c Not without reason: Rabirius had lent money to King Ptolemy Auletes of Egypt, who refused to pay him back and then threw his creditor in prison. Rabirius escaped to Rome, where he was arraigned (perhaps at Ptolemy’s instigation) for illegally funding an African potentate. He was acquitted, just.
d One of Spinoza’s sharpest weapons, after he had crossed the line into apostasy, was the philological expertise that enabled him to state that the Torah could not be the seamless word of God, transmitted through Moses, since it was the work of various hands over a long period of time.
e According to Lemprière’s classical dictionary, Antony was often lampooned as the sozzled Heracles being spanked with a slipper by Cleopatra playing the part of Omphale, the queen of Lydia with whom the mythical strong man was hopelessly besotted.
f He may also have been making an oblique reference to Seneca. Nero’s éminence grise had accepted that political enemies or menaces (such as the emperor’s half brother, Britannicus) could be murdered and conquered cities pillaged, but he is said to have drawn the line when Nero started taking treasure from temples, of all denominations, in order to pay for his architectural extravaganzas. Paul Veyne (Sénèque) says that, at this point, Seneca’s versatile conscience required him to withdraw from public life.
g In the early years of his reign, Antiochus IV Epiphanes had been a genial Epicurean. The notion that the king conceived a vocation to universalize some kind of pagan monotheism does him undue honor. No potentate proposed a single god for all humanity until after the third century. Since Antiochus IV’s ban on Judaism made a specific target of the Zealots in Jerusalem, it is possible that it was delivered after a warning wink from the Seleucids to the Jewish Hellenizers to make themselves scarce. Jews in other parts of the kingdom do not appear to have been severely affected, although circumcision was formally banned. The Temple became a condominium for Zeus and for Baal-Shamim, the god of the Philistines (Antiochus’s personal deity was the Sun, with which he identified himself, perhaps for its golden gleam). To complete the profanation, the Seleucids slaughtered a pig on the high altar. In From Alexander to Actium (p. 515), Peter Green concludes that “all that Antiochus aimed to achieve was the elimination of a rebellious local group by abolishing the code that sustained it.” The Seleucids had no time for missionary zeal.
h So too, in postwar England, were the philosophers Bertrand Russell and C. E. M. Joad, whose broadcasts popularized the phrase “it depends what you mean by.…” When Russell was invited to review a book by Joad, he declined by saying, “Modesty forbids.…” Philo may have taken the same attitude to the writings of the posturing Apion.
i Philo noted how, at a performance of Euripides’s lost play Auge, the entire audience cheered two lines exalting “Liberty.” The charm of the Greek way of life disposed an Alexandrian Jewish poet called Ezekiel to go so far as to write Greek-style tragedies.
j Herod’s treatment of his family had been so vicious that—according to Macrobius, a fifth-century pagan anthologist—the emperor Augustus remarked that he would sooner be Herod’s pig than his son.
k In the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionist presence in Palestine would excite a similarly dual rage on the part of the Arabs: overt when it concerned the newcomers and by implication against the imperial power that had introduced them. The British government had been obliged, reluctantly, to honor the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Neither the Foreign Office nor the military establishment welcomed it. Many in both departments sided with the Arabs, who were more picturesque and less argumentative. A. J. Balfour’s apparent pro-Semitism was based on much the same belief in the arcane powers of “the Jews” to affect the world economy as was held by anti-Semites. In the dark days of the Great War, it had seemed a good investment to promise them something as vague as a “national home”; it would amount to no more than a slice of the as yet undefeated Ottoman Empire. When, after the Allied victory, the carving had been done, rare British soldiers, such as Orde Wingate, supported the Jews and trained the Haganah to resist Arab attacks. Even Wingate’s partisanship was primed by the calculation that, in preserving Britain’s communications with its Indian empire, the Jews would be more dependable allies, if only because they would have fewer friends, than the Arabs. During the Second World War, Wingate went to command the Chindits in Burma. He died in defense of the jewel in Britannia’s crown, which the British soon renounced, as they would responsibility for the antagonisms in Palestine which their policies, and cartographers, had generated. If disdain for wogs and Jews was a commonplace with the British all over the world, it rarely issued in programmatic persecution. The overriding imperial prejudice, ancient and modern, has been in favor of maintaining the empire. Nevertheless, in “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell recalls how amazed he was to hear an Indian “admit,” without shame, “I am a Joo, sir!”
