy Land and the Manuscript Legacy of Slavs - was published with support of the Michael Cherney Foundation.

The process of collecting the Slavic medieval manuscript books in the Holy Land and taking them to other countries began already in 18th century. The interest shown by scholars in the Slavic manuscript heritage in the Holy Land has been growing ever since and now scholars have at their disposal extensive knowledge on the emergence of this heritage, on the periods of its entry into Palestine in the Middle Ages and on its peculiarities, and many MSS have already been published.

The present volume, published with assistance and sponsorship of MCF, has the task to fill some gaps in our knowledge concerning the links within the framework of a joint project sponsored by the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and implemented jointly by the Center for Slavic Languages and Literatures of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Cyrillo - Methodian Research Center in Sofia.

Of special importance is the fact that the volume has published the first report about the results of the Austrian expedition in 2007 to the Monastery of St. Catherine.

Several articles of this volume are dedicated to the problems of the textual tradition of the Christian biblical texts from the Old and the New Testament in their Slavic version and to the descriptions of the Holy City of Jerusalem in the mediaeval literature of the Southern Slavs.