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An Israeli scholar, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Moshe Taube was born on December 12th, 1947, as Moniek Taube in the West Pomeranian port city of Szczecin (Stettin), Poland, a city only just repopulated after its annexation from defeated Nazi Germany. Both his parents, Yona (1897, Łódź) and Luba Taube (née Kagan; 1920, Wojsławice, East Galicia), were Holocaust survivors. During the war they had lost their entire families and found refuge in Soviet Central Asia. After the war they met in Szczecin, where Moshe and his younger sister Sarah would be born. The future linguist grew up in a Yiddish-speaking, observant family and began his studies in a Polish Jewish school. At the age of eight, he moved with his family to Israel (1956). The year was a turbulent one for Poland, where the Taubes witnessed the Poznań riots; no less so for the young State of Israel – half a year younger than Moshe himself – which faced the Suez crisis and carried out the Sinai campaign (Operation Kadesh).

Moshe’s childhood during these formative years of Israel included growing up in a ma’abara (refugee absorption camp) in Lod (1956-1962), studying in a Lubavitcher Hassidic elementary school (Tomchei Tmimim in Lod), and completing a national-religious middle school (Bar Ilan in Lod) and then a secular high school (the regional school of Ramle-Lod).

He was drafted into the army in February 1967, several months before the Six-Day War, and served as a signal corps officer (from the rank of first lieutenant in regular service to captain in reserve duty). The years of his regular service (1967-69) fell in the period known as the War of Attrition, which followed the Six-Day War of 1967.

In 1969 Moshe enrolled in the Departments of History and Linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1972 he graduated summa cum laude with his BA in Linguistics and delivered his first course (Gothic language) in the same year.

The Yom Kippur War of 1973 interrupted his academic occupations for about half a year. Taube took part in the war on the Golan Heights in the “Ugdat Musa” (the 146th Reserve Armored Division under the command of General Moshe “Musa” Peled).

Upon returning to the university, Moshe concentrated mainly on linguistics. Among the scholars who were of formative influence on him were the linguist and classicist Haiim B. Rosén, the founder of Israeli palaeoslavic studies Moshé Altbauer, the eminent Semiticist and Egyptologist Hans J. Polotsky, and the renowned Semiticist Gideon Goldenberg. Moshe studied Russian language and specialized in Slavic linguistics, while also undertaking extensive study of Arabic language in both Classical and Modern dialects under Haim Blanc and Joshua Blau (among others). He also took classes with David Flusser on comparative religion.

His research interests in this period split between the linguistics of his native Yiddish and Slavic languages, which most naturally led him to the rich questions of interference between Jewish and Slavic languages. In accordance with this tendency, his MA thesis האספקט ומקומו במערכת הפעל בבילרוסית: קודקס ווילנא 262 (“Aspect and its Place in the Belorussian Verbal System: Codex Vilnius 262”) dealt with proto-Belorussian grammar as reflected in a unique 16th-century text which itself reflected a late-15th-century Jewish translation from Hebrew.

In 1975 Moshe married Dana (née Meron), a Hebrew linguist. They have three children: Hamutal (1982), Ma’ayan (1986), and Yonatan (1989).

The same year he graduated summa cum laude with his MA and entered the PhD programs at Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-4), Université de Paris-Vincennes (Paris-8), and École Pratique des Hautes Études (IVe section). During his studies under Wladimir Vodoff, René L’Hermitte, and Jacques Veyrenc, Moshe served as Teaching Assistant in Yiddish Linguistics at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris. He graduated in 1979 with the highest possible grade.

Moshe Taube’s dissertation, “Les formes verbales et leurs emplois dans la chronique moscovite de la fin du XVe siècle,” was written under the supervision of Jacques Veyrenc of Université de Paris-Sorbonne. It comprises a synchronic description and analysis of the verbal system of the late-15th-century Muscovite chronicle (published in the collection of Russian chronicles, PSRL, vol. 25), taking into account also the diachronic layers within that text, which represents a compilation of compilations. The dissertation remains unpublished, but two papers, written shortly after its completion, deal in detail with some of the main findings. “On the Penetration of the Perfect into the Russian Narrative System” (1980) treats the gradual introduction of the periphrastic perfect form into the system of narrative tenses in Russian, concurrently with the progressive disappearance of the simple preterite forms (first the imperfect and then the aorist). David Matthews discussed these observations in his “Preterites in Direct Discourse in Three Old East Slavic Chronicles” (namely, Povest’ vremennykh let and the Galician and Volynian chronicles), which was published in Russian Linguistics 19.3 (1995): 299-317. Taube’s other paper based on his dissertation, “Participe et gérondif en vieux russe” (1981), constitutes a diachronic analysis of the morphological and syntactic circumstances in which certain participial forms lost their declension and became fixed as gerunds in Russian.

In this period Moshe also translated from Polish into Hebrew Hanna Krall’s book about Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem (1977).

