A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  On one occasion, he was knocked unconscious by a stone, to cheers from those on the ramparts. He claims to have been rescued by Titus himself. His depiction of the young Titus is loaded with ambiguity. Celebrated as bold, and often ruthless, the young general is also revealed as naïve. During the siege of Jerusalem, after a heavy ram had been wheeled close to a tower on the notorious northern flank of the walls, a “charlatan” called Castor, with ten comrades, tried to ambush the Roman engineers. They were chased off by a volley of arrows. Later, when the tower seemed about to topple, they stood up as if in despair. Castor raised his hands and begged “Caesar” to have pity on them. Convinced of his sincerity, Titus shouted to Castor that he should encourage the rest of his companions to do the same.3

  Five of Castor’s platoon appeared to agree that they should surrender. The other five called out that they would sooner die than be slaves. They brandished their swords and, as far as could be seen in long shot, thrust them into their breastplates. They fell to the ground, as if mortally stricken. Titus and his staff were amazed at their courage and pitied their fate. During this, an archer let off an arrow, which struck Castor near his nose. He plucked it out and waved it at Titus, claiming that he had been unjustly used. Titus was furious with the archer and asked Joseph to go and give Castor a hand. Joseph suspected a trick and refused. How did Titus look at him at that moment?

  Castor called out to his enemies to send a volunteer to receive all the money he had on him. A certain Aeneas, a deserter to the Romans, offered to go. His Hellenized name suggests that, if a Jew, he may never have been a Zealot. As he ran forward, holding his skirts out to catch the cash, Castor hefted a large boulder and flung it at him. The stone missed Aeneas (an apt name for one who survived a siege) but hit another soldier who had run up beside him, hoping to cadge a coin or two.

  Titus is said by Josephus to have drawn from this petty incident the grand conclusion that pity was futile in warfare and cruelty the best policy. Since Castor’s charade was staged at least a year after the extermination of the helpless citizens of Tarichaeae, and of many others elsewhere, there has to be irony in Josephus’s assertion that the Roman commander-in-chief resolved on pitilessness because of a prank in which a common soldier was bruised by a boulder. Might Titus’s outburst have been primed by the fact that Joseph had witnessed him looking foolish?

  When the bombardment resumed and the tower did collapse, Castor set fire to what was left. He and his comrades then jumped through the flames into a subterranean vault. This show of courage, Josephus says, again impressed the Romans. They thought that the Jews had genuinely flung themselves into the fiery pit. The implication is that the Gentiles had failed to see through a trick that Josephus himself recognized. This vignette is typical of the “clips” with which he intersperses his panorama of the war. It also illustrates his ambivalence. Although Joseph’s instinct, at the time, was to distrust Castor, he cannot conceal his amusement at the rogue’s Odyssean slyness. Castor and his crew, when they put on their show of committing suicide, re-enacted Joseph’s own disappearing trick after he had leapt into that secret chamber in Jotapata, from which he too had emerged, although not to fight another day.

  Like the convert centurion Metilius, Castor makes one appearance and then vanishes from Josephus’s story. In Greek mythology, the brothers Castor and Pollux are sons of Zeus. They had cult in Sparta and, appropriately enough, lived half their time below the earth. The dichotomy that sets Athens against Jerusalem obscures similarities between Greek poneria (impudent rascality) and what came to be known in Yiddish as chutzpah. The Jew Castor outsmarts Titus, as Odysseus did the Cyclops Polyphemus. The story implies both that the man was a clever trickster and—since Joseph guessed that he was up to no good—that it took one to know one. Josephus seems to have cast himself in the role of the divine Castor’s twin brother, Pollux, the will-o’-the-wisp who, in mythology, knows how to get out of tight spots. Joseph had done as much when he found a way out of the charnel house in Jotapata.

