The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  in Toledo, and nowhere was it more bitterly opposed than in Russia. The Russian and Spanish hierarchies were the most adamant within the Eastern and Western churches respectively in opposing the reconciliation of the churches at Florence in 1437-9. The leading Spanish spokesman at Florence was, in fact, a relative of the famed inquisitor, Torquemada.

  Amidst the rapid expansion of Russian power under Ivan III, the Russian hierarchy appears to have found both a challenge to its authority-and an answer to that challenge-coming from distant Spain. Whether or not the search for "Judaizers" in the late fifteenth century was prompted by a confusion between the early Russian word for "Jew" (Evreianin) and that for "Spaniard" (Iverianin), as has been recently suggested,63 there seems little doubt that many of the proscribed texts used by these alleged heretics (such as the Logic of Moses Maimonides) did in fact come from Spain. Looking for a way of dealing with this influx of foreign rationalism, the Archbishop of Novgorod wrote admiringly to the Metropolitan of Moscow in 1490 about Ferdinand of Spain: "Look at the firmness which the Latins display. The ambassador of Caesar has told me about the way in which the king of Spain cleansed (ochistil) his land. I have sent you a memorandum of these conversations."64 Thus began the Russian fascination with, and partial imitation of, the Spanish Inquisition-and the use of the word "cleansing" for ideological purges.65 There seems little doubt that the subsequent purge of "Judaizers" was undertaken "not on the model of the Second Rome, but of the First."66 The techniques of ritual investigation, flagellation, and burning of heretics were previously unknown to the Russian Church and vigorously opposed by the traditionalist trans-Volga elders. Although the Muscovite purges were directed against Roman Catholics, often with special fury, the weapons used were those of the Inquisition that had flourished within that church.

  A strange love-hate relationship continued to exist between these two proud, passionate, and superstitious peoples-each ruled by an improbable folklore of military heroism; each animated by strong traditions of veneration for local saints; each preserving down to modern times a rich musical tradition of primitive atonal folk lament; each destined to be a breeding ground for revolutionary anarchism and the site of a civil war with profound international implications in the twentieth century.

  As national self-consciousness was stimulated by the Napoleonic invasion, Russians came to feel a new sense of community with Spain. The leader of Russian partisan activities against Napoleon in 1812 drew inspiration from the Spanish resistance of 1808-9: the original guerrilla, or "little war."67 The Decembrist reformers of the post-war period also drew inspira-

  tion from the patriotic catechisms and constitutional proposals of their Spanish counterparts.68

  Ortega ? Gasset, one of the most perceptive of modern Spaniards, saw a strange affinity between "Russia and Spain, the two extremities of the great diagonal of Europe . . . alike in being the two 'pueblo' races, races where the common people predominate." In Spain no less than in Russia the "cultivated minority . . . trembles" before the people, and "has never been able to saturate the gigantic popular plasma with its organizing influence. Hence the protoplasmic, amorphous, persistently primitive aspect of Russian existence."69 If less "protoplasmic," Spain was equally frustrated in its quest for political liberty; and "the two extremities" of Europe developed dreams of total liberation, which drove the cultivated minority to poetry, anarchy, and revolution.

  Modern Russians felt a certain fascination with Spanish passion and spontaneity as a spiritual alternative to the dehumanized formality of Western Europe. They idealized the picaresque roguery of Lazarillo de Tormes, and the implausible gallantry of Don Quixote, in the book Dostoevsky considered "the last and greatest word of human thought."70 One Russian critic attributed his preference for Spanish over Italian literature to the Spaniards' greater freedom from the confinements of classical antiquity.71 Even Tur-genev, the most classical of the great Russian novelists, preferred Calderon's dramas to those of Shakespeare.72 Russians loved not just the world-weary beauty and sense of honor that pervaded the works of Calderon, but also the fantastic settings and ironic perspectives provided by a man for whom "life is a dream" and history "is all foreshadowings." The malaise of the Russian intelligentsia in the twilight of Imperial Russia is not unhke that of the great dramatist who lived in the afterglow of the golden age of Imperial Spain:

