title: Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature  (Harvard Judaic Monographs)
author: Isadore Twersky
description: <b>Isadore Twersky</b> was Nathan Littauer Professor of Jewish History and Philosophy at Harvard University.
zlib_text: T H E J E W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 102, No. 3 (Summer 2012) 371–403
  Jews from Rus’ in Medieval England
  ALEXANDER KULIK
  A COMPOSITE HISTORICO-PHILOLOGICAL APPROACH is seldom con-
  sidered applicable in medieval East European research; in medieval
  Judeo-Slavica it is neglected entirely.1 However, given the state of the
  art in the latter discipline at present, such a methodological synthesis
  becomes the one approach which promises innovative progress. In order
  to understand the complex picture that emerges from the heterogeneous
  and underexplored sources documenting early Eastern European Jewish
  history, philological ﬁndings should be studied against their historical
  background; there is also a clear need for a more nuanced sense of the
  historical subject matter, which we can achieve by grounding historical
  speculation in a philological analysis of the documents. Working with this
  aim in mind, in my 2008 essay in Viator, I made an attempt to reassess a
  number of hypotheses