Holy Russia,
Holy Russia,
Sacred Israel
Sacred Israel
Holy Russia, Holy Russia, Sacred Israel Sacred Israel
DOMINIC RUBIN
JEWISH-CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS IN RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rubin, Dominic, 1972-
Holy Russia, sacred Israel : Jewish-Christian encounters in Russian religious thought / Dominic Rubin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-934843-79-6 (hardback)
1. Judaism--Russia--History. 2. Judaism--Soviet Union--History. 3. Russia--Religion. 4. Soviet Union-- Religion. 5. Judaism--Relations--Christianity. 6. Christianity and other religions--Judaism. I. Title.
BM331.R83 2010 296.0947--dc22
2010017687
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C ONTENTS
Preface . . . 9
Chapter One: Soloviev’s Judeo-Russian Wisdom . . . 13
Introduction: Russian Jewry in the time of Soloviev . . . 15
Soloviev’s general development . . . 24
Soloviev, the Jews and Judaism . . . 29
Th e fl awed wholeness of the Jewish nation . . . 29
Th e encounter with J.Rabinowitz . . . 36
Judaism, Judeo-Christianity and the Law . . . 40
Talmudic Judaism and integral Christianity . . . 43
Sophia (Soph-Jah) and Judaic/Christian pan(en)theism . . . 47
Jewish responses to Soloviev . . . 53
Chapter Two: Bulgakov and the sacred blood of Jewry . . . 59
Bulgakov: wrestling with Soloviev’s heritage . . . 61
Th e Jews in Bulgakov’s thought: a preview of the main problem . . . 66
Judaism and the Old Testament in Bulgakov’s early philosophy . . . 69
Two Cities (1906-1910) . . . 70
Th e Unfading Light (1917) . . . 74
Bulgakov and Kabbalah . . . 80
Bulgakov and Jewry (1): in Russia – the shadow of the Revolution . . . 82
An early essay in Christian Zionism (1915) . . . 82
Th e paradox of Bulgakov’s anti-Semitism . . . 91
Bulgakov’s recollections of the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions . . . . 101
Bulgakov and Jewry (2): in exile – the shadow of the Holocaust . . . . 105
Th e Biblical conception of blood and nation . . . . 108
Sophiology and sacred blood . . . . 112
Th e blood-chosenness of the Jews aft er Christ . . . . 123
Th e collective fate of Israel and the remnant . . . . 127
A critical development of Bulgakov’s ideas . . . . 134
A Messianic Jewish reading of Bulgakov? . . . . 134
A (covert) two-covenant reading of Bulgakov? Judas, Saul, and Paul . . . . 138
Conclusion . . . . 147
Bulgakov in two contemporary Russian-Jewish interpretations . . . . 149
Chapter Three: N. Berdyaev, M. Gershenzon and L. Shestov: Jewish and Russian Nihilists of the Spirit . . . . 153
The three pessimists . . . . 155
Berdyaev and Gershenzon . . . . 157
Nicolai Berdyaev . . . . 157
Mikhail Gershenzon . . . . 161
Between Slavophilism and Bolshevism . . . . 165 Berdyaev and Gershenzon on Slavophilism . . . . 165 Gershenzon, Berdyaev and the Bolshevik Revolution . . . . 174 Gershenzon and Vyacheslav Ivanov aft er the Revolution . . . . 177 1922: Berdyaev and Gershenzon on history . . . . 183 Berdyaev on history and Jewry . . . . 184 Gershenzon and Jewish destiny . . . . 188
Pushkin-Ahasuerus . . . . 188
Apotheosis of Jewishness: Gershenzon against Land, Torah and People . . . . 191
Th e ‘Judaization’ of Berdyaev . . . . 197
Lev Shestov . . . . 200
Shestov on Gershenzon . . . . 203 Shestov on Buber and Judaism . . . . 205 Shestov on Berdyaev . . . . 207
Shestov, Bulgakov and Steinberg . . . . 211
Bulgakov on Shestov: ‘fi deist without faith’ . . . . 212 Steinberg on Shestov: reveal the ‘black man’ . . . . 214 Judaism beyond the Pale: superseding both Testaments . . . . 220 Gershenzon and Shestov – diff erences and similarities . . . . 220 V.V.Zenkovsky: the dialectic of Jewry and Christianity . . . . 225
Chapter Four: Vasily Rozanov (and Pavel Florensky) . . . . 227
‘Sinful slave Vasily….’ . . . . 229
Rozanov’s intellectual development. . . . . 236
Early Rozanov: Judaism over Christianity . . . . 246
“Judaism” (1903) . . . . 246 Th e immanent church of conciliar Jewry . . . . 249 1.Circumcision . . . . 249 2.Sabbath . . . . 254 3.Mikveh . . . . 258 Astarte, Egypt and Judaism . . . . 262
Th e agonies of Marcionism . . . . 262
Middle Rozanov: Russia expels the Jew within . . . . 267 Two Jewish encounters in the Beilis years . . . . 271 Mikhail Gershenzon . . . . 271 Aaron Steinberg . . . . 283 Rozanov’s Judeophobic outpourings (1911-1914) . . . . 288
Florensky: Rozanov’s secret helper . . . . 294
Florensky’s Jewish writings . . . . 298 Ritual murder and the eucharist . . . . 301 Th e fl aw in Florensky’s two-tiered logic . . . . 304 Florensky, Romans 11 and Jewish blood . . . . 307 Florensky’s ‘Kabbalistic scholarship’ . . . . 312
Florensky: the broader context . . . . 313
Occultism and magic . . . . 313
Political totalitarianism . . . . 315
Katsis and Florensky’s ‘Christian exegesis’ . . . . 317
Florensky’s position in Russian religious thought . . . . 319
Name-worship and symbolism . . . . 322
Iosef Davydovich Levin: “I met Florensky once….” . . . . 326 Christianity and anti-Semitism: fi nal words . . . . 330
Chapter Five: L. Karsavin and A. Steinberg: Russia and Israel Symphonically
Interwined . . . . 335
Two friends, two worlds . . . . 337
Eurasianism,Volphila, Autonomism . . . . 342
Th e Karsavin-Steinberg exchange . . . . 347
Karsavin . . . . 347 Steinberg . . . . 360 Infl ected philosophy: Jews and Russians among the Greeks . . . . 367 Steinberg, Jewishness and philosophy: How strange that I am a Jew. . . . . 367 Jewishness and Russianness in philosophy . . . . 378 Jewish Platonized Kantianism . . . . 379 Steinberg and Jewishness in philosophy . . . . 386 Th e boundaries between the believer and the world . . . . 391 Core and periphery, Orthodoxy and Revolution . . . . 391
Th e case of Georgy Fedotov . . . . 393
Th e case of Alexander Meier . . . . 396
Karsavin: rootless Christianity . . . . 399
“A Study in Apologetics” . . . . 400 Karsavin: experiencing the Jewish vision of God (Poem on Death) . . . . 410
Th e tortured Jewess . . . . 410
Contrary couples . . . . 412 Karsavin’s and Steinberg’s triadology . . . . 417 Israel and the living God . . . . 422
Th e end of the Poem on Death . . . . 428
Th e Inquisitor and the Jewess-‘conversa’ . . . . 429
Th e fi nal drama . . . . 432
Th e role of the Jewess in the fi nal drama . . . . 435 Jews and personality . . . . 436 Final years: London, Lithuania, Siberia . . . . 439 Abez and a fi nal Jewish encounter . . . . 441 Death and burial . . . . 442
Chapter Six: Semyon Frank: from russkiy yevrei to russkiy yevropeetz . . . . 445
Frank: the Jew as universal man . . . . 447
Frank’s philosophy . . . . 455
Frank and Gershenzon . . . . 462
