Out of the editorial: Limitless popularisation can make scientific research hell.
Ideas and concepts
– once they’ve been let out into the world – can mutate into rumours. Their
truthfulness, which becomes more questionable over time, decreases, while their
acceptance in society is constantly increasing. The title of this year’s edition
of PaRDeS deals with the turn concept, one of the terms, that reaches cult
status after they have been taken away from scientific research. On the long
list of turns, which can be found in the arts subjects, among them including
Linguistics, Cultural, Pictorial, Spatial, Sensual, Performative, and Semiotic,
is also Geographical Turn. The concept of ‘turn’ is understood as an appearance
of a new paradigm, through which the until then unseen comes to light and must
be systematically ordered according to the theme. In the case of the
Geographical Turn, the ‘unseen’ is in reference to Judaism on the other side of
Germany’s Eastern border. Consciously, the German counter-part to the English
term is here avoided, because the processes of self-assurance and self-assertion
must be ordered according to themes within the international research
community. In order to complete the mental map of the academic research into
Judaism, with its two centres of Israel and the USA, the direction is set
towards the East, where new things in the field of Jewish studies are being
achieved. In the texts selected here by authors chosen from Romania, Lithuania,
Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Slovak Republic, the actual research on the
Jewish religion and culture in Middle and Eastern Europe is presented: The difference
in the topics discussed and the questions asked as well as the width of the
geographical and temporal fields, show how many areas of interest there are and
how large these areas are.