After his PhD graduation in 1979, Moshe Taube joined the faculty of the Hebrew University: first as Instructor, and then from 1980 in a joint appointment as Associate Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and the recently founded Department of Russian and Slavic Studies. This was a rapidly developing program that attracted the most brilliant scholars in diverse areas: Lazar Fleishman, Omri Ronen, and Dimitri Segal in modern literature; Jonathan Frankel and Ezra Mendelsohn in history; Wolf Moskovich in linguistics – to mention only a few who taught there at that time. Moshe Taube filled the position of Paleoslavist and was promoted to Lecturer in 1983 and tenured Senior Lecturer in 1986. During 1981-83 he also served as Adjunct Lecturer in Yiddish at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba.

During the early 1980s Taube focused mainly on modern literary Yiddish, its grammar, and especially the traces of Slavic influence thereon. His paper “Le parfait participial en yiddish” (1982) analyses the semantic differentiation, in determined conditions, of the periphrastic past tense in Yiddish into two variants: with and without finite auxiliary. One such semantic differentiation noted in the paper is between perfect and preterite. Another paper, “Langues-être, langues-avoir et le Yiddish” (1984), represents an attempt to characterize Yiddish typologically with regard to the expression of possession. The status of Yiddish is unique, possessing a living HAVE verb for that purpose, but at the same time accepting influence from co-territorial Slavic languages in which possession is expressed by means of locative combinations. In his “Le développement d'un auxiliaire modal en yiddish: lozn ‘laisser’” (1985), Taube scrutinized the syntactic and prosodic conditions for the diachronic reanalysis in Yiddish of the transformation of “let X-Acc Inf” into “let X-Nom Inf” and the subsequent development of a new modal paradigm. This paper served as the cornerstone for the discussion in one of the chapters in Klaus Eggensperger’s Modale Nebenverben im Jiddischen: Eine korpusgestützte Untersuchung zu soln und wolt (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1995). Ewa Geller also discussed the findings of these papers in her “Hidden Slavic Structure in Modern Yiddish,” in Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999), 65-89.

Taube’s subsequent paper “The Development of Aspectual Auxiliaries in Yiddish” (1987) deals with the diachronic process of grammaticalization of combinations with the light verbs “do+ Nominal stem+ Inf” and “give+ Nominal stem+ Inf” in Yiddish, describing how they became the productive means for denoting “semelfactive” actions in the framework of aspectual distinctions influenced by Slavic. Robert Rothstein discussed this study in his “Yiddish Aspectology,” in Studies in Yiddish Linguistics (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990), 143-154; followed by Ellen Prince in “On the Discourse Functions of Syntactic Form in Yiddish: Expletive ES and Subject-Postposing,” The Field of Yiddish 5 (1992): 59-86; Molly Diesing in three articles – “Yiddish VP Order and the Typology of Object Movement in Germanic,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 15.2 (1997): 369-427; “Light Verbs and the Syntax of Aspect in Yiddish,” The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 1 (1998): 119-156; and “Aspect in Yiddish: The Semantics of an Inflectional Head,” Natural Language Semantics 8.3 (2000): 231-253 – and Ewa Geller in “Hidden Slavic Structure in Modern Yiddish,” in Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999), 65-89.

An important milestone of Moshe Taube’s Slavic research during this period was his paper written for the 1983 Congress of Slavists held in Kiev. The paper was read in absentia by his teacher Moshé Altbauer, due to the Soviet authorities’ refusal to grant Moshe a visa. Altbauer and Taube thus gave two separate papers on a single question: from which language the earliest version of the Slavic Book of Esther had been translated. Both came up with the same answer: from Greek. Altbauer’s paper focused on the transcription of proper names, whereas Taube’s work dealt mainly with syntactic and phraseological arguments. These presentations were subsequently merged (by Horace G. Lunt, as a member of the editorial board of Harvard Ukrainian Studies) into a single paper, “The Slavonic Book of Esther: When, Where and from What Language Was It Translated,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8.3 (1984): 19-35. The importance of this innovative work extended well beyond the destiny of one particular text. It initiated a wide-ranging, decades-long, and still open discussion about early East Slavic translations from Hebrew, and, by extension, the characteristics of early East Slavic culture and questions concerning Jewish presence and the cultural role of Jews in this region and period. The conclusions of this paper were discussed by Andrej Arkhipov, По ту сторону Самбатиона: Этюды о русско-еврейских культурных, языковых и литературных контактах в Х-ХVI веках, Monuments of Early Russian Literature 9 (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1995); and by Anatolij A. Alekseev in “Русско-еврейские литературные связи до 15 века,” Jews and Slavs 1 (1993): 44-75, and in “Кое-что о переводах в древней Руси (по поводу статьи Фр. Дж. Томсона “Made in Russia”),” Trudy otdela drevnerusskoj literatury 49 (1996): 278-95.

