5. Ancient Rus and the Great Steppe, Gumilev

IV. The wandering super-ethnos; a superb look at the formation of the Jews and the Christians, also focusing on Bible adaptations, and leaving off with the Khazars.

[This is another section that moves fast and is chock-full of details.]

Just last week a lot of people have subscribed to our library. I THANK YOU. I think you must be interested in Russian history, without a western bias. Most of our works are pre-modern history, so there is nothing about the cold war, the Soviets. or the conflicts of the last century. I never even mention MARX.

Our current upload is in the category of history. Then the Index has a lot of other and varying Index categories, then going through Ethnogenesis, Methodology of Archeology, and finally getting to HISTORY at the numbers 4. - 5. - 6. & 7.

I pledge to remake the Index into a more intuitive organization.

Where to Start reading? If not with this upload, perhaps go to section 7. where the books are condensed, and shorter to read, (until, and if, you become captivated with Gumilev's writing style). Read some shortened versions of Ethnogenesis too.

Also please let me give note; This site is comprised of books and their authors, without much personal commentary. The books speak for themselves, and the commentary is yours to make. When I want to speak for myself, express my opinion, or my findings, I am a guest author on another site:

https://whynotthink.substack.com/ (The name was originally “why not think differently”, but then was shortened.) There are 6 authors who currently can post there, and all their thoughts are interesting. My posts are up to 12 L., (always with an "L" in the numbering, ‘librarian’). My latest posts were about the Chinese peasantry, under Mao and before. (They come out of our Chinese Index section). Before I did some posts on anti-Semitism, and others in March and February.

You can see the way I think about things.

Let’s continue with Ancient RUS and the Great Steppe: (Don’t forget to consult the notes at the end.)

18. THROUGH THE BOUNDARIES OF THE AGES.

In the first millennium of the new era there was another super-ethnos, without territory, without centralized power, without an army... But there was one. The Jews, scattered from Germany to Iran, lived without losing their internal unity, despite their external diversity. Among them were bearers of different cultural traditions, different ideals, different stereotypes of behavior. Oriental Jews were not like the Byzantine or German Jews, but we do not call them an ethnos, but a super-ethnos. And in the ninth century it was time for them to say their-word. And because this "word" was spoken in Khazaria, and had a significant impact on the fate of the Khazars, then we will have to trace how and why it could happen. And to do this, we will have to delve into antiquity and trace the fate of the eastern branch of the Jewish community and its connection to Iran.

The ethnic history of the Jews was winding and varied, but the transformations resulting from the passionate impulses modified them no less than all other ethnic groups. Even the appearance of culture and religious dogmas, phenomena far more stable than ethnic stereotypes, were changing, but the ethnonym was preserved, which misled ignorant people and even scientists.

The legendary information of the first books of the Bible [1] tells vaguely about the unclear connections of the ancestors of the Jews with Sumer, and then with Egypt, but this has nothing to do with our topic. The historically recorded Habiru tribes in the 14th century B.C. began a conquest, extremely violent, of the defenseless and peaceful Canaan, but encountered resistance from the Philistines, one of the "people of the sea", apparently the ancient Achaeans or Hittites. The war with the Canaanites and the Philistines lasted until the 10th century B.C. (the acmatic phase of ethnogenesis).

Only King David (1004-965) achieved decisive success and took Jerusalem, where his son Solomon built a temple. But after Solomon's death, his kingdom split in two (nadolom), and in 586 BC Jerusalem was taken by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who took prisoners to Babylon. Thus began the famous dispersion (diaspora), the inertial phase of ethnogenesis.

In Babylon the Jews took root, and when, in 539 BC, (47 years), Cyrus allowed them to return to Palestine. Cyrus allowed them to return to their homeland, but few took advantage of this permission. The Babylonian colony of Jews was richer and more populous than the Palestinian colony.

From Babylon the Jews spread throughout Mesopotamia and Susiana,[2] where they came into close contact with the Persians. There is even an assumption that the famous anti-dev inscription of Xerxes, who forbade worshipping the tribal gods - devs, is reflected in the Bible, in the book "Esther", containing the description of how wise Mordoheus, thanks to the charm of his niece Esther, who captivated the king, managed to organize a pogrom of the Macedonians [3] and other rival Jews, struggling for influence on the Persian king of kings [4].

Mordecai's success, however, proved to be ephemeral. The Persians grew cold toward the Jews, and they cheerfully welcomed Alexander the Great, taking advantage of the fact that neither the king nor his Hellenic friends had ever confronted the Jews. When, however, the Greeks and Jews found themselves within a single Seleucid state, a bloody war broke out between them, ending in the victory of the Jews, who established a kingdom in Palestine with the Hasmonean dynasty. Gradually the Palestinian Jews and the Jews of the Diaspora began to separate from each other, "forming, as it were, two nations. And their fates were different.

Before Alexander the Great's campaign, the ethnoses of Hellas and the Near East lived separately. The cultures of Egypt and Babylon were quietly withering away under the aegis of the Persian king. Though Babylon still stood, there were hardly any Babylonians left. Though the Nile still deposited sludge on the fields of the Egyptians, only graves remained of the ancient greatness apart from the Fellahs (farmers), and a bunch of priests. Besides Persians, Sogdians, Bactrians and peoples of Asia Minor, some identity was preserved by Jews in Palestine and Deylemites in Elburz and, perhaps, by robbers of Cilicia and Parthians.

But after the Macedonian conquest, everything got mixed up and a civilization called Hellenism emerged. There is no need to characterize this epoch, for it has already been done repeatedly. It is sufficient for us to grasp its significance for ethnogenesis. Under the Seleucid and Ptolemaic powers were not ethnos-units, with their original structures and peculiar stereotypes of behavior, but territories: beautiful cities, where people spoke Greek, and surrounding villas, where Greek was understood. Both obeyed the authorities, for this gave them peace of mind. They had no feeling for their rulers, however. The Macedonians were to the population, strangers and unpleasant people. The internal ties were destroyed by the emergence of a common market and a common Hellenic civilization. Ethnoses were dissolved in it. The only exception was the Jews, who regained their independence under the leadership of the Maccabees. But we are not talking about them now. In the 1st century BC. Rome had brought Syria and Egypt under its rule. There was no resistance, and nothing changed, except that the Macedonian officials were replaced by Italian ones. Tax oppression increased a little, but the Roman order provided a boost to the economy, and one thing made up for the other. The cities grew and overflowed with sub-passionarians who existed in this fertile region at the expense of surplus agriculture, for nature, not raped by machinery, can feed not only the workers, but also the freeloaders. But when the passionary impulse passed, a new process of ethnogenesis began.

In the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire a variety of God-seekers emerged. To enumerate the ideas put forward at that time would lead us away from our topic. Suffice it to say that the Christian community won and spread everywhere, drawing in the vast majority of the emerging passionarians. There was no need for weak passionate people in Christian communities. About such people it was said: "I know your works. You are neither cold nor hot: oh, IF you were cold or hot; but as you are lukewarm, I will cast you out of my mouth" (Apocalypse III, 15-16). On this principle the first consortia of a new type of passionarians were created. By the middle of the second century they merged into a special sub-ethnos, or "ethnos according to Christ".

