The Icon and the Axe

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-