To give a child an idea of scarlet or orange, of sweet or bitter, I present the objects, or, in other words, convey to him these impressions; but proceed not so absurdly, as to endeavour to produce the impressions by exciting the ideas. Our ideas, upon their appearance, produce not their correspondent impressions, nor do we perceive any colour, or feel any sensation merely upon thinking of them.

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

An old saying keeps coming back to me as I read Dennis Eoffe’s essay: “To read a book as the devil reads the Bible.” Mr. Eoffe’s text is rich in many respects, its documentation far-reaching; the author’s pathos cannot be doubted. It is a pity that the author spends it demonstrating my failure to meet up with goals I have never set before me and to answer questions that are largely irrelevant for my scholarship as represented by my two-volume A Grin without a Cat.^[1] Another problem is the complex link between that book and Eoffe’s narration; but all of this will become plain in due course.
The simplest way of dealing with the matter would have been to state that Mr. Eoffe’s main argument with my work has to do with my (as he appears to think) devious and inexplicable refusal to treat the all-important questions of Russo-Khazarian liaisons, the Jewries of the Crimea, Byzantium, and Ruthenia, as well as the mainly Novgorodian heresy of the so-called Judaisers at the turn of the 15th century; then to inform the reader that these subjects are all wittingly and explicitly excluded from my subject for geographical, chronological, and methodological reasons, which are given in my work on this and that page. (As it happens, Mr. Eoffe never refers to these reasons or even to the fact that there might be any.) It might also have been stated, since Eoffe presses these points, that I have no problem whatsoever assuming that the relatively prosperous Jewry of medieval Kiev (my views on which are distorted literally beyond recognition in Eoffe’s relation) may to a considerable extent have stemmed from Khazarian Jews and that I would not exclude the possibility that the aforementioned heresy incorporated Judaic influences to quite some extent – it is fairly certain that there were some such influences.
However, had I chosen that easy way out I should have lacked in respect for the Russian readers, who may not have access to my work unless they live in Moscow or St. Petersburg. I shall therefore go into some further detail, but without pretending that the points I can expand on here is a substitute for my book. There is a particular need to quote my own text at some length, for only that will show the reader the gross misjudgements and, I am forced to conclude, dishonest misrepresentations Mr. Eoffe makes himself guilty of; how little resemblance there is between the book I wrote and the chimera he comments on. Much would have been superfluous, or at least less tedious to write, had the reviewer cared to read my thirty-page introduction on method, principles and necessary limitations. Alas, I can find nothing in his piece to suggest that this is the case. Maybe I have made the wrong methodological choices? Maybe I have excluded things that must not be excluded if the treatment is to remain fair? However, I feel reassured having read Mr. Eoffe’s philippics, for not in a single instance does the reviewer prove the relevance of his digressions for my subject; nor, with one exception, does he present any relevant new material.

PERSONS

The arguments ad hominem will be lost on few reflecting readers, and I think that I may be excused if I do not ignore them altogether; they are clearly meant to compromise my integrity and solidity as a scholar and as a person. I shall deal with the most devious ones only briefly, however, making the age-old distinction between “form” and “content” and starting with “form”; for in the matter of rhetorical contrivances the malice is the most insidious. Still, Mr. Eoffe professes a preference for “a gentlemanly tone” in scholarship (re Lunt vs. Alekseev), and I shall do my best to reciprocate.
From a rhetorical point of view one notes first the juxtaposition of heat and cold in the initial discussion of me, my work, and the origin of my family (sic!). Thus, the reader is acquainted with me first as a “blestiashchii znatok tserkovnoslavianskogo iazyka”,^[2] who has studied “bespretsedentnoe po okhvatu kolichestvo relevantnykh sviatootecheskikh materialov”; one, furthermore, who stems from a “starinn[yi] ro[d] sluzhilykh liudei, prizvannykh v Shvetsiiu predpolozhitel’no v XVII veke”, upon which the author graciously informs us in a footnote (why!?) that my being family with the 16th century publicist Ivan Semenov syn Peresvetov “naskol’ko my mozhem sudit’, ne dokazano”. Indeed, I might well comment on all these points. There can, for example, be no doubt as to the time at which a representative of my “family of servitors” chose the Swedish party at occupied Novgorod (viz. step by step from August 1613 till July 1615); I am not family with I. S. Peresvetov;^[3] and as for Church Slavonic I am a mere toiler in the increasingly deserted field of Philology, hardly a renowned specialist. But then, of course, such comments from me would not hit the mark. Ne ob etom rech’. We recognise the trick from Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, addressing the masses poised over the horrendously maimed corpse of Caesar: “And Brutus is an honourable man.” After a show of goodwill from Antony, Brutus can be defamed, discarded, hunted. Why at all bother with the history of my family, for example, if not in order to let that snake, “predpolozhitel’no”, enter paradise, effectively casting a shadow over my person, although by proxy. Also, I very much suspect that the spuriousness of my liaison with that “great” Ivan Peresvetov is expected to work the same wonder – not that I have ever claimed the honour! Yet, perversely, the actual facts of my family history are, I believe, sufficiently well known to the author.^[4] I will not dwell on the question of what makes him cite the “udalenie shvedskogo goroda Lunda ot tsentrov mirovoi slavistiki”, nor do I here intend to defend my ancient university.
Another trick is the guilt by association with Authorities and anti-Authorities meted out by Dennis Eoffe. It is insinuated, for example, that I either ignore or slate and disapprove of G. M. Prokhorov, G. G. Litavrin and V. N. Toporov because I disagree with or will not treat some of their tenets (I may disagree with them on points, but not always in the way Eoffe alleges). The last-mentioned scholar I ostensibly criticise povsemestno, which is very far from the truth. On the other hand I am, allegedly, a confirmed adept of the late Jacob Luria (Ia. S. Lur’e) – in Eoffe’s books an anathematised, notoriously “old-regime” figure. (As a scholar I am probably in many respects a follower of Luria but never in the ways reported by the reviewer.) The four men mentioned are all scholars whom I hold in esteem, and if any of the three still among us holds or will hold in future a view of me and my scholarship I can only hope that it will be based solely on myself and my work.
The only previous review by Mr. Eoffe that I have read is his “polemical observations” (thus the reviewer) on A. V. Nazarenko’s Drevniaia Rus’ na mezhdunarodnykh putiakh (Moscow, 2001), which exhibit the same amazament at the reviewed author’s not mentioning and treating Khazars when he should have; a similar use of the sobriquet of “starorezhimnost’”; the same smuggish observations on the works of which (the reviewer tells us) the author is ignorant, but on which the reviewer liberally informs us; the loud rhetoric, employing the very same contrivances and innuendos.^[5]
But why the rhetorics? What is my crime? (“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now…”; “My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar…”). Apparently: having murdered – or at least emasculated – the Jews of Rus’; and not only in the quite passive sense in which an expert in Byzantine Jewish history recently inquired: “Who killed the Jews of Byzantium?” (the villain then: historiography, which would not treat them).^[6]

