Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe.

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.