Here they concern us as Russo-Jewish historians. What Linnaeus, Agassiz,
and Cuvier did in the field of natural philosophy, they accomplished in
their chosen province of Jewish history.[1] Levinsohn was the first to
express the opinion that the Russian Jews hailed, not from Germany, as
is commonly supposed, but from the banks of the Volga. This hypothesis,
corroborated by tradition, Harkavy established as a fact. Originally the
vernacular of the Jews of Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev was Russian and
Polish, or, rather, the two being closely allied, Palaeo-Slavonic. The
havoc wrought by the Crusades in the Jewish communities of Western
Europe caused a constant stream of German-Jewish immigrants to pour,
since 1090, into the comparatively free countries of the Slavonians.
Russo-Poland became the America of the Old World. The Jewish settlers
from abroad soon outnumbered the native Jews, and they spread a new
language and new customs wherever they established themselves.[2]

Whether the Jews of Russia were originally pagans from the shores of the
Black and Caspian Seas, converted to Judaism under the Khazars during
the eighth century, or Palestinian exiles subjugated by their Slavonian
conquerors and assimilated with them, it is indisputable that they
inhabited what we know to-day as Russia long before the Varangian prince
Rurik came, at the invitation of Scythian and Sarmatian savages, to lay
the foundation of the Muscovite empire. In Feodosia there is a synagogue
at least a thousand years old. The Greek inscription on a marble slab,
dating back to 80-81 B.C.E., preserved in the Imperial Hermitage in St.
Petersburg, makes it certain that they flourished in the Crimea before
the destruction of the Temple. In a communication to the Russian
Geographical Society, M. Pogodin makes the statement, that there still
exist a synagogue and a cemetery in the Crimea that belong to the
pre-Christian era. Some of the tombstones, bearing Jewish names, and
decorated with the seven-branched Menorah, date back to 157 B.C.E.;