A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  Josephus’s failure to compose in Latin does not prove that he lacked the competence to learn its syntax. Despite having “consolidated” his knowledge of Greek, he admitted to poor pronunciation in alien languages.d With his usual ingenuity, he then made a Jewish virtue of his limitations: “Among us, they do not favor those who have mastered the accent of many nations and made their speech frilly with elegance of diction.… they consider such a pursuit common—not only among.… the free, but even among domestic slaves who desire it.…. They acknowledge wisdom only among those who master the legal system and can bring out the force of the sacred literature.”

  The end of the war in Judaea left Josephus isolated between two worlds, a condition in which few Jews had been before and in which many after him would find themselves. Translated to Rome, Josephus walked among bruising reminders and relics of Jewish humiliation.e The Colosseum grew to be the largest. The paradox of life as a writer in exile was that once he had adopted the mask of another culture and residence in its capital, he was liberated to be more intelligent, because more ambiguous, than in his own.f For centuries, the Delphic oracle had specialized in cleverly cryptic utterances. Classical forms, from Homer to the Hellenistic novel, shaped Josephus’s voluble discourse. He was not alone in such ambitious travesty: Saint Luke’s gospel was emulous of Greek narrative models. Conformity with current styles won readers and lulled censors. Josephus’s contemporary Quintilian, the prototypical literary critic, said that, in good writing, he looked for hidden meanings accessible only to the sophisticated: irony implied the opposite of what appeared on the page.g Sub/versions are the catacombs in which writers can embalm secret sentiments.

  In the analyses of Christian apologists, Josephus was scrutinized, as time went by, for secret winks and nods. Dots were not only joined but also, when necessary, inserted: his words were distorted and glossedh to lend him the oracular voice of a near Christian and so to align him with the version of Agrippa II who, in the Acts of the Apostles, said to Saint Paul, when the latter was arraigned in front of the king in 60, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” Christians assume that Agrippa’s “almost” lacked ironic content. When the sentence is translated into Koine and said aloud, a hint of sarcasm breaks cover.

  The abasement of the Judaean Jews was an instant and abiding signal to Christians that they had graduated to the position of God’s chosen people. For Vespasian and Titus, the boast of Judaea capta enhanced their imperial credibility, not their righteousness. Christian fathers were the first to declare that “the Jews” were not only defeated but damned.i Roman legislators considered that the destruction of Jerusalem entailed no more than that the Judaeans no longer had either a communal identity or a geographical heartland over which a king could properly preside. As a result, although Agrippa II had not failed to supply auxiliaries to Vespasian and had hosted Titus’s victory games (featuring “the entertaining deaths of great numbers of Jewish prisoners”) in the city of Caesarea Philippi, he lost his throne as well as his sister-consort, Berenice. Josephus was then free to depict his now redundant patron, whose policies before the war he had called “peace-loving and courageous” (that is, the same as his own) in scathing terms: Agrippa is condemned in Jewish Antiquities for financing idolatry in Berytus (today’s Beirut). Later in the same book, he is accused of causing divine wrath to descend on Jerusalem. Josephus also chides two of Agrippa’s sisters for marrying unconverted Gentiles. Clearly, far from flirting with Christianity, he remained an unreformed Jew. Its gossipy detail also suggests that Jewish Antiquities was intended at least as much for Jewish readers, especially in Alexandria, as for inquisitive Gentiles.

  After 73, to be a good Jew became a matter less of hierarchical standing than of observing the commandments and their bylaws. In the conditions of what became permanent dispersal, the priesthood lost its mystique. Sacrifice was never again part of Jewish ritual. In the Diaspora, rabbis were regarded as teachers rather than lawgivers, although—as Isaac Bashevis Singer remembered in In My Father’s Court (1997)—the laity often solicited the in-house judgment of venerable sages.j Jews clung to their faith by obeying ancestral obligations to the Holy One. The standoff between Jews and Christians moved into the realm of ideas, to which the enlistment of both Plato and Aristotle as proto-Christians added Hellenic flavors. As Christian propaganda flowered, proselytizing pamphleteers, from John Chrysostom to Saint Augustine, depicted the Jews as an undifferentiated crop of deicides.k

  Any charge—the blood libel the earliest and most persistent—might become an article of faith or folklore if it denigrated “the Jews.” Like ancient slaves, they had no human rights. In the lubricious vocabulary of Christian malevolence, relayed by the Nazis, Jews are often said not really to be men.l In self-conscious refinement of the same sentiment, circumcision has been read, by some Freudians, as symbolic castration. It is more plausible to see it as the mark the community makes on its members: even in the most private acts (excretion and copulation)m Jews are reminded of a corporate, corporal allegiance.

