What the “Heresy” Was

The movement that Joseph of Volotsk and Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod called the “Judaizers” (zhidovstvuyushchie) appears in the surviving record almost entirely through the writings of its prosecutors. This file sets out what those hostile sources allege the heresy to have taught and done — a denial of the Trinity and of Christ’s divinity, a rejection of icons and monasticism, “Judaizing” observances, a skepticism about the approaching end of the world, and an origin with a Kievan Jew named Skharia around 1470 — and then sets that indictment against the deep and unresolved scholarly disagreement over what the movement actually was, with the older “real heresy” reading and the skeptical revisionism of Ya. S. Lurie and others named and weighed. The uncertainty is itself the subject.

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

The Problem of the Evidence

No account of the “Judaizers” can begin anywhere but with the nature of the sources, because almost everything we are told about them was written by the men who set out to destroy them. The two great bodies of testimony are the Enlightener (Prosvetitel) of Joseph of Volotsk — a long dogmatic-polemical work in sixteen “Words” (Slova) directed against the Novgorod heretics — and the epistles of Gennady Gonzov, Archbishop of Novgorod from 1484, who first raised the alarm and pressed for an inquisition (Kazakova & Lurie 1955; Fennell 1995). To these may be added the acts of the church councils that condemned the accused and a handful of related polemical texts. What is almost entirely absent is the other side: the heretics left, so far as survives, no confession of faith, no apologia, no body of writing in their own voice. A few texts that circulated in their milieu — translations of astronomical and logical works, a Hebrew-derived psalter or prayer book, the so-called Laodicean Epistle of Fyodor Kuritsyn — have been identified and argued over, but they are fragments, and their heretical character is itself disputed (Lurie 1960; Pliguzov 2002; Taube on the Judaizing texts).

The methodological consequence is severe and must be stated at the outset. To describe “what the heresy taught” is, almost entirely, to describe what its enemies said it taught. This is the same source-critical predicament that attends the early martyr-acts and the heresiological tradition generally — the accused is known through the indictment — and it requires the same discipline: report the allegations as allegations, name the accuser, and refuse to let the prosecution’s confidence become the historian’s (cf. METHODOLOGY §3, §4). [Disputed: whether the hostile sources can be read as substantially reliable testimony to a real, organized heresy — the broad assumption of older scholarship and of much pre-revolutionary church history (e.g. the descriptive treatments summarized in Kazakova & Lurie 1955); or whether they are polemical constructions whose categories cannot be trusted as a map of the accused's actual beliefs — the position developed most fully by Ya. S. Lurie (1960) and pressed further by later skeptics]

What the Sources Allege

Within the world of Joseph’s Enlightener and Gennady’s letters, the heresy has a definite and alarming shape. The accusers charge the zhidovstvuyushchie with a cluster of denials that strike at the center of the Christian confession.

First and gravest, they are accused of denying the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Christ — of holding that God is one in a manner that excludes the Son and the Spirit as consubstantial persons, that Jesus was a man and not God incarnate, and that the Messiah of the prophets is yet to come. This is the charge that gives the movement its name: to deny the Trinity and await a still-future Messiah is, in the accusers’ eyes, to “Judaize,” to fall back from the Gospel into the synagogue (Joseph, Enlightener, esp. the opening Slova against those who deny the Son and the Spirit; Kazakova & Lurie 1955). Joseph builds the great bulk of the Enlightener as a positive demonstration of Trinitarian and Christological dogma precisely to answer this alleged denial, marshalling the Old Testament theophanies (the three visitors at Mamre, Gen. 18; the “Let us make man,” Gen. 1:26) and the prophets as witnesses to the Trinity and to Christ (Joseph, Enlightener, Slova 1–7; on the work’s structure see the companion treatment in Section 03, The Enlightener).

Second, they are charged with rejecting the veneration of icons and the cross as idolatry, and with deriding monasticism and the monastic life — a charge that touches Joseph personally and that connects the heresy, in his presentation, to a broader contempt for the institutional and ascetic Church (Joseph, Enlightener; Gennady’s epistles; Fedotov 1966, II). The alleged iconoclasm gives the Enlightener its long defense of images, which stands in the native Byzantine tradition of the seventh ecumenical council (see Icons and Iconoclasm).

Third, they are accused of “Judaizing” observances — keeping the Sabbath, reckoning Passover by the Jewish calendar, and the like — and of mocking Christian practice. How literal or widespread any such observance was is one of the most heavily contested points in the whole question, and will be taken up below.

