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 nationalism, 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 humanity 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 himself 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. Reconciler and Polemi- cist, eds. Wil van den Bercken, Manon de Courten, Evert van der Zweerde (Leuven, 2000), pp. 39-62. 6 Such instances as the refusal, in 1997, of judge Stephen M. Cohen to sign letters dated A.D. [http://zog.to/3/antisemi/cohen.htm], or the continuous quarrels over holy places such as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or Holocaust / Shoah monuments in Auschwitz are serious enough, as is present-day anti-Jewish exaggeration of them [see: http://www. jewwatch.com/index.html]. 7 For a brief survey, see David C. Burrell, CSC, ‘Jewish-Christian Relations’, in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, eds. Adrian Hastings et al. (Oxford, 2000), pp. 344-346. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 215

Christians and Jews is never neutral, whether Christians accuse Jews of ‘murdering' Jesus Christ, or, like the Russian-Orthodox priest Pavel Florenskij (1882-1937) or the publicist Vasilij Rozanov (1856-1919), share in the accu- sation of Jews of ritual murdering of Christian children (the Juscinskij affair in Kiev 1911);8 whether concerned Jews and fundamentalist Christians in the present-day USA join hands in their protest against a ‘road map' for the settlement of the ‘Palestinian problem', claiming that Jerusalem must indeed be the ‘eternal capital' of Israel;9 or whether an ecumenically minded Christian like Vladimir Solov’ëv adopts the title of ‘Jew' in order to stress his solidarity with Jews in general and with his Russian-Jewish compatriots in particular, at the same time hinting at his own incarnation of divine truth.10 The tense relation between Jews and Christians applies in particular to Russia, where westward expansion in the 18th century (the partition of Poland) turned the tsarist empire into the home of a large Jewish minority, num- bering 5 million in 1897.11 From 1815 to 1917, Jews were confined by law to the Pale of Settlement [Certa osedlosti], a territory roughly coinciding with the area where in 1648-1652 the Ukrainian peasantry, led by the Cossack national hero Bogdan Khmel’nickij (1593-1657), had massacred 100,000 Jews.12 It was mainly in this area that, in the second half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, pogroms took place, with waves in 1881- 1883, 1903-1906 and 1917-1921, the government doing little to prevent

8 See the thorough, archive-based publication by Michael Hagemeister, ‘Pavel Florenskij und der Ritualmordvorwurf’, in Appendix 2. Materialien zu Pavel Florenskij [Anhang zu Pawel Florenski, Werke in zehn Lieferungen], eds. Michael Hagemeister and Torsten Metelka (Berlin & Zepernick, 2001) pp. 59-73. 9 See, for example, http://www.oneway.nl/nieuwsartikel.php?nieuwsID=9192 10 See V.S. Solov’ëv, letter to N.N. Strakhov, 1890: ‘By the way, how can Danilevskij’s [ultra- nationalist] theory explain that the purely Russian, Orthodox culture that we share does not prevent you from being a Chinaman, and me – a Jew?’; quoted from Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, ‘Vladimir Solov’ev on Spiritual Nationhood, Russia and the Jews’, The Russian Review 56 (April 1977), pp.157-177, on p. 157; see also Nikolai O. Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy (New York, 1951), p. 121, or, in a recent Russian edition: Nikolaj Losskij, Istorija russkoj filosofii (Moskva, 1991), p. 161: ‘In his passionate desire to not only theo- retically discover divine thruth, but also to assist to its incarnation on earth, Solovyov often called himself a Jew’. 11 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union, eds. Archie Brown, Michael Kaser, Gerald S. Smith (Cambridge, 1994), p. 46. 12 Martin Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of Russian History (London & New York, 1972, 32002), maps 31 and 69. 216 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE them.13 In 1891, 700,000 Jews were deported to the Pale, including many inhabitants of the ‘two capitals', Moscow (20,000) and St.Petersburg (2,000).14 The revolutions of 1905 and 1917 (the ‘bourgeois' February revolution) resulted in complete legal equality and civil rights for Jews.15 The civil war (1918-1921), however, led to new massacres, perpetrated by both the Red and the White Army,16 and the Soviet period has also known many cases of anti-Jewish action, ranging from the decision not to evacuate Jewish citizens from the Western part of the USSR at the beginning of World War II – with the result that 3 million Russian Jews were killed by the Nazis – through the ‘anti-cosmopolitanism' campaign in 1949 and the notorious ‘Doctor’s Plot' in 1952 (with pogroms and rumours of the deportation of all Jews to Siberia), to restricted university access for people of Jewish descent (a regulation that existed in tsarist times, too),17 and the refusal of exit visas to Soviet Jews who desired to emigrate to Israel – the so-called refuseniks.18 Even today, when Jews form only a tiny minority of the population of the Russian Federation – well less than 0.5 percent – anti-Semitism is very much alive in nationalist, neo- Stalinist, and right-wing Orthodox circles, one of the favourite explanations for the existence of the Soviet regime and for various evils of post-Soviet Russian society being the zidomasonskij dogovor [conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons].19

13 Norman Davies, Europe. A History (London, 1997), p. 844. The Russian word pogrom, derived from the suffix po- and the verb gromit’, means ‘routing about' or ‘lynching'; although it can refer to any mob action against an ethnic or other group, it has gained the special connotation of assaults on Jews (ibid.). 14 Gilbert, Routledge Atlas (see n. 12), map 69. 15 S.V. Utechin, Concise Encyclopedia of Russia (London & New York, 1961), p. 245. 16 Davies, Europe (see n. 13), p. 844. 17 See F. Gec, ‘Ob otnosenii Vl.S. Solov’ëva k evrejskomu voprosu’, in Vladimir Solov’ëv: Pro et Contra, eds. V.F. Bojkov, Ju.Ju. Bulycev (Sankt Peterburg, 2002), vol. II, pp. 695- 725, p. 696, and Walter G. Moss, ‘Vladimir Soloviev and the Jews in Russia’, The Russian Review 29 (1970), pp.181-193, p. 182. 18 Utechin, Encyclopedia (see n. 15), p. 24 and 155; Nicolas Werth, ‘The Last Conspiracy’, in: Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA & London, 1999), pp. 242-249 [translated from the 1997 French original, Le livre noir du communisme: crimes, terreur, répression (Paris, 1997)]. 19 See the studies by Michael Hagemeister, e.g., ‘Vladimir Solov’ëv and Sergej Nilus: Apocalypticism and Judeophobia’, in Vladimir Solov’ëv. Reconciler and Polemicist (see n. 5), p. 288f, and n. 6; on Russian-Orthodox anti-semitism, the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, and the ‘Red-Brown church', see also John B. Dunlop, ‘The Russian Ortodox Church as an VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 217

However deplorable the Russian-Soviet record in this respect may be, anti- Jewish policies by the tsarist and the Soviet regimes and widespread ethnic anti-Semitism are not identical with religiously motivated anti-Judaism. In fact, Orthodox-Russian Christianity has always been divided on this point: for the most part of its history, the Russian Orthodox Church has had to follow the state’s policy in this as in every other respect, which makes it hard to decide whether it did so approvingly or not: in Soviet times, the church had to deal with the unique combination of privilege and suppression that made up the essence of its ‘Golden Cage', and in tsarist times the church was directly subordinate to the government’s Holy Synod, while the state had ‘orthodoxy', next to autocracy and nationality, as one of its ideological pil- lars. And while it is clear that anti-Judaic sentiments were and are widespread among Orthodox clergy and laity alike,20 including many Slavophile and Russophile thinkers (for example Ivan Aksakov (1823-1886) and T. Stoja- nov [K.E. Istomin] (1848-1914), or, in our days, the painter Ilja Glazunov (b. 1930)),21 Russia also has a rich tradition of Christian intellectuals and cler- gymen speaking out in defence of their Jewish compatriots, a tradition which from Jevgenij Barabanov (b. 1943) and Aleksandr Men’ (1935-1990)22 reaches back to Lev Tolstoj (1828-1910) and Vladimir Solov’ëv (1853-1900).