Frank’s universalism . . . . 463 Frank and Gershenzon from Landmarks to Revolution . . . . 469 Gershenzon and Frank: the wisdom of Pushkin . . . . 472 Pushkin between Frank and Gershenzon . . . . 473 Pushkin’s message for contemporary Russia . . . . 475
Russian-Jewish Wisdom . . . . 482
Frank and German-Jewish philosophy . . . . 485
Cohen and Frank . . . . 486 Frank and Cohen on suff ering . . . . 490 Frank and Rosenzweig . . . . 495 Th e argument of Th e Star and Frank’s critique . . . . 496
Th e Star . . . . 496
Th e critique . . . . 498
Evaluation of Frank’s critique . . . . 500 Frank and O.Goldberg . . . . 507 Conclusion . . . . 508
Conclusion: Soloviev’s heirs: the third generation . . . . 511 Alexander Men: Bulgakovian Judeo-Christianity? . . . . 511 Th e polemic against Men’s Jewish Christianity . . . . 514 N.Feingold and S.Lyosov . . . . 514 Men in the context of post-Auschwitz theology . . . . 516 Benevich: no Jew, no gentile – no Russian? . . . . 520 Conclusion: Russian Orthodoxy and Jewish-Christian dialogue – a note . . . . 522
Bibliography . . . . 527
Index . . . . 547
P REFACE
Th is book has personal roots. An earlier fascination with and immersion in Hasidic theosophy triggered in me a shock of recognition when I started to become familiar with Russian religious thought. Th is was fi rstly through the books of Sergei Bulgakov. On picking up his Sophia: Th e Divine Wisdom, I was struck by the parallels with the panentheistic thought of the Habad and Breslov schools of Jewish mysticism, and began to wonder whether the similarity was mere coincidence. Some time later, at a monastery in Jerusalem with a group of Russian pilgrims, a member of the group had selected another text of Bulgakov for discussion, one germane to the location of the pilgrimage. Th at text was Zion, and as I listened to the text being read out loud, my curiosity increased by several degrees: so, Russian religious philosophers had thought in some depths about their Jewish neighbors in the Russian empire.
Shortly aft er returning from Jerusalem, I met Fr.Vasile Mihoc, a Romanian Orthodox priest with an interest in Jewish-Christian relations, at a lecture he was giving about Maximus the Confessor. I unwittingly monopolized his attention by asking some questions about Judaism, and it emerged that we were both intrigued by the same questions. Shortly aft erwards, I approached him with a two-page summary of a book I thought might attract the interest of people other than ourselves. His assurance that the theme was worthwhile and interesting set me off on the path to fi lling out the summary with content. Over three years, the book and my conceptions of the subject evolved rather exponentially.
Being by education neither a specialist in Russian studies nor, technically speaking in philosophy or theology, the learning gradient was rather steep. My theological education was in large part down to Fr. Georgy Kotchetkov, the rector of St.Philaret’s Orthodox Christian Institute in Moscow. Fr.Christopher Hill, a priest at St. Andrew’s monastery in Moscow, was another source of inspiration, and he generously loaned me signifi cant chunks of his library. Dr. Marion Wyse read draughts of each chapter and off ered extremely helpful comments. Georgia Williams did likewise, and was another source of theological enlightenment and friendship in the three years that the book was being germinated. I am also grateful to Fr. Fyodor Ludengoff , both for personal conversations and for inviting me to teach Old Testament at his church in Novoperedelkino, where parishioners’ questions about Judaism and the Old Testament drove me to investigate the patristic perspective on some of the questions raised as the book progressed. Students and teachers at St.Philarets, including Lev Shipman, Olga Sushkova, Grigory Gutner, Lyuba Brisker, Semyon Zeidenberg, and Victor Kott also provided friendship and food for thought. I also spent many hours talking to Andrei Iljichev, a fellow amateur theologian (and, unlike me, professional computer specialist), and his input was invaluable. Finally, Bill Bloom helped me with some intractable word-processing subtlties.
I subtitled the book “Jewish-Christian encounters” because I did not want to write a strictly comprehensive academic history, but to focus on the personal element of Russian thought, mixing the “high” and the “low,” i.e. dense theology as well as conversations, fall-outs, chance meetings and so on, which are the stuff of life and oft en as, or more, revealing than dense treatises. Nonetheless, having selected the people through whom a certain story would be told, I did decide, as matters progressed, to devote serious attention to particular texts of these authors.
Th e result is sometimes sustained literary exegesis, which again, I tried to relate to the author and the historical circumstances in which he was writing.
As far as the selection of the authors is concerned, I chose those Russian religious thinkers who are infl uential today in Russian church consciousness, and whose infl uence has penetrated in translation into Western theology as well.
Th e other selection criterion was, of course, that they had written considerably on the Jewish question and had had Jewish friendships which were germane to their work. Obviously Bulgakov, Florensky and Berdyaev are well-known to English-speaking readers interested in Orthodoxy. (Even here a diff erence can be observed: the last named thinker is a veritable cultural hero in Russia, while he is at best a rather musty name from the distant past in the West, in academic circles at least). Rozanov and Karsavin and perhaps even Frank, however, will be new names to some whose interest is more in theology than Russian literature or philosophy. Other minor characters quickly joined the cast, whose relationship to theology and even philosophy was marginal, and yet whose creativity was highly illuminating for theology. Th is led to my own discovery of the fascinating infl uence of literary, cultural and political activity on theology in the Russian context.
Th e pride of attention has certainly been devoted to the Christian aspect of these Christian-Jewish encounters. Th is applies particularly to Aaron Steinberg:
more space is given over to Karsavin in the chapter devoted to them. One conclusion I have come to is that, for me at least, this study for the most part only raises questions concerning the relationship and nature of Jewish and Christian philosophy and theology, and that for the investigation to go deeper, one would have to examine the Jewish context much more thoroughly than has been done here, especially in the sections concerning Steinberg – whose work deserves to be explored further and disseminated far more widely.
