Transmission of Scientific Texts in 15th-Century Eastern Knaan

M o s h e Ta u b e

Transmission of Scientific Texts in 15th-Century Eastern Knaan Introduction Little is known about the Jews who lived in “Eastern Knaan”1 (the Slavic-speaking areas of Eastern Europe) before the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from the west.2 The ancient city of Kiev, the first Russian capital,

The research for this study was supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation, founded by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. I am indebted to three anonymous readers on behalf of Aleph and to the editors of the journal for their criticism and helpful remarks. I am grateful to Will Ryan for his extremely valuable comments. 1

Kenaʿan (i.e., Canaan, Heb. ‫ )כנען‬is the medieval Hebrew name for the Slavic lands, probably based on an association between the Latin Sclavi, Sclavonia with Genesis 9:25: “And he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’ ” This interpretation is first encountered in the tenth-century Josippon: ‫“ = הם הנקראים סקלאבי ואומרים אחרים כי הם מבני כנען‬These are those called Slavs [Sclavi], while others say that they are of the sons of Canaan” (see David Flusser, ed., The Josippon [Josephus Gorionides] [Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1978–81], 1:9 and 1:10n. [Heb.]). The twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tudela echoes this interpretation: ‫= וקוראים אותה היהודים הדרים שם כנען בשביל שאנשי הארץ ההיא מוכרים בניהם ובנותיהם לכל‬ “The Jews who live there call it Canaan, for the men of this land sell their sons and daughters to all’ (quoted by Flusser, ibid.).

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had a Jewish community by the early tenth century (well before the Christianization of the Russian lands by St. Vladimir in 988), as witnessed by a Geniza letter dated to ca. 930, which refers to ‫קהל של קייוב‬ ‘the community of Kiev’.3 It is generally agreed that these Jews, like their coreligionists everywhere, spoke a Jewish variety of the local language; in this case, Judeo-(Eastern)-Slavic, also referred to as (Eastern)-Knaanic.4 A letter from the Romaniote community of Salonika (of disputed date, ranging from the eleventh to the thirteenth century) recommends to neighboring Jewish communities a monolingual Jew from Russia (‫ )מקהל רוסיאה‬who is on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and requires assistance and guidance, “since he knows neither the Holy Tongue (Hebrew) nor Greek nor Arabic, but only the language of Canaan spoken by the men of his native land.”5 Despite their antique origins, the Jewish communities in these lands did not produce any prominent scholars.6 We do read, here and there during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of Jewish merchants and scholars going to Russia or of Jews coming from Russia to study at the renowned rabbinical academies in Germany, France, and even Spain.7 We hear of a twelfth-century scholar from Kiev, R. Moses (also called “the first”), mentioned as part of the line of transmission of a halakhic ruling about wine that had been touched by gentiles which he received, it is to be presumed orally (‫)מפי‬,8 from the French tosafist Rabbenu Tam (Jacob ben Meir),9 and also as addressing a legal question on levirate marriage to a rabbinic authority in Baghdad, Samuel ben Ali.10 Nevertheless, up to the middle of the fifteenth century we remain unable to name a single work written by a Jewish scholar from Eastern Europe. We must assume, therefore, that the situation noted in the thirteenth century by the author of ʾOr Zaruaʿ, Rabbi Isaac of Vienna, prevailed until that time: ‫הנה ברוב מקומות שבפולין ורוסייא ואונגרין שאין שם לומדי תורה מתוך‬ ‫דוחקם ושוכרים להם אדם מבין מאשר ימצאו והוא להם שליח צבור ומורה‬ .‫צדק ומלמד בניהם‬ 316

2

For recent surveys, see: Omelian Pritsak, “The Pre-Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe in Relation to the Khazars, the Rus’ and the Lithuanians,” in: UkrainianJewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1990), pp. 3–21; Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath, A Grin without a Cat. I: “Adversus Iudaeos” Texts in the Literature of Medieval Russia 988–1504; II: Jews and Christians in Medieval Russia (Lund: Lund University, 2002), vol. 2.

3

See Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982)

4

See Max Weinreich, “Yiddish, Knaanic, Slavic: The Basic Relationships,” in M. Halle et al., eds., For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 622–632. From the eleventh century onward we encounter Slavic glosses, referred to as ‫‘ בלשון כנען‬in the language of Canaan’, in halakhic and exegetical texts (see Franciszek Kupfer and Tadeusz Lewicki, Źródła hebrajskie do dziejów Słowian i niektórych innych ludów środkowej i wschodniej Europy: wyjątki z pism religijnych i prawniczych xi-xiii wieków [Wrocław: Zakład im. Ossolińskich, 1956]); e.g. in Rashi’s commentary on Deuteronomy 3:9—“The Sidonians call Mount Hermon by the name Sirion, and the Amorites call it Snir”: “Snir is ‘snow’ in the language of Ashkenaz [i.e., (Old) German snēo] and in the language of Canaan [i.e., snieh in Old Czech, the western Slavic language with which Jews were acquainted]. See Roman O. Jakobson and Morris Halle, “The Term Canaan in Medieval Hebrew,” in For Max Weinreich on his Seventieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), pp. 149–171.

5

.‫ כי אינו יודע לא לשון הקודש ולא לשון יוני גם לא ערבי כי אם שפת כנען מדברים אנשי ארץ מולדתו‬See Kupfer and Lewicki, Źródła hebrajskie do dziejów Słowian, pp. 269–70.

6

Unless one counts (I do not believe we should) the author of the fourteenth-century Torah commentary Śefat ha-ʾEmet, R. Abraham of Crimea, preserved in three unpublished MSS of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all of them Karaite (although the author, it is generally assumed, was not a Karaite). This work remained unknown until unearthed by Firkovich in the nineteenth century and was not cited by later commentators, with the noticeable exception of Moses the Exile in his supercommentary on Abraham Ibn Ezra. See Sergei [Israel] Zinberg, “Abraham of

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M o s h e Ta u b e

Thus in most locations in Poland, Russia, and Hungary where there are no Torah scholars, due to their poverty, they hire an educated man wherever they can find one, and he serves them as cantor and rabbi and schoolteacher.11

7

318

For a recent study see Alexander Kulik, “The Earliest Evidence of the Jewish Presence in Western Rus’,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 27 (2004–2005): 13–24, and the literature cited there.

8

The Jewish condition is of course linked to the general situation in Eastern Europe. The Mongol destruction of Kiev in 1240 put an end to Kievan Rus’. From the fourteenth century onward a new polity emerged to dominate the Eastern European lands with a Jewish population—the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This multi-ethnic and multi-confessional realm, the largest state in fifteenth-century Europe, covered present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldavia, and Latvia, as well as parts of Poland and Russia, and included within its boundaries territories inherited from Kievan Rus’ and neighboring principalities, where Jewish presence had been attested before the Tatar invasions and massacres of the 1240s.12 Although the Grand Duchy was a rising political and economic power, there is no evidence for a flourishing of cultural activity there. Here we need to distinguish between the Catholic parts of the Eastern Slavic lands—Cracow was an early center of learning, where a university was established in 1364 and Aristotle was taught (albeit not in the original Greek)—and the Orthodox parts, where no institutions of higher education existed until several centuries later.13 Orthodox Rus’, now divided between Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, remained locked in its “intellectual silence” for a long time yet.14 Fifteenth-century Christian Kiev was in the middle of a long period of cultural decline, marked not only by the absence of original works but also by the paucity of copies and commentaries on earlier scholarship.15 From a Jewish perspective, the situation is similar. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of the fifteenth century, with its expanding Jewish population (soon to become what Max Weinreich called Ashkenaz II16), is not particularly known as a center of Jewish

Crimea and Moses of Kiev,” Evreiskaia starina 11 (1924): 93–109 (Russian).

Thus Sergei [Israel] Zinberg, “Abraham of Crimea and Moses of Kiev,” Evreiskaia starina 11 (1924): p. 95.

9

The transmission of the ruling is stated in Sefer ha-Yašar, ed. S. Schlesinger (Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1959), §728, p. 422: … ‫ מפי ר‘ משה‬.‫ דכי היכי דאסור בשתייה אסור נמי בהנאה‬.‫ואין ר‘ מודה שהוא אוסרו בהנאה בזמן הזה‬ .‫מקיוב מפי רבי‘ תם‬

10

The text of the responsum is printed in Samuel Poznański, Babylonische Geonim im nachgaonäischen Zeitalter nach handschriftlichen und gedruckten Quellen (Berlin: Mayer ̣ Müller, 1914), pp. 54–56. ‫והרב ר‘ משה מקיוב שאל את פי ראש ישיבת של גולת בית ]דין[ הגדול שמואל בן מרנן ורבנן אדונינו עלי ראש‬ ‫ וששאלת לענין יבמה האיך המנהג אם חולצת או מתיבמת כמשנה אחרונה או‬:‫הישיבה של גולה והשיב כך‬ ...‫ דע‬.‫כראשונה‬ The same ruling is mentioned in a responsum by R. Meir of Rothenburg (Lemberg, 1860), f. 47b, No. 443:

11

... ‫ כך שלח רבי‘ שמואל בן רבי‘ עלי ראש ישיבה מבבל אל ה“ר משה מקיאו‬... Sefer ʾOr zaruaʿ, Pt. 1, Hilḵ ot šeliaḥ ṣ ibbur, §113.

12

See Pereswetoff-Morath, A Grin without a Cat, 2:14–15: “With the Mongol invasion the traditional centre of the Rus’ commonwealth became separated from those north and north-east provinces that were to form the heartland of Muscovy in the late 14–15cc. The split into two main polities— … politically and culturally opposing one another in either’s aspiration to become the one Orthodox Russia, was made permanent as the western principalities beyond effective Mongol control were pulled into the sphere of influence of the expanding and increasingly Slavonicised pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The founding of a Lithuanian (Lettovian [note in original: to use Rowell’s term for that which pertains to the Grand Duchy but is not necessarily ethnically Lithuanian.]) Orthodox metropolitanate at some point before August 1317 was instrumental. By the mid-1360 the Lettovian grand duke held in his sway or could count on as close allies most of the principalities which now

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learning. By the middle of that century we still cannot name a single great scholar living there. It is only in the second half of the fifteenth century that we finally encounter two Jewish figures from Eastern Knaan whose scholarly activities bore fruit that survives to the present day (one as author and the other as copyist, annotator, and translator); both are from Kiev. In the last moment before it was totally overrun and absorbed by the Ashkenazi newcomers from the West, the Knaanic Jewry of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at long last produced names to bear witness to its tradition of erudition, a tradition that, similar to the Karaites’, was intellectually oriented mainly southward, toward Byzantium and then the Ottoman Empire.

constitute Ukraine and Belarus: notably Polock, Turov-Pinsk, Brest, Kiev, Černigov, and Volhynia.” 13

“Neither Kievan nor Muscovite Russia had an equivalent of scholasticism or Renaissance; there were no universities, only occasional schools, and no learned professions; there was little knowledge of Greek, effectively none of Latin” (William F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999], p. 10).