  The recurrence of the same first names in Josephus’s narratives—Jesus or Jeshua, Eleazar, Matthew (Mattathias), Simon, Joseph, Jacob—suggests that, in Second Temple Judaea, family continuity and status were more important, as they were to upper-class Romans, than individual distinction or career; hence the unsentimental view of childhood and the paucity of autobiography and of any but rudimentary personal details about most ancient people and heroes, unless they had some signal defect or precocious merit (the infant Heracles was said to have strangled two snakes sent to kill him by the jealous goddess Hera). Blemishes might be remarked—for instance to disqualify a priest—but no one tells us whether Herod the Great, for example, was tall or short.

  Fifth-century Greeks and Romans, in the great days of the republic, were equally disposed to regard “private life” as a form of dodging the column; militant citizenship was the essence of manhood. Pericles, in his funeral oration of 431 B.C.E., rejected the “idiot,” a citizen who thought only of his own private life, as un-Athenian; no Roman patrician could secede honorably from the res publica, “the public thing”; hence the shame of exile and its solitude. Idiocy, in the Greek sense, was a form of unsociable selfishness, at least in the fifth-century city-state. In the Hellenistic world, self-preservation became the overriding concern; Epicurus supplied a philosophical justification for preferring provincial privacy to metropolitan ambition.n In Rome, sexual excess or romantic obsession (like that of Catullus and, later, of Sextus Propertius) was both a poetic trope and a form of dissidence.o Under the laws promulgated by Augustus, in his belated embrace of conjugal propriety, official Roman policy—like that of the Essenes and, later, of Roman Catholicism—made procreation, an essentially social activity, the sole righteous form of sexual behavior.p

  Augustus extended the vigilance of the imperial apparat to include the arts, especially literature. The most effective form of control was through generous grants to those, Virgil and Horace in particular, whose genius embellished the new order and found roots for it in mythology. In the republic, historians such as Sallust had expressed their disapproval (or personal disappointment) in a more or less overt critical style. Writing in the reign of Augustus, Livy chose to go back to the foundation of Rome and to proceed no further than the Battle of Pydna (Polybius’s nemesis), in 168 B.C.E. Livy’s antiquarianism may have suited his temperament; it also avoided the risk of giving offense to the princeps (Augustus wrote his own Res Gestae, the official history of his achievements).q Poets such as Sextus Propertius made bold to deviate from the obsequious line followed by those laureates who touted for imperial favors, but he did so only with nervous effrontery. Although born (around 57 C.E.) during the reign of Nero, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a socially eminent senator, was careful not to publish his caustic histories (which had a limited, sophisticated audience) until he was living under the indulgent aegis of Trajan and his successors. Tacitus’s acid account of the succession of imperial tyra
nts that had ended with the death of Domitian flattered the Antonine emperors in whose genial light they were written. With all his social advantages, Tacitus bided his time before denouncing the aberrant Julio-Claudians. His unguarded eulogy of the old republic was a form of rhetorical conservatism which borrowed antique lustre to flatter the modern facsimile of a vanished aristocracy for whom honor and patriotism had prompted a principled and often brave way of life.

  Under the upstart Flavians, of whom the deranged Domitian was the last, even native Roman citizens had been wise to wrap their sentiments in Delphic ambiguity. As a naturalized Jew, Josephus worked under the rubric which the brave and solitary Spinoza would adopt, in the liberal, but changeable, climate of seventeenth-century Holland: caute (be careful).r Josephus’s verification of his akribeia (accuracy) in the light of Vespasian’s and Titus’s dispatches and of Agrippa II’s comments helped turn his sources into his collaborators. The diatribe Josephus launched against Justus of Tiberias, in the Vita, suggests that the latter’s criticism may have been sharpened because he was left out of the loop of subsidized authorities.