During 1983-84 Moshe Taube was engaged in editing (with Dimitri Segal and Wolf Moskovich) the seventh volume of Slavica Hierosolymitana, a special edition for the eighty-fifth birthday of Moshé Altbauer. In this volume he also published the article “On Two Related Slavic Translations of the Song of Songs,” an analysis of two 15th-century Slavic translations made from Hebrew. This brief paper commenced Taube’s long series of works on medieval Slavic translations from Hebrew, which subsequently grew into a defined field of research. His editorial work on this volume also initiated his connection with the patriarch of American Slavic studies, Horace G. Lunt, and with Slavic research institutions at Harvard: the Harvard Russian Research Center and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where Moshe held multiple visiting positions (in 1986-87, 1992-93, 1998-99, and 2009). This produced a prolonged and fruitful collaboration which yielded a book and two papers coauthored by Taube and Lunt.

During Taube’s first sabbatical at Harvard (1986-87), the two began working on the text of the Slavic Book of Esther. They proceeded by each one writing first drafts of certain sections of the work which would then be continuously reshaped and reworked via an ongoing exchange of annotated versions. Thus, Taube wrote the first draft of the commentary and some of the sections on syntax, while Lunt wrote the first draft of some of the sections on grammar (e.g., phonology) and a lexicon. Nonetheless, the final form of the book in no way permits any mechanical repartition of their joint authorship and responsibility.

The resultant published book (1998) contains a critical edition of the Slavic text of Esther with variants, a modern Russian translation and a concordantial index, a verse-by-verse commentary, a linguistic analysis of the grammatical forms and their use, a largely comparative analysis of the outstanding vocabulary of Esther, and moreover a methodological treatment of translation problems in general.

The book was reviewed in several periodicals: by Catherine Mary MacRobert in The Slavonic and East European Review 78.4 (2000): 747-748; by Rumjana Zlatanova in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 48.3 (2000): 472-473, and in Starobŭlgarska Literatura 32 (2001): 132-135; and by V. Rusanivs’kyj in Movoznavstvo 3 (2001): 133-136. It is extensively discussed in: Irina Lysén, Kniga Esfir': K istorii pervogo slavjanskogo perevoda, Studia Slavica Upsaliensia 41 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 2001); Borjana Velčeva and Kiril Kostov, “Kniga Estir i nejnijat Slavjanski Prevod,” Paleobulgarica 26.1 (2002): 73-92; Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath, A Grin without a Cat, vol. 1: ‘Adversus Iudaeos’ Texts in the Literature of Medieval Russia, 988-1504, and vol. 2: Jews and Christians in Medieval Russia: Assessing the Sources, Lund Slavonic Monographs 4-5 (Lund: Lund University, 2002).

In addition to the book, the co-authors had also written a preliminary or background study for their joint project on the Book of Esther. In this article, entitled “Early East-Slavic Translations from Hebrew?” (1988), they surveyed the texts allegedly translated from Hebrew in Rus’ before the 15th century, showing that they were either not translated from the Hebrew, or else not translated in Rus’, or, finally, not translated before the 15th century. This paper generated a prolonged controversy, and is extensively discussed by Anatolij A. Alekseev in “Русско-еврейские литературные связи до 15 века,” Jews and Slavs 1 (1993): 44-75, and in “По поводу статьи Г.Г. Ланта ‘Еще раз о мнимых переводах в Древней Руси,’” Trudy otdela drevnerusskoj literatury 51 (1999): 442-445; as well as by Francis J. Thomson in The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Mediaeval Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 295-354. Later Taube and Lunt also published an exposition, designed for non-Slavicists, of the principles which led them to assume an underlying (Judeo-)Greek original for the Slavonic Book of Esther. This paper also presents certain particularities of the Slavonic translation which are of general interest to biblical scholars (“The Slavonic Book of Esther: Translation from the Hebrew or Evidence for a Lost Greek Text?” The Harvard Theological Review 87.3 [1994]: 347-362).

Taube’s other works in Paleoslavica in the late 1980s included “Solomon's Chalice, the Latin Scriptures and the Bogomils” (1987), an examination of Chapter 13 of Vita Constantini and in particular the story of Solomon's chalice. He proposed some new readings suggesting a dualistic stratum (or one that could have been interpreted as such). Moreover, he raised the possibility that the biblical quotations and allusions pointed to a Latin original, thus reopening the question of the Vita’s place of composition. “Povest’ o Esfiri: The Ostroh Bible and Maksim Grek's Translation of the Book of Esther” (1987) was written in collaboration with Hugh M. Olmsted of Harvard. After Taube had become acquainted with Olmsted’s microfilm collection of the works of Maksim Grek, he identified the translation of Esther it contained as closely related to the text of the Ostroh Bible (1581). His detailed analysis revealed a combination in the Ostroh Bible of Maxim's text with that of the older Gennadij translation. This analysis also disproved (at least for Esther) the accepted view that the compilers of Ostroh used the Aldine editio princeps as their Greek authority. “An Early 12th-Century Kievan Fragment of the Беседа Трех Святителей” (1988-89) identifies and linguistically analyzes a single folio from St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, Slavic ms. 39, as the earliest Slavic witness to date of the Conversatio trium hierarcharum. “О генезисе одного рассказа в составе Еллинского Летописца второй редакции (О взятии Иерусалима Титом)” (1989), analyzes the affinity of the Russian Titus story in the 2nd redaction of the Hellenic Chronicler (EL-2) with the reworking of the Josippon attested in a unique Hebrew manuscript (Bodley, Huntington 345) dated to 1462. This paper is discussed by O. V. Tvorogov in Летописець Еллинский и Римский, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: D. Bulanin, 2001).

