Magda Teter had a review in the December 7, 2023, NYRB (archived) of what she calls “a frustrating book, requiring a patient reader,” Moshe Taube’s The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe; after describing “a late-fifteenth-century Russian collection called the Academy Chronograph” that “follows almost verbatim a medieval Hebrew text known as Midrash Ma’aseh Hanukkah,” she says:
Yet at the time this manuscript was produced, Jews were not allowed to live in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, or Muscovy, where this particular manuscript appears to have been created. Vasily I (1371–1425), the grand prince, did not allow Jewish merchants or immigrants; neither did his successors. […]
How did medieval Jewish texts such as the Midrash Ma’aseh Hanukkah end up translated into Slavic languages in regions from which Jews were banned? This is a puzzle Moshe Taube seeks to solve in The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe. Taube, an Israeli scholar of linguistics and Slavic philology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who spent thirty years studying and comparing different manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, and various old Slavic languages, unravels a fascinating if difficult to follow story of pre-Ashkenazi Jews’ presence in medieval eastern Europe and their intellectual contributions, which have been lost within Jewish culture but were preserved in east European Orthodox Christian society.
What makes the existence of this Slavic version of medieval Hebrew texts even more intriguing, Taube points out, is that Muscovy was then a backwater, its clergy “barely literate.” No “classical learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans penetrated the walls of pious obscurantism in Russian church institutions, including the monasteries.” If so few scholars had Greek, certainly none were trained in Hebrew. And even Kyivan Rus’, a region where Jews lived that was politically and culturally distinct from Muscovy, was a place known “as a source of furs and slaves,” not erudition.
She describes the development of terms like “Russian Empire” and “Great Russia,” then continues:
Taube tries to sidestep these political issues of geographic terminology by largely eschewing both the anachronistic yet common shorthand “Russia” to describe territories that were variously part of Muscovy, Novgorod, Ukraine, or Belarus and the modern national nomenclature for those that would in the twentieth century become independent states. Instead, he generally uses historically accurate names—Muscovy, Volgograd, Lithuania.
Although the book contains an occasional slippage to Russian-centered place-names, Taube, a linguist, is more careful when describing languages. The translations his book examines were made from Hebrew into a variety of medieval east Slavic languages, but predominantly into that spoken in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and known as Ruthenian. The Latin-derived designation, Taube explains, helps avoid politically charged phrases such as “simple speech” (prosta mova) or “Rusian speech” (Ruska mova); in Belarusian scholarship, “Old Belarusian speech”; in Ukrainian academic works, “Old Ukrainian speech”; or, even, by Russian scholars, “West Russian” language. In modern times, the east Slavic languages would become Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian. […]
If one can understand Christian interest in these tales about biblical figures, it is much more difficult to explain the existence of fifteenth-century Ruthenian translations of texts in science, medicine, and philosophy, which were originally written in Arabic, or Judeo-Arabic—then the native language of the Jewish population in the Islamicate world (where Muslims were culturally, but not specifically religiously, dominant)—and typically written in Hebrew characters. Translated into Hebrew in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were Russified and preserved in multiple Muscovite copies.
Jews would not have needed translation into Ruthenian—those educated enough to read such texts would have known Hebrew. A Christian from the region, even one interested in sciences, would likely not have known enough Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic to make these texts available to Slavic readers. As Taube notes, these translations are “quite remarkable” given that, to quote his frequent collaborator William Ryan,
no complete major work of Greek antique philosophy or science was translated and no sophisticated ancient Greek or Byzantine work of history or literature…was available in Slavonic until comparatively modern times.
[…]
And yet there are medieval Ruthenian translations of works such as The Intentions of the Philosophers by the Persian Muslim philosopher al-Ghazali (d. 1111); Six Wings, an astronomical calendrical work by Immanuel ben Yakov Bonfils (1300–1377), a Provençal mathematician and astronomer; a medieval pseudo-Aristotelian work, Secret of Secrets; and several books by the rabbinic scholar and physician Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), including Logical Terminology, On Poisons and the Protection Against Lethal Drugs, and Treatise on Asthma, as well as sections from his On Coitus, written
for an unnamed, high-ranking official, who inherited from his father a large harem with pretty maidens, and needs advice from his physician on how to maintain, sustain, and entertain his harem without ruining his health.
