The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature

By Leonid Livak

This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness.

This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9780804775625

Book preview

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

A Case of Russian Literature

Leonid Livak

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and the Richard and Dorothy Shiff Fund.

Portions of Chapter 12 were originally published as Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment: ‘the jews’ and the Furtive Pleasures of Liberalism, The Russian Review (January 2009).

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Livak, Leonid.

    The Jewish persona in the European imagination : a case of Russian literature / Leonid Livak.

          p. cm.–(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8047-7055-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

    1. Russian literature–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Russian literature–Jewish authors–History and criticism. 3. Jews in literature. 4. Antisemitism in literature. 5. Christianity and antisemitism–Europe–History. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

    PG3015.5.J49L58 2010

    891.709′3529924–dc22                               2010018633

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7562-5 (electronic)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction. The Western Wall of Russian Literature

Part I The Generative Model of the jews

1.  The jews in Christian Theology and Myth

2.  Archetypal Elaboration

3.  Animal Symbols and Human Types

4.  The Semiotics of the jewish Body

Part II How Gogol's Iankel' Is Made

5.  Taras Bul'ba in Context

6.  The Theology of Archetypes in Taras Bul'ba

7.  The Opponent

8.  The Eschatology of Taras Bul'ba

9.  The Temptation of Taras

10.  The Helper

Part III The Discreet Pleasures of Liberalism

11.  Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

12.  Ivan Turgenev’s Crime and Punishment

13.  Uncle Iankel’s Cabin

14.  Of Chekhov and Garlic

Part IV Concerto for Flute Without Orchestra

15.  Reb Goethe and the Problematics of Russian-Jewish Authorship

16.  Isaak Babel’s Portrait of the Artist as a Former Jew

17.  Writing and Reading in the Margins: Iurii Fel'zen’s Significant Absences

Notes

Works Cited

Index

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: The Jews of Worms (detail)

Figure 2: The Jews of Worms (detail)

Figure 3: C. W. Faber du Faur, Polish Jews and French Soldiers

Figure 4: Ivan Turgenev, The Portrait Game (details)

Figure 5: Charles Léandre, Rothschild, France, 1898

Figure 6: Caricature from the almanac Kikeriki

Figure 7: George Du Maurier, an illustration for the first edition of Trilby

Figure 8: Vladimir Zhabotinskii, The Savage Cavalry of the First Hassidic Brigade

Figure 9: Boris Efimov, caricature of Isaak Babel'

Figure 10: Mikhail Lermontov as an example of a jewish racial type, in Hans Günther’s 1930 racial manual

Figure 11: Marginalia within copy of Iurii Fel'zen’s Schast'e

Acknowledgments

My greatest intellectual debt goes to the many students who, year after year, have provided me with a challenging testing ground for the ideas and analytical methodology informing this book. Without this continuous trial by fire in probing and demanding classrooms, my study would not have seen the light of day in its present form.

This book has been in the making for as long as I have been involved in literary studies. Over the years, my reflection on the problems of cultural modeling and Jewish representation has been influenced by colleagues whose opinions I may or may not share but whose thought-provoking conversation I value as much as I appreciate their interest in and attention to my subject matter. I have had the good fortune to discuss many aspects of my research with Alexander Dolinin, Lazar Fleishman, Vladimir Khazan, Judith D. Kornblatt, Galina Kriukova, Alexander Kulik, Ralph Lindheim, Wolf Moskovich, Harriet Murav, Donna Orwin, Anne-Marie Pontis, Omry Ronen, Gary Rosenshield, Gabriella Safran, Norman Shneidman, Efraim Sicher, Roman Timenchik, Elena Tolstaia, Mikhail Vaiskopf, and Vladimir Zviniatskovskii. I am especially indebted to Gabriella Safran for her insightful critique of the manuscript. Excerpts from this study have appeared in academic journals, providing me with invaluable critical feedback that further shaped my thought and methodology. I gratefully acknowledge the following scholarly venues for their openness to my research: Jews and Slavs (13, 2004; 19, 2008), Stanford Slavic Studies (2007), The Russian Review (68.1, 2009). Special thanks go to Steven Zipperstein for opening the doors of this book series in Jewish Studies to me; to Edith Klein for the manuscript’s stylistic proofreading; to Mariana Raykov and Jeff Wyneken for its production and copyediting; and to Norris Pope and Sarah Crane Newman for steering the book past the Scylla and Charybdis of academic publishing. Professor Hindy Najman, Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, was instrumental in securing a publishing subvention for this book.

Some debts are too big to be acknowledged adequately. This is the kind of debt I owe to Ann, Josephine, and Isabelle.

Note on Transliteration and Translation

This volume consistently follows the Library of Congress transliteration system for words and names originally written in Cyrillic characters. However, when palatalized proper names (Gogol', Babel', Iankel') appear in the possessive, formed by the addition of an apostrophe (Gogol’s, Babel’s, Iankel’s), the prime symbol indicating palatalization is dropped in order to avoid redundancy.

All translations from foreign languages into English are my own unless otherwise specified.

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

Introduction

The Western Wall of Russian Literature

The representation of Jews by European artists and thinkers is monotonous and repetitive. For almost two millennia, it has drawn on a fixed imaginative lexicon with little variation or originality, suggesting the existence of a common model that generates the Jewish image in theology, philosophy, literature, visual arts, and folklore across European cultures. The concept of stereotype does not convey the durability and continuity of Europe’s imaginary Jews; whether connoting mechanical reproduction or implying the cognitive representation of social environment, it evokes prejudice, inflexibility, and exaggeration.¹ As a result, it diverts attention from the Jewish image under scrutiny to the ethical evaluation of its carriers, obfuscating the fact that the conceptualization of ethnocultural otherness is not a matter of fully independent personal choices—our culture shapes us as much as it is shaped by us. In my opinion, the concept of stereotype does more harm than good when applied to the examination of Jewish difference in artistic texts. Clashing with the popular view of art as the domain of individual geniuses who are above the bias of their historical age, it puts many a reader on the defensive, effectively turning the study of the Jewish image in art into an exercise in the interpretive exculpation of art’s creators.

