In the latter part of the fifteenth century, a Jewish translator,
working together with a Slavic amanuensis, translated into the East
Slavic language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania three medieval Hebrew
translations of Arabic philosophical texts: the Logical Terminology, a
short work on logic attributed to Maimonides (but probably by a
different medieval Jewish author); and two sections of the Muslim
theologian Al-Ghazali's famous Intentions of the Philosophers.
Highlighting the unexpected role played by Jewish translators as agents
of cultural transmission in the heady messianic atmosphere leading up to
the year 1492, these texts drew the attention of the Orthodox Church
authorities as being in the possession of the enlightened heretical sect
known as the Judaizers, which had emerged in Novgorod and spread to
Moscow. Reflecting three and even four layers of translation, Prof.
Moshe Taube's new triple-language critical edition of the Logika of the
Judaizers displays the Slavic texts alongside the Hebrew translations on
which they are based and accompanies them with a modern English
translation. In his comprehensive introduction and commentary, Taube
surveys earlier scholarly efforts to identify the provenance and purport
of the translations, discusses the linguistic and textological issues
raised by these early Ruthenian texts, puts forward the likely
dissimilar motivations of the Jewish translator and the Christians who
commissioned the work, and reveals the translator's probable identity.
The present publication, a long-awaited desideratum, will be of interest
not only to historians of the Great Duchy of Lithuania and of the
principality of Muscovy, but also to scholars of Jewish history and of
the history of philosophy and science, as well as to linguists studying
the history of the Belorussian, Ukrainian and Russian languages.