This is an impressive medieval scientific and philosophical library. All of these works—and more—came into Ruthenian and Russian not directly from Arabic or Judeo-Arabic but via previous Hebrew translations. But it is also a distinctly non-Ashkenazi Jewish library, suggesting that the medieval Jewish translators in eastern Europe were Jews who arrived in the region via the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and who may have preceded the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from the West and their subsequent cultural domination. At the very least Taube demonstrates the presence of an intellectually active group of highly educated Jews in the region whose origins were not in the German lands and who left a mark—just not on Jewish culture in eastern Europe as it has been traditionally understood.
The translators had quite a task at hand. With few works of philosophy available in Ruthenian, there was no adequate vocabulary to convey the abstract ideas contained in these works; the way to express them had to be invented by using neologisms or assigning new meanings to everyday words. This at times resulted in distorted translations that became only more corrupt as Slavic copyists struggled to grasp the texts’ meaning. Often, the translations became interpretations in a new language, effectively new texts. […]
Taube’s book is a work of linguistic and textual archaeology, grounded in a painstaking comparison of different versions of a text. It has to work around evidentiary gaps. To decipher the translations and map out the paths of transmission—for instance, to demonstrate that texts, such as biblical books, that exist in other languages were translations from Hebrew—Taube turns to phonetics of proper names and syntactic, semantic, and phraseological “calques,” word-for-word translations of sentences, words, or phrases that retain the structure and meaning of the original language but seem awkward in translation. In Greek “the Hebrew hushing sound sh” is not available, so if the Slavic translation contains “sh,” not “s”—as in Shushan in Hebrew vs. Susan in Greek, or Achasveros (Ahasuerus from the Book of Esther)—the translation was likely made from Hebrew. (Examples of the parallels between medieval Hebrew texts and their Slavic versions in the original languages, with the English translation, are published as appendices at the end of the book.) […]
Taube’s book approaches the east Slavic region from a new direction—the southeast. It shifts the perspective away from the legacy of Russian imperial historiography, which looks down from Moscow in the north, and away from the history of Ashkenazi Jews, which looks eastward from the German lands, telling the story of a migration “in ever growing waves in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with their superior erudition and dominant tradition.” In this telling, there was little learning among local pre-Ashkenazi Jews, and if there were any Jewish traditions, they were then “practically obliterated.” […]
Yet Taube reveals not only the presence of a pre-Ashkenazi Jewish population in the region but also its cultural connections with Jews in the Mediterranean and the areas bordering the Black Sea. The existence, in eastern Europe, of an impressive, previously unknown medieval Jewish medical and philosophical library, as indicated by the Slavic translations of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic texts, shows that philosophy and science could indeed be found there—just not among Ashkenazi Jews. Moreover, these evidently “highly cultivated” pre-Ashkenazi Jewish scholars left a cultural legacy—albeit not in Jewish writings but in Slavic translations.
Taube links some of the translations of Jewish scientific and philosophical texts to a late-fifteenth-century Judaizing heresy that coincided with Orthodox Christian expectations of the end of times for September 1492, which marked the completion of seven thousand years since Creation. Easter was not worked out in calendars beyond that year. But Hebrew books such as the Six Wings proposed different calculations. The archbishop of Novgorod complained that Muscovite “heretics were mocking the Orthodox believers,” pointing to dates found in one of the translated Jewish texts and “casting doubt” on the Christian calendar.
The Orthodox Christian “Y7K problem,” as Taube puts it, intersected with some Jews’ own eschatological forecast. Moses ha-Goleh (literally “Moses the Exile”) of Kyiv also reckoned the year of redemption (Ge’ulah) for 1492 (5252, according to the Jewish calendar) and argued for “the importance of proselytes to bringing it about” through “a mystical union” between Jews and non-Jews, as “the proselyte has shed off his garment of impurity and brought about the union of [the assembly of] Israel with its partner.” The years leading up to 1492 thus spurred an unprecedented number of translations, perhaps in an effort to convert non-Jews. Rabbi Moses’s “mission to the Slavs,” Taube speculates, might be “the missing link connecting the Muscovite heretics” of the late fifteenth century “with the Ruthenian translations of scientific texts from Hebrew.” While this hypothesis helps explain the translations from the late 1400s, it does not explain those that had been made earlier.
Teter says “Not all history has to have a subsequent relevance, but even this little-known history of medieval Slavic translations of largely Jewish texts touches upon concerns and ideologies of our times,” and after describing various nationalist rants concludes:
And yet the history of the region—as Taube’s study shows—complicates such simplistic nationalist accounts of the past and highlights its multicultural and multiethnic connected legacy. Sometimes even obscure histories have contemporary implications.