The confection of nation-states in the Middle East was largely the result of rectilinear decisions made in European chancelleries. After the enforced breakup of the Ottoman Empire, boundaries were decreed that took small account of the divisions, cultural and religious, among the communities they enclosed. Iraq, in particular, was a factitious amalgam. Its instability was designed to make its disparate elements rely on the British to hold the ring. The small, obstinate community of Assyrians, who refused to be acquiescent, were bombed to virtual extinction by the RAF during the 1920s. Saddam Hussein would be following an old Whitehall policy when he crushed the Marsh Arabs, of whose independent way of life Wilfred Thesiger wrote an involuntary elegy.
One of the expressions of the English genius, in the period when Britannia ruled the waves, was the invention of games, cricket and soccer in particular, in which conflict was socialized, violence sublimated, fair play respected. Common to them all was the paramount role of the referee or umpire, whose decision had to be accepted without cavil if the players wished to remain, so to speak, on side. Teaching the world to play up and play the game elevated the imperial power to the role of disinterested arbiter. Only bad losers challenged its decisions or doubted its good faith; cheating was social treason. The regulation of leisure, and an appetite for admission to its rites, became a means of social indoctrination, both at home and abroad. The greatest of compliments was to say of a native that he was, or very nearly was, “a white man.” A retired British Palestine policeman once told me that the real pity was that neither the Jews nor the Arabs ever learned to play cricket.
l In his Ateli Piimata (Unfinished Poems), edited by Renata Lavagnini (Athens: Ikaros, 1994/2006), Cavafy has one of the later Ptolemies, “The Doer of Good (or Evil),” declare that the Alexandrians are “superficial (elaphros) through and through.” The irony is that Cavafy’s ruler is himself fat and dozy, and nothing like the manly and forceful Macedonians from whom he takes fatuous pride in being descended.
XV
ALTHOUGH ITS FIRST EXTANT USE was by Josephus in the Vita, autobiography is scarcely an exclusively Jewish mode. It is, however, a recurrent means of expressing the solitude that haunts or dignifies the exile. For the Jewish intellectual, especially once he repudiates—or no longer has access to—community, the blank page becomes his only inalienable territory. In the first person singular, Josephus reverts to a world that, by the time he was writing about it, no longer existed. He is the first of countless retrospective Jewish solitaries.
Josephus pays tribute to his father both for his sense of justice and for the education he gave his two sons. He says that by the time he himself was fourteen, he was applauded on all sides because of his passion for literature. He can mean only the Scriptures and his glosses on them: “the chief priests and leading citizens” are said to have kept coming to him for elucidations. Cicero remarked, after dilating on his own achievements, that “it would be better if another had said it.” Josephus’s good report of himself chimes with legends of famous men who declare their genius by their precociousness. Apollonius of Tyana, a Cappadocian mystic and miracle worker of the generation before Josephus, was
said to have spoken, as a small child, with astonishing grammatical rectitude.a
The Temple and the synagogues, like the great European universities and the stern examinations for the Chinese mandarinate, offered an arena in which bright students could parade competitive ingenuity. The young Jesus of Nazareth distinguished himself through a similar ability to astonish his elders. Spinoza’s genius was first revealed when he amazed the presiding rabbi of the Amsterdam synagogue from which he was later expelled with contumely. Excellence creates distance between the successful candidate and the examiners who, until he trumps them, sit in judgment on him.
Josephus wrote with filial devotion about his mother, who was in Jerusalem throughout the siege,b but childhood was not a topic for the record in ancient societies. During his time in Rome, Josephus must have observed how Roman grandees filled their houses with the statues of famous forebears (graven images, by Judaic standards). In the Roman courts, patrician advocates fortified their speeches, and sometimes secured instant acquittal, by recounting the achievements of the defendant’s ancestors. Reference to his mother allows Josephus to validate the quality of his authorship by announcing that he had royal blood: a remote maternal ancestor was related to the Maccabees. Josephus may have hoped that this tenuous “royal” connection would enable him to pull rank on his Greco-Roman readers.
