By the way, confirmation of what has been said (the presence of an Iranian element in Kiev, explained primarily by the Khazar presence in the city during the period of the greatest power of the Khazar Khaganate) can be the fact that Vladimir introduced into the Kiev pantheon (already very limited) two characters of Iranian origin - Simargl and Hors. Their introduction into the Slavic pantheon in Kiev in 980 in this historical context receives its natural and, in fact, very enlightened explanation. Moreover, it reveals in Prince Vladimir a great master of bold, almost adventurous decisions, which in the end turn out to be wise compromises, however, periodically removed and replaced by new "syntheses". It is indicative that the first object of "flirting" was precisely the Iranian element, which represents, at least potentially, a military force, but economically and, possibly, socially passive. It was to him that Vladimir made a concession in the first place, introducing Iranian mythological images into the Kievan pantheon in their natural form, so to speak, without prior assimilation and assimilation by the Russian tradition. A number of features of these characters attract attention. Thus, unlike other deities of the pantheon, these Iranian innovations are devoid of any signs of anthropomorphism: Simargl in its origin is the theriomorphic image of a half-dog, half-bird (Avesta. saena-maraga, pehl. Senmurv-, Persian, simurg (γ), etc.), Khore-Khers-sun, as if duplicating the already existing solar deity Dazhbog; in the lists of gods, Hors most often neighbors with the main god Perun, which would seem to be completely out of rank for him, a stranger and a stranger; finally, this ethno-confessional alienation itself is emphasized (cf. Hors Zhidovin in "The Discourse of the Three Saints"). The veneration of the shining Sun and Simurgh by the Khorezmian warriors of the Kiev garrison and their descendants was, apparently, the proximate reason for their appearance in the circle of the "Vladimir" gods. And this was not only a tribute to the bygone time: Vladimir knew that the Khorezmians played a major role in trade with Southern Russia and that in Khorezm, as in Central Asia, the Simurgh and the solar deity were especially revered (by the way, during the Safavid dynasty, the Simurgh became the state emblem of Iran), despite the Muslim conquest. Finally, it should be recalled that the very name of Khorezm is solar (in the Khorezmian glosses of the XIII century — "The Book of the Oath" the word xvarazm "Khorezmian" is noted: in the 2nd part — the element z/a/m "earth", the 1st part is understood either in connection with the sun, cf. Avestan hvare, or in connection with food, Avestan huarena-:huar "to be satisfied"); On the way from Central Asia to Kievan Rus, "Khorezm" traces are found more than once (cf. the Khvaliso Sea, the Khvalizh Sea, the Khvalitskaya Doria, the Khvarezm Sea, the Khvalynsk Sea, etc.). Hors became a "Jew" as a deity of the former Khazar state, where Judaism was the official religion (the subtleties of differentiation were not held in high esteem even then). The Iranian topic is discussed in more detail below.

