Although their biblical connection with Egypt went back to the Hebrews’ enslavement under the pharaohs, Alexandria’s emancipated Jews lived in a Hellenized city. Egyptians never figured among its elite. As in Los Angeles, everything that made the city great was built on sand. The upstart Ptolemies had soon displayed the cultural ambitions of well-heeled intruders. Their voluminous library and illustrious Mouseion (home of the Muses) were ostentatiously endowed. Salaried professors and librarians staffed an institution where scholarship and “music” enjoyed a virtually autonomous domain. Alexandria’s Mouseion founded a new school of poetry, precious and arcane. In the third century B.C.E., Callimachus and his imitators (two centuries later, Catullus was among their smart Roman followers) created verbal artifacts in the spirit of Fabergé’s exquisite baubles for the last czars. Specializing in recondite allusion, Callimachus played the cultural arbiter: small was beautiful, less was more. Embellishing a mythology concerning gods in whom they had no ardent faith, the scholar-poets of Alexandria were encomiastic parasites on a Hellas that no longer existed. Art was an alternative to life; poetry, a gloss on religion and a faith in itself. Cicero called Catullus and his friends neoteroi, a pun combining tribute to their youth with a hint that they were firebrands. In The Jewish War, Josephus regularly uses neoterizein to denote the instigators of social revolution, ancient Angry Young Men.
Literature had been among Alexandria’s earliest exports. The first translation into Greek of what would be known as the first five books of the Old Testament is said to have been commissioned in the third century B.C.E., when seventy-two Jewish translators, all imported Jews, were sequestered on the island of Pharos at the peremptory invitation of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The separate sections of the text were alleged to have meshed miraculously into a seamless narrative. It is a pretty story, but scholarship has since proved that the Septuagint (which incorporated other texts as well as the Torah) was written by different hands at different times, as was the Quran.d
Alexandria’s Jews might take their God and His ordinances seriously; but they could not deny or ignore that they were citizens of a great trading center and the neighbors of an intellectual forcing house. The lure of assimilation is caught in Constantine Cavafy’s 1919 poem “Of the Jews (A.D. 50),” about a young man “from a family affiliated to the synagogue.” In it he claims to care less for Hellenism’s cult of physical beauty than for what he “wants to remain forever.… one of the Jews, the holy Jews.” Cavafy concludes:
But he didn’t remain anything of the sort.
Hedonism and the Art of Alexandria
Held him their addicted son.
Friction between Jews and Greeks was not uncommon and, to the Romans, not unwelcome: it justified their self-righteous presence as keepers of the peace. Egypt’s grain crop was more important to the Roman economy than Alexandria’s academic verses, although Roman poets liked to feed on them. Unlike Judaea, Egypt was the emperor’s personal fiefdom. Its governors were always equites, members of the often mercantile and well-heeled middle class. The best of them could be relied on for administrative competence. Alexandrian Jews suffered more regularly than its Greeks from Roman repression, yet part of their unpopularity was due to a Greek tendency to identify the Jewish presence with Roman imperialism. The city’s pivotal position required it to be policed with repressive severity. Its streets were said to be safer than those of Rome itself.
Apion, a local grandee related to the last of the Ptolemies, profited from his connections to become head of the Alexandrian library. He and his colleague Chaeremon wrote a history of Egypt barbed with disparagement of the Jews. Apion provided early evidence of the compatibility of erudition and fraudulence when he derived the Jewish word for “Sabbath” from an Egyptian word for a disease of the groin. His mention of Moses having climbed Mount Sinai suggests familiarity with Hebrew Scriptures, but Apion had been equally happy to retail the oddly persistent story that the Jews worshipped an ass’s head (kanthelios) that was kept in the Jerusalem Temple.
