ABSTRACT:
The paper is an investigation of the attitudes to Jews and Judaism in the 12th-century East Slavonic homilist Cyril of Turov. For comparison the author introduces comparative material from Byzantine and Slavonic homiletics and discusses the history of Judaism on Rus soil in the middle ages. The author argues that "the anti-Jewish theme in Kirill's sermons is not a contemporary polemic against actual Jews but merely a conventional mode of theological exegesis (typological, contrastive), prompted by the festal context (in an Easter cycle of sermons) rather than by current social conflict or personal animosity" (quotation from Simon Franklin's review in Slavonic and East European Review 80:3 (2002), p. 541).