The Jewish element, which was pushed aside after the adoption of Christianity, did not disappear, but its position changed: the economic and economic activity of the Jewish element in Kiev continued, apparently without any special upheavals, until the great pogrom under Vladimir Monomakh in 1113, but the main motive was economic: the wealth of the Jews "interfered", which, apparently, had not aroused envy until then. But in the sphere of religion, the confrontation was outlined earlier, although at first it was not acute. Nevertheless, there is no greater mistake than to believe (and many researchers have done and still do) that the Christian-Jewish polemics in the Discourse on Law and Grace are a purely rhetorical exercise, which had no real "Kievan" basis. The Jews, of course, strove not to fight, but to preserve the faith in the new conditions, to prevent the conversion of their fellow tribesmen to Christianity. Christianity struggled with Judaism, but at first this struggle apparently took the form of polemics-discussions, reminiscent of the disputes between Constantine the Philosopher and the Jews, described in detail in his "Life" (in particular, the "Khazar" theme is present here as well) and did not exclude the assimilation of the religious and speculative values of Judaism ("friend of Sophia", the Wisdom of God (Σοφία–hkmh), Constantine the Philosopher was at the same time a conductor of these values in Christianity). In the Discourse on Law and Grace, too, of course, there is polemics, but the main thing in it, perhaps, is not the desire to shame the Jewish faith, but the surprise at its unexpected blindness, which did not allow the Jews to see what they seemed to have foreseen and what they were talking about. At the same time, there is also an undoubted sense of sonship and common roots in the Lay. It is also necessary to take into account that in Hilarion's time, the opposition of Christianity to still living paganism played, as already mentioned, a more important and purely practical role than the opposition of Christianity and Judaism, grace and law; Moreover, both Christianity and Judaism together as monotheistic religions opposed polytheistic paganism. Obviously, with the passage of time, the intensity of polemical disputes could increase, especially when they concerned practical issues. The "Life of Theodosius of the Caves" tells about the harsh forms of disputes: "For this is the custom of the blessed one, as many people get up in the night and go to the Jew, and those who still argue about Christ, and reproach and annoy them, and as those who are marked and lawless are called, for they are slain because of Christ's confession." Nevertheless, it should not be overlooked that the polemics took place even when it was fraught with danger to life: there is an opinion that Theodosius argued not with the Jews who lived in the city, but with voluntary or involuntary baptisms from among the Jews, who had fallen away from Christianity and were exiled for admonition and exhortation to the Pechersk Monastery, where they secretly gathered at night for prayer and rituals; among other things, in the "Life of Theodosius" the Hebrew word zemarnaya is noted, cf. Heb. zemar "to sing", "to play a musical instrument".