I am also conscious that, despite the length of the study, in many ways it is not as thorough and systematic as it could be. Th is is partly because I chose to concentrate on a small number of fi gures. However, another reason is that, living in Russia, my access to scholarly literature in English and even some Russian texts of the Russian emigration has not been completely satisfactory. (Th e most obvious aspect of this was the need to read certain English books in belated Russian translations). Th ere are thus no doubt gaps in the literature. However, I hope that a certain critical mass was achieved so that my conclusions can survive these omissions. And despite these gaps, I hope that the work as it stands can provide food for thought and further research among interested readers.
Th e book is intended to fulfi ll diff erent functions. In addition to exploring how Russian religious thinkers thought about Jews and Judaism, I wanted to sketch a history of this thought for theological readers (both Jewish and Christian) who do not know Russian and are not familiar with the Orthodox tradition: hence at times the rather extensive presentation. My hope is that readers theologically more experienced than myself can gain enough access to the material to develop their own analyses and critiques – which may well diff er from mine. Next, I was interested in how this thought is being received now in the Russian, Jewish and Christian camps. Finally, I wanted to engage in what these thinkers had to say on a personal level – and in this endeavor, it must be said that my conclusions are still evolving and not always free of ambiguity.
Before moving on to the matter at hand, I would like to thank my wife, Maria, who helped with the editing, discussed at length some of the chapters with me, and helped with tricky linguistic, literary and cultural moments. Most importantly of all, she expressed her faith in me by giving me the space and time to work for very long stretches uninterrupted by the mischievous attempted incursions into my domain of the younger generation. She also tolerated rather well the notable changes in my mood as I immersed myself fi rst in one powerful personality, and then another, becoming fi rst Bulgakovian, then Karsavianian, and so on in turn.
I dedicate the book to her and hope that it will help us in our common spiritual development.
one
Soloviev’s Judeo-Russian Wisdom
O NE
Introduction: Russian Jewry in the time of Soloviev
Th e religious philosophers who are going to be investigated in this study can all rightfully be called the heirs of Vladimir Soloviev. Th is is true of their philosophical orientation, as well as their attitude towards Judaism. Although Soloviev lived for a mere forty seven years, by the time of his death he had achieved a legendary status in Russian philosophy and literature. However, it was not merely his philosophic and literary output that made Soloviev signifi cant: as a personality, both in character and physical appearance, he came to embody the Russian God-seeker for the following generation, the generation of the bright new twentieth century.
In terms of his relationship to Judaism, Soloviev lived through a critical time in the fortunes of Russian Jewry. At his birth, just over half a century had passed since Russia had incorporated one million Jews within her borders with the annexation of Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine in 1772, 1793, and 1795 – the spoils of the divided Polish kingdom. Before then, according to the statutes, Jews had been forbidden from living in Russia, as being “enemies of Christ;” since the so-called “Judaizing” heresy of the fi ft eenth and sixteenth centuries they had little direct impact on Russia’s consciousness. By the beginning of Soloviev’s life, the number of Russian Jews had increased from a million to two and a half million; by his death even that number would have doubled and the status of Russian Jews would have changed radically.
Two years aft er he was born, Alexander II came to power. In the 1860s, the new tsar initiated a series of political reforms in Russian society (including most famously, the emancipation of the serfs in 1861). Th ese included reversing some of the discriminatory legislation against Jews, who were now permitted to receive a Russian secondary and university education and live in Russian cities outside the Pale of Settlement. Th is was an about-turn as regards the harsh policies of his father, Nicolas I, one of whose measures had been the introduction of twenty fi ve year military service for Jews of twelve years and older (a law that was repealed by Alexander)1.
During Alexander’s reign, Jews began to assimilate into Russian society.
Many of them became involved in Russian political movements; the presence of Jews among the professions rose sharply, as well as in fi nance and academia, and signifi cant Jewish communities grew up in St Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa. It was during this time that Russia’s “Jewish question” took on a diff erent coloring.
1 Cf. Feliks Kandel’, Kniga vremyon i sobytii: istorii russkykh yevreev, 1. Moscow, Gesharim: 2002. Ch.12 tells the harrowing story of these recruits, who were oft en as young as 7 or 8, and who were oft en forcibly converted whilst serving. 30, 000 Jews were “Christianized” in this way during Nicolas I’s reign.
Under Alexander I, the government’s reaction to the unprecedented number of Jews in Russian lands had been an optimistic policy of Christian mission and conversion. As the defender of Orthodoxy, the tsar aimed to foster the good will and subsequent conversion of Jewish communities by founding such societies as “Th e Society of Israelite Christians” for the support of Jewish converts. He also made the conduct of “ritual trials” for the investigation of so-called Jewish ritual murders of Christian children illegal. Th is was combined, however, with eff orts to ban Jewish books, such as the Talmud and Zohar, which would delay the Christian enlightenment of the new population.
Th e eff ort was fairly half-hearted, however, and produced little eff ect. Th e next tsar, Nicolas I, then adopted a policy of oppressing the Jews through military conscription – pursuing by diff erent means a similar aim to his predecessor:
to hasten the “improvement,” assimilation and disappearance of this suddenly sprung-up community of “Christ’s enemies” on Russian soil2.
It was only under Alexander II – who was to become for Jews, as well as for serfs, the “liberator tsar” – that for certain sections of the population, the status of Jews began to approach what had already long been the norm in Western Europe. Nonetheless, these reformist measures were also ultimately undertaken to benefi t Russian society, which had suff ered an economic and ideological setback aft er the defeat of Russia by Western powers in the Crimean war. Th e measures only allowed certain classes of Jews, namely merchants, manufacturers and artisans to settle outside the Pale, with the express aim of improving the economic conditions of the interior provinces; the vast majority of poverty- stricken Jews in the Pale were unaff ected by the new legislation – and many of these would turn to radical political movements to vent their frustration.
As with other reforms of Alexander the eff ects of Jewish “liberation” were mixed. In the 1860s and 1870s, which overlapped with Soloviev’s formative intellectual years, the reforms and the subsequent emergence of russifi ed Jews at all levels of society provoked a backlash. Th ese years coincided with the second wave of Slavophile philosophy, whose main proponents were Konstantin Aksakov and Yuri Samarin.
Whereas in the fi rst wave of Slavophilism in the 1830s and 1840s, Jews had been sealed off from Russian cultural life, the rise of Russian-language Jewish papers and the appearance of Jews in the cities of the interior evoked a new type of reaction to Jews in Russian thought. Jews became a visible symbol of Alexander’s reformist policies, and thus as in Western Europe, a target for conservatives who associated their freedom with the demise of old forms of power and belief.
