A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  g So called in imitation of the Roman “Sibylline books,” supposedly inspired by the Cumaean Sibyl from whom auguries were taken in times of crisis. The works of Virgil, who lived for a time near Cumae, took on a similar aura. The so-called sortes Virgilianae involved seeking guidance from a random selection of his lines.

  h There is no evidence than any Christian child was ever kidnapped for ritual purposes by any Jew anywhere. In the aftermath of the Shoah, however, Jewish parents and relatives of children who had been secreted by Catholic institutions, and baptized in the process, managed to retrieve their purloined offspring only with the greatest difficulty and often after prolonged wrangling.

  i See the notes and appendix to Nodet’s translation, Flavius Josèphe: L’homme et l’historien (Josephus: The Man and Historian [New York: Cerf, 2000]), of the translation by Henry St. John Thackeray (1929).

  XVII

  JOSEPHUS STANDS AS THE INITIATOR of the Jewish writer’s long trek along an unending “road into the open.”a The charge that the culture and art of the Jews is parasitic rather than authentic derives essentially (hence inescapably) from their dispossession of Jerusalem.b Josephus has been accused by literary surveyors of tailoring Jewish Antiquities in symmetry with the Greco-Roman history of Dionysios of Halikarnassus. With scarcely surreptitious animus, his critics point out that Josephus’s Book X ends with the fall of Solomon’s Temple, Book XX with the fall of Herod’s.c The implication is that Josephus is not to be trusted as a historian because he imposed a certain shapeliness on his work. In truth, it is as likely that he sought to blend with the going literary models as it is certain that Roman writers, in prose and verse, made a similar virtue of the sublime plagiarism of Greek models. Solitude gave Josephus the time for the aesthetic refinement of his marginal existence. His case was exceptional only because he lived an isolated life: in antiquity, Jews did not, as a rule, hide their heads or seek, like Marcel Proust’s Bloch (or, indeed, like Proust himself), to pass themselves off as reproduction Gentiles, although the more assimilated of them, when writing in the vernacular, imitated earlier masters.d As Richard Wagner showed, the charge that “the Jews” lacked originality was the expression of programmatic anti-Semitism. It is at least tempting to see Europe’s long and varied efforts to disqualify the Jews from civilization as a symptom of the repression of how much Christianity owes to what Pope John-Paul I had the belated grace to call his “older brother Joseph.”e

  Some estimates of the size of the Jewish population of the Roman world at the time of Josephus’s war put the figure as high as 10 percent. This number, or anything close to it, greatly exceeds the tally of Jews resident in Judaea before the alleged dispersal of its population, even when it is combined with that of Alexandria. It follows that adherents of Judaism, whether by birth or by conviction, were widespread. The speed with which Pauline Christianity recruited converts suggests that Jewish messianic imagery had shaped audiences to be receptive to the Gospel of a modified, often quasi-Pharisaic, monotheism. For the Jews themselves, the ruin of Jerusalem and the destruction of Herod’s Temple was a disaster with enduringly agonizing consequences, especially as it was depicted in Christian mythology. What happened in Judaea did not, however, lead to any crisis of faith, or campaign of persecution, in other parts of the Mediterranean. The large Jewish community in Alexandria continued to have vexed relations with its Gentile neighbors, but the tendency to assimilate seems to have secured it from any sustained repression. The Romans saw no necessary seditious connection between the Judaeans and other Jews, though they took the opportunity to raise extra taxes.

  Christianity came to replace Judaism not least because it universalized (and cannibalized) themes already present in the Talmud and in what came to be called the Old Testament. Christians of various kinds, down the centuries, would gladly have dispensed with the Jewish sources of their own religion. They were embarrassed by its roots among the people from whom their Savior had sprung and to whom He chose exclusively to preach and whom they now derided as little better than vermin.f The standoff between Christians and Jews has elements of the stasis Josephus described within the precincts of the Temple, in which one sect or faction of Jews was literally at daggers drawn with another over matters of doctrinal detail and political ascendancy. Even the quarrels between Arian and Orthodox Christians, between Monophysites and Homoousians can be seen as a revision of the disputes between Sadducees and Pharisees that Joseph ben Mattathias witnessed in his youth.

