A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  Josephus treats Christians, en passant, only as a band of essentially Jewish eccentrics. Until the fall of the city in 70, the members of “the Jerusalem church” were conspicuous in honoring Orthodox traditions in the Temple. Led by James, the brother of Jesus (who was co-opted after the martyrdom of the disciple of the same name), they respected the Nazarene’s teachings but never ventured to proclaim His divinity. It was unthinkable for James and his friends to offer cult to the Virgin Mary as “the Mother of God.” Nor does any extant Hebrew or Aramaic text accuse her of the virginity which became canonical as the result of a wishful translation of the Greek parthenos.

  Early forms of Mariolatry had more appeal to Gentiles familiar with female deities such as Cybele, “the Great Mother,” than to Christians of Jewish origin. The New Testament’s Diana of the Ephesians, the Greeks’ Artemis, was a famous virgin goddess (and also a goddess of childbirth, although never herself a mother). The so-called House of the Virgin Mary has become a tourist attraction in Ephesus. It is a modest dwelling not far from the single pillar that is all that remains upright of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  The liquidation of the “Jerusalem church” was a significant, if incidental, consequence of the fall of the city, and of the massacre and dispersal of its inhabitants. Since James was the brother of Jesus, he had been able, although a late recruit, to pull rank over Saint Paul and his admirers. Religion, like revolution, was a family business; seniority counted. After James and his friends had disappeared in the cataclysm, Pauline apostles outside Judaea had no rivals for doctrinal hegemony. Pseudo-Hegesippus glossed Josephus, in the fourth century, to make him say “God delayed the imminent end of the war until ruin could involve much—almost all—of the Jewish race. God expected.… that the enormity of their crimes would increase until, by the heaping up of impropriety, it would equal the measure of His supreme punishment.” The presumption that Christians were the spokespersons of the Almighty became habitual; so did the attribution to all Jews of whatever a particular group or individual might do, or might be said to have done. It is now generally conceded that there is no such thing as a Jewish gene; Jews may be all sorts of things, but they are not a scientifically identifiable “race.”a

  After 73, Christian evangelists made their separate peace with Rome by distinguishing themselves from the defeated Jews. Melito, the Christian “bishop” of Sardis in the second century, is quoted as saying, “You cast the Lord down, you were cast down to earth. And you, you liedead, when He went up to the heights of heaven.”1 Melito’s rhetoric was sharpened by the fact that cosmopolitan Sardis had a very large synagogue from which he was hoping to siphon supporters. Shimon Applebaum maintains that there were “intimate and excellent relations” between Jews, Greeks and Christians in the city in the early third century.b Melito was selling Christianity, not remarking on the degradation of local Jews.

  Thanks to the destruction of the Temple, the evangelists were free to remodel Christianity into the righteous antagonist of “the perfidious Jews,” as the Roman Missal would label them until Vatican II, at Pope John XXIII’s urging, excised the phrase, if not the sentiment, from Catholic practice. The long reluctance of the Vatican to recognize the State of Israel illustrates how God has continued to be assumed to be an agent in history, delivering due punishments and rewards, of which statehood was thought to be one. If the Jews could come to rest, especially back in Jerusalem, it did something to blight the notion, sacred to messianic cultists (including the Quakers of Spinoza’s time), that their wanderings would end only when Christ returned to sit in judgment on mankind.

  Theologians and rabbis have been variously resourceful in justifying the ways of God to men, especially since the Shoah. Their logic has scarcely differed from that of Josephus: however mysterious His ways, God had to honor the free will that, conveniently for His defenders, He had granted, irrevocably, to human beings. Their sins were their own; their punishment or redemption was up to Him. Some ultra-Orthodox rabbis have hinted that the Shoah was the Holy One’s response to the scandal of assimilation, the self-willed sin of emancipated European Jews.c Like Josephus, such authorities deny that the Gentiles can be the primary agents of the disaster that overcame their people. Could anything but some kind of Talmudic casuistry attribute the deaths of six million people, a quarter of them children and infants, to the displeasure of a God at the supposed misuse, by some of them, of the free will with which He had endowed them? It remains true that such a notion of effect and cause lies at the root of unreformed Judaism. Self-accusing vanity has kept some Jews at least convinced that the viciousness of their persecutors can be explained only if they are so important to Yahweh that they merit condign chastisement. Punishment and priority become indistinguishable.d

