A Grin without a Cat 1 : 'Adversus Iudaeos' Texts in the Literature of Medieval Russia (988–1504)

Abstract: This study, which is the first and main part of a two-volume work, is concerned with the history and philology of original and translated works Adversus Iudaeos circulating among the Eastern Slavs from the baptism of Rus' c.988 till the early 16th century. Excluded is the literature of Lithuanian Ruthenia from the 14th century onwards. On the material of 11–15th-century MSS the dissemination of the works on East Slav soil has been traced in order to make out the main points in their textual history, particularly the circumstances of their entry into East Slavonic letters. The texts have been divided into four, partly overlapping, categories – Biblical works and works on world history; homiletics; disputations; tracts, epistles, and poems – and aspects of their textual history have been treated in as many chapters. Despite what has been traditionally claimed there is nothing generally to connect the composition, copying, or importation of anti-Judaic works in Rus' with vicissitudes within the Rus' Jewish community or in its rapport with Christian Slavs. On the contrary, nearly all anti-Judaic motives ascend to a common Christian heritage in exegesy, hagiography and homiletics passed on to Rus' from Byzantium and paralleled by its sister cultures in the Balkans, with which Rus' shared its set of translated model texts. The anti-Judaic tendencies of the literature of Kievan Rus', although not quite negligible, have been greatly exaggerated because several masterpieces of Kievan literature are paschal sermons with a highly traditional treatment of exegetical and hermeneutical Jews, playing a rôle in the passion of Christ and in salvation history. The bulk of anti-Judaic works known in Muscovy were imported only in the late 14th century–early 15th century, at a time when next to no Jews are recorded on East Slav territory outside Ruthenia and long before the rise of the heresy known in historiography as ‘the Judaisers’, notwithstanding that earlier scholarship has tended 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. There was a heightened interest in Adversus Iudaeos texts in the second half of the 15th century, which appears to culminate at the turn of the century, never to vanish entirely thereafter.