In the 1990s Prof. Taube served as Chair of the Department of Linguistics at The Hebrew University (1993-96) and attained the rank of Associate Professor (1995). During this time he continued to work on Yiddish language and culture. The paper “On Factivity, Emotivity and Choice of Conjunction in Yiddish” (1994) deals with the distribution of the conjunctions az and wos in Yiddish, determining the conditions for the choice of the second as a combination of factivity and emotivity (in the sense employed in Kiparsky and Kiparsky, “Fact” [1970]). The observations of this paper have become commonplace and are often cited without attribution or acknowledgment, as if they had always been common knowledge. Taube’s “Echo-Construction in Yiddish” (1996) analyzes the modalities and syntactic function of the repetition of phrase components in Yiddish as means of thematization. Another work, “A Hassidic Ritual Dance: the ‘Mitsve-Tants’ in Jerusalemite Weddings” (1994), represents the fruit of an enterprise ongoing since 1982 to record and study the Yiddish language of the Hassidic communities in Israel – mainly in Jerusalem, but also in Tiberias, Safed, and Bnei Brak. In this paper, written jointly with the musicologist Yacob Mazor, the authors characterized two main types of traditions of the mitsve tants in weddings, one continuing the tradition of the diaspora, and the other being a local innovation.

In 2001-05 Taube served as Head of the Institute of Arts and Letters at the Hebrew University. In 2002 he was promoted to Professor of Linguistics and Slavic Studies; since 2004 he additionally holds the Tamara and Saveli Grinberg Chair in Russian Studies. He was Academic Director of the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry in 2005-09 and held a number of visiting positions: Directeur d’études at École Pratique des Hautes Études, IVe section, Paris (2008); Mihaychuk Research Fellow at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2009) and at TOPOI Excellence Cluster, Freie Universität Berlin (2016-17). In 2011 he headed (together with Alexander Kulik) the Research Group “Cultural Archeology of Jews and Slavs: Medieval and Early Modern Judeo-Slavic Interaction and Cross-Fertilization” at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, and hosted (also together with the author of this survey) an international conference on the same topic.

In this period Taube worked predominantly in the field of Slavic translations of Jewish texts, mainly from Hebrew, and gave real visibility and a methodological basis to this hitherto mostly neglected field. In addition to his earlier works that concentrated on biblical texts, Taube now attracted attention to medieval Hebrew midrash and associated genres (like the semi-historiographic narratives of the Book of Josippon) as sources for some East Slavic texts well integrated into ecclesiastical literature. Thus, his “On Some Unidentified and Misidentified Sources of the Academy Chronograph” (1992) traces the Hebrew sources of some passages in the 15th-century Academy Chronograph, establishing an affinity between the Russian “Story of Jechonia” and Hebrew midrashic sources (Wayiqra Rabbah and Pesiqta di-Rab Kahana), as well as between stories about Antiochus in the Chronograph and in the Midrash le-Hanukah. The paper is cited by Cesare De Michelis in La Valdesia di Novgorod: “Giudaizzanti” e prima Riforma (Torino: Claudiana, 1993); by Francis J. Thomson in The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Mediaeval Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); and by Maria Pljukhanova in “Библейские хронографы,” in Библия в духовной жизни, истории и культуре России и православного славянского мира (Moscow: Bibleisko-bogoslovskii institut sv. Apostola Andreia, 2001), 75-91. Taube continued this topic later in “On the Third Capture of Jerusalem, by Titus and its Sources” (2014). “On the Slavic Life of Moses and its Hebrew Sources” (1993) identifies the Hebrew original of the Russian Life of Moses as the Hebrew “Chronicle of Moses Our Teacher” in its early ms. form and analyzes in detail the translation. The paper also deals with the traces of an earlier apocryphon on Moses in the Explanatory Palaea and concludes, on the basis of an analysis of the proper names mentioned, that the apocryphon had been translated from Greek. This paper is also discussed by Francis J. Thomson in The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Mediaeval Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).