“Empire-Saving” Institution’, in The Politics of Religion in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, ed. Michael Bourdeaux (Armond, NY & London, 1995), pp. 32-36, and Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church in the Postcommunist CIS’, ibid, pp. 56- 62. Recently, right-wing orthodox believers protested against the introduction of a personalized tax code in Russia on the grounds that these numbers contained the number 666, and that ‘a/ these very codes would bind them into the controlling networks of global organizations… and b/ globalization itself was just one new manifestation of the Jewish-Masonic “world- conspiracy”…’: see Jonathan Sutton, ‘Religion, Civil Society and the Nation: Reflections on the Russian Case’, in Nation, Religion, Civil Society: Modernization in Context, eds. Wout Cornelissen, Gerrit Steunebrink, Evert van der Zweerde (forthcoming); for empirical data, see, for example, ‘Survey: Anti-Semitism still strong in St. Petersburg’, at http:// www.jewishsf.com/bk96071/iasurvey.htm 20 See, for example, the authoritative Timothy K. Ware, The Orthodox Church (London, 1963, rev. ed. 1993), p. 163, as well as Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church. A Contem- porary History (London & New York, 1986), pp. 7 and 450. 21 See Moss, ‘Vladimir Soloiev and the Jews in Russia' (see n. 17), pp. 182-184, esp. on p. 184: ‘Perhaps not all publicists shared the feelings of Aksakov and Istomin, but hardly anyone came forth in the 1880s to defend the Jews’. 22 See Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church (see n. 20), pp. 345 and 300. 218 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE

2. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV, FRIEND OF THE JEWS

It is on Solov’ëv, the well-known philosopher, religious thinker, poet, and publicist that I focus in this article. First of all, he was personally close to numerous Jews, most notably of all rabbi Faivl Gec [Goetz] (1853-1931): Gec not only was, since 1879, his private teacher of Hebrew, which Solov’ëv learned in order to read Jewish sacred literature in the original, but also a life-long friend who assisted him in ‘Jewish matters' on several occasions.23 Secondly, Solov’ëv was a consistent and courageous advocate of civil rights for the Jew- ish minority in Russia, claiming that ‘to give full civil rights to the Russian Jews is one of the obligations of Russia’,24 and he also was one of the few public adversaries of the anti-Jewish policies of the tsarist government as well as of anti-Semitism among (Orthodox) Christians: in 1890 he was the author of an anonymous open letter of protest against the persecution of Jews in Rus- sia and in favour of equal rights for Jews, that was published in The Times, thus heading with Lev Tolstoj a protest of ‘some sixty [over one hundred according to other sources, EvdZ] or more Russians connected with art and literature’.25 On this occasion, he also wrote a letter to tsar Aleksandr III, in which he defended the aforementioned action along the same lines as dissidents did in the late Soviet Union, namely by calling upon the tsarist government to obey its own law.26 In 1891, a long letter by Solov’ëv to Gec was published

23 Hamutal Bar-Yosef, ‘The Jewish Reception of Vladimir Solov’ëv’, in Vladimir Solov’ëv: Reconciler and Polemicist (see n. 5), particularly pp. 371f. 24 Gec, ‘Ob otnosenii' (see n. 17), p. 696, and Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevica Solov’ëva, ed. E.L. Radlov (Sankt Peterburg, 1909; reprint Brussels, 1970), vol. II, pp. 146-147. 25 See ‘Appendix A: The Jews in Russia’, in Politics, Law & Morality; Essays by V.S. Soloviev, ed. Vladimir Wozniuk (New Haven & London, 2000), pp. 291f, incl. the footnote; see also Ludolf Müller, ‘Vladimir Solovjev und das Judentum’, in Solovjev und der Protes- tantismus, ed. L. Müller (Freiburg, 1951) pp. 125-131, p. 126; Moss, ‘Vladimir Soloview and the Jews in Russia' (see n. 17), p. 186; and Vladimir Wozniuk, ‘Vladimir S. Soloviev and the Politics of Human Rights’, Journal of Church and State, 41 (1999), 1, p. 44. 26 Vl. Solov’ëv, ‘Pis’mo imperatory Aleksandru III’, in Vladimir Solov’ëv, Socinenija v dvukh tomakh (Moskva, 1989), vol. II, pp. 283-285, p. 284: ‘Finally, most recently, when I, in the light of the permanent violation in the Russian press of the state’s law, which strictly forbids to stimulate hatred and scorn of one part of the population against another, I joined hands with numerous writers and scholars, desiring, in the name of justice and law…, to censure our anti-semitic press which is particularly guilty of this kind of abuse, the Ministry of the interior,…, would not allow this declaration to be made public, despite the fact that it related exclusively to the anti-semitic press and contained nothing whatsoever against the government’. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 219 in The Floor to the Accused, a book in defence of the Jews that was confiscated upon publication, in which he developed his argument against anti-Semi- tism.27 He spoke and wrote on the subject on several occasions from 1882 onwards, and his rehabilitation of ‘the Jewish character, Jewish religion, Jew- ish history, and even the unanimously defamed Talmud’, in a period when Jews were under permanent pressure to convert to Christianity, was received very positively among Jews, who made him honorary member of the ‘Soci- ety for the Spread of Enlightenment among Jews in Russia'.28 In the third place, as a thinker he was not only deeply influenced by Spinoza, his ‘first love in philosophy’, whom – and indirectly himself – he passionately defended against ‘accusations' of atheism and pantheism in 1897,29 but also by Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C – A.D. 40), whom he called ‘the last and most significant thinker of Antiquity’,30 and by the Jewish Kabbalah (omitting, as Judith Deutsch Kornblatt noted, the Christian Kabbalah that influenced him through Jacob Böhme – arguably we witness here one of Solov’ëv’s ‘narrative tricks', which consists in dividing other positions in such a way that he himself appears as the unique synthesizing and reconciling factor).31

27 See Pis’ma II (see n. 24), pp. 163-172. 28 See Bar-Yosef, ‘The Jewish Reception of Vladimir Solov’ëv’ (see n. 23), p. 364f, p. 368f, and p. 391, and Moss, ‘Vladimir Soloview and the Jews in Russia' (see n. 17), p. 185. 29 See Vladimir Solovyov, ‘The Concept of God (In Defense of Spinoza’s Philosophy)’, translated by Boris Jakim, in The Concept of God. Essays on Spinoza, ed. Robert Bird (Carlisle, PA, 1999), pp. 25-50, and Nelli V. Motrosilova [Motroschilowa], ‘Die philosophischen Grund- begriffe Vladimir Solov’ëvs und die Lehre des Spinoza’, in Studia Spinozana, 11 (1995), pp. 319-341. 30 Vl. Solov’ëv, Opravdanie dobra, ch. IX, section ii, in: Socinenija v 2-kh tomakh (Moskva, 1988), vol. I, p. 271, footnote; cf. Lev Sestov, Umozrenie i apokalipsis, in Vladimir Solov’ëv: Pro et Contra (see n. 17), vol. II, pp. 467-530, p. 481. 31 In his entry for the Brokgauz-Efron’ Encyclopedia, Solov’ëv defines the Kabbalah as ‘a mystic doctrine and mystic practice in Jewry’: V.S. Solov’ëv, ‘Kabbala’, in Filosofskij slovar’ Vladimira Solov’ëva, ed. G.V. Beljaev (Rostov-na-Donu, 1997), pp. 151-156, on p. 151; see further J.D. Kornblatt, ‘Vladimir Solov’ev on Spiritual Nationhood, Russia and the Jews’, The Russian Review, 56 (1997), pp. 157-177, on p. 160, n. 12 and id., ‘Russian Religious Thought and the Jewish Kabbala’, in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, ed. B.G. Rosenthal (Ithaca & London, 1997), pp. 75-95. Konstantin Burmistrov has recently questioned the often alleged but never demonstrated direct influence of Jewish-Kabbalis- tic writings on Solov’ëv: ‘Vladimir Solov’ëv i Kabbala; k postanovke problemy’, in Issle- dovanija po istorii russkoj mysli; ezegodnik za 1998 god, ed. M.A. Kolerov (Moskva, 1998), pp. 7-104; on p. 9, he mentions the indeed less than critical A.F. Losev, Evgenia Gourvitch, Thomas Schipflinger, and Jean Halpérin, but apparently is not familiar with Kornblatt’s 220 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE

In the fourth place, the Jewish people, for whom he prayed in Hebrew on his deathbed,32 played a crucial role in his vision of the historical development of religion and Christianity. In point of fact, the Jews were, according to Solov’ëv, the thrice chosen people: the chosen people of Israel in the Old Testament, the chosen people in the historical situation in Eastern Europe contemporary to Solov’ëv, and finally, they were elected to play a key historical role once more in the apocalyptic turmoil described by Solov’ëv in the famous Kratkaja povest’ ob antikhriste, included in the last text published during his lifetime, Tri razgovora [1900]. Interestingly, as Michael Hagemeister has shown, this latter text bears great resemblance to other ‘apocalyptic' texts from the same period, with one important difference: while other texts focus on the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy as part of the plan of the Antichrist, Solov’ëv’s tale does pick up the idea of Freemasonic conspiracy, and depicts the Antichrist himself as a ‘secret member [neglasnyj clen]’ of the ‘powerful brotherhood of Freemasons [moguscestvennoe bratstvo frank-masonov]’,33 but ‘the Jews, the traditionally chosen people, who actively oppose the force of the Antichrist, and thus play the crucial role in the final attainment of sal- vation by human-divine interaction’,34 are positive heroes in his narrative, contrary to the spirit of the time. The ‘Jewish question', approached from a primarily religious angle, represented for Solov’ëv one out of three ‘great questions [velikie voprosy]' that occupied his mind during the period in which he wrote the articles that were

