Abraham Harkavy

Born to a wealthy family in the Minsk region, Abraham (Albert) Harkavy was a historian, activist, and librarian whose work concerned Jewish history and language in Eastern Europe, particularly in the ancient and medieval periods. After a traditional education, a stint at the Volozhin yeshiva and the state-sponsored Vilna rabbinical assembly, Harkavy received a Western-style education in oriental studies at universities in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Paris. He became the librarian of the Oriental and Semitic Department of the Russian Imperial Public Library in 1877. In his first monograph, Ob iazyke evreev zhivushikh v drevnee vremia na Rusi (On the Language of the Jews Who Lived in Ancient Russia), Harkavy advanced the influential if later disproven thesis that, on the basis of linguistic evidence, modern Russian Jews likely descended from Jews of Crimea and the Khazars. Writing in Russian and Hebrew, among other languages, Harkavy produced some four hundred books and articles on early interactions between Slavs, Muslims, and Jews; Jewish settlement in Eurasia; and the history of the Karaites. In 1880, he was appointed chair of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia.