Not by Firkowicz's Fault: Daniel Chwolson's Comic Blunders in Research of Hebrew Epigraphy of the Crimea and Caucasus, and their Impact on Jewish Studies in Russia

Daniel Chwolson (1819-1911) made a huge impact upon the research of Hebrew epigraphy from the Crimea and Caucasus. Despite that, his role in the more-than-a-century-long controversy regarding Crimean Hebrew tomb inscriptions has not been well studied. Chwolson, at first, adopted Abraham Firkowicz's forgeries, and then quickly realized his mistake; however, he could not back up. The criticism by both Abraham Harkavy and German Hebraists questioned Chwolson's scholarly qualifications and integrity. Consequently, the interference of political pressure into the academic argument resulted in the prevailing of the scholarly flawed opinion. We revisit the interpretation of these findings by Russian, Jewish, Karaite and Georgian historians in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Soviet period, Jewish Studies in the USSR were in neglect and nobody seriously studied the whole complex of the inscriptions from the South of Russia / the Soviet Union. The remnants of the scholarly community were hypnotized by Chwolson's authority, who was the teacher of their teachers' teachers. At the same time, Western scholars did not have access to these materials and/or lacked the understanding of the broader context, and thus a number of erroneous Chwolson's conclusion have entered academic literature for decades

Self-assembled levitating clusters of water droplets: pattern-formation and stability

Water forms ordered hexagonally symmetric structures (snow crystals) in its solid state, however not as liquid. Typically, mists and clouds are composed of randomly moving small droplets lacking any ordered structure. Self-organized hexagonally patterned microdroplet clusters over locally heated water surfaces have been recently observed. However, many aspects of the phenomenon are far from being well understood including what determines droplets size, arrangement, and the distance between them. Here we show that the Voronoi entropy of the cluster tends to decrease indicating to their selforganization, while coupling of thermal effects and mechanical forces controls the stability of the clusters. We explain the balance of the long-range attraction and repulsion forces which stabilizes the cluster patterns and established the range of parameters, for which the clusters are stable. The cluster is a dissipative structure similar to self-organized Rayleigh–Bénard convective cells. Microdroplet formation plays a role in a variety effects from mist and clouds to aerosols. We anticipate that the discovery of the droplet cluster phenomenon and its explanation will provide new insights on the fundamental physical and chemical processes such as microdroplet role in reaction catalysis in nature as well as new tools for aerosol analysis and microfluidic applications

An introduction to superhydrophobicity

This paper is derived from a training session prepared for COST P21. It is intended as an introduction to superhydrophobicity to scientists who may not work in this area of physics or to students. Superhydrophobicity is an effect where roughness and hydrophobicity combine to generate unusually hydrophobic surfaces, causing water to bounce and roll off as if it were mercury and is used by plants and animals to repel water, stay clean and sometimes even to breathe. The effect is also known as The Lotus Effect® and Ultrahydrophobicity. In this paper we introduce many of the theories used, some of the methods used to generate surfaces and then describe some of the implications of the effect

Translation or Divination? Sacred Languages and Bilingualism in Judaism and Lucumí Traditions

I compare the status of a sacred language in two very different religious traditions. In Judaism, the Hebrew language is the language of liturgy, prayer, and the Written Law. The traditional way of reading Torah passages involved translating them into Aramaic, the everyday language of communication in the Middle East in the first half of the first millennium CE. Later, other Jewish languages, such as Yiddish, played a role similar to that of Aramaic in the Talmudic period, constituting a system referred to as the “Traditional Jewish Bilingualism”. Hebrew lexemes had denotations related to the realm of Biblical texts, while Aramaic/Yiddish lexemes had everyday references. Therefore, the act of translation connected the two realms or domains. The Lucumí (Santería) Afro-Cuban religion is a syncretic tradition combining Roman Catholicism with the Ifá tradition, which does not have a corpus of written sacred texts, however, it has its sacred language, the Lucumí (Anagó) language related to the Yoruba language of West Africa. While the Spanish-Lucumí bilingualism plays an important role in Santería rituals, the mechanisms of reference are very different from those of the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism in Judaism. In Santería, divinations about the meaning of Lucumí words play a role similar to the translations from Hebrew in Judaism. I further discuss the role of ritual dances in Santería for the transition from the sacred to the secular domain and a function of Hebrew epitaphs to connect the ideal world of Hebrew sacred texts to the everyday life of a Jewish community

Connecting Sacred and Mundane: From Bilingualism to Hermeneutics in Hebrew Epitaphs

Gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions are the most common class of Jewish monuments still present in such regions as Ukraine or Belarus. Epitaphs are related to various Biblical, Rabbinical, and liturgical texts. Despite that, the genre of Hebrew epitaphs seldom becomes an object of cultural or literary studies. In this paper, I show that a function of Hebrew epitaphs is to connect the ideal world of Hebrew sacred texts to the world of everyday life of a Jewish community. This is achieved at several levels. First, the necessary elements of an epitaph – name, date, and location marker – place the deceased person into a specific absolute context. Second, the epitaphs quote Biblical verses with the name of the person thus stressing his/her similarity to a Biblical character. Third, there is Hebrew/Yiddish orthography code-switching between the concepts found in the sacred books and those from the everyday world. Fourth, the epitaphs occupy an intermediate position between the professional and folk literature. Fifth, the epitaphs are also in between the canonical and folk religion. I analyze complex hermeneutic mechanisms of indirect quotations in the epitaphs and show that the methods of actualization of the sacred texts are similar to those of the Rabbinical literature. Furthermore, the dichotomy between the sacred and profane in the epitaphs is based upon the Rabbinical concept of the ‘Internal Jewish Bilingualism’ (Hebrew/Aramaic or Hebrew/Yiddish), which is parallel to the juxtaposition of the Written and Oral Torah