The Sivuv of Rabbi Petachiah: a circuit through Rus to the East

The road runs: Regensburg, Prague, Poland, Rus, the Crimea—he calls the nomads' land Kedar—the remnants of the Khazars, the early Karaite community of the Crimea, then Armenia, Kurdistan, Babylonia, Syria, the Land of Israel and back through Greece. For the Jewish history of the eastern Slavs it is one of the few views from inside the twelfth century.

The book is peculiar in how it was made. Petachiah did not write it: others wrote it down from what he told them, and among them is named Rabbi Judah he-Hasid of Regensburg—of Chasidei Ashkenaz. So the book speaks of him in the third person, and what survives in it is not all he saw but what his listeners kept.

His chief impression was Babylonian. There he found an exilarch sitting firmly and a head of the academy whose word could be enforced. Ashkenaz knew nothing of the kind: there a community held together by consent, not by authority. In this reference work another event stands on exactly those years—the death of the last exilarch recognised by the caliph, and the end of the office. Two testimonies come to stand side by side.

In the Land of Israel he saw the opposite. Jerusalem was Latin, the battle of Hattin was not far off, and Jews in the city, by his count, numbered one—Abraham the dyer, kept for his craft.

The Sivuv was first printed at Prague in 1595, four centuries after the road.