14

See Francis J. Thomson, The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).

15

As Mykhailo Hrushevskyi put it, with passion and frustration, in the introduction to Volume 5 of his History of Ukrainian Literature (Історія Української Літератури [Kiev, 1926]): From the perspective of scholarly output, these two and a half centuries, the

1. Two Scholars from Fifteenth-Century Kiev a. R. Moses ben Jacob the Exile

R. Moses ben Jacob the Russian (1448–1520), also known as “Moses the Exile” (‫ )רבי משה הגולה‬and “Moses the Second,”17 applied himself to biblical exegesis, poetry, grammar, astronomy and kabbalah. In his youth he studied in Constantinople, with both Rabbanite teachers such as the talmudist Rabbi Abraham Ṣ arfati (whose daughter he married) and Karaites like Elijah Bashyazi.18 In later years, after returning to Kiev, he engaged in polemics against the Karaites, who had significant communities in the Lithuanian cities of Troki and Luck. His attacks on their most venerated work, the Book of Commandments or Book of Paradise (‫ ספר גן עדן‬,‫ )ספר המצוות‬by the fourteenth-century Karaite Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia, inevitably attracted virulent attacks on the part of the Karaite leaders in Constantinople, including his former teacher Elijah Bashyazi and Bashyazi’s disciple Caleb Afendopolo.19 R. Moses’ broad erudition, acquired in Constantinople, is reflected in his writings. In his exegetical work (a supercommentary on Abraham Ibn Ezra’s commentary on the Torah) he displays an acquaintance not 320

fourteenth, the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century, still stretch out before the eyes of the investigator as such an empty, barren desert, that he stands confused, afraid to venture into this empty space, devoid of any orientation marks. On the one hand, we have evidence, that even in the thirteenth century not only in the Galician-Volhynian lands, but also in Kiev, abandoned by the princes, bishops, boyars and clerics, there still lived on literary activity—the nerve of creative thought has still not died out, and that Galicia and Volhynia in the first half of the fourteenth century were still “outstanding in every kind of abundance and glory.” On the other hand, there is an almost complete lack of original works, and even an unusually small quantity, relatively speaking, of reworkings, compilations and plain copies of literary documents from these times! … (quoted from the unpaginated online edition at http://litopys.org.ua/hrushukr/hrushe.htm; translation mine, MT) For a review of scientific texts circulating among the Orthodox Slavs see Ihor Ševčenko, “Remarks on the Diffusion of Byzantine Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Literature among the Orthodox Slavs in Letters and Culture,” Slavonic and East European Review 59 (1981): 321–345; repr. in idem, Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1991), pp. 585–615. As W. F. Ryan summarized his findings: “The Orthodox Slavs translated fewer of the scientific and

321

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only with the most important Jewish exegetes and thinkers (Rashi, Maimonides, Naḥ manides, Gersonides, Joseph Ibn Kaspi, Moses of Narbonne) but also with lesser known figures (Joseph ben Eliezer Bonfils and Samuel Ibn Motot) and rarely cited ones, such as Abraham of Crimea.20 He also mentions Muslim thinkers, including Avicenna, al-Ghazā lı,̄ and Averroes.21 In his writings Moses left us quite a few details about his own biography. Thus we learn from a remark at the end of a chapter in his supercommentary, written over the course of many years, that he was born on Tuesday, 15 Kislev 5209 (November 12, 1448). There is, however, uncertainty concerning his birthplace.22 His Karaite opponents call him “Ashkenazi” and “Alemano,” which may indicate that he was (or was thought by them to be) of Ashkenazi descent. His former teacher Bashyazi also calls him “ugly,” “blister upon pimple,” “with yellowish hair,” etc. But Bashyazi’s identification of the Ashkenazi polemicist with his former student of astronomy is not certain.23 The manuscript of the supercommentary, which Zinberg held to be R. Moses’ autograph,24 is written in Byzantine rather than in Ashkenazi script.25 So while his origins may have been Ashkenazi, his education was not. When Kiev was sacked by Tatars in 1482, Rabbi Moses lost his possessions, including his books, which later ended up in the Tengnagel collection of the Imperial Library in Vienna.26 Among these, what is now Hebrew codex No. 183 in Schwarz’s 1925 catalogue explicitly bears Rabbi Moses’ name as owner;27 codices 135 and 168 may also have belonged to him.28 He himself escaped, but his sons were taken captive and hauled off to the Crimea. Moses spent the next years traveling between the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe to collect money for their ransom. Moses, as we learn from his own detailed testimony, recorded in the only copy of his work Yesod ʿibbur,29 was expelled from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the order of “King Alexander” (Alexander 322

philosophical works available in Byzantium than did the Syrians, Arabs or Latins, and indeed no complete major work of Greek antique philosophy or science was translated and no sophisticated ancient Greek or Byzantine work of history or literature (apart from works of Josephus and George of Pisidia) was available in Slavonic until comparatively modern times” (Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, pp. 9–10). 16

Max Weinreich, Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh (New York: YIVO, 1973); English version: Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

17

See Israel Berlin, Istoricheskiia Sud’by Evreiskago Naroda na Territorii Russkago Gosudarstva (Petrograd: Knigoizdatel’stvo Evreiskaia Istoricheskaia Biblioteka, 1919), p. 192: “Моисей б. Яков га-Голе (р. Моисей Изганник) или, как его называют обычно, р. Моисей ІІ из Кіева, в отличіе от р. Моисея из Кіева, жившаго в ХІІ в.” (Rabbi Moses ha-Goleh (R. Moses the Exile) or, as he is usually called, R. Moses II from Kiev, in contradistinction to R. Moses from Kiev who lived in the twelfth century.)

18 19

See Zinberg, “Abraham of Crimea and Moses of Kiev.” Israel Zinberg, The History of Jewish Literature (Wilno, 1929–1937), 5:21–22 (Yiddish); English in idem, A History of Jewish Literature (Cincinnati and New York, 1972–78), 6:14–15. Zinberg calls the author of the Book of Paradise Abraham ben Elijah instead of Aaron ben Elijah.

20

For the St. Petersburg copy of his supercommentary, see the Jerusalem National and University Library (JNUL), F 51225.

21

See list of sources in the entry for the Schocken copy (F 46843) of his supercommentary.

22

Zinberg (The History of Jewish Literature 5:20 = English trans. 6:13), quotes, with strong reservations, the testimony of Firkovich (published in ha-Karmel 2 [Vilnius 1861]: 39) that he had seen a copy of Moses’ supercommentary in the possession of a Karaite named Isaac Uchsuz, with the explicit statement that his birthplace was Shadov (i.e., Šeduva in Lithuania). Zinberg finds this unlikely, inasmuch as Shadov is mentioned for the first time only in 1539, and also because it is inconceivable that a native of a remote shtetl in Zamut (Samogitia; Zamut is the Jewish name for the northwestern region of Lithuania known in Lithuanian as Žemaitija and in Polish

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M o s h e Ta u b e

Jagiellończyk, 1461–1506: Grand Duke of Lithuania, 1492–1506; king of Poland 1501–1506). Together with all the Jews he was rounded up and forced out of Luck on Thursday, Iyyar 6, 5255 (April 30, 1495), and headed for the territories of Alexander’s brother, “the noble King Jan Olbracht” (1459–1501: king of Poland, 1492–1501), arriving in Belz on Wednesday, 12 Iyyar (May 15, 1495). The expelled Jews, with Moses among them, were allowed back into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1503. Then, in 1506, while in Lida (today in western Belarus), Rabbi Moses was captured by Tatars and brought to Kaffa (Theodosia) in Crimea, where he was ransomed by the local Jewish community. Within a few years he became head of the community there and introduced a new Kaffa prayer rite (‫)נוסח כפא‬, which constituted a compromise among the various components of the local Jewish community—Romaniote, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, native Krimchak, and Persian (Tat). The following works of Rabbi Moses the Exile have come down to us:30 1. A supercommentary on Abraham Ibn Ezra’s commentary on the Torah, ʾOṣ ar neḥ mad (Coveted treasure), still unpublished, and preserved in five copies, two of them Karaite. The oldest copy is MS Firkovich I 71 (F 51225 [Reel 10]), in a sixteenth-century Byzantine hand, considered by Zinberg “in all probability to be R. Moses’ autograph.”31 2. An astronomical work, Yesod ʿibbur32 (Principle of intercalation), also still unpublished, extant in a single sixteenth-century Ashkenazi copy at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy in St. Petersburg. In this work, based on Maimonides’ “Laws of the Sanctification of the New Moon,” Moses deals not only with astronomy and calendrics, but also with the planets and astrology. One chapter takes on the Bohemian rabbi, philosopher, and kabbalist, Yom Tov Lipmann Muelhausen (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries), and seeks “to alert students to places where the meaning 324

as Żmudź) would go study in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. He suggests instead that the passage quoted by Firkovich cites not Shadov but the old city of Turov, north of Kiev (today Turaŭ in southern Belarus) (Zinberg, “Abraham of Crimea and Moses of Kiev,” p. 103). The spelling ‫טארוב‬ ָ (clearly a typo for ‫)טוראב‬ ָ in the 1935 Yiddish version of this account (History of Jewish Literature, 3:20) led to misunderstandings, yielding the non-existent Tarov in both the Hebrew and English translations of Zinberg’s work. This error was perpetuated as recently as 2007, when the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica reprinted without modification S. Eidelberg’s entry “Moses ben Jacob” from the first edition of the encyclopedia (2nd ed., Vol. 14, pp. p. 550–551). Zinberg explains the confusion of Shadov and Turov as a misreading of ‫ ט‬for ‫ ש‬and of ‫ ר‬for ‫ד‬. Brutzkus suggests that the name should be read as ‫[ כיוּ ֿב‬Kiyuv], i.e., Kiev (Julius Brutzkus, “From the Library of the Kievan Rabbi, R. Moses the Exile of the Fifteenth Century,” YIVO Bleter 8 (1935): 269–272, on 269 (Yiddish). 23

See the passage from Bashyazi’s letter to the Karaite community in Luck: ‫“( אולי זה האיש שכח הזמן שהיה נכנע לפני כשהיה לומד עמי חכמת התכונה‬perhaps this man has forgotten the time he was subordinate to me when he studied astronomy with me”) (Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 5:21, n. 50 = Eng. trans. 6:14, n. 39.

