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.
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