SUMMARY:

The article by Galina Zelenina treats the “Russian inquisition’s” assault on Judaizers heresy in the context of the historiographic revision of Spanish inquisition (this revisionism reconsiders the latter as a relatively coherent bureaucratic system, a precursor to the absolutist bureaucracies of the early Modern period, a source of the practices of rational governance and mechanisms of societal homogenization). The paper examines a complex of issues related to the phenomenon of so-called “Orthodox Inquisition” and the heresy of Judaizers detected and persecuted in Novgorod and Moscow in the late fifteenth – early sixteenth centuries. Activities of heretical circles as well as of their opponents and oppressors are considered through the prism of different existent scholarly traditions on the subject, those denying Jewish origins of the heresy and its very existence as well as those holding heretics for clandestine Jews. The author’s approach is twofold: it is focused on the activities of the “Orthodox inquisition” against the actual Judaizers heresy or against the “fictional” heresy constructed by the contemporaries and later scholars – on the one hand, and on the heresy itself – on the other.
The article establishes Sephardic connections of the heresy and of practices of the “Orthodox inquisition” on a number of levels which include: genealogy of the heretic literature; the context of eschatological expectations; direct borrowings from Spanish inquisitional practices; reasons of the joint church and lay powers actions against the Judaizers.
The first section of the article analyzes parallels and connections between heretics’ doctrine (as known from their scarce writings and their opponents’ reports), so-called “literature of Judaizers” (the body of various works translated from Hebrew into Ruthenian in Grand Duchy of Lithuania), and Jewish intellectual background in Europe. Russian Orthodox, heretical and Jewish eschatological expectations intensifying to the end of the fifteenth century are one of the central issues of comparison. The first part’s conclusion is that if one accepts Israeli and Western scholars’ viewpoint about deciding Jewish influence on Judaizers that influence is evidently Sephardic, carried by Spanish Jews or their descendants.
The second section examines the fight against the heresy, including polemical activities and literature and penitentiary methods, since according to the Soviet historiography which made the greatest contribution to the study of Judaizers, there was no Judaism-inspired heresy or even no heretical movement at all, but persecutors’ invention only, and therefore the only thing safe and worth investigating is the persecution itself. In the texts used by the churchmen in anti-heretical controversy and in tools and practices they applied translations and borrowings from and parallels with European, particularly Spanish experience are clearly seen. Spanish experience of persecuting Cryptojudíos (baptized Jews who secretly observed Judaism) by the Crown and Inquisition might have served as a role model for Muscovite clergy.
Conclusion of the paper contains some further speculations upon similarity between Crown-Church relations in sixteenth century’s Spain and Russia and the possible role of heretical movements and inquisitorial repression of them in the process of autocratic State construction. Zelenina concludes that Sephardic or Spanish influence on Judaizers and anti-Judaizers may be considered an established fact. The joint assault of clergy and great princes against the Judaizers was an important step toward the “symphony” of the church and the state in Muscovy. As such, this can be regarded as a precondition (alongside with the “gathering of lands,” centralizing the governance, etc.) for the emergence of a new type of the state and much later – of an absolutist empire.