The main enemy of the new population was not the Roman authorities, who confused Christians with Jews, but the urban subpassionarians, (rabble) who fought against the passionate and spiritual growth by writing denunciations; so numerous that Trajan by special edict forbade their consideration. At this time Christians were persecuted under the law forbidding any social organizations, such as the cobblers' union or the fire-fighting society, rather than for confessing faith in the crucified God.

In this phase, the ethnos behaved like a child in the womb. Being essentially a new person, it was not conscious of this itself. The first apostles regarded themselves as Galileans. They sensed their difference from their tribesmen, but attributed this to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them. But this fact alone was enough to cause the Jews to stop regarding them as members of their own ethnos. As early as AD 35 they had already stoned the archdeacon of the Christian community, Stephen. From this time on, the enmity between Jews and Christians steadily worsened.

The activities of the Apostle Paul attracted a large number of people of different ethnicities to the Christian community, the consortium. The first generation of Christians, feeling their community, remembered their origins. For example, the centurion Cornelius knew he was Roman, while Dionysius the Areopagite thought he was Hellenic. But the community of destiny united the members of Christian consortia, especially during the time of persecution. Especially the brutal murder of Christians by the Jewish insurgents of Bar Kochba (Son of the Star) in 135 AD had a special effect on the consolidation of Christians. After that the traditional ties between the new ethnic entity and the old, but reformed by supplementing the ancient tradition; were severed. The survivors of the Roman repression adopted in 219 the Mishnah, the interpretation of the tradition compiled in Tiberias by Rabbi Judah, which became the basis of the Talmud. From here came the teachings of rabbinism, hostile to Christianity. And the Babylonian communities, made up of different ethnic substrata, were sensitive to Hellenic and Persian philosophy. Gnostic teachings, including the Kabbalah, emerged in their midst. Thus the Galilean teaching of Christ and Diaspora Judaism finally diverged, giving birth to two super-ethnoses with different dominants and different destinies.

Unlike the Jews, the pagans offered no ideological resistance to the early Christians. Belief in the ancient tribal patron gods was undermined by the development of philosophy, which had torn the most intellectual part of the Hellenes and Romans away from the cult. In the age of the Principate the religion of Jupiter became a respected tradition, an expression of loyalty to the government, and thereby lost the element of the mystical connection between deity and man. The death blow to ancient religion was dealt by the emperors themselves, who demanded divine worship of their statues in the temples. After all, no one could honestly believe that the drunkard Vitellius, the lecherous Othon, the madman Gaius Caesar Caligula and the like were gods. And since they had to be sacrificed to on an equal footing with Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Venus, even those were no longer taken seriously. Most of the educated society became indifferent and atheistic, while the lower classes confined their spiritual life to superstition.

The persecution of Christians for the first 150 years was conducted either by denunciations from the Jews or by Trajan's law forbidding all societies. Trajan treated the Christians without any interest, even forbade to accept denunciations, and commanded to execute them only on their own personal declaration of belonging to the Christian community. Therefore, Christianity spread throughout the empire, drawing in those who were hungry and thirsty for the truth, i.e., passionarians. And since the passionaries were clustered in the region of the passionate push: in Syria, Asia Minor and Palestine, it was the Roman East that became fertile ground for the seeds of the Christian faith.

19. CONFESSION - THE SYMBOL OF ETHNOGENESIS

But now the incubation period was over. In 155 the Christians made themselves known in the Dispute. Justin the Philosopher rejected belief in pagan gods, condemned animal sacrifices, and formulated a doctrine of Christianity that differed from both Judaism and the philosophical systems of Hellas. The Christian consortia merged into a sub-ethnos, a phenomenon with which the imperial authorities had to reckon. From the end of the second to the beginning of the fourth century, Christians were demanded a sign of political loyalty - recognition of the emperor as a god and sacrifice on his altar. Christians guaranteed political loyalty, but categorically rejected ideological loyalty. They refused to recognize a centurion or a senator, a schemer, a lecher, a murderer, as their god, although they were ready to serve him as a human ruler. The authorities were unhappy with this half-heartedness and went along with the wishes of the masses, the urban mob who demanded the extermination of Christians. But the trouble was that the Christians were the most faithful, honest and brave legionaries, while the pagans were the most deceitful, willful and unstable soldiers in battle, often betraying their leaders. And this was due to a natural division: into the Christian communities went people of a new psychological mood, and in paganism there remained those who essentially lost the old faith and did not acquire a new one, learning the principle of maximum subservience instead of religion.

In 313 AD. Constantine, who had defeated his opponent Maxentius with the help of the Christians, gave an edict in Milan that put Christianity in a privileged position. And then the city mob declared itself Christian and began to exterminate the pagan philosophers with equal fury. This went on all through the fourth century.

Christianity and paganism fought each other in a very strange way. Neither the ✓Neoplatonist philosophers-Jamplichus, Libanius, Hypatia, Hemerius, Themistius, nor the Stoics, nor ✓the Mithraist emperor Julian the Apostate, nor ✓the "church fathers" - Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian; neither ✓the learned Christians - Origen, Marcion, nor ✓the Gnostics - Basilides and Valentine - sullied themselves with vile crimes against those who thought otherwise. But the Roman, Antiochian, and Alexandrian ✓mobs, ✓soldierly emperors, ✓demagogues, ✓illiterate monks, and ✓corrupt officials took part in the murders first of Christians, and then of pagan philosophers. It is easy to see that both the lower classes of the townspeople and the leaders of the mercenary soldiers were least interested in matters of spiritual life. These demoralized descendants, not even of the ancient Romans and Hellenes, but of the hybridized population of the Hellenistic trade and craft centers, were equally diligent in destroying the sprouts of new spiritual life and traces of ancient culture. Constantine's heirs, who were very unsteady on the throne, considered it a good thing to meet the desires of the masses and their leaders. Constantine's son, Constantius, had the pagans stripped of their possessions and put to death for practicing sacrifices. He did, however, send Christians into hard exile for rejecting Arius' teachings. But after 381 Theodosius began to send the Arians into such exile. Gratian in 382 AD ordered the altar of victory, the symbol of Roman power, to be taken out of the Senate Curia. The last attempt to save paganism in 392-394 was suppressed by Theodosius, who executed the leaders of the revolt, Eugenius and Arbogastus.

The Western Church received a very heavy inheritance from the early period. The rural populations of Italy, Spain and Gaul, unaffected by the passionate push, treated the preaching of any faith with stunning indifference. And they defended the old religion just as lukewarmly, so pagan cults in Western Europe survived until the VII c. But in the cities, where the population was newcomers from the East, passions boiled and Christianity took extreme forms. The genetic drift of passionarity generated a population of martyrs and fanatics that secured the throne of Constantine, who managed to harness this terrible force.

In the flames of the acmatic phase of passionarity burned all the slag that Byzantium inherited from antiquity. The sub-passionary mobs of cities died out. Pagan outskirts were taken over by Germans (in the west), Slavs (in the Balkan Peninsula) and Muslims - a new ethnos that emerged in Arabia as a result of another passionate push and with amazing speed went through the whole phase of the rise, up to the formation of super-ethnos.