However, there is, apparently, another range of arguments (independent of the "Kievan Letter") in favor of the presence of the Jewish element in Kiev and the real underpinning of the Jewish theme in Hilarion's Sermon. At the same time, however, this author, as already mentioned, emphasizes the direct or indirect connection of the NWB with the Jewish tradition (cf. also the conclusion of this researcher that the well-known spiritual verse, the so-called "Song of the Evangelist" was formed under the influence of the Hebrew song text "Ed. Who knows?" – Echad mi joden). Strictly speaking, there are no serious reasons to consider these similarities and parallels unexpected (it should not be forgotten that already in the works of Harkavy 1866; 1874; 1879–1880; 1881–1882; 1884 and others) many issues directly related to Russian-Jewish relations in the field of culture in the early period were elucidated; thereby laying the foundations for the explosion of this topic that occurred in recent years; on Harkavy's contribution to this problem, see Wihnovich 1992, 238–244). They are reliably motivated "from above" and "from below" by the unity of the Biblical Revelation for Jews and Christians, accomplished through the Word of God, which is both the cause and the main nerve of this unity (from Isaiah and Memrah of the Aramaic Targums to the Gospel of John and the 1st chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews), and by a liturgical unity reminiscent of the Jewish basis of early Christian worship, which in its structure goes back to Jewish worship in its synagogue (mainly) form. about the stage of "liturgical dualism", about the dependence of the Christian "worship of the time" on the Jewish "eschatological" theology of the time, and of Christian prayer on Jewish liturgical texts, and finally, about the continuity of the Jewish and Christian ritual meal and the affinity of its very spirit of merciful love (cf. the Prophet Hosea's Gesed and the Christian agapes, the spirit of which was revealed to Andrei Rublev with such fullness and depth in his "Trinity"). In this context, it is appropriate to recall the famous "Pigeon Book", which is a text about the Word (= Book), on the one hand, and, on the other, is based on a description of a ritual action. Its name, as has recently been suggested (Arkhipov 1988; 1990), is explained from the Hebrew title of the Pentateuch, sefer tôra "Book of the Law", understood as sef er tôr "Book of the Turtledove" – "Book of the Dove" (cf. the "Palestinian" flavor of the "Pigeon Book"; it may be recalled that the "Pigeon Book", as it is described, and the Torah are scrolls; the variant of the Deep Book, referring to the cf. Iranian tradition (cf. Pehl. Bundahisn, i.e., "The Book of Deepness (Fundamentals)," see especially. Such parallels, cripples, reinterpretations, and "additions" of various kinds should be expected in a number of other cases as well. Much has been written about Jewish influences in later texts, but see elsewhere. But the very fact that a number of translations in Russia were made directly from Hebrew, bypassing Greek, is extremely important, especially since the number of such examples has increased significantly in recent decades and probably has a chance to increase even more. In this respect, the Old Russian situation is not an exception, but a practice that is still not fully understood and therefore is often questioned without sufficient grounds. It is possible to assume with some reliability a single line of succession from some of the early monuments of Kievan Rus to the "Psalter of Judaizers", "The Logic of the Judaizers", "The Six Wings", "The Mystery of the Secrets" and other texts of a later period, the originals of which were written in Hebrew. Finally, it is impossible not to take into account the linguistic evidence of the interaction between Russian and Jewish culture. Arkhipov's research (not to mention the older works of Harkavy, Barats, and others) has revealed a significant and diagnostically important layer of Hebraisms in old Russian texts, where they are presented at the textual, semantic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic levels: most of the Hebraisms (not counting, as a rule, those obtained through the Greek intermediary) belong to a different time, but some of them are also present in earlier texts. However, secondary evidence can sometimes throw a ray of light into the past, and then some important earlier situation is revealed. As is known, the Hebrew vocabulary plays a very significant role both in the language of Old Russian cryptography, and later in various variants of argot (cf. gibberish letter, tary-bars, razdabars, etc. — to the Hebrew dabar "to speak", among other things, about secret speech; ikubana — a distortion of the Hebrew kawwanâ, about the inner meaning of prayer, ritual, and later — about the play of letters, words, ideas; effata, cf. Mark 7, 34, one of the names of cryptography, explained by the fact that the Hebrew word denoted a prayer for the gift of words and speech, cf. the Russian calque otvernitsa otebernitsa (according to the testimony of Isaac Massa and Richard James) to denote secret tongues, etc.). The use of Hebrew words in secret writing testifies in the opposite way to the high symbolic role of the Hebrew, to its prestige and sacredness (a well-known analogy to the use of Hebrew words in secret writing can be seen in the ritual practice of sects conventionally designated as "Jewish", sometimes it also turned to elements of the Hebrew language). The appeal to the Hebrew language has as its purpose to increase the rank of the text, its sacredness, which fully corresponds to the Old Russian ideas about the special marking of the Hebrew language. In general, the secondary, transformed, deformed, reduced, even reduced to absurdity and turned inside out, often provokes continuations, sometimes breathtakingly risky and almost boundless, in the vastness of which the meaning that refers to the original unity barely flickers. The scope — the gap between Wisdom, the Divine artist and vulgar absurdity, cheap scoffing, an appeal to undemanding taste, between Hkmh and hochma — symbolizes, as it were, the entire space and all the modes of Russian-Jewish relations that have been going on for the second millennium.