  It took more than three centuries after the fall of Jerusalem for Christianity to achieve the critical mass that, thanks to the declaration of Constantine, promoted it to primacy among the many religions and cults in the empire. Even then, Constantine never sought to impose the Christian faith on his subjects. Pagan practices of one kind and another persisted in Europe deep into the Middle Ages. Judaism was eclipsed, but it never dwindled into the obsolescence that Arnold Toynbee, for malevolent instance, wished upon it. The venom with which the Christian fathers denounced Judaism (Saint Louisg burned its books before more diligent Christians proceeded to burn Jews) is proof of the infuriating persistence of the ancient faith. The vindictiveness of the Holy Inquisition indicates a morbid obsession, on the part of Mother Church, with rescinding the debt Christianity owed to the first “People of the Book.” In the so-called Dark Ages and for some centuries afterward, Spanish Jews found themselves much more happily at home with the followers of Muhammad. The Arab conquest of Egypt, in the seventh century, was no gentle takeover (the burning of the libraries of Alexandria reciprocated the great Alexander’s sack of Persepolis), but the Prophet had specifically recommended respect both for Christianity and for the Jews, whom he had hoped to convert to his faith. His version of monotheism chimed more easily with that of the Jews than with the mystery of the Trinity. If Jews were scarcely treated as equals by the conquering Arabs, their habits of worship, their diet and their social life were generally respected.

  The spread of Judaism in the late Roman Empire must have been particularly easy along the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Alexandria was a cosmopolitan stew (in several senses) with no long attachment to any of the Greco-Roman gods. Egypt had exported its antique cults, most noticeably that of Isis, to Rome, but Alexandrians were nothing if not eclectic. Alexandria’s Jews were vigorous and had no marked sense of inferiority. Why should they have been reluctant to share their religion and spread its influence? Many of them were Hellenized and at least bilingual. The traffic of ideas is likely to have been in all directions. As the Arab conquest extended westward, it must have taken adventurous Jews with it.

  By the eighth century, the Arab advance across North Africa had reached almost to the Atlantic and was spilling across the Pillars of Hercules, from Morocco into Spain. Within a century of their ejection of the Visigoths, the invading Arabs, under the leadership of the first of the Umayyad dynasty, had established their caliphate in El-Andalus.h It is not unduly fanciful to see their capital city as Alexandria born again. For several hundred years, Córdoba had a sumptuous culture under a benign and tolerant series of caliphs (successors of Muhammad) who tolerated the arts and fostered the interplay of Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers and poets. The work of Ibn Gabirol, one of the greatest and earliest of Sephardic poets, embodies a variation of themes from Jewish, Arab and Latin sources. Medicine and philosophy, with their emphasis on accuracy and truth, provided bridges that sprang from particularism toward common ground.

  Many of the subjects of Abderrahman I (756–788 C.E.) were of native Spanish, more or less Christian, origin; a high proportion was only superficially Islamicized.i Abderrahman I chose Jews and Christians as his close aides rather than Arabs; since their preferment derived from him alone and would end if his autocracy were deposed, he could rely on their loyalty. The splendor of his city and his court laid a heavy burden of taxation on the population. There were frequent revolts during the eight generations of Umayyad rule, but the Jewish community never featured among
the dissidents. Whenever Christian enthusiasts rose against the Umayyads, the Jews sided strongly with the Muslim regime. The caliphate’s reputation for tolerance and patronage attracted a flow of Jews from North Africa, Syria and Egypt. By the early tenth century, its golden age was symbolized by the glittering palace of az-Zahra. Under Hakam II (961–976 C.E.), the invention of the cusped arch allowed the great Mezquita, with its seeming infinity of aisles and columns, to become one of the wonders of the world. Córdoba’s quarter of a million inhabitants made it the largest city in Europe at the time. In Córdoba, as in Alexandria, bilingualism was a commonplace, at least among males. Scholars from all over Europe came to ferment the intellectual mix. In Muslim Spain, Judaism was as much respected (and perhaps as profitable, for the socially ambitious) as Christianity.j

  The Jewish renaissance in Spain produced a series of outstanding individuals. Their literary, medical and philosophical brilliance was hybridized by outside (mainly Arab) influences, but they were not lamed by any sense of belonging to an inferior caste. Muslim Spain was a place where any number of Josephs were able to flourish.k