Another aspect of this field is the corpus of texts and activities associated with the 15th-century heresy of the “Judaizers,” including medieval scientific texts, as well as some historical personae who might have been involved in their translation. “The Kievan Jew Zacharia and the Astronomical Works of the Judaizers” (1995) opens the series of Taube’s publications on this topic. It deals with the historicity of Scharia, the Jew depicted by Iosif Volotskij in his Enlightener as the heresiarch and instigator of the Novgorod “Judaizing heresy.” In this paper Taube succeeded in establishing a link between Zacharia ben Aharon ha-Kohen of Kiev, copyist and annotator of astronomical Hebrew texts, and astronomical works translated from Hebrew in the Great Duchy of Lithuania, e.g., Immanuel Bonfil’s Six Wings and Johannes de Sacrobosco's De Spera. In all, five Hebrew manuscripts carrying Zacharia’s name are presented, three of them for the first time. In the appendix Taube provides the Ruthenian text and an English translation of the two works.

Another active person connected to this movement was Fedor Kuritsyn, chief diplomat to Ivan III and a leader of the Moscow “heretics” accused of Judaizing. Two of Taube’s papers deal with the “Poem on the Soul,” a 15th-century Muscovite text ascribed to this Fedor Kuritsyn. “The ‘Poem on the Soul’ in the Laodicean Epistle and the Literature of the Judaizers” (1995) questions the Muscovite provenance of the poem and establishes its similarities with the rest of the corpus translated from Hebrew in the Great Duchy of Lithuania. This paper is discussed by Cesare De Michelis in “Il valdismo e le terre russe (secc. XIV-XVI),” Revue de l’histoire des religions 217.1 (2000), 139-53. The second work, “The Spiritual Circle in the Secret of Secrets and the Poem on the Soul” (1994/98) links the poem with the Slavic version of the Arabic-Hebrew Secretum Secretorum. Finally, an important and extensive publication, “The Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translations from Hebrew and the Heresy of the Judaizers: Is There a Connection?” (2006) summarizes the problem and establishes the long-disputed affinity between the corpus of translations from Hebrew made in the Great Duchy of Lithuania and the Muscovite movement of Judaizers. A hitherto unnoticed 16th-century testimony is presented, ascribing the terms for the seven liberal arts (as they are found in the Logika) to Scharia, whom Taube identifies with the Kievan Jew Zacharia ben Aharon.

During the 2000s-10s Moshe Taube has returned to some of his early topics, such as Codex Vilnius 262 and Yiddish linguistics (“Kemoy-subordinatsye in yidish: narative az-zatsn” (in Yiddish). In I. Bartal et al. (eds.), A Touch of Grace: Studies in Ashkenazi Culture, Women’s History and the Languages of the Jews, Presented to Chava Turniansky. Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish Studies, 2013. Pp. לז-מו; “On Superordinate az-clauses in Yiddish Narrative.” In M. Aptroot and B. Hansen (eds.), Yiddish Language Structures. Empirical Approaches to Language Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2013. Pp. 231-252; “The Usual Suspects: Slavic, Yiddish and the Accusative Existentials and Possessives in Modern Hebrew.” Journal of Jewish Languages 3 (2015): 27-37; “On Argumentative az-clauses in Yiddish.” In Nathalie Bosson et al. (eds.), Labor Omnia Vincit Improbus: Miscellanaea Ariel Shisha-Halevy. Louvain: Peeters. 2017. Pp. 647-660). 

His works in this period question the Jewish provenance of the book of Psalms in Codex Vilnius (“The Vilnius 262 Psalter: A Jewish Translation?” Jews and Slavs 14 (2004): 36-45), analyze the books of Job (“The Book of Job in Vilnius 262.” Jews and Slavs 15. Judaeo-Bulgarica, Judaeo-Russica et Palaeoslavica. Jerusalem-Sofia (2005): 281-296) and Proverbs (“The Book of Proverbs in Codex Vilnius 262.” In Alexander Kulik, Mary MacRobert, Svetlina Nikolova, Moshe Taube, and Cynthia Vakareliyska (eds.), The Bible in Slavic Tradition. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2016. Pp. 179-194) found there, and, more generally, discuss the modes of Jewish-Christian collaboration in translation projects (“Transmission of Scientific Texts in 15th-Century Eastern Knaan.” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 10.2 (2010): 315-353; “Questions about the Make-up and the Making of the Old Testament Books in the Vilnius Codex.” In E.L. Alekseeva (ed.), Библеистика, Славистика, Русистика (Festschrift for Prof. A.A. Alexeev). St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, 2011. Pp. 315-320; “Jewish-Christian Collaboration in Slavic Translations from Hebrew.” In V. Izmirlieva and B. Gasparov (eds.), Translation and Tradition in “Slavia Orthodoxa.” Slavische Sprachgeschichte 5. Munich: Lit, 2012. Pp. 26-45). During the 2000s-10s Moshe Taube took active part in many joint projects with the Cyrillo-Methodian Research Centre at Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, directed in this period by Svetlina Nikolova.

