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Abstract
In the culturally complex Irshava raion of Transcarpathia is a confessional community that has been practicing a post-Soviet version of Judaism, following religious law norms and biblical text understandings of the Old and New testaments. Small and peripheral, they nonetheless illustrate a dynamic understanding of religious conversion and “textual rationalization” that has similarities with the historical creation of new religious communities out of Christianity and Judaism. Although termed here “Judaizers,” this is not a self-appellation. Data derives from fieldwork in 2011-12.
Notes
1. Judy Batt writes: “One of the more endearing inconveniences of everyday life in Transcarpathia today is the local insistence on using Central European time—one hour behind official Kiev time—quietly asserting where the province feels it belongs” (Batt Citation2002, p. 155).
2. Compare understanding of “border” and “periphery” in Yuri M. Lotman: “If in the center the meta-structure appears as ‘our’ language, then on the periphery it turns out to be a ‘foreign’ language, not capable of appropriately reflecting the semiotic practice lying underneath it.… This is the realm of semiotic dynamics. Precisely here is created a stress field where future languages get worked out” (Lotman 2000, p. 259). A contemporary interpretation of this Lotmanian concept of the periphery can be seen in the context of the political philosophy of G. Agamben, A. Badiou, and J. Rancière (Monticelli Citation2014).
3. Computations were made on the basis of the Otchet o seti tserkvei i religioznykh organizatsii v Ukraine na 01.01.2013 g., published by Kiev’s Institute for Religious Freedom (http://www.irs.in.ua/files/statistic/2013.01.01_zvit_f1_irs.in.ua.pdf), and from results of the All-Ukrainian population census 2001 (http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/rus/results/general/estimated/).
4. See the Otchet o seti tserkvei i religioznykh organizatsii v Ukraine na 01.01.2013 g. (http://www.irs.in.ua/files/statistic/2013.01.01_zvit_f1_irs.in.ua.pdf).
5. Called Sabbatarians in Transcarpathia, as in most regions of Ukraine, are various Christians who celebrate Saturday instead of Sunday. In the words of my informants, Sabbatarians differ from Seventh-Day Adventists in that in former times they did not aspire to official registration of their communities. Registered associations of Sabbatarian Christians do exist at present in Transcarpathia, as well as unregistered communities of Adventists. However, in Russia the term subbotniki [Sabbatarians] is the widespread name for a completely different religious group, whose members consider themselves not Christians, but Jews or Karaim. In this article subbotniki is used in the first (characteristic of Ukraine) sense wherever it is not stipulated otherwise. To avoid confusion, the synonym khristiane-subbotniki [Sabbatarian Christians] is likewise used.
6. In particular, he organized a seminar for the study of kabbala in Uzhhorod, inviting as an instructor the director of the Jewish studies program at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, dr. of hist. sciences Igor Turov, who kindly communicated with me about this.
7. Referred to here is the Russian translation of the book Eight Questions People Ask about Judaism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, first issued in 1986. Broadly distributed in the former USSR, it played a perceptible role in the religious revival of the late 1980s through the early 1990s.
8. The term iudeistvuiushchie [Judaizers], which I use for lack of a better one in the title of the article, evokes associations with Christian sects for the members of the community and, of course, is not their self-appellation.
9. A significant part of the members of the community engage in small business, in particular international motor transport, closely connected in Transcarpathia with religious associations. The latter assertion—about the connection between religious and economic life—is based not on an analysis of statistical data, which I unfortunately do not have at my disposal, but on my informants.
10. It is also sometimes called, after M.N. Pokrovskii and A.I. Klibanov, folk Protestantism (see Klibanov Citation1965, p. 31).
11. A main task of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan was to justify the exclusive right of the sovereign to interpret legal and religious texts.
12. Although many religious practices of Judaism have direct foundations in the texts of the Pentateuch, a significant part are either connected with Biblical texts in an extremely complex and indirect manner, or are based only on oral tradition. A symbol of this deviation of Judaism from Biblical simplicity in the polemical texts (both scholarly and folk) often turns out to be the Talmud. One community leader, indicating the warehouse of Baptist literature in a neighboring village, commented heatedly to me: “There’s ten tons of books there! And only one ton there is the Bible, while all the rest is their Talmud!” (8) It is obvious that this was a response to an accusation of following the Talmud, and not the Bible, which he had heard on the part of Christians.
13. Several times I was present during a discussion of the attitude toward such crucifixes. The talk was always structured following the same formula and consisted of a question and an answer: “But are these not idols after all? They are! And they’re supposed to be destroyed!”—“No, the commandment to destroy them applies only in the Land of Israel!”
14. See Deut. 19:9 [sic, should be 18:9—Trans.]: “…thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.”
15. A [Spring] custom practiced in many Ashkenazi communities—that of decorating houses with green grasses and branches for the holiday of Shavuot—has an obvious similarity to the analogous Christian custom on the Trinity [Pentecost] holiday, widespread in Slavic countries.
16. Many members of the community have negative experience of such contacts with synagogues: “Then, when we contended with the holidays too.… We still figured that even with holidays, you’ve got to do something, so, in the morning we did… physical work, and then—off to the service. … But then we read: “don’t do any work.” Don’t do any work! … so off we went over there [to the synagogue]. Well, they started with us there … getting interested in us. Who are you, where are you from, what impelled you, and what for, and you don’t need this.… What do you mean we don’t need this? We need it! People are interested in this—that means they need it!” (2)
17. Shammai and Hillel—sages of the Second Temple era, personages in Talmudic lore, in which Shammai shows himself to be a very strict and demanding teacher, and Hillel, on the contrary, is soft and flexible.
18. In a synagogue, they would most likely characterize such people as sectarians and would try to avoid discussing religious questions with them (see note 16).
a. On the politics and variety of religion in post-Soviet Ukraine, see especially the work of Catherine Wanner, for example Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010).
b. Translation is from Russian, although reference is to a work originally in French.
c. Literature on these “schismatic sects” of Russian Orthodoxy, the Molokans, Doukhobors [Dukhobors], and Subbotniks, is vast. See especially Nicholas B. Breyfogle Heretics and Colonizers: forging Russia’s empire in the south Caucasus. (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005).