b Josephus says (Jewish War V: 41), in G. A. Williamson’s version, that “he was entrusted with command as a reward for having been the first to welcome the newly emerged imperial dynasty and with splendid faith to throw in his lot with theirs when the future was uncertain.”
c Martin Goodman remarks that the attraction of messianic figures such as Theudas was precisely because of their “lack of institutional authority or social status” (The Ruling Class of Judaea, p. 78). The cult of Dionysos (the divine outsider) was similarly external to the Greek city and defied its rulers. Seaford (Reciprocity and Ritual) offers a very full account of Dionysos as the ambivalent force that brought both disruption and regeneration to the city.
d The Roman autocratic scheme, apparently so solid, was the result of what François Mitterrand (referring to General de Gaulle’s engineered ascension to power in 1958) would call a “coup d’état permanent.” Augustus had endowed himself with the trappings of constitutional propriety, but he was an unelected tyrant who had come to the throne along bloody tracks. Each Julio-Claudian emperor succeeded the previous one with uneasy presumption. Attachment to the imperial family shortened the life expectancy of any attractive alternatives to the incumbent ruler.
e The British had the same hopes when they made the Jewish liberal politician and philosopher Herbert Samuel their high commissioner in 1930s Palestine. In trying to abate communal conflict between Jews and Arabs, Samuel leaned over backward so far that he approved the selection of the virulently anti-Jewish Amin al-Husseini as grand mufti of Jerusalem. A well-intentioned English Jew awarded supreme authority to a fanatical enemy of the renewed, and increasing, Jewish presence. In imperial administration, it is seldom enough to be decent and fair-minded. David Lloyd George, who was neither, remarked of the philosophical Samuel (whose liberalism was not of the Welshman’s brand), “When they circumcised him, they threw away the wrong bit.”
f Almost three centuries later, Constantine the Great’s enrollment under the banner of the Christian God would, he hoped, ally divine might (and favor) with temporal power.
g A source that must remain anonymous has told me that he was once reproached by the great ancient historian’s wife for speaking to Sir Moses Finley in a “Jewish way.” The quondam Moses Finkelstein was, she said, now a Buddhist.
h Heinrich Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution, would be the darkest instance of the Jew turned Jew-killer, if the rumors of his ancestry are anything more than a spiteful canard put about by those who resented his handsome ascendancy in the Nazi hierarchy, which, according to Dawidowicz (The War Against the Jews), they are almost certainly not.
i This verdict would be appropriated by Christian preachers, such as Saint John Chrysostom, the man with the golden mouth: “Although Jews had been called to be adopted as his sons, they fell to kinship with dogs; we who were dogs received the strength through God’s grace to put aside irrational nature.… and rise to the honor of sons.” (For Saint John Chrysostom’s dicta, see Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews.) Disinheritance was transformed into a genocidal warrant by other theological enemies of the Jews in later centuries. Cain and Abel became archetypal figures. The Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus (born in Syria in 330) depicted the brothers as “the first Christians” and the murder of one by the other as conduct “worse than that of wild beasts.” Saint Augustine made Cain stand for the Jewish people, his brother for Jesus: “Abel, the younger brother, is killed by the elders of the Jews.… so the voice of the Holy Scriptures accuses the Jews.”
j As the Polish partisans did in Andrzej Wajda’s film Kanal. In both cases, none escaped. A recent Polish film, Agnieska Holland’s In Darkness, tells the true story of a handful of Jews from Lwów who survived by hiding, for fourteen months, in the rat-infested sewers of the city. They were brought food by a “righteous Gentile.” According to the film’s postscript, when the latter was killed in a road accident in 1945, it was said, loudly, by other Poles that this was Jesus’s judgment on him for helping Jews.
k So did the Sephardic Jews from Thessaloníki in Auschwitz.
l Almost two millennia later, anti-Semites in Arthur Schnitzler’s and Theodor Herzl’s Vienna would chant “Hep, hep, hep!” (an acronym for Hierosolyma est perdita) when they encountered a Jew. For two thousand years, scattered Jews repeated the pious wish “Next year in Jerusalem” as they celebrated Passover.