Fourth, the accusers connect the heresy to a skepticism about the approaching end of the world. The Byzantine-Russian chronology placed the seven-thousandth year from creation — and with it, in a widespread popular expectation, the end of the age and the Second Coming — in what we call 1492. The paschal tables, which had been computed only to that year, ran out; and when the year passed without the end, the failure of the prophecy was a real crisis (Fennell 1995; Lurie 1960). The accusers charge the heretics with having mocked this expectation and with having drawn from the non-event a rationalist conclusion — that the Church’s reckoning, and perhaps its eschatology altogether, was unreliable. It was in the aftermath of 1492 that new paschal tables had to be computed (Metropolitan Zosima issued a continuation), and the episode forms part of the background to the campaign (Kazakova & Lurie 1955). [Disputed: whether eschatological skepticism was a genuine tenet of the accused or a charge constructed around the embarrassment of the failed year-7000 expectation — older accounts treat it as a real feature of a rationalizing movement (cf. the framing in Lurie 1960, who nonetheless doubts much else), while skeptical readers note that the year-7000 anxiety was general and not peculiar to any "heresy"]

The Alleged Origin: “Skharia the Jew”

The hostile sources give the movement a founding story. According to Joseph’s Enlightener and the related tradition, the heresy was brought to Novgorod around 1470 by a learned Jew named Skharia (Zacharia/Zachariah), who came in the retinue of a Lithuanian-Kievan prince (the Orthodox prince Mikhail Olelkovich is named in the entourage that arrived at Novgorod in 1470–71), and who seduced two Novgorod priests, Denis and Aleksei, into apostasy; from these the infection allegedly spread, and was later carried to Moscow when the two priests were promoted — extraordinarily — to prominent Kremlin churches (Joseph, Enlightener, the historical Slovo; Kazakova & Lurie 1955; Fennell 1995). The Skharia story is the linchpin of the “Judaizer” reading: it supplies a literal Jewish origin for the alleged Judaizing, and it makes the heresy an importation rather than a native dissent.

But the figure of Skharia is exactly where the source-critical problems are sharpest. [Disputed: the historicity and identity of "Skharia the Jew" — older scholarship accepted him substantially as the *Enlightener* presents him, a Kievan Jew and the founder of the heresy (the reading underlying most pre-twentieth-century church histories); Ya. S. Lurie (1960) and the skeptical tradition treat the Skharia narrative as a polemical etiology, doubting that a single Jewish teacher founded a coherent movement and noting the confusion in the sources over who he was; some scholars have sought to identify Skharia with a known figure — e.g. the Crimean-Genoese notable Zacharias de Guizolfi, with whom Ivan III is documented as corresponding — while others regard even that identification as speculative]. The uncertainty is not marginal: if the Skharia story is a construction, then the central evidence that the movement was actually Jewish in origin dissolves, and the “Judaizer” label looks less like a description than like a charge.

What Was It Actually? The Older View and the Revision

Here the scholarship divides into two broad camps, and the honest answer to the question “what was the heresy?” is that the answer is genuinely unsettled.

The older, source-trusting view read the indictment more or less at face value: there really was, in Novgorod and then Moscow, a Judaizing heresy — a secret movement that denied the Trinity and Christ’s divinity, observed Jewish practices, and traced back to Skharia’s teaching — and Joseph and Gennady, whatever the harshness of their methods, were combating a real and dangerous apostasy. This reading dominated pre-revolutionary Russian church historiography and survives in popular and confessional accounts; it takes the Enlightener as substantially a true report (summarized and critiqued in Kazakova & Lurie 1955; cf. Fedotov 1966, II, who is more cautious but still treats a real heretical current as the referent).

The twentieth-century revision, associated above all with Ya. S. Lurie (and the foundational documentary work he did with N. A. Kazakova), turned the question inside out. On this reading the very category “Judaizer” is a polemical weapon, not an analytic description; what the sources call a single organized heresy may have been, at most, a loose and varied current of free-thinking, rationalist, and reformist dissent, with little that was authentically Jewish in content (Lurie 1960; Kazakova & Lurie 1955). On this view the “Judaizing” label functioned the way “Manichaean” or “Bogomil” did elsewhere — as an all-purpose smear that imported the worst available associations and discouraged any sympathetic hearing. Lurie emphasized the interest of the milieu in translated secular learning (logic, astronomy, the Six Wings astronomical tables, Maimonides-derived logical handbooks) and read the movement primarily as an intellectual rather than a confessional phenomenon — closer to a critical, questioning attitude toward clerical authority, relics, monasticism, and the failed eschatology than to any deliberate return to Judaism. [Disputed: the essential character of the movement — a genuine Judaizing heresy substantially as charged (older church historiography); versus a rationalist / free-thinking / reformist dissent on which the "Judaizer" label was a polemical imposition with little real Jewish content (Lurie 1960; Kazakova & Lurie 1955; broadly followed by Pliguzov 2002); with intermediate positions holding that the sources mix a real but small heterodox circle with a far larger penumbra of the merely accused]