Until then, Russian reactions to Jews had consisted of abstract theological images of Jews as “God-killers” and “enemies of Christ,” drawn from Byzantine tradition. To this, it is true, had been added the Judaizing heresy that had spread from Novgorod and Pskov to Moscow in the fi ft eenth century, seducing among
2 Brian Horowitz, p.c., remarks that recent research (by Petrovsky-Shern and Michael Stanislawski) reveals that Nicolas I was not as oppressive and cruel as previously imagined: his aim was, in principle, benign: to modernize the new population.
other members of the court, Grand Duke Ivan, who placed Judaizing bishops in charge of the Kremlin’s cathedral. While the heresy’s link with actual Jews was tenuous aft er its beginnings, and the heresy’s Old Testament reformism was an old and constant tendency within Christianity itself, its very name3 connected religious heresy and political sabotage with the image of Jews in the Russian imagination at a formative moment in Russian history.
To this anti-Judaism (or perhaps more accurately anti-anti-Trinitarian Christianity4), was added from Polish Catholicism the idea of Jews as religious fanatics and exploiters of the peasants – the latter especially was a favorite theme of Dostoevsky in his 1860s entries in his Diary of a Writer.
However, an entirely new note was added to this predominantly religious Russian anti-Judaism by Ivan Aksakov, the publicist brother of the Slavophile writer. From his reading of the French and German press, Aksakov took the modern Western European idea of a world conspiracy of the Jewish race. He also propagated the idea that the Jewish religion and race (the two were inextricable) were inherently hostile and opposed to Christianity.
However, Aksakov himself presents an interesting microcosm of the changes in perception towards Jews during the reign of Alexander II. He moved from the more traditional Russian anti-Judaism to the new-fangled Western anti-Semitism.
In 1867, he wrote an article5 reacting skeptically to the recent granting of rights to Jews. However, even though the article argues for the need to “emancipate”
Russians from Jewish economic oppressors, the main thrust is that Jews need to be treated as a religion and not as a nationality. For Aksakov, it is unjust that Jews are granted the privileges to convene rabbinical courts and assemblies, rights which no one would think of granting to Lutherans or Catholics.
In that article, Aksakov supports “the sincerity of progressive Jews” who
“who wish to merge with Russians, to earn the name of Russians of the Mosaic faith, to separate from their fanatical co-religionists,” thus escaping the rabbis who are suppressing their own people. In other words, Aksakov’s argument is with Judaism and not with Jews who wish to emancipate themselves, as he sees it, from that religion.
3 In Old Russian, the heresy is called zhidovstvuyshaya yeres. Th e old Russian word
“zhid” later became pejorative, and at least from the early nineteenth century corresponds in most cases to “Yid” or “kike.” In later chapters, we will see how the use of zhid versus yevrei (non-pejorative ‘Jew’) continued to have a variety of emotional connotations in the work of nineteenth and twentieth century religious writers’ reactions to the Jewish question.
4 Th e hostility to heretical Christian sects, combated as religious and political enemies, oft en translated into attitudes towards the new “alien entity,” Judaism. Th ere were also, for example, blood libels against Christian sectarians – which resembled those brought against Jews. Cf. L.Katsis (2006) for a discussion of attitudes to Jews and Christian sectarians.
5 Ivan Aksakov, “Ne ob emansipatsii yevreev sleduet tolkovat’, a ob emansipatsii russkyx ot yevreev,” in Rus’ 15 July, 1867.
In 1883, however, his rhetoric has changed6. Th e intervening years had seen a rise in the number of Jews joining radical movements, from the populists to the social democrats. In addition, Alexander II, the great reformer, had been assassinated by such radicals, one of whom was a Jew. Now the new conception of a merciless world conspiracy of the Jewish people is developed. Judaism and Jewry are inseparable, and Judaism is “utilitarian” in ethics and “anti-mystical”
in spirit – epithets associated with political and religious philosophies that were anathema to Slavophilism. Further, Russian liberals and radicals are all automatically Judophiles, identifying gladly with an ideology, which whether they are fully aware of it or not, undermines Russia and Christianity. Th ey thereby play into the hands of the Jews, who infl uence them through their control of the press and the stock-exchange.
In examining the attitude of Russian religious thinkers to Judaism and Jews, both Aksakov’s new anti-Semitism and the layers of that more archaic Russian anti-Judaism need to be kept in mind – as they continue to feed into the consciousness of all these fi gures from Soloviev to Karsavin, and even the Jewish-born Semyon Frank. A fi gure who combined the “new” and the
“old” anti-Semitism was Dostoevsky, whose infl uence on Russian religious thought was as iconic as that of Soloviev. To a signifi cant extent, these religious philosophers derive their basic principles for judging Judaism by swinging sometimes unpredictably between these two foundational personalities.
Soloviev himself reacted with repugnance to the new anti-Semitism, as we shall shortly see: it was a major reason for his break with the new hard- nosed nationalist “young” Slavophilism and the stimulus for a counter-active new type of Russian philo-Semitism. Nonetheless, Soloviev’s celebrated philo- Semitism cannot be understood without bearing in mind that it too has deep traditional Russian Christian roots.
In this sense, the fi gure of St.Philaret of Moscow (1782-1867) is useful for comparison. His life and service in the church stretched from the incorporation of Jews into the empire until Alexander’s reforms, and he outlived the four emperors who laid the foundations of Russia’s policy to the Jews. In a certain sense, Philaret was friendly to Jews and supported Jewish rights.
In one sermon on Good Friday7, he made it clear that the Jews were not responsible for crucifying Christ, for as the Savior Himself said: “They know not what they do.” He intervened with Alexander I to soften the decree to ban all Jewish books. He persuaded Nicolas I to allow a Jewish secondary school in Riga a degree of self-determination, rather than having the school answer to the local bishop. And he argued for a loosening of the laws of
6 Ivan Aksakov, “Vozzvaniye Kremyo, obrashennoe k yevream ot litsa ‘Vsemirnirnogo Izrail’skogo Soyuza’,” in Rus’, 1. Nov.1883.
7 Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), “Iz ‘Slova v Velikuyu pyatnitsu,’” in Willem J.
Vavilon i Ierusalim. Blizhnevostochnii konfl ikt v svete Biblii. Edited by D.Radyshevski, 9-11. Moscow-Jerusalem: MCF, 2002.
travel for Jews outside of the Pale of Settlement8.
All of these incidents have a twist, however: Philaret’s benefi cence towards Jews was part of that early optimistic groundswell of enthusiasm that believed the newly incorporated Jewish population would soon convert to Christianity.
Th e reason he argued for a relaxation on the ban of Jewish books was that it demonstrated the problematic non-unity of Jewish tradition, and might thus weaken Jewish belief. Th e secondary school was to be granted independence, as Christian heavy-handedness would alienate Jews from Christianity. He concerned himself with Jewish travel rights when a scrupulous observance of the discriminatory laws interfered with the desire of several Jews to be baptized outside the Pale.
Philaret was a dynamic and, in his time, controversial fi gure, in the Russian Church. It was he who pioneered the translation of the Slavonic Bible into Russian, and issued the fi rst Russian catechetical handbook for the spreading of the faith.