2. On the Early Russian–Jewish Literary and Textual Connections (XI–XVI Centuries)

Here it is appropriate to draw attention to the kind of literary Russian-Jewish relations that can be judged from Russian-language texts related primarily to texts written in Hebrew or, to a lesser extent, referring outside the text, but relating to certain realities of Jewish life, with a special emphasis on religious themes. This last case is represented by a very large number of texts, both translated (usually from Greek) and original. In all their fullness and variety, they constitute a kind of Summa Iudaica of the man of Ancient Russia, who was keenly and often biasedly interested in this world, especially marked for him, and evaluated and judged it according to his own standards. One part of the corresponding texts was created or translated in Russia, the other by the South Slavs, from where it came to Russia. This kind of "Jewish encyclopedia", a collection of knowledge about the Jews, their history, culture, sacred texts, religion, outstanding people, etc., was very rich both in the number of texts that make it up and in the amount of information. These "secondary" Old Russian works ("primary" should be considered those that assume the relationship "Hebrew text" to > "Russian text") included in their circle texts of "historical" (in the broad sense of the word) content: chronicles (George Amartolus, John Malalas, etc.), chronographs (cf. the so-called "Jewish Chronograph"), "Hellenic "Roman Chronicler", "Explanatory Palea" and, above all, the "Six Days" that opens it, chronicles and other texts that in one way or another contain information. drawn from more direct sources; religious texts dating back to certain parts of the Old Testament and the New Testament, liturgical books, etc.), but also non-canonical texts such as renounced books; polemical texts from the genre "Contra..." (including, of course, the "Discourse on Law and Grace"); texts from the genre of "journeys" - pilgrimages ("The Journey of Hegumen Daniel", the first and one of the best examples of this genre in Russian literature); literary and artistic works (the tales of Solomon and Kitovras, The Tale of the Destruction of Jerusalem [The History of the Jewish War], which is equally related to historical works, The Tale of the Journey of John of Novgorod to Jerusalem, etc.), etc. If we talk about later times, it is necessary to recall those texts related to the situation around the Judaizers, which were not translated from the Hebrew.

But, of course, the main attention in this connection should be attracted by those Old Russian texts that were translated directly from Hebrew in Kievan Rus in the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. On the one hand, despite some exceptions that did not make the weather, until recently the opinion prevailed, summed up years ago by V. M. Istrin: "Translated works were mainly works from Greek, and only in a very small number of Latin. In the fifteenth century, some translations from the Hebrew language made in Western Russia were added." On the other hand, it was in the last decades (from the middle of the 1950s) that a decisive turn took place in the question of the presence in Old Russian literature of direct translations from Hebrew, and valuable results were obtained, in some cases absolutely indisputable, in others inconclusive, but either very plausible or probable, or, at least, not excluding the very possibility of direct translation and requiring further research. It should be noted that even earlier, of course, the presence of many common parallel motifs and images in Old Russian and medieval Jewish (Talmudic) literature was not hidden from the attention of specialists, which acquired special significance in cases where these motifs and images were not present in the corresponding texts of Byzantine literature or when these texts themselves were unknown. N. S. Tikhonravov is credited with pointing out possible Jewish sources in connection with some of the components of the "Explanatory Palea": "The Legend of Solomon and Kitovras", "The Judgments of Solomon", "The Legend of King Adarian", "The Life and Exodus of Moses". The parable "Of the Lame Man and the Blind Man" also found Talmudic parallels" (Tikhonravov 1898). At the same time, however, none of these comparisons was brought to a truly textual level, at which it is only possible to resolve the question of the nature of translation by turning directly to linguistic data. In addition, the ignorance of specific Old Russian translations from Hebrew and the presumption that arose in connection with this (as well as with some general considerations, not to mention the practical conditions for such a direct translation – who? where? when? how?) that between the Russian and Hebrew texts there must always be an intermediate Greek text, which could have disappeared, made it extremely difficult to make progress in the study of this topic. and sometimes led to partial deviations from the initial conjectures (for example, as early as the 90s, Sobolevsky suggested that the book of Esther was translated from Hebrew, but at a later time; 10 years later, on the basis of the discovery of two other copies of Esther dating back to the fourteenth century, he was forced to assume that the text arose in the pre-Mongol period, but this assumption alone almost automatically forced him to abandon the idea of the possibility of a direct translation from Hebrew and to assume that the translation was made from the Greek; another example, because of the presence of untranslated Hebrew words in the "Legend of Solomon and Kitovras" such as the famous shamir, even with the general ancient character of the text, A. N. Veselovsky was forced to attribute it to the era of the "Judaizers" and thereby "explain" the Hebrew words, see Veselovsky 1872 (cf. also other Old Russian texts, such as "The Pigeon Book", "The Tale of Volot", etc., which, at least thematically, but not only, refer to the Hebrew topic and, probably, to Hebrew texts, cf. Mochulsky 1887; Markov 1881 and others). To date, such a radical breakthrough has been made in this area of Jewish-Russian textual parallels, which is of fundamental importance, that perhaps it is time to fear an epidemic of too hasty "positive" decisions and to return to clarifying the methods of such studies aside, to curb them. The greatest achievements in the field of establishing the range of Old Russian texts that are direct translations from Hebrew are associated with the names of N. A. Meshchersky, A. A. Alexeev, as well as A. A. Arkhipov, M. Altbauer, M. Taube, G. Lanta, and A. Y. Borisov. As a result of their research, we can talk about the emergence of a new branch of philology devoted to the study of the connections between Old Russian texts and Hebrew texts, "Judeo-Russian textual criticism."