Since the Hellenized Apion had died in 48 C.E., Josephus was free to vent his scorn and amuse his Gentile readers by putting down the old Homeric scholar as an “Egyptian.” He must have known that the Romans found Egypt’s animal cults outlandish. More important, Cleopatra’s notorious alliance with Mark Antony (who was said to have been subjugated by her Oriental charms)e had left Egypt’s old ruling dynasty with a rancid reputation. No Roman emperor could take offense at a writer who belittled anyone connected with the Ptolemies. Against Apion was a prolonged apology for Judaism in which Josephus could exercise his polemical resources without risk of any response from their target. No one in Rome would argue with his jibe that, although the Jews might have been defeated from time to time, the Egyptians had never been free men at all, since they always served tyrants. He takes the opportunity to repudiate the charge that the Jews had a lackluster history of political insubordination and military failure. Misfortunes did not prove lack of courage. He cites the Athenians and the Spartans: “The latter universally agreed to be the most courageous of the Greeks, the former the most pious,” he writes, noting that neither of them had escaped defeat in battle. Here he succumbs to the antithetical manner of his model, Thucydides. In fact, the Spartans were both courageous and—as Herodotus had pointed out—exceptionally pious. In 490 B.C.E., they had failed to reach Marathon in order to participate in the Athenians’ victory over Darius because they had dared not abridge the religious festival of the Hyakinthia. They arrived only in time to congratulate the victors, laconically.
Apion must have suggested that Egypt had been spared calamity because of its true piety and prudence. In repudiation, Josephus lists a great number of temples, of all faiths, that had been destroyed, without including Herod’s in Jerusalem. “No one,” he concludes, “blames these things on the victims but, rather, on the perpetrators.” Nowhere does Josephus accuse the Romans directly of the willful destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. He does, however, have Eleazar, the defender of Masada, complain that the Romans’ uprooting of the Temple was “houtos anosios,” an extremely unholy act. By putting the words in a rebel mouth, Josephus was able to appear to disown them, but it was still he who put them there.f
Apion also alleged that when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes entered the same Temple, in 173 B.C.E., he discovered a captive Greek who was being fattened for the annual sacrifice of a Gentile. Antiochus IV was the monarch who, by his furious repression of the Jews, incited the Maccabean uprising that eventually evicted the Seleucids from Judaea. Antiochus IV’s “eyewitness” evidence smacks of a bad loser’s parting shot.g Apion’s recital of the plan to sacrifice the plump Greek was a seminal instance of the blood libel that, with a variety of Christian embellishments, would endure, despite its regular rejection, sometimes by ecclesiastical dignitaries, and metastasize into Islamic anti-Semitism and eventually feature, in our own times, on modern Egyptian (and thus Alexandrian) television.
The great Jewish commentator Philo makes no mention of Apion, although the two philhellenic scholars were contemporaries and, to some extent, two of a kind.h Philo could only have been an Alexandrian. His ignorance of Hebrew and his fluency in Greek prove that he would have been out of place in Jerusalem. Unlike his Romanized nephew, the apostate Tiberius Julius Alexander, Philo never renounced the Jewish faith. He did, however, read the Torah in a Greek light: his biblical commentaries reconciled Jewish and Platonic ideas. He also attended Greek games, went to the races in the hippodrome and enjoyed the theater.i
For Philo, the narrative in Genesis spells out the logical order of things, but does not entail their serial creation. His version chimes with Saint John’s Greco-Christian notion of the Logos as the beginning of everything.1 Philo’s life was decorous and scholarly. At Jerusalem, his ideas might have made him a target for the Sicarii; in the Jewish community of Alexandria, he was revered as a sage. In dignified old age, after violent riots in the city, he was persuaded to lead the Je
wish delegation that went to Rome, in 39, to plead with Caligula against the Alexandrian Greeks who had fomented the trouble for which they now blamed the Jews.
Herod the Great’s grandson Agrippa had been the emperor’s boyhood friend. He and Caligula lived in privileged isolation on the island of Capri, where—according to Suetonius—the elderly emperor Tiberius moped in pedophile misanthropy, an autocrat who splashed out only in his swimming pool, where he liked to be attended by a shoal of succulent minors. Agrippa had been sent from Judaea to Rome in order to be educated and also to live unthreatened by the wrangles between Herod’s heirs.j Fruit of a variety of mothers, they resolved the issues of inheritance by alternating fratricide with appeals to Rome.
