Karaites Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This book deals with the preliminary results of a linguistic and textological study of the Edited Slavonic-Russian Pentateuch (henceforth ESRP; in the Russian copies, the Slavonic is Church Slavonic). The ESRP was discovered by Alexander Vostokov in 1842, and in 1860 Protoiereus Alexander Gorsky mentioned a lot of glosses and emendations of the ESRP which originated primarily in the Masoretic Text, and in minor cases in Jewish Biblical exegesis. To the present day, there have been no well-grounded ideas about the dating and provenance of the ESRP. Thus, Anatoly Alexeev supposes that it could have been edited and glossed in the early period, close to the era of Kievan Rus’, although he admits that glosses could have been written on more than one occasion.
In total, we know of twenty copies of the ESPR (not all of them are complete). They were prepared starting in the 1490s (the earliest one we have dated is from 1494, written by the scribe Pavel Vasilyev) and until the third quarter of the 16th century (the second-dated copy was written in 1514 in Vilna, by Fedor the dyak of Metropolitan Joseph II (Soltan) of Kiev, Galicia, and all Ruthenia). There are four indications that the ESPR was a special separate version of the Slavonic-Russian Octateuch: 1) the composition of the Five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch proper) in five books, not eight as in the Byzantine tradition (the Octateuch); 2) the division into weekly Torah portions (častʹ ‘a part’ in Church Slavonic or Russian, though there are no special names for parashiyot—only numbers—and there are only 52 “parts”); 3) the Table of Contents of the Pentateuch at the beginning of the book (which corresponds to the division into “parts”); and 4) the hundreds of marginal glosses and textual emendations made according to Jewish sources, and other redactions of the full Slavonic-Russian Octateuch.
This book contains short descriptions of all twenty copies of the ESPR; a preliminary publication of the ESPR Table of Contents based on several copies; and an analysis of the glosses and emendations which has led to surprising results. First of all, the bookmen, who glossed the ESPR, were familiar with the rabbinic exegesis of the Holy Scriptures; for example, in Genesis 49 (Jacob’s Blessing to His Sons), there are several exegetic glosses of the names of Jacob’s sons: along with ‘Dan => Samson’ (which also appears in the Semitic form Šamišon), one can find ‘Zebulun => harbor,’ ‘Issachar => (gentile) sages,’ and ‘Benjamin => Saul and Mordecai.’ These comments have been appearing in rabbinic literature since Genesis Rabba (the 5th century) and afterward, e.g., in Rashi’s commentary on the Tanakh (end of the 11th century).
Moreover, it turns out that in the 15th century the ESPR was edited not directly according to the Masoretic text, but via the obvious intermediary translations of the Masoretic text into a Turkic language, more precisely Old Western Kipchak which was close to the language of the 1330 copy of the Codex Cumanicus; to the Mamluk-Kipchak of the Egyptian texts of the 13th–15th centuries; and to the Armenian-Kipchak of the Galician and Podolian MSS of the 16th–17th centuries; and finally to Karaim, the language of the East European Karaites who lived at that time in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Though this fact seems to be extremely strange and improbable, the author has very strong evidence for this conclusion which confirms the hypothesis of Dan Shapira and Golda Akhiezer on the Golden Horde origins of the Turkic-speaking Jews (mainly Karaites) in medieval Eastern Europe. The inspiration for this discovery is the appearance of the gloss and emendation sturlab in place of the old word kumir ‘an idol’ (resp. Greek εἴδωλον and Hebrew tərāfîm), in Gen 31:19, 34, and 35) in eight copies of the ESRP. The word sturlab turns out to have been borrowed from the Old Western Kipchak translation of the Pentateuch, where it was used as an exegetical counterpart of the Hebrew tərāfîm which originated from the Arabic word ’aṣṭurlāb, ‘astrolabe.’ The first exegete who coined this word for the Arabic translation of the Torah was Yefet ben ‘Eli ha-Levi, the eminent 10th-century Karaite commentator on the Bible. This word was then transmitted, in the forms ṣurlab and ’ûṣṭûrlāb, to the Judaic-Persian translations of the Bible. In the second half of the 15th century, the Turkic translation of the Torah did exist in Eastern Europe (see below), and at the same time there was intensive Jewish-Christian collaboration in Kiev, which was a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Thus, the cryptic Slavonic gloss sturlab corresponds to the Karaim forms istorlab/istorlap (Łuck and Crimean), isṭôrlap/ēstôrlap (Constantinople), sturlap (Halicz), and especially sturlab (Troki).