His description, in the Vita, of the three years of his adolescence which he spent touring the main schools of Jewish thought and practice is phrased to give the impression that his education, like that of any ranking Roman, involved making a choice from a buffet of philosophies (Cicero took garrulous pride in savoring a variety of Greek ideas). There was, however, a basic asymmetry between Josephus and his Gentile readers: Jewish cultural aspirations were both exalted and limited, by the covenant, from the moment Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Sinai. The tablets of the law did not tell the Hebrews what they might do to be rated good Jews, but what they had not to do. The “jealousy” of the Holy One preserved community (and continuity) by inhibiting deviation. Obedience to Him alone would allow the Jews to prosper, on the land the Lord their God had given them, “unto the thousandth generation.” Innovation was never a good thing.c
The distinction between “Jerusalem” and “Athens” was patent both in the social structure and in the divinities of the two cities. Monotheism concentrated the wandering Hebrews into a common allegiance. The commandments supplied focus, a hearth for those without a home. Their discipline kept Moses’s company spiritually in step as they headed for the promised land. It could not avert divisions once they had found it. Monotheisms, like monoliths, may not bend; but they regularly crack. All three enduring versions have suffered from acrimonious and often bloody schisms.
Social stresses in Judaea were expressed in doctrinal antagonisms (as they would be in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe). As Leo Strauss insisted, mundane reason can never reconcile the children of a revelation with those who cannot, or will not, see it.1 Jerusalem might be a great city but it was never, in the Greek sense, a polis. The irrational, and seemingly irrelevant, reason why Jews of the Middle East were drawn into conflict with Greek neighbors and with their Roman masters was the Second Commandment. The Mosaic ban on “graven images” led the Jews to defy, and exasperate, a succession of foreign sovereigns. Josephus supplies plentiful instances of how the horror of desecration inspired them, repeatedly, to risk their lives against overwhelming odds.
Greeks fought and died for their freedom or their vanity; but what Greek of any city or allegiance chose to die rather than to allow a statue to be set up in his city or an “impure” animal to be sacrificed on one of its altars? Pythagoras was a vegetarian (he would not eat kidney beans because they resembled human embryos), but he did not expect his followers to die of starvation rather than chew on a chop. A law without practical utility was taken to require Jews to fight to the death for a principle that the worship of an abstract deity alone could impose. Like circumcision, the Second Commandmentd denoted them by what they did not have in common with surrounding cultures.
Joseph ben Mattathias knew that the “Jewish War” might never have taken place without the delusive precedent of the Maccabees’ triumph over the Seleucid monarchy in 167 B.C.E. Their rebellion was triggered by a demand by King Antiochus IV Epiphanes (his full, typically overblown title declared him “God Manifest, Bearer of Victory”) that a pig be sacrificed, on an altar dedicated to Zeus, within the Temple precinct of Jerusalem. The order, from a king whose name alone was blasphemous to Jewish ears, was an expression not of orthodox Hellenic theology (there was none) but of exasperation with Jewish subjects who failed to give him the respect and—if there was any difference—the revenues he required.
When the High Priest refused, as Antiochus knew he would, to defile the Temple’s altar with porcine blood, the king signed an edict banning the practice of Judaism altogether. He also proposed to defile the name of Jerusalem by attaching “Antioch” to it, in his own honor. His domineering actions had nothing to do with racial hatred. Cities were often renamed or hyphenated to emblazon a ruler’s fame. Why else is the world badged with Alexandrias? Jews might be feared or disliked, their solitary god despised or ridiculed; but conceit and covetousness required no ideological license. Juvenal and Tacitus are often cited as evidence of ancient antipathy to Jews because they wrote scornfully about them; but the list of people or peoples whom the sour patrician and the déclassé misogynist depicted with admiration is not a long one.e It is true that, in his Germania, Tacitus seemed to find merit in the German tribes who, in 9 C.E., had pushed the Romans back across the Rhine, but his eulogy of the brawling northerners was intended more to highlight the effete decadence of contemporary Rome than to recommend the savage practices of the barbarians.
Judaism never threatened Antiochus IV; bankruptcy did. His decree was designed to hit people who had failed to pay up where it hurt them most.f Antiochus IV’s closure of the Temple and the suppression of its cult would show the Jews who was boss.g Their unsociable God was a matter of indifference; the confiscation of what was left of his treasures was irresistible. The effect of Antiochus’s ban was to make strict religious observance the binding form of allegiance for Jews when battling for independence, both then and in Josephus’s war. The Zealots stiffened the Hasmonaean fighters into a uniform force. Exclusivity also divorced them abruptly from the civilized Levant, whose inhabitants, ever since the time of Alexander the Great, had acquired Greek accents. For many Jews, as for no one else, cultural assimilation became synonymous with treason.