In 37 C.E., Tiberius died and Caligula became emperor. Agrippa was rewarded by his youthful companion with the throne of Judaea. Almost immediately, there were violent anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria. They may have been encouraged by the prefect of Egypt, Avilius Flaccus, who had been in the post for five years. As long as Tiberius was on the throne, Flaccus had acted with impartiality toward Jews and Greeks. The prefect’s principal office was to keep the peace and to make sure that the grain fleet sailed regularly to the new entrepôt at Ostia, built by the emperor Claudius. Alarmed by rumors of Caligula’s execution of Macro, the praetorian prefect, and of Tiberius’s grandson Tiberius Gemellus, among others left over from the previous reign, Flaccus chose to make trouble between the communities and then to side with the Greeks. What better than a spasm of sectarian strife to render his experienced services indispensable?
Apion’s polemic, to which Josephus was to make belated reply, dated from this period. It justified the hostility of the Greeks (and Flaccus’s partiality in their favor) by the charge that the Jews were not legitimate citizens; parasites from “Syria,” they occupied “undesirable” parts of the city. The Lower East Side of New York and the East End of London were, for many years, similarly said to be infected by those who had no choice but to live in them. Jewish religious practices had little to do with Apion’s case; they might be bizarre, but there was no unified Gentile doctrine with which they clashed, as there would be when dogmatic Christianity became mandatory. For native Egyptians and Greeks alike, the local Jews were resented not least because their presence was identified with that of the same Romans who, under Flaccus’s leadership, had turned so violently against them.k
In 39 C.E., Herod’s grandson Agrippa landed in Alexandria on his way to assume the throne in Antioch. He was met and jostled by hostile demonstrators. A local clown called Carabas dressed up as “the king of the Jews” and parodied Agrippa’s strut. The mob called on Governor Flaccus to put images of the new emperor in the local synagogues, a provocative demand that he himself may well have scripted, knowing that it was bound to meet with doctrinaire Jewish opposition, which the Greeks could interpret, loudly, as disloyalty to Rome. Flaccus took the opportunity to rescind the Jews’ citizenship. They could then be pillaged and murdered with impunity. A number were killed and wounded, but the community defended itself and fought the Greeks to a standstill. Flaccus alleged that Jewish Zealots from outside Egypt had imported the violence, but his men failed to discover the expected stocks of arms in the Jewish homes they looted.
With some courage, Agrippa returned to Alexandria after the pogrom. Having investigated its source and conduct, he denounced Flaccus to Caligula. The governor’s connivance must have been flagrant: the prefect was sent to the island of Andros and later executed. Philo interpreted this outcome as “indubitable proof that the help which God can give was not withdrawn from the nation of the Jews.” The same determination to see God’s hand in the affairs of men was to find a sorry parallel in Josephus’s history of the disaster that would afflict Judaea after Philo’s death.
On reaching Rome, in 39, Philo and his friends had a difficult time with Caligula. The audience turned into a shouting match between Jews and Greeks. The emperor—primed by an Egyptian named Helicon, whom Philo refers to as “an abominable, execrable slave”—called the Jews “god haters” who did not believe him to be divine. How was it, he was prompted to ask, that he was acknowledged as a god by everyone else? Philo must have supplied a calming answer. Caligula soon proved more interested in teasing the Jews than in theological inquiry. Why should he take seriously the beliefs of people who refused to eat something as delicious as pork? (Romans rarely ate beef or mutton.) In an excess of amiable impatience, the emperor wished a plague on both their houses, Greek and Jewish, and dismissed them from his presence.