  Jews such as Hasdai ibn Shaprut (born in Jaen around 910 C.E.) served the Muslim caliphs and kings in high positions and with much greater security and panache than was ever available to the seventeenth-century “court Jews” in central Europe.l Under the Arabized name of Abu Yusuf, ibn Shaprut was Abderrahman III’s supreme authority on Jewish matters. Because he spoke fluent Latin, he was also the caliph’s chief emissary when it came to the Christian states. In 948, in order to establish diplomatic ties, the emperor Constantius VII Porphyrogenitus sent a delegation from Byzantium with the priceless gift of a Greek manuscript of Dioscorides’s Materia Medica. The caliph asked Constantius to send a Greek teacher,m who collaborated with ibn Shaprut in making an accurate translation of botanical terms into their local Arabic equivalent.

  Spanish Jews lived dangerously, but sometimes gloriously. After the victory over Almeria in 1038, the triumphant vizier of Granada, Samuel ibn Naghrela (the only Jew to hold quasi-sovereign power in the Middle Ages)n decreed a “Second Purim” and circulated a Hebrew poem of celebration. Had Granada been defeated, however, Naghrela and all the Jews under his aegis might well have been killed or expelled. Two generations later, in 1066, when the Andalucian convivencia was supposedly at its most amiable, some four thousand Jews were slaughtered in riots in Granada, even though (or because) the city was nicknamed “Granada of the Jews,” on account of the number of Jews at the highest levels of the sultan’s administration. His vizier, Samuel ibn Naghrela’s son Yosef, the builder of the Red Fortress, now known as the Alhambra, was crucified by the rioters. Against strict Islamic law, he had commissioned Christian craftsmen to decorate the Alhambra’s harem (its windows overlook the Court of the Lions) with representations of the human figure. The syncretism of the senior members of the emir’s court contrasts, as it did in Córdoba, with the tight sectarianism of the lower orders. Their exclusion from power, like that of the city mob in first-century Jerusalem, turned religious fervor into the principal expression of the resentments of the plebeian Moors.o

  In eleventh-century Andalusia, the Jewish poet and philosopher Yehuda Halevi furnished a prime example of the mélange of influences. At home with Arabic literature and music, he composed poetry that sometimes mimicked the Arabic “girdle song.” It was accompanied by music (on lute, drum and guitar) that has left plangent traces, Jewish and Arab, in flamenco. In Andalusia’s golden age, starting in the middle of the eighth century, the caliph Abd al-Rahman and his successors in the great city of Córdoba were blessed with longevity. Untroubled by hereditary jostling, their dynasty procured a period of social stability. During Europe’s Dark Ages, they had time to open a wide, bright window, looking onto the Mediterranean, which had, for centuries, allowed the easy transit and exchange of men and ideas.

  The caliphs’ copious libraries matched those of the Ptolemies in Egypt, which ardent Muslim invaders had torched not many years before. Córdoba’s great Mezquita announced that the Umayyads were the masters of Iberia; but Hillel Halkin notes, in his study of Halevi, that that great monument was oriented not toward Mecca, but southward, quite as if it were situated in Damascus, from which the Umayyad Arabs claimed to have sprung.1

  Halevi was born, in the early 1070s, either in Toledo or in Tuleda, farther north in Castile. From early youth, he was fluent in Hebrew, Arabic (the secular mother tongue) and Spanish; verse and versatility went together. Literature is as often a means of social advancement as of self-expression.p Combining innovation with deference to tradition, Halevi was by turns lyric poet and, later, the advocate of an uncompromising version of Judaism.

  His long prose dialogue, The Kuzari, has led him to be taken for both a prototypical Zionist and a chauvinist mystic. He is seen in a variety of lights, which his critics themselves often supply. The fragility of the convivencia helps to explain Halevi’s belated, but then increasingly plaintive, yearning for Jerusalem. His appetite for Zion came to match the passion that, in younger days, had been spent on the anonymous love of his life. Evidently a beauty, she was not the woman he married. In the style of the Arabic poets, and of the Provençal troubadours, the unattainable was the thing he most desired. Pain tempts the poet to treat God as both supreme and not wholly beyond reproach. There is a flash of Jewish egalitarianism in such presumption.