m The posthumous cult of those who, for the sake of the city, died in battle or in obedience to a loyal oath was not unusual in Greek lore. The much-respected Attic shrine of Aglauros was in honor of the daughter of Cecrops who “voluntarily killed herself in response to an oracle promising to Athens victory in war in return for a suicide” (Richard Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, pp. 212, 214).
n Atkinson also suggests that the fall of Gamala, the hill town that somewhat resembled Jotapata, came about because Joseph revealed a vulnerable section of the walls to the Romans. He reasons that, since Joseph had, before the arrival of Vespasian, spent money on reinforcing the walls, he knew where they could best be undermined and so shortened the siege. Josephus’s account may be melodramatized and—like all ancient histories—statistically unreliable, but if it is even roughly true, the Romans had a hard time reducing the place. That Gamala did eventually fall to the Romans scarcely entails that it was betrayed.
o Literally “in the crotch.” In my translation of the Satyrica, I call him “Mr. Crotchety.”
XII
JOSEPH HOPED, in vain, that the Jews in Jerusalem would surrender the city before it was too late; but however the siege ended, he must have been conscious that his utility to the Romans would then cease. What would become of him? If he was a turncoat of a kind, he never sought to exempt himself from the Jewish cause. In this he differed, for example, from a certain Antiochus, an apostate Jew—“son of a respectable father”—whose claim that the city’s Jews were planning to burn down Agrippa II’s capital prompted the pogroms that literally inflamed the Syrian city.a Despite his services to them, Joseph was too compromised, in the eyes of the Roman military, to hope for access to the cursus honorum. His most plausible role was that of oracular savant. His “annunciation” of Vespasian’s coming glory, after he emerged from Jotapata, was timely but not unique: according to rabbinic tradition, Johanan ben Zakkai, a leader of the Tannaim, a Pharisaic sect trained in the oral tradition, later came out of besieged Jerusalem, where he had preached “moderation,” and he too hailed Vespasian as “Imperator.”1
Vidal-Naquet notes that, after his comely (if somewhat banal) salutation, Johanan received imperial permission to found a rabbinical college in Jamnia (modern Yavneh).2 The Romans were ruthless, but they had none of the doctrinal animus that later armed European Christendom with vindictive zeal. After Jerusalem fell, the forced abandonment by the Jews of the ceremonial rites, and of the sacrificial cults associated with them, altered the practice of Judaism beyond easy recognition. It could no longer be centered in Jerusalem, except in the memories and hopes of its practicants. Biblical scholarship and rabbinic counsel were all that remained of the theatrical flamboyance of the High Priests and their acolytes in the Second Temple period. The sects that had thronged its courts lost the focal point that had held their disputatious dissidence together.
The Sadducees, as well as the Essenes, are said to have “disappeared”; but not for the same reason. The Essenes had been massacred. The eviction of the Jews from Jerusalem had the incidental effect of disbanding the Sadducees, if only because their worship centered on Temple ceremonial and dutiful repetition. The rabbis who met at Yavneh after the war agreed, however dolefully, on an “extraterritorial” version of Judaism, centered on discourse and texts. Johanan ben Zakkai inspired them to neo-Pharisaism. His tailoring of its practices allowed the studious style of Judaism alone to survive as a force strong enough to rival, and question, Christianity. As a result, the evangelists had reason to pillory the Pharisees of Jesus’s time and t
o depict them, retrospectively, as His principal and priggish rivals. Freud’s “narcissism of small differences” impelled Christians to widen the distinction between Jesus and teachers such as Hillel into a chasm. The de-Judaizing of Christianity grew more obsessive as time went by. It became psychotic in the mysticism of the “saintly” twentieth-century apostate Simone Weil, who wanted to amputate the Old Testament from the Bible and delete the influence of Roman civilization in order to substitute Hellenism and Platonism as the sole antique sources of Christian doctrine. The long standoff between Christianity and Judaism has always had the lineaments of a civil war. The two sides understood each other all too well.
