Vladimir Solov'ëv and the Russian-Christian Jewish

VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE* ‘…ljubi vse drugie narody, kak svoj sobstvennyj […love all other nations like your own].’ (Vladimir Solov’ëv, 1897)1 ‘The needy peasant goes to the Jews because his own people will not help him. And if the Jews, when they help the peasant, exploit him, then they don’t do this because they are Jews, but because they are masters of financial affairs, which are based on the exploitation of some by others [italics in the original, EvdZ].’ (Vladimir Solov’ëv, 1884)2 ‘Die Judenemanzipation in ihrer letzten Bedeutung ist die Emanzipation der Menschheit vom Judentum.’ (Karl Marx, 1844)3 * Dr. Evert van der Zweerde is senior lecturer at the Department of Social and Political Phi- losophy, and director of the Centre for Russian Humanities Studies, both at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands. This article is based on investigations supported by the Foundation for Research in the field of Philosophy and Theology which is subsidized by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). A first version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘Vladimir Solovyov and the Jews', held June 1998 at the Jewish University in St.Petersburg, Russian Federation. The present version has bene- fited from the discussions at that conference, from the feedback by members of the Centre for Russian Humanities Studies, University of Nijmegen, and from a recent visit to Oswiecim / Auschwitz. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are the author’s, Russian spelling has been adapted to contemporary standards, the transliteration follows the ISO-standard. 1 Vladimir Solov’ëv, Opravdanie dobra III, 14, v, in Vladimir Solov’ev, Socinenija v dvukh tomakh, eds. A.F. Losev and A.V. Gulyga (Moskva, 1988), I, pp. 47-480, p. 379. Cf. also, in the same paragraph, p. 378: ‘my dolzny ljubit’ vse narodnosti, kak svoju sobstvennuju’. 2 Vladimir Solov’ëv, ‘Evrejstvo i khristianskij vopros’, Pravoslavnoe obozrenie 1884, August, pp. 755-772, and September, pp. 76-114; here cited from V.S. Solov’ev, Socinenija v dvukh tomakh, eds. N.V. Kotrelëv and E.B. Raskovskij (Moskva, 1989), I, Publicistika, pp. 206-256, p. 254. 3 Karl Marx, ‘Zur Judenfrage', in Marx Engels Werke, Bd. 1 (Berlin, 1983), p. 377 [orig. in Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, Paris, 1844]. 212 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE In the 21st Century, one of the ‘post-modern' conclusions to be drawn is that the ‘modern' idea of a gradual reduction of religion to a strictly private sphere of ‘conscience' and an equally gradual, but fundamental exclusion of religion and church from the public domain and from ‘politics' has proved to be an illusion. For better or for worse (or perhaps: for better and for worse), religion and politics continue to be interconnected in a variety of ways: religion is a political factor and the political obtains, in many contexts, a religious colouring. Although it is possible to argue, in a continuity of Enlightened thinking, that in reality religion and politics are different and separate affairs, the question then is where this ‘reality' is to be found, apart from the mind of the person who thinks it or the intellectual milieu in which she or he thinks. To put it more radically: the disconnectedness of politics and religion is a reality to the exact extent to which people think that they are disconnected and act accordingly. As a rule, however, people think and act otherwise. Much the same applies to the phenomenon of national identity and nation- alism, also at some point believed to be a thing of the past, but in some parts of the world vitally and violently manifesting itself. One of the ways in which religion and politics are often connected is in the idea of a ‘national religion', the idea of a one-to-one correspondence of a specific religion and a national identity. The clearest example of this idea in the present-day world is to be found, probably, in former Yugoslavia, where, in the independent republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, you can be a Croat, a Serb, or a Muslim, the three functioning as mutually exclusive determinations within the same category, a category in which the ethnic and the religious are interchangeable. The lurking opposition of ‘Europeans' (post-Christian or Christian) and ‘Muslims' within the context of the expanding European Union copies the same category mistake at a larger scale, and with potentially disastrous consequences.4 Christianity and Christians have a special problem here, because this religion has come into being, on the one hand, on the basis of an explicitly national religion, Judaism, while representing, on the other hand, the idea of a religion that transcends all national differences in the name of human- ity as such – the fact that the Roman Catholic Church is often nicknamed 4 See my ‘Europe – A Christian Super-Nation in a Globalizing World?', in Orthodox Chris- tianity and Contemporary Europe, eds. Jonathan Sutton and W.P. van den Bercken (Leuven, 2003), pp. 145-162. