A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  A benevolent Lucifer, he instructed mankind in how to deceive the Olympians: while ascendant smoke from the fat and bones delighted the nostrils of the immortals, the best cuts could be kept back for human festivities (fat priests are an ancient species). Prometheus was humanity’s intermediary on high, a proof that intelligence could trump even the gods.n For the Greeks, comedy was an element in the play between gods and men, and between gods and gods. The Holy One of the Jews suffered no ribaldry and entertained no rivals.

  Judaism could never tolerate the polymorphous insolence of Greek literature or the salty babble of Athenian democracy. As the psalmist put it, “Happy the man who does not sit on the bench with those who mock.” The Greeks liked nothing better.o Their drama engendered new ways of looking at gods and men. Postclassical “journalism” was the other agency of Greek skepticism. The second-century Hellenized Syrian essayist known as Lucian wrote a notorious piece mocking the senility of Pheidias’s great statue of Zeus at Olympia. Once regarded as virtually the god himself, it was now a sad old thing, more pitiable than revered. Lucian was, for many centuries, filed by severe classicists as “the Syrian Semite,” but his chatty insolence must have given a sophisticated readership what it wanted.p

  Plato had used his dialogues to condemn the “poets” who portrayed the gods as frivolous and immoral, but the Greek genius for contradiction and mockery—of which Plato himself was a copious exponent—would never go back into the bottle. A play such as Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, which mocked the futility of a ruinous war that was actually in progress, by imagining a simultaneous sexual strike by female Athenian and Spartan pacifists, was never conceivable in Jerusalem. Aristophanes’s scorn for what amounted to a Greek civil war between Athens and Sparta never earned him the accusation of being a “bad Athenian.” If Joseph ben Mattathias had had a theater available and the talent to mock the savagery of the Zealots and the silly war they were bent on, he would almost certainly have earned himself the sharp attention of an unamused Sicarius.

  Hebrew literature was never playful with regard to the Holy One. No Jew could question the paramountcy, still less the existence, of Yahweh and still be a Jew. There was no devious Prometheus in the Torah, no rampant Priapus, no tipsy Dionysos, no shameless Silenus.q The Scriptures made the drunken, unbuttoned Noah a shameful laughingstock to his children. In Joseph ben Mattathias’s Jerusalem, the only public rituals were liturgical repetitions.r The mutual denunciations of the Jews were the debates of the deaf. Jerusalem embraced no public arena in which to enact or discuss them, no assembly for public debate, no means of resolving differences or deciding policies by the votes of the people.

  In Athens, no preconceived idea was sacred. There were religious festivals, monuments and sacrifices, but no unquestionable, full-time hierarchy. The city’s priests could, like Sophocles, also be its generals (not a very good one, in his case) and its poets. Although Socrates was formally arraigned, in 399 B.C.E., for corrupting the youth and for “introducing other, brand-new gods” into the city, the motives of his accusers were political. His allusions to his personal daimonion—something between his conscience and his guardian angel—issued from a vanity that irritated some Athenians, but no priestly caucus had decisive influence in classical Athens (although a priest did propose the decree outlawing “irreverence”). Socrates might be associated, in the public mind, with the recently evicted tyrant Critias and with the turncoat chancer Alcibiades, who had played for both sides in the Peloponnesian War, but he was never arraigned as a “bad Athenian.”s What condemned the mock-modest philosopher to drink hemlock was less any alleged heresy than his flippant arrogance in proposing, as a just penalty after his conviction for “perverting the young,” that he be given a pension for life. A larger majority voted for the death penalty than had found him guilty as charged. The Athenian sense of humor had its limits.

  Themistokles was the first politician known to challenge a pronouncement of the Delphic oracle, where Apollo was held to put words in the mouth of his divinely inspired Pythian priestess. Sprung from a serpentine source, she was renowned for her ambiguities. In 480 B.C.E., when the oracle was asked how to deal with the invading Persians, the Pythia’s advice was to “trust the wooden wall.” Athenian conservatives claimed that the words could refer only to the original flimsy timber palisade around the Acropolis. According to them, the god was proposing that Athenians make sedentary piety their only strategy. In effect, the old guard was resigned to Xerxes’s overlordship of Hellas, if not to becoming the ancient equivalent of the Ottomans’ Phanariots, a nice class of quisling.