For these reasons, I find the concept of generative model to be a more productive analytical tool whose axiological neutrality does away with moralizing value judgment, allowing us to focus on the mechanisms behind the genesis and dissemination of the Jewish image. In addition, and contrary to the idea of stereotype as an unchanging imprint, the generative model accounts for the predetermined historical evolution of the Jewish image and reflects the fact that the human imagination is both culturally conditioned and not always contingent on empirical knowledge. To my mind, when it comes to the issue of cultural modeling, any quest for understanding requires the recreation, rather than the anachronistic criticism, of the religious and social attitudes that have conditioned the imagination of the producers and receivers of the European discourse about Judaism and Jews.

I base my argument for the existence of the common European model generating the Jewish image on the findings of those scholars who, in the wake of the Second World War, radically rethought the phenomenon of anti-Jewish animus. The pioneers of this effort, James Parkes and Jules Isaac, see Jew-hatred as a unique expression of group prejudice arising out of a unique cause—the teaching and action of the Christian Church. They postulate the essential difference of Christian Jew-hatred from anti-Jewish hostility in pagan antiquity, arguing that the former shows no break in the line which leads from the beginning of the denigration of Judaism in the formative period of Christian history, from the exclusion of Jews from civic equality in the period of the Church’s first triumph in the fourth century, through the horrors of the Middle Ages, to the death camps of Hitler.² The next cohort of historians and theologians elaborates and nuances this argument. They show that anti-Judaism is an intrinsic need of Christian self-affirmation and a basic element of Christian exegesis, while anti-Christianity is not proper to Jewish exegesis. They further argue that Christian attitudes toward Judaism and its adherents, unlike the pagan ones, express a theological and existential need rather than political or cultural bias; and that biblical hermeneutics, theology, and the patristic adversus Iudaeos tradition shape the legal and social status of Jews in Christendom by affirming the identity of the Church through the invalidation of Jewish identity. Crucially, these scholars show how anti-Jewish heritage thrives independently from the physical presence of Jews in European countries; and how the initial religious rationale for the image of the Jew assumes a number of secular guises.³

Indeed, despite the passage of time, the generative model of the imaginary Jews remains stable, assuring the continuity of the image’s inner logic. As a result, the Jewish persona’s evolution expresses itself not so much in narrative or descriptive changes as in motivational recoding. The Jews of the European imagination maintain their cultural role of the paradigmatic Other after Christianity loses its legal and social hold on European societies. Enlightenment thinkers divorce the image of the Jew from its theological justification and give it an Orientalist raison d’être couched in the novel terms of the secular nation-state. In this reinterpretation, the imaginary Jews become a foil to burgeoning secular identities—a negative referent needed by all those unsure of their Germanness, Frenchness, Britishness, and so on. By the mid-nineteenth century, the imaginary Jews receive a pseudoscientific grounding at the crossroads of biology, medicine, sociology, and linguistics, becoming a Semitic race that is opposed to the Aryan one whose habitat coincides with what used to be known as Christendom. This racial and Orientalist recoding culminates in the ideology of antisemitism, which despite its secular guise, draws on the logic and rhetoric of Christian anti-Judaism and the concomitant tradition of sociocultural Judeophobia, down to the very terms Semite and Semitic, coined a century earlier by German theologians.⁴

The ecclesiastic dogma of Jewish immutability since the age of Jesus reassures Christians that their own religious praxis retains its original quality despite the passage of time and informs the historical continuity of the imaginary Jews. That is why European religious and secular authorities, mediaeval and modern, are profoundly disturbed by the existence of rabbinic Judaism, symbolized for them by the Talmud, a fact clashing with their idea of the ossified Jewish worship. In the nineteenth century, the trope of Jewish religious immutability morphs into its new secular guise of ethnocultural immutability. And if, as late as 1835, a Russian historian still argues that the Jews have kept their religious beliefs and primordial character intact for many centuries, Robert Knox’s 1862 treatise on The Races of Men already postulates that Jewish immutability is, above all, racial, thus replacing religion with biology as the primary motivation of the imaginary Jews.⁵

My study proposes to explore the representation of Jews in literary fiction by placing them within the continuity of the Jewish vocabulary of difference not only in Christian but also in post-Christian Europe, to use the term by which C. S. Lewis designates the age of cultural secularization beginning with the Enlightenment.⁶ In other words, my analytical approach presumes that most narrative and descriptive peculiarities of the Jewish literary type are traceable to the theological and mythical sources informing the generative model of Europe’s imaginary Jews. This investigation, then, is not primarily concerned with Jewish individuals living in Christian and post-Christian societies. Its main interest lies with the cultural model generating the image of the jews whose literary life is my preoccupation.

I borrow the jarring term the jews from Jean-François Lyotard’s essay Heidegger and "the jews, in which this signifier’s definite article, lower case, plural form, and quotation marks indicate that it does not refer to real people or groups in any historical period. And while my use of this unconventional term and its derivatives (jewish, jewishness") may run counter to good style, I am happy to sacrifice stylistic felicity for the sake of the estranging effect this artificial usage produces on the reader, reminding us of the similarly contrived nature of the cultural models that inform the human imagination.

