Russian Judaizing Heresy

--- Building a New Jerusalem: Ivan Murashko and “Murashkovtsi" ---
The study, based on archival documents, doctrinal texts and memoires collected by the author, discusses the history of a sectarian movement of Evangelical Christians Saint Zionists (also known as Murashkovtsi) that emerged in 1930-s in Polish-controlled Western Polissya. The movement arose in the situation of a social and cultural crisis caused by the decline of the traditional rural economy as well as by the collapse of peasants’ world outlook in the course of the World War I and Bolshevik revolution; the crisis led to a massive expansion of Protestant sects, including Baptists, Evangelical Christians and, most notably, Pentecostals. It was the radical Pentecostal milieu that the sect’s founder, “Prophet Elias” and the “Father of Zion” Ivan Murashko (1891-1954), came from. Together with his wife, the “Mother of Zion” Olga Kyrylchuk (1885-1956) he created a vibrant millennialist movement which combined a Pentecostal-style ecstatic cult with Judaizing moral and ritual prescriptions based on the Old Testament and absorbed many elements of popular beliefs (e.g. the idea of reincarnation). The principal constitutive event for the sect came in 1933 when, for the sake of the world salvation, Olga as “Christ’s Second Sacrifice” made Murashko perform the rite of “Breaking the Seals” in which he cut her flesh with a razor and collected her flowing blood. In 1936, the Zionist made an attempt to establish an agricultural commune in Polissya, called “New Jerusalem”, selling their property and purchasing some 200 ha of land in the Sarny distric, but the counteractions by Polish authorities led to the dissolution of the commune and the emigration of Murashko and Olga to Argentine.
In 1940-s and early 1950-s, the Zionists – despite their sympathy towards the Soviet communist ideology – suffered severe repressions, provoked by their antimilitary stance, their ecstatic cult which the authorities considered “barbaric,” and their passive resistance to the Soviet economic and cultural reforms. In late 1950-s, following the death of Joseph Stalin and the release of GULAG prisoners, the Zionists, dispersed in small local groups and facing a progressive loss of younger generation, reestablished their commune as a team of industrial construction workers that migrated from one major construction site to another before settling in South Kazakhstan in 1961 (in 1974 part of the group resettled to the town of Kominternivske near Odessa). By shifting to team-based construction works, Zionists occupied a unique niche in the Soviet society which allowed them to work in a closed circle of believers and to observe both Sunday and Sabbath. In Kazakhstan, Zionists lived in community of goods until early 1990-s, while the group in Kominternivske gave up its original communism while maintaining strong solidarity between members.
Today, Zionists still exist in Kazakhstan, Moldova and Southern Ukrainian town of Kominternivske, where the most viable community of nearly 500 members is located. Despite a clear decline of the initial religious enthusiasm (near extinction of the ecstatic cult with dances and glossolalia, renunciation of proselytizing activities etc.) the group grows fast through natural increase, with most families having five and more children. Maintaining isolation from the outside society (endogamy, working in faith-based teams, restricted social relations with unbelievers), the sect allows for many influences of the modern popular culture (modern technologies, music, TV, internet etc.), which helps socialize the young generation and ensures the group’s viability in the foreseeable future."

The Slavic manuscripts containing the Erotapokriseis of Pseudo-Caesarius are late, from the 15th-17th century, all without exception being Russian by origin, orthography and linguistic features, but numerous lexical characteristics show categorically that the translation was made in East Bulgaria in the early 10th century. The paper deals with the editorial interventions made in the Russian tradition of the text. They are limited mostly to sporadic substitutions of outdated lexis. Taking into consideration data from a critical edition, textological and linguistic analysis, comparison with other texts, and medieval literary sources, the roots and the features of a new culture of reading in Russia are observed. Glosses and direct lexical substitutions in copies of Old-Bulgarian works and the contents of the so-called Azbukovniki are examined as a valuable layer of unclear and incomprehensible lexis for the Russian copyists, which is important as a source for extracting lexemes-isoglosses, providing reliable criteria for attribution and precising the chronology of texts originated in the early period of Slavic literacy.

Inspired in part by conversations with David Goldfrank, this essay considers aspects of how attitudes toward biblical language contributed to representations of national and religious identity in late medieval and early modern Muscovite Russia. At roughly the same time in history that revived Hebrew and Greek study in Western Europe helped to stimulate the Renaissance and Reformation, bookmen in East Slavia also reconsidered the original languages of sacred writings. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, such interest was neither unknown nor marginal within Muscovite religious culture. Hebrew-Russian glossaries circulated in leading monasteries from at least the thirteenth century; major infusions of Greek (and other) words and definitions in the sixteenth century transformed these texts into multilingual dictionaries. This mainstream tradition in Russian Orthodoxy can be linked to such important religious figures as Nil Sorskii and Maksim Grek. I argue that by “appropriating” biblical languages and terminology, often via inaccurate translations, Muscovite Russian literati created and defended their distinctive identity vis-à-vis Jews and Greeks, who were considered God’s former chosen peoples. These findings suggest reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of faith in Muscovy in the “age of confessionalism.”
Keywords: Bible – East Slavic – Greek – Hebrew – identity – language – Muscovy – religion – Russian Orthodox Christianity

The Hebrew Bible is the shared canonical text of Judaism and Christianity. It might even be the central common text of Western civilization. Yet this collection of books is also remarkable for the degree to which its meaning and authority for both believing Christians and believing Jews is so thoroughly embedded in, and even superseded by, later texts - the New Testament for Christians and the rabbinic corpus for Jews.

Nevertheless, over the centuries, in various places and against the backdrop of various contexts, certain persons and movements in both traditions have repeatedly sought to reclaim the authority or religious meaning of the Hebrew Bible in-itself, so to speak, alongside or instead of the Bible’s traditional embedded meaning, in the name of one or another restorationist, reforming, revisionist, or radical agenda. These persons and movements have often been suppressed, sometimes violently. But they keep appearing as a hodge-podge of distinct but oddly similar historical moments - Persian Karaites, Russian Judaizers, Christian Hebraists, Puritans, Calvinists, Reform Jews, Zionists, Old Testament theologians, and many others - to the point that it is fair to say that they represent a consistent, abiding, tendency, a counter-story to the main trends of both Judaism and Christianity.

This Article explores this recurring phenomenon. After a selective historical survey, it collects threads of that history to propose some common themes in the sporadic but insistent return to the Hebrew Bible in-itself. It then explores the complex task of reintegrating the Hebrew Bible-in-itself back into the larger complex of Jewish and Christian tradition and suggests some broader implications of that lure for the place of the Hebrew Bible in Western culture and the distinct, paradoxical, nature of its religious and textual authority.