BOOKS

Allow me first to state what I have attempted to achieve in the book under discussion. Mr. Eoffe has not made this clear either to himself or to the readers of Ab Imperio.
The first and main volume (A Grin without a Cat, 1: Adversus Iudaeos Texts in the Literature of Medieval Russia (988-1504), is concerned with the history and philology of original and translated works adversus Iudaeos (sc. works “against the Jews”) circulating among the East Slavs from the introduction of Christian literature in Rus’ till the very early 16th century. I follow the development Kievan Rus’–Muscovy and hence exclude the literature of Lithuanian Ruthenia (on which see below). On the material of 11th-early16th century manuscripts the dissemination of a selected corpus of works on East Slav soil is traced in order to make out the main points in their textual history, particularly the circumstances of their entry into East Slavonic letters. Here I adhere to the general position that a text should not be supposed to be older than the oldest witness unless positive evidence suggest otherwise. This I do in order to establish fairly reliable corpora, which may later be added to rather than extracted from. From a practical point of view the texts are divided into four, partly overlapping, categories: Biblical works and works on world history;^[7] homiletics; literary disputations; tracts, epistles, and poems. Aspects of their textual history are treated in as many chapters. Despite what has often been claimed I find nothing generally to connect the composition, copying, or importation of anti-Judaic works with vicissitudes within the Rus’ Jewish community or in its rapport with Christian Slavs before the second half of the 15th century. On the contrary, information on living, “non-liturgical”, “non-biblical” Jews can never be identified,^[8] and nearly all anti-Judaic motives appear to ascend to a common Christian heritage in exegesis, hagiography and homiletics passed on to Rus’ from Byzantium and paralleled by her sister cultures in the Balkans, with which Rus’ shared her set of translated model texts. In addition, nearly all the texts were translated in South Slavia.^[9] The anti-Judaic tendencies of the literature of Kievan Rus’, although not quite negligible, appear to have been greatly exaggerated in some scholarship because several masterpieces of Kievan literature are festal sermons to do with liturgical lections on Judaism vs. Christianity; in particular, these are paschal sermons with a highly traditional treatment of exegetical and hermeneutical Jews, playing a role in the passion of Christ and in Heilsgeschichte (salvation history).^[10] The bulk of anti-Judaic works known in Muscovy were imported only in the late 14th–early 15th century, at a time when next to no Jews are recorded on East Slav territory outside Ruthenia and long before the attested rise of the heresy known in historiography as “the Judaisers”,^[11] notwithstanding that much earlier scholarship has tended unreflectedly to connect the composition/importation of some of them with the campaign against these schismatics. This is not to say that the texts concerned cannot have been used against heretics or even Jews at a secondary stage. However, any explanation claiming that their importation to Rus’ was to do with real Jews or heretics should also consider the question of their earlier South Slavonic genesis and manage to separate their translation and importation from the appreciable general translatory activity in 14th-century South Slavia and the appreciable general import of new texts to Rus’ during the 14th-15th century. It is probably safe to say, however, that there was a heightened interest in ancient and, to some extent, newly-imported, but already present, texts adversus Iudaeos in the Rus’ of the second half of the 15th century, which appears to culminate at the turn of the century, never to vanish entirely thereafter.^[12] At this late stage, when transient Jews were becoming more common in Muscovy and when some Orthodox hierarchs may have suspected actual Judaic elements in contemporary heresy, there are a small number of uncertain points in the “Jewish denotation” of some texts. These I have indicated and I hope they will be illuminated by future research on textual traditions and content. Cf.:

