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Inhalt: Introduction Developments in creating corpora dlexDB, subtitles, and tabloid newspapers Rating corpus emotionality Current study Method Materials Corpora Results Type-token ratio Validity: Effects of task difficulty Emotionality of a corpus Validity: Effects of emotionality Discussion Outlook References
This paper explores questions surrounding corporeality and heavenly ascent, in texts ranging from 1 Enoch to the Hekhalot literature, including Philo’s works. It examines both descriptions of the heavenly realms and accounts of the ascent process. Despite his Platonic apophaticism, Philo superimposes cosmological and spiritual heavens, and draws upon the biblical imagery of dazzling glory. Although they do not express themselves in philosophical language, the heavenly ascent texts make it clear that human beings cannot ascend to heaven in their earthly bodies, and that God cannot be seen with terrestrial eyes. In terms of ideas they are not so far from the philosopher Philo as might at first appear.
This article examines Pierre Nora’s concept of memory using the examples of York and Winchester to demonstrate the individuality of local approaches to the memory of medieval Anglo-Jewries. Overall, this paper will highlight how memory can be rescued from a period of prolonged silence and reintegrated back into a wider historical narrative. Conversely it will also examine how in stark contrast to this new attitude of remembering the silence surrounding Jewish memory continues to exist elsewhere. Finally this paper will ask why this silence remains, and question whether Nora’s theory that memory is constantly evolving is applicable to the experiences of Jewish memory in York and Winchester.
This article considers one of the major weaknesses in the existing historiography of Irish Jewry, the failure to consider the true extent and impact of antisemitism on Ireland’s Jewish community. This is illustrated through a brief survey of one small area of the Irish-Jewish narrative, the Jewish relationship with Irish nationalist politics. Throughout, the focus remains on the need for a fresh approach to the sources and the issues at hand, in order to create a more holistic, objective and inclusive history of the Jewish experience in Ireland.
This study is based on an editorial report, which was presented at the 2009 working conference »Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere« at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN). It demonstrates the textual genesis of Humboldt’s writings on Cuba through examples, which were obtained from a detailed text comparison of the three existing »original« versions of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba. The collation was part of a larger strategy to regain philological ground for the »Humboldt in English« (HiE) project. Since 2007 and funded with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US-German research team behind HiE has been working on new and unabridged translations and critical editions of three of Humboldt’s most significant texts from his American oeuvre.1 The following observations will outline the most important results of this collation effort as a complementary contribution to the recent release of the HiE project’s first volume, The Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (Chicago University Press 2011), edited by Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette.
Inhalt: - Kurzzusammenfassung - I. Introduction - II. Current challenges to the United Nations Human Rights Programme - III. The Secretary General’s Reform report “In larger Freedom” and its impact for the human rights programme - IV. The High Commissioner’s Plan of Action of May 2005 - V. Negotiations on the establishment of the Human Rights Council and first Council activities - VI. Reform of the treaty body system and debates over the creation of a unified standing treaty body
The commuting island
(2011)
"Unavoidably side by side"
(2011)
The essay compares the dichotomous concepts of corporeality and spirituality in Judaism and Christianity. Through the ages, deviations from normative principles of beliefs could be discerned in both religions. These can be attributed either to the somewhat confrontational interaction between Jews and Christians in the Medieval urban environment or to the impact of Hellenic civilization on both monotheistic religions. Out of this dynamic impact emerged Christian art with a predilection to expressed corporeality, whereas Jewish religiosity found its artistic expression in a spiritual noniconographical mode. A genuine Jewish art and iconography could develop only after a certain degree of assimilation and secularization. Marc Chagall was the first protagonist of a mature expression of Jewish iconography.