By the fourth century, Christianity as an ideology surpassed the boundaries of the ethnos. The Goths, Burgundians, Sveves, Vandals in Europe, Armenians and Georgians in Asia, Abyssinians in Africa became Christians. These ethnic groups never knew Roman authority, Roman culture, Roman discipline. Therefore, they did not form a single ethnos with the Romans, but remained on their own. And here played a decisive role in the fragmentation of the Christian ethnos into two currents: the Nicene and the Arian. The Germans embraced Christianity with the doctrine of Arius, while in the empire the doctrine of Athanasius, i.e. the Nicene doctrine, prevailed. Having triumphed at the Council of Constantinople in 381, it united its supporters into the ethnic entity that we call Byzantine. From this date the Byzantine ethnos entered its acmatic phase. In the fourth and sixth centuries it expanded, took over Transcaucasia and Ireland, destroyed the remnants of ancient culture, and fragmented into a number of subethnoses, each of which put forward its own confession, often without sufficient dogmatic grounds. In the 7th century, it lost half of its territory because of internal strife, and finally in the 9th century it passed into the inertial phase of ethnogenesis.

20. BACK TO JUDEA

The separation from the homeland does not pass without a trace. The Jews who returned to Palestine from Babylon did not find any rapport with the local population of the Jewish cult, with the Samaritans, nor with the descendants of the ancient Canaanites (Phoenicians), who inhabited Galilee, the region around Lake Tiberias (Genisaret),[6] nor with the Arabs who came from Napata, the Idumeans, who settled in the former land of the Philistines, in the vicinity of Gaza [7]. However, the Galileans and Idumeans found themselves drawn to the impulse of the Maccabees' revolt in 166 B.C. and fought with them against the Macedonians. The Jews, feeling an urgent need to replenish the army, converted both of those peoples to Judaism, reasoning that they had allegedly been Jews in ancient times, but, unlike the Samaritans, had lost their faith during the Seleucid domination. [8] Therefore, during the Hasmonean dynasty (152-37 B.C.) the incorporated ethnic groups were considered Jews, but as if second-class[9]. They responded with hostility, which turned into bloodshed. Herod the Great (37-4 BCE) in spite of all his services to his country and people "only found love and affection in Samaria and Edom, but not among the people of Israel," for he was a stranger. And he himself said that he "felt an attraction to the Greeks in the same degree that he harbored an aversion to the Jews." He even feared his own children by a Jewish woman as Jews. This went on until a passionate explosion gave the inhabitants of Palestine the energy they needed to assert themselves. Then the Idumeans seized power in Palestine, driving out the last Hasmoneans, and Galilee became the birthplace of the Incarnate Word and a new religion, not only alien, but opposite to that form of Judaism which took shape in contact with the Hellenes and ingratiation with the Romans, what T. Mommsen called neo-Judaism"[10].

It was different in Galilee. Everything Hellenic and Roman was hated there. This is where the first Sicarii (daggers) came from - terrorists who stabbed foreigners and apostates to death. And the Galilean Jesus Christ said to the Jews: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, hidden tombs" (Luke II, 37) and "Your father is the devil; and you want to do the lusts of your father. He was a murderer of men from the beginning and did not stand in the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks his own, for he is a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44). Such categorical descriptions are indicative of the incompatibility between Christian and Jewish behavioral patterns,[11] for in the 1st century BCE Jews were more likely to serve mammon (wealth) than the Temple in Jerusalem.

It was not difficult to get money, but to do so it was necessary to join the common market of the Hellenistic world and take part in its intrigues and squabbles. There were people to trade with, but they had to learn Greek, adopt a Hellenistic education, adopt manners, change their names ... in short, to change their behavioral patterns. These Hellenized Jews were called Sadducees, and not only held the economy and the highest administrative positions in the Hasmonean kingdom in their hands, but also represented it beyond its borders. In Alexandria, where the Greeks made up 50% of the population, the Jews were 40% and everyone else, including the Egyptians) 10%. It was the same in Cyprus and in the cities of Asia Minor. In other words, the Sadducee Jews entered Hellenistic civilization and gradually dissolved into it.

It tore them away from the guardians of tradition, the Pharisees (purush - pure), and from the masses of the people. The latter were particularly disgusted that their rulers had become like their worst enemies - the Hellenes. Therefore, the division of the ethnic field widened to the point where Herod's power was held by mercenary warriors and the popular prophets cursed him, a situation characteristic of the obscuration phase. And in the 1st century A.D. the ethnos disintegrated and died.

Palestinian Jews, preserving a fair share of the indomitability and intolerance of their ancestors, also quarreled with the Romans, but the latter did it twice, in 70 and 132 AD, so that Palestine became unsettled and Arabs repopulated it[12]. Those Jews who escaped the horrors of war to the western fringes of the empire found peace and security there. Moreover, Judaism began to spread in Rome itself, through women who had lost their traditional morals during the empire. This caused the Romans to adopt a negative attitude toward the Jews, and by analogy that was carried over to the Christians.

When the memory of the bloodshed faded, there was still a Jewish population in the big cities of the Roman Empire, in the Greek colonies of Panticapaeum, Gorgippia and Tanais, in Armenia [13] and in the oases of Arabia. However, they were already new Jews, affected by the passionary impulse of the 1st century and, therefore, of the same civic age as the Byzantines and Slavs. They maintained active relations with their Iranian co-religionists, who enjoyed the patronage of the Parthian kings, the enemies of Rome. As a consequence, both communities exchanged ideas and people incessantly until the end of the fifth century[14].

And how they needed it! Persia was poor but favored the Jews; the Eastern Roman Empire was rich, but the Greeks competed successfully with the Jews. In those centuries, the center of gravity of inter-ethnic conflicts was shifted to the realm of ideology. The Bible had already been translated into Greek and was no longer a mystery. It was read diligently, but the reaction of the readers varied. Some stood up for the serpent, who induced Eve to acquire the knowledge of good and evil, and called the god who wanted to leave people in ignorance an evil demon (Ophites). Others declared matter, and consequently the whole visible world, non-existent, i.e. simply a hindrance to the perfection of the soul, the reality of which they affirmed (Gnostics). Others denied the continuity of the New Testament and the Old Testament, considering the ancient Jewish religion to be the worship of Satan (Marcion and his school). The fourth, the Manicheans, saw the world as an area of struggle between light and darkness, but while Christians recognized the world and life as the creation of God, the Manicheans held the opposite view: the world is darkness that has ensnared the particles of light (the soul), and must be destroyed.

In the West, dualism did not hold. The pagan Plotinus and the Christian Origen created slender, monistic concepts which captured the minds of third-century thinkers, while the Gnostic followers closed themselves off in their disdain for the common people, and their ideas stopped influencing the broad strata of Roman society and the ethnic groups that comprised it. In Iran, Gnostic Manichaeism encountered a slender system of Zoroastrianism, where life was blessed and affirmed as a creation of Ormuzd, and death and destruction (the annihilation of matter) were considered the work of Ahriman. Mani paid with his life for the consistency of his teachings. There seemed to be no place in the world for life-negating Gnostic systems, but there was.

At the borders of the great super-ethnoses: Hellenism and Iran, Iran and Turan, Turan and India, where the small, though independent principalities of the Arabs, Caucasians, and Hephthalites nested, the followers of Gnostic ideas found shelter and security. And the Jews, who traded Palestine for Mesopotamia, were among them. Constrained by the rigid regulations of the official religion, they responded sensitively to the development of the world's creative thought and passed off their considerations as ancient traditions - the Kabbalah, thus giving them a place next to the rigid system of the Talmud. The Kabbalah included monistic systems close to Neo-Platonism, dualistic systems inherited from the Yeseis, and the craving for new ideas that emerged now and then in Iran and Byzantium. And since there were many passionate people in the Babylonian community, from the 3rd to the 6th century it was bursting with ideas and took an active part in events of importance for our theme.

