Alexander Kazhdan
| Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan | |
|---|---|
| Born |
September 3, 1922 Moscow, Soviet Union |
| Died | May 29, 1997 (aged 74) Washington, D.C. |
| Fields | Byzantine studies |
| Institutions |
Soviet Academy of Sciences Dumbarton Oaks |
| Alma mater | University of Moscow |
| Known for | Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium |
| Influences | Evgenii A. Kosminskii |
Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan (Russian: Алекса́ндр Петро́вич Кажда́н; 3 September 1922 – 29 May 1997) was a Soviet-American Byzantinist.
Born in Moscow, Kazhdan was educated at the Pedagogical Institute of Ufa and the University of Moscow, where he studied with the historian of medieval England, Evgenii Kosminskii. A post-war Soviet initiative to revive Russian-language Byzantine studies led Kazhdan to write a dissertation on the agrarian history of the late Byzantine empire (published in 1952 as Agrarnye otnosheniya v Vizantii XIII-XIV vv.) Despite a growing reputation in his field, anti-Semitic prejudice in the Joseph Stalin-era Soviet academy forced Kazhdan to accept a series of positions as a provincial teacher (in Ivanovo, 1947–49, and Tula, 1949–52). Following the death of Stalin in 1953, however, Kazhdan's situation improved, and he was hired by a college in Velikie Luki. In 1956 he finally secured a position in the Institute for History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he remained until leaving the Soviet Union in 1978.
Kazhdan was an immensely prolific scholar throughout his Soviet career, publishing well over 500 books, articles, and reviews, and his publications contributed to the growing international prestige of Soviet Byzantine studies. His 1954 article, "Vizantiyskie goroda v VII-XI vv.," published in the journal Sovetskaya Arkheologiya, 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 has since been widely accepted and has 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 Derevnya i gorod v Vizantii IX-X vv. (1960), a study of the relationship between city and countryside in the 9th and 10th centuries; Vizantiyskaya kul'tura (X-XII vv.) (1968), a study of Middle Byzantine culture; and Sotsial'ny sostav gospodstvujushchego klassa Vizantii XI-XII vv. (1974), 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 Armiane v sostave gospodstvuyushchego klassa Vizantiyskoy imperii v XI-XII vv. (1975).
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