With some exceptions, Gentile artists and thinkers did not acquaint themselves with authentic rabbinic Judaism or Jewish life. Their idea of Jews would seem to go against the most elementary verisimilitude were it not for the function of the jews as the Christian psyche’s symbolic trope—a rhetorical figure with mythical connotations to which Jews in their historical situation are often incidental. Thus, John Chrysostom’s influential Homilies Against the Jews (387–89) have been deemed a glorious reading for those who love eloquence and zeal untempered by knowledge. Secular authors fare no better. Walter Scott’s Isaac (Ivanhoe, 1817) enters the hall of Cedric the Saxon and turns eagerly to the smoking mess which was placed before him, and eats with haste a meal that cannot be kosher, although we are told that Isaac is strictly observant. And to top this culinary mess, the jews of Scott’s Russian contemporary cook tzitzit (prayer shawl fringes) and tefillin (phylacteries) identified by the writer in a learned footnote as favorite jewish dishes.⁷

But even those Gentile authors who do have a grasp of the Jewish tradition and the life of contemporary Jews hold on to the image of the jews. Catholic and Protestant Hebraists, as well as such a connoisseur of the Talmud as Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev, study Judaism for the sake of Christian exegesis and view Jews, at best, as objects of conversionary ambition. Official experts traveling in Russia’s Pale of Settlement to study Jewish life, from Gavriil Derzhavin to the emissaries of the Imperial Geographic Society, only recycle and rationalize their preexisting idea of the jews.⁸

In their obsessive monologic dialogue with Judaism, Christian writers and thinkers rarely allow Jews to argue on their own terms, instead advancing what they think the jews should say or do as a religious symbol and a marker of cultural difference. The physical presence of Jews within the reach of Christian observers has never been a defining factor for the jewish image. English writers in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, and French writers in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, are intensely preoccupied with the jews despite the expulsion of Jews from both countries in 1290 and 1394, respectively. Shylock rises to fame at a time when no observable Jewish community has lived in the British Isles for hundreds of years. A similarly keen interest in the jews is manifest in Russian culture from the eleventh century on, with virtually no Jews in open sight in Kievan Rus', Muscovy, or the Russian empire until the first partition of Poland in 1772.⁹

Such examples abound. They alone suffice to place Jewish-Christian economic rivalry among those explanations of Jew-hatred that Martin Buber describes as superficial and transitory thanks to their failure to account for the continuous influence of religious patterns on the cultural imagination. They also put a nail into the coffin of the Marxist analysis that presents anti-Jewish animus as a by-product of class struggle. This approach, rigidly adopted by Soviet ideologues and promoted with more finesse by Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre, treats Jews as the scapegoats of the ruling classes, who thus channel the fury of the exploited masses. Yet this explanation fails to account for unremitting Judeophobia under communist dictatorships, which supposedly do away with economic exploitation. The same failure to appreciate the role of religious patterns in the cultural—particularly secular—imagination informs, albeit to different ideological ends, Edward Said’s exclusion of Jews from his study of Orientalism (1978) despite the fact that as a method for describing cultural alterity, Orientalism crystallizes in the process of the jewish image’s secular recoding.¹⁰

Past experience teaches that a scholarly inquiry into the jews does not get far if it is predicated on their comparison to Jews. The focus on this comparison among the early students of the jews in artistic texts did little to clarify the image’s fuller meaning. Such pioneering works as B. Gorev’s Russkaia literatura i evrei (Russian literature and the Jews, 1917–22), M. J. Landa’s The Jew in Drama (1926), Joshua Kunitz’s Russian Literature and the Jew (1929), and Manya Lifschitz-Golden’s Les Juifs dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge (Jews in medieval French literature, 1935) rarely go beyond an oddly parochial (as well as un-historical) sense of astonishment that novelists and playwrights could have strayed so far, in their portrayal of Jews, from the biological or physiological or behavioral actuality.¹¹ The main contribution of the early critics resides in positing the jews as a valid subject of scholarly inquiry. But even today, a theoretically updated version of the same approach—exploring the ways in which literary treatments of Jews in nineteenth-century Russia reflected the realities of Jewish life—yields few analytical insights.¹² Background research and commentary on Jews or Judaism, which hold together such sociologically inclined studies, appear to miss their mark because the subject under investigation requires attention, above all, to Christians and Christianity. A product of cultural modeling often reveals more about those who invoke it than those it describes.

Let me make clear that I do not deny links between real life and cultural imagination; nor am I intent on arguing that the behavior of Jewish individuals or groups has nothing to do with the European discourse about jewish difference—after all, the Jewish rejection of Christianity is at the core of this discourse. But convinced as I am in the preeminence of cultural conditioning over empirical knowledge in the human imagination, I challenge the traditional view of the relationship between fact and fiction in the construction of the jewish Other. In this book, I argue that most historical facts of European Jewish experience are not the sources of the jewish image. Instead, they are enlisted to support the image’s preexistent structure. For example, the concept of jewish carnality, elaborated by the Church Fathers, finds many embodiments, among them—medieval Jewish moneylenders and modern Jewish capitalists. Similarly, jewish demonic seditiousness, as defined in patristic literature, is later confirmed in the eyes of the Gentile majority by a professional specialization of Polish Jews (alcohol-farming) and by the visibility of Jews in radical left-wing politics—historical facts that through the prism of the generative model, acquire the same symbolic function as jewish well-poisoning, ritual murder, and aid to the Antichrist.

Many critical studies further suffer from the desire to define this or that author’s personal attitude toward Jews on the basis of the jews in their works, a desire that tends to blur the lines between literary and extra-artistic discourses and often abuts anachronistic moral judgment. But even if the scrutiny of a given author’s personal attitudes is justified by extra-artistic documentary evidence, the usefulness of this evidence in the interpretation of art as a mirror of personal feelings remains problematic. For instance, does the depiction of Jankiel the tavern-keeper in Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1832–34), frequently touted as a Judeophile work of art, reflect the author’s true feelings or is it a bow to literary fashion, especially considering the manifest anti-Judaism and Judeophobia of Mickiewicz’s Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage (1832) and of his lectures at the Collège de France (1842–44)? And how can we be sure that extra-artistic Judeophile statements reflect an author’s innermost beliefs and do not just pay lip service to current ideological fads? Consider, for instance, the 1858 protests against the Judeophobe ethos of the Petersburg newspaper Illiustratsiia signed by many Russian and Ukrainian writers whose own artistic depiction of the jews would shock today’s reader.¹³

