Historically, Vladimir the Great converted to Christianity because the Byzantine emperor offered to marry him to his daughter if Vladimir did so. But what if the emperor hadn't done this, and Vladimir instead chooses to convert to Judaism. (Besides the fact that part of the reason he converted to Christianity was because it allowed him to drink and eat pork still.) How would this effect Russia and elsewhere?
WI: Vladimir the Great converts to Judaism
- Thread starter cheeschomper
- Start date
Abhakhazia
Banned
Impossible, we already had a thread about how Judaism is so hard to export because it was an ethocentric religion.
Vladimir's own grandmother, Olga of Kiev, also known as St Olga, converted to Christianity many years before Vladimir was born. During this time, the Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantines would already have a strong presence in the lands of the Rus. So the story about him 'choosing' alternative religions is just that, a story.
There's no such thing as an ASB when it comes to people making different decisions. People make crazy fucking decisions all the time. Charles VI put metal rods in his clothes because he thought he was made of glass and might break. If you want to have a conversation about Vladimir converting to Judaism, don't let a couple of naysayers talk you down. At worst you get an interesting exchange about a very influential monarch making a decision that alienates him from his court and people only a few years into his reign. Or maybe not, maybe he has the pull to really enforce it on the Rus. I have no idea about the plausibility of that. But as far as the plausibility of one man changing his mind: Go for it.
Unlike Charles VI Valois, Vladimir wasn't insane. So how is this a useful analogy?
As well as marrying into the imperial family of the Byzantines, Vladimir would have been well-enough familiar with the rite of the Greeks over any other Abrahamic religion. Kiev had closer ties with the Byzantines than they did with the Sunni Abassid Caliphate, the form of Latin Christianity developing in western Europe, or even the Judaism of the then vanquished Khazars. As far as Vladimir was concerned, there was little option other to convert to the religion of his nearest and most powerful neighbour.
The Judaism the Khazars practiced could be barely considered Judaism in the first place. Judaism has been and most likely will continue to be ethnocentric, it's been like that for upwards of 3-4 millennium.
Zioneer
Banned
Hmm.. Its not the PoD you asked for, but if Sviatoslav falls to crush the Khazars and they (for example) take his sons as hostages to make sure he doesn't try again, the possibly of Vladimir converting to Judaism would be fairly high.
Add to this PoD an outside force smashing the Khazars anyway and the Kievan Rus picking up the pieces, and you could have a Judaic Vladimir using his religion to keep control of the former Khazar Khaganate.
Add to this PoD an outside force smashing the Khazars anyway and the Kievan Rus picking up the pieces, and you could have a Judaic Vladimir using his religion to keep control of the former Khazar Khaganate.
It could be interesting through to consider a TL where the Khazar Judaism was spread more aggessively (not nessesalily by sword, but maybe by massive missionary work), or that they weren't as much vanquished as assimilated into Kievan rus, where the key point would be that they bought the religion to Vladimir
Might be considered a Heretic judaism by the orthodox jews but that'd just make it more interesting
Might be considered a Heretic judaism by the orthodox jews but that'd just make it more interesting
That explains all the Jewish folks with red hair like my brother and blue eyes like my father.Maybe at a young age Vlad takes a fancy to the Old Testament and admires the Hebrews as Fellow Warriors. He then feels The Call to embrace kinship with himself as an obvious remnant of some lost tribe.
Why wouldn't it? Cross-faith intermarriages aren't exactly impossible.
Over the course of thousands of years, to an extent, change happens, including interaction with a local community. Intermarriage for Jewish people is historically discouraged; as you noted, ethnocentricity etc. But it happened. The level of interaction that would have resulted in Vlad converting would have been difficult, but, not impossible.
Titus_Pullo
Banned
Too many ASB's freely fly around here to avoid a challenging question. When in reality the whole genre of Alternate history is ASB as it operates on the concept of altering the physical events of what had already happened so that it can have an entirely different outcome. Since history is not an exact science then neither is alternate history, which in itself is based on a theoretical interpretation of quantum mechanics which claims that the universal wave function never collapses but is in a process of continual splitting of the universe into a multitude of unobservable but real worlds. In another words, Alternate history, is science fiction, until quantum mechanics and themulti verse theory are proven to be facts.
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birdboy2000
Banned
OTL he seriously considered it to the point of inviting Jewish envoys to teach him about their faith. It's unclear if ay Khazar polities survived the fall of their capital, but they weren't exactly a distant memory, and the political reasons which drove the Khazars to Judaism (a religion which both Christians and Muslims afforded some respect) remained. It's not implausible by any stretch.