“The goal of the present study is twofold: to help clarify which distinctly anti-Judaic works were known and copied in medieval Rus’, and to examine how extant manuscripts containing these works are distributed in time and, partly, in place in order to enhance our understanding of the uses to which the works may have been put. A collateral goal in the resulting textual enquiries has been to determine on the available material whether there is positive evidence that the specific texts may have been connected to Jewish realia in Rus’: this generally amounts to determining whether the texts may have been intended, or used, as tools in confrontations with adherents to Judaism, whether Jews or Christian sectarians. I have no illusions that these goals can be attained quite satisfactorily within a single study of modest proportions: a great many of the works needing to be addressed have been poorly studied, and full-scale monographic inquiry into the multifarious texts would require many volumes. Still, a series of pilot studies of the historiography of individual works have shown that only a broad investigation of a fair number of them will save the student from making faulty conclusions on times of creation/translation/importation, on the influence of the works on one another […], and on functions works may have had in the society that created them, or in which they were read. /fn/ Anti-Judaic works are always in dialogue with other anti-Judaic works, and – generally, not necessarily – borrow extensively from one another rather than find inspiration in physical circumstances. Paradoxically, therefore, they must first be studied as groups of texts, since the most basic investigations into their geneses and histories will otherwise be thwarted. […]
It cannot be helped that some readers may be troubled by the fact that my study occupies only a middle position of sorts: it is rarely concerned with such primary philological study of the texts on a broad manuscript basis as might have provided us with incontrovertible knowledge of filiations, origins, ages, and linguistic stages. Nor does it occupy itself much with the make-up of actual ideas or with their dispersion – with what might have been called a cultural outlook or, perhaps, with a modern phrase, Christian Rus’ “imagining the other”.^[13] Historical facts and hypotheses will at times be used to help understand the textual transmission of the works; only in a very few instances shall I attempt the opposite except in order to disprove earlier theories based on flawed facts.
Notwithstanding the philological methods and goals of my study (on the former, see below), it is my hope that it may benefit other disciplines. There can be little doubt that anti-Judaic texts were important vehicles for attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in medieval Rus’ – which is not to say that were not other, (more) important sources of information and moulders of opinion. For those interested in such things this book will give some basic information; it will also provide plenty of warnings lest the secure dating of texts should not be a constant concern to the student. It goes without saying that I hope that future special inquiries into the anti-Judaic works here treated, and into others unknown to me, may benefit from the material I have collected and from the preliminary conclusions I have drawn.” (GWAC 2. Pp. 8-10)^[14]

Attempts at finding traces of, e.g., enmity must not then be based merely on the risky interpretation of theological tracts which carry no trace of flesh and blood Jews, since that would be begging the question (petitio principii) and, in the end, lead us no closer to any truth we might feel confident to believe in. If such enmity may only be reconstructed on the evidence of traditional material that would surface in Rus’ in any case (since few South Slavonic texts were not imported), without there being means of even gauging its relative weight in Rus’ as compared with other, commensurate, cultures (those of South Slavia in particular), we quite simply stand without evidence. The sermons adversus Iudaeos of John Chrysostom (Ru. Ioann Zlatoust) and the Doctrine of Jacob the Jew – vivid works of fair repute in second-half 15th century Muscovy – tell us much of the Jews and Christians of 4th century Antioch and, probably, of 7th century North Africa. At this stage of our knowledge, however, they can tell us precious little of the situation in Rus’. Nor can the works of their Rus’ followers be relied on here if they only follow their master copies. This tremendous problem – a main subject of my book – which contaminates or risks contaminating almost all histories of medieval Jewry on the territory of today’s Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, Mr. Eoffe chooses more or less to ignore. The “simulacra of hatred” to which I allegedly endeavour to turn Rus’ Jewry has their only counterpart in the corresponding common Christian simulacrum of “the Jew” from which I attempt to deliver the seriously aiming student.
The second volume, A Grin without a Cat, 2: Jews and Christians in Medieval Russia – Assessing the Sources, is a supplementary study constituting something akin to a security check. It was researched in order to enhance our understanding of the dissemination of the literary works adversus Iudaeos, and in it I look into the evidence for a Jewish presence – or for transient Jews – in Christian Kievan Rus’ and non-Ruthenian post-invasion Rus’ before the very early 16th century.^[15] It is not a general history of these Jewries but specifically focuses on the evidence of – or silence on – Jewish-Christian confrontations and religious or cultural contacts in post-988 Rus’ that might change the picture of the textual studies (hence the subtitle on “Jews and Christians”). This is done on Slavonic evidence and such Hebraic evidence as has been translated into modern European languages; sporadically other than textual and linguistic evidence is also brought into play, but of this there is as yet very little that pertains to the times and places under study. The first part of the volume contains a survey in time and space of the Jews of Rus’ (as always within the chronological and geographical limits of the study); the second part looks into the evidence for contacts and potential aggression in economic activity, learning, alleged or possible conversions, and alleged or possible assaults/pogroms/expulsions.^[16] Notwithstanding the thriving Jewish community at pre-Mongol Kiev, the evidence signalled so far does not positively support the flourishing view that there was a particularly marked opposition between the two religions on Kievan soil between the 11th and 13th centuries, nor is there evidence that the later East Slav polities outside Ruthenia (sc. budding Muscovy) provided an arena for such interconfessional clashes. Some new developments in the second half of the 15th century will probably warrant further study, however, when the traditions of a number of signalled texts have been followed in detail.

