Israeli trope in ancient Russian literature of the 11th-14th centuries

This short article is the response to the article by Prof. T. V. Bordachev who found a link between formation of the concept of God-chosenness of Rus’ and the updating of the formula “Rus’ is New Israel” during the final stage of the struggle of the Moscow state against the Horde yoke. One should focus on two aspects of Bordachev’s theory. Firstly, the idea of Holy Rus’ by itself was formulated much earlier, without being directly associated with the Mongol-Tatar yoke. There were various formulations of the idea of God-chosenness, but the one in which Rus’ is presented as the embodiment of Israel as chosen by God at a new stage of history, can be found in large numbers in the Russian literature of pre-Mongol period without much difficulty. This idea is found both in chronicle texts, and especially often, in the Alexander Nevsky hagiographic tradition. Accordingly, some clarification seems to be necessary: did ideas of Archbishop Vassian really contain a fundamentally new historiosophical concept, or did he just use a well-known traditional system of views in the “Message to the Ugra” to rhetorically strengthen his address to Ivan III? Secondly, it is important to understand how firmly the image of the “enemies of Israel” turned out to be related precisely to the Horde in the worldview of the thinkers of the 15th century. According to the assumption made, the formula “Israel vs the graceless world” remained a universal one for describing the relationship of Rus’ with all its “existential” enemies, including the West.