  It has been claimed that the Aramaic version of The Jewish War was commissioned to alert the Parthians to the futility of provoking the Romans. If the original text resembled the Greek, it was an improbable book for anyone to read on horseback, whichever way an equestrian might be facing. Of the Greek translation, Josephus says only that it was made “for the benefit of the emperor’s subjects.” If it found an appreciative audience among the Jews of Alexandria, they took its moral to be that assimilation was the wisest course. By the second century, most of them had adopted Greek names and embraced the cosmopolitan culture against which the Zealots had risen in ruinous revolt.s

  a In a similar spirit, when Henry Kissinger was asked what he thought about the Iran-Iraq War, he replied, “Pity only one side can lose.” George Walden heard him say it.

  b The Olympian gods actually sat at table with mortals until the Lydian king Tantalus took gastronomic innovation to the point of serving his divine guests with the flesh of his own son, Pelops. This put an end to any such commensality. It was and is, of course, unthinkable that Yahweh should participate in a meal, although he is always properly thanked for providing it.

  c The Romans themselves, like other muscular imperialists, had small mimetic aptitude when pronouncing foreign languages. When, in 281 B.C.E., they were negotiating with Tarentum (a Spartan colony in Magna Graecia), the bad Greek of the leading Roman ambassador, Postumius, is said to have been “so ungrammatical and strangely accented that the Tarentines could not conceal their amusement.” (Cited by Mary Beard, reviewing Stephen Halliwell’s Greek Laughter in the Times Literary Supplement, Feburary 18, 2009.) The Romans did not see the joke and brutally appropriated Tarentum.

  d It does not entail that he lacked written fluency any more than Henry Kissinger did in Diplomacy. Accentual mastery is not necessary for competence, and need not inhibit brilliance, on the page. Joseph Conrad’s spoken English was sometimes incomprehensible.

  e One can imagine him deliberately choosing not to look at them, just as certain Frenchmen, like the family in Vercors’s Le silence de la mer, refused ever even to acknowledge the presence of the Germans during the Occupation. Vercors was the pseudonym of Jean Marcel Bruller, an Alsatian Jew (as Alfred Dreyfus had been).

  f As an exile in post-1945 Paris, E. M. Cioran—a Romanian tainted by his anti-Semitic and Fascist past—assumed a new identity by dressing his morbid pensées in the aphoristic morgue of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat (he also paraded a belated philo-Semitism).

  g Archaism has the same utility. Josephus’s use of Thucydides’s fifth-century term stasis, when alluding to the civil war in Jerusalem, served to remind Roman readers how common it was in Italy itself, without Josephus ever alluding directly to the turbulence of recent Roman history.

  h Steve Mason points out (Life of Josephus, p. 225 and following) that Josephus was alleged to have endorsed the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth by saying, “This man was the Christ.” The term meant only “wetted, anointed” and was meaningful to Jews (while never implying divinity), but never to Greeks of the period, for whom Chrestos was a common slave name.

  i The organizers of the new faith appropriated, consciously or not, the taxonomy that, in Aristotle’s philosophy, warranted the righteousness of Alexander the Great’s assault on the Persian Empire by designating “barbarians” —all non-Greeks—as natural slaves. Mutatis mutandis, Christians became the equivalent of Aristotle’s Greeks and the Jews their proper inferiors. Further pious work darkened the Jews into the henchmen of the devil and the embodiment of treachery.

  j Rabbinic verdicts were not enforced by any civil power, but they were generally honored as immeasurably more just than any judgment a Jew might expect in a Gentile court of law.

  k After the Shoah, some citizens of the self-announced most Catholic country in Europe persuaded themselves, and hoped to convince others, that the Jews had killed Poland, “the Christ among nations.” The Jewish victims of the Nazis and, in many cases, of Polish malice were transformed into the perpetrators both of their own and of Poland’s misfortunes. Survivors were murdered or driven, forcefully, into exile.

  l Isaac Cardoso (in Yerushalmi’s From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto) testifies that it was common in seventeenth-century Spain to believe that male Jews menstruated. To read circumcision as a form of emasculation is a pseudoscientific gloss on the same notion. Arnold Schwarzenegger was never so Austrian as when he spoke of “girlie men,” a description that, according to Otto Weininger, applied especially to Jews (of which Weininger was one by birth). Schwarzenegger was being no more anti-Semitic than he was intelligent.