TIMES AND PLACES

We must now consider a most important factor, which has already been referred to more than once: the geographical and chronographical limitations chosen for the study. They are discussed in the introduction to Vol. 1, and I quote in extracts:

“In order for the results of this inquiry into literary texts to be referrable to the religious situation in a specific society or in specific societies, geography will necessarily become an issue of some importance. […] When I choose to follow the “Great Russian” development [sc. from Kievan Rus’], as I do in this study, this is not in the belief that it is the only, nor necessarily the main, development. However, if comparisons with realia must be made, and if the Jews in literature and real life are to be studied – and I wish to retain that as a possibility – one line must be singled out, if only to keep the study from assuming Gargantuan proportions or to avoid having it run along very many parallel lines.
When we consider Jewish developments in eastern Europe in the middle ages there is no doubting that Ruthenia, ie post-Mongol Rus’ under Lithuanian (or Lettovian /fn/) rule, had a^[17] injection of new Jewish life at some point in the 13-14cc., when Germanic-speaking Ashkenazi Jewry immigrated and could not but change the outlook of Jewish life and thus, at some level, the image of the Jew among the Slavs surrounding them; budding Muscovy on the other hand […] appears to have had no or little such immigration, if all handbooks on the subject are to be believed. /fn/ (Ruthenian intellectual traditions were furthermore to evolve along quite different lines from Muscovy, even though this is mainly a 16-17c. phenomenon to do with new impulses and developments.) My study will concern then (pre-Mongol) Kievan Rus’ and those of its eastmost heirs after the Mongol invasion which were not to be ruled from Kaunas and Cracow but would in time be integrated with “Mos[c]ovia”, Muscovy. (This is also, more or less, the East Slavia that had had no need to reconsider a “new” Jewry with, probably, new customs and ways of living.) It need not concern us here that there were areas in southern Rus’, or what was before the invasion the southern periphery of Rus’, such as the Crimea and the principality of T’’mutorokan’, where the history, density and, probably, make-up of Jewish settlements were quite different from the core-lands; for there is little to suggest that very many cultural and literary impulses reached the centre from there.”^[18] (GWAC 1. Pp. 23-24, transliteration slightly simplified, two misprints corrected within square brackets)

What is “Russia”? What is “Rus’”? – I can accept the notion that the early history of today’s Russia lies in Kievan Rus’ and in the history of all those territories now constituting the Russian Federation, though I cannot speak of this continuity without reservation: it is not “reversible”. For I can also accept that the history of, say, Ukraine lies in Kievan Rus’ and in the history of those other territories which now make up the Ukrainian state (though again I cannot do so without reservation). And so on. The history of some Turkic peoples and of some Jewish people partly lies in, e.g., the Crimea, although neither is now a state-defining ethnicity on that territory. These perspectives and many more make perfect sense and they need not be in conflict. But often when we speak we do best to make it perfectly clear to ourselves and to our audience which of the concepts we are in actual fact apostrophising; this is particularly important in a scholarly text. In my book I deal with the cultures producing 15/16th century Muscovy, not the present-day Federation, still less the Russian Empire of yore. This I make abundantly clear. In particular, I do not treat the East Slavonic territories under Lithuanian or Polish rule – separated from Muscovy in a way which to many probably seemed final – since the preconditions for Jewish contacts were completely different there, totally changing the preconditions for an analysis, as explained above. Mr. Eoffe chooses completely to ignore my exclusion of Ruthenia and even to bring it to the readers’ attention. He makes a slapdash reference to “prostory mnogomudroi Rutenii” in connection with translatory activity among the Slavs and the views of myself, professors Moshe Taube, Moshe Altbauer, Horace Lunt, et al. That is all. What does it matter, then, that Mr. Eoffe states that he makes no difference between the categories, when he forgets that I do and that the subject might appear to demand that the distinction be made? (Which is “his” Rus’? – Some answer can be had from the places he cites as being certain centres for “Old Rus’” Jewry: apart from Kiev this is the Saltov-Maiatskaia culture,^[19] the Crimea, Khwarazm and Darband…) As a consequence he chooses to treat my use of “Rus’” as though it pertained to his “backshadowing” of the Empire, my stated qualifications notwithstanding and despite any reasonable requirements of historicity. I should have expected an awareness of the problem to be elementary indeed in medieval studies and not merely an angle of “mnogomudrost’”; but the principle conveniently allows him to digress on the matters dear to him: Crimean Jews, the common Russo-Khazarian chronotope, etc. His Russia appears to be eternal, her zemli – iskonno russkie. This may seem as an argument ad hominem on my part, as dispensing “guilt by association” with Imperial or Soviet nationalism, but if my interpretation is incorrect I am at a loss as to how I should interpret the author’s position. Were, for example, the Crimean Jews,^[20] who, it is true, had had Rus’ overlords for parts of the 10th and 11th centuries, predestined (“again”) to become “Russian” many centuries later? Must really, should really, any Jewries of the Slav and other principalities of 1290, 1390, or 1490, etc., be understood in the light of much-later Russian territorial expansion?
On the question of the Crimea, moreover, I sincerely hope that G. G. Litavrin does not acquaint himself with my view-point on his research on Eustratios the Faster from the juicy digest of Mr. Eoffe.^[21] I am not questioning the existence of Jewish slavers in the Crimea, and Eoffe’s words – “Po mneniiu Peresvetova, nikakoi dostovernoi informatsii o real’nom evree-rabotorgovtse izvlech’ iz analiziruemogo Litavrinym teksta pocherpnut’ nevozmozhno” – remain somewhat strange to me, especially since the reader can hardly resist the interpretation that I deny the existence of Jewish Crimean slavers in this era in a general manner, not only that I may question the minutiae on the slaver in the legend of the Blessed Eustratios. (Does Mr. Eoffe, for example, also vouch for the historicity of the chariot of fire, which, according to his sole source on these events, took Eustratios’ soul to heaven?^[22]) What I am questioning is the direct relevance of the matter for Kievan Rus’. As Mr. Eoffe himself quotes from V. N. Toporov “pri nashestvii polovetskogo khana Bonyaka na Kievo-Pecherskii monastyr’ Evstratii byl uveden v plen i prodan evreiu” (my italics).^[23] The reader may note, as the late Henrik Birnbaum did,^[24] that this was done in Crimean Chersonesus and can hardly be assumed to “point to any Jewish settlement in Kievan Russia proper”.^[25] How much then does it tell us of Kievan realia? I am tempted to quote the telling title of the work of Bogdanova referred to by Mr. Eoffe (which, he asserts, I “also do not know”): “Kherson v 10-15 vv. Problemy istorii vizantiiskogo goroda” (my italics). As Mr. Eoffe might have seen in the pious source on Eustratios, the day after the saint’s death a message comes from the emperor against the Jews, declaring that “all the Jews were to be expelled, their property confiscated, and their elders killed.”^[26] Is this Rus’ territory, Rus’ perspective? G. G. Litavrin is very correct in concluding that this is mainly a Byzantine tale.
On slaving, I write, among other things,^[27]