Yoel Hoffmann is an Israeli writer born in 1937 in Brasov (Kronstadt), Romania. Brought up in a German-speaking family, already in his first book, Sefer Yosef (1989), he conveys the voice of German-speaking immigrants in Israel (the “Katschen” story, 1986) and that of the East European Jewish community in Berlin in the late 1930s, on the verge of the Second World War. His works are crammed with characters of Jews from Germany gripped by the memory of the language they abandoned following their emigration to Palestine in the 1930s. The classic one is the character of Bernhard, in the eponymous work. The current article focuses on the representation and elaboration of Hoffmann’s unique creation, in a language influenced by his deep identification with Zen Buddhism on the one hand, and his attraction to the modernist, Western style of stream of consciousness on the other. In central sections of his works, Hoffman presents his entire literary corpus as a type of explicit, allusive, or secret Holocaust literature, and invites his readers and his critics to decode the allusions and expose the secret in this theme, a surprising statement in relation to Hoffmann’s work and its analysis so far. Hoffmann represents the Holocaust as a collective Israeli trauma for which his literary fiction creates a special catalogue of representative characters. In the creation of a catalogue, and particularly one that simultaneously classifies and individualizes, Hoffmann’s project resembles the monumental 1920s cataloguing project by the celebrated German photographer August Sander (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts). Hoffmann included photographs from this project in his works, and even chose some of them for the covers of his books. The article examines the implicit relationships between these two creative artists as conferring a meaning so far not considered in the research of the Holocaust theme in Yoel Hoffmann’s writings.
Immobile Tremor
(2011)
The threshold between the XVth and the XVIth Century represents a historical period during which, both for Christians and for Jews, the geopolitical sceneries and the interior horizons radically change. The modified reality provokes new forms of expectation and the need of new historical interpretations. Ferrara, within this scenery, can be considered, as other Italian cases, as a paradigmatic example, a narrow space where phenomena of spiritual and cultural Jewish rebirth can take shape. The permeability between Christian artistic and cultural world and Jewish intellectual production determines a prosperous context, further strengthened by the introduction of Jewish typography and by a growing claim and restoration of social elective dignity among the Jews of the Este Duchy. After the transfer of the capital city from Ferrara to Modena, the indirect effects of this intellectual resurgence are deeply transformed on a social level, and allows us to catch the persistence of important forms of communication between Christians and Jews in everyday life. The introduction of the Inquisition provides us, through the production of the judicial archive, with the most important instrument to understand social dynamics, which allows us to comprehend a new potential interpretation key for the reality of the ghetto and the choice of its erection. The urban division is nothing else but a new attempt to separate the invisible spaces of the thought. The effective efficacy of the physical separation shows several weak points, which persist during the entire life of the ghetto, since 1638 until 1789.
What is visualization?
(2011)
Over the last 20 years, information visualization became a common tool in science and also a growing presence in the arts and culture at large. However, the use of visualization in cultural research is still in its infancy. Based on the work in the analysis of video games, cinema, TV, animation, Manga and other media carried out in Software Studies Initiative at University of California, San Diego over last two years, a number of visualization techniques and methods particularly useful for cultural and media research are presented.
This co-authored paper is based on research that originated in 2003 when our team started a series of extensive field studies into the character of gameplay experiences. Originally within the Children as the Actors of Game Cultures research project, our aim was to better understand why particularly young people enjoy playing games, while also asking their parents how they perceive gaming as playing partners or as close observers. Gradually our in-depth interviews started to reveal a complex picture of more general relevance, where personal experiences, social contexts and cultural practices all came together to frame gameplay within something we called game cultures. Culture was the keyword, since we were not interested in studying games and play experiences in isolation, but rather as part of the rich meaning- making practices of lived reality.
This paper addresses a theoretical reconfiguration of experience, a repositioning of the techno-social within the domains of mobility, games, and play, and embodiment. The ideas aim to counter the notion that our experience with videogames (and digital media more generally), is largely “virtual” and disembodied – or at most exclusively audiovisual. Notions of the virtual and disembodied support an often-tacit belief that technologically mediated experiences count for nothing if not perceived and valued as human. It is here where play in particular can be put to work, be made to highlight and clarify, for it is in play that we find this value of humanity most wholly embodied. Further, it is in considering the design of the metagame that questions regarding the play experience can be most powerfully engaged. While most of any given game’s metagame emerges from play communities and their larger social worlds (putting it out of reach of game design proper), mobile platforms have the potential to enable a stitching together of these experiences: experiences held across time, space, communities, and bodies. This coming together thus represents a convergence not only of media, participants, contexts, and technologies, but of human experience itself. This coming together is hardly neat, nor fully realized. It is, if nothing else, multifaceted and worthy of further study. It is a convergence in which the dynamics of screen play are reengaged.
Define real, Moron!
(2011)
Academic language should not be a ghetto dialect at odds with ordinary language, but rather an extension that is compatible with lay-language. To define ‘game’ with the unrealistic ambition of satisfying both lay-people and experts should not be a major concern for a game ontology, since the field it addresses is subject to cultural evolution and diachronic change. Instead of the impossible mission of turning the common word into an analytic concept, a useful task for an ontology of games is to model game differences, to show how the things we call games can be different from each other in a number of different ways.