work in this field; according to Burmistrov, who distinguishes three periods in Solov’ëv’s life, his direct familiarity with the Kabbalah was determined by ‘occultic-theosophical pseudo-cabbalistic literature’ during the first period (1875-1881), substantially hindered by the negative attitude to the Kabbalah of Gec during the second (1881-early 1890s), and was based on direct knowledge only during the third period (latter part of the 1890s). when, however, ‘this new knowledge is not likely to have had any significant influence on his worldview, because at the basis of Solov’ëv’s philosophical intuitions lay, as before, the spiritual experience that he had in his youth’ (ibid., pp. 103f)). 32 Bar-Yosef, ‘The Jewish Reception of Vladimir Solov'ëv' (see n. 23), p. 370. 33 Vladimir Solov’ëv, ‘Tri razgovora’, in: idem, Socinenija v dvukh tomakh (Moskva, 1988), vol. II, p. 745, here quoted from the English translation by Alexander Bakshy, revised by Thomas R. Beyer: Vladimir Solovyov, War, Progress, and the End of History. Three Conversa- tions, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ (Hudson, NY, 1990), p. 171; cf. Hagemeis- ter, ‘Vladimir Solov'ëv and Sergej Nilus' (see n. 19), p. 292, who further notes that already in the early 1890s, Solov’ëv was convinced that it would be ‘the freemasons’ cause to orga- nize the coming empire of Antichrist’. 34 Hagemeister, ‘Vladimir Solov'ëv and Sergej Nilus', p. 295. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 221 subsequently collected under the title The National Question in Russia: ‘Our history has foisted on us three great questions, through the solution of which we can either glorify God’s name and bring nearer His kingdom by fulfill- ing his will, or ruin our national soul and retard God’s case on Earth. These questions are: the Polish (or catholic) question, the Eastern, or Slavonic question, and the Jewish question’.35 (God’s case on earth [delo Bozie na zemle], as perceived by Solov’ëv, can be defined in different ways: the establishment of a free theocracy as the perfect form of human society, the realization of Godmanhood or bogocelovecestvo as the union of humanity with the divine principle, the restoration of the unity of Creator and creature. What these formulations share, however, is that they assign a specific task to man, both individually and collectively, that they are profoundly optimistic in the sense that the ultimate goal of the process will inevitably come about, and that they assume the fulfilment of this task to be a free act.) The Jewish question he addressed is a lengthy essay under the title ‘Evrejstvo i khristianskij vopros [Jewry and the Christian Question]’, published in 1884.36

3. FROM A JEWISH TO A CHRISTIAN AND RUSSIAN QUESTION

The first thing to note about ‘Evreistvo i khristianskij vopros’ is Solov’ëv’s attempt to turn the Jewish Question into a Christian Question: ‘…the Jewish question is a Christian question’ (p. 230). The ‘evreiskij vopros' had become a central topic in Russian political and intellectual discourse in the course of the 19th century, and in Solov’ëv’s days judaeophobia and anti- Semitism were widespread. Following the familiar two-step pattern of Russian discussions, consisting of the subsequent questions ‘Kto vinovat [Who is to blame]?’ and ‘Cto delat’ [What to do]?’, Solov’ev is more than clear on the first one: ‘We are completely guilty [my krugom vinovaty] [italics mine]’ (p. 206). But, to invoke a core question of political philosophy: who is this ‘my [we]’, and, further, who is the ‘oni [they]’ to which it is

35 ‘Nravstvennost’ i politika; istoriceskie objazannosti Rossii’, in ‘Nacional’nyj vopros v Rossii, vypusk pervyj', Socinenija ‘89, I, p. 273; identical phrasing in ‘Velikij spor i khristianskaja politika’, in Socinenija ‘89, I, p. 69. 36 In what follows, I refer between brackets to the 1989 edition by N.V. Kotrelev and E.B. Raskovskij, Vladimir Solov'ev, Socinenija v dvukh tomakh (Moskva, 1989), I, pp. 206- 256. 222 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE opposed?37 Assuming that, generally speaking, Solov’ëv by ‘we’ means himself plus his audience, i.e. the readers of Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, we find that, in the text, my, and its derivatives nas [us] or nasi [our] refer to different subjects: my = Russian Orthodox Christians [russkie pravoslavnye khristiane] (p. 206), ‘our, i.e. the Christian religion [nasa, t.e. khristianskaja religija]’ (p. 216), ‘we / in our place / our’ [my / u nas / nase] referring to Russians [in the sense of russkie and of rossijane] (p. 249), ‘our [nas]’, i.e. ‘Russian system’ (p. 250), ‘our peasants [nasi krest’iane]’, i.e. Russians as opposed to Poles and Jews (p. 254), ‘Upon us [na nas]’, i.e. ‘upon Russians and Poles [na russkikh i poljakakh]’ (p. 255). By thus expanding the initial ‘we’, i.e. Orthodox Christian Russians (russkie), to Russian citizens (rossijane) and peasants, Russian Orthodox and Polish Catholics as the major actors within Slavdom, and Christians in general, Solov’ev creates a virtual subject of future action that includes his audience, but it not limited to it. Consequently, in answer to the second question, ‘Cto delat’?’, he can address the ‘us’ that he has successfully constructed in the imperative mood and call it to action in relation to ‘them’, i.e. the Jews: ‘So show them [pokazite ze im] a visible and tangible [osjazatel’noe] Christianity, so that they may have something to attach themselves to. (…) Unite [ob'edi- nite] the Church, combine it [socetajte ee] with a state…, found [sozdajte] a Christian state and a Christian society’ (p. 254) [italics mine]. This passage is the central occurrence of the imperative mood in this text: an active ‘we’ must show a passive ‘them’ something visible and tangible in order for ‘them’ to attach themselves to it. A Christian question is, by definition, a question by, of, and for Christians: calling upon a ‘we’ which, however it is defined, at any rate does not include the Jews – ‘they’ – themselves, and explicitly and repeatedly denying that not they are guilty: ‘They [oni] never violated their own religious law in their relation to us’ (p. 206); ‘… the Jews, where they constitute the entire industrial class, are exploiters of the people, [but] not they were the ones who created such a situation’ (p. 254); ‘… if the Jews, when they help the peasant, exploit him, than they do not do this because they are Jews’ (p. 254); ‘… we are not to

37 The use of ‘we' and ‘us' – and of the opposite ‘they' and ‘them' – can generally be regarded as the key to understanding the political character of any text, and certainly of philosophical ones. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 223 blame them [… ne nam obviniat’ ikh]’ (p. 254; italics mine). Solov’ëv can impossibly be accused of anti-Semitism, nor can be accused of being blind to the Jewish Question’ which dominated in Russian politics and intellectual debate in his days: in fact, he is repeating major anti-Semitic arguments, but he employs them in another syllogism, and with a different conclusion. His anti-anti-Semitism, as a negation of anti-Semitism, is determined by it: it is an example of immanent critique, which, while transcending the position that is being criticized, remains within its paradigm. When Solov’ëv states, mimicking common parlance, that England is being ruled by the Jew Benjamin Disraeli and thus is subjected to Jews [podcinenie evrejam] (p. 207), that they dominate the world of finance (ibid.), and that ‘a large part of the press is (directly or indirectly) in the hands of Jews’ (ibid.), none of this is due to their intentions or to them being Jewish, but to ‘our [i.e., of the Christians, EvdZ] moral, or rather immoral weakness’ (p. 207). When he states, echoing Karl Marx, that they, ‘masters [mastera] of financial affairs’ are ‘the masters [gospoda] in contemporary Europe’, this is because money has become the major interest in Europe (p. 207) and the Jews cannot be blamed for this ‘absolute power of money [vsevlastie deneg]’ (p. 254).38 The syllogism can be reconstructed as follows: Jews are masters of finance, Jews dominate financial and political affairs in Europe, hence Europe is vic- tim to money, and Jewish dominance is a ‘symptom' of what is wrong with Europe. And if the Jews exploit the Russian peasantry when they help them financially, this is because ‘the needy peasant turns to the Jews because his own people [i.e., the Russians] will not help him (svoi emu ne pomogut) [italics in the original]’ (p. 254). The second syllogism runs like this: Jews are masters of finance, Russians fail to engage in financial affairs, hence Jews dominate financial affairs in the Western part of Russia. Pointing to the same phenomena as the average anti-Semite would do, but ascribing them to a different cause, Solov’ëv arrives at the opposite conclusion: the answer to the Jewish Question is not ‘persecutions of Jews in our

38 Marx, ‘Zur Judenfrage' (see n. 3), p. 373: ‘Der Jude has sich auf judische Weise emanzipiert, nicht nur, indem er sich die Geldmacht angeeignet, sondern indem durch ihn und ohne ihn das Geld zur Weltmacht und der praktische Judengeist zum praktischen Geist der christlichen Volker geworden ist. Die Juden haben sich insoweit emanzipiert, als die Chris- ten zu Juden geworden sind'. Here, Marx is clearly not speaking about Russia, but about Western, capitalist Europe. 224 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE days and in non-Catholic countries [gonenija na judeev v nasi dni i v stranakh nekatoliceskikh – Solov’ëv carefully avoids to mention Russia, EvdZ]’ or ‘persecutions of Jews [presledovanija evreev] and the more or less open justifica- tions of those persecutions’ (p. 207), but the realization of Christianity, including the ‘truly Christian resolution of the Jewish question’, i.e. the conversion of Jews to Christianity on ‘the theocratic basis that is common to them [na obscej im teokraticeskoj pocve]’ (p. 209).