Philo probably considered a draw to be an excellent result. Nevertheless, several members of his delegation were kept in custody in Rome. The emperor’s belief in his own divinity was no joke. Later in 39, when Gentiles in Jamnia, on the coast of Judaea, erected an altar in Caligula’s honor, their Jewish fellow citizens were provoked, as expected, into pulling it down. When the local procurator, Capito, reported the incident to Rome, the emperor was incensed. Rage had become Caligula’s characteristic condition. He ordered Capito’s superior, Petronius, the legate stationed in Syria, to install a colossal statue of him in the Temple in Jerusalem.2
Instructed to use all the force needed to honor the emperor’s decision, Petronius was astute enough to hasten slowly. He marched into Palestine with two full legions and the usual auxiliaries, but quartered them in the largely Greek city of Ptolemais (founded by the Egyptian dynasty at a time when it had control of the region). Petronius then commissioned a large statue of the divinity from the best sculptors in Sidon (whose artists were famed for their excellence). Philo reports that he negotiated simultaneously with the Jerusalem authorities, hoping that the Sanhedrin would find a peaceful way to indulge the emperor’s desires. He hoped in vain: when the news of Caligula’s intentions reached the streets of Jerusalem, a throng of citizens marched on Petronius’s headquarters in Ptolemais in order to demonstrate, yet again, the Jews’ implacable opposition to the emplacement of a graven image.
Petronius remained cool. Conscious that he could not do as Caligula wished without a wholesale massacre of Jews, he ordered the craftsmen in Sidon to take very, very great care, and all the time they needed, to make their statue a masterpiece worthy of its donor. He then informed Caligula of the scrupulous aesthetics behind the delay. The governor was pleased to add that, in the interim, the mood in the province was peaceful enough for a good harvest to be gathered. The emperor was not amused or appeased. Fortunately, however, Agrippa happened to be in Rome. He used his emollient skill to persuade his boyhood friend to cancel the imposition of the statue in the Temple precinct. In return, Agrippa promised, he would have altars set up in Caligula’s honor in other Judaean cities. He knew, as Caligula seemingly did not, that such statuary was already a common embellishment in Hellenized communities. Jewish residents might avert their eyes from pagan images, but they had to tolerate and do business among them.
Knowing nothing of Agrippa’s démarche, but aware of growing tension in the province, Petronius wrote to the emperor requesting that the order to impose the statue on the Temple be rescinded. As an administrator, he did the sensible thing; but his letter was delivered to a paranoid psychopath. Going back on his word to Agrippa, Caligula ordered a huge new statue of himself to be made in Italy. He proposed to ship it to Palestine and have it inserted all of a sudden into Jerusalem. Pending its construction, he sent word to Petronius, advising him to commit suicide. As it happened, the emperor was stabbed to death before the governor’s deadline. It requires a hectic determinist not to reflect that, if Judaea had been governed by more officials of Petronius’s qualities, the disaster Josephus recorded need never have happened.
Philo remains a remote and austere figure, but his patient humanism, spiced with amiable guile, was typically Alexandrian. The Ptolemies’ city featured the great Alexander’s tomb, but it had no presiding deity and no scriptural embroidery. Its hybrid population, if fractious, was more devious than dogmatic. The aesthetic skirmishing of its academics was te
sty but recreational, not religious. Its abiding ethos was a conflation of vanity, stylishness and opportunism. Alexandria may have seemed unstable and often, as Cavafy said, “frivolous,” but it was also durable.l The stylish self-indulgence and idle tolerance of its miscellaneous elite—Jews, Greeks, Levantines, Copts and Muslims—sustained the ethos of antique Alexandria until, in 1956, it was ethnically cleansed by Gamal Abdel Nasser.
a Herodotus set the style for regarding Egypt as the most antique of ancient societies and the source of Greek civilization, philosophy and mathematics. The impenetrability of Egyptian hieroglyphics encouraged the belief that they encrypted age-old wisdom. In recent years, tendentious theorists, primed by Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (London: Free Association Books, 1991), have bundled Egypt and Africa into a single entity whose civilization, along with that of Asia, they claim to have been plagiarized by Europeans, led by the Greeks. What was true (and rarely denied) concerning alien influences on Greek art and literature has been exaggerated, sometimes to the point of absurdity: for instance, Aristotle has been accused of stealing his philosophy from the library of Alexandria, which was not constructed till well after his death. For an account of Afrocentrism as an assertive and distortionate ideology, see Not Out of Africa and History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, both by Mary Lefkowitz.
b The island of Pharos figured in myth as the home of Proteus, the changeable Old Man of the Sea. The lost satyr play that followed the Oresteia of Aeschylus involved a comic encounter between Proteus and Menelaus, who was on his way home from the Trojan War.
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