21. INCOMPATIBILITY

The creative explosion and the ensuing development of Jewish philosophical thought led to the creation of the Kabbalah, in which the tendency toward the philosophical and ritual reproduction of the pre-Jews orgiastic cults became evident. But with the Christian Gnostics, Neo-Judaism did not have even a shadow of agreement. Either the blood of the first Christian martyrs cried out, like that of Archdeacon Stephen who was stoned in 35 AD, and the victims of the Bar Kokhba fanatics, or the Jews who were repelled by the Hellenistic audacity of thought, which was expressed in strict consistency, where every logically perfect conclusion was seen to be true as a directly observable fact. Episodes from the Old Testament frightened Christian neophytes away from traditional Judaism, and contact between Christianity and Talmudism was out of the question. Therefore, in the second century there was a tendency among Christians to distinguish between the teachings of the Old Testament and the New Testament and to justify it theologically. It followed logically that Yahweh, the god of Moses, was not at all the same Eloi to whom the crucified Christ called.

[Good description below.]

The difference between the god of the Old Testament and the evangelical God was formulated by the Christian Gnostics in the following way: "The first forbids men to eat of the tree of life, and the second promises to give the victorious one "the hidden manna" (Apocalypse 2:17). The first exhorts to the mixing of the sexes and to multiplication to the boundaries of the oikumen, while the second forbids even one sinful look at a woman. The first promises land as a reward, the second promises heaven. The first prescribes circumcision and the killing of the defeated, while the second forbids both. The first curses the earth, the second blesses it. The first repents of having created man, the second does not change his sympathies. The first prescribes vengeance, the second prescribes forgiveness for the penitent. The first demands animal sacrifices, the second abhors them. The first promises the Jews dominion over the world, while the second forbids dominion over others. The first allows the Jews usury, while the second forbids the appropriation of unearned money (war booty at the time was seen as payment for valor and risk). In the Old Testament a dark cloud and a fiery tornado, in the New Testament an impregnable light; the Old Testament forbids touching the ark of the covenant or even approaching it, i.e. the principles of religion are a mystery to the mass of believers; in the New Testament it calls all to themselves. In the Old Testament there is a curse on him who hangs on a tree, i.e., to be executed; in the New Testament there is the death of Christ on the cross and resurrection. In the Old Testament it is the unbearable yoke of the law, but in the New Testament it is the good and easy burden of Christ."[15] This treatise is attributed to Marcion, a Christian Gnostic of the mid-2nd century.

Marcion's view of the cosmos was clarified by his disciple Apelles (died c. 180 AD). A single beginning, the unborn god, created two main angels. One, "famous and glorious," created the world; the other, "fiery," is hostile to god and the world. Consequently, the world, as the creation of the good angel, is benign, but subject to the blows of the evil, "fiery" one identified with Yahweh of the Old Testament[16].

This teaching, which affirms the presence of metaphysical Evil that threatens culture and nature (the biosphere), is absent from the Old Testament. There, sin is considered a violation of the "law," i.e., the injunction, as an act of disobedience. Satan is mentioned only in the Book of Job, but even here he is neither a rival nor an enemy of God, but his collaborator. God and Satan together carry out a cruel experiment on the defenseless and innocent Job and then threaten to clamp his mouth shut. But in the Gospel, Christ refuses to fellowship with the devil, saying, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" Thus, it appears that the meaning of the Old Testament and the meaning of the New Testament are opposite. (WOW)

But if so, why did the Christian church introduce the Old Testament into its sacred books? To solve this question, it is necessary to review the balance of power in the late second century and in the third and fourth centuries.

The main enemy of the young Christian ethnos was the neo-Judaism of the Talmud and the Kabbalah, but the polemic between Christians and Jews was conducted on the factual material of the Bible. Both sides argued that their teachings were closer to the ancient and therefore more correct (as Justin the Philosopher wrote about in "Conversation with Tryphon the Jew"). In fact, both sides were wrong, for both Christianity and Talmudism were new phenomena, connected with the initial phases of their ethnogenesis. But the aberration of proximity caused them also to appeal to Scripture as an indisputable argument. And if so, this Scripture had to be studied.

In the third century a new partner came into play, Manichaeism. The Manichaean concept is essentially atheistic, i.e. it puts the elements of "light" and "darkness" in the place of the personal god and the devil, as a result of the struggle of which the material world arose and exists. But the Manicheans and Christians had an opposite view of the world. The Manicheans considered the material world (biosphere) to be evil, and its creator to be an evil demon. In contrast to Christianity, who regarded "creating light" (divine energy), as light, and darkness, (the abyss or vacuum). For the struggle against culture and against the biosphere itself [17] this was quite enough.

Then in 180-190 the Christian thought, in order to resist the atheistic anti-systems of Gnosticism, adopted the Old Testament in the version of "Seventy Interpreters" made in the II century B.C. This "covenant" was in the II century A.D. "old" not only for Christians, but also for the Jews themselves, the vast majority of whom adopted the Talmud, which practically supplanted the religious ideas of antiquity.

And at the end of the third century, Diocletian's brutal persecution and, on the other hand, the propaganda of Manichaeism posed challenges to the church that were more pressing than the struggle against ancient Judaism. Moreover, they wanted to see in the Jewish tradition an ally against the common enemy, and in monotheism (genotheism) a rudiment of monotheism, as if a premonition of Christianity. In a strange way this tendency coexisted with the development of the doctrine of the Trinity and the Logos, which in its philosophical origins went back to Neoplatonism, which was as hostile to Gnosticism as Church Christianity.

For its time such a position was appropriate. We must not, therefore, condemn the third-century apologists and the fourth-century "church fathers" for favoring the historical passages and poetic masterpieces of the Greek translation of the Bible. These brilliant philologists and philosophers could not even imagine that a thousand years from now there would be people who wanted to resurrect stoning of prophets, sacrificing innocent animals in their place, killing or "shooting" foreigners and the doctrine of predestination which absolves people of moral responsibility for any crime. All of the above, existing in the civilized world, is associated with the Old Testament worldview, but in the V-VIII centuries no scholarly husband recognized such ugliness.

The ugliness took on a different appearance. This will be the subject of our attention.

22. ANOTHER "CENTENNIAL WAR."

The war of France with England (1339-1449) is called a hundred years' war, but equally long and even more fierce was the series of revolts in Arabia and Syria, at a high degree of passionalism of the Byzantine ethnos and the final disappearance of Hellenism. These excesses were a continuation of each other and lasted 110 years, from 517 to 627.

"Two swords cannot be put into one sheath," says an old Persian proverb. Jews and Christians were equally passionate. The incompatibility described above manifested itself not only in philosophy, but also in the sentiments of the masses. The Jewish population of South Palestine was destroyed in the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt, but it survived in Samaria because the Samaritans did not participate in the Jewish movement. The Jews at that time did not consider the Samaritans as "their own.