Apart from turning the Jewish question into a Christian one, Solov’ëv also turns it into a Russian question, making Russia the place of the encounter of the three theocratic nations –Russians, Poles, and Jews – that he distinguishes. Using judej [Jew in the religious sense], evrej [Jew in the ethnic-national sense], and zid [Yid in the pejorative ‘sociological’ sense (p. 254)] as syn- onyms, Solov’ëv identifies three levels: the religious or spiritual,39 the ethnic- national – ‘krovno-rodovaja' as he calls it in Opravdanie dobra –, and the socio-economic. Although his focus is, generally, on Judaism and Jewry, the third aspect, that of the coincidence of judei / evre with a specific layer of society, is not irrelevant for his argument. He notes a ‘remarkable phenomenon [zamecatel’noe javlenie]’ in the area where the Jewish Question is most acute, namely the ‘russko-pol’skij kraj’ (White Russia and North-West Ukraine): ‘the social elements here are sharply distributed according to different nationalities’, the area being populated by Orthodox-Christian Russian peasantry, Roman-Catholic Polish gentry [sljakhta], and a Judaic Jewish urban industrial class (p. 253). Nor is this ‘remarkable phenomenon’ mere historical circumstance, on the contrary: ‘history’, which we here feel tempted to identify with Providence, ‘moved a third religious people,… the people of Israel (…) in between these two religious nations’ (p. 242), thus bringing together three theocratic peoples [teokraticeskie narody], embodying the three theocratic ideas [teokraticeskie idei] of Orthodoxy [the royal principle, i.e. the principle of tsardom], Catholicism [the priestly principle], and Judaism [the prophetic principle] respectively (ibid., as well as p. 231). Because, first of all, the best people [lucsie ljudi] of Poland, as well as the whole mass of the ordinary Polish people [vsja massa prostogo pol’skogo naroda]’ are Catholics (p. 242), further ‘the best people [lucsie ljudi] of Russia and the mass of the

39 What Judith Kornblatt has aptly called ‘spiritual nationhood' (see n. 31). VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 225

Russian people [massa russkogo naroda] are true to Eastern Orthodoxy’ (ibid.), and finally, ‘the Jews distinguish themselves through profound religiosity’ (p. 213), the accidental and external connection of these three theocratic peoples ‘prepares for the spiritual union in a single all-embracing theocratic idea, in spite of the hatred that up to now is dividing them…’ (p. 242); that is, of course, if one believes, as does Solov’ëv, that these theocratic ideas ‘do not exclude each other, [but] on the contrary combine with each other’ (ibid.). He perceives, in this external coexistence of three more or less intact – both elite and folk adhere to the traditional religion – theocratic factors, the possibility of transforming their external relation into an internal one, uniting them. How does or will or can or should this union come about? It is their intactness, the coincidence of the national, religious, and socio-economic aspect, that makes it possible for these three nations to unite as nations each with their religion.

4. ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM, PHILO-SEMITISM, AND SEMITISM

As has been made clear, Solov’ëv cannot be called an anti-Semitic thinker, but the label of philo-semite does not suit him either. He rejects both the Russian nationalism that could imply the first, and the Jewish nationalism with which he might perhaps be expected to sympathize. For Solov’ëv, nationhood implied nationalism, but of the right, non-egoistic kind, i.e. patriotism. Politically, he was as much an anti-anti-Semite as he was an anti-Zionist. There are no places where Solov’ëv expressed himself on Zionism, a strong current among Russian Jews in the last decade of his life, but it is not diffi- cult to construe a critique of it on the basis of Solov’ëv’s overall rejection of exclusive nationalism and of the idea of national political self-determination. Anti-Zionist Russian Jews eulogised him for his stress on religious rather than territorial national identity, while others invoked his rejection of aggressive, oppressive nationalism as opposed to emancipatory nationalism.40 It seems clear to me that Solov’ëv, who understood the desire of individual Jews to emigrate to Palestine, and defended their right to do so,41 would by all means prefer Jews to stay in Europe and especially in Russia, where they could perform their key role in his theocratic project.

40 Bar-Yosef, ‘The Jewish Reception of Vladimir Solov'ëv' (see n. 23), p. 372 and 378f. 41 Moss, ‘Vladimir Soloview and the Jews in Russia' (see n. 17), p. 186. 226 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE

The problem of his consistent anti-anti-Semitism is in its persistent core: ‘Semitism' or ‘Judaism', i.e. the idea that there is such a thing as a Jewish ‘national character', and that any solution of the Jewish question should start from its recognition. His overall qualification of the national character of the chosen people ‘that gave birth to God' [narod bogorozdajuscij] is appreciative (p. 211). What unite the Jews as a nation are three specific qualities that condition its electedness: profound religiosity, national self-consciousness [samosoznanie], and materialism (p. 213). The latter is, according to Solov’ëv, not a practical or philosophical, but a religious materialism, i.e. a religious attitude that demands the material incarnation of ideas and ideals and, at the same time, perceives the spiritual and divine principle in everything material – hence the idea of ‘sacred corporeality [svjataja telesnost’]’(pp. 218-220). Apart from being the nation that gave birth to Jesus of Nazareth, Judaism also contains the idea of true theocracy [istinnoe bogovlastie (teokratija)] (p. 221). Staying clear from political nationalism, Solov’ëv must be qualified as a theoretical – or ‘philosophical' – nationalist, a thinker who sees ‘nations' as dis- tinct entities with their particular nature or essence. Evgenij Trubeckoj ranked Solov’ëv’s ‘characterization [kharakteristika]42 of the Jewish people’ among ‘the most brilliant pages ever written by him’.43 With this one may agree or disagree, but the underlying assumption, shared by both authors, that such a characterization is possible in the first place, is what makes up ‘theoretical nationalism'. Solov’ëv’s ‘Judaism' – as Trubeckoj calls it,44 together with his ‘Polonism' and ‘Russism', testifies to his participation in a ‘national paradigm' which, in all three cases, in the end is neither primarily racial nor historical, but theological: the nations that exist are part of a Divine creational plan. As he elaborated in ‘l’Idée russe’ [1888]: ‘En acceptant l’unité essen- tielle et réelle du genre humain, – et il faut bien l’accepter, puisque c’est une vérité religieuse justifiée par la philosophie rationnelle et confirmée par la science exacte, – en acceptant cette unité substantielle, nous devons considé- rer l’humanité entière comme un grand être collectif ou un organisme social

42 It should be noted that the Russian word ‘kharakteristika' means not so much an external, empirical description of a given entity, but a rendering of core characteristics one can recognize that entity by. 43 Evgenij Trubeckoj, Mirosozercanie Vl.S. Solov’ëva (Moskva, 1913, 1995), vol. I, p. 493. 44 ‘Judaizm Solov’eva – certa sliskom dlja nego kharakternaja, sliskom tesno svjazannaja s ego religiozno-obscestvennom ideale, ctoby my mogli obojti ee molcaniem’ (ibid.). VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 227 dont les différentes nations représentent les membres vivants’.45 In Velikij spor i khristianskaja politika [1883], Solov’ëv claims that ‘National character [narodnost’], or nationality, is a positive force, and every nation [narod] is destined, in accordance with its particular character, to a particular service. The various nationalities are different organs of the full body of humanity – for a Christian this is an obvious truth’.46 This ‘obvious truth' is indeed what determines his analysis.

5. NAROD, NATION, PEOPLE

‘Narod', the Russian word used by Solov’ëv, is ‘an ambiguous term which basi- cally means either ‘nation’ (also rendered by the Russian word nacija) and, less frequently ‘people’.47 According to the widely employed etymological dictionary by Max Vasmer, narod is an age-old Slavonic word, composed of the prefix na- [on, at], and the noun rod [clan, birth, kind], whereas nacija, derived through Polish nacja from the Latin natio, exists as a Russian word only since the reign of Peter I (1689-1725).48 The widely used dictionary by Ozegov gives the following four meanings for ‘narod': 1. The population of a state or country; 2. Nation [nacija]; 3. The mass of the population as opposed to an elite; 4. People, as in ‘many people [mnogo narodu]'.49 In the same dictionary, nacija is explained as: 1. ‘A stable community of people that has taken shape historically, emerging on the basis of a community of language, territory, economic life and psychological mould, expressing itself in a community of culture’; 2. Country or state, as in United Nations.50 On the whole, these two meanings of nacija cover those of their equivalents in French, German, English, and Dutch, with the two core elements of i. an historically