24

Ibid., 5:347–48, Appendix 3 (not included in English translation).

25

MS St. Petersburg Russian National Library, Firkovich I 71.

26

Sebastian Tengnagel (1573–1636), librarian of the Imperial Library in Vienna from 1608 till his death in 1636, prepared a catalogue of the scientific works in the library: Sebastian Tengnagel, Catalogus manuscriptorum, theologicorum, juridicorum, historicorum, philosophicorum et philologicorum, medicorumque: Bibliothecae augustissimae caesareae vindebonensis. Houghton MS Lat 387.

27

Moses asserts his ownership (MS 183, VI pagination, f. 25v, as follows: ‫לעולם יחתום אדם‬ ‫שמו על ספרו אני משה ב“ר יעקב מ“כ ז“ל קניתי זה הספר בל‘ לבנים מר‘ שמריא שלוניקי בי“ג בכסליו שנת‬ [!‫לכו ונעלה א“ל ה“ר יי‘ השם יזכני ללמוד בו וללמדו לאחי יחידי ר‘ ישראל אמן ויאמן ]כך‬ (quoted from Arthur Z. Schwarz, Die Hebräischen Handschriften der Nationalbibliothek in Wien [Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1925], pp. 207–208) One should always sign one’s name on one’s book: I, Moses son of R. Jacob from Kiev [reading the abbreviation either with Brutzkus as ‫מכיוּ ב‬ ּ or perhaps as ‫ ]מקהילת כיוב‬of

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of words of the Teacher [Maimonides] was misinterpreted by Rabbi Lipmann of blessed memory.”33 3. An unpublished commentary (or rather user’s manual) on Šeš kenafayim (Six wings), the astronomical tables by the famous fourteenth-century mathematician and astronomer of Tarascon (Provence), Immanuel ben Jacob Bonfils.34 4. A commentary on the early esoteric text Sefer Yeṣ irah, preserved in nine copies from the sixteenth century onward, first printed in Korets in 1779 as ʾOṣ ar ha-šem (Treasure of the name)35 and since included in printed editions of Sefer Yeṣ irah (most recently Jerusalem, 2004). 5. A kabbalistic work entitled Šošan sodot (Lily of secrets), so named because it contains 656 (‫ )שוש“ן‬secrets, completed in 1511,36 preserved in eighteen copies from the sixteenth century onward, and first printed in Zhitomir in 1872.37

blessed memory bought this book for 30 silver pieces from R. Shemaria [of] Saloniki on [Wednesday] 13 Kislev 5231 (= November 7, 1470). May God make me worthy of 28 29

326

Brutzkus, “From the Library.” MS St. Petersburg, Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy C 97, f. 214r.

30

Among those mentioned in his extant works but now lost is a treatise on grammar, Sefer ha-Diqduq, mentioned in the supercommentary.

31

Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 5:347, Appendix 3 (not included in English translation).

32

F. 69322. Within the text, the treatise is referred to as ‫יסוד עבור‬, whereas at the top of the first page (f. 209r) a later hand added ‫ס‘ יסוד העבור‬.

33

On f. 219: ‫לעורר לב המתלמדים על מקומות אשר החטיא כונת הרב מהר“ר ליפמן זצ“ל‬.

34

According to Brutzkus (“From the Library,” p. 270), the exemplar of the “commentary” preserved in MS Vienna National Library 183 was written by Moses himself. Gardette repeats this attribution, referring to Zinberg 1924, where no such claim is made,

b. The scribe, annotator and possibly translator Zechariah ben Aaron ha-Kohen

The name of another Kievan Jew involved with scientific texts has come down to us from both Jewish and Christian sources. From colophons in Hebrew manuscripts we learn of the work of Zechariah ben Aaron ha-Kohen, who copied and annotated several scientific and philosophical works in Hebrew between 1454 and 1485—in Kiev and later in Damascus. Christian sources refer to the dangerous astrologer and black-magician Scharia (Схарїа), the initiator of the Judaizing heresy in Novgorod and Moscow (see below). I have demonstrated in previous studies that Zechariah the scribe and Scharia the magician were one and the same person.38 The following Hebrew manuscripts were copied and annotated by Zechariah ben Aaron of Kiev: 1. Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De sphaera (MS St. Petersburg RNB [= Russian National Library] Firkovich Evr I 355, F. 50932 [Reel

studying it and teaching it to my only brother, R. Israel, Amen and Amen.

however (Philippe Gardette, “Judaeo-Provençal Astronomy in Byzantium and Russia (fourteenth–fifteenth c.),” Byzantinoslavica 63 (2005): 195–209, on 204 n. 50). The attribution is based on the colophon on f. 12r of the fourth set of page numbers in MS 183: ‫תם ונשלם ע“י משה ב“י בחודש כסלו ליל ה‘ י“ו בו רל“א לפ“ק‬ “Completed by Moses b[en] J[acob] in the month of Kislev on the fifth night of the week, the 16th thereof, (5)231” (quoted by Schwarz, Die Hebräischen Handschriften, p. 205). This colophon is problematic, since 16 Kislev that year was a Sabbath. The “fifth night of the week”—what we call Wednesday night—would correspond to 14 Kislev 5231 (= Nov. 8, 1470). Furthermore, it is customary for scribes to refrain from writing down the sequences ‫ י“ו‬and ‫י“ה‬, because they occur in the holy names of God; consequently the standard forms for fifteen and sixteen are ‫ ט“ו‬and ‫ט“ז‬. The reported ‫ י“ו‬is likely a transcription error for ‫י“ד‬. 35

Thus Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 5:24 n. 60 (= Eng. trans. 6:17, n. 49). I have not been able to verify this statement.

36

A detailed colophon puts the date of its completion as Tuesday, August 26, 1511 (‫והיתה‬

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M o s h e Ta u b e

2.

3.

4.

5.

21]), copied on Sept. 18, 1454, in Kiev. The Hebrew title is Qiṣ ṣ ur Sefer ha-Galgal, with the subtitle Sefer ha-ʾAsfiraʾ ha-qaṭ an. The Englishman Johannes de Sacrobosco (John of Holywood, 1195–1256) taught mathematics at the Sorbonne. His Tractatus de sphaera39 was translated from Latin into Hebrew twice: once by Solomon Avigdor, as Marʾeh ha-ʾofanim (The appearance of the wheels) and once anonymously, as Sefer ha-Galgal (The book of the sphere). Both versions are attested in several manuscripts and were printed in a single volume together with Abraham bar Ḥ iyya’s Ṣ urat ha-ʾareṣ in Offenbach in 1720. Mešaret Mošeh (Moses’ servant) (MS St. Petersburg RNB Firkovich Evr I 502, F. 51287 [Reel 46]), copied on Sept. 2, 1455. This commentary on (and defense of) Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, attributed to Qalonymos of Provence, is attested in many manuscripts from the thirteenth century onward; it was printed in Leipzig in 1845. In this codex Zechariah copied the missing beginning and end (ff. 1 and 15–17). Ruaḥ ḥ en (MS St. Petersburg RNB Firkovich Evr I 494, F. 51418 [Reel 57]), copied Oct. 31, 1456. This thirteenth-century philosophic encyclopedia, in the Maimonidean vein, has been variously ascribed to Samuel Ibn Tibbon, to Jacob Anatoli, and to Zeraḥ iah ha-Levi Anatoli.40 Al-Farghani’s Elements of Astronomy (MS Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod hebr. 60 = Cat. Schwarz 183, F. 1337), copied on Jan. 14, 1468, in Kiev. This compendium of Ptolemy’s Almagest was translated into Hebrew by Jacob Anatoli in Naples in the thirteenth century, on the basis of both Arabic and Latin versions.41 Two pages from the third chapter of Solomon ben Joseph Ibn Ayyub’s Hebrew translation of Averroes’ De substantia orbis, added to the end of a different work (MS St. Petersburg RNB Firkovich Evr I 436, F. 50957 [Reel 27]), copied by Zechariah on May 27, 1485, in Damascus.42 328

‫)השלמתו יום ג‘ ב‘ לאלול שנת לשמוע אנקת אסיר‬. (quoted in Zinberg, “Abraham of Crimea and Moses of Kiev,” p. 107 n. 3). 37

The last 193 of its 656 secrets are in fact a commentary on Sefer Yeṣ irah; see Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 5:24 n. 60 (= Eng. trans. 6:17, n. 49).

38

See: Moshe Taube, “The Kievan Jew Zechariah and the Astronomical Works of the Judaizers,” in W. Moskovich et al., eds., Jews and Slavs 3 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1995): 168–198; idem, “The Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translations from Hebrew and the Heresy of the Judaizers: Is there a Connection?” in V. V. Ivanov and Julia Verkholantseva, eds., Speculum Slaviae Orientalis: Muscovy, Ruthenia and Lithuania in the Late Middle Ages (Moscow: OGI, 2005), pp. 185–208.

39

For the Latin original and the English translation see Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

40

Nonscholars have attributed it anachronistically to Judah Ibn Tibbon (1120–1190), e.g., in the 1826 Warsaw edition.

