The Jewish emigration from Russia after the Revolution of 1917 changed the face of Jewish culture in Western Europe. Russian Jews brought with them the visions of a national Jewish literature in Hebrew, Yiddish or Russian, and new concepts of secular Jewish music and art. Often they acted as intermediaries between Jewish centres in Europe, which resulted in the creation of a single sphere of Jewish culture common to all parts of the European diaspora. Although some stayed in Western Europe for only a few years before moving on to Palestine, the budding Hebrew culture in Palestine would not have been the same without this relatively short period of intense contact between Russian Jewish and Western European cultures.

Jörg Schulte, Ph.D. (2003), is a Honarary research associate at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL. He has been a fellow at The Warburg Institute in London and has been teaching at the universities of Hamburg and Warsaw. His publications include Eine Poetik der Offenbarung: Isaak Babel' - Bruno Schulz - Danilo Kis (Harrassowitz, 2004) and Jan Kochanowski und die europäische Renaissance (Harrassowitz, 2012).
Olga Tabachnikova, Ph.D. (2007), University of Bath, has been working at the universities of Bath and Bristol. She has published widely in the field of European philosophical and literary studies, with the main focus on Russian cultural history. Her recent publications include Anton Chekhov through the eyes of Russian thinkers (editor, Anthem, 2010) and Unpublished Correspondence between Lev Shestov and Boris de Schloezer (YMCA, 2011).
Peter J. Wagstaff, Ph.D. (1981), University of Exeter, teaches French and European Studies at the University of Bath. He has published extensively on French and other European narratives of migration and exile, including Cultures of Exile (Berghahn, 2004) and Border Crossings (Lang, 2004).