  Themistokles did not attack the oracle directly; he accused his opponents of its unsubtle interpretation.t “The wooden wall,” he told the Athenian assembly, did not have to refer to obsolete battlements but could be a divine reference to the new triremes whose keels had been laid down—thanks to Themistokles’s own foresight and as a result of a democratic vote—during the previous few years. This revision of the oracular message had something in common with the glosses on the Torah by which Jesus of Nazareth and Joseph ben Mattathias announced their precociousness; but when the Athenians voted to take to the ships and sail to the island refuge of Salamis, they put liberty before piety: they left the temples of their gods to be burned by the Persians. Thanks to Themistokles’s tactics, they won a great victory.

  By a somewhat Josephan irony, Themistokles himself fell out of favor with the Athenians and, within a few years, was ostracized. He fled into exile at the court of the Persian king, who respected his genius and made him the governor of a province in western Asia, where most of the citizens were, in fact, Greeks from Magnesia. Themistokles crossed a line he himself had earlier drawn. Yet after he was dead, his body is said to have been repatriated to Athens. Typical, if not exemplary, Themistokles was never called a bad Greek.

  The Hellenes had no covenant. Although the Orphics, like the Pythagoreans, in their search for purity and salvation, refrained from eating meat, no holy scriptures dictated the Greek diet or circumscribed the Hellenes’ conduct, sexual or social. The Jews were Jews because they honored the Torah. Originally homeless fugitives, they could never claim, as Athenians did, and the Germans would, to be “autochthonous,” sprung from the soil. Jewish identity was a function only of communal allegiance to Yahweh, never of their place of birth (His ubiquity matched their rootlessness). Descendants of runaway slaves who had spent forty years in the wilderness, the Jews defined their unity above all by reference to the covenant that bound them. The Torah was their wooden wall: it clamped them behind an intractable tradition which they could never abandon without losing what determined their identity.

  When Josephus applies the word demokratia to the decision-making process in Jerusalem, it is to persuade Gentile readers that there was nothing mysterious or esoteric in the social arrangements of the Jews.u The truth was that, in Joseph ben Mattathias’s Jerusalem, the common people—its equivalent of the Athenian demos—had a say only when they shouted or agitated in the streets. If the masses sought to dislodge the old hierarchy, it was never to make any abrupt political alteration to the social system. The Zealots proposed only that the High Priest be chosen by lot rather than by the hereditary succession, which, in practice, had been honored more in the breach than in the observance.v In Jerusalem, since they played no practical part in the government, the poor and the unemployed were ripe for seduction by extremists. Ultra-orthodoxy, and the xenophobia that braced it, offered the only revolution for which the Jerusalem masses ever agreed to unite, temporarily at least, and fight.

  a With an exemplary use of parenthesis, Edward Gibbon said, in a footnote, “Apollonius of Tyana was born about the same time as Jesus Christ. His life (that of the former) is related in so fabulous a manner by his disciples, that we are at a loss to discover whether he was a sage, an impostor, or a fanatic.” (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, p. 328, n. 71.)

  b He reports that, presumably because of his own defection, she
had been put in prison, where she was told that he was dead. She responded that she had “foreseen that this would happen ever since Jotapata and that even when he was alive, she might as well have had no son” (Jewish War V: 544–45). Martin Goodman (The Ruling Class of Judea, p. 210) gives Josephus no credit for reporting his mother’s bitterness, but that he does so argues at least somewhat against the notion that he concealed whatever failed to suit his book.