41

Jacob Anatoli (ca. 1194–1256) translated mainly from Arabic, but in this case the 36 extant Hebrew copies offer conflicting versions of the translator’s colophon. The oldest (MS Warsaw Żydowski Instytut Historyczny 190, F10111) reads as follows:

‫ ואני יעקב בר אבא מרי בר‬... ‫זה הספר נקרא אלפרגאני והוא לקוח על דרך קצור מספר אלמגיסטי‬ .‫שמשון בר אנטולי העתקתיו מלשון הערב‬ This book is called al-Farghani and is abridged from the book Almagest. ... And I, Jacob bar Abba Mari bar Samson bar Anatoli, translated it from the Arabic language. Most other copies, (e.g., MS Florence Biblioteca Medicea Laurentiana Plut.88.28, MS Paris BNF héb. 1/1021, MS Paris BNF héb. 1/1022), as well as the copy made by Zechariah ben Aaron in Kiev in 1468, have: ‫ואני יעקב בר אבא מרי בר שמשון בר אנטולי‬

‫העתקתי אותו מפי נוצרי אחד ודקדקתי אותו מלשון הערב‬ … and I, Jacob bar Abba Mari bar Samson bar Anatoli, translated it as dictated by [lit. from the mouth of] a certain Christian and corrected it from the Arabic language. For early attempts to deal with this discrepancy and to identify this Christian as Michael Scot (1175–1232?), see Romeo Campani, “Il Kitab al-Farghani nel testo arabo e nelle versioni,” Rivista degli Studi Orientali 3 (1910): 205–252, esp. 216ff. More recently, in his analysis of the different versions of Ptolemy’s Almagest, Mauro Zonta

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M o s h e Ta u b e

2. Ruthenian Translations of Scientific Works in Hebrew Evidence about these learned Kievan Jews’ interest in science and philosophy can be obtained from sources other than the works that one of them wrote and the other copied and annotated. Important and rather unexpected testimony is provided by a series of translations of scientific and philosophical texts from Hebrew into Ruthenian,43 carried out between 1450 and 1480. The circumstances, purpose, and intended audience of these translations remain a matter of debate, but there can be no doubt of two points. First, Jews from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania participated in this enterprise, inasmuch as there is no evidence of knowledge of Hebrew among Christians in the Grand Duchy, nor, a fortiori, in Muscovy, where Jews are not allowed to settle or even to visit, whereas there are clear indications of Jewish participation in the translation.44 Second, the translations were destined for a non-Jewish readership, inasmuch as the translations are extant not in Hebrew script, as is customary with Jewish translations for internal purposes, whether in Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, or JudeoGerman (Yiddish), but in Cyrillic script. Although some of these texts are preserved in Ruthenian witnesses only, most of them ended up in Russified copies in Muscovy and are linked to the movement that the Russian Church labeled the “Heresy of the Judaizers.” We are not sure how much the members of this movement were interested in Judaism as a religion; but they certainly were interested in the scientific and philosophical texts in the Jews’ possession and which were completely unknown at that time in Muscovy; nor were similar texts of non-Jewish provenance available then and there. The little we know about the Muscovite Judaizers, all of which comes from Church sources, can be summarized as follows. According to the two main figures of the Russian Church who persecuted the heretics, Archbishop Gennadii of Novgorod45 and Iosif Sanin, also known as Volotskii, abbot of Volokolamsk, the Judaizing movement started in Novgorod in 1470, shortly before the annexation 330

embraced Campani’s conclusion that Anatoli made use of the twelfth-century Latin version by Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187) as well as of the Arabic. (Mauro Zonta, “La tradizione ebraica dell’Almagesto di Tolomeo,” Henoch 15 (1993): 325–350, esp. 332–3). 42

The colophon reads: ‫תם ע“י זכריה איש ירושלים בכ“ר אהרן כצז“ל בדמשק י“ג לסיון שנת מה“ר‬. The epithet “man of Jerusalem” signifies that Zechariah had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land at some point between 1468 and 1485.

43

Ruthenian is an East Slavic dialect, massively influenced by Polish and the predecessor of modern Belarusian and Ukrainian, which served as the written language of the multi-ethnic Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was usually transcribed in Cyrillic, but occasionally in Roman, characters.

44

One indication that the Slavic translator of the Logika was Jewish is found in his rendering of a passage in Millot higgayon ‫ כאמרנו כוכב הנאמר על‬,‫ ובפרט[ הוא אשר יקרא מין מן המינים בשם סוגו‬:‫והשם הנאמר בכלל וייחוד ]אחיטוב‬ ‫ וכשם חשישא בערב הנאמר על כל מיני העשבים‬.‫כל כוכב מכוכבי השמים בכלל והוא שם לאחד מז‘ כוכבי לכת‬ ‫ועל הפרח הצהוב אשר יצבעו בו הצבעים‬

And a noun applied to [both] a particular and a universal is when a species is referred to by the name of the genus, e.g., koḵ av means any of the stars in heaven and is [also] the name of one of the seven planets [Mercury], or the noun ḥ ashish in Arabic, which refers to any plant as well as to the yellow flower used for dyeing. The Slavic, on the other hand, has: а им рєчєноє во всєм и єдинє то ижє нарєчєс сщєство всчєством. ��ко рєчємъ Ізраиль всѣмъ намъ им. и одном мєжи нами. And a noun said of a particular and of a universal, is when a species is referred to by [the name of] the genus; e.g., “Israel” is the name of us all, as well as of an individual among us. 45

In his letter (Oct. 18, 1490) to Zosima, Metropolitan of Moscow (1490–94), describing the emergence of this movement in Novgorod some twenty years earlier and its subsequent expansion into Moscow, Archbishop Gennadii traces its roots to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania See Natal’ia Kazakova and Iakov Solomonovich Lur’e, Antifeodal’nye Ereticheskie Dvizheniia na Rusi XIV–nachala XVI v. (Antifeudal heretical movements in Russia,

331

M o s h e Ta u b e

of Novgorod by Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow. In that year, at the invitation of the pro-Lithuanian party in Novgorod, Prince Mikhailo Olenkovich of Kiev visited the city-state of Novgorod in the company of several nobles and merchants, including the learned Jew Scharia, described by Volotskii as a man knowledgeable in astrology, astronomy, necromancy, and magic. This Scharia succeeded in “leading astray” several priests of the lower “white clergy,”46 some of whom were later invited—surprisingly enough, by Ivan III himself—to Moscow, where two of them were appointed to churches in the Kremlin. There they continued their efforts to spread the heresy, under the protection of Fedor Kuritsyn, chief diplomat of Ivan III, as well as the prince’s daughter-in-law, the Moldovan princess Elena, whose son Dmitrii was crowned in 1498 with the cap of Vladimir Monomach and pronounced heir to the throne of Russia in the presence of his grandfather. In 1487, Gennadii, the newly appointed archbishop of Novgorod, discovered the heresy in his city and began persecuting the heretics, though without strong backing from either the secular power—Ivan III, who had named him archbishop—or the ecclesiastical authorities in Moscow. Because the Church lacked the conceptual and institutional tools to carry on a serious discussion with the heretics,47 it chose the judicial path and accused them of being “Judaizing apostates,” hoping to eradicate the heretics along with the heresy. After several delays, the heretics were finally brought to trial and punished severely. This was done in two phases. In the 1490 trial, the reforming Novgorod clerics were decimated. Elena and her son Dmitrii were imprisoned in 1502. But it was only in 1503, after Ivan III was forced to alter his ecclesiastic policy, that the Muscovite functionaries and clerics were tried, although some of the more powerful ones, first and foremost their leader Fedor Kuritsyn, escaped persecution. By 1504 the heresy had been crushed. While there is general agreement regarding this chain of events, the nature of the heresy, its ideology, and especially its affinity to 332

Judaism are a subject of ongoing controversy. Different scholars have described the Judaizers variously as Anti-Trinitarians, Arians, Bogomils, Humanists, Hussites, Rationalists, and Waldensians. The most balanced and persuasive analysis of the heresy is that offered by the philosopher Thomas M. Seebohm.48 His interpretation, based on an extensive study of all the relevant published texts, may be summed up as follows. The heresy was a sui generis Russian phenomenon, for which only very partial analogies can be found in the West. It started in Novgorod as a movement among the white clergy to reform the Church from within.

14th to early 16th centuries) (Moscow and Leningrad: Academy of Science of the USSR, 1955, pp. 373–79, esp. 375: А что которые литовскіе оканные дѣла прозябли въ русской земли, в Великом Новеграде, в вотчине государя великого князя, коли был в Новеграде князь Михайло Оленкович, а сним был жидовин еретик, да от того жидовина распортерлась ересь в Ноугородцкой земли.... As for the damned Lithuanian affairs that sprang up in the Russian land, in Novgorod the Great, the patrimony of his Majesty the Grand Prince [Ivan III of Muscovy], when Mikhailo Olenkovich [brother of Prince Semen of Kiev] was in Novgorod [i.e., between November 8, 1470 and March 15, 1471], and with him a heretical Jew, and from this Jew the heresy spread in the Novgorodian land ... 46

“White clergy” is the traditional designation for the nonmonastic clergy (parish or secular priests) of the Russian Orthodox Church, from which the hieromonks (monkpriests) distinguish themselves by their commitment to celibacy and black habits.

47

The Russian Orthodox Church in Muscovy, like the Orthodox Church everywhere, and unlike the Catholic Church, had no institutions of higher education and never came to grips with the philosophical and scientific traditions of classical antiquity. See: Ševčenko, “Remarks on the Diffusion of Byzantine Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Literature”; and Thomson, The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Russia.

48

Thomas M. Seebohm, Ratio und Charisma: Ansätze und Ausbildung eines philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Weltverständnisses im Moskauer Rußland (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1977).

