A reassessment of the Kyivan letter from the Cairo Genizah

Abstract

Known as the ‘Kyivan letter’, Cambridge University Library T-S 12.122 was first published more than 40 years ago by Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, who identified it as a letter of introduction written by Jewish Khazars in tenth-century Kyiv. Their identification was based on the presence of Turkic runes at the base of the letter, Turkic names among the signatories, and their reconstruction of its historical background. In the decades since that publication, many of these details have been contested, but the document continues to be cited as a Khazarian artefact. The current article re-examines the original Hebrew text of the letter, offering a new edition and translation, and analyses the names of its signatories and its potential historical background. We demonstrate that, while a Khazarian connection is possible, the dominant landscape of the letter, and of the Jews whose names appear in it, is Slavic rather than Turkic.