By the end of 69, Vespasian, already sixty years old and of undistinguished origin, had become the ruler of the known world. His worthiness to be emperor was validated, in the eyes of the citizens of Rome itself, by the lavishness with which he was able to celebrate the subjugation of the Judaeans. Was anyone disenchanted enough to remark that his triumph was the first in which a Roman general had treated the suppression of a revolt in a minor province as if it were a new conquest? The advertisement of the pillage and destruction of Jerusalem added luster to the Flavians. His triumphal parade through Rome was a living newsreel. A family without impressive pedigree became instantly glorious. The nascent Colosseum—funded, so an inscription announced, by “the spoils of Judaea”b—was a monumental lesson, from which others were advised to learn. Under the shattered walls of Jotapata, Vespasian had been happy to take Joseph ben Mattathias’s words as a divine omen; on his deathbed he would resume the Sabine realism that had been his mark as soldier and emperor. His last words—“Vae puto deus fio” (Alas, I think I am becoming a god)—convey succinct skepticism about the existence of any celestial scheme of the kind that, according to Josephus, had sanctified his autocracy.
Whatever might become of his native Judaea after the war, Joseph would certainly be a marked man if he stayed there. His years with the Roman army had been an education in duplicity. For the rest of his quite long life, he would always be intelligent but never forthright, never wholly himself. Like Racine’s Christian, he might have said, “My God, what a cruel war! I find two men in myself.” Life in the Roman camp, under often scowling surveillance, had required willful self-control. His writing proved an extension of the same exercise. Skillful verbosity offered a way of at once making a name for himself and secreting unspoken feelings. Josephus was the first of many exiles who, whatever their internal dissidence, impersonated conformity with a dominant culture. Need there be anything “typically Jewish” in such imposture? Roman and Greek education encouraged the emulation of noble models. Schools of rhetoric combined “creative writing” with dramatic impersonations. To be an advocate, in court and politics, was an exercise in style. To make a name for oneself was the common goal. Under tyrants, ancient and modern, outspokenness has been a luxury few could afford. Imposture may have its secret pleasures but, for the survivor, public conformity is the rule.c
Memories were all Joseph could carry with him when he sailed for Italy with Titus in 71, together with the booty from Jerusalem and the “tallest and most handsome” of the prisoners,3 who were destined to be butchered to make a Roman holiday. Titus reserved one trophy for himself: Agrippa II’s sister Berenice. He had fallen in love with “the Jewish Cleopatra” during the campaign.
A dozen years older than the emperor’s son, she was, according to ancient standards, a mature matron of forty-five by the war’s end. She is not said by Josephus to have tried to influence Titus’s conduct toward the Jews as she had that of Gessius Florus. The fact that she is unmentioned in The Jewish War, after the outset of hostilities, suggests its author’s tacit disapproval of a woman whose passion, or opportunism, was greater than her faith. There is a hint of Essene condescension toward female levity in the indulgence with which Berenice is spared solemn censure.
She continued to live with her brother in Antioch until they both traveled to Rome two years after the fall of Masada. The complaisant Agrippa was appeased with praetorian status and by an extension of his royal lease. Berenice and Titus resumed their passionate relationship for four more years. Since Agrippa stayed in Rome at least some of the time, it is likely that Josephus had occasion to solicit detailed information about the war. Their correspondence seems to have continued for a while.d Suetonius says that Titus promised to marry Berenice, but that when he succeeded Vespasian, in 79, raison d’état prevailed. Titus was led to believe, perhaps by catcalls when he attended the Games, that the Roman public would not accept an Oriental princess, now over fifty years old, as his Augusta. Racine prefaces his tragedy on the subject by quoting Suetonius’s curt text: “Titus, reginam Berenicen cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.”e In the play itself, Racine makes the Romans’ visceral dislike of all royalty the sole motive for Berenice’s eclipse.f