  The cause lies within my breast Where the heart is so large That it fears-not without reason- To find the world too narrow for it.73

  Spain was the only foreign country in which Glinka, the father of Russian national music, felt at home. He gathered musical themes on his Spanish travels, and considered Russian and Spanish music "the only instinctive musics" in Europe, with their integration of Oriental motifs and ability to portray suffering.74 The first Western operatic performance in Russia had been the work of a Spaniard with a suitably passionate title- Force of Love and Hate-in 1736.75 The setting was Spanish for the only

  important Western opera to have its premier in Russia (Verdi's Force of Destiny), the one that subsequently became perhaps the most popular (Bizet's Carmen), and one of the most consistently popular Western plays (Schiller's Don Carlos)-even though these works were written in Italian, French, and German respectively. The most famous scene of Dostoevsky's greatest novel, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Kara-mazov, was set in Seville at the time of the Inquisition. Fascination turned to repulsion in the twentieth century, as the Spanish and Russian revolutions took opposite turns. Participation in the Spanish Civil War became almost a guarantee of liquidation in the Stalinist purges of the late thirties and the forties. But Communist incursions in Latin America in the late fifties and the sixties brought not only political pleasure to the Soviet leaders, but also a curious popular undertone of envious admiration for the naive idealism of the Cuban Revolution-perhaps reflecting in some ways the older but equally distant and romantic appeal of the Hispanic world.

  One of the most fascinating points of resemblance between Russia and Spain is the obscure but important role played by Jews in the development of each culture. Although Jewish influence is more difficult to trace in Russia than in Spain, there are repeated hints of a shadowy Jewish presence in Russian history-from the first formation of a Slavonic alphabet with its Hebrew-derived letters "ts" and "sh" to the philo-Semitism of dissident intellectuals in the post-Stalin era.'6

  From the point of view of Jewish history, there is a certain continuity in the fact that the Russian attack on "Judaizing" followed closely the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and accompanied the transfer of the cultural center of world Jewry from the southwestern to the northeastern periphery of Europe: from Spain to Poland and Western Russia.

  The anti-Jewish fervor that was built into the Muscovite ideology in the sixteenth century represents in part the eastward migration of a Western attitude and in part classical peasant antipathy to the intellectual and commercial activities of the city. However, this attitude bespeaks an inner similarity between the ancient claims of Israel and the new pretensions of Muscovy. A newly proclaimed chosen people felt hostility toward an older pretender to this title. The failures and frustrations which might logically have caused the Muscovites to question their special status led them psychologically to project inner uncertainty into external fury against those with a rival claim to divine favor.

  Like ancient Israel, medieval Muscovy gave a prophetic interpretation to bondage and humiliation, believing in God's special concern for their destiny and developing messianic expectations of deliverance as the basis of national solidarity. Like Israel, Muscovy was more a religious civilization

  than a political order. All of life was hedged with religious regulations and rituals. Like Old Testament prophets, ascetic monks and wandering fools saw Russia as the suffering servant of God and called its people to repentance. Philotheus of Pskov addressed the Tsar as "Noah in the ark, saved from the flood."77 Moscow was referred to as "Jerusalem" and "the New Israel"78 as well as
the "third Rome." Its savior, Dmitry Donskoy, was likened to Moses and Gideon; its princes, to Saul and David.79 Like the early Jews, the Muscovites dated their calendar from creation, celebrated their New Year's Day in September,80 wore beards, and had elaborate regulations about the preparation and eating of meat. The Muscovites no less than the Jews looked for the righteous remnant that would survive both persecution and temptation to bring deliverance to God's chosen people.