  If Josephus’s enormous literary output was a prolonged attempt to put a good face on his translation to a Roman underling, it is only fair to say that during the siege he did everything he could—even though, in the end, it amounted to very little—to avoid the spilling of Jewish blood. Out in no-man’s-land, he tried to talk the Jews into surrender, for as long as there was any hope of averting the culminating horror. He submitted to the obscenities and missiles with what a modern mind might interpret as masochistic courage. If he was a coward because he had failed to die, he was also egregiously brave; if a traitor, it was to a reckless nationalism he never favored, not to Judaism.

  a Revolutionaries often expect their enemies to abide by civilized rules that they themselves disparage: in flight from Stalin, Trotsky presumed that the English would extend their bourgeois tolerance to giving him asylum. Like Czar Nicholas II, when he appealed to his first cousin George V, he was mistaken. Safely in America after escaping Nazi Germany, Herbert Marcuse stigmatized Western democracy for its “repressive tolerance.” In 1960, the terminally ill anti-Western activist Frantz Fanon sought expert treatment in America. Terrorists guarding hostages in the Middle East have asked their help in securing green cards so they could emigrate to the United States.

  b The modern Druses have adopted a Scythopolitan ethic: they agree to be subject to whatever power commands the area in which they live. Alone of non-Jews, Druses who live within the borders of Israel serve, with marked diligence, in the Israel Defense Forces. Despite allegations of dual loyalty, Europe’s Jews have been equally patriotic within the boundaries of its nation-states. German Jews who had been decorated for gallantry in the Great War were sent, in first-class carriages, to their deaths in concentration camps; French Jews decorated for fighting against them were, in theory, exempt from deportation. In practice, Marshal Pétain refused to acknowledge their claim on his protection.

  c As Bertolt Brecht would the Nazis, in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

  d As did Georgi Dimitrov, in 1935, when the Nazis arraigned him for causing the 1933 Reichstag fire. Dimitrov was a Bulgarian Communist who happened to have been in Germany at the time. As Hannah Arendt describes it, “He was.… confronted with Goering whom he questioned as if he were in charge of the proceedings.… thanks to him all the accused, except van der Lubbe, had to be acquitted. His conduct was such that it won him the admiration of the whole world, Germany not excluded. ‘There is one man left in Germany,’ people used to say, ‘and he’s a Bulgarian.’ ” During the Shoah, when the Nazis demanded that their Bulgarian allies hand over all their Jews for extermination, more Bulgarians turned out to be men than anyone had imagined. Its government, alone of all the rulers of Balkan states, refused to deliver their Jews. Bulgaria’s northern neighbors, the Romanians, horrified even the SS by the wanton ferocity of their pogroms.

  e Marxists attach similar immunity to unalloyed proletarians and the “class justice” they dispensed. Michel Foucault defended the French Revolution’s Terror (and that of the Iranian ayatollahs) in the same preemptive spirit. Principled killing is at the sharp end of logic; hence Auden’s 1938 camp version of Marxism, relishing the “necessary murder.” G. B. Shaw was of the same view, saying that “states” had the right to choose whom to kill. He backed totalitarian ruthlessness—puckishly, of course. René Cassin’s formal enactment of the notion of “universal human rights,” after 1945, has to be seen as an assertion of the individual’s claim not to be subsumed under statistics. It so happened that Cassin (1887–1976) was an emancipated French Jew as well as a jurist. An early supporter of General de Gaulle, he returned to active Jewish allegiance as a reaction to the Holocaust but, in the French style, he universalized the lessons to be learned from it.

  f His body was thrown into the river and his head carried round the city on a pole. Vespasian himself arrived after the savagery but did not reproach those, including the “rapscallion” general Marcus Antonius Primus, who had tortured his prede
cessor. Vitellius had begun public life as Tiberius’s catamite, gambled with Claudius, became a charioteer under Gaius and, it is said, sung along with Nero, a paradigm of rising and falling in imperial Rome.

  g In The Jews Under Roman and Byzantine Rule (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), Michael Avi-Yonah goes further: “If we regard Jewish history as a whole.… the Zealots were successful in their struggle.…. The destruction of the Temple and the elimination of Jewish statehood widened an already existing gulf between Judaism and its environment.… no conciliation in the fields of art and literature could bridge it.…. If Israel has kept its national identity.… the only nation of antiquity to do so.… this is due.… to the warriors of two lost wars against the Romans. From the point of view of Jewish nationality, their [the Zealots’] desperate undertakings appear in a positive light, however much one can regret the amount of suffering caused to the community and to individuals.” The secular version of much the same argument has been advanced by Eric Hobsbawm in defense of the “experiments” of Communist regimes, especially in the Soviet Union but also in China, as a result of which some sixty million people died from ideologically justified famine.