  With his Jewish critics, Josephus could afford to be polemical. He honored one tradition—denunciation is among the oldest art forms exercised in the Bible—and initiated another: the invective that Jewish writers and intellectuals so often reserve for one another. In mutual recrimination, they speak and write without the reticence forced upon them by Christian repression. Benedict Spinoza was only the noblest example of Jews who attack Judaism, to the satisfaction of Christians who lack the wit to see that, mutatis mutandis, his disdain for those who believe in miracles and resurrection applies, with even greater force, to their own faith.e

  In 64 C.E., after the great fire that had devastated Rome, Nero had preferred to arrest and brutalize Christians rather than Jews. Before the war in Judaea, cranky innovators were a likelier target for public suspicion than members of a recognized, somewhat fashionable cult. Nero inaugurated the public games with which he hoped to retrieve his popularity by turning a number of Christian martyrs into human torches.f In response, apocryphal Christian texts dressed the emperor as the Antichrist, whose wanton persecution of their faith would trigger the final destruction of Rome. His death, in 68 C.E., did not deliver all that the Christians had hoped for, but it must have suggested that things were going their way.

  In an antiphonal variation, the Jewish “Sibylline oracles”g—composed soon after the incineration of Jerusalem in 70—announced that the deposed emperor was still alive. Although he had, in fact, been driven to commit suicide two years earlier, Nero was declared to have fled from Rome and joined her eastern bugbear the Parthians. With their help, the bogeyman would return to the charge, put an end to the Roman empire and accelerate the End of Days. In this way, Nero too was credited with “messianic” resurrection.

  After the Roman reduction of Judaea, Jewish brigand chiefs are said to have remained in control of swaths of Parthian territory, although the Jewish kings Anilaeus and Asinaeus had been deposed at the time of Joseph’s birth.2 Conversion to Judaism—as in the later case of Queen Helena of Adiabene, an Assyrian kingdom centered in today’s Kurdistan—was a way of declaring independence from Roman tutelage. Helena was so ardent a Jew that, the story goes, she moved to Jerusalem for the last fifteen years of her life which ended in 56 C.E. Her elaborately rosetted sarcophagus (which served for a time as a water trough) is in the Israel Museum. A number of the sons of proselytes from Adiabene rallied to the Judaean cause during the siege of Jerusalem.

  Jews outside the Roman imperium reacted to the sack of Jerusalem with unintimidated indignation. Josephus, like almost all Jewish writers of the Diaspora, especially after the triumph of Christianity, could never afford to express himself so recklessly. In the Middle Ages, anti-Christian texts written in Babylon, and beyond the reach of inquisitorial vengeance, continued to be unguarded. Shylockian sufferance was not a racial badge but a skulking concession to European domination. Since it also carried an undertone of banked grievance, it did little to allay the malice of Christendom; the worse the Jews were treated, the more keenly their enemies suspected them of plotting unspeakable revenge. The Christian conscience expressed itself in demanding even more repressive measures. As in ancient Egypt, whatever “the Jews” showed no detecta
ble signs of doing—whether it was kidnapping Gentile childrenh or poisoning the wells—was commonly construed as evidence of their conspiratorial deviousness. The Jews were never in the clear. Among themselves, consolatory myths of election and loyalty favored an endogamous and unchanging solidarity.