Music to my ears, and I like Taube’s “Y7K problem.” We discussed Ruthenian, Belarusian, and related terms here, here, and here, inter alia.
They say “pious obscurantism” like it’s a bad thing! I think the phrase “spoken in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania” is maybe a little bit imprecise. The semi-standardized literary form of “Ruthenian” existed because the Grand Duchy, finding itself ruling over more East-Slav speakers than Lithuanian-speakers, had started using it as its administrative/chancery language and was a distinct variety from the standardized East-Slav variety used by the Muscovite regime for the same purposes, but it’s unlikely it reflected any single spoken peasant dialect and of course there was a chain of such dialects that didn’t experience any dramatic break right at the border between Lithuanian and Muscovite rule, although the Lithuanian literary standard was obviously more likely to have drawn from peasant spoken varieties on one side of that line. (After the Grand Duchy got into closer political union with Poland in the 16th century, its elites became Polonized and the history of “Ruthenian” as a literary or administrative language pretty much screeched to a halt.)
Good points all.
That the Rambam — Moses Maimonides, the most renowned Jewish sage of the medieval period — wrote a treatise on how to satisfy a harem without endangering one’s health is definitely not something they taught me in Hebrew day school.
@Jon W.: Well, when not engaged in his sagely vocation, Maimonides had a day job as a well-regarded physician, including to Gentile patients as prominent as Saladin. So he could no doubt take an appropriately clinical and non-judgmental outlook toward requests for practical advice as to how to avoid endangering ones health in a variety of circumstances.
Fascinating. And, as apocalyptic predictions go, 1492 is a remarkably well-chosen date. Not quite the end of the world (unless you’re Taino, or Granadan), but certainly the end of an era…
Al-Ghazali would surely have been tickled that his summary of what the philosophers think was considered accurate enough to be translated by someone who evidently disagreed with him on the value(lessness) of their work.
Reminds me of an entertaining book I read some years back, Simon Franklin’s Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950-1300. As the author notes, although Kyiv Rus keenly adopted literacy from the Byzantine Empire, it was completely uninterested in the Greek literary canon that the Byzantines used to teach reading and writing. Even the use of writing in civil administration was for a long time limited. This is particularly striking when one compares Kyiv Rus and medieval Bulgaria, as the latter took far more of the cultural package associated with Byzantine literacy.
Yes, an excellent book; I wrote about it here.
The 2023 book ( https://luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.137/ ) is somewhat easier or more exciting to read than the review, at least IMVHO. The connections with the Russian Orthodox church faction condemned as “Judaizers” by their rivals (whose claims were most definitely polemically overstated, although the so-called Judaizers may have learned a thing or two, and borrowed a philosophical book or two, from the Jews) and with the year 1492 end-of-times expectations seem to be real. But the translations, and revisions, of Hebrew books didn’t seem to be linked to Novgorod (the cradle of Judaizing heresy). More like with Kiev, or maybe even Wilno. Perhaps the translations were commissioned by a Kiev nobleman who traveled to Novgorod, probably accompanied by one of his Jewish translators, and who was suspected of being involved in the birth of the heresy.
It is fascinating, and many minor details of the researched texts are cool. I don’t think it points to the broad existence of non-Ashkenazic Jews of XVth c. Eastern Europe. All we see is two learned Jewish men from Kiev, one of whom was later based in Crimea. Wise learned men were being invited by the frontier communities from afar whenever the Jews of the Lithuanian Duchy could afford it. It served as a token of grandeur and maturity of the Jewish outposts, to host a visiting luminary from the Old Centers of Learning. These wise men might have had little in common with the communities which hosted them, and the favorite books of these learned men wouldn’t tell us anything about the prevailing dialects and customs of the local Jews.
Re: Ruthenian
It’s little hard to figure out what to call language of Kiev in the 15th century. One cannot really call it “Russian” because it will create a false sense that it is in a chain of languages that led to modern Russian. Calling it “Ukrainian” before there was any notion of Ukraine as southern East Slavic/Orthodox lands under the rule of Poland-Lithuania sounds ahistorical (“ukraine” was applied to any number of lands depending on POV, but not specifically to this sub-political entity). “Middle Sothern East Slavic” is a bit mouthful.
