Old Israel (''Staroizrail'') was a 19th-century sect founded in the 1830s by Perfil Katasonov, a disciple of
Abbakum Kopylov, the founder of the
Postniki (Fasters) sect, as the result of a schism. Its adherents considered themselves to be the Chosen People establishing the
Kingdom of God
The concept of the kingship of God appears in all Abrahamic religions, where in some cases the terms Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven are also used. The notion of God's kingship goes back to the Hebrew Bible, which refers to "his kingdom" ...
on earth. The sect disintegrated into various spin-off sects, among them
New Israel, at the death of its founder.
References
*Daniel H. Shubin, ''The History of Russian Christianity, Volume III: The Synodal Era and the Sectarians, 1725 to 1894'', Algora Publishing (2005), , pp. 124ff.
*Sergei I. Zhuk, ''Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917'', JHU Press (2004), {{ISBN, 978-0-8018-7915-9.
Khlysts
Christian denominations in Russia