Kievan Letter

The Kievan Letter scan in The Kievan Letter scan collection of Cambridge University Library website

The Kievan Letter, or Kyivan letter[1] is an early 10th-century (ca. 930)[2] letter thought to be written by representatives of the Jewish community in Kiev. The letter, a Hebrew-language recommendation written on behalf of one member of their community, was part of an enormous collection brought to Cambridge by Solomon Schechter from the Cairo Geniza. It was discovered in 1962 during a survey of the Geniza documents by Norman Golb of the University of Chicago. The letter is dated by most scholars to around 930 CE. Some think (on the basis of the "pleading" nature of the text, mentioned below) that the letter dates from a time when Khazars were no longer a dominant force in the politics of the city. According to Marcel Erdal, the letter does not come from Kiev but was sent to Kiev.[3]

  1. ^ Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan (2017). "The Art of Shifting Contexts". In Plokhy, Serhii (ed.). The Future of the Past: New Perspectives on Ukrainian History. Cambridge MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Harvard University Press). p. 234. Found by Norman Golb in the Cairo Geniza, the tenth-century Kyivan letter illuminating the presence of allegedly Turkic-named Jews among the Kyivan Jewish elites, again pointed to the Khazarian origin of Jews in Kyivan Rus′, and to the Judaic character of the Khazarians.
  2. ^ Nomads in the sedentary world
  3. ^ Marcel Erdal, 'The Khazar Language,' in Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, András Róna-Tas,(eds.), The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives,Brill, 2007 pp.75-108, pp.95-97.