Space is understood best through movement, and complex spaces require not only movement but navigation. The theorization of navigable space requires a conceptual representation of space which is adaptable to the great malleability of video game spaces, a malleability which allows for designs which combine spaces with differing dimensionality and even involve non-Euclidean configurations with contingent connectivity. This essay attempts to describe the structural elements of video game space and to define them in such a way so as to make them applicable to all video game spaces, including potential ones still undiscovered, and to provide analytical tools for their comparison and examination. Along with the consideration of space, there will be a brief discussion of navigational logic, which arises from detectable regularities in a spatial structure that allow players to understand and form expectations regarding a game’s spaces.
Die besondere Beziehung zwischen Humboldt und Darwin, zwei der bedeutendsten Persönlichkeiten in der Welt der Naturwissenschaften und der Biologie des 19. Jahrhunderts, wird detailliert auf den verschiedenen Ebenen ihres Kontaktes analysiert, sowohl was das real stattgefundene persönliche Treffen betrifft, als auch hinsichtlich ihrer Korrespondenz und der Koinzidenz von Ideen. Dieser wechselseitige Blick zeigt uns wie sich die beiden Gelehrten gegenseitig wahrnahmen, ob sie wirklich versuchten, mit dem Paradigma ihrer bedeutenden Vorgänger zu brechen, oder ob sie lediglich schrittweise das bereits erlangte Wissen erweiterten, bis es durch die Erstellung einer genialen Idee zu einem Bruch des bisherigen Wissens kommt. Bekannt ist die wiederholte Referenz von Darwin auf die Werke Humboldts, insbesondere auf die Tagebücher des deutschen Naturwissenschaftler und seine Art der Beschreibung der amerikanischen Natur in ihrer ganzen Reichhaltigkeit. Weniger bekannt hingegen sind andere Verweise in seiner Autobiografie, sowie die wissenschaftliche Verwendung des Humboldtschen Werkes oder die Zitate in seiner Korrespondenz, die in diesem Beitrag aufgezeigt werden. Darüber hinaus wird die Verwendung der frühen Schriften von Darwin durch Humboldt in einigen seiner Publikationen, vor allem im Kosmos, erwähnt.
This is the second part of the presentation of data elicited by means of QUIS within the project on information structure in Gur and Kwa languages. Whereas the first part (Anne Schwarz) introduces the project and the rationals behind the development of the focus translation task, this part provides some comparative remarks gained from the data presented in both parts.
Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Selection of QUIS Data for Comparative Goals 2.1 Fairy Tale (Topic and Focus in Coherent Discourse) 2.2 Focus Translation Extract 3. On the Presentation and Comparison of the Data 4. Buli 4.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Buli 4.2 Focus Translation Extract in Buli 5. Kɔnni 5.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Kɔnni 5.2 Focus Translation Extract 6. Baatɔnum 6.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Baatɔnum 6.2 Focus Translation Extract in Baatɔnum
This article presents a situation description production experiment investigating the interaction between syntax and information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger- Congo family spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put the object in narrow informational focus or narrow corrective focus while controlling for the tonal structure of the target word. Contrary to the prediction that corrective focus is marked by fronting and morphological marking of the focused constituent the data suggest that the in-situ strategy is the preferred one.
Ngizim fieldnotes
(2011)
This chapter presents field notes of the West Chadic language Ngizim, spoken in North-East Nigeria. In Ngizim, subject focus is indicated by subject inversion, whereas the word order of sentences with focused non-subjects can remain unchanged. The goal of the field work was to find out more about focus marking in Ngizim.
This paper is a critical examination of the relationship between reality and simulation. After a brief theoretical introduction, it unfolds its argument on an empirical level, using a thick game playing description of GRAND THEFT AUTO IV. This in-game experience serves as material for the subsequent analysis, in the course of which defining characteristics of computer game playing are formulated. Finally, on the basis of this analysis, the paper postulates the hypothesis that playing computer games like GTA IV promotes competency in deconstructing simulations and implements a cyclic logic of recreation.