“The sources do mention “Rus and Slavs from the town of Cracow” [re European 9th-10th c slave trade] arriving in Prague, bringing merchandise; they also mention Jews “from the lands of the Turks”. They do not, however, speak of Jews from Rus’ being involved in this trade. /fn/ Making too much of such differenciations borders on sophistry, however, and it remains a real possibility that Jewish slavers were involved in the selling of East Slavs at an early stage, before Rus’ was baptised.
However, the fairly wide-spread Jewish participation in early medieval European slave trade seems never to have extended to include Christian Rus’ as an immediate large-scale collection area; nor is there any evidence at all of there ever having been a Jewish slave market at Kiev, despite occasional claims to the contrary. /two footnotes/ In fact, after 988 Jewish slave trade quickly disappears even as a possibility in Rus’ and much of Eastern Europe. Christian culture in general strongly disapproved of Jews owning Christian slaves – the redeemed people should not be enslaved by the murderers of Christ (Roth. 1966. P. 27) – and, as far as the European market was concerned, trade in slaves of Slav extraction appears to have come to an end with the 10 c. /fn/ (It should also be observed that in the role model culture of Byzantium Jewish slave-owners were a very rare phenomenon as a result of imperial legislation (Starr. 1939. Pp. 19, 31-32)).” (GWAC 2. Pp. 44-45, emphasis added)

I ask the reader to compare this to Mr. Eoffe’s digest. The fact remains that I can find no evidence of Jewish slaving on actual Rus’ soil in the Christian era. Can Mr. Eoffe?
The chronological point of departure, 988 (in actual fact the 1030-1040s because of lack of earlier literature), gave itself in the discussion of texts. It was stated that the historical survey of vol. 2 would run parallel to the philological one of vol. 1, the idea being juxtaposing texts and verifiable history. This is underlined in the introduction to vol. 2:

“[The Kievan Jewish community] predates Slavonic Rus’ literacy and any known Rus’ literature by at least a century. Since Khazarian domination was overthrown in the 10 c. – that too before the beginning of Rus’ literature and before there was any officially endorsed “Christian” image of the Jew; since, furthermore, “Khazars” even in later Kievan times does not seem to imply any particular associations with things Jewish or vice versa,^[28] the complicated and largely conjectural discussion of a Khazarian prehistory of Rus’ Jewry may be ignored in the present study as having little immediate relevance for our subject.” (GWAC 2. P. 10, transliteration slightly simplified)

To me it appears to be a natural interpretation that later Kievan Jewry had partly Khazar roots, even though no theses of my text are contingent on the question of their Khazarianness/non-Khazarianness.^[29] See for example in my text:

“…the two most likely candidates as “originators” or early “inspirators”, Romaniote (“Byzantine”, also known as Yavanic) and Khazarian Jewries, are poorly recorded… (GWAC 2. P. 5)
…We must probably assume that there were in fact several “original” vernaculars among first-generation Jewish Kievans over time, as the shifting international contacts that suggest themselves after the possibly Khazar-dominated 9 c. would more likely than not be accompanied by shifts in demography. (GWAC 2. P. 59. Cf. p. 53)
…Their cultural Ashkenizisation appears to have begun before we have reason to suspect a large-scale immigration from the West (in the 14 c.?), and probably the two (or more) Jewries – Ashkenazi and pre-Ashkenazi (whether it was Romaniotes/Byzantine, “Khazarian” or yet something else) – coalesced gradually over a long period of time.” (GWAC 2. P. 122).

