Taube , Moshe The Logika of the Judaizers: A Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translation from Hebrew (review)

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 97, 2, 2019 Reviews Taube, Moshe. The Logika of the Judaizers: A Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translation from Hebrew. The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 2016. 720 pp. Illustration. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Glossaries. Index. $115.00. The critical edition of the Book Called Logic prepared by Moshe Taube is a long-anticipated publication in this field of the literature of Judaizers. As the author writes in his Preface, the aim of this book was to provide the necessary ground for a discussion of two medieval Arabic philosophical texts that were translated from their medieval Hebrew translations into the language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the last quarter of the fifteenth century: (pseudo-?) Maimonides’ Logical Terminology and Al-Ghazālī’s Intentions of the Philosophers. Parts of these Ruthenian translations, which are called following Alexej Sobolevskij’s appellation, ‘the literature of the Judaizers’, were combined in the Muscovite Principality into a single text, entitled Logika, first mentioned by Archbishop Gennadij of Novgorod in his 1489 letter to Iosaf, former archbishop of Rostov. The book under review is structured in several parts, namely, the Preface followed by extensive references, the Introduction, the Logika of the Judaizers, consistingofSlavictexts,Hebrewtexts,Englishtranslationsandcommentaries. The edition of the Logika is capped with a glossary of English terms, a glossary of Hebrew terms and a Slavic concordantial index. This book also contains a Hebrew preface. Right at the outset of this review, I deem it necessary to point out that Taube’s critical edition of the Logika is a masterfully crafted book which has nevertheless some flaws as I will explain below. The Introduction features a most exhaustive survey of the corpus of translations from Hebrew into Ruthenian. The first group contains Hebrew works integrated at the beginning of the fifteenth century into Russian compilations. The second group includes works belonging to the second half of the fifteenth century, in particular the first two sections of Abū Hāmid Muhammad Al-Ghazālī’s Intentions of the Philosophers (Logic and Theology) and (pseudo-?) Mimonides’ Logical of the Sphere. According to Taube, the text of the Logika was translated by a learned Jew from the Ruthenian lands who dictated his literal rendering into a vernacular, heavily Polonized Ruthenian (pp. 50–51). The Slavic collaborator put it down in writing, occasionally correcting in accordance with the bookish, heavily Polonized ‘chancery language’ (pp. 50–51). Whence, perhaps, a very peculiar language whose analysis in the book takes only six pages, which is not enough for a critical edition of this calibre. According to the author, several of the phonological and morphological features reflected in the orthography of the text clearly REVIEWS 343 indicate the scribe’s “Belorussian” [! – A.D.] provenance (p. 51). With this in mind, the author confuses the t’ > c’ affrication in Belarusian with the results of phonetic assimilations in podvoicьsę ‘repeats itself’ (p. 51), describes ‘v/u fluctuation’ (better to name, alternation) as found in the following changes v, vъ > ou, ou > v, ou > vo, ou > vъ (p. 52), although only the first change is historically grounded; he also mentions the x/h confusion (p. 53), which reflects in fact an assimilation process rather than a shift as attested primarily in Transcarpathia under a Hungarian influence. The author also believes that cases of relative clauses without a relative pronoun but with an anaphoric pronoun represent a syntactic calque of the Arabic asyndetic relative clause (p. 54), though this pattern reflects one of the types of relative clause chaining in East Slavic. Clearly, the aforementioned features are misleading enough to posit the Belarusian provenance of the translations collated as an ‘eclectic edition’ and presented as a ‘reconstruction’ by the author (p. 130). Needless to say, the question of delimitation of Ukrainian and Belarusian texts is of utmost importance for a critical edition of the Ruthenian texts. Speaking about a possible Jewish motivation in the translation of the texts under consideration, Taube repeated his view first advanced in 2005 that learned Jews, such as Scharia, versed in scholarly and scientific literature, translated a variety of works of rationalist tenor for Slavs eager to gain access to such scholarly treasures; the Jews...