Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe

Judaism and Jewish Influences in Russian Spiritual Christianity

Judaism and Jewish Influences in Russian Spiritual Christianity The Practices of the Early Dukhobors and the Prophecies of Maksim Rudometkin J. Eugene Clay The relationship between Judaism and Christianity on the eastern European plain has been complex, fraught with violence and conflict on the one hand, and, on the other, a creative and fruitful cultural exchange. This relationship has a long history: the rulers of the Turkic Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, and, according to the Russian chronicles, Jewish missionaries sought to convert the pagan Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev as early as 987.1 Ultimately, however, Vladimir chose to accept baptism and become a Christian,adoptingtheEasternOrthodoxritethathisambassadorshadfound to be so beautiful when they visited Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Despite Vladimir’s decision, Judaism continued to exercise an important influence on eastern Christianity. First, Russian Christianity inherited a rich theological tradition in which the fathers had engaged with—and sometimes adopted— Jewish interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures. For example, Christian efforts to find the doctrine of the Trinity in Genesis—the subject of Andrei Rublev’s famous 1405 OldTestamentTrinity icon—developed arguments that 310 J. Eugene Clay the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE) had advanced in the first century.2 Second, Christians also adopted and adapted Jewish apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings. The extensive literature about Adam and Eve, for example, probably originated in a Hellenized Jewish milieu, but Christians used this Jewish framework to compose their own works about the primal couple, reflecting Christian concepts about humanity, sin, Satan, and salvation.3 Third, although largely absent from Russia until the late eighteenth century, Jews loomed large in the Christian imagination.4 If spiritual verses (dukhovnye stikhi) about the crucifixion pictured the Jews (zhidy) as the enemies of Christ, Jews also provided an example of a “textual community” that remained faithful to its scriptures. For one group of Russian religious dissenters, the Spiritual Christians, Judaism played an especially complex and significant role. The Spiritual Christians, who first appear in the historical record in Russia’s black-earth provinces in the 1760s, represented the second largest tradition of religious dissent from the Orthodox Church after the Old Believers, who, a century earlier, had refused to accept the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow (r. 1652–58). While the Old Believers, who grew to approximately ten million by 1914, regarded themselves as true Orthodox Christians who had remained faithful to the unreformed church and its liturgy, the Spiritual Christians, who may have numbered two million by 1914, consciously rejected both the Orthodox church and its traditions.5 Unlike the Old Believers , they rejected the very principle of the Orthodox hierarchy and sacraments . On the basis of their reading of the Old Testament, the Spiritual Christians were also iconoclasts who denied the power and authority of holy images. Never a monolithic movement, Spiritual Christianity quickly split into many competing denominations. Although Spiritual Christianity initially arose without any direct Jewish influence, Jews and Spiritual Christians shared the common practice of serious scriptural study. There were very few Jews in the Russian empire before 1772, and there is no indication of direct contact between Jews and the early Spiritual Christians. But through their emphasis on reading the Bible and especially the Old Testament, the first Spiritual Christians adopted elements of the Mosaic law, including iconoclasm and the prohibition against the consumption of pork. These early similarities with Judaism—and their common opposition to the state church—made Spiritual Christianity open to further developments that brought them closer to Judaism. Most dramatically, in the late eighteenth century, the so-called Subbotniks or Sabbatarians—ethnic Russians from the central and southern provinces—even turned away from Judaism and Jewish Influences in Russian Spiritual Christianity 311 the fundamental Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the messiahship of Jesus to embrace the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. As the work of Aleksandr L’vov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Panchenko, Sergey Shtyrkov, and Nicholas Breyfogle demonstrate, these Russian sabbatarians developed strong communities that survived the severe persecution of both the imperial and Soviet governments.6 Although the Subbotniks did not, as a rule, follow the Talmud, some of them took the next step and began following the practices of different Jewish communities, both talmudic and non-talmudic, even as they retained their separate ethnic identity. In the religious census of 1912, the Department of Spiritual Affairs of...