pretensions and the religious character of its entire culture.
The peculiarities of Muscovite civilization as it took finished shape under Ivan IV invite comparisons not only with Eastern despots and Western state builders but also with two seemingly remote civilizations: imperial Spain and ancient Israel.
Like Spain, Muscovy absorbed for Christendom the shock of alien invaders and found its national identity in the fight to expel them. As with Spain, the military cause became a religious one for Russia. Political and religious authority were intertwined; and the resultant fanaticism led both countries to become particularly intense spokesmen for their respective divisions of Christianity. The introduction into the creed of the phrase 'and from the Son,' which first split East and West, took place at a council
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