333

M o s h e Ta u b e

After its transfer to Moscow, however, it became a Bildungsbewegung espoused mainly by the newly emerging diachestvo class, the educated lay functionaries who administered the Muscovite state. Their keen interest in worldly and scientific literature was greater than their interest in religious issues, which had a political cast. However, the underlying ontological concepts of the translated literature, echoed in the original literature of the heretics, reflect a strict prophetic monotheism incompatible with central notions of Christian dogma—the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection.49 The heretics assigned sovereignty to reason, which was posited as the foundation of any religion, and asserted the legitimacy of exploiting every possible source in the search for truth, including the pagan Aristotle, compared in their literature to a prophet. The Church justifiably saw this as a threat to its monopoly on the literary canon. Since the translated texts were of Jewish origin and displayed a pronounced monotheistic bent, which can easily and with good cause be interpreted as anti-Trinitarian, the Russian Church had every reason to suspect the heretics of “Judaizing.” The corpus of philosophical and scientific works translated from Hebrew in the second half of the fifteenth century, traditionally labeled the “Literature of the Judaizers,” consists of the following works: 1. Immanuel ben Jacob Bonfils’ astronomical work Šeš kenafayim (referred to above),50 also known in Latin51 and in Greek.52 Excerpts from the Slavic version, from a unique sixteenth-century manuscript formerly at the Orthodox Brotherhood of the Holy Theotokos in Chełm and now lost, were published by Sobolevskii.53 Among the particularities of this translation are extensive additions made by the Jewish translator for his uninitiated Christian readers, such as detailed instructions for the use of the tables, explanations of basic terms such as intercalation and the nineteen-year cycle. A feature that has gone unnoticed is the use in the Slavic tables (as in the Hebrew originals) of a glyph resembling “0” to stand for zero.54 This peculiarity may not have been remarked by copyists, since the 334

49

For an analysis of passages in the translations that reflect such strict monotheistic belief, see Taube, The Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translations from Hebrew.

50

Immanuel bar Jacob Bonfils, Sefer Šeš kenafayim (Zhitomir: Bakst, 1782). Zinberg (History of Jewish Literature, 3:198; Eng. trans. 3:151) states, without any corroboration, that Šeš kenafayim was translated from Latin into Russian. But on the basis of some literalisms in the Slavic text and its similarities to the other texts in our corpus, we must reject this statement and conclude that the translation was made directly from the Hebrew (see Taube, “The Kievan Jew Zechariah,” p. 174).

51

Solon knows of only one Latin manuscript, MS Florence, Central National Library, conventi soppr. J.IV.20. (See Peter Solon, “The Hexapterygon of Michael Chrysokokkes,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1968, p. 1; idem “The Six Wings of Immanuel Bonfils and Michael Chrysokokkes,” Centaurus 15 (1970): 1–20, on p. 1 n. 5. Raymond Mercier identifies a second manuscript and adds an interesting observation: There are two quite distinct but close Latin versions of the text, respectively from 1406, by an Italian Zacharias Lucae e Camerino (Florence conventi soppr. J.IV.20; Axel Björnbo, “Die Mathematischen Marcohandschriften in Florenz,” Pt. 3, Bibliotheca mathematica xii (1912): 97–132, on p. 113) and anonymously c. 1420 (MS Padua Escorial e.III.23). In the latter the literal Latin version is accompanied by another in more fluent Latin. There is also a Greek version of the tables, with instructions given in an original Greek text, including calculations for 1435, by Michel Chrysococces. It is interesting that the Latin versions were made before the Greek, and that the texts are close translations. (Raymond Mercier, “The Astronomical Tables of George Gemistus Plethon,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 29 (1998): 117–127, on p. 127 n. 6.

52

The relations between the Greek and Latin versions and the Hebrew original are still not fully elucidated. The Latin version, dating from 1405, precedes the Greek by some 30 years. In a previous paper (Taube, “The Kievan Jew Zechariah,” p. 174) I mistakenly attributed to Solon (“The Six Wings”) the opinion that the 1435 Greek translation of the text, by Michael Chrysokokkes, was made from the Latin. In fact, he makes no such claim, neither in his 1968 dissertation nor in the 1970 paper, although he mentions both versions and notes that the Latin version precedes the

335

M o s h e Ta u b e

symbol looks exactly like the traditional Slavic letter o, which (like the Greek omicron from which it is derived) also represents the number 70. The other numbers in the tables are indeed rendered by letters, as was customary in Hebrew and in Greek and Slavic. 2. Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De sphaera (also mentioned above). Sobolevskii published excerpts of the Slavic version, under the title Cosmography, but without identifying it.55 It was only in 1962 that Vasilii Zubov identified it as Sacrobosco’s De sphaera.56 My comparison of the Hebrew with the Ruthenian translation shows that the Slavic rendering of this text is based on the anonymous Hebrew translation from Latin known as Qiṣ ṣ ur Sefer ha-Galgal, not on Solomon Avigdor’s Marʾeh ha-ʾofanim.57 Some of the noticeable features of the Slavic version are: a. In the division of the universe into ethereal and elementary regions, the elementary is described in the Slavic in kabbalistic (or Plotinian?) terms, unwarranted by the Hebrew (and of course by the Latin): основалныи єжє прємєнєтс уставно отъ искръ нєбєсныxъ. = The elementary is the one that is being continually altered by celestial sparks. Hebrew: ‫היסודי הוא המשתנה תמיד מחמת צירוף תערובות היסודות‬ ‫ופרידתם‬ = The elementary is the one that continually changes due to the combination[s] and mixtures of elements, and their separation. Latin: Elementaris quidem alterationi continuae pervia existens. = The elementary [region], existing subject to continual alteration. b. In the enumeration of the climes of the northern hemisphere, the seventh clime, which in Latin is clima dia Ripheos, usually interpreted as referring to the Ural Mountains, is rendered in 336

Slavic as клима и Рускаа и Нємєцькаа (“the clime of both Russia and Germany”). Most Hebrew manuscripts have: (‫נוף ריפומ“ש )נ“א ריפיוס‬ ‫פי‘ הם הרי שלג וכפור וארץ אשכנז‬. One Hebrew manuscript,

Greek. He admits, however, that in the dissertation he disregarded the Latin version in his analysis (“The Hexapterygon of Michael Chrysokokkes,” p. 1). Philippe Gardette, without any corroboration, embraces the option that the Greek version was translated directly from the Hebrew: So it was in a spirit of inter-confessional interchange that the treatise Six Wings by Bonfils of Tarascon was translated into Greek by a descendant of George Chrysokokkis, namely Michael Chrysokokkis. … Generally speaking, these translations of Hebraic manuscripts into Greek raise the question of how much Hebrew was actually known in Christian milieux. With the exception of these particular cases, Christians often proved that they were quite ignorant of Hebrew: no other treatise, scientific or otherwise, was translated from Hebrew into Greek. (Gardette, “Judaeo-Provençal Astronomy,” p. 203) So far, I have not been able to obtain access to the Latin MSS in order to compare the Latin with the Greek and verify these observations. 53

Aleksei Sobolevskii, Perevodnaia Literatura Moskovskoi Rusi XIV–XVII vekov (= Sbornik Otdeleniia Russkogo Iazyka i Slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk 74/1 [1903]), (St. Petersburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1903; repr. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1989), pp. 413ff.

54

See the facsimile for Aries of the fifth table, reproduced from the unique sixteenthcentury Chełm copy (now lost) by Sobolevskii, ibid. (following p. 460 in the 1989 Leipzig reprint).

55

Ibid., pp. 409–413.

56

Vasilii Pavlovich Zubov, “Neizvestnyi Russkii Perevod «Traktata o Sfere» Ioanna de Sakrobosko” (An unknown Russian translation of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Treatise on the Sphere), Istoriko-Astronomicheskie Issledovaniia 8 (1962): 221–239.

57

Taube, “The Kievan Jew Zechariah.”

337

M o s h e Ta u b e

however—that copied by Zechariah in Kiev in 1454 (MS St. Petersburg Firkovich Evr I 355)—has instead: ‫“ = נוף רוסיוס פי‘ הם הרי שלג וכפור וארץ אשכנז‬the clime of Russia, meaning the mountains of snow and ice and the land of Ashkenaz.”58

58

‫‘ ארץ סקלבא‬crossing the Slavic land’. 59 60

3. The sections on logic and metaphysics from the eleventh-century Muslim theologian al-Ghazā lı’̄ s Maqā ṣ id al-falā sifah (Intentions of the philosophers).59 Al-Ghazā lı,̄ a native of Ṭ us in Iran, based his exposition of Peripatetic thought on his countryman Avicenna’s Dâniš nâmeh (Book of science).60 Of the three extant Hebrew versions of this work, by Isaac Albalag, Judah Nathan, and an anonymous translator, it was the last that was turned into Slavic, as established by Pavel Kokovtsov in 191261 on the basis of the small published excerpts from the Introduction in all three Hebrew versions.62 4. A short exposition of logic, the Maqā lah fı̄ ṣ inā ʿat al-manṭ iq (Treatise on the art of logic; Hebrew Millot higgayon [Logical terminology]) traditionally attributed to Maimonides.63 Of the three extant Hebrew translations of this work, by Moses ben Samuel Ibn Tibbon, by Aḥ ituv of Palermo, and by Joseph Ibn Vives of Lorca, Spain,64 the Slavic translator used the first two.65 5. A tenth century Arabic “mirror of princes”66 allegedly written by Aristotle for Alexander the Great: Pseudo-Aristotle’s Secretum secretorum, translated into Hebrew as Sod ha-sodot.67 The Ruthenian version, Tainaia Tainykh, attested in manuscripts from the sixteenth century onward, was published by Speranskii in 1908. It includes four additional Slavic translations from Hebrew:68 Maimonides’ On Coitus, On Poisons and Antidotes (only the section on mineral poisons), and Book of Asthma (only chapter 13 on the importance of personal hygiene and of clean air and water), as well as al-Razi’s chapter “On Physiognomy” from his al-Manṣ uri. 338

Note also that in MS Vienna Heb. 183 of Al-Farghā ni’s Elements of Astronomy, copied by the same Zechariah in January 1468, the seventh clime is described as ‫ויחתך‬ The Arabic has been edited several times, e.g., Al-Ghazā li’s Maqā ṣ id al-falā sifah, ed. Sulaymā n Dunyā (Cairo: Dā ru-l-Maʿā rif bi-Miṣr, 1961; repr. 1984). This was suggested long ago by Moritz Steinschneider, who thought, however, that the Maqā ṣ id showed the influence of “die grosse Encyklopädie, vielleicht auch die kürzere”—that is, Avicenna’s Šifā ʾ and Najā t (Moritz Steinschneider, Die Hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher [Berlin, 1893; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlaganstalt, 1956], pp. 310–311). As a matter of fact, al-Ghazā lı’̄ s recourse to Avicenna goes beyond mere influence; he reproduces whole sections of Avicenna’s writings, not from any of the Arab treatises, but from the Persian Dā niš nā meh (Book of science), which was not available in Arabic. For a detailed list of correspondences between the Maqā ṣ id and the Dā niš

nā meh, see Alónso’s Spanish translation of the former (Algazel: Maqā ṣ id al-falā sifa o intenciones de los Filósofos, trans. Manuel Alónso Alónso [Barcelona: Juan Flors, 1963], pp. xlv–li). More recently, Jules Janssens has suggested another possible source

for Al-Ghazā lı’̄ s dependence on Avicenna, namely the latter’s Arabic work Taʿliqā t (Glosses), which he describes as “ce qui fut probablement la première rédaction, faite par Ibn-Sînâ lui-même, de la partie métaphysique du Dânesh-Nâmeh” (Jules Janssens, “Le Dânesh Nâmeh d’Ibn Sînâ: un texte à revoir?” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 28 (1986): 163–177, on p. 163. 61

Pavel K. Kokovtsov, “K Voprosu o ‘Logike Aviasafa’ ” (On the question of “Aviasaf’s Logic”), Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia n.s., 39 (May 1912): 114–133.

