The Icon and the Axe

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.