Most crucially, as they speculate about an author’s personal attitude, critics unjustly presume that an artist should feel something or other for an abstract, heterogeneous, and heterodox group by virtue of utilizing an eponymous stock literary type. This presumption homogenizes a diverse community whose membership is continuously questioned and redefined from within. To admit the very possibility of an artist’s feelings for Jews is to reduce the latter to a common denominator in an echo of the Christian procedure of turning Jews into the jews. One thinks of the bitter French joke—Un philosémite est un antisémite qui aime les Juifs (A philosemite is an antisemite who loves the Jews)—which, as I will show in the third part of this study, is applicable to the Judeophile discourse in fin de siècle Russian literature. By trying to reconstruct an artist’s personal attitude, critics unwittingly adopt the basic premise of the language of jewish difference, which has been recently dubbed allosemitism, the practice of setting the Jews apart as people radically different from all the others, needing separate concepts to describe and comprehend them. This practice hails from Christian theology for which the jews are the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God, as Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov argues in 1941—a view that makes the positive and negative feelings for Jews two sides of the same coin.¹⁴

For these reasons, my study will sidestep the issue of artists’ personal attitudes on the assumption that, before the Second World War, a non-Jewish European author could not have been free from the narrative and symbolic logic of Christian anti-Judaism or the concomitant allosemitism, be it expressed in Judeophobia or Judeophilia. As iconoclastic as they may be in their art and thought, it is naïve to expect artists and intellectuals to defy the symbolic and narrative patterns instilled in them from childhood, especially without a major shift in cultural attitudes in their lifetime, like the one brought about by the slow realization of the full extent of the Nazis’ destruction of Europe’s Jews and of its moral and spiritual implications for Western civilization. True, this is difficult to admit in the case of authors elevated to the status of cultural institutions. Yet the critics who project the iconoclasm of a Dostoevskii, a Solov'ev, or a Rozanov on their writings about the jews unwittingly or deliberately obfuscate the unoriginal and derivative nature of these writings.¹⁵

This is not to say, of course, that assimilated Jewish writers and readers did not internalize the generative model of the jews as part of their acculturation in European societies. This phenomenon, ignored by the pioneers of the study of the jewish image in artistic texts, makes the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia a necessary part of any inquiry, including the present investigation, into the jews of the European cultural imagination.

Marginalizing the issue of authorial attitudes, we also reduce the importance of the thorny question of terminology applicable in the study of the jews. The term most often used and abused in the course of many such studies is anti-Semitism. This term was coined by Wilhelm Marr to denote a (pseudo)scientific ideology in contrast to traditional anti-Judaism and Judeophobia. The anachronistic use of this term in reference to attitudes predating Marr’s Antisemitic League (1880) is counterproductive because it draws on the vocabulary of jewish difference in order to describe that same vocabulary. This fallacy is only partially undone by the change in the term’s spelling—antisemitism—recently proposed as a way of showing the senselessness of the concept of Semitism.¹⁶

Thus, throughout this study, I will speak of anti-Judaism when theology appears to be the primary motivation of the imaginary jews (from the Church Fathers to Nikolai Berdiaev to Jacques Maritain). Judeophobia, in its dual sense of hatred and fear, will denote social, political, and cultural attitudes engendered by Christian anti-Judaism, even if their religious sources are no longer apparent. Judeophilia will designate those intellectual trends that espouse the image of the jews but advocate their moral improvement and elimination as the religious and cultural Other through favorable social treatment in the hopes of converting (for example, young Martin Luther, the English Puritans, Vladimir Solov'ev) or assimilating them into the modern nation-state (Enlightenment-inspired liberalism). Such terminological distinction is all the more important for my study because Judeophobia and Judeophilia have been the preferred terms in Russia both before and after the birth of antisemitic ideology. Characteristically, as late as 1916 a Russian commentator treats the term anti-Semitism as novel and sees its meaning as different from that of Judeophobia. I will therefore use the term antisemitism in its modified form when the image of the jews seems to appeal primarily to racial theories, even if its initial religious motivation remains important.¹⁷

To sum up, the present investigation is not concerned with Europe’s so-called Jewish question or with various authors’ putative opinions of Jews as expressed in the jews of their literary fiction. My interest lies elsewhere. I explore the meaning and function of the jews as a literary type within the economy of artistic texts; and the reasons for which authors invoke this particular type. These reasons, as I will show, reside with writers’ psychological and intellectual idiosyncrasies that are articulated in the imaginative lexicon of Christian and post-Christian cultures. The jews loom large in the European code of cultural otherness as the object of projection that reveals more about the personality of its users than about Jews and Judaism.¹⁸ This approach, I hope, precludes the marginalization of the inquiry into the jews, too often relegated to the periphery of cultural and literary studies by virtue of focusing on phenomena that today may appear as parochial (Jewish experience) or anomalous (antisemitism). It is my conviction that when writers and artistic texts are treated on their own terms, the scrutiny of the jews stops being a Jewish matter and becomes an indispensable tool for reaching better insight into the imaginative universe of a Gogol', a Turgenev, or a Chekhov, to cite a few names at the center of my investigation.

The Christian narrative’s basic story, embodied in the Gospels (and especially in their Passion parts), conveys the myth of redemption more effectively than theology, whose outreach is limited to learned elites. This basic story casts the jews in a mythical and archetypal role that leaves a profound impact on the receivers of the Christian narrative—so profound, in fact, that the jews continue to perform the same role in the post-Christian imagination. This mythical and archetypal dynamic makes the jews a perfect candidate for the narratological analysis developed by Vladimir Propp and Algirdas Greimas, as well as for the psychological analysis informed by Carl Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which like structural narratology is grounded in the study of myth and folklore.