  In 1099, Pope Urban II, the godfather of the First Crusade, put an end to a period in which—among the educated, at least—interfaith argument and mutual respect were not uncommon. His successors sought, and fought, to homogenize and centralize Christendom. North of the Pyrenees, Catholic orthodoxy became the price of admission to the blessings of civilization; dissent—as the Cathars would learn during the Albigensian Crusade of the early thirteenth century—meant death. Men such as Petrus Alfonsi, a Spanish Catholic convert from Judaism, and Peter Abelard (whose vision of Christianity was less dogmatic than the pope’s) had written dialogues that, while insisting that Christianity was superior to Judaism, showed scholarly respect for Jewish sources. It is hard to believe that the exposure of Abelard’s affair with Héloise was motivated only by moral outrage; it also served to smirch the “liberal” theology of which he was the outstanding exponent. Six centuries later, Spinoza’s conspicuous chastity deprived both Jews and Christians, of all denominations, of any convenient opportunity to depict him as a libertine atheist.

  Halevi’s The Kuzari was a response both to Christian polemics and to Jewish waverers. Just as Plato had attacked “the Sophists” for rhetoricizing truth, Halevi’s dialogue challenged philosophers and their rationalism. Of these, the most significant in Jewish thought had yet to be born: Moses Maimonides was still only a baby when Yehuda Halevi quit Córdoba, in 1140. The great libraries in the city were already replete with translations of classical texts. Aristotle’s notion of a universal and impersonal divinity is said, by Maimonides’s enemies, to have polluted The Guide of the Perplexed. His own perplexity was caused not least by the difficulty of reconciling the interventionist God of the Jews with Aristotle’s unmoved mover. The tension between faith and logic has never been resolved: the square may sit tight in the circle, but it can never square it.

  Halevi’s dialogue is more than a tract; he was an artist as well as a thinker. His certainties arose from his doubts and from his fears. The Kuzari questions as much as it answers. Its inspiration springs from fascination with the Khazars, whose kingdom dominated the northern Caucacus in the centuries immediately before Halevi’s birth. Having elected—from whatever spiritual or pragmatic motive—to adopt a monotheistic faith, the Khazar king is said first to have consulted Christian and Muslim divines before deigning to quiz a rabbi, whose maligned faith had had little appeal for him. However, when he learned that both Christianity and Islam based the authenticity of their theology, as each professed, on the books of the Jews, the king decided that their “truth” had, logically, to be parasitic on that of Judaism: where they veered
away from the Torah, Christians and Muslims had therefore to be diverging from the truth into the speculative. The king agreed to be circumcised and turned the Khazars (or at least its ruling order) into what Arthur Koestler would call “the thirteenth tribe.”q

  Halevi ranges beyond interfaith disputation. His fictional rabbi confronts the issue of determinism five centuries before Baruch Spinoza’s bleak and bold declaration of human bondage. The rabbi’s defense of free will is defiantly mundane and surprisingly modern. He might be an Oxford philosopher of the 1950s when he says to the king, “We are free to choose because we instinctively feel that we are and act in accordance with our feeling. This is not something that can or needs to be proved by philosophy. It is an empirical reality, the denial of which would be as foolish as denying the existence of our bodies or of the world around us.”r Determinism may have its logical sense, sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza came to put it, but what human being lives his daily life solely in the light of eternity?

  Halevi’s defense of human liberty, and of the empiricism it encourages, is obstinately of this world. At the same time, his eclecticism has abrupt limits. His rabbi holds the smallest demand of ritual obedience to be unquestionable: “There is no room in the worship of God for guesswork, logic or considered judgment. If there were, the philosophers would have achieved by means of their intellect twice as much as the Israelites.” Halkin reads this to imply that “the commandments, if executed correctly, have an objective impact on things, just as—to resort to a scientific analogy—combining hydrogen and oxygen in certain proportions and no others yields water.”2 “Just as” is a brave attachment to a tendentious analogy. In Halevi, as in Josephus, the very fact that he was writing secular literature in a pious cause admits a tincture of the irony Quintilian hoped to find in books worth reading.