Both of these measures met with opposition from conservative churchmen. It was also his evangelical zeal in a sometimes staid church that led him to embrace converted Jews and fi nd a place for them in seminaries teaching Hebrew and Judaism and translating the liturgy and New Testament into Hebrew – all with the ultimate aim of spearheading that mission to the Jews of which Nicolas I had fondly but idly dreamed.
Th us, Philaret took the sudden intersection of Jewish and Russian fate with utmost zeal and seriousness, and was concerned for Jewish destiny. But, of course, this “philo-Semitism” came from a viewpoint that could hardly be regarded as amicable or benefi cial by Jews concerned for their own interests.
Nonetheless, this makes him a precursor of Soloviev. Th e latter was more sympathetic to and interested in Judaism, and fought for Jews’ rights regardless of whether they were considering conversion. And yet, Soloviev never hid his belief that what he desired above all was the same as Philaret: that which he saw as ultimately being best for Jews, their embrace of Christ.
Th is Christian philo-Semitism is met in other fi gures who fall outside the remit of this book, as they do not belong to the stream of Russian religious thought. Th ey combined their ardent faith in Christ with a concern for the Jewish people. Oft en the doleful history of Russian anti-Semitism, replete with acts of discrimination, violence and persecution carried out in the name of the state religion of the empire, has led to an assumption that Russian Orthodox fi gures, especially conservative ones, were anti-Semitic by default.
While the imbalance of power between Jews and Christians before Alexander II, and to a large extent aft er his reforms, meant that many of these fi gures held unconscious prejudices with regard to Jews, the actions and opinions of several of the most outstanding fi gures in the Russian Church of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries refute an excessively hasty judgment about anti-Semitism in the church hierarchy.
8 For these incidents, cf. Konstantin Gavrilkin, “Mitropolit Filaret (Drozdov) i yevrei,”
in Kontinent No.111. (2002).
St. Th eophan the Recluse (1815-1894), along with St.Philaret, one of the major fi gures involved in church education in the nineteenth century, argued for the judicious use of the Hebrew Bible alongside the traditional Septuagint in training Orthodox lay and clergy in the faith9. His interpretation on the ninth to eleventh “Jewish” chapters of St.Paul’s letter to the Romans is also outspokenly generous to the Jews10. His reading of this key passage, which we will encounter time and again in the work of Russian religious philosophers, holds that Jews continue to be God’s chosen people, who have been temporarily excluded only in order to bring truth to the gentiles. Th e small number of Jews who accepted Christ in Paul’s time brought about the foundation of world Christianity. “What then,” asks Th eophan, “will happen when they all believe?” For “of all the nations, none can fulfi ll better than them God’s intentions for the salvation of people.”
Hence “it is impossible not to care for them and worry about them.”
Another example is John of Kronstadt, who has earned a reputation as an anti-Semite due to the use that was made of his name by right-wing organizations at the end of his life11: and yet he delivered a sermon in reaction to the 1903 Kishinev pogrom sharply condemning the “satanic” violence of the pogromites, and urging his “Russian brothers” to act in accordance with the spirit of humility and patience and respect innocent Jewish life12.
Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky, who became the head of the conservative, monarchist Russian Church Abroad in exile on several occasions met rabbles intent on committing a pogrom and by his spiritual authority persuaded them to turn back. In 1905, the strict and conservative Kiev priest, Mikhail Yedlinsky (1859-1937)13, went out at the head of a religious procession
9 Metropolitan Th eophan. O mere upotrebleniya yevreiskogo nynyeshnogo teksta, po- ukazaniyu tserkovnoy praktiki, in Tserkovniy Vestnik, 1876, No.23, 12 June: 1-5.
10 Metroplitan Th eophan. “Iz tolkovaniya na XI Poslaniya k Rimlyanam svyatogo apostola Pavla,” in Willem J. Vavilon i Ierusalim. Blizhnevostochnii konfl ikt v svete Biblii, ed. D.Radyshevski. Moscow-Jerusalem: MCF, 2002.
11 For more details on the distortion of John of Krontstadt’s teachings by his self- proclaimed followers, the “Johannites,” cf. Nadezhda Kitsenko. Svaytoi nashego vremeni: otets Ioann Kronshtadtskii i russkii narod. (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2006).
12 “O how thunderously Christ would have forbidden the Kishinev thugs from killing Jewish townsmen and from smashing and destroying their property. Do you know, Russian brothers, of what spirit you are? Do not off end anybody for any reason.
Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, bless those who hate you, and pray for those who off end you (Mt.5:44). Th at is my short Gospel word, Russian brothers, on account of the bloody massacres of the Jews and their children, who are guilty of nothing. Amen.” Th e quote from Matthew may imply that Jews are somehow
“enemies;” for John of Kronstadt, in a certain theological senses that was the case – but as the entire context makes clear, in terms of action and peaceful co-habitation Jews are fellow townsmen, to be equally respected as Russian brothers, and moreover they are not “guilty” of anything – such as the murder of Christ etc.
13 He was imprisoned and shot by Stalin in 1937. He did charitable work among
to confront a mob intent on committing violence in the Jewish quarter, and forced them to disband.
Th ere are odder stories too, like that of Mikhail Pavlovich Polyanovskii, a general in the army of Alexander II14. In his love for the Jews, he imagined the day when an Orthodox Jewish Church would be founded, so that Jews could be Christian without losing their culture and identity. In fact, Polyanovskii was born into a poor Jewish family and seized by the Cantonists when he was seven.
Losing contact for many years with his Jewish family, and climbing higher up the echelons of the army, he eventually became a sincerely believing Christian, and yet never lost his loyalty to the Jewish people.
In one man there were combined two deeply diff erent experiences: that of a persecuted minority and that of the ruling majority. According to rabbinic law, he was quite literally a tinoq shenishbah15, i.e. an apostate from Judaism who cannot be blamed as he apostasized against his will. And yet Polyanovskii resisted that judgment, embracing his new faith with utter devotion, which owed nothing to the desire to fi nd a place in Russian society.
Th us, although the abhorrent position of the new Jewish minority in the Russian Christian empire very oft en led to the compromising of the Christian religion, there were cases of sincere belief by Christians in the theological superiority of their faith to that of the Jews, which did not lead to attacks – verbal or physical – on the humanity of the latter.
Aft er the assassination of Alexander II, the Russian Church lost much of its zeal for converting the Jews. What came aft erwards highlights that for all the heavy-handedness of Philaret’s approach, it was well-intentioned. For the new Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev16, changed the missionizing policy of the Russian Church towards Jewry, replacing it with defensiveness. In the last years of the nineteenth century and the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, Russia became an unenviable centre of anti-Semitic propaganda, manufactured by church fi gures close to the government, oft en converted Jews who – unlike Polyanovskii – had a psychotic hatred of their past lives17.
workers in Kiev. Cf. Anotoly Zhurakovsky, My dolzhny vsyo preterpet’ radi Khrista:
zhizn’, podvig i trudy svyashchenika Anatoliya Zhurakovskogo (Moscow: PSTGU, 2008).
