**Dr. Olga Borovaya: In Memoriam**
Cohen, Julia Phillips
Dr. Olga Borovaya: In Memoriam
One of the great scholars of Ladino culture and Ottoman Sephardi history, Dr. Olga Borovaya, has passed away. Passing after a long struggle with illness both chronic and acute, she leaves behind her father Dr. Volf Borovoy, her brother, numerous friends and admirers from the many worlds in which she moved, from Moscow to Palo Alto and beyond, and innumerable colleagues, students, and friends in the scholarly world who had the privilege of encountering her astonishing learning and analytical acuity alongside her deep warmth, humor, and uniquely indomitable spirit.
Borovaya produced in her all too short career a robust body of astonishingly original, rigorous, and erudite scholarship that has recast our understanding of Ladino culture, early modern Sephardi thought, and Ottoman Jewish political modernity. A lifelong resident of Moscow, Borovaya came late to the study of Ladino culture and Sephardi history. Having taken an MA in Romance languages and literatures in 1981, she worked for many years as a freelance translator of scholarship and literature, including work by Elie Wiesel (if memory serves). In the late 1990s, as she neared forty, Borovaya returned to the academy to pursue a doctorate in Ladino cultural studies; she earned her degree at the Russian State University for the Humanities in 2002, but in fact her primary advisor and interlocutor for the project was Dr. Aron Rodrigue of Stanford University, and Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies served as her second research home. Borovaya’s dissertation research eventuated in a 2005 Russian-language publication Modernizatsiia kultury: belletristika i teatr osmanskikh evreev na rubezhe XIX-XX veko, and then in a much-expanded English-language study, the 2011 Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire; along the way, she published a series of groundbreaking articles on the topic in leading journals such as Jewish Social Studies and Jewish History. Borovaya’s Modern Ladino Culture is now widely recognized as having had a transformative impact on the field of modern Judeo-Spanish cultural production through its rigorous formal examination of the textual strategies by whichmodernizing Sephardi elites sought to inculcate their program of cultural “Westernization” among Ottoman Jews. In particular, Borovaya identified and analyzed what she showed to be an especially important literary genre, namely, a vast body of Ladino translations of Western novels and plays. In fact, she demonstrated, what their translators produced was a new genre of its own: not faithful translation but rather highly adaptive ‘rewritings’ intended to communicate the cultural and sentimental values of an imagined West in a way that would be legible to—and suitable for—Ottoman Jewish audiences.
Having reframed the study of modern Ladino print culture, Borovaya turned her attention to the early modern era and to one of the key figures of the then-newly established Ottoman Sephardi community, R. Moses Almosnino. Marrying her exacting formalist interest in the production and modulation of voice and genre to the omnivorous curiosity of an old-school intellectual historian, Borovaya’s 2017 study The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers rediscovered the breadth and originality of Almosnino’s Ladino-language creativity. In so doing, she shed new light on a foundational moment in Ottoman Sephardi cultural history. She made a powerful argument for the view that the sixteenth century writings of Sephardi Jewry in the Ottoman Empire should be understood not as carryovers from Iberian literature but as a distinct new mode of writing – a first Ottoman Jewish Ladino literature – in their own right. Borovaya’s findings also appeared in the form of an award-winning article entitled “The First Ladino Travelogue: Moses Almosnino’s Treatise on the Extremes of Constantinople,” in the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies.
Following the publication of her first two books, Borovaya then turned in a very different direction: the study of mid-19thcentury transformations in Ottoman and Ottoman Jewish political culture as reflected and enacted in the little-studied ‘cousin’ to the 1840 Damascus Affair, the Rhodes Blood Libel case of the same year. The resultant 2024 study, The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era, is not wholly divorced from Borovaya’s long-standing interests in the history of Ladino culture and its genres; among other things, it offers a careful anatomization of all extant Ladino prose accounts and kantikas connected to this traumatic event. But the book is also a wide-ranging social and political history of the Jews of Rhodes and the complex relationship between that community’s elites, competing ethnoreligious communities, European consuls increasingly involved in Ottoman life, and the reforming Ottoman state. Based on a strikingly multilingual archive, the book ultimately yields new findings in Ottoman Jewish political history by showing how the Jews of Rhodes and the empire writ large learned to ‘speak Tanzimat,’ that is, learned to adapt and employ the reforming state’s political languages of reformism, modernization, and proto-citizenship two decades earlier than scholars had generally thought. Borovaya further extended and deepened this finding in an article reconstructing the agendas and circumstances of the earliest Ladino-language newspaper, Shaarei Mizrach, showing that it too was an ‘early adopter’ of new Ottoman patriotic-reformist political language.
Alongside these three major research projects and the books they yielded, Borovaya published numerous articles and essays. Some of these – like the aforementioned piece on Shaarei Mizrach – offer essential additional research findings reaching beyond her books. These include her 2025 article in Middle Eastern Studies “The gabela crisis in Izmir in 1846-1847: a response of Ottoman Jews to the Tanzimat Reforms” and an encyclopedia article on “Ladino” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia that offers both a magisterial summation of her work on Ladino literary production and a challenging new argument regarding how best to understand the historical periodization and development of Ladino literature as a whole.
Borovaya also participated in a number of collaborative scholarly projects over the course of many decades. Apart from translating widely from Ladino into Russian and English, she was sought out by numerous scholars and editors for her inimitable expertise and unmatched knowledge of the Ladino textual corpus. In the early 2000s, Borovaya served as a consultant for the project “Oral Literature of the Sephardic Jews” at UC Davis, spearheaded by Samuel G. Armistead and Bruce Rosenstock; at Rosenstock’s initiative, the OLSJ was digitized and indexed, becoming one of the first large-scale digital humanities projects in the field. It can be found here: https://sephardifolklit.illinois.edu/FLSJ/OLSJ. Borovaya was also co-editor and co-organizer, with Aron Rodrigue, of the Digitized Ladino Library at the Sephardic Studies Project at Stanford University and accessible using the following link: https://jewishstudies.stanford.edu/academics/sephardi-studies.
At the time of her passing, Borovaya was working on an article that interrogates the category of Ladino “children’s literature.”
It seems right to add that Borovaya produced her extraordinary scholarship despite severe physical and health challenges and despite spending her entire career as an independent scholar, apart from several teaching engagements at Stanford and Johns Hopkins and a fellowship at UPenn’s Center for Advanced Jewish Studies. Finally, despite not holding a regular academic posting and despite the Russian war on Ukraine making travel to the US still more difficult, she sought out opportunities to share her incredible knowledge of Ladino and Sephardi history and became a demanding but beloved mentor and teacher for a number of younger scholars in those fields over the course of many years.
The authors of this text are planning an online event to honor Dr. Olga Borovaya and celebrate her work and person. Anyone interested in attending is invited to contact Ken Moss at kmo...@uchicago.edu
----
Authors: Dr. Kenneth B. Moss (University of Chicago); Dr. Aron Rodrigue (Stanford University); Dr. Julia Phillips Cohen (Vanderbilt University); Dr. Jacob Daniels (University of Texas at Austin)