A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  k The British assumption of the imperial mantle was signaled not only by the acquisition of colonies but also by Gibbon’s translation of Roman history into one of the glories of English literature and by the transfer of the Parthenon marbles to London. The Church of England, its liturgy and hymns, made God very close to the ideal English gentleman. In his role as the ubiquitous referee, Yahweh has never quite been evicted from the world’s game: Einstein was more Jewish than Greek when he said that God “does not play dice” with the universe.

  l In private correspondence, Zuleika Rodgers has pointed out that, in earlier Hebrew texts, “the presentation of Cyrus as God’s anointed or ‘mashiach,’ [after] he brought about the return of the exile and the destruction of the first temple, revealed a somewhat similar world view.” There is, in my opinion, a difference: Cyrus was glorified by the Jews because, thanks to the Holy One, his actions were central to their restitution in Palestine and to their future prosperity. Josephus’s salute to Vespasian announced the imminent displacement of the Jews as God’s favorites, a prediction that, by the time Josephus was writing his history, had been verified by the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.

  m The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) discovered the suicide rate among Jews to be lower than that among the rest of the population; persistence against the odds appeared to be a function of their sufferance. There has yet to be a convincing account, if there can ever be one, of why concentration camp survivors—Primo Levi, Piotr Rawicz, Paul Celan among the most renowned—seem often to have “waited” for many years before taking their own lives. That they suffered from “survivor’s guilt” is too glib (and too general) an explanation. Each case had a specific etiology: Levi seems to have been possessed by a foreboding that Holocaust denial would render his patient witness futile; Celan, to have been pushed to the limit by a painful love affair.

  IX

  FOR JOSEPH, the good news was that Vespasian had taken his bait, with some pleasure; the less good was that the Roman general’s prisoner was a witness to the ambition he had kindled. He had become a real and present danger to his captor. To stay alive, he had to combine discretion with proof that he could be of further use. His own narrative says nothing to this effect; but it was manifest in his conduct. If the Flavians were disposed to leniency, one of the reasons had to be superstitious respect for a man apparently privy to the future plans of the strange, solitary God whose mandate he had transmitted to them.

  It would be surprising if Joseph was not aware of the similarities of his situation with that of his biblical namesake, and if he did not somewhat glory in them. Even before he went over to the Romans, Joseph ben Mattathias paraded his distinction from Judaeans who lacked his intellectual and diplomatic education. Although he never alludes to it, the future traveler and versatile historian had been given a name illustrious in Jewish history. Did the original Joseph inspire him to keep calm in the face of important aliens? He must have known, from his earliest years as a student of the Torah, how the precocious son of the patriarch Jacob was said, in Exodus, to have exasperated his eleven brothers, not least by boasting of a dream in which they all bowed down to him. On a trip to the desert, they planned to dump him down a well, but then reprieved him only in order to sell him to a caravan of Ishmaelites, for twenty pieces of silver. The Arab traders transported their smart purchase into Egypt and sold him into slavery.

  The young Joseph’s renowned “coat of many colors” may be a mistranslation of the original Hebrew, but it flags his ability to be all things, or as many as necessary, to all men. Camouflage and ostentation, mimicry and versatility go together. Like Joseph ben Mattathias, the archetypal Joseph had a knack of making a favorable impression on important persons. As a slave in Egypt, the son of Jacob attracted the sexual overtures of his master Potiphar’s wife. When he denied her, she accused him of attempted rape. Joseph was thrown into prison, where two Egyptian officials, who had been locked up with him, told him their dreams. He interpreted them with such pre-Freudian acuteness that when Pharaoh himself had a disturbing dream, one which his counselors were unable or afraid to decode, the smart young Hebrew was summoned to supply an explanation. With nothing to lose, Joseph could afford to tell Pharaoh that the royal dream about the seven fat cows and the seven skinny ones implied that seven years of plenty would be followed by seven “lean” years. During the latter period, the Nile would fail to flood broadly enough to irrigate the fields that, for centuries, would make Egypt one of the fattest granaries of the Mediterranean world. The young prisoner’s lucidity led Pharaoh to recruit him as his plenipotentiary with the task of averting the recession he had forecast.a He evidently did so with astonishing success.