In 2016 Taube published The Logika of the Judaizers (The Logika of the Judaizers: A Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translation from Hebrew. Critical Edition of the Slavic Texts Presented Alongside their Hebrew Sources, with Introduction, English Translation, and Commentary. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2016), a work begun in 1991 after his colleague, occasional opponent, and friend Anatoly Alekseev sent him, on his own initiative, copies of all extant manuscripts of the text in question, since he was convinced that Taube was the only scholar capable of tackling the problems involved in its investigation. This monumental work, of interest not only to Slavic and Jewish historians and scholars of the history of philosophy and science, but also to linguists studying the history of the Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Russian languages, contains three medieval Hebrew translations of Arabic philosophical texts translated by a Jew working together with a Slavic amanuensis into the East Slavic language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the latter part of the 15th century. The three translations comprise the Logical Terminology, a treatise on logic attributed to Maimonides but possibly composed by a different medieval Jewish author, and two sections of the Muslim theologian Al-Ghazālī’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 in fact attracted the attention of Orthodox Church authorities due to their possession by the enlightened heretical sect known as the Judaizers, which had emerged in Novgorod and spread to Moscow. Reflecting three or four layers of translation, Prof. Moshe Taube’s 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 the extensive introduction and commentary, Taube surveys earlier scholarly efforts to identify the provenance and purpose of the translations, discusses the linguistic and textual critical issues, 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 difficulty of accomplishing this monumental work cannot be exaggerated. These texts, virtually incomprehensible (and mostly unpublished) before Taube’s groundbreaking research, were written in a poorly attested variant of Ruthenian, with mostly ad hoc invented philosophical and scientific jargon, which can be deciphered only through scrupulous philological analysis based on a comparison with Hebrew and Arabic texts. Taube, it seems, is the only specialist in the world able to undertake this task, which requires equal expertise in Slavic linguistics and ecclesiastic literature, as well as a deep grounding in rabbinic tradition and Arabic literature, not to mention a good understanding of medieval Aristotelianism. For this pioneering work, Professor Taube has been awarded the Early Slavic Studies Association’s 2016 Translation Prize for the most outstanding recent scholarly translation of primary source material relating to pre-modern Slavdom and First Prize among the 2017 Polonsky Prizes for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines. The book has been discussed in a review paper (in Hebrew) by Warren Zev Harvey in the philosophical journal Iyun 65 (2016): 381-88; and several more reviews are now in press.

Among Taube’s forthcoming works are: another book co-authored with William F. Ryan, The Slavic Version of the Secret of Secrets (a 10th-century Arabic work ascribed to Aristotle and translated into Slavic from Hebrew); several works in Yiddish and Hebrew linguistics.

(With H.G. Lunt.) The Slavonic Book of Esther: Text, Lexicon, Linguistic Analysis, Problems of Translation. Cambridge: Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 1998.

The Logika of the Judaizers: A Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translation from Hebrew. Critical Edition of the Slavic Texts Presented Alongside their Hebrew Sources, with Introduction, English Translation, and Commentary. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2016.

Edited Volumes

(With D. Segal and W. Moskovich.) Slavica Hierosolymitana 7 (1985).

(With R. Timenchik and S. Schwarzband.) Quadrivium: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Wolf Moskovich. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006.

(With W. Moskovich and S. Nikolova.) Jews and Slavs 20: The Holy Land and the Manuscript Legacy of Slavs. Jerusalem-Sofia, 2008.

(With Alexander Kulik, Mary MacRobert, Svetlina Nikolova, and Cynthia Vakareliyska.) The Bible in Slavic Tradition. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2016.

“Slavic-Hebrew Concordantial Glossary to the Five Biblical Scrolls.” In M. Altbauer, The Five Biblical Scrolls in a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Translation into Belorussian. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1992. Pp. 249-421.

“On the Penetration of the Perfect into the Russian Narrative System.” Russian Linguistics 5 (1980): 121-131.

“Participe et gérondif en vieux russe.” Folia Linguistica Historica 2.1 (1981): 125-132.

“Le parfait participial en yiddish.” Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 77 (1982): 331-340.

“Langues-être, langues-avoir et le yiddish.” Orbis 33.1-2 (1984): 222-235.

(With M. Altbauer.) “The Slavonic Book of Esther: When, Where and from What Language Was it Translated.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8.3 (1984): 19-35.

“Le développement d'un auxiliaire modal en yiddish: lozn ‘laisser.’” In J. Fisiak (ed.), Papers from the 6th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science IV, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 34. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1985. Pp. 499-514.

“On Two Related Slavic Translations of the Song of Songs.” Slavica Hierosolymitana 7 (1985): 203-210.

“Old Russian блискъ ‘pavement’?” Die Welt der Slaven 31.1 (1986): 1-4.

“The Development of Aspectual Auxiliaries in Yiddish.” Word 38.1 (1987): 13-25.

“Solomon's Chalice, the Latin Scriptures and the Bogomils.” Slovo 37 (1987): 161-169.