Dmitry Pruss, I don’t understand the point you are making, neither the one of Taube nor of Teter. Someone had to commission a translation from (medieval) Hebrew to “Ruthenian” in 15c. P-L. Who that someone might have been? If it were Jews, why did they need a translation (everyone seems to agree that Jews spoke local languages of Europe, but were not literate in them)? Taube gives at least two examples showing that intended recipient was a Christian (one is not entirely convincing). But who could those non-Jews be? Why would they be that much interested in Jewish (or Jewish-mediated) philosophy? There are absolutely no answers. Fragments from Tolkovaia Palaea read as if written by Messianic Jews. There were conversos in P-L in 15th c. who could not read Hebrew, but wanted to hold on to their Jewish heritage? And no one noticed?
I also reviewed Professor Taube’s book on my book review blog: https://rachack.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-cultural-legacy-of-pre-ashkenazic.html
By the way, in the community being discussed here, Hanukkah was actually used as a given name, as I wrote in my latest Jewish Press article on Jewish Names: https://www.jewishpress.com/judaism/jewish-columns/names-and-numen/a-guy-named-chanukah/2024/12/25/
@JWB / @JW: there’s a substantial amount of sefardi sexological literature from RaMBaM’s era – some of it medically oriented (and worth noting that the harem problem was one that jews could have too; polygyny and concubinage were active if class-bound institutions), some of it (as part of the emerging field of kabala) more concerned with the “as below, so above” effects of properly conducted sex on the underlying structures of the universe. if memory serves, i wrote a seminar paper about one of the latter for yosef yerushalmi (i can’t remember at all what he thought of it).
—
i look forward to reading taube’s book! i found his 2010 paper on these subjects fascinating, and expect the book will be as well.
but to (contra) DP’s point:
there’s plenty of evidence for substantial east-slavic-speaking jewish communities in eastern europe (alongside the greek-speaking ones around the black sea and the tatar-speaking ones in crimea, and separate from the west-slavic-speaking one centered in bohemia) before the emergence of a yiddish-speaking jewish world. alexander kulik did a survey of it in 2014, pointing to sources from the cairo geniza to lithuanian jewish onomastics to a gloss (attributed by an english rabbinic writer to a colleague from the east) in a hebrew text that is apparently the earliest attestation for ебать.
“east knaan” – to get a trifle rabbinic about the terminology – wasn’t ephemeral, either. as late as the early 1600s, in the yiddish era, we have the testimony of rabbi meir katz of mogilev that the jewish community there primarily spoke east slavic. and even max weinreich couldn’t manage to dismiss (though he buries them in the footnotes to the History of the Yiddish Language) multiple accounts like that of isaac ber levinson (born 1788): “And our elders have told us that several generations ago, the Jews in these parts spoke only the Russian language… this is the Russian language spoken by the old inhabitants of the Volhynia (Podolia) and Kiev provinces and of other provinces that had been under Polish rule up to 1772″. [shlomo noble’s translation of (i assume) uncle max’s translation from levinson’s Teudah beYisrael]
I also reviewed Professor Taube’s book on my book review blog
Thanks, that’s a useful review. Here’s a snippet:
@Rabbi Klein: I think the review text contains a small typo – a missing “h”.
Part of his reason for making this argument is that unlike in Europe w[h]ere a Christian Hebraist movement sprung up at various times and places …
Camaanic in 1500s is most definitely Rabbi Meer Katz of Moliff’s indignant prescriptivist exaggeration. He seems to base on a handful of dialectic differences, chiefly based on the fact the locals called the principal Jewish center to their West, Brest (Litovsk), in Slavic, instead of using the weird toponym Brisk as decent Jews were supposed to
I was intrigued by the following tidbit from Rabbi Klein’s review: “Interestingly, Taube notes that when it comes the Biblical Book of Daniel, the Ruthenic translation only translated the Hebrew parts of that book into the contemporary dialect of East Slavic, but the Aramaic parts of the book were rendered in the Old Church Slavonic, which was by then considered largely archaic.” Intrigued not just because the translators consciously tried to duplicate the bilingual nature of the original, but because the way they did so seems bass-ackwards (sorry, don’t know the Yiddish for that). You’d think Hebrew:OCS::Aramaic:Rutheni[c/an] would have been the obvious set of analogies, but that’s apparently not how they saw it because they did it the other way ’round.