45 ‘L’Idée russe’ in La Sophia et les autres écrits français, ed. F. Rouleau (Lausanne, 1978), p. 84. 46 ‘Velikij spor i khristianskaja politika’ (see n. 35), I, p. 65. 47 Andrzej de Lazari, art. ‘Narod’, in Idei v Rossii / Idee w Rosji / Ideas in Russia, ed. A. de Lazari, 5 vols. (Warszawa & Lódz, 1999), vol. I, p. 267. 48 See Maks Fasmer, Êtimologiceskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka v 4-kh tomakh [3ee, dopoln. izdanie, perevod s nemeckogo O.N. Trubuceva; orig. Max Vasmer, Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg, 1950-1958)] (Sankt Peterburg, 1986, 1996), vol. III, p. 45 and p. 51. 49 S.I. Ozegov, Slovar’ russkogo jazyka (Moskva, 1983), p. 342. 50 Ibid., p. 350. 228 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE developed cultural identity (language, mentality), and ii. a clear connection to a certain territory, eventually a country, though not necessarily a state.51 The problem, therefore, is not with nacija, but with narod and its derivative narodnost’: as a result of Russian history, ‘narod' can be both linked to the nation, the gentry, and even the state, as in the official ideology coined by Minister of Education S. Uvarov in 1833, who made it part of the triune notion of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality [Pravoslavie, Samoderzavie, Naro- dnost’], or in the 20th Century idealization of the ‘Soviet people [sovetskij narod]’ which included everybody except the ‘enemies of the people [vragi naroda]’, but at the same time it can be linked to the peasantry, the yet unspoiled folk or ‘simple people [prostoj narod]’, and then, in a Slavophile vein, be opposed to the allegedly uprooted Russian intellectual elite as well as the state.52 Of course, it is possible, in Russian as well as in any other language, to qualify and specify words in order to evade ambiguity, and this means that not to specify it is to retain the same ambiguity. This happens in the case of Solov’ëv. And not only of Solov’ëv himself: the translator of Krizis zapadnoj filosofii, Boris Jakim, gives ‘nation’ as the English equivalent for Russian ‘narod’ in places where this seems, to say the least, disputable: ‘…philosophy arises only when, for thinking individuals, the faith of the nation [in the original: vera naroda, EvdZ] ceases to be their own faith,… Western philosophy begins with a split between individual thought as reason and the common national faith [in the original: obscenarodnaja vera] as authority (ratio et auctoritas)’.53 In Russia, in the 18th and 19th century, the elite, the intelligenty, very often did not share the faith of the common people: they were freemasons, agnostics, and atheists; hence they were part of the nacija, but not of the narod. The same ambiguity of ‘narod' also allows Solov’ëv to both belong and not belong to it, to identify with the Russian nation without becoming a member of the Russian people. It allows him, further, to discuss narodnost’ in the sense of national character as a quasi-object to which he relates without fully sharing it: it is part of Russian narodnost’ to be Orthodox, but within

51 Larousse Dictionnaire de Français (Paris, 1987), p. 685, Duden Deutsches Universal- wörterbuch (Mannheim, Wien, Zürich, 1989), p. 1063, Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language (Naples, FA, 1996), p. 845), and Van Dale Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse taal (Utrecht & Antwerpen, 1999), p. 2147. 52 Andrzej de Lazari, entry ‘Narodnost’, in Idei v Rossii, vol. I, pp. 269 ff. 53 Translation of The Crisis of Western Philosophy by Boris Jakim, p. 12f; cf. also p. 162. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 229 the elite circles of society in which he participated along with Jews, Catholics, Atheists and Freemasons – to name a few –, this was not a requirement. It allows him, finally, to speak about three theocratic nations as separate entities, each with their national character or narodnost’, while himself being situated at a ‘higher’ level: albeit both Russian and Orthodox, his own narodnost’ is not as determining or limiting a factor as it is for the people he speaks about.

6. NATION – NATIONALISM – NATION-STATE?

Both the Poles and the Jews are nations, but for Solov’ëv being a nation does not, and emphatically not, imply statehood: he opposes the idea of the nation- state, generally preferring the idea of an empire. The logic outlined by Adrian Hastings, ‘Here, if anywhere, the basic order runs: nation, nationalism, nation- state’ is not fully applied in this case.54 Consequently, the set of nations is divided into two subsets, one made up of nations that do qualify for statehood, the other made up of nations that do not, the second group of neces- sity implying the idea of the multinational state. Not surprisingly, the Russian nation is in the first subset, the Polish and Jewish nations in the second. This of course makes one slightly suspicious, and critical of Solov’ëv’s paternalism. Certainly, not all nations necessarily aspire at statehood, and many – e.g. Frisians in the Netherlands, Cree in Quebec, Welshmen in the United King- dom – may be perfectly satisfied with local self-government, bilingualism, a ‘native' university, etc., and prefer such a situation to an activation of their statehood potential.55 Many may also be better off that way. But why not leave it to nations themselves to decide in which subset they want to place themselves, especially when they have existed as nation-states in the past: the Jews form the Biblical prototype of the nation-state, and the Poles had formed a nation-state until the Third Partition of 1795, less than a century before the time of writing of Solov’ëv’s article [1884]?56

54 Cf. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood. Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997, p. 187. 55 Ibid., p. 31: ‘Every ethnicity, I would conclude, has a nation-state potentially within it but in the majority of cases that potentiality will never be activated because its resources are too small, the allurement of incorporation within an alternative culture and political system too powerful’. 56 Ibid., p. 18, and Davies, Europe (see n. 13), p. 660. 230 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE

However lofty Solov’ëv’s systematic distinction between national character [narodnost’] and nationalism may be, ascribing Shakespeare and Byron to English national character, but the activities of Lord Seymour to nationalism, it is, despite its ‘political correctness', not very convincing.57 Not so much because there might be greater interconnectedness between the two, or because the difference might well lie in the field of application – national character, once turned to the world of everyday politics and economy, becomes national interest –, but most of all because the two notions share the same, problematic presupposition, summarized as the national paradigm, the essentialist idea of the nation.

Solov’ëv’s political position, though perhaps slightly utopian, is clear and sympathetic enough: his idea of ‘love of nation' as being only acceptable in the form of a patriotism that obliges people of a given nation ‘to love all other nations as one loves one’s own’, and not in the form of an exclusive nationalism that justifies the suppression of other nations or comes down to the pursuit of national interests and ‘international cannibalism [mezdunarodnoe ljudoedstvo]’,58 directly implies his anti-nationalist stance. The more fundamental question, however, is whether the moral commandment ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself' to which the Apostle Paul reduced all ten Old Testa- ment commandments59 is applicable to ‘nations' at all. Are ‘nations' moral subjects? According to Solov’ëv, they are, and his argument is partly biblical, partly natural. For the Biblical part, Solov’ëv (at pains to avoid the jump to immediate universalism), refers, as might be expected, to the concluding lines of the Gospel of Matthew, which, according to him, suggest that ‘He [Jesus Christ, EvdZ] foresaw not only individual people but whole nationalities [celye narodnosti] outside of Israel also’.60 Jesus’ order to the Apostles was, according to Solov’ëv, ‘go, teach all peoples / nations [sedse, naucite vse narody] [italics Solov’ëv’s]’,61 and in ‘L’Idée russe’ he adds that if ‘… le Christ ressuscité lui même, tout en reconnaissant, dans sa première [NB: dernière, EvdZ] parole aux Apôtres,

57 Ibid., pp. 64f. 58 ‘Velikij spor i khristianskaja politika’ (see n. 35), I, p. 61. 59 Romans 13: 9. 60 Opravdanie dobra, p. 367, here quoted from Vladimir Wozniuk (see n.25), p. 45. 61 Ibid. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 231 l’existence et la vocation de toutes les nations (Ev. Math., XXVIII, 19) [italics Solov’ëv’s], ne s’est pas adressé et n’a pas adressé ses disciples à aucune nation en particulier: c’est que pour Lui elles n’existaient que dans leur union organique et morale comme membres vivants d’un seul corps spirituel et réel’.62 In the Russian translation by G.A. Racinskij, the French ‘nation(s)' is rendered with ‘nacija': ‘… sam Khristos, priznav v poslednem slove svoem k apostolam, suscestvovanie i prizvanie vsekh nacij (Matf. xxviii, 19), ne obratil- sja sam i ne poslal ucenikov svoikh ni k kakoj nacii v castnosti: ved’ dlja Nego…’.63 This latter choice is not Solov’ëv’s, but his use of nations in the French text, where peuples would have been an appropriate alternative, is his choice, giving a modern twist to the traditional text. The shift from nationalities [narodnosti] to peoples / nations [narody] equally testifies to Solov’ëv’s attempt to provide a dogmatic foundation for his own central thought: ‘Ainsi la vérité chrétienne affirme l’existence permanente des nations et les droits de la nationalité [here in the sense of ‘national character', EvdZ], tout en condemnant le nationalisme qui est, pour un people, ce que l’égoisme est pour l’individu’.64 Adrian Hastings has shown that the Latin Bible translation widely used in Europe, the Vulgate, translates Greek ‘ethnos', which in the New Testament context essentially refers to pagan peoples, alternatively with ‘gens' and ‘natio', not making a clear distinction between the two, but using ‘natio' only six times in the New Testament, mostly rendering ‘ethnos' by ‘gens' and ‘laos' by ‘popu- lus'.65 In the passage just referred to, the New Testament has ‘(poreuthentes) ouv mathèteusate panta ta ethnè / euntes ergo docete omnes gentes’.66 In this case, ‘ethnè' (in plural) refers to the numerous pagan peoples who have not yet joined the people (in singular) of Christianity, ‘laos', successor to the chosen people of Israel. In Russian, the obvious translation of ‘ethnos', as well as of ‘laos', is ‘narod', not ‘nacija' – the latter being an obvious Latinism. The alternative options of nation and people in the Latin tradition, reflected in the later vernaculars, offering the possibility of a clear distinction of the two in late Medieval and early Modern times, are thus absent in the Slavonic