(With H. Olmsted.) “Povest’ o Esfiri”: The Ostroh Bible and Maksim Grek's Translation of the Book of Esther.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 11 (1987): 100-117.

(With H.G. Lunt.) “Early East-Slavic Translations from Hebrew?” Russian Linguistics 12 (1988): 147-187.

“An Early 12th-Century Kievan Fragment of the Беседа Трех Святителей.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 12-13 (1988-89): 346-359.

“О генезисе одного рассказа в составе ‘Еллинского Летописца’ второй редакции (‘О Взятии Иерусалима Титом’).” In W. Moskovich et al. (eds.), Russian Literature and History: In Honour of Professor Ilya Serman. Jerusalem: Soviet Jewry Museum Foundation, 1989. Pp. 146-151.

“Une source inconnue de la chronographie russe: le Dialogue de Timothée et Aquila.” Revue des études slaves 63.1 (1991): 113-122.

“On Some Unidentified and Misidentified Sources of the Academy Chronograph.” In W. Moskovich et al. (eds.), Russian Philology and History: In Honour of Professor Victor Levin. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1992. Pp. 365-375.

“On the Slavic Life of Moses and its Hebrew Sources.” Jews and Slavs 1 (1993): 84-119.

“On Factivity, Emotivity and Choice of Conjunction in Yiddish.” Studies in Language 18.1 (1994): 113-125.

(With Y. Mazor.) “A Hassidic Ritual Dance: The ‘Mitsve-Tants’ in Jerusalemite Weddings.” In I. Adler, F. Alvarez-Pereyre, E. Seroussi, and L. Shalem (eds.), Studies in Jewish Oral Tradition: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Yuval 6. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994. Pp. 164-224.

(With H.G. Lunt.) “The Slavonic Book of Esther: Translation from the Hebrew or Evidence for a lost Greek Text?” Harvard Theological Review 87.3 (1994): 347-362.

“The Kievan Jew Zacharia and the Astronomical Works of the Judaizers.” Jews and Slavs 3 (1995): 168-198.

“The ‘Poem on the Soul’ in the Laodicean Epistle and the Literature of the Judaizers.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19 (1995): 671-685.

“Echo-Construction in Yiddish” (in Hebrew). Masorot 9-10-11 (1996): 397-420.

"תבנית הד ביידיש". מסורות ט-יא (תשנ"ז): ספר היובל לגדעון גולדנברג. עמ׳ 397-420.

“Послесловие к ‘Логическим терминам’ Маймонида и ересь жидовствующих.” In Н.М. Ботвинник и Е.И. Ванеева (eds.), In Memoriam: Памяти Я.С. Лурье. St. Petersburg: Feniks, 1997. Pp. 239-246.

“The Spiritual Circle in the Secret of Secrets and the Poem on the Soul.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 18.3-4 (1994; appeared 1998): 342-355. 

“Подлинный и вымышленный Иерусалим в восточнославянских переводах с еврейского 15-го века.” Jews and Slavs 7 (2000): 41-47.

“The Vilnius 262 Psalter: A Jewish Translation?” Jews and Slavs 14 (2004): 36-45.

“The Book of Job in Vilnius 262.” Jews and Slavs 15. Judaeo-Bulgarica, Judaeo-Russica et Palaeoslavica. Jerusalem-Sofia (2005): 281-296.

“The Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translations from Hebrew and the Heresy of the Judaizers: Is There a Connection?” In V.V. Ivanov et al. (eds.), Speculum Slaviae Orientalis: Muscovy, Ruthenia and Lithuania in the Late Middle Ages. UCLA Slavic Studies 4. Moscow: OGI, 2005. Pp. 185-208.

“Which Hebrew Text of Algazel’s Intentions Served for the Translation of the Slavic Logika?” In M. Taube, R. Timenchik, and S. Schwarzband (eds.), Quadrivium: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Wolf Moskovich. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006. Pp. 47-52.

“How Imperfect Can a Cleft Sentence Be? Focusing dos- and es-sentences in Yiddish.” In T. Bar and E. Cohen (eds.), Studies in Semitic and General Linguistics in Honour of Gideon Goldenberg. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 334. Münster: Ugarit, 2007. Pp. 345-377.

“The ‘Praise of the Virtuous Woman’ from Hilandar.” Slovo 56-57 (2008): 545-558.

“A Long(-Forgotten) Passive Construction in Old Rusian.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 28.1-2 (2006; appeared 2009): 287-305.

“Transmission of Scientific Texts in 15th-Century Eastern Knaan.” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 10.2 (2010): 315-353.

“Questions about the Make-up and the Making of the Old Testament Books in the Vilnius Codex.” In E.L. Alekseeva (ed.), Библеистика, Славистика, Русистика (Festschrift for Prof. A.A. Alexeev). St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, 2011. Pp. 315-320.