Of course the then-extant Slavonic versions of Daniel were based on the LXX, meaning they included the parts where there is neither a Hebrew nor an Aramaic original accessible to us, but only Greek. If those parts were left out of this bilingual translation that suggests to me a Jewish intended readership, unless the so-called “Judaizing” heretics of Muscovy were proto-Protestants on questions of the OT canon which for all I know they could have been.
shlomo noble’s translation of (i assume) uncle max’s translation from levinson’s Teudah beYisrael
Here (fn. 2).
@DP:
that’s not at all what weinreich holds; i follow his view because he is so actively hostile to the idea of east-slavic-speaking jewish communities continuing into the yiddish era.
with apologies for the long quotations, here’s uncle max:
The idea [of northward jewish migration within the grand duchy of lithuania], therefore, suggests that there were in Lithuania-Belorussia not only Ashkenazim, but also Knaanic (and Crimean; 2.23) Jews. Possibly those Jews of Lithuania-Belorussia, of whom the frequently cited sentence of R. Meir Katz, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, testifies that they speak “the language of Russia” (2.13.5), were late Knaanites. [I.86]
Few remains of the eastern Knaanic language have survived, but there should be no doubt of its existence. There are several testimonies. One document, emanating from the Cairo Genizah, goes back roughly to the year 1000. It is a Hebrew letter of recommendation of the community of Salonika for a Jew who was journeying to Palestine “to bow down to the holy place” and would undoubtedly require the assistance of the communities on the way. “He is from rvσyʔ (the congregation of Russia), visiting our community of Salonika… and he has requested from us these two lines to commend him to your generosity and to your guidance from town to town and from island to island through reliable people, for he knows neither Hebrew, nor Yavanic, nor Arabic, only the language of Knaan that the people of his native land speak….” The link of Russia and the language of Knaan in the same document precludes the possibility that the recommendee was from the Elbe basin. [I.87]
R. Meir Katz was asked why in Brisk dekuya (in northern Poland, in Polish Brzesc Kujawski; 7.56.2.2) the name of the town was written in bills of divorce Brisk, whereas in Brisk delite (Brest) brσty. To which R. Meir, then rabbi in Mogilev-Dniepr, replied: “It seems to me that there is no need to write the non-Jewish name in Brisk dekuya, for there all Jews call it Brisk. …And the fact that it is general usage in Brisk delite… to write brσty is no proof, for it has become customary among most of the Jews in these parts to speak the language of Russia, and they call the city Bresti. God willing and the world will be full of knowledge and all [Jews] will speak one language, the language of Ashkenaz, then Brisk will be written exclusively….” [I.87]
On the question of the two names Brisk, R. Meir Katz makes it clear that Brisk (דקױא dqvyʔ) is the authentic Jewish [i.e. yiddish] name; the equivalent in the non-Jewish language is a non-Jewish name.—In this controversy, the truth is rather on the side of Dubnow [advocating against alexander harkavy for a comparatively small eastern-slavic-speaking jewish population in the yiddish era], but we have to modify it as follows: “pockets” of Knaanic speakers, to borrow a designation from military operations, held out until the seventeenth century, although Yiddish had scored a decisive victory several centuries earlier. [I.A76]
.
as the last sentence makes clear, even someone as determined as weinreich to claim eastern european jewry for ashkenaz as early and as definitively as possible can’t avoid accepting that there were eastern-slavic-speaking jewish communities much later than he would like. yes, he’s determined to minimize them – even to the extent of ignoring his own basic methodology to endorse katz’s view that the only true “jewish language” on the scene was yiddish. but to his credit he doesn’t deny the evidence, even in that regard: “Since “the language of Ashkenaz” here does not mean [non-jewish] German, we are justified in thinking that “the language of Russia” is not necessarily [non-jewish, or/and “Great”] Russian. The formula of betrothal cited by R. Meir (yʔ tʕby ʔσtym mqds byl) is certainly not Russian; the fusion character of the sentence renders it absolutely unintelligible to a speaker of [non-jewish] Russian or any other [non-jewish] eastern Slavic language.” [I.89]
meir katz is certainly a prescriptivist in the sense that he believes all jews should speak one language (yiddish), but his point in talking about the predominant jewish language of mogilev – which is simply a description of his own congregation and community’s everyday speech, not in any way a philological argument or based on anything to do with dialects – is precisely that the reality around him goes against his prescription. weinreich tries to claim that katz is deliberately exaggerating – “the temperament of a community leader with a program: he presents the danger [of jews continuing to speak a language other than yiddish] as greater than it is in order to combat it with greater vigor” [I.88] – but, having no actual evidence to support this just-so story, honest-though-polemical max backs off in the very next sentence, saying “We dare not brush off the notations of the BaH or of R. Meir Katz. The question is only of their correct interpretation.”
given the rest of the evidence he presents, which includes multiple testimonies to the prevalence of eastern slavic among jews within yidishland a century or more after meir katz’s time, i think we can discard weinreich’s minimizing interpretations as fictions driven by his core ideological framework. but his overarching conclusion seems inarguable to me: as he says, the only thing in question is the balance of numbers between speakers of east slavic and speakers of yiddish at any given time (and varying from place to place, of course), not the lasting presence of the one and the ultimate dominance of the other.