14 Archbishop Ioann Shakhovskoy, Ustanovlenie yedinstva (Moscow: Sretinskii Monastyr, 2006), 184.
15 Heb.: “a child who is captured.”
16 He was famous for his dictum that the ideal solution to the Jewish question would be for “one third to die, one third to emigrate, and one third to assimilate without trace.” Less than four decades aft er he made this remark, one third of the Jews in the territory of the former Pale of Settlement did indeed “die” in the Nazi genocide.
17 One such early fi gure was Yakov Brafman (1825-1879), baptized in 1858. He was more extreme that Aksakov in his creation of an anti-Semitic cocktail that would eventually be used by the author of Th e Protocols of the Elders of Zion: world conspiracy, rabbinic misanthropy, blood libel, calumny of the Talmud. (His grandson was the
Nonetheless, even with the growing fear of revolution infecting church circles that new defensiveness oft en expressed itself – in contradistinction to Aksakov’s fi rst stage – as a tolerance, and sometimes even admiration18, for traditional Jewry and Judaism and a distaste for emancipated liberal Jews, whom traditional church fi gures now associated with radicalism. Th is support for traditional Jewry, which to some extent was a recognition of the stalemate in the attempt at conversion, oft en coincided with the interests and beliefs of traditional Jewish leaders themselves. Th e latter were just as keen to stop the assimilation of their youth and their infatuation with atheistic ideas.
In the remainder of this chapter and throughout this book, we will focus on one aspect of Russian Jewish-Christian relations in the period aft er Alexander II’s assassination and up to the middle of the twentieth century. In terms of the number of individuals considered here, and indeed the layer of Russian society to which they belonged, this encounter among the Russian “spiritual intelligentsia”
is objectively rather narrow. And yet encounters which passed “undigested” in the wider society were analyzed in depth by these fi gures in terms of the new theologies and philosophies they were trying to forge.
In addition, these fi gures have once again attracted lively interest in the Russian Orthodox church in post-Soviet Russia, as well as in other non-Russian and non-Orthodox churches. Th eir heritage continues to be absorbed and debated, and their relevance can be assessed simply by considering the large quantities of their books being printed and sold in contemporary Russia – in commercial as well as church bookshops.
Unfortunately, as regards the Jewish question, there is little critical evaluation of this material which includes a spectrum of views from Soloviev’s philo-Semitism to Rozanov’s Judeophobia. In the explosion of liberty since the disintegration of communism, it is also common to fi nd in Moscow bookshops tomes arguing for a re-opening of the case against Mendel Beilis and the canonization of Andrei Yushchinsky19 standing next to scholarly volumes by poet Vladislav Khodasevich, on whom cf. ch.3 for his attempts to make amends for the anti-Semitism of his grandfather by translating Hebrew poets into Russian).
18 Nicanor, Bishop of Kherson and Odessa (1883-1890), gave a sermon on the consecration of the church of the Odessa commercial college in whose building
“Russians not only of the Christian but also the Mosaic law” had enthusiastically participated, where he draws detailed parallels between Judaism and Christianity, and refers to Jews as brothers of Christians, not only in spirit but in fl esh and vice versa.
Others contrasted the enthusiastic observance by Jews of Jewish law and festivals with the lax observance by Christians of church holidays and practices. Archbishop Nicanor, “Iz poucheniya pri osvyashchenii tserkvi Odesskogo komercheskogo uchilishcha,” in Willem J. Vavilon i Ierusalim. Blizhnevostochnii konfl ikt v svete Biblii, edited by D.Radyshevski, (Moscow-Jerusalem: MCF, 2002), 20-23.
19 Th e boy allegedly ritually murdered by Beilis and shadowy Jewish associates, but even before the trial known to have been murdered by members of a criminal gang whose secrets he had become privy to. Cf.ch.4 for details and a discussion of Rozanov’s and Florensky’s writings connected to the “Beilis aff air” as it came to be
Jewish authors on aspects of Russian-Jewish history. However, some of that chaotic mix of attitudes to the “Jewish question” is not unknown within the writings of Silver Age20 authors themselves – Rozanov, of course, being the most obvious example. Th us part of the aim of this book is to evaluate these writings both in their original context and as they can speak to us now.
For an Orthodox Christian, fi nally, there is another question that must be addressed. Th is is the relationship of Russian religious philosophy to Christian theology. In this sense, these thinkers’ writings on Judaism, the Old Testament and contemporary Jewry are oft en situated in the cross-roads between traditional Christian dogma, Russian and European ideology about Jewry (which had its origins in a range of social, economic and cultural developments), and the neo- pagan tendencies of the turn-of-the-century symbolist literary movement21.
Th e Jewish question sometimes enables dissections to be made that in other areas of thought are subtler and trickier to perform: as we will see in the chapter on Pavel Florensky, many thinkers had long been worried by Gnostic and even occultist tendencies in this priest-philosopher’s thought. Th e discovery of letters written to Rozanov during the Beilis trial reveal that he also embraced a racist anti-Semitism, which he attempted to derive and justify from a reading of select Old and New Testament passages. Here clearly, the pseudo-Christian justifi cation of the “new anti-Semitism” can be shown to be incompatible even with the, by comparison, benign religious anti-Judaism of the church fathers.
Th e appraisal of Russian religious philosophy through the lens of the Jewish question also raises philosophical questions: can there be a “national” philosophy as the term Russian philosophy indicates? If so, how does it diff er from Jewish philosophy?
Th e four (or three and half) Jewish thinkers examined here (Gershenzon, Steinberg, Shestov – and Frank, for certain purposes) are also interesting from the point of view of Jewish history. All of them were Jews who benefi ted from Alexander II’s reforms, joining the mass infl ux of Jews into the Russian professional class. Th us their stories comprise an aspect of Russian-Jewish history. As the term “Russian-Jewish” indicates, however, in entering Russian society to an extent that was impossible for their parents, they also became deeply Russifi ed. Th us the question of what is Russian and Jewish in their thought arises again in sharper form.
called, by analogy with the earlier Dreyfus Aff air in France.
20 Th e Silver Age refers to the fl ourishing of Russian literature, poetry and religious thought during the last two decades of the nineteenth century until the Russian Revolution. Th e “Golden Age” would then be that explosion of literary genius starting from Pushkin and running till Dostoevsky.
21 We draw on the judgments of several contemporary Russian philosophers and religious thinkers to evaluate Silver Age thought, who judge by philosophical as well as “Christian” criteria. For a purely “Christian” judgment on Soloviev, Berdyaev, and Shestov by a recent Church fi gure, cf. Hieromonakh Dmitri (Zakharov), Vsyo obretaet smysl, Moscow: Fond “Khristianskaya zhizn’,” 2000 – pp.109-123.