Scrutinizing the Russian folktale, Propp proposes a set of invariant functions whose combination constitutes a mythical narrative and which are embodied by different dramatis personae in different narratives. Greimas, in turn, addresses the redundancy of Propp’s list of invariants, reducing it to six narrative functions: Subject/Object, Sender/Receiver, Helper/Opponent. These narrative functions, or actants in Greimas’s terminology, constitute the immanent level of any given mythical narrative. On the apparent level, these actants are personified by various dramatis personae, or actors. Greimas shows that each actant can have any number of actors in a given narrative; and, inversely, an actor can personify several actants.¹⁹ Proceeding from Propp’s descriptive typology to the elaboration of a deep structure common to all mythical narratives, he postulates the possibility of a single model generating several narratives. Finally, Greimas’s vision of actant pairs with opposite functions echoes Jung’s idea of psychological archetypes as having two faces, positive and negative, impersonated by different characters in different narratives. Drawing on this theoretical framework, I will argue that Christian narratives employing the actor called the jews—be they ecclesiastic, folk, or artistic narratives in nature—are informed by this actor’s role as the simultaneous personification of two actants, Helper and Opponent, in the basic Christian story, which thus sets the narrative principles of the generative model of the jews.

A question immediately arises. Can the jews ever act out the Subject, especially at a time when cultural secularization seems to challenge Christian imaginative patterns? Consider modern Judeophile artistic narratives: these ideologically motivated works tend to preserve the actor’s traditional function and descriptive lexicon, simply banishing the Opponent and stressing the Helper in the image of the jews as meek and defenseless do-gooders who persist in their secondary role of a litmus test for the religious or secular virtues of the Gentile actor(s) playing the Subject. Hence the ease with which, from the early days of political liberalism, European authors shuttle between jewish villains and saints.²⁰ In fact, even if all but jewish characters vanished from a Judeophile text, its saintly jews would still not embody the Subject in the eyes of the Gentile reader, because this function belongs to the authorial persona implicitly present in the text and whose exhibition of liberalism challenges the majority opinion. But what about assimilated Jewish writers? Can the jews play the Subject in their artistic texts? Theoretically, this is possible; but in practice, as I will argue in the last part of this study, such cases are hard to come by.

It follows that the study of the jews, whose narrative function is secondary by definition, may very well distort authorial intent and consequently amounts to the deliberate violation of a literary text’s semantic structure. We commit interpretational fallacy by the very fact of focusing critical attention on those literary personages who are relegated to the circumstantial roles that are fully contingent on the role of the narrative Subject. A case in point is the modern treatment of The Merchant of Venice as a play about Shylock, although the merchant in the title is not Shylock, who is originally conceived by Shakespeare as a character auxiliary to the play’s Christian heroes and, in keeping with his narrative function, exits the stage long before the play’s end. Likewise, Gogol' could not have imagined that the character of Iankel' in his Taras Bul'ba would one day overshadow the Cossack whose name appears in the story’s title. Embracing nonetheless the interpretational fallacy that makes the jews the focus of literary analysis, my study will make every effort to keep this critical procedure from becoming more anachronistic than it already is. To this end, I will consistently analyze the jews of Russian and Russian-Jewish writers against the backdrop of the original cultural and historical circumstances of the texts in which this actor appears.

The elaboration of the jews from an actor embodying a narrative function to a stock type in European art and folklore is mediated on several discursive levels. If the basic Christian story instills in the minds and psyche of its recipients the narrative role of the jews, theology provides the rudimentary vocabulary to describe this actor. Beyond the Gospels, clergymen propagate the image of the jews in didactic tales (exempla), sermons, hagiographies, apocrypha, and anti-Judaic tracts (the adversus Iudaeos genre). Their effort is paralleled in the church drama and visual arts of Latin and Byzantine Christianity, and in the school drama and quasi-religious puppet theater (vertep, betleika, and so on) of east Slavic lands. Anti-Judaism and Judeophobia are disseminated, first and foremost, by the learned elite: written or commissioned by clerics, the verbal and visual vehicles of the imaginary jews ensure the transformation of a theological abstraction into a stock figure of folklore. Filtered through folklore, the jews often re-ascend to the level of the elite, as in the cases of the blood libel legend in Western Europe; or of the Cossack songs composed in seminaries but cited by seventeenth-century Ukrainian scribes as folk traditions.²¹

Secular authors add another dimension to this dynamic. For instance, Chaucer’s Prioress Tale simultaneously draws on the blood libel legend recently minted by an English cleric and on the folklorized Miracles of the Virgin, thus consecrating the novel motif of ritual murder by the force of artistic persuasion and the prestige of the written word. And if after the decline of ecclesiastical culture the generative model of the jews retains its hold on the European cultural imagination, it does so owing largely to the combined impact of folklore and secular art, which convey the narrative and descriptive peculiarities of the actor called the jews as effectively as exegetic and didactic religious genres.²²

Early students of the jews in art typically adopted a diachronic approach: they wrote histories of the jewish image, favoring a comprehensive chronological survey over a selective analysis. This approach presumes that over time the image undergoes changes meaningful enough to warrant an exhaustive account of its manifestations in a given national artistic tradition, historical period, or literary genre, often at the expense of the comparative rapprochement of texts from unrelated historical, cultural, or generic series. Yet such a comparison reveals the image’s remarkable lack of change. And it is precisely this continuity that renders most diachronic studies of the jews in the European artistic and cultural imagination dishearteningly monotonous and repetitive.

A study informed by the idea of art history as a cumulative progression focuses on the evolution of artistic forms and is predicated on the concept of change. But a lack of change is also significant and requires explanation. Since the human imagination is subject to cultural conditioning, artistic expression is rooted in social conventions and may defy authorial intent by appealing to the collective memory of a given author’s culture. As a result, the diachronic logic dictating that an artistic event in period C is shaped by homologous events in periods A and B tends to overlook the possibility that all three might draw on the same implicit model in the imaginative vocabulary of their culture. This model can be revealed by bringing to a common denominator chronologically, geographically, and generically disparate instances of the jews, as I attempt to do in the present study. By adopting this comparative approach, I hope to clarify the jewish image’s fuller implications in modern literary, philosophical, and political discourses—implications that are not always apparent even to the image’s contemporary carriers and consumers—against the backdrop of the pan-European generative model, which has been producing this image for centuries.