If Racine has it right, Berenice proved an unselfish, if tearful, Cleopatra: she agreed to renounce the man she loved for the sake of his reputation and future glory. It is tempting to see her rejection by the Romans as foreshadowing the failure of Jews ever quite to be accepted in European society, but Racine depicts her as unacceptable only because she was a “queen”; and the Roman people, he says, abominated royalty: “Rome haït tous les rois; et Bérénice est reine.” Her Jewishness was irrelevant. In his 1844 essay on the play, Sainte-Beuve depicts Racine’s Bérénice as “scarcely a Jew, already a Christian, that’s to say, resigned” (to her eclipse); “she will return to her Palestine, and perhaps meet some disciple of the apostles who will show her the way of the Cross.” There is no evidence that the resilient lady did anything of the kind. She came back, hopefully, to Rome after Titus was emperor, but her lover refused to see her. According to Ronald Syme, there is erudite, if larky, speculation that the fifty-year-old beauty then married the elderly king Sohaemus of Emesa, who, like Agrippa II, had supplied auxiliaries to Vespasian’s four legions at the siege of Jerusalem.4
After his arrival in Rome, the renamed Titus Flavius Josephus was housed on the fashionable Quirinal, not in the main imperial compound on the Palatine. One of the consequences of his Roman citizenship was that it severed the connection between him and his children. Vespasian allotted him a stipend in order to write the history that would, on the face of it, glorify his patrons. These favors did not imply that Josephus was a member of the emperor’s suite. He was never formally dignified as his amicus. The new imperial family enfranchised a long quota of arrivistes and hallmarked them with “Titus Flavius” before their Romanized names. Placatory donatives were distributed to clients whose gratitude would solder them to the new regime.
If Josephus was free to walk among the Seven Hills, did he find time to visit the new three-dimensional advertisements of Titus’s victory? His illustrated arch was part of the stone furniture that conveyed what Ezra Pound called “news that stays news.” The lapidary headlines on the Flavian monument told passersby that Titus “subdued the race of the Judaeans and destroyed the city of Jerusalem, which by all generals and kings of races previous to himself had either been attacked in vain or not even attempted.” In the ancient world, when it came to rendering a falsehood true, no one was more convincing than a good stonemason. Hadrian’s defeat of the Bar-Kochba revolt proved almost as great a military achievement as the Flavians’, but it had no equivalent billboard in Rome.g As an addicted Hellenist, Hadrian cared more about his reputation in the eastern Mediterranean, where his monuments are plentiful.
Vespasian took a certain pride in his lack of august lineage. The great, now deified, Augustus was beyond criticism, but the last of the Julio-Claudians, Nero, was so disgraced that the Flavians made a virtue of their detachment from him. The new emperor took all available measures to make himself and his dynasty legitimate and respected. He built for the public’s pleasure rather than for his own gratification. He despised affectation and artiness: when a young man came to thank him for being made prefect, V
espasian was affronted by his use of perfume and retracted the appointment. “You should have smelt of garlic,” he told him.5 The emperor nevertheless commissioned several works of literature, apart from Josephus’s, for the glorification of his regime. Silius Italicus, Valerius Flaccus, Papinius Statius and other poets did their rococo best to embellish the Flavians.
The most influential (and durable) writer of the time was Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. The first professional literary critic and an almost exact contemporary of Josephus’s, he wrote an oration in defense of Queen Berenice (perhaps as an exercise in winsome contrariness). He did not hail any of the epic poets of the day as a latter-day Virgil. Vespasian might be as ruthless as Augustus had been, but he was never as pretentious: when one of the literati flattered him by tracing the emperor’s pedigree to Heracles, who was said to have visited Sabine Italy, he was greeted with “roars of rustic laughter.” No such laughter would be tolerated by the church when it came to the improbable travels and miraculous achievements of Christian saints and apostles.
Flavian loot from Jerusalem decorated Rome’s Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace, which became a dynastic museum. It was swagged with the great curtain from the inner sanctum of Herod’s Temple. Artifacts from Jerusalem centralized world power in the metropolis where they were on display. Most of the exhibits were looted yet again, in 455, when the Vandal king Gaiseric conquered and sacked Rome. Almost a century after that, Belisarius, the great Byzantine general—a latter-day Corbulo whose victories served Justinian much better than Justinian treated him—repossessed “the ornaments of the Jews” and dispatched them to Jerusalem, for the enhancement of the Christian community’s trophy cabinet.
A Jew Among Romans Page 21