On the Language of the Jews Who Lived in Ancient Russia

In our previous studies¹ we attempted to prove that the first Jews in southern Russian were not Germanic, as is claimed by Graetz² and other German scholars, but rather Bosporan and Asian, as they came through the Kavkaz [Caucasus]. Let us now look at whether we can draw conclusions, based on historical data, about the language spoken by those first settlers. It is understood that we are speaking of the earliest period of settlement for which we have information, before the stream of Germanic Jews arrived at the time of the First Crusades. At that time, under the influence of Germanic Jews whose numbers highly exceeded those of their Slavic coreligionists, the mother tongue of the latter was gradually pushed out by the German dialect, as we will see below.

That the Bosporan Jews and their brothers in other Greek colonies of southern Russia spoke Greek in the first two centuries ad is evidenced by the writings of Jews in the Greek tongue about the liberation of captives found in Panticapaeum (Kerch), Anapa, and Olbia, which mention Jewish synagogues in these cities.³ Additionally, these texts make it clear that scholars like Graetz⁴ mistakenly suppose that the first Greek Jews in those environs arrived in the second decade of the eighth century, escaping persecution by the Byzantine emperor Leo the Isaurian. Furthermore, quite early on there were other Jews in Taurida who used the Hebrew language, as revealed in the burial stones with Jewish inscriptions discovered by Mr. Firkovich the Elder [Isaak-Boaz/Boguslav Firkowicz].⁵ Knowledge of the Hebrew language by Crimean Jews continued, in some form at least, for a long time afterwards, until the Tatar tribes flooded Taurida and it fell to the rule of the Khazars. When the Slavic apostle Constantine the Philosopher (Cyril) headed to Khazaria around the middle of the ninth century (i.e., more than a century after some Khazars accepted the Jewish faith), to teach the Christian faith to the other part of this people, he passed through Korsun (Byzantine Chersonesus), where Jews lived.

In the same way that Greek Jews were using the Greek language, so, too, the Caucasian Jews, having arrived in southern Russia, undoubtedly spoke the languages of the countries from which they came. In general, before the settlement of Germanic Jews in Slavic lands and of Spanish Jews in Holland, Italy, and Turkey (at the end of the fifteenth century), there were no instances in Jewish history of Jews using a dialect different from the spoken language of the people among whom they lived. [ . . . ]

Again, we repeat, the question must be posed in this way: did the Jews who arrived from Caucasian lands and Greek colonies to Slavic lands exchange the languages they brought with them for the Slavic language, or did they keep speaking those earlier languages until they were absorbed by Germanic Jews?

Since researching any question requires knowing its status, i.e., what was done up to this point to arrive at its solution, we will present here those few studies that comprise the history of our problem.