In truth, as he must often have been reminded as he was writing Jewish Antiquities, Joseph ben Mattathias sprang from a mulch of cultural contradictions. The Semitic “bedrock” that F. M. Donner, for instance, claims to have been so solid under the Greek overlay of the Levant was riven with cracks. In the heyday of the Seleucid Empire, smart young Jews, derided by the Orthodox as “Antiochenes,” took to going to the new gymnasia, where men exercised naked, in the Greek style. Embarrassed by what Gentiles took to be a deformity, some capped their penises with prosthetic foreskins. A number of Hellenizers ceased circumcising their sons.
There was, however, a limit to assimilation: “liberal” Jews might work out with their Gentile neighbors, but it was a transgression too far to eat with them or to admire their art. There is no evidence that the Hellenizers, who included some of the Temple priests, ever intended to abolish Judaism or to mesh with pagan practices. The allegation fueled the fundamentalist surge among the Jerusalem lower orders.h Unlike the Greek demos of Thucydidean times, the Jerusalem mob had no class consciousness: their labor was not vital to the local economy; nor was their muscle essential to the defense of the city. They found solidarity only in accusing the upper class of heresy. The Greek habit of impersonating their gods and of depicting them onstage, quarreling, making love between themselves and with humans, was intolerable to Judaism. Man was said to have been made “in God’s image,” but Yahwe
h himself was invisible—although Moses had been granted a brief glimpse of His hind parts during their summit meeting on Mount Sinai—and unportrayable. The secluded emptiness of the Holy of Holies in the Temple implied that, even where He was at home, He was not to be seen or visited, as Zeus might be at Olympia and Athene was, in gilded Pheidian majesty, in her Athenian Parthenon.
Yahweh’s austere Second Commandment ensured that, although there were some decorated synagogues, Judaism sponsored no sculpture, no secular art, no public spectacles. There could be no Jewish Pheidias or Polygnotus.i The effect of Jewish obedience to the Second Commandment was immeasurable. The terms of the covenant embargoed Jews from freedoms of which Greeks, if only by chance, had early experience. The Attic theatrical festival of the Great Dionysia, instituted by Peisistratus in sixth-century B.C.E. Athens, was never conceived as an intellectual or political forum; it became both.j An aristocratic populist, Peisistratus bluffed his way to tyrannical power by rolling into Athens in a chariot, accompanied by a young woman rigged to look like the goddess Athene. She was an advertisement for which there could be no equivalent in Jerusalem. What would have scandalized any Jew was taken by educated Athenians to be no more than buffoonery and by the common people as proof that Peisistratus enjoyed divine favor, or at least that he had divine nerve.k His theatrical festivals began as a mixture of traditional folk drama and religious masque. The Greek stage drew from a ready-made roster of dramatis personae in the mythical repertoire of heroes, gods and monsters such as the Minotaur.l Although Peisistratus had no such intention, tragic and comic dialogue came to school Attic audiences in self-expression. As it evolved, the theater armed Athenians with the power to think, and speak, for themselves and to question the gods while continuing to honor them with festivals and sacrifices.
The Olympian gods were superhuman, but they spelt out no decisive morality, unless placating their ill humor (and satisfying their copious sexual desires) was moral. Zeus was a usurping parricide whose brute force was opposed by the maverick Titan Prometheus, the first proponent of the rights of man. The Titans had been the Olympians’ predecessors as rulers of the world, but they were defeated by the superior firepower of Zeus and his allies. There was something slightly Josephan about Prometheus: since his capacity for foresight had warned him that the Titan cause was doomed, he came over to the Olympians. When they were victorious, Prometheus lent his wit to their parties, without ever quite being one of them. To amuse them, he fashioned human beings out of clay, as toys for the gods. After Athene had breathed life into them, just for fun, Zeus feared that they might become Prometheus’s private army. He exiled them from Olympus and condemned them to shivering mortality. Prometheus then stole divine fire to keep them warm and cook their food.m Cooking was of itself a declaration of human independence, for which Prometheus taught his creatures to apologize, after a fashion, by making burnt offerings to the gods.
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