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 213 the largest transnational NGO is a apt illustration of this fact. Post-Christians (secularists, humanists, neo-Marxists, etc.) share this problem with their Chris- tian predecessors: their pretension, badly hidden behind relativistic rhetoric, remains universal, while at the same time the phenomenon of national religion is too manifest and strong to be disregarded or rejected. One of the possible ways of getting access to the core logic of this problem is to turn to historical examples. Within the context of this article, I attempt to trace this core logic in the thought and action of one of the greater intellectual figures of late-19th century imperial Russia, Vladimir Sergeevic Solov’ev (1853-1900), a thinker who was clearly aware of the aforementioned problem, and who not only was ready to acknowledge the political relevance of religion, but actively engaged in what he called ‘Christian politics', the attempt to real- ize, within the framework of human history, the conditions for the Kingdom of God. The fact that the idea of this Kingdom is itself part of the Judeo-Chris- tian tradition accounts for the special attention paid by Solov’ëv to the so- called ‘Jewish Question', and serves to explain his attempt to ‘invert' that question. At the same time, as I shall show, Solov’ëv not merely remains within the ‘national paradigm', but even hypertrophies it in the form of a national-religious essentialism. The historical and cultural distance between Solov’ëv and ‘us' is what, hopefully, gives my analysis more than purely scholarly relevance. In this article, my objective is, most of all, to analyse the notion of ‘nation' employed by Solov’ëv in his discussion of the Jewish question. Secondly, I focus, in a reflexive manner, on the position Solov’ëv is claiming for him- self vis-à-vis the ‘Jewish Question' as he discusses it, using his perspective on the Jewish Question as a perspective on Solov’ëv. In the third place, my aim is to intervene in a particular kind of discourse on nationality and religion, exemplified by Solov’ëv. All three questions have both a historical, a philosophical, and a present-day aspect, i.e. they are relevant for Solov’ëv studies, for an assessment of Solov’ëv’s importance as a thinker, and for contemporary discussions about national identity and the role of religion in it. A lot has already been written about Solov’ëv’s perception of the Jews and of the Jewish question. Instead of repeating points made by others, I shall refer to them in passing. If, however, there is one thing that is absent in the extant literature, it is a political reading, not in the sense of siding with or against Solov’ëv in this or any other matter, but of detecting ‘the political' in his writing: the key to this is the question ‘Who is “we”?'. Finally, in another 214 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE context, I have made a plea for the denationalisation, de-russification, and de-christianisation of the philosophical heritage of Solov’ëv – this essay can be regarded as a specimen of this triple deconstructive move, the ultimate aim of which is to ‘liberate' the creative elements inherent in his thought and make them valuable for a contemporary audience.5 1. THE JEWISH-CHRISTIAN QUESTION AND RUSSIA Relationships between Jews and Christians, Jewry and Christendom, and Judaism and Christianity have never been particularly smooth or easy in human history. In spite of numerous cases of harmonious cooperation and notwithstanding the substantial contribution by people of Jewish descent to the development of European culture (think only of Baruch de Spinoza, Marc Chagall, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud), anti-Semitism must be seen as one of the fils rouges of the history of ‘Christian Europe’. Although the mass destruction of Jewish people by the Nazi regime cannot be ascribed to Chris- tianity as such, Nazism alone does not suffice to explain the Shoah either. At the same time, throughout European history, Christians have often protested against anti-Semitism and many Jews were helped by Christians during World War II. The counterpart of Christian anti-Semitism, Jewish anti-Christian- ism, is not wholly absent, but it is both rare and innocent by comparison.6 The heart of the matter is perhaps best expressed with the statement that, while ‘material' for both anti-Semitism, judaeophobia, philo-semitism, and cosmopolitanism abounds in the Christian tradition, for Christians Jews cannot and therefore never will be ‘just people' if only because they are the people from which Jesus of Nazareth originated.7 The relationship between 5 See Evert van der Zweerde, ‘Deconstruction and Normalization: Towards an Assessment of the Philosophical Heritage of Vladimir Solov’ëv’, in Vladimir Solov’ëv.

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