“Jewish-Christian Collaboration in Slavic Translations from Hebrew.” In V. Izmirlieva and B. Gasparov (eds.), Translation and Tradition in “Slavia Orthodoxa.” Slavische Sprachgeschichte 5. Munich: Lit, 2012. Pp. 26-45. 

“On the Relative Marker vos and Yiddish Post-modifiers.” In M. Aptroot et al. (eds.), Leket: Yiddish Studies Today. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2012. Pp. 467-481.

“Kemoy-subordinatsye in yidish: narative az-zatsn” (in Yiddish). In I. Bartal et al. (eds.), A Touch of Grace: Studies in Ashkenazi Culture, Women’s History and the Languages of the Jews, Presented to Chava Turniansky. Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish Studies, 2013. Pp. לז-מו.

“On Superordinate az-clauses in Yiddish Narrative.” In M. Aptroot and B. Hansen (eds.), Yiddish Language Structures. Empirical Approaches to Language Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2013. Pp. 231-252.

“On the Third Capture of Jerusalem, by Titus and its Sources.” In Michael S. Flier, David J. Birnbaum, and Cynthia M. Vakareliyska (eds.), Philology Broad and Deep: In Memoriam Horace G. Lunt. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 2014. Pp. 247–264. 

“On the Slavic Testimonies in Rabbinical Responsa.” In Wolf Moskovich et al. (eds.), The Knaanites: Jews in the Medieval Slavic World. Jews and Slavs 24. Jerusalem–Moscow: Gesharim, 2014. Pp. 215-223.

“The Usual Suspects: Slavic, Yiddish and the Accusative Existentials and Possessives in Modern Hebrew.” Journal of Jewish Languages 3 (2015): 27-37.

“The Book of Proverbs in Codex Vilnius 262.” In Alexander Kulik, Mary MacRobert, Svetlina Nikolova, Moshe Taube, and Cynthia Vakareliyska (eds.), The Bible in Slavic Tradition. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2016. Pp. 179-194.

“On Argumentative az-clauses in Yiddish.” In Nathalie Bosson et al. (eds.), Labor Omnia Vincit Improbus: Miscellanaea Ariel Shisha-Halevy. Louvain: Peeters. 2017. Pp. 647-660. 

Review of Joel Raba, The Contribution and the Recompense: The Land and the People of Israel in Medieval Russian Thought, Tel Aviv: Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, 2003 (in Hebrew). Zion 71.2 (2006): 233-237.

[על] יואל רבא, "התרומה והתמורה: ארץ ישראל ועם ישראל בעולמה הרוחני של רוסיה בימי הביניים" (תשס”ג). ציון עא, ב (תשס"ו): 233-237.

Encyclopedia Entries

“East Slavic Texts.” In G. Hundert et al. (eds.), The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

"תרגומים מעברית לסלאווית ברוסיה ותנועת המתיהדים". תולדות יהודי רוסיה, כרך א, בעריכת א. קוליק. ירושלים: מרכז זלמן שזר, התש"ע. עמ' 290-308.

“Ересь ‘жидовствующих’ и переводы с еврейского в средневековой Руси.” In А. Кулик (ред.), История еврейского народа в России: От древности до раннего нового времени. Moscow–Jerusalem: Gesharim–Mosty kul’tury, 2009. Pp. 367-397.

Hanna Krall, Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem. Kraków: Literackie, 1977.

Hebrew translation from Polish:

להקדים את אלהים, מאת חנה קראל. תרגום מפולנית: משה טאובה. ירושלים: אדם, 1981. (מהדורה שנייה: בן שמן: מודן, 2001.)

Books, Chapters, and Papers in Press

(With William F. Ryan.) The Slavic Version of the Secret of Secrets. London: The Warburg Institute.

“Verbal Hendiadys in Yiddish.” In N. Jacobs, H. I. Aronson, and T. Shannon (eds.), Yiddish and Typology.

“The Limits of Multiple-source Contact Influence: The case of ecel ‘at’ in Modern Hebrew.” In E. Doron, M. Rappaport-Hovav, Y. Reshef, and M. Taube (eds.), Linguistic Contact, Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew. Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

(With William F. Ryan.) “The Slavic Version of Maimonides’ De Coitu.” In G. Bos et al. (eds.), Maimonides’ De Coitu in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Slavic.

“Knowledge Hidden from Whom and for Whom? Some Questions about the Omissions and Additions in the Slavic Secret of Secrets.” In Florentina Badalanova-Geller (ed.), Knowledge to Die For. Leiden–Boston: Brill.

“On the Corpus of Yiddish Court Testimonies in the Responsa Literature and its Reliability as Specimens of Spoken Language.” In D.M. Bunis, C. Turniansky, and K. Šmid (eds.), Ladino and Yiddish Rabbinical Writings.

Based on: "Moshe Taube’s Path in Life and Scholarship: For his Seventieth Birthday,” Palaeobulgarica 42 (2018): 3-17.

References

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