It is expedient to recall some of the main results of these studies, because the topic of the Slavic (Russian) Jewish "cultural" neighborhood discussed here receives, perhaps, the most powerful stimulus for its development and deepening as a result of these studies, and reaches an extremely concrete and highly demonstrative level.

The "breakthrough" mentioned above occurred when Meshchersky, while studying the book of Esther, made a "strong" (and ultimately the most natural and simple) move, suggesting the ancient origin of Esther and its Jewish origin. This assumption was made possible by the combination of two correct and non-trivial choices that provided a solid basis for comparison: the Masoretic text from the Hebrew side and one of the three known translations of Esther from the English side (of the other two, one had its source in the Greek text). The essence of the heuristic construction built by Meshchersky was precisely in the simultaneous joint proof of both assumptions put forward (by the way, although the immediacy of the translation from Hebrew for Esther was not proved, it seemed more than probable to Gorsky, Nevostruev, and Evseev; moreover, Vostokov, who was the first to pay attention to the translation of Esther as early as 1842, remarked, however, without trying to prove it: "It is remarkable that the book of Esther was translated from Hebrew and, apparently, in Russia, but in a very ancient time"). Meshchersky successfully solved the problem he set, collecting arguments at different levels of comparative analysis, from the ratio of volume and content of the texts being compared (the identity of volume, division, even deviations, not to mention the content of the Masoretic textus receptus and the Old Russian text) to such linguistic "shiboleths" as proper nouns, both personal and local (cf. Ahasveros — Heb. Ahasweros in Greek: Άρταξέρξης or Άσσυέρος; Ud — Hebrew. Hud, on India and Ethiopia; Susan-grad — Heb. šušan-, not Susa, etc.; cf. also the names of the Persians and Medes, referring to Hebrew forms, not Greek, etc.). The conclusion about the dating of the proto-text to the eleventh and twelfth centuries should be considered equally reliable, and although the oldest copies are 200-250 years away from the time of the creation of the Russian text of Esther, the Old Russian basis is clearly visible in them and is proved by almost all diagnostically significant linguistic phenomena in this case. The attempt of Altbauer and Taube to revise Meshchersky's decision both in favor of the South Slavic origin and in favor of the Greek original is hardly tenable, which was convincingly shown by Alexeev.