  c T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was a tract in favor of educated humility and unromantic conformity to classical models. Seeking to be unduly original was a form of heresy. Eliot’s aesthetic was more Jewish than he might have liked. He too can be categorized as some kind of a Josephus. As an immigrant from the United States into 1920s London, he adopted the manners and tone of a culture in which he could better express himself than in the land of his birth. His deprecation (in The Idea of a Christian Society) of “free-thinking” Jews just might conceal an apprehension both of their mockery and of a vestigial, if camouflaged, similarity to them. Eliot’s miglior fabbro, Ezra Pound, another immigrant into European culture, with a Judaic-sounding first name, propounded an unbridled version of anti-Semitism. Pace Freud, there is also a narcissism of supposedly large differences.

  d The iconoclasts of Byzantium, who reacted violently against the veneration of icons, showed equal zeal in vindicating the Second Commandment. The Puritans under Oliver Cromwell displayed similar destructive ardor; like the passengers on the Mayflower, they saw themselves as latter-day children of Israel. The decoration of Christian churches and the advertisement of the faith through images of the crucifixion and illustrations of the Holy Family aligned Christianity with pagan styles as against the austerity of Jewish sacred architecture (even though this too was sometimes richly ornamented).

  e Juvenal accused Jews of “misanthropy” and “arrogant exclusiveness,” apt charges from a snobbish and solitary satirist.

  f A tactic employed, with explicit relish, in Jerusalem in 1946 by General Evelyn “Bubbles” Barker, when—following the right-wing Irgun Zvei Leumi’s bombing of the King David Hotel (of which a warning had been delivered to the hotel switchboard, but not acted upon)—he decided on the communal punishment of “the Jews” by “striking at their pockets and showing our contempt of them.” Barker’s mistress, Katy Antonius, was the widow of a renowned Lebanese-Palestinian Arab intellectual.

  g Antiochus IV was on the rebound from a humiliating encounter. In 168 B.C.E., as he led his army into Egypt, he had been halted by a Roman delegation, led by Popillius Laenas. As Livy reports the scene, when the king held out a friendly hand, the senator demanded whether he would promise to evacuate his forces from Egypt. Popillius then drew a circle around Antiochus with his rod and said, “Before you step out of this circle, give me an answer to carry back to the Senate.” The king hesitated and then complied, after which Popillius shook his hand and greeted him (we can imagine with what condescension) as “friend and ally.”

  h Its anti-Europeanism presaged the sentiments in the Tehran bazaars before Iran’s Islamic revolution of the 1970s. Resentment and exclusion from power often assume the form of spiritual enthusiasm; consciously or not, the ayatollahs reprised the Persian magi’s resistance to Alexander the Great in the name of the One God, Ahura Mazda.

  i Even in the twentieth century, Mark Gertler, brought up in the Orthodox East End of London, wrestled with ancestral demons when he became a figurative painter. In more pretentious mode, the painter Balthus, born Balthasar Klossowski, adopted a lordly title and fabricated a Gentile lineage. Graced with the airs of an eccentric châtelain, he disembarrassed himself of ignoble Jewish origins and inhibitions. Prepubertal nymphets were his favorite subject.

  Marc Chagall had the nerve, after the Shoah, to revise the archetypal, implicitly anti-Jewish image of the Crucifixion and replace the suffering Jesus with a Ukrainian Jew as the emblem of martyrized humanity. The uses of tact had been exhausted. Chagall broke a mold that can never quite be repaired: he made art a means of challenging the iconography in which, for centuries, Christianity had had a free hand in caricaturing Jews and Judaism. The Polish Roman Catholic establishment responded by raising a crucifix on the site of Auschwitz. It assumed that an institution that had preached anti-Semitism for centuries, and kept silent during the Shoah, had proprietary status in a place where hundreds of thousands of Jews and few Roman Catholics had died. Many Jews were dispatched to the camps by governments, such as that of Father Tiso in Slovakia, of which priests were in charge. The crucifix was later removed.

  j Recent scholarship (cf. W. R. Connor, cited by Seaford in Reciprocity and Ritual, p. 244n.) claims that the Dionsyia, in its full-blown form, was developed by Kleisthenes to celebrate the overthrow of the Peisistratid tyranny.

