Alexander Kazhdan


Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan was a Soviet and American Byzantinist. Among his publications was the three-volume Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, a comprehensive encyclopedic work containing over than 5,000 entries.

Biography

Born into the affluent Jewish family of the leather and chemical industrialist Pyotr Israilevich Kazhdan and Anna née Frumson, Kazhdan was raised in Moscow by his maternal grandfather Tamara Frumson, a member of the Rostov-on-Don Jewish elite from the Tsarist era. While attending school in 1934–35, he published poems in the children's magazine Pionerskaya Pravda.
Kazhdan studied history at Moscow State University from 1939. In December 1941, as the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union threatened Moscow, he was rejected from service in the Red Army due to his extreme short-sightedness and evacuated to Ufa, where he graduated from the in 1942. From 1943, he pursued doctoral studies as an aspirant at Moscow State University and then with Eugene Kosminsky, a historian of medieval England, at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. A post-war Soviet initiative to revive Russian-language Byzantine studies led Kazhdan to write a Candidate of Sciences dissertation on the agrarian history of the late Byzantine Empire, defended in 1946 and published in 1952.
The anti-cosmopolitan campaign launched in the Soviet Union in late 1946 is said to have prevented Kazhdan's career at the Academy of Sciences. Instead, he held a series of academic teaching positions at the Ivanovo Pedagogical Institute in Ivanovo, the in Tula and the in Velikiye Luki, from where he established contact with Byzantine studies scholars in the West. He completed his Doctor of Sciences dissertation at Tula but only obtained the degree in 1961, for which he blamed his clashes with the Soviet Byzantinists, and.
In 1956, Kazhdan secured a position at the Institute of World History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, in which he remained until leaving the Soviet Union in 1978.
After Kazhdan's religious son, the mathematician David Kazhdan, accepted a position at Harvard University and emigrated to the United States in 1975, Kazhdan began to experience professional difficulties in the Soviet Union; his wife, Rimma, was fired from her position at Progress Publishers, Kazhdan was told he would not be allowed return travel to see his family in the United States, and censorship of his work by his superiors in the Soviet academic establishment increased. In October 1978 Kazhdan and his wife departed from the Soviet Union, having received a visa for immigration to Israel. Kazhdan lectured briefly at the University of Vienna, the Collège de France and the University of Birmingham before moving on to the United States. In February 1979 he and his wife arrived at Dumbarton Oaks, a center for Byzantine studies in Washington, D.C., where Kazhdan held the position of senior research associate until his death.

Work

Soviet Union

Kazhdan was a prolific scholar throughout his career in the Soviet Union, publishing 555 books, articles, and reviews in total. His 1954 article, "", published in the journal, argued on the basis of archaeological and numismatic evidence that the seventh century constituted a major rupture in the urban society of Byzantium. This thesis was widely accepted in the second half of the twentieth century and led to intensive research on discontinuity in Byzantine history and the subsequent rejection of the earlier conception of the medieval Byzantine empire as a frozen relic of late antiquity. Other major studies dating from this first half of Kazhdan's career include , a study of the relationship between city and countryside in the ninth and tenth centuries; , a study of Middle Byzantine culture; and , an influential prosopographical and statistical study of the structure of the Byzantine ruling class in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Kazhdan also contributed heavily to the field of Armenian studies, notably writing about the Armenians who formed the elite ruling classes that governed the Byzantine Empire during the Middle Byzantine Era in his .
Kazhdan's publications were removed from circulation after his emigration to the United States. His Russian students include, Sergey Ivanov, and.

United States

Kazhdan's first major publications in English were collaborative: People and Power in Byzantium, a broad ranging study of Byzantine society, was written with Giles Constable; Studies in Byzantine literature with Simon Franklin; and Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries with Ann Wharton Epstein. His greatest English-language project was likewise a massive collaborative effort: the three-volume Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, edited by Kazhdan, was the first reference work of the sort ever to be published, and remains an indispensable point of departure for all areas of Byzantine studies. He wrote approximately 20%, or about 1,000, of the entries himself.
As Kazhdan became more comfortable with English, his pace of publication once again matched that of his Russian years. His later scholarship is above all marked with a growing concern with Byzantine literature, particularly hagiography. In his later texts, he proposed to seek the origins of Russian and Eastern European totalitarianism in Byzantium.
Kazhdan died in Washington, D.C., in 1997. His death cut short his work on a monumental History of Byzantine Literature; however, the first volume of this work was published in 1999, and the second followed in 2006.

Main publications

Books