While the life of the jews in Western ecclesiastic, folkloric, and artistic discourses has been adequately described, it remains poorly elucidated in the Russian cultural sphere. Few methodological equivalents to the post–Second World War scrutiny of the jews in Western European literatures and cultures exist in Russian studies. The notable exceptions are all very recent and include such work as Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath’s monograph on the adversus Iudaeos tradition in medieval Russian literature; Mikhail Vaiskopf’s survey of Russian Romanticism; Leonid Katsis’s and Henrietta Mondry’s studies of modern Russian art and thought; and Ol'ga Belova’s explorations of east Slavic folklore. Such relative paucity is not surprising if we consider the failure of Russia’s intellectuals to grasp the larger significance of the Shoah, in part due to Soviet ideological pressure and in part to their own unreadiness to face the harsh truths of Christianity’s role in casting Jews as Europe’s paradigmatic Other—witness the resistance to post-Auschwitz theology manifest among Russian theologians who persist in the millennia-old one-way dialogue with Judaism and in its concomitant denigration to the ends of Christian self-affirmation.²³

Moreover, the extant studies of the jewish persona in Russian letters, including recent work by such Western Slavists as Gary Rosenshield and Elena Katz, ignore some eight hundred years of the image’s development on the Russian soil and view it as a modern importation from the West.²⁴ But even though secular art in Russia is a late bloomer, it takes a leap of faith to explain the ubiquity of the jews in nineteenth-century Russian literature by foreign literary influences alone. Since the introduction of Christianity in Kievan Rus' (988), the Russian cultural imagination has been haunted by the jews despite the virtual absence of Jews in Russia until the late eighteenth century. Western influences, even when they were stimulated by interest in the empire’s recently acquired Jewish minority, could not have been the only, or even the defining, factor in fostering the persistent attention to the jews as a literary type manifest among modern Russian writers. While we cannot deny the role of foreign examples in a young secular art form, the Russian literary tradition in all its aspects (exegetic, homiletic, epic, hagiographic) is not much younger than its Western counterparts. For centuries this tradition codified the image of the jews in Russian culture and should not be discounted in the study of this image in modern Russian literature.

Despite its present lacunae, the study of Russia’s jews is not a matter of filling a minor gap in the story of Europe’s paradigmatic Other as told by Western scholars on Western material. This study enriches our understanding of the image’s meaning and mechanisms in general. This is because Russia’s jews are informed by a combination of factors unknown in the West. The Russian empire was the only modern European state whose treatment of Jews drew explicitly on the precepts of Christian anti-Judaism. Russia became the staging ground for a clash of medieval religious attitudes and modern Western thought, from the Enlightenment ideal of acculturation to racial science to antisemitic ideology.²⁵ Furthermore, the study of the jewish persona in Russian art and thought faces unique methodological hurdles whose resolution may open new horizons for inquiries into the jews of other European cultures. The lack of a post–Second World War tradition elucidating Russia’s imaginary jews makes us turn to Western scholarly examples and methodologies. But are there limits to the application of these approaches, developed on Catholic and Protestant material, to Orthodox Russia? Can we view a culture reputed for its premodern isolation as part of the European continuum for the dissemination of the jewish image? Finally, what are the boundaries of the Russian cultural sphere in the larger Orthodox one, considering that population flow between Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia ensured the cross-fertilization of Orthodox and Catholic intellectual, artistic, and popular traditions concerning the jews?

A case in point is the poet and statesman Gavriil Derzhavin, who is dispatched at the very beginning of the nineteenth century to the empire’s recently annexed western provinces with the task of forging a state policy on Russia’s Jewish minority. Born in Kazan', far from Catholic influences and observable Jewish communities, Derzhavin travels to Ukraine and Belorussia with the basic baggage of Christian anti-Judaism and the idea of the jews inculcated by the Russian ecclesiastical and popular traditions. Yet the traveler not so much observes Jews as absorbs the local lore about the jews. The result, recorded in Derzhavin’s diary and reported to the tsar, is an amalgam of religiously motivated Judeophobia, with quotes from a sixteenth-century Russian anti-Judaic treatise (Iosif Volotskii’s Prosvetitel'); modern political theories from the West; and Catholic-inspired popular traditions—all of it integrated in the author’s preexisting imaginative framework. As far as Derzhavin’s idea of the jews goes, then, no barriers exist between Catholic and Orthodox theology; Western and Russian political thought; or Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian folklore.²⁶

The methodological problems listed above cannot be adequately treated within the confines of my study. I will only briefly formulate my position inasmuch as it informs my approach to the jews of the Russian cultural imagination. The doctrinal theology underlying Byzantine and Russian ecclesiastical traditions is that of the ancient Church and the seven ecumenical councils—essentially identical with the doctrinal theology of the Western Church. The Great Schism of 1054 did not concern the Church’s teaching about Judaism. Nor did the Protestant Reformation challenge traditional theological anti-Judaism and the concomitant image of the jews, maintaining both at the center of its exegesis and myth. The treatment of Jews in Byzantium—the primary source of religious and legal thought in Kievan Rus'—followed the same theological and legal premises as the treatment of Jews in the Latin West. There was a constant exchange of ecclesiastic and popular traditions regarding the jews between Byzantium and Latin Christendom. These traditions arrived in Kievan Rus' and Muscovy through both Greek and Latin channels.²⁷

