Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church Book

Doubly Chosen provides the first detailed study of a unique cultural and religious phenomenon in post-Stalinist Russia-the conversion of thousands of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity, first in the 1960s and later in the 1980s. These time periods correspond to the decades before and after the great exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt contends that the choice of baptism into the Church was an act of moral courage in the face of Soviet persecution, motivated by solidarity with the values espoused by Russian Christian dissidents and intellectuals. Oddly, as Kornblatt shows, these converts to Russian Orthodoxy began to experience their Jewishness in a new and positive way. Working primarily from oral interviews conducted in Russia, Israel, and the United States, Kornblatt underscores the conditions of Soviet life that spurred these conversions: the virtual elimination of Judaism as a viable, widely practiced religion; the transformation of Jews from a religious community to an ethnic one; a longing for spiritual values; the role of the Russian Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russian national culture; and the forging of a new Jewish identity within the context of the Soviet dissident movement. Kornblatt shows how the choice of baptism into the church was a doubly brave act-first, because of the hostile environment the convert might find inside the Church and the hostile environment the Church found itself in during the Soviet era and second because it forced Jews to confront their Jewish identity. Many of her sources testified that their conversions to Christianity renewed their appreciation for their Jewish identity. Kornblatt calls these Jews "doubly chosen" because while they became religiously Christian, they remained culturally and ethnically Jewish.Read More