  k The processional entrance of a god into the city was a feature of the sacred calendar in ancient Greek cities. It is no great stretch to see the emphasis on Jesus of Nazareth’s procession into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday as a Hellenizing element in the Gospel narrative.

  l The Minotaur may have figured, if only in a nonspeaking role, in Aeschylus’s lost Cretan trilogy. If the tragedy was followed, as might be expected, by a burlesque “satyr” play, the Minotaur can be imagined as taking some kind of talkative part as a prototypical Caliban.

  m There is nice irony in the fact that the classic study of the role of the raw and the cooked in the structure of human societies was written by an unreligious twentieth-century French Jew, Claude Lévi-Strauss, a wandering anthropologist who confessed that he detested going on his travels.

  n Carl Jung regretted that no such figure was incorporated, as a kind of joker, in the triune Christian Godhead.

  o Dialogue loosened Greek tongues; Aeschylus made controversy an art form. In the Persae, he imagined (if a little gloatingly) what it felt like to be on the losing side in the war which had made his own city, Athens, the mistress of the Aegean. With Euripides, tragedy veered toward satire: the gods became questionable. Aristophanes openly poked fun at war, slavery and phallocracy (although he made out that gynecocracy would be even worse).

  p The notion that pagan society was yearning for some unifying, therefore monotheistic, moral principle is part of a Christian exercise in giving the Logos an integral part in European history. G. W. Bowersock, in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), doubts whether, in practice, there was ever a “conflict” between paganism and Christianity. They lived side by side, and the former certainly infected the latter; but it makes small sense, if good propaganda, to postulate some Hegelian “progress” from ancient theologies to one of greater spiritual refinement.

  q King David was the subject of heroized admiration, but his story never generated a cult that threatened the uniqueness of the Holy One. There could be no frivolous diversity in Judaism. David’s deviousness, not least when it came to Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, manifests something akin to Odysseus’s metis: excusable perhaps, but scarcely exemplary. Solomon in all his glory had a flamboyance (in song and in grandiose architecture) not unlike that of Nero, but his reign ended in schism and disaster, which ascetic and celibate moralists could read as a divine judgment on the excesses which others might envy.

  r The nation of priests developed no legislative forum for revising or laicizing society.

  s Unlike Joseph ben Mattathias, however, he refused to save his life by going into exile.

  t The Spartans, by contrast, were inflexible in their deference to the Delphic oracle, from which they derived “their entire code of laws and discipline” (Paul Cartledge, Ancient Greece). If Themistokles was some kind of a Pharisee, the Spartans were Sadducees; they admitted no clever glosses on the fundamental and immutable laws.

  u Josephus also translates the Sanhedrin as the “Gerousia,” as if it had authority as unquestionable as that of the Spartan council of elders. The notion that popular demonstrations are evidence of a desire for democracy, or that “protest” is i
n itself democratic, is a persistent illusion.

  v In classical Athens, most municipal offices were filled by drawing lots among the citizens. For the properly superstitious, recourse to chance left room for the gods to make their choices prevail. Since any Athenian citizen thus had the possibility of taking office, the process also abated envy or the fear of a political fix. Dr. Johnson defended the hereditary peerage in a somewhat similar spirit: since access to a title was due solely to the luck of being born into the aristocracy, no thinking man should resent the ascendancy of fortune’s favorites.

  XVI

  IN HIS PREAMBLE to The Jewish War, Josephus assumes the high ground by accusing his critics and rivals of having sought only to establish the superiority of Rome by disparaging the Jews. How, he asked, could the Romans be proved great by being said to have overcome puny opponents? The ex-general glorifies the resistance of the Jews by emphasizing the bravery and the resources required of their conquerors in order to overcome it. Tact coincides with sincerity when he chides the Zealots for their recklessness and for the internecine slaughter which followed it. He even suggests that the final disastrous conflagration in Jerusalem was due to the indisciplined fury of the legionaries rather than to a direct order from Titus. The latter certainly did nothing to stop it, though he may have regretted it on the morning after, just as Alexander the Great was said to have been ashamed of the burning of Persepolis.