62 ‘L'Idée russe' (see n. 45), p. 90. 63 V.S. Solov’ev, Socinenija v dvukh tomakh (see n. 36), II, p. 228 in 1989. 64 ‘L'Idee russe' (see n. 45), p. 90. 65 Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, pp. 17f. 66 Matthew 28,19. 232 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE tradition, which explains the ambiguity of ‘narod': it can be interpreted as ‘people' but also as ‘nation', whereas on the basis of West European translations one could argue that where ‘gentes' is used, what is meant is not ‘nations' but rather ‘peoples', the more so since in the context of the New Testament – the Roman Empire – there were many peoples, but no nations (with the arguable excep- tion, from a Christian perspective, of the people of Israël). Russian does have an alternative for ‘ethnè', namely ‘jazycniki',67 which is comparable to Latin ‘gen- tiles', but, like it, not referring to groups of pagans, but to all ‘pagan people'. The other foundation of Solov’ëv’s notion of nation is its natural basis. He distinguishes a third, intermediate level of human existence between the individual and humanity as a whole [celovecestvo], and this level, which he labels ‘collective man [sobiratel’nyj celovek]’, is further distinguished into three levels, three ‘abiding degrees of incarnation’, which, according to Solov’ëv, are the ‘natural groups, that in reality [real’no] expand the life of the individual person, namely: the family, the people / nation [narod], and mankind [celovecestvo]…’.68 To these ‘three levels of incarnation of collective man’ corres- pond, in ‘the historical order’ the following three ‘stages: the blood-native [krovno-rodovaja], the national-political [narodno-politiceskaja] and the spiritual-universal [dukhovno-vselenskaja]’.69 We can indeed regard mankind, Homo sapiens, as a natural phenomenon, and the natural basis of the family is obvious, too. But the same does not as obviously apply to all that is between family and humanity. Even if we leave out those forms of collectivity and community that evidently result from social life and the free decision of individuals, such as associations, clubs, and societies, it is not clear what is meant by ‘narod': a tribe, a people, a nation? With respect to the first two, which can be seen as natural in the sense of being related to ethnicity, we are left with a question of generality: if fam- ilies form clans, clans tribes, tribes peoples, and peoples make up mankind, then the question is which is the essential element (of course, we only need to pose this question if we are looking for an essential element, as is Solov’ëv). With respect to the third element, the nation, it is questionable if it is not

67 Galatians 1,16; Illarion of Kiev distinguished ‘jazyk' and ‘ljudie': cf. W. van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe: East and West in the Religious Ideology of Russia (London, 1999), p. 230, n. 47. 68 Opravdanie dobra, p. 485; in the Brussels edition, vol. VIII, p. 448. 69 Ibid. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 233 a human artefact, rather than a natural phenomenon, esp. if one stresses, as does Solov’ëv, its political aspect. ‘Nation’ and ‘the national’ are only seemingly natural phenomena, taken for granted as facts of nature by Solov’ëv. He situates them at the intermediate, properly social level, between the animal – krovno- rodovaja – level of ‘race' and the spiritual and universal level of ‘humanity'. The question about the moral accountability of nations boils down to their unity: to be a moral subject presupposes a unity of free will, conscious action, and responsibility. In order to be held responsible, a nation must be free to act, it must know what it does, and the outcome for which it is held responsible must indeed be the effect of its conscious action. Solov’ëv clearly assumes such a substantial and concrete unity: ‘A nation [narod] is not conscious of itself in an abstract manner, as some kind of empty subject, separate from the content and meaning of its life, it is conscious of itself just in it or in relation to what it does and what it wants to do, to what it believes in and to what it serves’.70 This presupposes, first of all, the absence of oppression (a subjugated nation cannot act freely), secondly, a certain level of intellectual development, and a field of action. These three elements are present in the way Solov’ëv operates: his stress on freedom is obvious, he himself acts as part of the self- awareness of his own nation, and he tries to point out where and how this nation should act. Two aspects need to be remarked here. First of all, Solov’ëv speaks not only to his own, Russian nation, but also to the Polish nation. Not being Polish, he cannot do this on the basis of his own national identity, hence he must be speaking on the basis of his belonging to a ‘wider' notion, viz. on the basis of the Christian truth for which different nations exist in their ‘union organique et morale comme membres vivants d’un seul corps spirituel et réel’.71 Secondly, the unity of the nation as a moral subject points to its intactness in spiritual terms: to share the same faith is what makes a nation obey to the same moral requirements, i.e. act as a moral subject.

7. NATIONAL RELIGION

The key to Solov’ëv’s text, again, is the notion of national religion, i.e. the idea of a one-to-one correspondence of nation A, B, C to religion R, Q, S

70 Opravdanie dobra, p. 376. 71 ‘L'Idee russe' (see n. 45), p. 90. 234 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE in individuals X, Y, Z: if, as an individual human being, you are Russian in the sense of belonging to the Russian – russkij, not rossijskij – people, you are an Orthodox Christian; if you are a Pole, you are Roman Catholic, and if you are a Jew, you are Jewish, etc. Obviously, this works neither way: not only ethnic Russians are (Russian) Orthodox, not all ethnic Russians are Orthodox, not only ethnic Poles are Roman Catholics, and not all ethnic Poles are Catholics, and not only ethnic Jews are Jewish nor are all ethnic Jews Jewish. The Jews are a particularly interesting case here, because of the historical example of the Khazars, a Turkic people that adopted Judaism as its official religion in 861 AD.72 The Khazar kingdom, known for its prosperity and religious tolerance, flourished from 650 until the early 11th century, and presents an early example of Jewish statehood – a fact Vladimir Solov’ëv must have been familiar with. When Vladimir, Prince of Kievan Rus’, according to legend was in the process of deciding which faith the Russian people should adopt, the Jews that visited his court were Khazars, not Jews from Palestine – interestingly, the story about Vladimir inviting representatives from various major religions is told, in a similar vein, about king Bulan of Khazaria.73 It is his preoccupation with the idea of ‘national religion', i.e. the idea of an essential connection between a given nation or people and a given positive religion, which allows Solov’ëv to regard the situation on the border of Poland and Russia as more than circumstantial, and which at the same time does not allow him to perceive the positive – not in the sense of ‘to be wel- comed’ but in the ‘neutral’ sense of ‘positing itself’ or ‘manifesting itself’ – disconnection of nationality and religiosity that is typical of West European modernity and that was taking shape in Russia in Solov’ëv’s days, too. The fact that a Jew can become the prime-minister of Great-Britain – Benjamin Disraeli, Solov’ëv’s own example (p. 207), the secretary of foreign affairs in the USA (Henry Kissinger), or the mayor of Amsterdam (Ivo Samkalden, Wim Polak, Ed van Thijn, Job Cohen), to name four post-World War II examples (four out of seven mayors in fact), is seen by Solov’ëv as a symptom

72 On Jewish Khazaria, see for instance the informative website http://www.khazaria.com, and see also Hans von Rimscha, Geschichte Rußlands (Darmstadt, 1983), p. 28, and Davies, Europe (see n. 13), p. 236f; see also the old Russian Nestor-chronicle, Povest’ vremennykh let (Sankt Peterburg, 1997), p. 63: ‘…prisli khazarskie evrei…’. 73 See http://www.khazaria.com/khazar-history.html VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 235 of religious indifference (p. 207), but it may just as well be seen as a sign of differentiation on the basis, like any form of differentiation, of a disconnection of at first sight essentially connected, but in fact only accidentally linked characteristics. The effect of such, to quote Karl Marx, ‘political emancipation’, i.e. the separation of citizenship from particular religious or national identities,74 is that you no longer have to be a non-Jew in order to run for mayor, minister of foreign affairs, or prime-minister in a ‘Christian' country. For Solov’ëv, this is a symptom of the decay of religion, of the fact that Europe was losing its Christian essence. But if we apply his argument about Disreali to Russia, it implies that something similar would be wrong with Rus- sia if a Jew became, say, prime-minister: it would mean the end of Russia as an Orthodox country (indeed, Russian nationalists protested against the prominent role of Gorbachev's advisor Aleksandr Jakovlev on this ground). This, however, means a substantial limitation to the equal civil rights that Solov’ëv otherwise claimed for Jews, or, more precisely, these rights can only be equal rights for Jews, Russians, Poles, and Buryats, as long as they do not include political rights, i.e. rights to participation and representation in government. In other words: the idea of a national religion is a serious obstacle for any idea of full political emancipation of the Jewish minority: one could imagine Jewish presence in something like a council for the nations and nationalities of the Russian Empire,75 but not Jewish participation in government. The idea of national religion does not hold empirically, and given the empirical absence of a one-to-one correspondence between nations and religions, the idea of a national religion obtains a normative nature. As a result, Solov’ëv is forced to protect and, where necessary, stimulate the national-religious intactness of the nations he is concerned with. Should Russians, Poles and Jews mix and merge through marriage and migration, this would go to the detriment of the Divine scenario that he pretends to represent.