62

Published in Moritz Steinschneider, Die Handschriften-Verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, II: Verzeichnis der hebräischen Handschriften (Berlin: Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1878), p. 86.

63

The generally accepted attribution of this work to Maimonides has been challenged recently by Davidson; see: Herbert A. Davidson, “The Authenticity of Works Attributed to Maimonides,” in Ezra Fleischer et al., eds. Me’ah She‘arim: Studies in Medieval Jewish Spiritual Life in Memory of Isadore Twersky (Jerusalem: Magnes

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M o s h e Ta u b e

Items 3 and 4 above were combined in Slavic into a single text, entitled the Logika, which survives in nine Muscovite copies from the early seventeenth century onward. It consists of the Maimonidean treatise followed by the first seven “divisions of being” in the section on theology in al-Ghazā lı’̄ s Maqā ṣ id. The Slavic text ends abruptly in mid-sentence, in the seventh division of being into potential and actual—i.e. after the discussion of most of the metaphysical concepts but right before the turn to theology proper (the Necessary of Existence, His Attributes etc.). Al-Ghazā lı’̄ s section on logic was translated too, and is attested separately in a single Kievan copy of 1482. It was removed, we assume, from the compilation named Logika and replaced by Maimonides’ work, which must have been considered simpler and more concise. The section of the Maqā ṣ id on physics, on the other hand, is not attested in the Slavic and probably was not translated. Although the translator’s command of his target language may have been less than perfect, he certainly had a strong background in philosophy, inasmuch as he is consistent in his terminology. This is to be especially appreciated in view of the fact that he had to create a logical, philosophical, and partially also mathematical terminology in Ruthenian out of nothing. The translation presents the author of the Logika as Moisei Egiptianin (Moses the Egyptian), which may have been a bit puzzling to the uninitiated Slavic reader, perhaps suggesting the biblical Moses, but nevertheless a fair description of Maimonides, who spent most of his adult life in Egypt. The same attribution to “Moses the Egyptian” is found in the Maimonidean interpolations in Tainaia Tainykh. Even more intriguing is the authorship attribution of the Maqā ṣ id alfalā sifah, written by the theologian par excellence of Islam, Muḥ ammad Abū Ḥ ā mid al-Ghazā lı̄ (1058–1111), before 1095. In the Slavic translation he is not identified by his Arabic teknonymic Abū Ḥ ā mid, as he is in Hebrew, but by the Hebrew name Aviʾasaf, unattested elsewhere in Jewish literature with reference to al-Ghazā lı.̄ Thus his work is presented to Christian readers as a work of Jewish wisdom. One 340

Press, 2001), pp. 111–133; idem, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 313–322. One of his arguments is the fact that Maimonides is not given as the author in the version written in Arabic characters (although in both versions of her edition Türker reproduces the title as it is attested in most Arabic texts written in Hebrew characters, i.e., with the attribution to Maimonides; see Mubahat Türker, “Al-Maḵā la fı̄ Ṣ inā ‘at Al-Manṭiḳ de Mûsâ Ibn

Maymûn (Maimonide),” İslâm Tetkikleri Enstitüsü dergisi: Review of the Institute of Islamic Studies. 3(1–2) (1960): 55–110; eadem, “Mûsâ İbn Meymûn’un Al-Maḳ ā la

fı̄ Ṣ inā ‘at Al-Manṭ iḳ ının Arapça Aslı,” Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya

Fakültesi Dergisi 18(1–2) (1960): 9–64). On the contrary, one of the two extant MSS lists an otherwise unknown Yaʿqū b Abu Isḥ aq bin Yū suf al-Isrā ʾıl̄ ı̄ as author, whereas the other bears no author’s name. Davidson’s most compelling argument, however, is the choice of the example employed by the author in chapter 12 of the Arabic-character text—a passage overlooked by all previous scholars—to illustrate two subjects distinguished by priority in time (implying that they do not differ in the other four proposed kinds of priority, such as in nature of being, in honor, or in excellence). The Hebrew-alphabet witnesses of the Arabic text cannot help here, because they are incomplete and lack the final chapters. The example chosen, ‫‘ ﻣﻮﺳﻰ ﺃﻗﺪﻡ ﻣﻦ ﻋﻴﺴﻰ‬Moses precedes Jesus’, is replaced in the Hebrew translations by “Noah precedes Abraham” (Ibn Tibbon), “Reuben precedes Simon” (Aḥ iṭuv), and “Moses precedes Ezra” (Vives). It is astonishing that Efros, having learned of the Arabic texts edited by Türker, republished the Judeo-Arabic version in full (Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 34 [1966]: 155ff.), using Türker’s texts to supplement the missing portions, and reproduced this example as ‫מוסי אקדם מן‬ ‫עיסי‬, without any note. Davidson justifiably considers the Moses/Jesus variant to be incompatible with Maimonides’ authorship of the work, even if it was written at the request of a Muslim, because it is inconceivable that Maimonides would juxtapose in a single sentence, as equals in all but in time, Moses, whom he considered “the choicest of the human species,” and Jesus, whom he invariably mentions with the phrases “may his bones be crushed” or “may the name of the wicked rot” (Davidson, Moses Maimonides, p. 321). Be it as it may, for the translator into Slavic, as for the translators of the work into Hebrew, this was unquestionably a genuine Maimonidean text.

341

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could advance some objective justification for this annexation, since al-Ghazā lı’̄ s writings in Hebrew had a life of their own, quite separate and different from their fate in Arabic. The Maqā ṣ id, expounding Aristotelian philosophy as it was known in the Muslim world through al-Farabi and Avicenna, was followed by a second volume, the Tahā fut al-falā sifah (Destruction of the philosophers). This second volume is what won al-Ghazā lı̄ his fame in the West, because a century later Averroes wrote a refutation of this refutation, the Tahā fut al-tahā fut or Destructio destructionis. Jewish readers were not interested in the refutation, however, but in the introductory volume of the Intentions, which served as a popular handbook of logic for Jewish readers well into the sixteenth century.69 As noted above, there were no fewer than three Hebrew translations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and many commentaries, and at least 72 handwritten copies of the three Hebrew translations taken together—whereas there are few witnesses of this text in Arabic. In the Logika, at the join between Maimonides and al-Ghazā lı,̄ we find, in Slavic alone, additions by the Jewish translator (here indicated by italics):70

Logical Terminology, about the division of the sciences, until we arrive at the seventh science: 14.5.1 The seventh science is Theology, which is the crown of all seven as well as the core of their purpose. 14.5.2 For through

64

See Maimonides’ Treatise on Logic: The Original Arabic and Three Hebrew Translations, ed. Israel Efros (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1938).

65

See my forthcoming edition of the Logika, in press.

66

For recent studies on this work, see: Kevin van Bladel, “The Iranian Characteristics and Forged Greek Attributions in the Arabic Sirr al-asrā r (Secret of Secrets),” Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57 (2004): 151–172; Miklós Maróth, “Possible Sources of Sirr al-asrâr,” in: Authority, Privacy and Public Order in Islam, ed. B. Michalak-Pikulska and A. Pikulski (Louvain: Peeters, 2006), pp. 71–79. I am indebted to an anonymous reader for Aleph for these references.

67

See Moses Gaster, “The Hebrew Version of the Secretum Secretorum: A Medieval Treatise ascribed to Aristotle,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, October 1907, pp. 879–912; January 1908, pp. 111–162; October 1908, pp. 1065–1084.

68

On the particularities of the Slavic Secret of Secrets see: William F. Ryan, “The Old Russian Version of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta Secretorum,” Slavic and East

14.2.1 And this Science was perfected by Aristotle, chief of all Philosophers both ancient and recent, in accord with the view of the wise men of Israel, since after the exile they did not find their books, so they relied on his wisdom, which is equal in its Principle to that of the prophets. 14.2.2 For it is inconceivable that a prophet be incomplete in the seven sciences, and especially in Logic ‹and in› the Mathematical sciences. And he completed it in the aforementioned eight books, for it guides everyone in those sciences, 14.2.3 and it is like a weight and a measure and like a touchstone for gold.

European Review 56/2 (1978): 242–260; idem, “Maimonides in Muscovy: Medical Texts and Terminology,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 43–65. The Slavic version also contains additions that do not seem to go back to a Hebrew text; e.g., the section on curing the horse Bucephalos and the life of Aristotle abridged from Plutarch. 69

See: Harry Austryn Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 10 n. 44; Steven Harvey, “Why did Fourteenth-Century Jews Turn to Alghazali’s Account of Natural Science?” Jewish Quarterly Review 91 (2001): 359–376. I am indebted to Ruth Glasner for the second reference.

70

For full Slavic text and discussion, see Moshe Taube, “Posleslovie k Logicheskim Terminam Maïmonida i Eres’ Zhidovstvyioshchikh” (The afterword to Maimonides’

The Slavic then resumes with several sentences from chapter 14 of the 342

Logical Terminology and the heresy of the Judaizers), in N. M. Botvinnik and E. I.

