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