  h Thomas Mann did something similar, in the Second World War, in broadcasts to the Germans he had quit in 1934. Mann dared to say, “All the heroism lies in enduring, in willing to live and not die.” He was referring to a remark of Frederick the Great’s, but the saying applied, to some degree, to himself and his acceptance of abuse and exile. No sane person has accused either of the Mann brothers of being “bad Germans.”

  XI

  TIBERIUS JULIUS ALEXANDER arrived in Judaea, probably in early 69 C.E., in order to become Titus’s effective chief-of-staff during the siege of Jerusalem. He had already played a cardinal part in Vespasian’s successful bid for the throne. As prefect of Egypt, he had command of the legions needed to ensure that the outsider won the big race. His duty in Jerusalem was to ensure that Titus had professional backup and the necessary resources for the final assault on the holy city of the Jews. Born in Alexandria, Tiberius Julius appears, on the face of it, to have been one more Roman provincial officer, able, ruthless and with no private sentiments that might infect his public allegiance. In fact, he had been born a Jew, the nephew of the Alexandrian Jewish sage Philo, whose wealth and intelligence confirmed him as the natural leader of the community.

  As a young man, Tiberius Julius chose not to “stand by the principles of his people.” Severing his connection with the Jewish faith, he exercised the kind of freedom that was easy in Alexandria, but unthinkable in Jerusalem. He features in The Jewish War as an important but marginal personage. He is always described formally, and at a distance. Historians continue to seek the roots of “anti-Semitism” in the supposed “Judeophobia” of the pre-Christian world. The brilliant career of T. Julius Alexander offers negligible evidence of it. He was no more distrusted or scorned by those with whom he had enrolled than others of whatever social or geographic provenance who made careers and fortunes by conforming with the ethos of the predominant power.a

  By the time he and Titus landed, in 69 C.E., at the head of a fresh Roman force of six thousand men, Tiberius Julius was at the peak of an adroitly managed career.b Years of experience had qualified him as an able and necessary adviser to Vespasian’s headstrong son. It was not Alexander’s first visit to Palestine. As an already thoroughly assimilated Roman citizen, he had been appointed procurator of Judaea from 46 to 48, during Joseph ben Mattathias’s boyhood. He was drafted to replace Cuspius Fadus, who had had to deal with Theudas, a rabble-rousing preacher who persuaded a throng of Jews to follow him out of Jerusalem, into the desert and up to the river Jordan, which he promised to divide by a Mosaic miracle.c Fadus had him arrested and beheaded, which reduced his charisma. Using the occasion to chasten the Jews further, Fadus canceled the privilege, granted by the emperor Claudius, that permitted the High Priest to keep his elaborate vestments, symbolic of his election, on Temple premises. The procurator ordered them to be sequestered under Roman control in the Antonia Tower. This petty measure excited an outcry loud enough to induce the emperor Claudius to replace Fadus with the young Tiberius Julius, perhaps on the advice of King Agrippa. The latter, with his gift for being in the right place, had been present in Rome when Caligula was stabbed to death by one of his bodyguards, Chaereas, in 41 C.E.

