04 — The “Judaizer” Heresy

The movement that the hostile Muscovite sources of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries called the zhidovstvuyushchie — the “Judaizers” — and the campaign against it that made Joseph of Volotsk’s name. This section sets out, first, what the accusing sources (Joseph’s Enlightener and the letters of Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod) allege the heresy to have been, against the deep and unresolved scholarly uncertainty over what — if anything coherent — the movement actually was; and second, the drive to identify, condemn, and finally burn the accused, culminating in the council of 1504. Both files are written source-critically and even-handedly: the case for prosecution and Joseph’s theology of punishment are stated in his own terms, and the burnings are stated plainly, without triumphalism and without the moralizing of a later age.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (cenobitic founder; “Possessors”)

This is the most contested ground in the whole record of Joseph of Volotsk, and the most sensitive. Almost everything we are told about the so-called “Judaizers” comes from the pens of the men who hunted them — above all from Joseph’s own Enlightener (Prosvetitel) and from the epistles of Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod — so that the modern reader is in the position of reconstructing a heresy almost entirely from the indictment, with the defendants’ own writings either lost, suppressed, or never committed to parchment (Lurie & Kazakova 1955; Fennell 1995). The scholarship divides sharply over how far that indictment can be trusted: an older tradition took the sources broadly at their word and described a genuine Judaizing heresy spread from a Kievan Jew; a powerful twentieth-century revision, associated above all with Ya. S. Lurie, read the “Judaizer” label as a polemical weapon and the underlying current as something closer to a rationalist, reformist, or free-thinking dissent with little authentically Jewish about it (Lurie 1960; Pliguzov 2002). The two files below keep that uncertainty in the foreground rather than resolving it by fiat, and they hold together two facts that an Orthodox account must not separate: that Joseph believed himself to be defending the Church’s faith against a real and corrosive denial of Christ, and that the campaign he led ended with men burned alive — a punishment that other holy men of his own Church, the Trans-Volga elders around St. Nilus of Sora, openly opposed.

Files in This Section

File Description
What the “Heresy” Was What the hostile sources allege — denial of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, rejection of icons and monasticism, “Judaizing” observances, skepticism about the end of the world and the failed 1492 (year 7000) expectation, and the alleged origin with the “Jew Skharia” of Kiev c. 1470 — set against the scholarly debate over what the movement actually was, with the older “real heresy” reading and the skeptical-revisionist reading (Lurie, Fennell) named and weighed. Heavy [Disputed: ...].
The Campaign and the Executions Gennady’s earlier hunt and his admiration for Spanish-Inquisition methods; Joseph’s pressure on Metropolitan Zosima and on Ivan III; the councils of 1490 (milder penalties) and 1504 (burnings — the leaders burned in cages in Moscow, December 1504, others at Novgorod); Joseph’s theological justification of executing the obstinate heretic in the Enlightener and his epistles; and the Non-Possessor objection that repentance, not death, was owed. Presented critically, not triumphally.

See Also

References

  • Kazakova, N. A., and Ya. S. Lurie. Antifeodal’nye ereticheskie dvizheniia na Rusi XIV–nachala XVI veka [Antifeudal Heretical Movements in Rus’ from the Fourteenth to the Early Sixteenth Century]. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1955.
  • Lurie, Ya. S. Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka [The Ideological Struggle in Russian Publicistic Writing of the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries]. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960.
  • Fennell, John. A History of the Russian Church to 1448. London: Longman, 1995.
  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II: The Middle Ages, the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Ed. John Meyendorff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.
  • Pliguzov, Andrei. Polemika v russkoi tserkvi pervoi treti XVI stoletiia [Polemics in the Russian Church of the First Third of the Sixteenth Century]. Moscow: Indrik, 2002.
  • Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000.