The peasants of ‘Judaic Faith’ in the Vladimir province: The ‘homegrown sectarianship’ phenomenon in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the unique model of religious conduct which could be described as a sectarianship beyond the scope of the confessional community The author discovered an archival document reflecting a case investigation of a Subbotnik peasant, his wife and children in the Vladimir Province of the nineteenth century. No researchers had ever discovered any Judaizers in that region previously. The work’s goal is to describe and analyze this religious phenomenon. The study utilized diverse methods: ideographic, retrospective, comparative, that of historical genesis as well as the method of interpreting historical sources and causal analysis. Research on the case of Abram Satin reveals, on the one hand, some peculiarities typical of the Subbotnik movement. These include the Biblical foundation of the Judaizers’ world outlook, their design of worship practices on the basis of the Old Testament texts, their combination of the secret observation of the ‘Mosaic Law’ and the formal performing the Christian rituals, identification of icons as idols along with the sympathetic attitude toward the person of Christ, and traditional tools for revealing their faith in front of the authorities. On the other hand, ‘religious dissidence’ restricted to just one family residing very far from its co-religionists’ communities makes the case totally unique. Perhaps Abram Satin’s conversion to the Mosaic Law was the result of an independent reading of the Bible and/or infrequent contacts with Judaizers from other regions. ‘The homegrown sectarianship’ made the family of the Vladimir peasants vulnerable when facing the authorities and this was most likely the reason for their re-conversion to Orthodoxy that effectively ended the microstory.