  No one recorded the year or the manner of the death of Titus Flavius Josephus. It may, however, be unduly romantic to assume that he was entirely without honor or entourage in his exile. Eusebius, the Christian bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century, says that a statue honoring Josephus had been erected in Rome, but does not specify by whom. Since personal commemorative statuary was contrary to Jewish tradition, it may be that the Flavians commissioned it for services rendered. It would be a pretty irony if Josephus’s sons had become sufficiently Romanized to celebrate their father’s fame (or vindicate his name) by an act of aesthetic apostasy. In any case, neither Justus nor Simonides left a noticeable mark on the society into which, if his choice of their names is any indication, he hoped they would be at least somewhat assimilated.

  As a historian, Josephus would have a long, unended afterlife. The craving for Christian unity, regularly proclaimed in Rome and elsewhere, implies the hope for the eventual elimination or conversion of those who will not go along with it. Faith and coercion are old allies. As a result of Christian readings, Josephus’s work, like his character, has suffered from frequent posthumous resection. Imaginative clerics interpolated whatever might enhance their visions or brace their faith. His Victorian translator, William Whiston, appears the slyest, perhaps because he seems only inadvertently biased. He thought he was rendering a faithful version, and so he was: one that chimed with his own creed.

  Josephus can hardly be blamed because Crusaders took his works with them as a guidebook to the city whose inhabitants they put to the sword with affectations of godly purpose. His defense of Judaism was less keenly honored. In the so-called Slavonic fourteenth-century manuscript, a passage was “discovered” in which Josephus was made out to endorse the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. Étienne Nodet, a French Dominican, would like this “restoration” to reveal Josephus’s “interest in a very Jewish Jesus movement in Judaea, different from the Christianity he encountered only in Rome.”i The implication is that Josephus was some kind of General de Gaulle avant la lettre, a leader in exile planning some “reorganized Judaism.” This ambition is held to explain why he is uncited in rabbinic sources; neither were the Essenes nor the Maccabees.

  In reliable manuscripts, Josephus alludes to Jesus only casually, but he does use the superlative (deinotatos) to highlight both his cleverness and his aura. The same term designates others, such as the rabble-rouser Theudas, who are depicted as no more than charismatic miracle workers in the tradition of the first-century C.E. figure Hanina ben Dosa and of Choni the Circle Drawer of the first century B.C.E. Because Josephus’s work lies at the intersection of history and myth, creeds and ideologies (from Christianity to Zionism), he provokes responses that carry perennial freight. His text was further improved to make Josephus say that the Temple was destroyed solely as punishment for the Jews’ crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Other Christian enthusiasts concocted a correspondence—cited by Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine as if it were genuine—between Josephus’s contemporary Seneca and Saint Paul.

  Uriel Rappaport has gone as far as to say that “the claims Josephus makes about his achievements during the war, as well as the personal qualities he ascribes to himself, are unsubstantiated and outlandish.”3 Since Josephus supplies the only account available, it is quite proper to question aspects of his story, but he can hardly be blamed for supplying no corroborating (or self-contradictory) texts. As for “outlandish,” the term sounds dismissive or disdainful, but antiquity is, as L. P. Hartley put it, “a foreign country”; it required rare qualities to survive in it, especially as any kind of a leader. Alexander the Great set the style for leading from the front by being the first over the tall battlements of Tyre. It is hard to conceive that Joseph ben Mattathias’s enrollment by Vespasian did not owe something to the extraordinary and soldierly qualities he showed during the siege of Jotapata.

  Rappaport backs his view by recourse to psychiatric jargon: Josephus is said to have dissembled his failings by creating an “Ideal Ego.” The charge is at least somewhat plausible because quasi-tautological: most people, especially authors, tend to do the same. The components of Josephus’s public personality are said to have “provided a response to the pressures he faced.…. Pro-Roman but pretending otherwise, Josephus had recourse to legerdemain to avoid confrontation with enemy forces.” If Rappaport thinks that Joseph would have been a better general by meeting the Romans in open battle, he understands nothing of the military odds. After the Roman legions had been almost annihilated at the battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.E., Quintus Fabius Maximus was nominated temporary dictator. His tactics were to shadow and harass Hannibal’s armies but never to be lured into direct combat. The dictator’s methods were, by Roman standards, outlandish if not unmanly, but they were also effective.

