As We Have Said Earlier, the Translation of Josephus' History of the Jewish War Was Made in the Era of Kievan Russia No Later Than the 11 Th Century

84 JOSEPHUS' JEWISH WAR AND ITS SLAVONIC VERSION XIV THE HEBREW JOSIPPON; DESCRIPTION; TRANSLATIONS; COMPARISON OF HEBREW AND SLAVONIC VERSIONS OF AN EPISODE FROM THE ROMANCE OF ALEXANDER; 1RACES OF HEBRAIC INFLUENCE IN THE SLAVONIC VERSION; 1RACES OF THE JOSIPPON IN OLD RUSSIAN LITERATURE. As we have said earlier, the translation of Josephus' History of the Jewish War was made in the era of Kievan Russia no later than the 11 th century. At almost the same time in Old Russian literature, its particular literary rival and competitor appeared in the form of an Old Russian version of the Hebrew book Josippon which goes back directly to the original. The Josippon is a mediaeval chronograph written in artificial, bookish Old Hebrew at a later date than is usually assumed, no earlier than the latter half of the 10th century by Jews living in Italy. It is thought that the Josippon appeared no earlier than 962, as certain of its copies contain a reference to the date of the coronation of Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, which took place in that year.139 The chronography of this work takes in events of world history from the point of view of Judaic religious exclusivity, beginning with the division of languages after the building of the Tower of Babel and ending with the capture of Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Titus in AD 70. It is divided into six separate books. Book I contains an exposition of events to the first capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar in 593 BC; Book II takes the story up to the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great, Book III relates the story of the Maccabees and their struggle against the dominion of the Seleucid emperor, Antiochus Epiphanus; Book IV consists of tales about the reigns of the Hasmonaeans and Herod; Book V relates events prior to the war of AD 66-70 and the beginning of the war in Galilee; Book VI, like Books V-VII of the History of the Jewish War includes the story of the final capture of Jerusalem by the Romans and their decisive suppression of the revolt. This work is known as the Josippon, or the book of Joseph-Ben-Gorion, as its basic sources were, evidently, the books of Josephus Flavius in their particular Latin reworking of the fourth century, attributed to an early Christian writer of the second century, Hegesippus. It is also thought that the name Josippon is a distortion of the Latinised Greek name Hegesippus. The Hebrew text of the Josippon was preserved in a multitude of copies from the 12-15th centuries; they are extremely different from each other in terms of the peculiarities of the text; the best studied of them are two recensions: the so-called Constantinopolitan, presented in Breihaupt's edition (1710), 140 and the so-called Mantuan, published by D. Ginzburg in 1908. The value of the Josippon as a source for the history of the Jewish nation deserves to be treated with scepticism and is usually not highly rated. The elucidation of historical events is embellished in legendary mode and is distinguished by fairytale features. The historian and biblical scholar, J. Wellhausen, when publishing the Arabic version of this monument, thus characterized its contents: "On every page the absence of any historical value whatsoever, even at the core of the Josippon, is revealed. The Roman data shows us how casually the author treated historical tradition. He himself has the most improbable ideas about the 'Seleucid Empire of Macedonia' and about its rulers, of 139 Kokovcov, p. XXII ff. 140 Breithaupt; .henceforth, references to the text of the Josippon are given only according to this edition and the abbreviation: Breithaupt, page number. INTRODUCTION 85 the 'Roman Empire' and its 'three hundred and twenty rulers', about the Roman emperor, Augustus, the 'king of kings', and about his commander Antonius. No less remarkable is his information concerning Jewish relations. He has no idea at all about them and therefore is not embarrassed by contradictions. Being fairly summed up in these terms, the author is completely alien to the era he describes, and he writes in the style of the biblical chroniclers. For that reason, it would be an extremely incautious act for someone to extract this or that detail from such an absurd work and to declare it worthy of credence, unless it is possible to corroborate it by reference to another source." 141 In spite of its historical unreliability, or perhaps precisely because of this and its folksy details, the Josippon was extremely widely read among Jews living in various countries of the East and West. This work is abundantly quoted in records of Jewish K.hazar correspondence, and especially frequently in the so-called Cambridge Document. 142 In the Middle Ages it was not only Jews who were interested in the Josippon. An Arabic translation of this book, published in 1897 by Wellhausen, has been preserved. There are reports of early Czech and Polish translations of this book. 143 The Josippon was translated into Russian as early as the ancient period. Among the texts of stories in the Old Russian chronographs there are fairly extensive pieces from the individual books of that work. But they were not collected, identified and recognised as parts of a single whole and in the main went unpublished. 144 One of the fragments of the translation which we are studying was preserved by the so-called 'Third' redaction of the Tale of Bygone Years in the entry for 1110. This provides an important basis for dating the whole work. In giving an account of the history of the Jewish nation in the post-biblical period, the author of the Josippon introduces into the fabric of his account, along with other tales, a Hebrew version of the universally known Romance of Alexander the Great, the Alexandriad of Pseudo-Callisthenes. It occupies the greater part of the second book of the Josippon. The Romance ofAlexander originated, in all likelihood, in Egypt, in the Hellenistic period among the Greeks who inhabited that country, and was wrongly ascribed to one of Alexander the Great' s contemporaries - Callisthenes. 145 Dozens of versions of this popular work exist in the cultures of many nations of Europe and Asia, amongst which the Hebrew version was also fairly widely represented. The latter also existed in a separate form (the so-called book of Alexander Makdon), and in the structure of the second book of the Josippon. 146 Essentially the Hebrew version is based on the renowned Latin adaptation of Pseudo Callisthenes - the book On Battles (De proeliis) of Liutprand. However, the Hebrew version makes the episode of Alexander of Macedonia's visit to Jerusalem during his campaign against Darius one of the central features of its account. This episode, absent in most of the manuscripts of the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes, derives from the famous passage in chp. Vill of Book XI of the Jewish Antiquities of Joseph Flavius where he was the first to subject the legend he was transmitting to literary treatment. 147 In the same Greek manuscripts, where this episode is given, it reads according 141 Wellhausen, p. 47 142 Kokovcov, p. XXVII ff. 143 Estreicher, vol. XVIII, pp. 640-642 144 See: Mescerskij 1956, pp. 58-68 145 See: Struve, pp. 131-146; Ausfeld 146 G ark avz . 147 The Jewish Antiquities, Books VIII and IX, translated into Russian by G. Genkel' .

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