In recent years computer games have been discussed by a variety of disciplines from various perspectives. A fundamental difference with other media, which is a point of continuous consideration, is the specific relationship between the viewer and the image, the player and the game apparatus, which is a characteristic of video games as a dispositive. Terms such as immersion, participation, interactivity, or ergodic are an indication of the deep interest in this constellation. This paper explores the resonance between body and image in video games like REZ, SOUL CALIBUR and DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION from the perspective of a temporal ontology of the image, taking particular account of the structuring power of the interface and its subject positioning aspects.
The debate whether to locate the narrative of digital games a) as part of the code or b) as part of the performance will be the starting point for an analysis of two roleplaying games: the single-player game ZELDA: MAJORA’S MASK and the Korean MMORPG AION and their respective narrative logics. When we understand games as abstract code systems, then the narrative logic can be understood as embedded on the code level. With a focus on the player’s performance, the actualization of the possibilities given in the code system is central. Both logics, that of code and that of performance, are reflected in players’ narratives based on the playing experience. They do reflect on the underlying code and rules of the game system as they do reflect on the game world and their own performance within. These narratives rely heavily on the source text – the digital game –, which means that they give insights into the underlying logics of the source text. I will discuss the game structure, the players’ performance while playing the game and the performance of the player after playing the game producing fan narratives. I conceive the narrative structure and the performance of the player playing as necessarily interconnected when we discuss the narrative logics of a game. Producing fan narratives is understood as a performance as well. This performance is based on the experience the players made while playing and refers to both logics of the game they use as their source text.
Reflecting on how and with what kind of consequences something artificial, something manufactured becomes naturalized in video games will be the central issue of this text. It deals with the question of how the video game hides its artificiality in terms of technique. In a certain sense this retrieves one of the fundamental questions of modernity and industrialization: How does the manufacturing of our environment become a naturalized, self-evident and indubitable process?
Video games structure play as performance in both the virtual and the physical space. On the one hand, the player encounters game worlds as virtual stages to act upon. On the other hand, the game world stages the player and re-frames the play space. This essay sets out to suggest some of the elements that are at work in this dualism of games as performative media. The two key elements here are the mediation of the game environment and the transformation of the player through virtual puppetry. Both cases will be argued with a focus on spatiality in performance.
Communication, simulation, interactive narrative and ubiquitous computing are widely accepted as perspectives in humancomputer interaction. This paper proposes play as another possible perspective. Everyday uses of the computer increasingly show signs of similarity to play. This is not discussed with regard to the so-called media society, the playful society, the growing cultural acceptance of the computer, the spread of computer games or a new version of Windows, but in view of the playful character of interaction with the computer that has always been part of it. The exploratory learning process involved with new software and the creative tasks that are often undertaken when using the computer may support this argument. Together with its high level of interactivity, these observations point to a sense of security, autonomy and freedom of the user that produce play and are, in turn, produced by play. This notion of play refers not to the playing of computer games, but to an implicit, abstract (or symbolic) process based on a certain attitude, the play spirit. This attitude is discussed regarding everyday computer use and related to the other mentioned perspectives.
Logic as a medium
(2010)
Computer games are rigid in a peculiar way: the logic of computation was the first to shape the early games. The logic of interactivity marked the action genre of games in the second place, while in massive multiplayer online gaming all the emergences of the net occur to confront us with just another type of logic. These logics are the media in which the specific forms of computer games evolve. Therefore, a look at gaming supposing that there are three eras of computation is taken: the early synthetical era, ruled by the Turing machine and by mainframe computers, by the IPO principle of computing; the second, mimetical era, when interactivity and graphical user interfaces dominate, the domain of the feedback loop; and the third, emergent era, in which the complexity of networked personal computers and their users is dominant.
Seki
(2010)
Game space can be conceived of as being structured by varying levels of ruledness, i.e. it oscillates between openness and closure, between playability and gameness. The movement through game space can then be described as a vector defined by possibility spaces, which are generated organically out of the interplay between ruled and unruled space. But we can only define rules ex negativo, therefore the possibility of breaking the rules is always already inscribed in this vector of movement. This can be conceptualized as a boundary operation that takes the difference between ‘ordinary life’ and ‘play’ as its argument, and which thus generates the difference between ‘play’ and ‘game’.
This paper comprises four parts. Firstly, an overview of the mathematics of decision logic in relation to games and of the construction of narration and characters is given. This includes specific limits of the use of decision logic pertaining to games in general and to storytelling in particular. Secondly, the rule system as the medial unconsciousness is focused on. Thirdly, remarks are made on the debate between ludology and narratology, which had to fail as it missed the crucial point: the computer game as a medium. Finally, gaming in general, as well as its relationship to chance, coincidence, emergence, and event is discussed.
