ON THE KIEVAN LETTER FROM THE GENIZAH OF CAIRO

This study focuses on two major issues in the Keivan Letter from the Genizah of Cairo that have not been treated in a satisfactory manner. The first issue concerns the diplomatic aspect of the Letter, which is a copy - not the original - of the letter produced by the Jewish community of Kiev on behalf of a member in distress. This observation has a crucial impact on the historical interpretation of the document. The second issue concerns the monetary unit, zaquq, named in the Letter to describe the debt that needed to be repaid by its bearer. This rare term, which the Kievan Letter seems to be the earliest surviving text to employ, links it to the Jewish communities of the Carolingian realm. An attempt to situate zaquq on Rus'ian ground prompts us to explore the complex nature of the Rus'ian grivna, which presents structurally similar traits. and of the early Rus'ian "monetary" system as a whole. This exploration also touches on increasingly larger issues leading to some observations on the monetary bases of the tenth-century East-West trade.