However, the Jews and Samaritans were unanimous with regard to the Greek population in Syria and Palestine. They did not want Greeks living in Palestine, nor did they want the Constantinople government to collect taxes and legionaries to graze unclean animals - pigs - on holy ground.

Since Zinon was a very unpopular emperor and the situation of the empire very difficult, the Samaritans ascended Mount Garizim in 484, set up a fortified camp there and made it the center of a movement against Byzantium. The rebels took Naples (Syrian) and Caesarea, with no mercy on Christians, forcing them to join the government-organized bands of volunteers, who defeated the Samaritans in 486.

The repression after the suppression of the revolt was moderate. The wealthy Samaritans had their wealth confiscated and a Christian church was built on Mount Garizim. But the war did not end there, only its theater was moved to the south, to the Arabian Peninsula, where the hand of the Byzantine basileus did not extend to.

In the fifth and sixth centuries there was no unified Arab ethnos. The northern nomads were called "Ishmaelites," as the descendants of Abraham's son Ishmael, driven out into the desert by his father at the request of Sarah, who gave birth in her old age to Isaac, the legendary ancestor of the Jews. The southern settled tribes of Yemen and Hadramawt were called the Ioktanites or "people of Saba,"[18] and the inhabitants of the south coast since the 1st century AD. - The people of the south coast were called "Himyar".[19]

Yemen was rightly called "Happy Arabia" because this richly vegetated country controlled the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, through which the maritime trade of Byzantium with India ran. This is why the Jews from Palestine and Syria flocked here in the 4th and 6th centuries. They achieved power here in 517 when Zu-Nuwas became king of Himyar.

Yusuf Zu-Nuwas was the son of a noble Himyarite of the Yazan family and a Jewish slave girl. The latter provided him with an opportunity to become a member of the Jewish community and the former with the right to the throne. And he seized power in early 517, killing the legitimate king of Himyar Maadikarib. a Christian, apparently of the Monophysite confession[20]. The first thing Zu-Nuwas did was to rob the Christian merchants: Byzantine, North Arabian and Aksumian (Ethiopian) merchants in his possession, and began persecuting the Christians, of whom there were many in sixth-century Arabia.

At the request of the Arabian Christians, the king of Axum sent an army which forced Zu-Nuwas to flee. After the victory, most of the Aksumites departed for their homeland, while a small force of 500-600 horsemen remained to watch, in the city of Zafars, the capital of Himyar. Zu-Nuwas gathered his supporters, surrounded Zafar, and invited the Ethiopians to leave the city, promising them free passage to the homeland. The simple-minded Ethiopians believed Zu-Nuwas, left the fortress... and were killed. Some were stabbed to death, others locked in the church and burned with it. The burned church was rebuilt into a synagogue. Violence grew by leaps and bounds.

The next year - 518 - Zu-Nuwas took Nagran and carried out mass executions of Christians. And all over the country churches were burned and Christians were exterminated. Until then there had been no religious persecution in Arabia[21].

The Christian bishops, both monophysite and orthodox, launched a widespread agitation against Zu-Nuwas. Funeral services were held for the executed everywhere. Even the Persians strongly condemned Zu-Nuwas, and only the Nestorian bishop of Iran, Sila, "wished to please the Gentiles and Jews," but perhaps this is a late slander[22]. The Christians in pagan Arabia were not opposed to one another. It was a single super-ethnos. And they all suffered from Zu-Nuwas.

Even Iran was restored against Zu-Nuwas, for the Persians had long carried on a profitable trade with Aksum, and now it had ceased. Nevertheless, no one took active military action. Iran was at the mercy of the Mazdakites, Byzantium was far away, and the king of Axum was at war in Africa with the surrounding tribes. It was not until 524 that Ethiopian troops were prepared for a landing operation - a march into Arabia to save the Arabs.

It was essentially a crusade. The Ethiopian army's march was timed to coincide with the Feast of the Trinity (May 18, 525) and was accompanied by a prayer service in the cathedral of the capital Axum[23]. The South Arabian emigrants were sent separately. Their task was to sneak behind enemy lines and raise the population against the tyrant. This they succeeded. Zu-Nuwas, with the forces that remained loyal to him, tried to throw a landing force into the sea, but was defeated. The Judeo-Himyarite army scattered, and Zu-Nuwas was killed. It turned out to be the end. The Ethiopians roamed the country, killing Jews and destroying synagogues, meeting no resistance[24].

The atrocities, however, were the usual rampages of the warriors who dispersed throughout the country and their Arabian allies. The Jews in Yemen survived to our time, and were partly resettled in Ethiopia, and the Falasha are probably their descendants[25]. The Ethiopians showed a tolerance of which the opponents, who had lost South Arabia but tried to get their revenge in Palestine, had no semblance.

Hardly had the news of the destruction of the Judeo-Himyar kingdom reached the borders of the Byzantine Empire, in Scythopolis the Samaritans attacked the Christians and burned down part of the city. Justinian blamed the archon for connivance and for some reason executed him, not the rebels. This, however, did not stop the rebellion. In the spring of 529 the Jews, pagans and Manichaeans began to burn churches, estates and killed priests and "nobles"[26].

However, it was not only the rich Christians who were in trouble. The leader of the rebellion Julian, who was declared "Tsar", not only destroyed all the Christian churches in the occupied cities, not only killed the bishop Sammon and ordered to cut the priests to pieces to burn them together with the relics kept in the churches, but also, having arranged the horse-races on the occasion of the victory, instead of rewarding the winner, ordered to behead him, since he found out that he was a Christian.

Only the help of the Arabian sheikhs allowed the Byzantines to put down the rebellion, during which 20 thousand insurgents died. The same number of captive women and children were taken away by the Arabs. And how many Christians perished - no one knows!

The repression must still be considered mild, for in 555 the revolt was repeated, but this time it was suppressed unaided. "And there was great fear in all the eastern provinces."[27]

These uprisings and coups should be regarded as a great war, which, had it been in the twentieth century, would have been called a national liberation war. The spontaneity of outbursts and ferocity, reminiscent of the Albigoyan wars and the Camisar rebellion in Provence, France are striking in it. And yet these uprisings cannot be regarded as futile. The leaders of the Jews hoped for help from Iran, which was at war with Byzantium and tried to regain Syria and Palestine in order to restore the kingdom of Cyrus the Great. But for some reason, the Persians supported neither Zu-Nuwas nor the Samaritan leaders, although they subsequently drove the Aksumites out of Arabia and temporarily took possession of Syria and even Egypt. But here and there they had the passive support of the Jews, not the active support. Isn't that strange?

Obviously, we must look at Persia in the fifth and twelfth centuries, otherwise the complexity of the situation would remain unresolved. And without sorting out these complexities, the tragedy that took place on the Volga in the 10th century will remain unclear. So let us direct the caravan of our attention from Syria and Arabia to Babylonia and Iran.