343

M o s h e Ta u b e

it the human soul will survive in eternity. 14.5.3 And this a man of any creed will admit, that he who is ignorant cannot be with the Lord. 14.5.4 For this is as if one were to say: I serve the prince, but who that prince is I do not know; or: I go to church, but where that church is I do not know. 14.5.5 And these seven sciences are not in accordance with any [particular] religion, but rather in accordance with humanity. 14.5.6 And a man of any creed can embrace them. As we see that in all creeds it is asserted that the jurist resembles the keeper of the treasury, whereas the wise man resembles him who adds to it. 14.5.7 And to whichever thing one fails to add according to it[s nature), that thing perishes. 14.6.1 Said Alexander [of Aphrodisias]: The reasons for ignorance of the truth are four. 1. Its depth for the shallow mind, 2. the weakness of the intellect, 3. the striving to overpower and dominate, 4. the cherishing of that to which one is accustomed. 14.6.2 And this is a greater hindrance than any other. 14.7.1 And these accomplishments cannot be [achieved] but in combination with the Political science by casting off all vices. 14.7.2 As King David said (Psalms 145:8): The Lord is near unto all who call upon him, to all who call upon him in truth. The italicized interpolations are extremely revealing about the ideology and perspective of the Jews who produced the Slavic translation. The ideas exposed in it draw upon the traditional Jewish sources of reference, ultimately the Bible and the Talmud, making skillful use of passages often employed in discussions of wisdom and faith. The acknowledgment of Aristotle as “chief of the Philosophers” is paralleled, for example, in Maimonides’ Guide (I 5); the insistence that Aristotle’s views accord with those of Jewish law is commonplace there (e.g., II 6). Maimonides compares Aristotle’s wisdom to that of the prophets in his 1199 letter in Arabic to Samuel Ibn Tibbon about the translation of the Guide: “Aristotle’s intellect [represents] the extreme of human 344

intellect, if we except those who have received divine inspiration.” The right to add to the divine law, reserved exclusively for the wise man, is also stipulated by Maimonides—for example, in his commentary on the Mishnah, in the introduction to the order Zeraʿim. The statement associating stagnation with death—“And to whichever thing one fails to add according to it[s nature], that thing perishes”—derives from the Babylonian Talmud (Taʿanit 31a and Baba Batra 121b).71 The universality of wisdom is a frequent theme in the writings of the Maimonideans. As Shem Ṭ ov Ibn Falaquera, the thirteenthcentury follower of Maimonides, remarks in Sefer ha-Maʿalot (Book of degrees): “All nations have a part in the sciences, and they are not the particular [property] of any given nation.”72 The notion that the wise men of ancient Israel were in possession of scientific wisdom that was lost with the exile of the Jews appears in the Guide of the Perplexed (I 71) and is also mentioned by Falaquera: “Undoubtedly Solomon of blessed memory composed books on the science of Nature and Divinity (=physics and theology/metaphysics), but these books were lost in the exile.”73 The latter also insists on the incompatibility of ignorance with true worship of God in Sefer ha-Maʿalot: “Plato said that it is impossible for a man to serve God truly, unless he is a prophet or philosopher, because they partake of wisdom.”74

Vaneeva, eds., In Memoriam: Pamiati Ya. S. Lur’e (St. Petersburg: Izd. Feniks, 1997), pp. 239–246. 71 72

.(‫ יאסף‬:‫מכאן ואילך דמוסיף יוסיף ודלא מוסיף יסיף )או‬ ‫( כי החכמות כל האומות משתתפות בהם ואינם מיוחדות לאומה ידועה‬Shem Ṭ ov Ibn Falaquera, Sefer ha-Maʿalot, ed. Ludwig Venetianer [Berlin: Calvary, 1894], p. 75).

73

Ibid., p. 12.

74

‫ואפלטון אמר כי אי אפשר שיעבוד האלוהים ית‘ עבודה אמתית אלא או הנביא או הפילוסוף במה שיש עמו‬ ‫( מן החכמה‬ibid., p. 34).

345

M o s h e Ta u b e

The passage attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias may be found, in somewhat different wording, in an excerpt from Maimonides’ Book of Asthma that appears among the Maimonidean interpolations in the Tainaia Tainykh, the Slavic translation of Secretum secretorum.75 Three of the four reasons for “ignorance of the truth” do indeed go back to Alexander.76 The fourth is Maimonides’ own addition, as we can see from Guide I 31, where the same four reasons are cited as “causes of disagreement”: Alexander of Aphrodisias says that there are three causes of disagreement about things. One of them is the love of domination and love of strife, both of which turn man aside from the apprehension of truth as it is. The second cause is the subtlety and the obscurity of the object of apprehension in itself and the difficulty of apprehending it. And the third cause is the ignorance of him who apprehends and his inability to grasp things that it is possible to apprehend. That is what Alexander mentioned. However, in our times there is a fourth cause that he did not mention because it did not exist among them. It is habit and upbringing. For man has in his nature a love of, and an inclination for, that to which he is habituated.77

to a Christian readership, one that is hardly representative of Judaism at this time and place.

3. The Ruthenian Translations from Hebrew in Context In order to get an idea of the true beliefs of the initiators of this translation project, we have to compare the views expressed in the Slavic translations with the views expressed by the same people in Hebrew for internal Jewish consumption. Only then can we hope to find answers to the most intriguing questions: What could motivate such an enterprise? Why would Jews from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania take upon themselves the difficult task of translating al-Ghazā lı̄ and Maimonides into Ruthenian? Why would they go to such lengths to disguise the Arabic origin of some of these works? I believe we have good reasons to assume that the Jewish

75

See Mikhail N. Speranskii, Iz Istorii Otrechennykh Knig IV: Aristotelevy Vrata ili Taïnaia Taïnykh (From the history of the banned books IV: Aristotle’s Gates or the Secret of Secrets) (= Pamiatniki Drevnei Pismennosti i Iskusstva 171) (St. Petersburg: Izdaniia Imperatorskogo Obshchestva Liubitelei Drevnei Pis’mennosti, 1908), p. 228.

Thus the additions by the translator of the Logika (unless they derive from a Hebrew text that I have not been able to identify so far) represent an ideological manifesto of a progressive and universalist, indeed cosmopolitan, nature. The ideas are typical of the Jewish rationalists, disciples and followers of Maimonides, who for three centuries had been waging a hopeless rearguard struggle against the mystical tendencies that were gaining ground in mainstream Judaism, marginalizing and delegitimizing rationalism as alien to traditionalist Jewish thought. In the translations into Slavic, however, these ideas were clearly meant to present a progressive, attractive image of Judaism 346

76

In a treatise entitled “The Theory concerning the Principles of the Universe,” preserved only in Arabic. For the text see Charles Genequand [ed.], Alexander of Aphrodisias: On the Cosmos (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 124. As Genequand notes, “these final considerations echo the similar remarks made by Aristotle in Metaph. a 1, in particular 993b 7–11, where the difficulty of philosophical studies is ascribed both to the intrinsic obscurity of the subject and to the weakness of our minds. The personal contribution of Alexander consists in the addition of a third cause, namely the arrogance and contentiousness of scholars” (ibid., p. 167 n. 149).

77

Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1963), fol. 1, p. 66.

347

M o s h e Ta u b e

collaborators in this project had their own motives, independent of those of the Christians who commissioned it. The Muscovite Judaizers, the only actual readership (though possibly not the primary intended one)78 of this corpus of scientific texts, thrived in the second half of the fifteenth century, a time of high excitement and eschatological fervor in some quarters, since the Orthodox Muscovites were expecting the world to end on September 1 of the year 7000 after Creation, which, according to the Byzantine calendar, corresponded to 1492. The Paschal Tables for calculating the dates of the movable feasts did not go beyond 7000, since, given the expected end of history with Christ’s Second Coming, such calculations seemed superfluous. The Judaizers, acquainted with the Jewish calendar and Šes kenafayim, mocked their opponents, assuring them that the year 7000 was still far away and the end nowhere in sight. Archbishop Gennadii of Novgorod mentions these controversies and disputes the authority of Šes kenafayim.79 But not only Christians had eschatological expectations at that time. Some Jews, including in fifteenth-century Kiev, were also predicting the coming of the Messiah at about the same time.80 Back in 1931 Zinberg pointed out that Moses the Exile was among the mystically inclined scholars who tried to reconcile Maimonides’ undisputed legislative authority with his much disputed rationalism, either by declaring the Guide of the Perplexed to be filled with mystical “awesome secrets,” or by claiming that Maimonides in his old age “repented” his strict rationalism and became an ardent devotee of the “esoteric wisdom.” Zinberg pointed out that Moses of Kiev, in Šošan sodot, was the first to publish the apocryphal Megillat setarim (Scroll of secrets),81 in which Maimonides allegedly informed his favorite pupil, Joseph ben Judah,82 that philosophy may lead men away from the right path and that only the way of kabbalah is free of stumbling blocks.83 Zinberg noticed, too, that Šošan sodot is the earliest work known to quote from two kabbalistic works written in Constantinople in the fourteenth century, Sefer ha-Peliʾah (the Book of marvel) and Sefer ha-Qanah.84 348

The extensive quotations include passages predicting the advent of the Messiah—the “Redemption”—in the year 1490, according to a kabbalistic-numerological exegesis of the word ‫ ברן‬in Job 38:7: “When

78

Romanchuk recently suggested that the translations were commissioned by and destined for a Kievan readership, most likely for the princely court of the Olenkovichi. See Robert Romanchuk, “The Reception of the Judaizer Corpus in Ruthenia and Muscovy: A Case Study in the Logic of Al-Ghazzali, the ‘Cipher in Squares,’ and the Laodicean Epistle,” in Ivanov and Verkholantseva, eds., Speculum Slaviae Orientalis, pp. 144–165.

79

See Kazakova and Lur’e, Antifeodal’nie Ereticheskie Dvizheniia, pp. 318–319.

80

The first to raise this point was Ettinger, in “The Jewish Influence on the Religious Turmoil in Eastern Europe at the End of the fifteenth Century” [Hebrew], in S. Ettinger et al., eds., The Y. Baer Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem, 1961), pp. 228–247 (repr. in Israel Bartal and Jonathan Frankel, eds. Between Poland and Russia: S. Ettinger’s Collected Papers [Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 1994], pp. 37–56). He wondered whether “perhaps it is not a coincidence that Jewish ‘calculators of the end,’ too, predicted the end for the year 252 [i.e., 5252 = 1492 CE]” (p. 236, n. 39).