“The formula of betrothal cited by R. Meir (yʔ tʕby ʔσtym mqds byl) is certainly not Russian; the fusion character of the sentence renders it absolutely unintelligible to a speaker of [non-jewish] Russian or any other [non-jewish] eastern Slavic language.”
Я тебя с этим mqds был or so, no? Can the past tense был be conceivably used here? This would be Russian but keeping Hebrew religious terminology (mǝquddāš ‘consecrated’, masc.sg.), as in e.g. Yiddish.
The usual formula of marriage is הֲרֵי אַתְּ מְקֻדֶּשֶׁת לִי hărēi at mǝquddešet lî “hereby you [f.] are consecrated [f.] to me [the groom]”. There is probably some precedent to the role reversal, but that I know nothing about.
Too bad that the Hebrew letters in the Cyrillic alphabet were adopted already in Glagolitic. I wanted to suggest that they came from written Knaanic.
I wonder what factors influenced family decisions on what language to speak in the home, between demographic weight of the Ashkenazi immigration, religious, economic and/or commercial prestige of those immigrants, and their own economic links to broader central and western European markets, vs. the chancery language and the possibly different governmental language of city, town or shtetl. And maybe the degree to which the hearth variety of Slavic wasn’t sufficient for other purposes? There is probably not enough evidence to figure out in which towns and regions the changes happened more quickly and slowly.
dropping back in from the Qırımlı thread with a little geographic onomastics:
one of taube’s eastern knaanic scholars, rabbi moshe ben jacob (1520-1449) – from kyiv, schooled in constantinople, and ultimately the creator of the syncretic nusakh & minhag kaffa in the crimea – needed to be distinguished in the rabbinic literature from the 12thC rabbi moshe of kyiv. the latter could just be “of kyiv”, since he was known to the literature as a student in champagne, where his hometown identified him. moshe the second could be called that (and was), but was also known as “ha-rusi”, which taube glosses as “the russian”, but would i think make more sense to understand as “from rus'” – in contrast to his residence in kaffa/theodosia/[t/f]eodosiia. what struck me, though, was that he was also called “ha-gole” – the exile, or the diasporic – which made me wonder about the conceptual geographies of the time, and which of his moves was considered exile or diaspora. the jump from capital to capital that took him to The City? the jump from imperial center to provincial hub? or one that we no longer know about?
@Ryan:
i only wish we had the evidence! but even what we have isn’t particularly well handled – probably because it doesn’t conform to the historical narratives that have become comfortable and convenient. i mean, i haven’t even been able to find a comprehensive list (much less a series of maps) of the dates at which each known eastern european jewish community is first attested, which should be the most basic element of any argument for any theory about the emergence of yiddish jewry. i can’t say i’ve sought that out systematically, but i’ve been reading widely on the subject (including wingnuts like paul wexler) for quite a few years now without seeing a trace of what should be everyone’s footnote #1.
I didn’t expect my question could be answered, but your reply is still interesting.
Might you have made a typo in the dates of Moshe ha-Rusi? Or did you just reverse the order of birth and death, either inadvertently or via reading then writing them sinistrograde?
“i haven’t even been able to find a comprehensive list (much less a series of maps) of the dates at which each known eastern european jewish community is first attested, which should be the most basic element of any argument for any theory about the emergence of yiddish jewry.”
At least one of the maps in Marvin I. Herzog’s The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland: Its Geography and History gives the information you seek.
@Ryan: o! yes; those are reversed – as far as I know, moshe did not live a chronologically inverted life, though that would certainly earn his “ha-gole” handle.
@M: thanks so much! I’ll have to track that down (though depending on what herzog considered to be northern poland, it may not cover some of the areas that are most in question and to me most interesting).
here’s a link for herzog (the dissertation version). the maps M referred to are p310ff, and better than i’ve seen anywhere else, though they only cover historic mazovia /sigh/.