Christianity brings anti-Jewish propaganda to Rus' not only in the form of the New Testament but as a literary genre that includes treatises against Judaism and exempla about the jews for popular consumption. The anti-Judaic homilies of John Chrysostom and Ephrem the Syrian are very common in Rus' and Muscovy; they circulate in all major canonical readers (Margarit, Zlatostrui, Izmaragd) and imbue original Russian works with the ideas and phraseology of the patristic adversus Iudaeos tradition. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the intellectual elite of the recently baptized Kievan Rus' (unlike its Byzantine counterpart, which is then consumed by anti-Latin polemics) pays significant attention to the jews. All authoritative Byzantinists—from Hilarion to Clement Smoliatich to Cyril of Turov—reiterate in their sermons the Church’s teaching about Judaism and its adherents, laying the groundwork for Judeophobia in Russian culture.²⁸

In the thirteenth century, Russian anti-Judaism branches out into historiography and hagiography. Concern with the jews marks The Tale of the Baptism of Rus' (the Primary Chronicle), in which prince Vladimir evaluates Judaism following the Byzantine selection of faith literary plot. Historiography is also the focus of translations from Jewish sources (usually via Greek versions) with added Christological commentary. Among these annotated translations are excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, Paleia tolkovaia, which replace the Bible in Russia until the sixteenth century; Tolkovaia Psaltir', Russia’s source of the Psalter text; Josephus’ The Jewish War; and many other texts (such as Slovesa sviatykh prorok; Arkhivskii [Iudeiskii] khronograf; Knigy vremen'nyia i obraznyia Georgiia Mnikha). These polemical works—continuously recopied and cited by such different figures as the sixteenth-century persecutor of heretics Iosif Volotskii and the seventeenth-century schismatic Avvakum—use the Christological revision of Jewish history to position Rus' and Muscovy within the framework of universal history. This quest for identity stimulates the anti-Jewish zeal of the Kievan neophytes and later of the Muscovite adherents of such political doctrines as Moscow—the third Rome (fifteenth century) and Rus'—the new Israel (sixteenth century). The same preoccupation with the jews marks Russian medieval vitae. In the oldest hagiographical collection, the Kievan Crypt Paterikon (thirteenth century), monks didactically confront the jews in implicit or explicit theological disputations and take passion from them in imitation of Jesus and Byzantine literary models.²⁹

Unlike these sources, intended for consumption by the learned elite, Greek and Latin apocrypha are a major venue for the transmission of the elite’s anti-Judaism and Judeophobia to the population at large. A case in point is the gospel of Nicodemus (including the Acts of Pilate and the Epistle of Pilate) whose Russian versions circulate in sermons (Cyril of Turov), legends, popular prints, and folk verse from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries. This apocryphal text serves as the focus of theological reflection at the time of Ivan the Terrible; periodically enters Russian canonical readers; and already in modern times informs such literary works as the grand duke Konstantin Romanov’s play, Tsar' iudeiskii (The King of the Jews, 1914), and Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1940).³⁰

Ol'ga Belova convincingly illustrates the existence of a common corpus of folklore about the jews in the areas of Eastern Europe with Orthodox populations. The shared Byzantine-Kievan religious heritage, at least with regard to the jews, informs Orthodox popular cultures despite their geopolitical divisions.³¹ For the purposes my study, then, I will treat Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian folklore as one east Slavic discursive body of texts.

Furthermore, thanks to their shared theological roots in the Latin and Greek doctrines, the jews of east Slavic folklore do not essentially differ from those of Catholic and Protestant areas. There is a plethora of cognate Western and Russian folk traditions about the jews, which share the same Byzantine ecclesiastical sources or result from direct Catholic influences. Thus, in the Latin West the Greek Miracles of the Virgin give rise to the widely disseminated tale about the jews who throw a boy into the flames; the same tale has numerous Russian equivalents.³² Greek exempla also travel both ways. For instance, Russian adaptations of The Merchant’s Surety (the jews cheat a Christian, but a sacred object exposes them) have their Catholic homologues. Similarly, the Byzantine tale of disputation between an ascetic and the jews exists in east Slavic and Germanic versions; as does its derivative about a buffoon and a jewish philosopher. The list of examples is long, since Russian scribes often adopted Catholic and Protestant traditions even when Greek versions were available.³³ All this suggests that as far as Christianity’s paradigmatic Other goes, confessional differences are not all that important. In my opinion, the commerce of Orthodox and Catholic, ecclesiastic and popular, traditions about the jews justifies the application of the methodologies developed by Western researchers to Russia’s imaginary jews.

Russia’s oft-exaggerated isolation from the West does not place its culture outside the European continuum for the dissemination of the jewish image. Latin ecclesiastic and legal influences arrive in Rus' via Bohemia and Poland in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, adding to the spread of popular Catholic traditions about the jews by foreign merchants, wandering German mimes, and the Dominican monks whose order establishes itself in Kiev in the early thirteenth century and views anti-Jewish propaganda as the core of its missionary activity.³⁴ Latin traditions about the jews manifest themselves in various ways on the Russian soil. The doors of the Novgorod Cathedral, made in Germany before 1138, feature Christ’s arrest and flagellation by the jews wearing conic hats in accordance with Catholic legal praxis and iconography. Originally Catholic, nativity scenes and the Church drama travel via Poland to Ukraine and Belorussia (sixteenth century) and as far as Siberia (eighteenth century) in the form of puppet shows whose main villains are the jews. Even such popular Russian folk narrative as Son Presviatoi Bogoroditsy (The dream of the Holy Mother of God), which contains an attack on the jews, may be of Catholic origin.³⁵

The Muscovite elite translated many Western works dealing with Judaism and the jews—a practice surviving well into the eighteenth century.³⁶ A case in point is Novgorod’s archbishop Gennadii. This persecutor of the Judaizing heretics knew about the expulsion of Jews from Spain even before its completion and expressed his admiration for the methods of the Spanish Inquisition. A fighter for the purity of the Russian Church, Gennadii did not hesitate to draw on Western sources: he ordered the translation of German Christological commentaries to the Hebrew Bible and of Latin anti-Judaic treatises—the apocryphal Epistle of Rabbi Samuel (1339) and the works of the twelfth-century Franciscan monk Nicolas of Lyre. Gennadii surrounded himself with Catholic scholars for the purpose of fighting the Judaizing heretics. At the same time, he borrowed from the very heretics he fought several translations of Western adversus Iudaeos texts, since the alleged Russian Judaizers were equally hostile to Judaism.³⁷ This use of the jews as the primary symbolic trope for conceptualizing human foes and hostile ideologies testifies to Russian culture’s integral place in the European continuum for the dissemination of the jewish image.