81

Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 3:212 (Eng. trans. 3:162, n. 54).

82

Zinberg (ibid.) perpetuates the common error of identifying Maimonides’ disciple, Joseph ben Judah ibn Simeon, to whom the Guide of the Perplexed was dedicated, with Joseph ben Judah ibn Aknin, and refers to the alleged addressee of Megillat setarim as “Joseph ibn Aknin.” His source was probably Schwarz’s annotation to the listing for Megillat setarim in MS Vienna Heb. 183: “Moše ben Maimon (unecht), Brief an Josef ibn Aknin, Ermahnung zum Studium der Kabbala” (Schwarz, Die Hebräischen Handschriften, p. 207).

83

.‫אך אצל חכמת הקבלה אמתת הדרכים מסוקלים מאבני המכשול‬

84

Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 3:344 n. 1 (= Eng. trans. 3:261, , n. 3). The reading ‫הקנה‬, presumably “the zealot” (in late mishnaic spelling with final heh instead of aleph) reflects the spurious attribution of this work to Rabbi Neḥ unya ben ha-Qanah of the tannaitic period. Another traditional reading is Sefer ha-

349

M o s h e Ta u b e

the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”85 Moses also quotes, with some modifications, passages from these works asserting that Jesus knew this prediction, and that when he announced the end of the world—Doomsday—he was referring to the downfall of the nations and their subjugation to Israel, but was afraid to say so.86 Inasmuch as it took Moses many years to write Šošan sodot—he finally completed it in the Crimea on Thursday, March 15, 1515, long after the expected date of Redemption87—he no longer specifies precisely 5250 (=1490 CE), but merely reaffirms that the Redemption will take place during the 500 years of the sefirah of Keter, which began in AM 5000 (=1240 CE): i.e., at some unspecified date between 1240 and 1740 CE.88 In this context, Moses quotes another passage from Sefer ha-Peliʾah, to the effect that proselytes are of a higher value in the process of redemption than those born Jewish, “for the proselyte shed his garment of impurity and donned a skin of purity,” whereas the Jews, who were present at Mount Sinai, made the Golden Calf and thus “shed the garment of God’s law and donned a skin of impurity.”89 Moses adds the kabbalistic explanation that those who made the Golden Calf had “destroyed the plants” (‫—קצצו בנטיעות‬a mystical metaphor for disturbing the harmony of creation), whereas the proselytes would bring about “the union between the congregation of Israel and its partner” (‫)חבור כנסת ישראל בבת זוגו‬, that is, they would enable the mystical union necessary for the redemption.90 This testimony about the views of the Jewish leader and scholar Rabbi Moses of Kiev may reflect a theological motive for a Jewish “Mission to the Slavs,” related to the eschatological fervor surrounding the year 1492. Here, perhaps, lies the missing link between the Muscovite Judaizers and the Ruthenian translations of scientific texts from Hebrew. At the initiative of Christian Slavs, probably interested in the treasures of ancient learning reputedly in the possession of the Jews, diverse works of rationalist tenor were translated from Hebrew by knowledgeable Kievan Jews. They combined these scientific 350

Qaneh, presumably “Book of the Reed/rod/staff.” Neither reading seems to be more compelling than the other. 85

‫ברן יחד כוכבי בקר ויריעו כל בני אלהים‬. One arrives at 1490 by computing ‫ ברן‬without the preposition -‫ב‬, thus getting 250 (short for AM 5250 = 1490 CE). An alternative computation would yield 1492, if one counts the preposition -‫ב‬, whose numerical value is 2.

86

See Sefer haqanah (Poryck, 1776), f. 18b

‫ואז תשוב מלכות ישראל ומלכות הש“י למקומו ותשוב העטרה ליושנה כמו שנאמר והיה ה‘ למלך‬ ‫על כל הארץ ביום ההוא והיה ]כך![ ה‘ אחד ושמו א‘ ואימת יהי‘ בר“ן לממשלת הכתר כי שתא אלפי‬ ‫הוי עלמא ודע שכל ספירה פועלת ת“ק שנה וכתר וחכמה אלף שנים והנה השנים מתחילין בכתר בזה‬ ‫הסדר ת“ק לכתר ת“ק לחכמה הוי אלף ת“ק לבינה ת“ק לחסד הרי אלף ת“ק לפחד ת“ק לתפארת הרי‬ ‫אלף ת“ק לנצח ת“ק להוד הרי אלף ת“ק ליסוד ות“ק למלכות הרי אלף הרי חמשת אלפים שנים בעשר‬ ‫ספירות וחוזר חלילה ת“ק לכתר ת“ק לחכמה הרי אלף שהם ו‘ אלפים ובין השמשות של אלף השביעי‬ ‫יעמוד העולם וביאת המשיח כשיעברו ה‘ אלפים ומאתים וחמשים שהוא חצי לממשלת הכת“ר לת“ק‬ ‘‫השנה אז יבא משיח זהו בר“ן יחד כוכבי בוקר ויריעו כל בני אלקים ואותו האיש קרא שיעבוד האומו‬ ‫ת“י ישראל חורבן העולם כי ירא לבשר מפלתם כדי לרדוף אחריו‬ 87

‫ופה נשלם פירוש סתימות פרשת וזאת הברכה ועם זה נשלם פיר‘ כל חמשה חומשי תורה יום ה‘ כ“ח לאדר‬ ‫בעיר קרים שנת האלהים הרעה אותי מעודי עד היום הזה‬. (Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 5:348 (Appendix 3, omitted from English). See the description of MS St. Petersburg Inst. of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy B 63, F 52997:

‫ ”זה הפירוש פירוש לפירוש ספר הישר שחברו החכם כ“ר אברהם בן עזרא ז“ל על התורה‬:‫בראשו‬ ‫ אני משה בן לאדוני הנשא והנעלה כ“ר יעקב יעמ“ש‬,‫האלהית משנת ד‘ אלפים תתקכ“ז ליצירה‬ .“‫פירשתיו והיתה השלמתו בשנת ה‘ אלפים רע“ה ליצירה‬ 88

See Moses ben Jacob, Šošan sodot (Korets: Anton Krieger, 1784), f. 73a:

‫סוד באיזה אופן ישמשו הספירות בשנות השמיטה וכמה שנים ישמש כל ספירה ובממשלה איזה‬ ‫ספירה תהי‘ הגאולה לישראל דע כי סוד זה יקר ונעלם ומתי מעט יבינו ובעבור היות לי למשמרת ולבאים‬ ‫אחרי למזכרת נכתוב זהו ידוע כי שית אלפי שני הוי עלמא וקבלה בידינו שכל ספירה מעשר ספי‘ תשמש‬ ‫ת“ק שנה והתחלת‘ מהכתר ת“ק שנה לכתר ת“ק שנה לחכמה הרי אלף ת“ק לבינה ת“ק לחסד הרי אלף‬ ‫שנ>י< ת“ק לגבורה ת“ק לת“ת הרי אלף שלישי ת“ק לנצח ת“ק להוד הרי אלף רביעי ת“ק ליסוד ת“ק‬ ‫למלכות הרי אלף חמישי חזרו השנים לכתר והנה אנחנו כהיום הזה רס“ט מאלף הששי בת“ק שני הכתר‬ ‫ובממשלתו יבוא הגואל כי גאל בא“ת ב“ש כתר וקבלנו כי מעת בא גואל עד סוף אלף הז‘ יהי‘ ממשלתו‬ .‫ ולא רצה לגלותו כי ירדופו אחריו‬.‫של ישראל ומה שאמר וחד חרוב ר“ל חרוב מן ממשלת האומות‬ 351

M o s h e Ta u b e

rationalist texts with more practical tracts of applied science that were far removed from Maimonidean rationalism, making the final product more attractive. Thus, the Secretum secretorum contains “medical and magico-medical elements including a physiognomy, a ‘regimen of health’ with seasonal diets, a section on the curative and talismanic properties of precious stones,”91 as well as onomantic tables for predicting the outcome of battles, a section in praise of astrology and its indispensability for the ruler, etc. The great authority in all these texts is Aristotle—not the original Greek Aristotle of the humanists (although one or two still accepted the Secretum secretorum as authentic), but the Aristotle of Islamic scholastics, who upheld Neoplatonic and Platonic ideas in the domains of theology and ethics, such as neo-Pythagorean numerology, natural magic, astrology, and alchemy. A positive view of astrology and other remnants of this kind can hardly be reconciled with the rationalism and scientism of Maimonides, but the uninitiated Christian recipients of this corpus would hardly have been aware of this incompatibility.

89

See ibid., f. 73b: ‫ וזה דבר זר מאוד לא‬.‫סוד המדרש שאמר גדולים גרים בזמן הזה מישראל שעמדו על הר סיני לקבל התורה‬ .‫יסבלהו השכל זה שעבד כל ימיו ע“ז ועתה ששב יהודי יהיה עדיף מישראל שזכה והשיג בקול מתן תורה‬ ‫ונראה הטעם כי סוד הדבר כן הוא כי העומדים בהר סיני הם בעצמם עשו העגל עד שהמלך במסיבו נרדי נתן‬ ‫ריחו הבאישו וקצצו בנטיעות ונטמאו והגר פשט בגד טומאתו ועשה חיבור כ“י בבת זוגו והנה בוודאי הוא גדול‬ :‫מאותם שעמדו בהר סיני ולא מאותם הבאים אחריהם המחזיקים בתורת ה‘ זהו היותר נאות לי בטעם זה‬

90

As first observed by Michael Schneider in an unpublished paper presented in Jerusalem in 1999.

91

Ryan, “Maimonides in Muscovy: Medical Texts and Terminology,” p. 48.

* * * In sum, we have seen that the “Knaanic” Jews of fifteenth-century Eastern Europe, on the verge of their total assimilation by the Ashkenazi tradition, preserved some of their own cultural legacy, derived through Byzantium, thanks to a few erudite scholars and copyists who were interested in philosophy and science, albeit not always for their own sake. Some of them even deemed it proper to share with their Christian neighbors the riches of their legacy in astronomy, medicine, and philosophy. But this proffered gift was branded heretical poison by the Russian Church, which reinforced the Muscovite authorities in their conviction that Jews should be kept out of the borders of their state.

352

353