74 Marx, ‘Zur Judenfrage' (see n. 3), p. 351. 75 They were so represented, in Soviet times, in the Soviet of Nationalities, one of the two chambers of the Supreme Soviet, in which every autonomous oblast’, of which the Jewish autonomous region around Birobidzan was one, was entitled to five seats; given the fact that, first, Jews were a minority within this oblast’ and thus did not necessarily furnish the representatives, and second, the Supreme Soviet could hardly be called a form of representative government, this did not help much, however just we might judge the principle. 236 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE

8. AFTER DECONSTRUCTION?

What happens if we deconstruct Solov’ëv’s notion of national religion? What disappears is his clever, though not very elegant essentialist combination of three levels – the religious, the ethnic-national, and the social – in the case of the area where Russia, Poland, and Israel meet. What remains is a proposal of social segregation along ethnic lines: the Russians are peasants and they should try to improve their affair (pp. 246f), the Poles are landed gentry and may remain such, and the Jews can continue their money-making and indus- try in the cities – the latter is even regarded by Solov’ëv as generally bene- ficiary: in a letter meant for publication, Solov’ëv points out on the basis of governmental statistics, that there is more prosperity and less alcoholism within the Pale of Settlement than outside of it.76 At the same time, Solov’ëv introduces an element that does not follow from his construction: Russians should help the needy Russian peasant to break the monopoly of the Jews. Russians have to engage in financial affairs, too. Which Russians? Not the local Russians, who are peasants. Nor the gentry, since they are Polish. Apparently, Solov’ëv is thinking here of active economic russification, i.e. import of Russian entrepreneurs and bankers. So, on the one hand we are left with a combination of segregationism and russification. The reason for accepting this, within Solov’ëv’s framework, is that this is a privilege as well as an obligation of the Russian nation: ‘In a similar way in the Kingdom of God (in civitate Dei), too, different peoples can have different advantages [preimucsestva], depending on their particular historical position and their national vocation [nacional’nomu prizvaniju]’ (pp. 230f). But such advantages rest precisely on the idea of national religion, which, once deconstructed, becomes sheer Russian imperialism. On the other hand, we are left with Solov’ëv’s proposal to combine three theocratic principles, the royal principle, the priestly principle, and the prophetic principle, within a single vision. The fact that these principles, or: ideas, as he sometimes calls them, are incarnated in Orthodox soil-tilling Russians, Catholic land-owning Poles, and Judaist money-grabbing Jews respectively, is not pertinent to the ideas themselves. On the contrary, it is precisely their division over three national religions, and their one-sided

76 See Pis’ma II (see n. 24), pp. 165f. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 237 development in Old Testament Israelite theocracy, Byzantine caesaropapism and European politization, that Solov’ëv wants to repair. From a divine perspective, i.e. the perspective of ‘[ce] que Dieu pense dans l’éternité’, this presents a task to humanity, which itself has to overcome, in a free act, its division.77 From the point of view of Solov’ëv’s theocratic project, this division of the idea of theocracy over three national religions is not only irrelevant, but in fact a major hindrance, to be overcome under the leadership of the Slavonic nations, the ‘fresh forces [svezie sily]’ (p. 242) that yet have to tell their word to the world (p. 210). But why should Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox, Jews, Poles, and Russians, peasants, gentry, and shylocks, or at least the ‘best people [lucsie ljudi]' from each group, be incapable of perceiving and embracing the theocratic ideal in its entirety and complexity? Solov’ëv is capable of this, but apparently he is the only one, which, obviously, has to do with his privilege. Both the Russian nation, privileged among nations, and Vladimir Solov’ëv, privileged among the ‘best people', derive this privilege from the fact that until God is all in all, … the Divine government of humanity requires special organs or bear- ers [trebuet osobykh organov ili provodnikov] for its own activity in humanity’ (p. 231). Without explicitly saying so, Solov’ëv implies that not only are the three ‘theocratic nations' chosen by God for their specific historical task, but that he himself, as a ‘special organ’ is chosen to explain the Divine scenario. The logic is consistent enough: nations are organs – or, as he put it in ‘l’Idée russe’: ‘membres vivants’ – of humanity, but there can also be other special organs, including individual human beings. The interesting question then poses itself how these individuals relate to the nations they belong to: do they address exclusively their own nation, or can they make an appeal to humanity as a whole?

9. THE PROPHET’S PRIVILEGE

As shown above, Solov’ëv’s answer to the Jewish Question ultimately relies on the idea of national religion. This is why it can simultaneously appear as a Christian question (p. 230) and as a specifically Russian question, linked to the ‘original and grand vocation of Russia’ (p. 248). The Russian nation

77 ‘L'Idée russe' (see n. 45), p. 83. 238 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE must not and cannot resolve this question on its own: ‘On its own, Russia is impotent [Rossija odinokaja bessil’na]’ (p. 249): it must not only overcome its own problems, but also unite with other nations, giving up all forms of national exclusiveness [iskljucitel’nost’] (p. 249-251). If the three actors on the Galician scene hate and despise each other, and Poles and Russians per- secute the Jews, this is because they are bound by the limitations of their respective national faiths. The connection of nationality and religion works as a barrier up to the point where the three faiths involved transcend themselves, Orthodox and Catholics giving up their exclusiveness and realizing themselves fully as Christians, eo ipso inviting ‘the best part of the Jews’ (p. 255) to join them, i.e. to give up their ‘mistake': ‘To show the Jews, that they are mistaken, is possible only practically – realizing the Christian idea in fact, consistently carrying it through in real life’ (p. 230). How is this move possible? The answer is as simple as it is provocative: because Solov’ëv is showing them the way, acting as a prophet in the properly biblical sense, enjoying and claiming the freedom to take the initiative that he has to take (p. 232: ‘The prophet enjoys the freedom of personal initiative [prorok pol’zuet- sja svobodoj licnogo pocina]’), and correcting the mistakes of Russians, Poles, and Jews (p. 231: ‘the prophet corrects [prorok ispravljaet]’), mistakes which, in each case, consist in ‘exclusivity [iskljucitel’nost’]’ (passim) in its many mani- festations. Solov’ëv, as prophet, speaks in the name of all-unity [vseedinstvo] and divine humanity [bogocelovecestvo], i.e. of universality as opposed to particularism. But here, once again, he does not cross the line of national religion: he does not speak to the Jews, he does not appeal to them as fellow human beings, they never become part of ‘we [my]', in fact, he does not even take them seriously as human beings: they are mistaken not to convert to Christianity, but they cannot help this, and we are not to blame them: ‘The case of the Jews is not worse than our own, and we are not to accuse them. Perhaps the only thing they are guilty of is that they remain Jews, retain their isolation’ (p. 254). Solov’ëv is not speaking at the level of humankind, but at the level of the plurality of national religions. That is, the line that separates Orthodox Russians and Catholic Poles from Judaist Jews remains intact, and the only actor, who can, in the end, cross this line, is Solov’ëv himself. He moves from one Slavonic nation, the Russian nation, which is Orthodox, to two Slavonic nations, the Russian and the Polish, Orthodox and Catholic, representing VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 239 two poles in Slavdom (p. 242), jointly addressing them as ‘we' (p. 255), and, at the same time, to Christianity, which is in fact not a national religion, and by virtue of its very principle cannot be one, if it has to make sense that all peoples are equal before the Gospel and are all called upon to follow it (p. 230). This move beyond the boundaries of national religions is the exclusive affair of Solov’ëv. Solov’ëv, like a magician who keeps the secret of his trick to himself, must, in order to be the executioner of God’s case on Earth, construct for himself a position of exclusive particularity, which can only be justified by the fact that he himself incarnates the Truth. The idea of a national religion, in this respect, is not simply Solov’ëv’s preoccupation, but also the logically necessary condition for the exclusiveness of his move from the particular to the universal. To drop the idea of a national religion would mean to give up the privileged position of the prophet, and trade it for a role as one among many enlightened intelligenty. To move from the particular to the universal in a concrete, not in an abstract manner is precisely what Solov’ëv himself was trying to do all the time, it was his way of ‘contributing to the incarnation of divine truth on Earth’.78 He sought to articulate universal truth as he perceived it, without becoming a ‘universal- ist' like the cosmopolitans, who oppose something universal – humanity – to everything particular – nations, individuals –, thereby turning the universal into a particular itself. His aim was rather to bring to the fore the universal aspect of everything particular, without denying all of its particularity: this is what is at stake in the key notion of his metaphysics, all-unity [vseedinstvo].79 The sin he perceived everywhere was particularism, i.e. exclusive affirmation of particularity, and the key-notion in this respect is exclusiveness [iskljucitel’nost’]. For example, Solov’ëv is not against stress on nationality (on the contrary, he believes it to be positive and necessary), but against exclusive stress on nationality. In his discussion of the Jewish question, iskljucitel’nost’ occurs when he makes the ‘exclusively ascetic tendency of religiosity’ in Byzantium responsible for the decline of the Second Rome (p. 236), or when he warns that an ‘exclusively or even predominantly national church inevitably becomes a state church’ (p. 251): nothing against asceticism or nationality as such, but

78 Losskij, Istoria russkoj filosofi (see n. 10), p. 161. 79 See Evert van der Zweerde, ‘Vladimir Solovjov – een levend denkwerk', Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 65 (2003), pp. 724-729. 240 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE against stress on a particular characteristic under simultaneous exclusion of others. So, generally speaking, Solov’ëv’s position can be qualified as anti- particularism, and if, therefore, we label his position as ‘universalism’, we should add that in this case, too, stress on the universality of everything, i.e. on the fact that in the final analysis it participates in vseedinstvo should not be taken in an exclusive sense: universality does not cancel particularity, but accommodates and balances it. What he ends up with, however, is the affirmation of his own highly particular, and in fact particularly exclusive access to universal truth, as well as to the key to solving the Jewish question, i.e. a Christian question that can only be resolved inasmuch as it is a Russian question to which only he has the answer. The fact that, according to himself, this is neither a ‘natural right’, nor ‘his personal privilege’, but ‘a special Divine gift [osobyj dar Bozij]’, testifies to his personal modesty, but in no way reduces the pretension to be ‘chosen' or ‘called upon' (p. 239).

