Transmission of Scientific Texts in 15th-Century Eastern Knaan

The study focuses on a little-known chapter in the history of Eastern European Jewry, namely the intellectual endeavors of local Jews before the Ashkenazi expansion into the area totally wiped out the autochthonous tradition. Two main figures are discussed. The first is the Kievan scholar and leader Rabbi Moses ben Jacob the Russian or "Moses the Exile," a Constantinople-trained scholar who engaged in biblical exegesis, poetry, grammar, astronomy and kabbalah and is mainly known as the initiator of the Kaffa prayer rite and as the author of the kabbalistic work Šošan sodot. The second is the lesser-known Kievan copyist, annotator, and (apparently) translator Zechariah ben Aaron ha-Kohen, known not only from the colophons of Hebre wscientific and philosophical texts he copied and annotated but also from Russian sources, as the dangerous astrologer and black-magician Scharia, the initiator of the Judaizing heresy in Novgorod and Moscow at the end of the fifteenth century. The scientific and philosophical texts copied and translated from Hebrew into Slavic at that time are listed and an explanation for this surprising enterprise involving Jews and Christians is proposed.