It is clear that Mr. Eoffe would have had me and everyone write more on the subject of 9th and 10th century Jews,^[30] particularly Khazarian, or on the Khazar blood running in the veins of Rus’ Jews, but I cannot see why I should have. Most probably there were Jews of Khazarian stock at Kiev in, say, the mid-11th century, but hailing from an empire crushed – as far as Rus’ was concerned – at least two generations back (and conceptually moved further back, from the point of view of the East Slavs, by the take-over of the Scandinavian Rus’ at Kiev); their ancestors may well have had a share in power at Kiev at a time when there was no officially-endorsed negative Christian image of “the Jew” but when almost all non-Jewish Kievans were pagans. In what way does that per se affect my argument? (One recalls, of course, that the reviewer feels the urge to cite my ancestors eleven generations back in order to write a comment on my book. His perspectives may be far-reaching and wide indeed, his genealogical aspirations are certainly baffling with regard to me and to the Jews of Christianised medieval Rus’.) Indeed, even though some pride in contemporary Rus’ superiority as compared to the once mighty Khazars is detectable in some early chronicles, Khazaria was probably in most respects “old history” at the time when Christian literature became part of Rus’ culture, being generations removed from the protagonists of, say, the mid-11c., and that in a Rus’ where the Slavs had had no writing to aid memory. (Not to mention that the degree, in demographic terms, of the Khazar conversion to Judaism is still very much a moot point sharply dividing scholars in the field,^[31] adding to the difficulty of gauging how much the Rus’ would ever have had reason to connect the two concepts in a general fashion.) Had “Khazars” been an ingredient in the texts adversus Iudaeos (or had some traits of political envy, etc.), things would have stood differently. In the years I have spent on these texts, however, I have found no such instances.^[32] Since even theoretically it can never be proved that there was not some particular atavistic enmity between Christians and saliently Khazarian Jews in 11-12 c. Rus’, the burden of evidence must lie with those who claim that there was, and this evidence must bridge a gulf of many uncertainties indeed. We do not need the postulation in order to explain anything signalled thus far in our field. Nothing, furthermore, suggests that Rus’ Christians made much difference between Khazarian Jews, Romaniote Jews, or yet other flesh-and-blood Jews.

OF THE MODERN RELEVANCE OF MEDIEVAL ANTI-JUDAISM

Sadly, I suspect an important reason for Mr Eoffe’s anger to be connected to a modern, largely internal, Russian debate. He mentions Solzhenitsyn’s much-discussed Two Hundred Years Together, and his concern for the continuity of the Jewish presence throughout “Russian” history is plain to be seen. I may add here, so that no one shall think otherwise, that my difficulty in tracing what might be reasonably styled “ethnic/racial anti-Semitism” or even a tradition of physically manifested “anti-Jewishness” in Rus’ does not make me blind to the phenomenon in modern time, and that includes the obnoxious views of factions within the modern Orthodox church. The connection is not for me to approach from a scholarly point of view, though, but for colleagues in partly other fields. I have said as much in another context:

“It has been understood that modern Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian antisemitism owes a great deal to the anti-Judaic tradition of medieval Russian Orthodoxy. /fn/ This is possible and, indeed, probable in view of the strong reaction and unmistakably anti-Jewish predisposition of the Orthodox Muscovite rulers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the time when Jews were reappearing on the western frontier of expanding Muscovy, having for centuries been an almost unheard-of phenomenon. The share of this legacy in the development of the pogroms of, for example, seventeenth-century Ukraine is complicated by the presence there of many other factors too, but we might note that a number of old Adversus Iudaeos texts were transposed into a more secular Ruthenian in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. However, the actual ways by which tradition may have been passed on to the early modern East Slavic ethnies and further to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how it may have moved from Church to City, have yet to be traced in exact detail and prudence is called for; […] But for all prudence, whilst it is true that theological anti-Judaism must not be confused with the horrors of the fully-developed antisemitism of pogroms and zhidotrepaniia, it must also be remembered that the two concepts should not be kept completely apart. We know from modern studies on Protestant communities in the United States of America that “the more negative images parishioners receive about Jews long ago, the more they tend (statistically, not necessarily) to project these images onto their Jewish neighbors”./fn/^[33]

Nor am I blind to the possibility, indeed the probability of religiously-coloured enmity towards physical Jews on Rus’ territory in medieval times. On several occasions in my work I have indicated that the fictitious “Jews” of the religious tracts must have tinged – to say the least – the overall picture of “the Jew” in the minds of the bookmen (whether still mainly a theologically-constructed “iiudei” or a more corporeal “zhidovin”, to over-simplify the ancient use of the terms somewhat). Cf. GWAC 2. P. 85:

“This perspective, where harshness in relations with Jews is the “unmarked” case (to use a linguistic term), is probably warranted in discussions of medieval attitudes, even if secular and ecclesiastical (especially monastic) attitudes probably did not coincide./fn/ We can know that resident Jews were de facto tolerated, /fn/ and there are no known “pogroms” (cf. below pp. 105ff), forced baptisms or secular anti-Jewish legislation, but that is all. For there are on the other hand no positive statements of love and respect, and the frequent outbursts against Jews in the literature must – let us not fool ourselves – have prepared the ground for a society in which Jews were regarded more as diabolical than as anything else.”

