Keele ja meele rollist võõrast omaks saamise teel professor Lazar Gulkowitschi näitel

Abstract

On the role of language and consciousness in the process of becoming “one of our own” upon the example of Professor Lazar Gulkowitsch Based on archive materials, the article explores the importance of language and consciousness in the process of becoming an Estonian citizen upon the example of Professor Lazar Gulkowitsch (1898–1941). The scholar of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Lazar Gulkowitsch was born and raised in a traditional Jewish family in Zirin (Belarus), he acquired his doctoral degree in philosophy at the Albertus University in Konigsberg, worked at Leipzig University (Germany) first as a lecturer on Late Hebrew, Jewish-Aramaic, and Talmudic Studies at the faculty of theology and then as an associate professor of the Study of Late Judaism at the faculty of philosophy. In 1934–1940 he was the head of the chair for Jewish Studies at the University of Tartu (Estonia). He was killed by the Nazis during the occupation of Estonia in the summer of 1941. His scholarly objective was to capture the phenomenon of Judaism as a historical and current entity especially from the aspect of language by exploring Hebrew as a reflection of and basis for the history of Jewish ideas; outlining both its formal-grammatical and material-conceptual aspects. For this purpose he applied a method based on the history of ideas (begriffsgeschichtliche Methode), defining the central ideas of the Jewish culture (God, good, Hesed, etc.). Language—a central part in his scholarly work—also played an important role to him in the process of becoming an Estonian citizen.