Again, the examination of four Russian-Jewish intellectuals is objectively a small number. Nonetheless, they were representative of that section of Jewry that chose embrace of Russian culture over Zionism, bundism, emigration, radical politics or the practice of Judaism in one or another form. As such, theirs is a Jewish story – even if for them the Jewish and Russian infl uenced each other to such an extent that they became indistinguishable at times.
Still, as in political and economic life, so in intellectual life the boundaries between the Russian and Jewish depended on who was doing the drawing.
While for some, political radicalism was archetypically and dangerously Jewish, and for others quintessentially Russian in spirit – so in philosophy, metaphysical immanentism – to take a case in point – was for some22 a dangerous Jewish error and for others the very expression of the Eastern Russian religious spirit.
In contrast, for others it was transcendentalism that was labeled accordingly.
Even in philosophy, then, it would seem that Jews were both “communists” and
“capitalists,” i.e. bearers of seemingly incompatible traits.
With this background in mind, we will turn to a more detailed consideration of Vladimir Soloviev, the father of Russian religious philosophy and the – not always heeded – conscience of the intelligentsia when it came to the Jewish question of Russia.
Soloviev’s general development
Soloviev’s life can be conveniently divided into three stages, coinciding approximately with the seventies, eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century23. We will outline these stages briefl y, before seeing how his writings on Jews and Judaism form a part of this development.
In his fi rst stage, Soloviev embraced the early Slavophiles’ attempt to fi nd a new synthesis of human knowledge, which following Khomiakov, he called
“integral knowledge” (tselnoe znaniye). His Moscow University dissertation, Th e Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists was published in 1873. It was in fact his own attempt to overcome the crisis of faith he had undergone during his last years at school, when he had identifi ed as an atheist and a nihilist.
Th e 1860s in Russia had seen the fl ourishing of positivism, materialism and utilitarianism in the works of radicals and nihilists such as N.K.Mikhailovsky (1842-1904), D.I.Pisarev (1840-1868), the radical democrat and materialist N.G.
Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), as well as in the liberal ideology of Westernizers
22 As we will see the charge of “immanentism” was in fact not directed at Jews in Russian philosophy: this was deemed Jewish by orthodox Protestants reacting to Spinozism in German romanticism. Russian philosophers considered a transcendental view of the deity Jewish.
23 Frank sees Soloviev as going through three stages, Vasilenko through four; Marina Kostalevsky emphasizes the continuity that existed between the diff erent stages. (Cf.
Marina Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev. Th e Art of Integral Vision. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997.)
such as P.L. Lavrov and A.Herzen. Both the second-wave Slavophiles, and in the same spirit, Soloviev, went back to Khomiakov and Kireevsky to fi nd a Russian answer to this crisis of faith.
In two ways, Soloviev’s emergence into philosophy preempted the later development of his heirs. Th ey too all passed through an infatuation with philosophical materialism, most oft en of the Marxist variety. In addition, Soloviev’s initial philosophical inspiration – as had been the case with the early Slavophiles – was deeply indebted to the German romanticist-idealists such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Schelling. However, for present purposes the most signifi cant hero in Soloviev’s gallery of philosophers, whom he called
“my fi rst philosophical love” was Spinoza.
Already in his fi rst descriptions24 of all-unity, Spinoza’s monistic infl uence is strongly felt in Soloviev’s characterization of all-unity as consisting of an absolute and true being – “absolute substance,” the “all-unifi ed fi rst principle,” the hen kai pan25 – that embraces and generates out of its
“positive nothingness” that “real being” which is the physical-sensual world.
Human thought must move from a rational understanding of this lower real being to a mystical intuition of this upper but connected absolute being, and thus merge with the truly essential, or God.
Of course, these pantheistic elements are found in Schelling and Hegel as well – but there too, the sometimes covert infl uence of Spinoza can be felt.26
24 Th e Crisis of Western Philosophy (1874), Th e Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge (1877), Th e Lectures on God-Manhood (1878) and Th e Critique of Abstract Principles (1880). For these early essays, see Vladimir Soloviev, Sobranie sochineniy.
Tom 1, edited by Ernst L. Radlow. St Petersburg, 1901.
25 Gk. “One and all.”
26 Yirmiyahu Yovel’s excellent study on Spinoza (and other Spanish-Dutch-Jewish thinkers) shows how deep his infl uence was on German fi gures such as Hegel and Feuerbach. (Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics. Th e Marrano of Reason;
and Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics. Th e Adventures of Immanence.
Princeton, Princeton University Press: 1989.) Yovel also sees Spinoza as the fi rst
“secular” Jew in history, and uncovers how his Marrano heritage, with its skepticism regarding both a recently discarded Catholicism and an unenthusiastically re- embraced Judaism, was instrumental in shaping his pantheistic, critical worldview, intended as an alternative to both mainstream religions. As we will see, Spinoza’s
“immanentist Jewish” infl uence can be felt quite distinctively in Soloviev, as well as in Frank, Karsavin and Florensky. It should also be remembered, however, (taking Yovel in a somewhat diff erent direction) that underlying Spinoza’s surface Rationalism and “secularism,” there is a powerful alternative religiosity, which is what was most admired by the Solovievian school. It may not be far wrong to see this, too, as an – albeit highly individualistic – expression of Jewish religiosity, consisting in a thirst for the unity of God and Being, which shares the same reformist and mystical tendencies as the Kabbalistic theosophy that was being developed by other exiled Spanish Jews at the same time (such as Luria and Cordovero). Cf. below for more on Spinozism, Kabbalism and Soloviev.
Soloviev’s new and self-proclaimed Russian “integral knowledge,” even at its inception, thus shares with German mysticism a direct genealogy that leads to the monism of the heterodox Amsterdam Jew.
At this stage of his development, the discovery of Jewish affi nities was not high on Soloviev’s agenda. Indeed, the purpose of Soloviev’s Russian all-unity had a specifi cally Christian apologetic purpose. Christianity was to be instrumental in the attainment of this integral knowledge, and at the same time Soloviev saw his life as being devoted to the task, as he wrote to his fi ancée, of “raising Christianity from blind traditional faith to the level of rational conviction” by creating a new Christian philosophy whose credibility would help overcome the fashion for atheism and materialism.
In the 1870s Soloviev’s all-unity had a Russian angle that was also taken from the Slavophiles. Th e attainment of integral knowledge would be realized through the Messianic task of Russian Christianity: the Russian Church’s historic mission was to overcome the split between East and West, thus realizing all-unity on earth, due to the special nature of Russia and her people as intermediaries between the East and the West. For in Russia the Eastern tendency to despotism and the Western tendency towards rampant individualism are harmoniously avoided.
Th e Slavophile orientation of Soloviev’s fi rst stage of development is not contradicted by the fact that he includes Kabbalistic terminology in the construction of his new Christian philosophy. It was in Th e Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge that Soloviev used the term “Ein Sof ” (Heb.