23. In the PERS of the fifth and twelfth centuries.

The Romans, even at the time of their greatest military power, could not conquer Dworech. The local population actively helped the Parthians and then the Persians. For their loyalty, the Shahs of Iran favored the Jews, allowing them to establish colonies in Ctesiphon and Ispahani (Isfahan). Similar favors were enjoyed by the Nestorians of Mesopotamia and the Monophysites of Armenia for their opposition to the orthodox Byzantine king. Zoroastrianism, like Judaism, was a genotheistic religion, i.e. all Persians had to follow the teachings of the magi and worship fire, but no foreigners were to be admitted to the cult. The conversion of Persians to Christianity was punishable by death, which sometimes caused complications that did not arise with the Jews, who, like the Persians, did not admit foreigners into their midst. Since this consistent approach ruled out assimilation, a Judeo-Syro-Armenian-Persian chimera emerged in Western Iran and Mesopotamia, with the addition of Parthian nobles and Arabs of Bahrain, who worshipped the star gods and served the Shah of Iran for money. Inside this bizarre mosaic there was no peace. The nobles and magicians tried to limit the Shah's power without attempting the throne, for central authority was needed for protection against external enemies. The Shah tried to suppress the arbitrariness of the nobles, but without bloodshed, because the nobles made up the mounted army. The Jews were on the side of the crown and, with their characteristic zeal, exceeded the measure of zeal, which did them no good.

In 491, Iran was struck by a drought, the resultant famine, and a plague of locusts. Shah Kavad opened the state granaries with grain, but this did not prevent popular unrest. And then one of the nobles, Mazdak, proposed to the Shah his concept of saving the state. It was dualistic, but in it, unlike Manichaeism, the "kingdom of light" was endowed with the qualities of will and reason, and the "kingdom of darkness" with the quality of an irrational element. Hence it followed that the injustice existing in the world was a consequence of irrationality, and it could be corrected by means of reason: by introducing equality, equating the goods (i.e., by confiscating the property of the rich and dividing it among the Mazdakites) and... Executions of the "supporters of evil," i.e., those who disagreed with Mazdak.

The system bribed with impeccable logic, and the Shah supported Mazdak. But how was it possible to distinguish the supporters of light from the defenders of darkness? Only by their personal statement! And then a lie[28] came into play. The Mazdakites, taking power in their hands, unleashed mass terror, and the Shah became in their hands a puppet. In 496 Kawad fled from his ministers to the Ephtalites, returned with an army and took the throne, but the Mazdakites continued to occupy positions around the throne and massacre unwanted people, both outsiders and each other. It was not until 529 (33 years) that King Khosroi gathered an army of men offended by the Mazdakites, drew the Saks to his side, and hanged Mazdak and buried his supporters alive in the ground. The bitterness of the parties was so great that the surviving Mazdakites had to flee to the Caucasus, for neither the Hephthalites in the east nor the Byzantines in the west would accept them.

Could the numerous Jews of Dworech and Isfahan have remained indifferent to the events taking place around them? Certainly they took a lively part in them, but, as always, they were divided. The orthodox Talmudists were disgusted by the Mazdakites, the freethinking Kabbalists were amiable. Within the Jewish community of Iran there was a struggle as intense and even bloody as that of the great power itself[29]. The triumph of the Mazdakites threatened the Jewish-Orthodox with doom, and they emigrated to Byzantium. There they were received sourly, but it was better than death.

In 529, when the massacre of the Mazdakites took place in Iran, the Jews who had joined them had a bad time as well. The exarch of the Jewish community of Iran, Mar Zutra, who collaborated with the Mazdakites, was hanged, as were all those who fell into the hands of Khosroi Nushirvan, who had assumed power while his father, Kawad, was still alive. The surviving Mazdakites fled to the Caucasus to lose themselves among the Christian population of Midia-Atropatene (present-day Azerbaijan). They succeeded, as the Christians had an extremely negative attitude towards the Persian fire-worshippers, and sheltered the fugitives from Iran.

Jews associated with the Mazdaqite movement also fled to the Caucasus, but away from the furious Persians. And they found themselves in the wide plain between Terek and Sulak, began to graze cattle there, avoiding conflicts with their neighbors and not strictly observing the traditional rites. However, they sacredly celebrated the Sabbath and performed the rite of circumcision[30].

Let us return to the fate of the orthodox Jews, for it is they who will play the leading role in the subsequent era. The Orthodox Church in Byzantium during the period of the Great Councils (5th century) had a favorable attitude towards Judaism. When the emigration of the Jews from Iran intensified and activated the Byzantine Jewish community, there began a period of not so much persecution, but state restrictions on the freedom of the Jewish cult. Justinian's edict of 546 forbade the Jews to celebrate the Passover and eat matzoh if the Jewish Passover occurred during Holy Week. In 553, Jews were forbidden to "use... oral tradition."[31] In short, the Jews were sought to be turned into second-class citizens (uiferiores, quasi, infames, turpes),[32] which led to a revival of Iranophile sentiments in Byzantine Jewry. The occasion for repaying their humiliation presented itself at the beginning of the seventh century.

In 602 soldiers assassinated the emperor Mauricius and enthroned the fierce tyrant Phocas. Shahanshah Khosroi Parviz started the war under the pretext of revenge for the deceased, who was his adopted father. In fact, this war was aimed to expel the Greeks from Asia and Egypt, i.e. to restore the Achaemenid Empire. The Jews sided with the Persians. They caused turmoil in the rear of the Greeks, and managed to secure the patronage of the Greek government and turn its wrath against the Eastern Christians - Monophysites and Nestorians,[33] which was to the advantage of the Persians, because the sympathies of the local population, after the guarding expeditions from Constantinople, went over to their side. Thus the Persians advanced as far as the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

The worst happened in 615 in Jerusalem, where, after the surrender of the city, the Persians took prisoners

62,000 to 67,000 people[34]. Unable to ferry live goods across the Syrian desert without heavy losses, the Persian warriors willingly sold off slaves and slave girls. "The Jews, because of their enmity, bought them cheaply and killed them,"[35] writes in 1234 a Syrian anonymous, i.e. a man with no personal interest and hence no predilection. There he also reports that the Jews "were taken away from Jerusalem", i.e. simply returned to their ancestral homeland, Mesopotamia. Here, after the conclusion of peace in 629, they persuaded the Persian garrison to defend Edessa against the Greeks, which was to be returned to Byzantium under the terms of the peace treaty. Thus they have provided to themselves impunity, having sent to emperor Heraclius the parimentalist which has begged to the tribesmen forgiveness, and Persian soldiers were lost at hands of Byzantines[36].

The Byzantine government either did not see or did not want to see the real balance of power. Heraclius dreamed of reuniting Monophysitism with Orthodoxy. To this end he proposed a compromise, the doctrine of Monothelitism, according to which the incarnate Word has two bodies - divine and human - and one will - divine. This doctrine was accepted neither by the Greeks, nor by the Syrians nor Egyptians, nor by the Nestorians of Persia, nor by the Pope. This doctrine found its supporters only in the mountains of Lebanon, but even there they were very few, for the Lebanese, who were equally unfriendly to Greeks and Syrians, were a relic ethnos.

Against this background of general alienation Heraclius retained his sympathy for the Jews and even helped them greatly[37]. The Western Jews, who penetrated the banks of the Rhine in the Roman era, suffered greatly from the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, but on the banks of the Rhone and Garonne they lived quietly and richly. The Merovingians had no sympathy for the Jews, and in 629 King Dagobert decided to expel them from his domain. But the Emperor Heraclius intervened, and the expulsion did not take place[38].

What guided Heraclius is unclear. Maybe he paid attention to the fact that bloody clashes had already started in Arabia between Jewish communities and supporters of the new prophet Muhammad, and maybe there were motives we do not know. In any case, the deal was at the expense of the Christian nations of the Middle East, with either the Greeks or the Persians losing and the Jews only winning.