  As a result of Egypt’s cleverly contrived surplus, Joseph’s brothers trekked there to buy corn. Brought into the grand vizier’s intimidating presence, they failed, of course, to recognize him. There followed a twist echoed in countless plots in Attic comedy and Hellenistic novels. Perhaps as a result of a “joke” contrived by Joseph himself, Benjamin—the youngest of the dozen brothers whose names were later attached to the twelve tribes of Israel—was accused of stealing a “magic” cup belonging to the brother he had failed to recognize. In fact, it had been slipped into his luggage on Joseph’s instructions. His motive is not specified. It could have had many colors: furtive generosity that was also an accusation; a parting gift that would allow his brothers to be detained; a means of reminding his brothers that they had better bow down to him now. Benjamin’s brother Judah defended the accused so forcefully that Joseph was moved to reveal who he was. That may have been his intention all along. He was as merciful to his brothers as they had been heartless to him.

  The whole family, including the old patriarch Jacob,b is said to have migrated to Egypt. They were the first of many. The immigrants, traditionally known as “Hebrews,” were at first welcome in Egypt because of their affinity with Joseph. However, their security depended on his sustained ascendancy. Lines of stress recur in Jewish history between those who find high, if precarious, favor with Gentile potentates, and other Jews, without rare qualities. When the grandees lost favor, they were powerless to protect whoever had relied on their patronage. Harold Bloom wrote of “the unhappy dialectic of Jewish existence whereby the Jews of exile perpetually sought everywhere an alliance with the ruling powers, thus further provoking the hatred of the masses.”1

  Even before the Hebrews adopted Judaism, a pattern of dependence and vulnerability was stamped on their history by numerical inferiority and, after they reached Canaan, by geographical location. Any search for some innate psychological inability to assimilate or to ape the supposed civility of their hosts is superfluous. Their allegiance to a singular deity, if diagnosed as a pragmatic detail, rather than as the fruit of revelation, suggests the wanderers’ need for a supreme and unifying “ruling power” whose benevolence might be trusted, provided always that His people deferred to His ordinances (it is tempting, as Nietzsche did, to call their devotion “slavish”). The consequences of fidelity to Yahweh would prove as ironic as any mythographer might wish.

  According to Exodus, Joseph’s patron was succeeded by a pharaoh who “knew not Joseph.” As a result, the status of Joseph’s clients—the entire Hebrew population of Egypt—was imperiled. By that time, on the hinge of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., the surge of Hebrew immigrants was felt as a threat to the local population. The new pharaoh, Seti I, then distanced himself from the conspicuous alien who had rectified Egypt’s finances. To adapt Descartes’s phrase, the ivy was threatening to grow taller than the tree. The foreignness of the Hebrews made it plausible to accuse all of them, including Joseph, of commerce with Egypt’s dangerous neighbors, the Hyksos.

  Oppression and enslavement followed. The worse the indigenous Egyptians treated the Jews, the more they overestimated the immigrants’ numbers. A plan was mooted to drown all male Hebrews at birth. According to the Torah, this form of culling was turned
on the Egyptians: their own firstborns were struck down by the hand of the deity who, shortly afterward, would declare Himself to Moses on Mount Sinai and recruit the errant Hebrews into His chosen people.

  Although he never rivals the place Moses occupies in Jewish mythology, the original Joseph is designated as “the righteous” by the rabbinic tradition (as it was revised after the fall of Jerusalem). He alone, however, of Jacob’s known sons, never lent his name to one of the tribes of Israel. Perhaps he was suspected of being too congenial with foreigners. However, the great polymath encyclopedist Louis Jacobs says that in the Kabbalah (the collection of glosses on sacred texts that began to be compiled in the twelfth century), Joseph stands for the Sefirah of Yesod, “foundation,” the source of all cosmic energy, represented by the organ of generation in the human body, the place of circumcision and the covenant. Hence Joseph and every male who is sexually pure is known as a “guardian of the covenant.”