  Some of this prophetic passion and Old Testament terminology was a continuation of Byzantine tradition and a reasonable facsimile of medieval Western practice. However, there also appear to have been direct and indirect Jewish influences, even though they have never been systematically assessed. There had been much contact during the Kievan period with the Jewish Khazar kingdom of the Caucasus, and even where Judaism was decried-as in Ilarion of Kiev's sermon "On Law and Grace"-the prince of Kiev was given the Khazar title kagan.81 Early Russian literature shows extensive borrowing not only from the Old Testament and Apocrypha but also from works of later Jewish history, such as the History of the Judaic War. Direct translations were made from the Hebrew as well as the Greek in eleventh-century Kiev;82 and by the twelfth century, Kiev had become-in the words of one meticulous student of Jewish history-"a center of Jewish studies."83 It seems likely that some Jewish elements were absorbed by Muscovy after the sudden and still mysterious disappearance of the Khazars in the twelfth century.84 There are traces of influence in surviving place names and clear indications of it in the thirteenth century, when there suddenly appeared Russian compilations of Jewish chronicles and a Russian glossary of Hebrew words.83 The elusive and neglected area of early Russian music also offer some hints of Jewish influence. As in Spain, the Jews in Russia appear to have been important intermediaries in bringing Oriental motifs into folk music.86 Some of the divergences of Russian from Byzantine church cantillation may also be attributable to Jewish influence.87

  Whatever the early impact of Karaite Jews from the south,88 there can be no doubt about the importance of the later influx of Talmudic Jews fleeing from persecution in the high medieval West. The growing influence of the large Jewish community may be reflected in the Muscovite use of Talmudic terms, such as randar for rent and kabala for service contract.89

  Anti-Jewish measures were based in part on a realization that contemporary Jews were bearers of a more rationalistic, cosmopolitan culture than that of Muscovy. Indeed, the Jews did perform this stimulative function when they finally emerged from their ghetto confinement in the twenty-five regions known as the Pale of Settlement to contribute significantly to the ideological ferment, artistic creativity, and scientific activity of the late imperial period.90 But fear and hatred did not abate; and there is an eerie similarity between the rooting out of "Judaizers" and hanging of Jewish doctors in the Moscow Kremlin for allegedly poisoning the son of the Grand Duke in the early sixteenth century and the lashing out against "homeless cosmopolitans" and the "doctor-poisoners" in Stalin's last years.91

  The most important aspect of Jewish influence in Russia lies, however, not in the sophisticated world of art and science, but in the primitive world of messianic expectation. The two great periods of apocalyptical excitation in Muscovy-at the beginning of the sixteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth-coincide exactly with times of disaster and renewed apocalypticism in the Jewish community and with violent anti-Jewish measures in Muscovy. What began as a crude imitation of Spanish persecution in the purge of "Judaizers" by believers in the messianic theory of the Third Rome led eventually to a massacre of Jews in 1648 that was unequaled anywhere prior to the twentieth century. By this time, however, the Russians were sufferers as well as persecutors; and one finds both the Muscovite Old Believers and Jewish Sabbataians expecting the end of the world in 1666. The subsequent history of Russian schismatic and sectarian movements is filled with apocalyptical, Judaizing elements which indicate far more interaction than either Russian or Jewish historians seem generally willing to admit.92 In some small part, at least, one could apply to Russia the statement that "it is not a paradox, but an elemental truth that Spanish society grew more and more fanatical in its Christianity as more and more Jews disappeared or were Christianized."93

  Messianic expectations found parallel expressions among Jews and Russians of the late imperial period through populism and Zionism respectively; and when revolution finally convulsed Russia in 1917, gifted Russian Jews, like Zinov'ev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, and above all Trotsky, helped give the Bolshevik cause the compelling voice of prophecy and a contagious conviction that messianic deliverance was about to occur on Russian soil.94 But the Jews who lent apocalyptical passion to the Revolution became victims rather than beneficiaries of the new order. Driven by a strange ideological compulsion of which he himself seemed unaware, Stalin accompanied his own mounting promises of millennial accomplishment with in-1 nasiiig persecution of the Jews. They were hounded out of the Third In-

  ternational as they had been from the Third Rome: scapegoats for the xenophobia that was to prove an enduring legacy of the Muscovite ideology.