Meshchersky, on the other hand, raised the question of the literary environment of the book of Esther and pointed out, and in a number of cases specifically analyzed, the range of texts of historical content and compilations in nature, the appearance of which on Russian soil he attributes to the eleventh and twelfth centuries and which are translations from the Hebrew. To this circle belong excerpts from the translation of the Jewish folk book "Josippon", which found their way into the Russian chronicle at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in one case, in the Academic Chronograph (the legend "Of the Three Captivities of Jerusalem") in another, in the "Hellenic and Roman Chronicler" of the so-called 2nd redaction ("On the Capture of Jerusalem by the Third Titovo") in the third (cf. now the article by Taube 1992). The Hebrew text of "Josippon" was compiled in Italy, no earlier than the second half of the tenth century, by one of the Jews living there and is a compilation chronography covering the events of world history from a Judeocentric religious point of view. Although the historical value of the book is not great, it enjoyed wide success in the Jewish environment, is often quoted in the texts of Jewish-Khazar correspondence (especially in the so-called "Cambridge Document"), and this circumstance seems to be very important in the light of the question of possible sources and impulses for the translation of this Hebrew text into Russian (perhaps it is significant to note that the lists of the Hebrew text of the book, which are very numerous, belong to the XII–XV centuries)· It is also noteworthy that the translation of Josippon belongs to the same school as the translation of Esther (it is assumed that in both cases the translator was the same person). And, finally, it is also important that the translation of Josippo from Hebrew appeared at about the same time as the translation from Greek of Josephus' History of the Jewish War. Meshchersky calls "Josippon" a kind of literary rival and competitor of "History". The literary milieu of Esther also includes the apocryphal Exodus of Moses, which was included in the explanatory book, and the Song of Songs, which has been preserved in the only copy of the sixteenth century (incidentally, the text already existed in the fifteenth century, and it was used in the work on the Vilna RCP. 262). Alexeev, who was engaged in the publication and study of the Song of Songs, later admitted that his assumption about the possible Western Russian edition of the translation of the Kievan era was unreliable, but did not recognize Taube's opinion that the translation was made in Kiev in the 15th century as motivated.

The same literary environment of Esther includes the texts in the Expository Palea that convey the haggadic legends of the Midrash and Targums. We are talking about the cycle of apocryphal legends about Solomon – about the construction of the temple (Solomon and Kitovras), about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, about the judgments of Solomon, about King Adarian, as well as the already mentioned "Exodus of Moses". These texts are represented by East Slavic copies and collections of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, as has been guessed for a long time (this possibility is also recognized by Meshchersky), they apparently reflect an ancient Hebrew source, although it seems that it is not yet known whether the construction of such a composition existed in the Talmudic writing. In any case, for these texts, the assumption of their direct translation from the Hebrew seems to be very likely, which is confirmed by a number of analyses at the linguistic level (it should be noted that from this circle of legends about Solomon there are separate texts about the wisdom of Solomon, the abduction of his wife by Kitovras by Kitovras, some parables and riddles, for which both their South Slavic origin and the Greek original are indisputable. from which they were directly translated). The very presence of lexical Hebraisms in these texts is significant, although, of course, they could have been included in the lists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as glosses (this applies not only to šamir — shamir, see above, but also to the name of the Queen of Sheba — Malkatshka, Malkatksha, Malkatoshva, a corrupt transliteration of the Hebrew teleket sebа). More indicative from the point of view of the presence of an ancient Hebrew source are cases that clarify semantic ambiguities: for example, the expression "nail bird mal" in the name of shamir (list of 1477), which caused so much perplexity, remains unclear even after Mazon's indication that the translator chose the wrong meaning of the Greek όνυξ (1. "Onyx", 2. "nail"), which is necessary in this case, is more easily explained on the basis of the Hebrew (cf. siporem šamir "diamond claw", Jeremiah 17:1, designation of a diamond point for carving and writing on stone; sipar – "bird"). Such explanations are found in other cases, and even the name Kitovras (κενταυρος) may suggest a Hebrew intermediary (cf. qintorin, plur., with the consequent well-known loss of the nasal). Finally, in connection with the range of these texts, some others are also indicated, suspected of the possibility of their translation from Hebrew (the Talmudic parable of the lame man and the blind man in Cyril of Turov, a chronological entry in the Gospel list of 1340, where the Hebrew calendar count is used; a number of examples indicating a direct acquaintance with the structure of the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch, glossing of Hebrew names in their linguistic form, the direct influence of Jewish models such as midrash on the East Slavic "Explanatory Palea", etc.). For the most significant works, see Vostokov 1842:25; Veselovsky 1880:298–300; Borisov 1987:162–167; Meshchersky 1956: 198–219; 1956a:58–68; 1958:58–72 (cf. 1958a); 1964:180–231; 1978; Alekseev 1980; 1987; 1990 and others; Altbauer 1992; Altbauer, Taube 1988:304–320; Taube 1985:203–210; 1989:146–151; 1991:113–122; 1992:365–375; 1993:84–119; Olmsted, Taube 1987:100–117; Lunt, Taube 1988:147–187; Arkhipov 1982 and others.