The existence of a Turkic Targum of the Pentateuch in the 15th century has been proven by the dating of the MS RNB (St. Petersburg), Evr.I.Bibl. No. 143, which contains a fragment of the Pentateuch (Ex 21:11–Num 28:15, with lacunae) translated into the Kipchak language of the Golden Horde. The MS was written in Hebrew semi-cursive, and dated by me and Alexandra Soboleva (as its watermarks indicate) to the 1470s–80s. Most likely, this MS was of Rabbanite—not Karaite—origin.
Besides the use of “astrolabe,” the connection between the ESRP and the Turkic Targum is confirmed by 21 Turkic loanwords used in the ESRP as glosses and emendations. Some glosses can only be interpreted with reference to the MS Evr.I.Bibl. No. 143, e.g., the Slavonic-Russian word saranča in Lev 11:22 was borrowed from the form sarynčqa from the Golden Horde Kipchak translation of the same verse (and not from later Karaim, as we know because the Karaim targumim of the Pentateuch since the 18th century were familiar with the form čegirtkä/cegirtke only). Moreover, among the lists of clean and unclean animals (Lev 11:1–31 and Deut 14:4–20) we will analyze in this book we find the Turkic loanword saigak ‘saiga antelope’ (Deut 14:5) instead of the Greek καμηλοπάρδαλις ‘a giraffe’ and the Hebrew zémer ‘a gazelle’), which is related to the later Karaim soğağ used in the same verse in the MS from 1720 (Galician Kukizów, Troki dialect). This MS also contains the Slavic loanwords bojvol ‘a buffalo,’ los ‘an elk,’ and zubra ‘a bison (accusative form)’, which are characteistic of the ESRP: bobolica (resp. Greek βούβαλος, Hebrew yaḥmûr ‘a roebuck’) appears in all the earlier redactions of the Slavonic-Russian Octateuch; but losʹ (resp. Greek ὄρυξ ‘an antelope,’ Hebrew tə’ô ‘a wild sheep or antelope’) and zubrʹ (resp. Greek πύγαργος ‘a white-rump (antelope),’ Hebrew dîšôn ‘a bison?’) are used only in the ESRP. Therefore, the question arises whether there was a mutual influence between the ESRP and the Turkic Targum of the Pentateuch.
The Turkic Pentateuch Targum was not the only source of the ESRP. The author of this book has found traces of a probable influence of the Czech Bible upon the ESRP, and even upon the Turkic Targum. There is a clear impression that a glossator of the ESRP referred to multiple Biblical sources written in several languages; and this glossing could be a part of a large Biblical project initiated perhaps in the second half of the 15th century in Kiev by the Ruthenian Olelkovich princes. This Biblical project also made use of Ruthenian translations from Hebrew which were kept, e.g., in the well-known Vilna Biblical Collection; in the so-called Hebrew Manual published by Sergejus Temčinas; and in the Zabelin Fragments found by the author of this book in a MS from the 1650s (State Historical Museum in Moscow, Zabel.436).
All these documents belong to the literary corpus of the Russian Judaizers, which is why we might rename the ESRP “the Judaizers’ Pentateuch.” It is, however, paradoxical that the ESRP was not prohibited in Muscovy—quite the contrary, it was the most popular redaction of the first Biblical books since the 1490s—and for the whole of the 16th century—in the Russian lands of Lithuania, Novgorod, and Muscovy. Moreover, one of its copies (the earliest dated one, from 1494) could have been used by Hegumen Joseph Volotsky, the second-fiercest opponent of the Russian Judaizers. Their main opponent was the Novgorodian Archbishop Gennady Gonzov, who was also a supervisor of the first full Biblical compendium in Church Slavonic—the Gennady Bible, 1499—whose compilers quite obviously used the ESRP. Finally, Gennady wrote in 1489 that the Judaizers were in possession of “The Genesis,” i.e., the Pentateuch. The main point of this book is that the Russian Judaizers were not converts to Judaism per se, but simply Christian Hebraists who were the first Eastern Slavs to be—like their contemporaries in Western Europe—Biblical scholars in practically the modern sense.