This paper discusses different options for institutional arrangements providing network infrastructure on the basis of the ‘transaction cost economic’ approach using the example of highway infrastructure. Drawing on lessons learned from highway provision in three European countries (Italy, Poland and Spain), five models of highway provision are discussed: public authorities, public enterprises, user clubs, private partnerships or a regulated private market. Three options to regulate the private market are presented: a rate-of-return regulation, a price-cap-regulation and franchise bidding. The main factor that makes private construction and provision expensive are the risk premiums of private companies that are incorporated for political risks. It is argued that the optimal model of highway provision depends on each country-specific situation. This is mainly influenced by the regulatory experience within the country on one hand and by the stage of highway development on the other.
Der Autor diskutiert in seinem Aufsatz kritisch den Friedensvertrag von Lomé, der am 7. Juli 1999 offiziell den bewaffneten Konflikt in Sierra Leone beendete. Nach einer kurzen Zusammenfassung der allgemeinen Regelungen des Vertrags stellt der Autor die in Artikel 9 des Abkommens vorgesehene Generalamnestie den bindenden Grundsätzen des internationalen Rechts gegenüber. Internationale Verbrechen, wie Völkermord, Kriegsverbrechen oder Folterung sind als Verstoß gegen ius cogens-Normen von allen Staaten zu verfolgen. Nach der Erörterung der betreffenden Konventionen, internationalen Abkommen und Fallentscheidungen des IGH, die diesen Grundsatz festschreiben, beschreibt er den - Friedensprozessen inhärenten - Konflikt, ein Gleichgewicht zwischen notwendiger Versöhnung und strafrechtlicher Verfolgung zu finden. Bei der Betrachtung des Fallrechts schließt Phenyo neuere Entscheidungen ein, wie die des britischen House of Lords im Fall Pinochet, die sowohl nationalen wie internationalen Gerichten das Recht auf Strafverfolgung internationaler Verbrechen zugestand. Stellvertretend für die weite Kritik der Generalamnestie des Lomé-Abkommens zitiert der Autor den VN-Generalsekretär Kofi Annan, der die Generalamnestie als unvereinbar mit der Tätigkeit und Aufgabe der internationalen Straftribunale in Den Haag und Arusha sowie des zukünftigen Internationalen Strafgerichtshofes ansieht. Phenyo schließt sich mit seiner kurzen Analyse des Friedensabkommens der kritischen Haltung Annans an und sieht nur eine geringe Möglichkeit für die Durchsetzung der fraglichen Amnestie, deren Gültigkeit durch die wiederaufgeflammten Kämpfe in Sierra Leone auch faktisch in Frage gestellt worden sind. (trai)
The article explores the pedagogical dimension of contemporary visual art which takes the Holocaust as a main subject of representation. It asks how a work of art can offer a viable alternative to the already existing methods or practices of Holocaust education, whose traditional aim is to endow the apprentice with an ‘absolute knowledge’ of the Holocaust. The article analyzes the characteristics and the effectiveness of a ‘performative’ approach to teaching about the Holocaust, which relies on an element of interaction and on critical self-reflection, by undertaking a close analysis of Your Coloring Book, – an art installation created by Israeli artist and representative of the third generation after the Holocaust, Ram Katzir.
This study deals with the impacts of the Holocaust on the identity of the Jewish community in Slovakia. The author is interested in the question (whether and) in which form God remained among the survivors after Auschwitz. The available ethnological material has shown that suffering during the Holocaust often resulted into abandoning the religion, and particularly in Judaism. Many survivors broke up their contacts with Jewry. They often decided to join the communist party (either due to their conviction or opportunism.) Our research has indicated that for the majority of the Slovak Jews, God after the Holocaust is rather an abstract concept or non existing. However, he is definitely not the biblical God of the Tora and micvot, to which our ancestors used to pray.