However, this colouring has, as far as I can see, left no recognisable traces in the material which is my subject; and any causality between “texts” and “reality” would be likely to run in the opposite direction from that which I study. I stubbornly maintain that almost all medieval East Slavonic works adversus Iudaeos would have been there whether there were Jews at Kiev, Chernigov, Novgorod, etc., or no (it is to be hoped, however, that future scholarship will be able to do much with the textual dissemination and tradition). As Simon Franklin concludes in his analysis of Hilarion of Kiev’s Sermon on Law and Grace, of which, to believe Mr. Eoffe, I hold such a singularly idiosyncratic view:

“…Ilarion’s anti-Jewish rhetoric is no more or less intense than that of scores of other Orthodox theologians and chroniclers both in Greek and in Slavonic throughout the Middle Ages. […] Ilarion does not push his conventional argument beyond its conventional context. This does not mean that Ilarion either liked or approved of contemporary Jews, or that he and his audience would have been incapable of finding contemporary resonances in the polemic. But it is unlikely that his remarks were primarily intended or perceived as being directed against real Jews in his own city.”^[34]

The links which may have existed between “iiudei” and “zhidove” in the minds of the Kievan homilists are irrecoverable for any known branch of science or scholarship if they did not find a contemporary expression in texts (in a broad sense of the word). The only certain way to recover such possible vestiges as there might be is very carefully to examine the material that I have begun to collect along with such related material as may be recovered in future. First, however, too facile identifications of the burning questions of the day in these – wholly or only mainly? – theological works must be kept at bay. Many traditional influences have been identified in the Rus’ antiiudaica, but as yet little else. Who read the antiiudaica? Who was interested and why? What made it so interesting for the East Slavs? And are we actually correct in thinking that it was particularly interesting for the East Slavs? These are questions for the future, for a stage of knowledge which we may not reach for several years of textual study.
Mr. Eoffe accurately states that there are Byzantine disputational works which almost certainly derive from concrete conflict situations.^[35] It might be observed, however, that there is a general scholarly consensus that most specific texts cannot and should not be linked to such situations; the exceptions are marked by their containing very clear data and references to contemporaneous events; their being formal manuals for polemicists; their containing almost exclusively Old Testament arguments (which may suggest an adaptation to an actual convening with Jews, who would not accept the “best” – New Testament – arguments of the Christian opponents), etc. How better to underline this than by quoting the authority referred to by Mr. Eoffe on the reality of such connections in Byzantium. From that scholar I have borrowed the above list of criteria:

“ Il est à peu près impossible d’admettre […] que la majeure partie de ces œuvres soient des productions originales reproduisant des débats réels: la répétition des mêmes arguments et des mêmes citations vétérotestamentaires d’un texte à l’autre, la constante défaite à plaite couture du Juif, la reprise de la mise en scène et de noms de Juifs célèbres dans la tradition littéraire […] sont autant d’éléments qui démontrent le caractère artificiel de ces textes.”^[36]

Mr. Eoffe must be aware of this, since he says on one occasion that one is not struck by the novelty of my general conclusions on texts adversus Iudaeos (as indeed one should not be). Vincent Déroche continues his analysis in a vein which Mr. Eoffe would have benefited from considering more carefully, however: even when the right preconditions are there for us to suspect some real liaison, we must be very cautious before letting the data from the tracts affect our understanding of the conflict:

“ le rapport de cause à effet entre la crise réelle et la production littéraire doit exister.^[37] […] mais à l’epoque qui nous intéresse, la maigreur des informations disponibles par ailleurs nous constraint à reprendre l’étude de la nature de ces textes avant d’en déduire, autant que possible, la nature du conflit.”^[38]

The reviewer, on the other hand, does not shun connecting texts and events (and events and situations, at that, which are not directly to do with religious conflicts) separated by 100, 200, even, it appears, 500 years, if I understand the implications of his striding from Novgorod heretics to Hilarion correctly. Non-medievalists do tend to presuppose that time never passed in those murky ages, forgetting that a hundred years are what separates us from the Tsushima disaster (which probably affects Russo-Japanese rapport relatively negligibly today). 500 years would take us back to the synod against the Judaically philosophising of Novgorod…
As should be clear from my book, I feel no necessity to cite all scholarly works known to me that, however remotely, touches upon my subject. I operate with lists of “works cited” not general bibliographies. I may know scholarly works without citing them in one particular book. (I say as much in a footnote to the list and I have also explained this to Mr. Eoffe on a previous occasion.) Why then does he explode with such apparent satisfaction upon noticing (fn 40), that I do not cite an article on “Byzantine legends of Jewish cannibalism” (!), to which, furthermore, I “nikak ne vyrazha[iu] svoego otnosheniia…”, etc, etc.? Has Eoffe found references to Jewish cannibalism in Rus’ works unknown to me?^[39] Insinuations of the type “Peresvetov, for all his pedantichnost’ (pedant being a favourite word with this sud’ia reshitel’nyi i strogii), does not know this or that book’ are legion. What of it? And, again in that same footnote (to cite one of many similar instances), why does the author bother to state in connection with subjects mnoiu nezatronutye that “russkoe karaimstvo takzhe imelo iavnye vizantiiskie korni”, citing a work by Zvi Ankori.^[40] When and where does this relocation of the Karaim take place according to Ankori? Before 1392, when the grand-duke Vytautas settled some 300 families at Lithuanian Trakai/Troki, which might make it relevant if not to Muscovy then at least to Ruthenia? To all appearances, no. The incorrectness of claims of an early relocation of Karaites to Galicia is in fact the sole reason why Ankori notes the “Russia” connection! It does not matter how many “very valuable” 11th-century Arabic witnesses of the Crimean Karaim Eoffe knows of (viz. Abu al-Faraj Harun’s grammatical treatise), or how many scholarly works dealing exclusively with the Crimean Karaim he cites (to wit, Fedorchuk and Gertzen). But for Mr. Eoffe it is enough to have, somewhere and at some point of time, “Russian” Karaim. And, “a rose is a rose is a rose.”