“without end, infi nite”) to describe the “positive nothingness” of the ground of being, i.e. to construct an apophatic theology of the unknowability of the Divine essence before creation. In the same period, he was also developing the Kabbalistic term “Adam Kadmon” (Heb. “primordial man/Adam”) to describe the supernal man, or Logos, who was an intermediary between the unknowable divinity (the Ein Sof) and the world. Finally, it was in this fi rst stage that Soloviev was developing the concept that was to prove his greatest heirloom: the concept of Sophia-Chochma (the Divine wisdom). Th is in particular was to become an intimate part of his mystical and literary life due to the famous three visions he had of a mysterious woman, whom he identifi ed as her embodiment– a subject, however, that we will treat at greater length below.
One needs to see Soloviev’s early Kabbalistic “activism” in the proper light.
At this Christian-Slavophile stage of his development, it would be wrong to see this as a drawing close to Jewish sources and a special openness to Judaism and Jewry. As Burmistrov points out27, while Soloviev undoubtedly did study Kabbalistic texts in translation and in Hebrew at this time, these concepts were also to be found in Jacob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg, Western European mystics for whose work Soloviev had the greatest admiration. In
27 Konstantin Burmistrov, “Th e interpretation of Kabbalah in early 20th-Century Russian Philosophy. Soloviev, Bulgakov, Florenskii, Losev,” in East European Jewish Aff airs, Vol.37, No.2, August 2007:157-187.
addition, Soloviev signifi cantly changed the concept of the Ein Sof and Adam Kadmon, so that it is clear that Kabbalah was merely a secondary source for his own Christian inspiration, to be adapted as necessary28. In that sense, Soloviev’s interest in Kabbalah in the 1870s was part of the broader trend among the Russian intelligentsia of the time to dabble in Kabbalah, theosophy, occultism and masonry.
Still, even if Soloviev’s Kabbalistic sources in the seventies were received to some extent through secondary sources, Boehme and Swedenborg themselves were part of that trend of Christian kabbalah whose roots went back to a very genuine immersion in Jewish mystical sources in the Renaissance. Soloviev may thus have been quite some way “downstream” from these originals, but – as with the infl uence of Spinoza, both in direct form and through “Spinozised” German romanticism – this fi rst stage of Soloviev’s development laid a convert Judaic ground in his thinking, which he would later appropriate when he did in fact turn consciously to Russia’s “Jewish question.”
Just such a reorientation was marked by Soloviev’s second stage of development, which began with a serious revision of his idealization of Russia.
Th e change of mind was triggered by the events that followed on from the assassination of Alexander II, a period which ushered in a mood of gloom throughout Russia. It was also the beginning of the long history of anti-Jewish violence that would last until the Civil War: pogroms broke out in Kherson, Odessa and Kiev in the wake of the assassination.
Th ere was a new aspect to the violence, however. Th e authorities were confused as to the meaning of the pogroms, and feared most of all that they were part of the same revolutionary terrorism that had killed Alexander II and of which the new tsar was terrifi ed. Th e government thus decided to appropriate the outbreaks for its own purposes, and a commission was launched into what peculiar practices of the Jews could have provoked such behavior on the part of Christian peasants29. Th e government, in other words, was quick to put itself on
28 Burmistrov writes that Soloviev Christianized these Kabbalistic concepts, as did the Renaissance Christian Kabbalists. To an extent this is true. But it needs to be kept in mind that in a serious sense, all these Christian Kabbalists (Mirandello de Pico, Boehme, Swedenborg, and Soloviev) departed signifi cantly from Christian dogma in creating their theosophic science. In Boehme and in some places in Soloviev, the Ein Sof becomes a divine essence that precedes the persons of the Trinity; Soloviev also equated Adam Kadmon with Christ and with the Logos, diff erentiating these three from the historical Jesus. Both these undogmatic moves led to the creation of what one might call a “trans-Christian” theosophy, in the sense that it holds that all humans have Christ-ian/ “Adam-Kadmonic” souls. As we will see later, this more open, less dogmatic “trans-Christianity” was also attractive to Jews interested in Russian philosophy (such as S.Frank, and one might add Osip Mandelstam, who was attracted by Florensky’s sophianic philosophy). In this sense, this “trans- Christianizing” of more orthodox Christian dogma can be said to be, in indirect origin, Judaic.
29 John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, ed., Pogroms: anti-Jewish violence in modern
the side of the pogromshchiki and disperse any revolutionary use the violence could be put to. Th is would set a grim precedent. Under Alexander III and then Nicholas II, government-sponsored or –tolerated anti-Semitic propaganda assumed the time-honored role of defl ecting attention from the inadequacies of the ruling regime.
On the other hand, the assassination of Alexander II gave Soloviev the opportunity to test his idea that Russia was a prototype of harmonious Christian all-unity by making a plea in 1881 to Alexander III to forgive his father’s assassins. Th at plea was rejected, however, and he was forbidden from lecturing at Moscow University. Although the ban was only temporary, such was Soloviev’s disillusionment that he immediately resigned his post.
In the coming years, this disillusionment only deepened. Th e closing of ranks of Slavophiles such as Aksakov with the government in a rampant condoning of anti-Jewish violence in the coming years left a bad taste in Soloviev’s mouth. He now began to view the Slavophile idealization of Russia as idolatrous: admiration for the Christian faith of the simple Russian people had turned into an uncritical faith in the people themselves, whatever they may do or believe.
He thus began to look Westwards for Christian inspiration, and there followed nearly a decade in which Soloviev tried to realize his vision of human and church unity by engaging in a campaign for the unifi cation of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. In so doing, he was trying to put into practice the ideas which he had previously outlined in theory: the concept of pan-unity, god-manhood, and Christian theocracy under the infl uence of Divine Wisdom.
For Soloviev, the Jewish Question in the heightened form it had taken in the eighties fi tted organically into this stage of his quest: the split between Orthodox and Catholic which he was trying by means of active “Christian politics” to heal was a consequence of the earlier schism in the church between Jewish and gentile Christians. It was for him a fact of great signifi cance that Providence had placed the greatest concentration of Jews in the world at the divide between the Christian East and West (the Pale of Settlement, which lay between Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia). Th us, as he saw it, if the East-West schism could be healed, the healing of the Jewish Question would surely follow.
Soloviev threw himself into a decade-long one-man campaign to overcome that schism. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in that struggle was his approach through a Croat bishop to Pope Leo XIII with a scheme for a reconciliation with Eastern Orthodoxy under the aegis of Alexander III. Th e pope, however, on learning of Soloviev’s idea was not convinced30, and in the coming years Soloviev’s enthusiasm for his theocratic project ground to a halt. We will dwell
Russian history, 39.
30 As Frank recounts, Pope Leo XIII said: ‘Bella idea, ma fuor d’un miracolo, e cosa impossibile.’ (A beautiful idea but short of a miracle, impossible to carry out.) Semyon Frank, introduction to A Solovyov Anthology, edited by S.Frank (London:
Th e Saint Austin Press, 2001), 18-19.