  Caligula’s uncle Claudius was still alive only because he had been discounted as a drooling dodderer.d Without Agrippa’s smart (and self-interested) encouragement, Claudius might never have stepped up to become emperor. Once installed, he proved as generous as he was grateful by honoring Agrippa’s request that he go easy on the Alexandrian Jews still under arrest in Rome. Tiberius Julius Alexander’s father, Philo’s brother, was among those released. Thanks to a reference from Agrippa, Philo’s nephew was granted equestrian status without having to do preliminary military service. It was no impediment to his accelerated progress that he had been born a Jew. However, having been in Alexandria during a particularly vicious spasm of sectarian violence, conducted by the Alexandrian Greeks against the Jews, he was probably glad to be appointed epistrategus (district officer) in the more peaceful Thebaid, the area around modern Luxor. His abandonment of Judaism was primed by no spiritual epiphany. As a nominal Gentile, he was not converted to any new enthusiasm, except for his own advancement. He and his younger brother Marcus (who died in 44), had common business interests. Alexander’s activities as a Roman official aided his acquisition of a steadily enlarged fortune in trade and banking. In combining public duties with an eye for private gain, he was no different from any Roman careerist.

  In 46 C.E., he had been in the Roman service for only five years when he was sent to govern Judaea. Josephus reports that, to mark the style of his administration, Alexander ordered the crucifixion of Jacob and Simon, sons of the Galilean Zealot called Judas. The last of his dynasty was the Eleazar who died heroically at Masada in 73. They had formed a nexus of outlaws whose power to intimidate tithing tax collectors, Roman or priestly, won them credibility as champions of the common people. Their hostility to authority was expressed in the fundamentalism that lent righteousness to resentment.

  Claudius or his advisers may have imagined that Alexander’s Jewish origins would enable Fadus’s successor to handle Judaea’s inhabitants more adroitly than his predecessors had and to be more acceptable as a keeper of the peace.e In the event, the young Tiberius Julius remained in Judaea for only two years. He could not be accused of an excess of moderation toward the Jews during his brief tenure. It may be that, recognizing the province as a place where reputations were more easily lost than enhanced, Tiberius Julius contrived an early transfer. It is unlikely to have been granted because Claudius disapproved of his heavy-handedness. Crucifying Jews never earned anyone bad marks; at least not until the Jews themselves could be accused, by Christian polemicists, of having practiced it in the case of Jesus of Nazareth.

  After 48 C.E., Tiberius Julius Alexander spent much of the next fifteen years serving on the eastern borders under the great Domitius Corbulo. In 66, he was personable enough to be given the mission of going to meet the Parthian prince Tiridates in order to escort him on the first stage of his journey to Rome, where Nero confirmed him, with great pomp, as king of Armenia. The king kept his throne for only another six years before he was evicted by an invasion of Alan tribesmen. The Roman emperor might be supreme, but he was not omnipotent.f

  Tiberius Julius Alexander chose to live by his wits. Joseph ben Mattathias had that choice forced upon him. By 69, when the apostate arrived in the Roman camp outside Jerusalem, as a senior member of Titus’s staff, Tiberius Julius had played for high stakes and won. While his mentor, Corbulo, had been forced to suicide, Tiberius Julius was promoted to prefect of Egypt, the grandest post available to anyone of equestrian rank. As things turned out, Nero installed the Alexandrian apostate as governor of his native city in time for him to play a key part in helping Vespasian become the fourth
man, in that single year of 69 C.E., to acquire the purple. Tiberius Julius Alexander was the last military emperor-maker until troops intervened to settle the succession after the death of Commodus in 192. As in 69, four emperors once again competed for power.

  On his return to Judaea, Alexander showed no reluctance, no split feelings, no remorse. He had already been in charge of the repression of the Alexandrian Jews when fifty thousand of them are said to have been slaughtered, probably by some of the same troops he now brought to Palestine. Josephus’s narrative supplies no close-up of the great apostate. He gives the impression that he himself was in friendly contact with Titus, but Alexander was an infinitely more important member of the young commander-in-chief’s entourage. Tessa Rajak suspects that Joseph ben Mattathias could have had closer links to Tiberius Julius than he cared to confess, both in his youth and in the period before the war.1 In that case, Joseph’s famous dream of Vespasian’s ascendancy could have been prompted, if not scripted, by what he had heard being mooted in the procurator’s circle when he was in Alexandria waiting for his boat to Italy. Nevertheless, the implication that Joseph was playing (or taking advantage of) some previously plotted part requires Tiberius Julius to have been improbably indiscreet in the hearing of a young Judaean on his way to plead a case at Nero’s court.