John Fennell, in his survey of the Russian church, registers the same caution from the Western side: he stresses how little can be securely known, treats the sources as partisan, and declines to certify the lurid picture the Enlightener paints, while not denying that some heterodox ferment existed (Fennell 1995). The cumulative effect of the revisionist work is not to prove that nothing happened — clearly something provoked Gennady and Joseph — but to make it impossible to say with confidence that what happened was the organized Judaizing apostasy the prosecution described. [Disputed: how "Jewish" the actual content was — ranging from a real adoption of Jewish doctrine and observance (the sources' own claim) through a movement influenced by Hebrew texts and Karaite or rabbinic learning but not a conversion to Judaism (positions canvassed by Taube and others on the translated literature) to essentially no genuine Jewish content at all, the term being pure polemic (the strong Lurie reading)]

The Moscow Connection: Court Circles and High Politics

What gives the affair its real gravity — and what makes the “secret heresy in a few Novgorod parishes” picture inadequate — is that the accusation reached into the highest circles of the Muscovite court. The most important named figure on the accused side is Fyodor Kuritsyn, a powerful state secretary (d’yak) and diplomat in the service of Ivan III, a man at the center of Muscovite foreign policy in the 1480s–90s and the reputed author of the Laodicean Epistle, a cryptic and much-debated text that has been read as a manifesto of rationalist free-thought (Lurie 1960; Pliguzov 2002). Around Kuritsyn the sources cluster a circle of educated laymen and officials, and the heresy is alleged to have had protectors and sympathizers at the summit of the state.

It reached, most dangerously, into the dynasty. The faction associated with Elena Stefanovna (“Elena of Moldavia,” the Moldavian-born widow of Ivan III’s eldest son Ivan the Young and mother of the grand prince’s grandson Dmitri, who was for a time Ivan III’s designated heir) was charged with protecting or favoring the heretics; and the fall of that faction in the dynastic struggle of the late 1490s and early 1500s — Dmitri’s eclipse and the rise of Vasili, son of Sophia Palaiologina — is bound up with the turn of the regime against the accused (Kazakova & Lurie 1955; Fennell 1995; Pliguzov 2002). This entanglement of the “heresy” with court faction is one reason the revisionist scholarship is so wary of the religious labels: a charge of heresy was, among other things, a usable weapon in a succession struggle, and the men finally burned in 1504 included figures whose offense may have been as much political as doctrinal. [Disputed: how far the prosecution of the "heresy" was driven by genuine doctrinal alarm and how far by court politics and the dynastic struggle over Ivan III's succession — Lurie (1960) and Pliguzov (2002) foreground the political dimension and the role of the Elena Stefanovna / Dmitri faction's fall; more traditional accounts treat the doctrinal danger as primary and the political fallout as consequence rather than cause]

Why the Uncertainty Is the Point

For an Orthodox reader the temptation runs two ways, and both must be resisted. One temptation is to take the Enlightener as simple history — to accept that a Jewish-founded heresy denying Christ really did honeycomb the Novgorod and Moscow clergy, and so to read the whole affair as a straightforward defense of the faith. The other is to assume, with the most deflationary revisionism, that there was no heresy at all, only innocent intellectuals destroyed by a clerical inquisition. The sources do not license either certainty. What can be said with confidence is narrow: that Gennady and Joseph believed they faced a real denial of Christ and the Trinity; that the milieu they attacked included men interested in translated secular learning and skeptical of clerical claims; that the “Judaizer” label is polemically loaded and historically insecure; and that the affair was entangled from early on with the highest politics of the Muscovite state. The campaign that followed from these convictions — and the burnings that ended it — are the subject of the companion file (The Campaign and the Executions). The dogmatic content of Joseph’s reply, the great positive exposition of the Trinity and the icons that the alleged heresy provoked, belongs to the treatment of the Enlightener itself.

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. (The foundational documentary edition and study; texts of Gennady’s epistles and related materials; the case for reading the “Judaizers” as a rationalist-dissent rather than a Judaizing heresy.)
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. (The developed revisionist reading of the heresy and the Enlightener; Fyodor Kuritsyn and the Laodicean Epistle; the political dimension of the affair.)
Fennell, John. A History of the Russian Church to 1448. London: Longman, 1995. (Western survey; cautious, source-critical treatment of the Novgorod heresy and the limits of the evidence.)
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. (The heresy and Joseph’s response within the spiritual history of the period.)
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. (The polemical literature, the court connection, and the political reading of the prosecution.)
Joseph of Volotsk. The Enlightener (Prosvetitel, The Book Against the Novgorod Heretics), cited by Slovo. (The principal hostile source; the Trinitarian and iconodule exposition; the historical narrative of the heresy’s origin with Skharia. Editions: the Kazan printings of 1857 and 1882–1904; redaction history in Lurie and Kazakova.)