Disrobing Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor: The Hidden Legacy of Christian Anti-Semitism in Brothers Karamazov

Abstract

??? COHPAnATIST DISROBING DOSTOEVSKy5S GRAND INQUISITOR: THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM IN BROTHERS KARAMAZOV Gary Adelman Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism evolved in the 1870s to connect with his central philosophical, social, and religious beliefs and eventually fueled the "great debate" between Zossima and the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov, or between religion and revolutionary socialism. I propose that Dostoevsky poured his extreme, late-life hatred ofJews, found especially in his Diary, letters, and notebooks, into the Grand Inquisitor, quite consciously attacking in him the Jew in his own imagination, a kind of diabolical Chief Elder, and driving the debate with the same sort of Manichaean opposition one finds in the Gospels between Christ and the Jewish Antichrist. The satanic energy of the Inquisitor derives primarily from this private symbolism, and from the desire "to [grind] into ethnographical dust" (Goldstein 54) the chief rival to Russian Messianism —the Jews. To make my case, I show the extent and extremity of the author's views in the context of his time, examine possible literary influences, and speculate as well on the personal origins of his prejudice. I offer a "surprise witness"—the German novelist Hermann Goedsche—to buttress my contention that the Inquisitor is a repository for Dostoevsky's hatred ofJews. For Dostoevsky, a devout Christian, the Jew came to represent a conspiracy to conquer not just Russia but the entire world. This was his position while he was writing Brothers Karamazov. During the 1870s, and especially toward the end of his life, when absorbed with Karamazov, he believed emphatically in the evil "Yid."1 The year before he began work on the novel, he wrote a long article on Jews (in the March 1877 issue ofA Writer's Diary) in which he repeated many of the old Christian libels: the Jews were morally corrupt; they constituted an alien state within a state, unassimüable and threatening; tv ;y controlled international banking and the press. He was convinced . Jewish hostility toward the rest ofthe world, and he was certain that Jews would never become loyal citizens of Russia. In the article, Dostoevsky warned his magazine readers that Judaism , i.e., "Yidism"—huckstering, self-interest, materialism—had taken over the Christian world, so Christians now shared completely in Jewish egoism and commercialism. The god of the Jews had been secularized and had become the god ofthis world, money. As he told his subscribers, every person for himself, all communion among people only for personal gain, mercilessness to the lower classes—never before had these strivings been elevated so openly, and held up as a guiding principle, as they Vol. 24 (2000): 83 CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM IN DOSTOEVSKY were now that "Yidism" was "creeping over the whole world in place of 'unsuccessful' Christianity" (Writer's Diary 2: 915). It was a pet notion of his that the Jews incomprehensibly had drawn strength from calamity. Adaptable, tenacious, clinging, and spreading like a kind offungus, they now were contaminating everything with their noxious influence. Despite his statement that it was in the spirit of Christianity to give Jews equal rights, he must have regarded the idea of giving them full equality as a danger that would ultimately lead to the destruction of Russia. Yet at times, a wild notion would come into my head: what if it weren't the Jews who numbered three million in Russia but the Russians; and what if there were eighty million Jews? Now how would they transform the Russians, and how would they treat them? Would they allow them to become their equals in rights? Would they allow them to pray freely in their midst? Would they not turn them directly into slaves? Even worse: would they not strip themutterlybare? Would they not massacre them altogether, exterminate them completely, as they did more than once with alien peoples in times ofold in their ancient history? (Writer's Diary 2: 909) Perhaps it is a tribute to his forbearance that he did not go as far as others who advocated abolishing the synagogues, refusing Jews any kind ofemployment, and banishing or exterminating them. Nor, in the magazine , does he actuaUy furnish the strategy by which the Jews were supposed to...