  Josephus’s ambiguities may shock Rappaport; Plutarch would have found them unsurprising. In his “Advice to the Politician,” he says, “if war comes, leaders have to be duplicitous: they must be in command of a revolt that cannot succeed, and try to steer toward a just climbdown.” In Rappaport’s account, the central episode of the siege of Jotapata is a fantasy, in which the historian uses tricks that “must have been copied” from military handbooks. A more genial view would be that Joseph had learned a trick or two from whatever old hands, or old handbooks, were available. He never suggests that no one had ever resorted to the tricks he used; disguising his couriers in sheepskins was a remake of Odysseus’s ruse to get his men safely out of Polyphemus’s cave. Taking his own presumption as evidence, Rappaport concludes that Joseph ben Mattathias was not involved in the defense of the town. The story of his survival “lacks all historical value, except to reveal.… Josephus’s double life between Rome and the Jewish nation.” Little detective work is needed to show that Joseph had had contacts with the imperial power. As for “the Jewish nation,” was there any such entity?

  Rappaport tells us as much about himself as about Josephus. His psychodramatized reading of the historian’s life and character is itself open to metapsychiatry. Not even Justus, Josephus’s fierce contemporary critic, suggests that events of the kind Josephus describes did not take place at Jotapata or elsewhere. The animus directed against Josephus generates a black-and-white moral crux. It ignores the simple truth that Joseph did not need to be pro-Roman in order to be anti-war. He was not necessarily false to his native city if he did all he could to prevent its destruction. It is going a little far then to accuse him of being responsible for it.

  a For this reason, in the United States, individual Jews cannot seek protection from persecution under anti-racist legislation.

  b See John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism, pp. 99–100. On p. 31, Gager cites G. F. Moore as saying that “Protestant [especially Lutheran] scholarship.… engaged in covert polemic against Roman Catholicism by projecting distasteful aspects of Catholic belief and practice onto Judaism and attacking them in that guise.” Another instance of metastasized zealotry.

  c The tendency to fanaticism and intolerance within Judaism should not be underestimated. In his autobiography, Vixi, Richard Pipes records that, in mid-nineteenth-century Lwów, a newly arrived “Progressive” rabbi and one of his daughters were murdered by an Orthodox Jew who had poisoned their food.

  d The case of Donato Manduzio, mentioned earlier, provides guileless evidence. Ignorant of any of the inflections of Judaism that had accumulated as a result of exile, humiliation and Talmudic or rabbinic gloss, he interpreted what he came to know of the modern world, and of the Shoah in particular, with unsubtle candor. In April 1945, as a now convinced Jew, he told the Roman rabbinate that Europe’s Jews had perished for their failure to observe the Jewish law. The Nazis were merely the instruments o
f Yahweh’s wrath. In Flavian Rome, Josephus had to be wary of saying out loud that, if the Jews resumed allegiance to the Mosaic law, they might become rulers of the world. The guileless Manduzio, in post-Fascist Italy, knew no such reticence. (See John A. Davis, The Jews of San Nicandro, pp. 144–45.)

  e Spinoza’s later equation of God with nature, in the formula “Deus sive Natura,” had the logical consequence of discountenancing miracles, as if en passant: if God was identical with nature, and miracles were, by definition, unnatural, the deity would contradict His essential nature by performing them. Without saying so (his loud scorn was reserved for Judaism), Spinoza’s formula proved Christianity to be by definition absurd. It is not surprising that Spinoza admired the Dutch republic and advocated democratic rule and free speech, although his own was hedged with caution. In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss was more outspoken: “By uprooting the authority of the ancestral, philosophy recognizes that nature is the authority.”

  f In due time, the Inquisition provided a similar spectacle for the faithful by burning Jews (old women as well as men) in the long series of autos-da-fé that entertained the virtuous. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), whose mother was of Se-phardic origin, remarked, “It is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.” His humane irony did nothing to curb the salutary practices of the church.