Such an openly treasonous position aroused bitterness against the Jews among the Syriac and Arabian Semites, so it is difficult to call it anti-Semitism. The result was an agreement reached in 637 between Bishop Sophronius and the Caliph Omar. The bishop surrendered Jerusalem to the caliph so that "the Jews would not live in Jerusalem,"[39] whereupon Omar ordered a mosque to be built on the site of Solomon's temple.

24. In the 7th century Arabs.

The Jews did not get along with the Muslims much more categorically than they did not with the Christians. The first conflicts occurred as early as Medina, with the prophet himself. The Jews were defeated in street battles, left Arabia and settled in Palestine, near the Lake of Genesaret, because that country was then under Persian rule. Then some of them went to Iran with the retreating Persians, fearing retaliation by the Syrian Christians. By 650, however, both fell under the Arab yoke. The Persians took it rather easily, for they embraced Islam, but the Jews were disgusted by the apostasy. They found another way out - Shi'ism as a way of fragmenting the Muslim community[40].

A certain Abdullah ibn-Saba, a Jew who converted to Islam, in 653 put forward the doctrine, at first sight true, that before the end of the world the prophet Mohammed would return to the world, and that in the meantime he should be replaced by his assistant in life, that is, Ali and his descendants. Here lay the seed not only of Ali's claim to the throne at the time, but also of later Shi'ism,[41] which was better inculcated in the Persians than in the Arabs. Thus was created the ideological basis for the civil wars that caused the relatively rapid disintegration of the caliphate.

No, we will not recount here the history of the many rebellions and suppressions, murders and betrayals, games of the mind and madness of human passions; the victims of this war were Ali (slain in 661) and his son Hussein (fallen in battle in 680), abandoned by friends and associates. But those, "repenting", rebelled again and were defeated again in 690, which was followed by another series of executions.

This is when the Jews left the unhappy Persia. They lived in this country for 1200 years, enjoying the patronage of the laws and the sympathetic support of the crown princes. But when the laws of Iran were replaced by Sharia, and the Shahs by appointed Emirs (Commissioners), the Jews again turned in search of the "Promised Land". They themselves imagined this migration as follows: "And it was in the summer of 4450 (i.e., 690), and the fighting between the Ishmaelites and the Persians increased at that time, and the Persians were smitten by them (the Arabs), and they fell at their feet, and many Jews fled from the country of Paras as from a sword, and they went from tribe to tribe, from state to another nation and came to the land of Russia and Ashkenazi and Sweden, and found many Jews there ..."[42].

This text shows a lot. The country of Russia was already vital in VII century; in Germany (Ashkenaz) and Sweden, still pagan, there are Jewish colonies, but Khazaria is not in the list, although in 737 the Arab conqueror supposedly forced "the Persian fire-worshippers, Khazars, who worshipped the calf, and some who obeyed the law of Musa" to accept Islam"[43]. In reality it was only the wish of Mervan II, which remained without consequences. And in 690 the Khazars, led by the Turkites by birth, the princes of the royal family of Ashina, who became the khans of Khazaria, smashed Transcaucasia and kept Derbent until 693. How could the Jews not see such a strong power? - Only by not seeing it!

So the way of the Jewish immigrants from Iran did not pass through the North Caucasian steppes, which at that time were soaked with Bulgarian and Alanian blood, but through Asia Minor and the Black Sea to the mouth of the Dnieper and Russia, and from there to the lands where were already colonies of the Western branch of the Jews, who remained in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.

But if so, who in Khazaria "performed the law of Musa"? Obviously, those Jews who fled to the Caucasus with the Mazdakites. They remembered very well the bloody clashes within the Jewish community of Iran in 690, and with good reason feared their countrymen and refused them a shelter. But their descendants in the 8th century did otherwise, as the Mazdakite tragedy was forgotten by the descendants of its participants.

25. In the Greeks of the eighth century.

So, the Umayyads of Syria turned out to be enemies of both branches of the Jews: the Mazdakite and the orthodox. The first were allies of the Khazars, and the latter found refuge among Christians... This balance of power gives us the right to conclude that during the battle of Constantinople in 717-718, when Leo the Isaurus burned the Arab squadron with "Greek fire" and drove back the land army worn-out with hunger from the walls of the capital, the Jews fought on the side of the Christians.

The forces of the Arabs were constrained on all fronts. In Spain in 718 the rebellious Christians formed the kingdom of Asturias. In Central Asia the Turks reached an agreement with China, made peace with Tibet, an ally of the Caliphate, and supported the rebellion of the Sogdians

The Khazars, on the other hand, forced the Arabs to make peace with the Arabians. The Khazars forced the Arab army to retreat and transferred the military action to Transcaucasia.

In 723 Emperor Leo III Isaurus issued a decree forcibly baptizing all Jews within the Byzantine Empire. This decree was issued after the victory over the Arabs and a year before the struggle against the veneration of icons began. Why did he need it?

There is no answer to this question in the sources, so we have to look for the meaning of the decree on the basis of the general situation. The Christians of Asia Minor, as well as the Monophysites and Nestorians, were opponents of the veneration of icons and enemies of the Arabs. Did Leo the Isaurus not want to increase the number of his supporters by counting the Jews among the Christians, in order to give them the right to participate in the future reform? This is probably the most probable interpretation, since the ensuing persecution did not fall on the Jews, who had remained faithful, but on the Orthodox. Conversely, one of the caliph's officials, John Damascene-Mansur, wrote a denunciation of the iconoclasts under the patronage of Umayyad Hisham.

This decree is thought to have caused the emigration of Jews from Byzantium to Khazaria, but it is not known whether it was enforced. Even if so, the emigration went to Khazaria, at that time an ally of Byzantium. And since the initiative to war with the Arabs was taken by Bulan, it is possible that Lev Isaur created the conditions for the transfer of the combat-ready ethnos to that part of the front, where it was needed. This is roughly what the Byzantine government did with the Mardaites of Lebanon: they were taken out of Syria and placed in the garrisons of Asia Minor to make use of their experience in fighting the Muslims.

However, the Jews were not so much thinking about the war against Islam as about themselves and their relatives. Just as in the 17th century the Jews persecuted in the Spanish possessions found refuge in the Protestant Netherlands, in the 8th century they took advantage of the Khazars' hospitality and mastered the "Caspian Netherlands", and the similarity was supplemented by the fact that Itil (city) became an entrepot on two caravan routes: from Iran to Biarmiya (the Great Perm)[45] and from China to Provence[46].

Having such a base, one could forget about friendship with Byzantium. And there was much to quarrel with the Jews and the Greeks about. The Greeks traded better than the Jews. So the Jews began to prefer the Arabs to them.

The testimony to the rupture between Byzantium and the Jewish diaspora is unequivocal, and its date is remarkable - against the background of world history it is particularly weighty[47]: "The ruler of Constantinople at the time of Harun-ar-Rashid (786-809) expelled from his dominions all the Jews living there, who consequently went to the country of the Khazars, where they found men of reason, but steeped in error (pagans. - L. G.), therefore the Jews offered them their religion, which the Khazars found better than their former religion, and accepted it."[48] This text, firstly, confirms our hypothesis that the Iconoclast emperors did not baptize Jews, otherwise there would be no one to expel, and secondly, that this persecution of Jews coincided with the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) and the subsequent period of dominance of the Greeks over the Minor Asians and Jews, bordering on the latter. According to the logic of the events, it was in the last years of the eighth century that the Greeks became interested in getting rid of the Jews, because their antipathy to the Arabs was replaced by sympathy after the caliph's throne passed from the Umayyads to the Abbasids, who were surrounded by Persian advisers and renewed the traditions of Sassanid Iran.