CONCLUSION

In the preface by Boris Jakim to his English translation of Solov’ëv’s The Crisis of Western Philosophy, we read: ‘It may well be that Solov’ëv’s unique synthetic vision of divine humanity and Christian politics will not be fully assimilated and acted upon until well into the twenty-first century’.80 I think this is an understatement: it may very well be that Solov’ëv’s vision will never be fully assimilated, let alone be acted upon. Solov’ëv’s philosophical works display a degree of originality and a level of insight into philosophical problems that make him a ‘world philosopher’, but, at the same time, he is not widely recognized as such. This is not a matter of lacking editions or translations, but has to do with aspects of his philosophical work that can be summarized as, first of all, ‘Russianness': Russian philosophical culture is traditionally being viewed, both by adherents and opponents, insiders and outsiders, as Russian thought by Russian thinkers about Russian questions. The second aspect that precludes his acceptance as a thinker of world-historical significance is the dogmatic variant of Christianity he adhered to.

80 Boris Jakim, preface to his English translation of V. Solovyov’s The Crisis of Western Phi- losophy (Hudson, NY, 1996), p. 7. VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 241

However, just as Spinoza is highly recognizable as a European Jewish thinker, but there is nothing specifically Jewish about his philosophy that might keep a non-Jewish person from understanding it, i.e. from regarding it as a possibility of that person’s own thought, so Solov’ëv would ideally be recognizable as a Russian Christian thinker, without there being anything Russian or Chris- tian about his philosophy that would keep a non-Russian or non-Christian from adopting (elements of) it. Solov’ëv frequently shows himself very much aware of both the individual nature and the universal pretension, the absolute claim of philosophical thought.81 In order to make him accessible, as a thinker, for global philosophical culture, his thought must be de-nationalized, de-rus- sified, and de-christianised. The realization of this goal requires an understanding and analysis of his philosophy that is best expressed with the term ‘deconstruction’, and I hope with this article to have yielded a contribution to such deconstruction. The title of Solov’ëv’s text is itself a fine example of deconstruction, turning the Jewish Question into a Christian and Russian one. He rightly protests against treating the Jewish Question as a Jewish problem (the Russian word vopros means both question and problem) – but he gives a surprising twist: not that the Jews cannot be blamed for having become part of the Russian population and for playing the role that they do, but that they cannot help being Jews. The Jewish question is a Christian problem, because only by really being

81 See Krizis zapadnoj filosofii, Predislovie (p. 13 in Jakim’s translation): ‘… philosophical knowledge is expressly an activity of the personal reason or the separate person in all the clarity of this person’s individual consciousness. The subject of philosophy is preeminently the singular I as a knower (…) Philosophy begins when thinking individuals separate their thought from the common faith, oppose it to this faith as to something external’; and Te o - reticeskaja filosofija, II, §§ iv-vi (quoted from eds. James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, Mary- Barbara Zeldin, Russian Philosophy (Knoxville, 1976), vol. III, pp. 102-106): ‘Philosophy, as an enterprise of free thought, by its very essence cannot confine itself within such limits [those of the positive results of particular sciences, EvdZ], and strives from the very beginning for unconditional or absolute validity. (…) Religion … assigns this unconditionality not to the form of thought but to the content of faith. (…) The philosophical mind will not deny such revelation in advance – that would be a prejudice improper to and unworthy of sound philosophy; but at the same time, even if it finds provisional reasons supporting religious truth, it cannot, without repudiating itself, repudiate its right to subject these reasons to free examination … The whole duty of the theoretical philosopher as such is simply to have the determination and the ability to abstract himself, in his enterprise, from all possible interests but the purely philosophical, to forget from the outset any other will but the will to possess the truth for its own sake’. 242 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE

Christians can Christians convince Jews ‘that they are mistaken’ and that they should convert to Christianity (p. 230). And this Christian question is a Russian problem, because it is in Russia that the three theocratic nations meet, thus presenting the Russian nation with a historical chance to perform the Divine libretto, for which it must not only relate to the Jews in a truly Christian manner, but also keep the Poles from acquiring statehood – otherwise they would ‘spoil' the scenario, since they would no longer be in the position of Catholic Christians under an Orthodox tsar. However sympathetic we may find Solov’ëv’s not blaming the Jews themselves, what strikes the reader is the central idea that the Jewish problem would be the problem of one particular nation cum religion, and not, for example, of the Russian state or society at large, including Russians, Poles, and Jews – including Solov’ëv’s own Jewish friends. His entire analysis thus turns on the idea of a national religion. In a way, one cannot blame Solov’ëv for being a theoretical nationalist: the idea of the nation dominated much of the discourse of the circles in which he moved. Yet, one is surprised by a complete lack of critical reflection on his part, as well as by obvious neglect of actual circumstance. To my mind, there is only one explanation for this: an essentialist understanding of the nation is presupposed in his own, religiously motivated and rather schematic conception of progressive historical development towards the realization of free theocracy. Possibly, in Solov’ëv’s days, the equation judej = evrej = zid still applied, to a considerable extent, to the region that he is talking about. At the same time, the process of secularisation, in the sense of a disconnection of precisely the religious, the national, and the social, was under way in Rus- sia as well, and many of the Jews Solov’ëv was acquainted with personally in fact were assimilated, secularised Jewish Russians. Should, in line with this secularisation, the three theocratic nations concerned embark on a path of development of their own towards overcoming the limitations of their respective national religions, should they – or rather, individuals from these groups – engage in inter-religious dialogue, found vol- untary associations for the improvement of ethnic relations within the area, or actually assimilate and merge, this would spoil Solov’ëv’s trick. In order to preserve the magic of his procedure, the three elements have to be preserved in their intact essence, i.e. in their difference. It is at this point that Solov’ëv shows himself to be not only a philosophical essentialist, who believes in VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV AND THE RUSSIAN-CHRISTIAN JEWISH QUESTION 243 categories such as ‘national character' without giving any critical thought to them, but also a political essentialist, whose conception is saved from racism only by his combined stress on ethnic, religious, and socio-economic fea- tures. Standing with one leg in the tendentially nationalistic as well as tendentially anti-Judaic tradition of Slavophilism, and with the other in a tradition of Christian universalism that implied the advocacy of liberal values, Vladimir Solov’ëv exemplifies the position of a Russian Orthodox-Christian free- thinking individual. An anonymous author in the Jewish weekly journal Nedel’naja khronika Voskhoda, when summarizing and commenting a lecture delivered by Solov’ev under the title ‘Mirovoe znacenie evrejstva [The World Significance of the Jews]’ on 11 February 1882 at the Higher Bestuzev Women’s Courses and the day after at St.Petersburg University, reported how the lecturer was of the opinion ‘that, contrary to Christians, Jews are not capable of abstract thinking [nesposobnosti k otvlecennomu mysleniju]’.82 What strikes the contemporary reader is not only the remarkable parallel with some people’s evaluation of the intellectual capacities of women, or with Hegel’s infamous judgment that ‘Negroes' are ‘not yet capable of grasping any fixed objective reality [Anschauung irgendeiner festen Objektivität]’,83 but the fact that this judgment is believed to express a national characteristic (based on an identity of nationality and religion), applicable to all Jews. Much to the surprise of the Jews among Solov’ëv’s audience who, if the statement were true, had very little reason to be there in the first place, unless their aim was to witness a specimen of rather abstract thinking by a typical Chris- tian. Defender of the Jews, praying for them on his deathbed, and provocatively identifying himself as ‘Jew', Vladimir Solov’ëv was their friend and their ally – only his battle was a different one.

82 Bar-Yosef, ‘The Jewish Reception of Vladimir Solov'ëv' (see n. 23), p. 366, quoting Anonymous, ‘Peterburgskaja letopis’, Nedel’naja khronika Voskhoda 8 (19.02.1882), p. 184. 83 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), vol. XII, p. 122. 244 EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE

SUMMARY

In this article, the well-known Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ëv’s argument concerning the ‘Jewish Question’ is analyzed on the basis of a combination of close-reading of his key text in this connection, and contextual analysis. While the latter proves his sincere sympathy for the Russian Jews and his courageous defense of their civic rights, in both cases against the spirit of his time, the former discloses a narrative that, while assigning the Jews a major and positive role in the Divine plan of human history, at the same time pegs them down on an essentialistically conceived national identity made up of ethnic, religious, and socio-economic elements. This ‘theoretical’ nationalism is shown to be linked to his own highly particular position of ‘prophet’.