רוח חן - אוניברסיטת בן-גוריון בנגב

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communities through several channels. Some were brought from the Byzantine
settlements, while others included copies, or copies of copies of printed editions
of Rua˙ Óen, published in Italy and on Ashkenazi soil in the sixteenth century
and in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Only a single Karaite printed
edition of Rua˙ Óen was published: it appeared in the nineteenth century in the
city of Gozlow (Eupatoria) in Crimea, and was intended for Karaite readers.
For many of its readers, Rua˙ Óen served as a primary source, often as an
exclusive source of knowledge in Aristotelian sciences. The text was passed
down throughout the generations without any significant changes. As a result,
readers of Rua˙ Óen remained unaware of scientific developments, not even
those presented in Hebrew texts, let alone such that could be found in non-
Hebrew texts only. Their world picture remained founded on basic medieval
scientific theories, drawn from the scientific world of Muslim philosophers and
uniquely presented in Rua˙ Óen; these were partly at variance with concepts
presented in other scientific works (e.g. in Ibn Rushd's commentaries).
In most of the investigated cultural settings, perhaps in all, there were
teachers who introduced Rua˙ Óen as a science textbook into the syllabus. This
type of utilization of Rua˙ Óen began already in Southern France and Italy, and
continued in the Karaite communities and probably also among Ashkenazi
readers. It stood out especially in the Italian Peninsula, and even more so
among the Karaites. In the educational system of the latter, a tradition of
reading Rua˙ Óen as part of science teaching was maintained. This tradition
was rooted in the Byzanine Karaite center. Karaite scholars working in
Byzantium in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries taught Aristotelian sciences,
mainly in preparation for studying texts on religious philosophy, Karaite as
well as Rabbanite. Some of them chose to adopt Rua˙ Óen as a textbook. The
Karaites in Eastern Europe and in Crimea continued to teach such texts that
presupposed basic Aristotelian scientific knowledge. They used Rua˙ Óen as