  m Cf. W. H. Auden, in pious mode, in 1944: “Everything [man] does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself.” (The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, vol. 2, Prose: 1939–1948, edited by Edward Mendelson, p. 229.)

  n Cultivating one’s garden was a less arduous form of the rural life that, in Greco-Roman literature from Hesiod to Varro and Virgil, was regularly celebrated as more honest than politics or commerce. Apprehension about money and its power begins almost as soon as the invention of coinage in the sixth century B.C.E. For a cogent analysis of the influence of coinage on ancient society and philosophy, see Richard Seaford’s Money and the Early Greek Mind. In his Politics (58 a 37), Aristotle considered moneymaking “unnatural” as against the self-sufficiency of the agricultural way of life. When they were confined to the ghetto, money-lending became the Jews’ main form of enriching themselves, when they could. The ancient anathema on such activities laid them open to another charge metamorphosed from ancient moralities (Roman senators were forbidden to be involved in trade, although they almost all gambled on the equivalent of the stock exchange).

  o Latin lovers found a truer, supposedly more sincere, world elsewhere; passion justified absenteeism. André Malraux said that eroticism is “a way of escaping one’s era”; hence both its attraction and the (now derelict) fence of pious prohibitions surrounding it.

  p Although known to be practiced, homosexuality was officially deplored or ridiculed among the Romans. All penetration was conquest and therefore manly; but to be penetrated was to be demeaned, hence effeminate. Oral sex was explicitly ridiculed by Catullus and by Martial, as was masturbation in the biblical case of Onan (who may have been practicing coitus interruptus as a means of birth control, as men often did when contraceptive devices were unavailable). The ancient world needed all the babies its inhabitants could make, especially if they were males. The turnover of warriors in ancient Greece meant that it was more important for Spartan women to be pregnant than faithful; this led to the emancipation of female citizens, who were even allowed to own and inherit property.

  q Winston Churchill made sure that, as soon as possible after World War II, his own prompt history of it should become the primary source for assess
ing its major figures.

  r Spinoza wore a signet ring with Caute incised in it (Nadler, Spinoza, p. 244).

  s Alexandria’s population would remain a polyglot amalgam until Gamal Abdel Nasser took the chance, in the late 1950s, to evict both Jews and Greeks, not a few of whose ancestors had been resident in Egypt centuries before the Arab invasion, and to appropriate their houses and goods.

  XIV

  MARTIN GOODMAN is the most recent of several historians who have set Jerusalem at the opposite pole to Rome. He posits Jerusalem as a sort of spiritual Carthage: its destruction in 70 C.E. left Rome and its emperor to enjoy what the Chinese called “the mandate of heaven” and Christian apologists “translatio imperii”—regime change graced by divine fiat. As the symbolic home of revealed religion, Jerusalem has more often been placed at the opposite pole to Athens, which is made to stand for science and the humanities. Alexandria, by contrast, was a quite new foundation, willed into existence in 331 B.C.E., only three and a half centuries before Joseph ben Mattathias’s birth. When Alexander the Great added Egypt to his bag of conquests after defeating the Persians, he created a city to stamp his authority, and name, on the most venerable state in the Mediterranean.a It is tempting to think that anyone of Joseph’s cosmopolitan tastes would have been much more at home as a citizen of Alexandria. Its large Jewish population was of a markedly different temper from that of Jerusalem.

  In a cardinal position, between east and west, Egypt’s capital city was literally flashy: its harbor’s towering lighthouse, on Pharos Island, advertised the city’s wealth, welcome and innovative ingenuity (pharos became, and remains, the Greek word for “lighthouse”).b It was a place of opportunity, as New York was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its population was descended almost entirely from immigrants—many Jews and more Greeks, of various Hellenistic stripes. When pleading in favor of Rabirius Postumus, that otherwise ardent Hellenist Marcus Tullius Cicero could call Alexandria “the source of all trickery and deceit.”c Cicero’s contemporary Diodorus Siculus was less alarmist: in his view, no city could rival it “in elegance, extent, riches and luxury.”