  The “coat of many colors,” which folklore insists that Joseph the son of Jacob chose to sport, advertised his want of modesty. A High Priest’s robes had to be whiter than white, just as his person had to be immune from deformity. Joseph’s patchwork wardrobe suggests the volatility of his character. That he should become a master of the Egyptian language and double as a senior functionary of an alien, often hostile country is proof both of his diplomatic skills and of the versatility that enemies could read as opportunism.

  Did the story of the original Joseph influence Joseph ben Mattathias’s conception of himself? In addition to his capacity for playing many roles, in a variety of costumes, Josephus resembled his biblical namesake in priding himself on his sexual restraint. He too had distinguished origins, showed precocious intelligence, was ill-used (so he insists) by his own people, escaped death by a ruse, and was promoted by an alien prince whose future he forecast, from a dream of his own that he claimed contained a message from God Himself. The validity of his interpretation was established, even in foreign eyes, by his credentials as a priest with prophetic provenance.

  Joseph the son of Mattathias too came to enjoy a somewhat favored life in consequence of services rendered to a culture that was not his own. Both Josephs had individuality pressed on them by circumstance. Both had, in a way, been flung into a hole in the ground, from which they were lucky to escape; the first because his brothers’ greed trumped their malice, the second by his own agility. Sustained by singular intelligence, both were distinguished by their resilient opportunism. But while Joseph the son of Jacob occupies an honored, central place in the catalog of Hebrew lorec (he was never a practicing Jew, since his life was over before Moses enrolled the Hebrews in the covenant that would bind them into one people under one God), Joseph the son of Mattathias has uneasy standing in Jewish esteem.

  Titus and his father presented their prize with clean clothes and other “valuable gifts.” Defeated generals can be flattering company. Joseph ben Mattathias may not have eaten with his captors (their diet was not his),d but he interested and perhaps amused or instructed them. If he was now in a lonely limbo, it was a limbo with cushions. Had he died in Jotapata, history would have had small occasion to remember Joseph ben Mattathias. Having contrived his own salvation, he was able to observe and annotate the disasters that, over the next five years, would overwhelm his compatriots. Parole allowed him to gain firsthand material for the single source on which all accounts of the war in Judaea have had to rely.

  He gives no indication of when it came into his mind, or was suggested to him, that he should be the chronicler of his people’s fate. There is no evidence that he undertook any literary work until after he crossed the lines and joined Vespasian’s camp. All clever young men in Jerusalem learned to read. The best and the brightest became conspicuous by their argumentative acumen in Temple seminars; but there is no record of secular literature during the Second Temple period, nor of any poetry that was not liturgical.e After Joseph ben Mattathias was transfigured into T. Flavius Josephus, and enrolled as a trumpeter for the Flavian dynasty, he became the first of a long line of fluent Jewish commentators and journalists for whom social, political and historical punditry offered a way both of rising above their particular condition and of making names for themselves. Revised nomenclature came to be a common career move among Jews who figured in Gentile societies, from Flavius Josephus to Isaac Babel and Leon Trotsky. The latter’s History of the Russian Revolution offered a supposedly dispassionate version of the events in which he played a leading part, before he was arraigned by Stalin as the Judas of the Communist myth.

  In time, Joseph both enhanced and compromised his individuality by putting his pen at the service of Roman masters. They encouraged him to garnish what he knew in a form that advanced their standing. In Josephus’s Greek account of the Jewish War, young Titus assumes some of the allure of the legendary and divinized Alexander, the first man to take his own embedded historian, Callisthenes, with him on his conquering travels. As Josephus must have known, when Callisthenes presumed to differ with Alexander, the vainglorious master of the world had him killed. Josephus was able to smuggle brutal truths about the conduct of the legions into his history only by appearing to excuse those who commanded them. His art concealed more than art. To call him a traitorous collaborator underrates his subtlety and simplifies his practice.