Indeed, from the very start of the Christian experience, feuding Christians accused one another of jewish practices. Byzantine polemicists routinely assimilate to the jews all those Christians, whether Greek or Latin, whose beliefs or praxis they deem heretical. The same rhetorical tool is used in the inter-Protestant and Protestant-Catholic polemics. Luther and his followers describe the Catholic Church as the Synagogue of Satan; Anglicans put Presbyterians in the same category; and the Polish Church accuses all Protestants of both Judaizing and converting Christians to Judaism. And since the jews are Europe’s main paradigm of difference, Byzantine and Latin writers see their Muslim foes as but a version of the jews. Thus, if the invading Mongols are identified by European scholars as the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Luther extends this classification to the Ottoman Turks. Moreover, from the seventeenth century on, the European colonial discourse tends to describe newly encountered peoples in terms of the Lost Tribes of Israel, be they the Australian aborigines, the Eskimos, or the American Indians.³⁸

The same imaginative mechanism is manifest in the logic and rhetoric of Russian polemicists. Kievan and Muscovite authors routinely accuse Catholics of jewish worship. The Church sees a fifteenth-century Russian Protestant movement as a Judaizing heresy spread by the jews, although historians have been unable to confirm the heretics’ Jewish ties. The seventeenth-century Russian Church schism employs the same polemical devices. Archpriest Avvakum, a leader of the Old Believers, describes his foes as the Christ-killing jews, while the official Church’s supporters do likewise in reference to the Old Believers.³⁹ Following Greek models, Muscovite authors equate the Ottoman Turks with the jews. And folkore echoes this equation. In Russian epics, Christians fight an army that is above all jewish but is also pagan and Muslim. In fact, any political enemy is potentially jewish. Thus, a chronicler describes Pskov’s sixteenth-century rebellion against Moscow as jewish behavior. Beginning in the seventeenth century, pro-Russian Ukrainians accuse Poles of favoring Judaism over Orthodoxy; Polish polemicists retort that the anti-Polish Ukrainian leader, Bogdan Khmel'nitskii, descends from the jews; and the pro-Polish Ukrainians see the Russian Church as Judaizing. It comes then as no surprise that east Slavic popular traditions commonly encode as jewish any religiously or culturally marginal group.⁴⁰

To sum up, even a cursory overview of the dissemination of the imaginary jews in Rus' and Muscovy belies the contention of some historians that the jews of the Russian cultural imagination are the product of Polish Judeophobia, which spreads into Russia after the partitions of Poland and subsequently finds a new life in the antisemitic ideology similarly imported from the West. This claim looks too much like a psychological projection, considering that a structurally identical yet opposite school of thought holds Muscovite Jew-hatred responsible for the Judeophobe culture of the Polish-controlled Ukraine. Both arguments are as dubious as they are indefensible by the high scholarly standards of their promoters.⁴¹ Anti-Judaism and the resulting Judeophobia came to Russia with Christianity and we should consider them no more foreign to Russian culture than Christianity itself.

Kievan Rus', Muscovy, and the Russian empire are part and parcel of the European cultural space for the dissemination of the jewish image. In this light, the custom of depicting the Last Judgment scenes on the western wall of Orthodox churches acquires new significance, especially since Judas, the eponymous representative of the jews, figures prominently in the Last Judgment iconography. Using the pompous metaphor the temple of Russian letters (khram rossiiskoi slovesnosti), engendered by the cult of literature in nineteenth-century Russia, we can in all justice describe the jews of the Russian literary tradition as characters from the western wall of that temple. And not just because their artistic representation on the western wall of Russian literature mirrors the one we find in all European literatures. Russia’s imaginary jews are fully comprehensible only in the context of the generative model they share with their counterparts in other European cultures. As a result, they serve as Russian literature’s permanent point of contact with its Western counterparts.

My study is divided into four parts. The first one examines the image of the jews at the intersection of Greimas’s and Jung’s analytical methods in order to lay bare the narrative and archetypal logic, as well as the basic descriptive vocabulary, encoded by the generative model of the jews. Here I establish the analytical framework for the subsequent inquiry into the imaginary jews in the works of individual Russian and Russian-Jewish writers.

The second part shifts attention from the general to the specific, analyzing the two redactions of Nikolai Gogol’s story, Taras Bul'ba (1834, 1842)—a text that became as paramount to the representation of the jews in Russian literature as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to their depiction by English writers. This close reading will test the analytical framework elaborated in the first part of my study by exploring the uses to which an individual artist can put the generative model of the jews in specific cultural, literary, and historical circumstances; and the extent to which these uses are shaped by an artist’s intellectual and psychological idiosyncrasies.

The third part once again shifts the reader’s attention, this time from the close reading of one literary work to the comparative study of the jews in several texts by two authors: Ivan Turgenev’s The Jew (Zhid, 1846) and The Hapless Girl (Neschastnaia, 1869); and Anton Chekhov’s Mire (Tina, 1886) and Rothschild’s Fiddle (Skripka Rotshil’da, 1894). Here I will attempt to illustrate how apart from being a repository of a creative writer’s psychological, intellectual, and aesthetic anxieties and concerns, the imaginary jews can serve, on the one hand, as the means and the pretext for an intergenerational artistic and philosophical dialogue within one national literary tradition, and on the other hand, as a bridge enabling cross-cultural intercourse between seemingly unrelated events in the artistic and intellectual life of modern Europe.

The last part of my study explores the dynamics of jewish representation in the writings of assimilated Jewish authors for whom Russian language and culture are the