HEBREW AND SLAVONIC EVIDENCE

No one regrets more than myself the fact that I do not read Hebrew; and that I have stated repeatedly in writing. Yet, since no one with such knowledge has chosen to try actually to understand those native Slavonic sources that are cited over and over again in histories of Russian Judaism and which generally eclipse other evidence in the scholarly literature, I decided to make do and write a survey myself in order to achieve some background understanding of the prime object of my research, the works adversus Iudaeos. I have never believed, however, that a proper history of the Jewries of Rus’ might be written without Hebrew. Cf.:

“…the result cannot claim to be the missing textbook on the history of the Jewries of Rus’: if such a thing can be written at all with the few sources at hand it must be a collective work bringing together experts from several fields. In the present volume Hebraic evidence cannot be ignored, but the focus will be on material within my general field of study, medieval Slavonic philology.^[41] (GWAC 2. P. 2)
…We still await a fuller-scale modern study which will critically address Sl[avonic] as well as Hebrew and other sources…” (GWAC 2. P. 9).

I have indicated areas where this is particularly to be wished for. Cf., for example, on the continuity of pre- and post-Mongol Jewries: “It is hardly the whole truth, however, but the situation in the critical 2nd half of the 13th century cannot be penetrated without further linguistic and onomastic analysis of 14th century material.” (GWAC 2. Pp. 18-19); regarding a note in Hebrew on one R Jacob bar Mordecai of Russia in 10th century Palestine: “It is to be hoped that it will be re-examined from a linguistic point of view and finally discarded or authenticated.” (Ibid. P. 58. Fn 139); on the Slavonic Esther: “For a definitive verdict regarding the arguments on linguistic niceties students with no Hebrew must await a future assessment by scholars capable of evaluating all the presented evidence.” (Ibid. P. 74); on the preserved responsa, halachic dicta, etc.: “An analysis of the scant Hebrew writing from Rus’, together with an analysis of the very few surviving notes of European Jews on the customs of Kievan Jewry,^[42] if at all feasible, would be a task of great importance, and it is to be hoped that it will soon be undertaken by students of Hebrew and medieval Jewish lore.” (Ibid. P. 62)
I have made my assessments on the evidence available to me, using the translated material I know of along with the works of scholars in the field conversant with the Hebrew sources and with Hebrew scholarship. I am aware of no cases where the interpretation of this Hebraic evidence has been questioned in a way which affects my conclusions. The result, and I state as much, is a preliminary one – scholarship does not stand still – and addenda and corrections from Hebraists and others are to be expected after I have made my statement as a Slavist. I might have rejoiced then that a man apparently “in the know” chooses to turn to the subject. Unfortunately, Mr. Eoffe appears to suffer at least from the opposite deficit from mine – an apparent ignorance of the original sources in Slavonic (although he is abreast of some common wisdom on them). Alas, among the many Hebrew sources no doubt known to him and not to me, he adduces not one that affects my thesis, only his projection of it. The two works of scholarship he proposes that I should have read is Abraham Poliak’s 1942 study of the Khazar empire,^[43] and a work on Jewish gravestones in the Crimea (!). I willingly confess to not knowing even of the second title; I have made use only of a, no doubt dated, Russian edition of such epigraphies and of the advice on any pertinent epigraphies of a contemporary Jewish student of the subject. If the new study contains any pertinent information I should be happy to learn about this.
Eoffe may scorn my being an old-school philologist, he may ridicule my insistence on “factual” evidence and my not frequenting his advanced epistemological positions. But should not the substantial role of the Jews in the very polity of Christian Kievan Rus’, their continuous presence in early Muscovy, Novgorod, etc., as professed by Mr. Eoffe, have left a single incontrovertible “fact” on which most scholars might agree? Is not that the first thing we should make sure of before raising breath-taking edifices, “etymological” or other? If anyone does find such bricks I shall be happy to stand corrected. The same goes for any new, good, evidence of Jewish-East Slav enmity, which might help to raise a better, more solid, building. I am not a dogmatic disbeliever in such enmities, but I have not seen good evidence. Even less so have I seen evidence that the general use of anti-Judaic texts were to do with such enmities (and that is my main finding). Cf., however:

“Were ever any new additional, more explicit, evidence to be unearthed, it would come as no great surprise to learn of clashes or break-downs of working relations at Kiev brought about by the church or by monastic circles fed on Byzantine literature, but that is as yet unknowable and positively suggested by no sources.” (GWAC 2. P. 12)

It is striking in this connection that Mr. Eoffe keeps returning to my analysis of some small Slavonic pieces of evidence, none of which he has studied in the original (to judge from his citations and assessments) and none of which he actually operates with or shows the exact pertinence of. Apparently this is important stuff indeed, however, and I should count myself happy to be such a “brilliant expert” in the field. The main Hebraic evidence adduced, to which he returns again and again, is the credential from the 9th/10th century Jewish community of Kiev. This is the true King Charles’s head of his essay, and I shall return to it presently.