  He was more devious than a turncoat—and more consistent. Without some measure of slyness, how could he have told as much of the truth as he did? Faced with an alien, often contemptuous audience, he was under the patronage of men whose indulgence could never be taken for granted. Nero had killed the best writers of his time out of jealousy. Later, under the Flavians, even well-born, native Roman historians could be put to death merely for adopting an independent tone. Tacitus tells of a certain Maternus who, during the reign of Vespasian, hurriedly rewrote his life of Cato, the champion of the republic, after a public recital of the text had been greeted as implying a slur on the principate; the laughs, it may be, came too easily. The fact that posterity has read with some ease between Josephus’s lines is more of a credit to his artfulness than scholarly detectives are in the habit of conceding.

  From the moment he devised a way not to share the fate of the other defenders of Jotapata, Joseph was alone. Isolated from other Jews, he was sentenced to life in the solitary confinement of his own memories and reactions. After the war was over, and spoils were being distributed, Vespasian rewarded him with estates in Judaea; but Josephus never visited them. He was safer in the company, and service, of the Romans. Despite his new citizenship, however, he was never one of them; nor could he ever again be what he was before. To himself, he remained a Jew; to his surviving compatriots, a pariah.

  For almost four years while Joseph was in Titus’s company in Judaea, he had to witness massacres in which thousands of Jews were slaughtered, thousands more sold into slavery. Like Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, forced to look on the corpse of her son and to react as if she had never seen him before, he was obliged, again and again and again, to hide his anguish. Like Dreyfus, if he wept, he wept alone. His captors did supply him with a Jewish woman to replace the wife from whom he was separated, but she has to have been more comfort than confidante. How could he be sure that his pillow talk would not be passed on to the Romans? Every word he wrote or spoke had to be guarded. He was committed to a form of self-consciousness, and repression, that individualized him, as a Jew and an outsider, to an unprecedented degree.

  From the time of his surrender until his departure for Italy in 71 C.E., Joseph ben Mattathias was in close attendance on the Roman commanders. While portraying himself as too gentlemanly to applaud such knavish dodges, Josephus cannot resist telling how, soon after the fall of Jotapata, his personal enemy, John of Gischala, blindsided the credulous Titus. Storming the town of Gischala presented nothing like the difficulty to the Romans that Jotapata had, which may explain why Vespasian delegated its capture to his son. In the usual way, before moving in to assault the walls, Titus
called on the garrison to surrender. In ancient warfare, prompt capitulation might procure lenient terms. The longer a town held out, the more certain its ruin and the death or enslavement of its population when captured. Surrounded and outnumbered, John agreed to open the gates and give himself up; but he claimed that, for religious reasons, he could do nothing at all, not even surrender, on the Sabbath day, which had begun at sunset.

  Gullible or chivalrous, Titus agreed to wait overnight and mounted only a superficial watch. John and his men took the opportunity to slip out and repair to Jerusalem. Josephus says that God allowed John to escape on that occasion so that he could live to play a catastrophic part as a faction chieftain inside the city; but the moralizing tag reads like a straight-faced coda to the Jewish joke John played on Josephus’s Roman patron. Despite his leading role in the revolt, John was able, at the very end, to escape the fate of many of the defeated Jews and somehow to make his peace with Vespasian: he was sentenced to life imprisonment, not crucifixion. Martin Goodman attributes his reprieve to his elevated social status,2 but others of the same class, such as another Zealot leader, Simon ben Gioras, were not so lucky. Simon had been dictatorial enough to make enemies even among the Jews during the last days in Masada. Arrogance helped qualify him for exemplary execution at the climax of Vespasian’s postwar triumph in Rome.f