It’s hard to say how this book reads in Hebrew, but in Russian it turned out to be both funny and profound at the same time. The author clearly and photographically accurately shows us the underside of the Talmud, its essence. Amazing things await the reader: immersion in the rules of the Talmudic game, the intellectual ingenuity of the co-authors of the main Jewish text and their medieval worldview, dependence on Hellenistic culture and xenophobic attempts to get rid of it. By and large, this is a satire. Israeli researcher and public figure Yaron Yadan wrote a tough and objective book that will not lose its relevance decades later. In one old Jewish joke, an elderly rabbi says to a young Pole tailor: “Do you know what the Talmud is? This is when two people crawl out of a chimney and one of them is clean!” This wise and funny book has nothing to do with either Zionism or anti-Semitism. This is a fragment of the fundamental work of the remarkable Israeli Talmud scholar and public figure Yaron Yadan. He managed to dissect the Talmud with surgical precision, demonstrate to us its internal structure, and show it in the form in which it was formed by the 6th–7th centuries of the new era. Everything is there - the rules of the Talmudic game, the intellectual ingenuity of numerous co-authors of the main Jewish text, the wretchedness of their worldview, their dependence on Hellenistic culture, and xenophobic attempts to get rid of this dependence. The book of Yaron Yadan is destined to live for centuries. From now on - also in Russian