On the example of the women’s magazines in Yiddish “Yidishe Froyenvelt” (1902- 1903), “Di Froy” (Vilnius1925-1933), “Froyen-Shtim” (Warsaw 1925) and “Di Froyen-Velt” (New York 1913) this article presents: • how feminist postulates are connected with questions of Jewish identity in a religious and political context • how the model image of a modern Jewish woman is presented • what the main spheres of feminist interests presented in the magazines are (a struggle for equal rights within the Jewish community as well as other social spheres, searching for and presenting outstanding women in the Jewish and world history, descriptions of women’s professional activities, psychological analysis of a woman's nature, establishing ties and a feeling of solidarity between women’s movements of other nations) • how the traditional women's roles are presented (mother, wife, housewife) • what degree of women’s participation in the edition of these periodicals is (a list of articles' authoresses and literature works appearing on columns of the periodicals) • whether and how a feminist discourse affects a language structure of the periodicals Comparing magazines from the beginning of the 20th century and the latter part of 1920s the article answers the question what direction did Jewish feminism evolve to and what content rose or fell in importance.
The article is a study research that attempts to reconstitute one facet of the Jewish cultural history, represented by the Jewish typographical activity in a geographic and historic context, i.e. North Transylvania at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The core of the study is represented by a detailed research of the typographical activity of Jacov Wieder’s printing house that he had set up in 1897 at Seini, a small locality in the county of Satu Mare. Wieder’s printing house, where some 150 Hebrew book titles were printed, was activated alongside with some other 20 Hebrew printing houses of the same county until 1944. The Hebrew books printed at Seini are thoroughly examined from the point of view of their subject and authors. The high technical quality of the print of Wieder’s printing house and not less the prestige of the authors contributed to its fame and reputation. The books were distributed throughout the world and reached the Jewish communities from countries in the immediate proximity Eastern, Central and Western Europe and even North America and the Land of Israel.
The Mariae Vitae Congregation was the first and possibly the most important missionary institution in Poland-Lithuania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the Rule of Mariae Vitae Congregation, it had to deal with religious and lay education of converted girls (mainly Jewish) and provide them with practical skills of work so they could establish in Catholic society. The innovatory social program of Mariae Vitae Congregation including education and financial help answered to possible problems of neophytes in Poland and Lithuania of that time.
Between history and legend
(2010)
In the early modern period, Jewish historiography moved from the Hebrew domain into the Yiddish one. Jewish writers have succeeded to match the historical literature to the particular needs of their audience. The most popular Yiddish chronicle of this kind was written in Amsterdam in the 18th century by Menachem Man Amelander, following both the Jewish and Christian genre. This paper briefly surveys the genre characteristics of this chronicle and the way it served the purpose of guarding Jewish memory and tradition.
Halakha and Microhistory
(2010)
Shifra was a Jewish businesswoman in Moravia in the fifteenth-century. In 1452 due to financial fraud she was arrested in Brno. Her life was saved by some members of the local Jewish community, who renounced their financial claims against their Christian neighbours in the exchange of Shifra’s life. However, one member of the community consented to the agreement only on condition that the other members would pay his losses. The case was extensively discussed in the correspondence of contemporary rabbis, among them Israel Bruna and Israel Isserlein. Their letters about the Shifra-affair reveal some important characteristics of the rabbinic authority in the late medieval Ashkenaz.
The issue of determining the time, when the Judaic communities have settled on Romanian land, is one of the most interesting and most delicate details that can be mentioned when talking about this ethnic group. The presence of the first Jewish communities in ancient times on this land was a “taboo” subject during many historical periods until 1989, but even after this year, studies oriented in this direction were more than sketchy. The article does not only bring a surplus of information in this domain, but manages to concentrate – almost didactically – the information and the archaeological proofs known and reknown to the present time. There are depicted material evidences as well as linguistic ones, toponymical and even religious. Also, the author tries to draw a parallel between some layouts of the Dacian state and Dacia Felix, conquered by the Romans, and the presence of some Judaic communities, not very numerous, made out of Judaic population who came together with the Roman conqueror.
Content: 1. Introduction 2. Getting to the Seen from the Unseen 2.1. The Theory of the Zones 2.2. Brief Comments on Mechanism 3. The Areal Evidence: Shared Features and Their Dialectal Provenance 4. Explaining the Evidence Seen 4.1. Why It Is Not Due to Mere Misleading Coincidence 4.2. Why It Is Not Due to French Influence 4.3. Why It Is Not Due to Norse Influence 4.4. Why It Is Not Due to English Influence over Brittonic 4.5. Why It Is Due to Brittonic Influence 5. Conclusion 5.1. The Areal Pattern and Its Explanation 5.2. Substrate versus Superstrate 5.3. Some Final Arguments, and Good Questions 6. Addenda