  The figure of Ivan the Terrible calls for both Spanish and Jewish comparisons. His crusading zeal, ideological fanaticism, and hatred of deviation make him closer in spirit to Philip II of Spain than to any other contemporary. His conviction that God had called him to lead His chosen people into battle made Ivan resemble the Old Testament kings, to whom he was repeatedly likened by chroniclers. One of the key points of the Josephites or "possessors," who were Ivan's teachers, was precisely their insistence on the crucial importance of the Old Testament and their rejection of the "non-possessors' " exclusive reliance on the New Testament and the "Jesus prayer." Ivan's favorite reading was the Book of Kings.95 He appears to have viewed the Tatars as the Canaanites and the Poles as the Philistines during his campaigns against Kazan and Livonia respectively. This Old Testament perspective is well illustrated in Ivan's famous letters to Prince Kurbsky after this former military leader had left Russia to live in Polish Lithuania. Writing in the alternately bombastic and profane Josephite style, Ivan defends his right to cruelty and absolutism as the leader of a chosen people locked in battle with "Hagarenes" and "Ishmaelites."

  "Did God," asks Ivan rhetorically, "having led Israel out of bondage, place a priest to rule over men, or a multitude of ordinary officials? No, Moses alone, like a Tsar, he made lord over them."96 Israel was weak under priests, strong under kings and judges. David, in particular, was a just ruler "even though he committed murder."97 Having gone over to the enemies of Israel, Kurbsky can only be described as a "dog" who even befouled the waters in his baptismal font. Kurbsky deserves nothing but contempt; for, unlike his messenger Shibanev, whom Ivan tormented by nailing his feet to the ground with a spear, Kurbsky lacked the courage to return to face in person the judgment of God and of His earthly regent, the Tsar.98 God's intercession and not man's arguments can alone vindicate one who has betrayed God's cause.

  Kurbsky, no less than Ivan, is dazzled by the Muscovite ideology. Although he adduces a wide variety of examples and ideas from classical scholarship, his main desire is clearly to find a place once more within Muscovy and not to challenge its basic ideology. Indeed, Kurbsky's letters seem at times little more than an anguished repetition of the question with which he opened the correspondence: "Why, ? Tsar, have you destroyed the strong in Israel and driven to death the generals given to you by God?"99 Far from aligning himself with the Poles and Lithuanians, Kurbsky considers his foreign residence as temporary and seeks to justify himself in terms of Ivan's favorite Old Testament figures: "Consider, ? Tsar, how

  even David was compelled by Saul's persecution to wage war on the land of Israel together with a pagan king."100 But eloquent pleadings from abroad only served to convince the leader in the Kremlin that his former lieutenant was secretly unsure of his position. Ivan's campaign of vilification -like those of his great admirer, Stalin-served the purpose of hardening his own convictions and warning pot
ential defectors in his realm.

  If Kurbsky as the defender of traditional boyar rights found himself unconsciously accepting the pretentious claims of the Muscovite ideology, defenders of independence for the church hierarchy and the city communities went ever further. Metropolitan Philip argued for an independent church establishment using a Byzantine text, which undermined his position by including the classic argument for unrestricted imperial power.101 The Discourse of Valaam, written by monks from the ancient monastery in Lake Ladoga to advocate some return to the old town assembly principle in Muscovy, argued at the same time for an increase in imperial power and the recognition of its absolute and divinely ordained nature.102 Thus, for all the discontent with Ivan's rule, there was never any effective program for opposing him. Generally ignorant of any but Byzantine political teachings, the anguished pamphleteers of the day included in their programs for reform Byzantine texts advocating unlimited power for the Tsar-often "to an even greater extent than did the apologists and theoreticians of the Muscovite imperial claims."103 Perhaps the leading apologist for Ivan's rule was the widely traveled and essentially secular figure of Ivan Peresvetov, who argued on grounds of expediency that

  A Tsar that is meek and humble in his reign will see his realm em-poverished and his glory diminished. A Tsar that is feared and wise [grozen i mudr] will see his realm enlarged and his name praised in all the corners of the earth. … A realm without dread [bez grozy] is like a horse beneath a Tsar without a bridle.104