From the point of view of literary and textual Russian-Jewish relations, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries open a fundamentally new page in this history, associated primarily with the activity of the "Judaizers" in the direct translation of a number of key texts from Hebrew into Russian, and far beyond the boundaries of the Biblical-Talmudic circle (cf. "The Psalter of the Judaizers", "The Six Wings", "The Secret of the Secrets", "The Logic of the Judaizers" and other later texts). The history of this period and the polemics with the "Judaizers" (in the course of which, in particular, translations of anti-Judaic writings appeared (cf. the translation of Delier's book in 1505) and original texts against the "Judaizers") constitute one of the brightest pages in the history of literary and textual Russian-Jewish relations. Fortunately, it is quite well known, and a lot has been written about it. Therefore, here, perhaps, it is more important to mention the text of the Book of the Prophet Daniel, the Vilna copy of which became the subject of a special study by Arkhipov. This text is literally teeming with herbaisms at various levels and reveals the intimate features of the relationship between the Russian text and the Hebrew text from which the Russian was translated.

Both in the late case of the era of the "Judaizers" and in the early epoch of the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, everything that is still known about Russian-Jewish literary-textual ties confirms the opinion about the intensity and fruitfulness of these contacts – not only indirect, indirect, but also direct, immediate. In the latter case, these contacts presuppose in a number of examples the immediacy of personal contacts in both these epochs, and again, referring us to the theme of the Jewish ethnic element, raise the question of the purpose of these direct transfers. When it was a question of "entertaining reading and translation of the corresponding Jewish texts," one could think of the interest of only the Russian reader. When the "Psalter of the Judaizers" was translated into Russian from Hebrew and other works aimed at seducing the inexperienced Russian reader and sometimes clearly anti-Christian, one could think that only Jews and Judaism were interested in them. But both of these options are true only in general. The most important and interesting thing lies in something else, one might say, in the opposite: the Russian reader was also interested in translating Jewish religious texts (the success of the propaganda of the "Judaizers" in various strata of society is now well known), but the Jews were also interested in translations into Russian and, consequently, in the Russian reader – and not only for the spread of Judaism and the recruitment of proselytes: The Jews themselves were in great need of manuals on their own faith, and because of the shortage of Jewish texts (and partly because of the poor knowledge of the Hebrew language among the Jewish masses), they were ready to turn to Russian translations of them. Language was exchanged for essence, for content, for meaning. The Jews sacrificed language for the meaning of the text, which they preserved. The Russians preserved the language and won a new content, a new meaning. The basis of this exchange is winning, although different for different parties. And one more aspect of the problem: much was translated, undoubtedly, in close cooperation between the Judeo-Russian translation pair, each of the members of this pair became acquainted with the opposite language, and if for a Jew acquaintance with the Russian language over time (e.g., in the Kievan circumstances, not to mention the "Judaizers") was a conditio sine qua non, then for the Russian scribe contact with the Hebrew language was an important and positively marked event (cf. the legend of Polycarp of the Caves in "Kiev Patericon" about Nikita the Recluse (later Bishop of Novgorod), who knew by heart the Old Testament texts in Hebrew and even refused to read the New Testament books for a long time). The significance of Jewish-Russian contacts in the history of the two peoples cannot be doubted, as well as, one would like to think, their mutual benefit.

LITERATURE

Abaev, V. I.