But the Baghdad caliphs could, and wanted to, see the Jews as only second-class subjects. It was convenient for them to sell Christian captives as slaves, which was profitable for the Jews, but unpromising. Power and domination over the people of the Caliphate was unattainable for them, because the passionarity of the Arabs and the Persians was higher than that of the Jews. Therefore, the Jews began to look for a new country ... and found it in Khazarin.

NOTES

[1] The Bible as a historical source has been criticized, establishing that even the Pentateuch was addressed to two different deities: Eloim, "the Only" (pl. from "Eloi"), and Yahweh, manifested in fire tornadoes (See: Reder D.G. History of the Ancient World. M., 1970, p. 172). So, this ethnos was in the beginning composite. The Jews, having become a monolithic ethnos, represented an anthropological diversity. The descendants of the Chaldean Urs were of the Sumerian type: short, stocky, with reddish hair and thin lips. The Negro admixture came from being in Egypt. The Semites are tall, slender, with a straight nose and narrow face, the result of mixing with the ancient Arabs, the Chaldeans. Most Jews, on the other hand, are of the Armenoid type that prevailed in Canaan, Syria, and Asia Minor, precisely the type that is now considered Jewish. This racial diversity points only to the complexity of the process of Jewish ethnogenesis, but has no bearing on ethnic diagnosis, for ethnos and race are notions of different frames of reference.

[2] See: Tyumenev A.I. The Jews in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Pg., 1922. С. 63.

[3] Macedonia was a part of the Persian power and 490-465 B.C., and during this brief period its natives served the king Artaxerxes.

[4] See: Tyumenev A.I. op. cit.

[5] See Ibid. С. 216.

[6] See: Strabo. Geography in 17 books.L.1964.P.704.

[7] See ibid. С. 703.

[8] Toynbee A. Hellenism. Oxford. 1959. P. 191.

[9] See: Mommsen T. History of Rome. VOL.V. M.,1949.P.452.

[10] See there.ws.P.441-442.

[11] The Jews' enmity to the "Galileans", i.e. Christians, was used by Julian the Apostate, a friend of the Jews.

[12] See: Mommsen T. Op. cit. T.V. С.487.

[13] See: Berlin I. Historical destinies of the Jewish people on the territory of the Russian state. Pg. 1919. С. 10.

[14] Against this background an updated Jewish doctrine was created. In the 1st century two versions of the Talmud, the Jerusalem and Babylonian, were compiled, and in the 2nd-3rd centuries the Kabbalah, i.e. "the doctrine received by tradition," arose. According to the Kabbalah, God, "bored with loneliness," decided to create equals. The world and people are his emanation; their purpose is to improve to the level of Deity, with the reincarnation of souls. God does not help them, for "help is shameful bread" - a handout. They themselves must attain perfection (see: Llorente X.A. A Critical History of the Spanish Inquisition. Т. 11.М..1936. Note Z. P.535- 536).

[15] Dollinger. Geschichle der gnostischen-manichaischen Lecten im fruher Mittelalter.Leipzig,1980.C.I.S.146-l47; quoted from: Arseniev I. Op. cit.

[16] See: Ibid.P. 117.

[17] See: Gumilev L.H. Ethnogenesis and biosphere of the Earth. Л., 1989.

[18] See: Muller A. History of Islam. VOL.1 P.24~28.

[19] See: Ibid. С. 28.

[20] See: Kobyschanov U.M. North-Eastern Africa in the early medieval world. М., 1980. С. 15-17.

[21] See: Ibid. С. 25.

[22] See ibid. С. 27.

[23] See ibid. С. 45.

[24] See ibid. С. 48.

[25] See ibid. С. 49-50.

[26] See: History of Byzantium. Т. 1. М., 1967. С. 276-277.

[27] Ibid. С. 278.

[28] "Their inner - may God curse them! - The words are opposite to the deeds" (Nizam al-Mulk.Siaset-nameh.P.188. Footnote 339).

[29] See: Solodukho Y.A. Mazdak's Movement and Revolt of Jewish population of Iran in the first half of the VI century AD / / Vestnik of ancient history. 1940. № 3-4 С. 131-145.

[30] A description of the life of this branch of the Jews see: Garkavi A.Ya.Tales of Jewish writers about Khazars and Khazar kingdom. SPb, 1874. С. 17; Cambridge anonymous considers them to be the Jews of the tribe of Simon, who forgot the faith of their ancestors, see: Kokovtsov P.K. Jewish-Khazar correspondence in the 10th century. L., 1932. С.25.

[31] Berlin I. Ibid, p. 76.

[32] See Ibid. С. 76.

[33] See: Pigulevskaya N.V. Byzantia and Iran at the turn of VI and VII centuries. Moscow, L, 1946, p. 183 -- 185; Kulakovsky U.K. To criticize Theophanos' stories about the last year of Phokas reign //Byzantine times. Т. 21 (1-2). SPb. 1914. С. 1-14.

[34] See: Pigulevskaya N.V. op. cit.

[35] Ibid. С. 263.

[36] See: Ibid. С. 270.

[37] See Tyumenev A.I. op. cit. p. 276.

[38] See Ibid: P.241-243.

[39] Pigulevskaya N.V. Op. cit. P 285.

[40] Shi'at-Ali - the party of Aliyah, or "partisans.

[41] See: Muller A. op. cit. С. 332.

[42] Berlin I. op. cit. p. 78-79. The text is attributed to the famous chronicler and physician Joseph b. Ihoshua Ga-Kogenes. Jehoshua Ha-Kogen who lived in the 16th century, but named earlier manuscripts in his possession.

[43] I. Berlin believes that it was this event that forced Jews to leave Khazaria and move to the West (see Ibid. P. 79).

[44] This decree is mentioned in the chronicles Theophanes (ed. Boppae, 1, 617) and Kedren (ed. Boppae, 1, 793); see: Berlin I. op. cit. 76.

[45] See: Henning R. The Unknown Lands. VOL.II. М ,1961. С. 212.

[46] Needham J. Science and Civilization of China. III. Cambridge,1959.P.681-682.

[47] This account attributed to the XIII century author Ibn al-Asir was preserved by Dimashka (Cosmographie de Dimaschqui. Copenhagen, 1874. P. 380) and was compared with the Masudi account by D.L.Khvolson (Collection of articles on Jewish history and literature. Kn. 1. Vol. 1. St. Petersburg, 1866. С. 152), for her refutation see: Berlin I, op.cit. p.77-78.

[48] There is huge literature on the conversion of the Khazars to the Judean faith. The latest consolidated studies. See: Artamonov M.I. History of Khazars, pp. 262-283; Kocstler Arthur. The Thirteenth Tribe - The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. London, 1976. P. 58-82. Our interpretation proposed below is independent of the preceding ones and, in our opinion, does not illuminate the subject sufficiently.

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