A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  Ignoring the Manichaean dichotomy between Christians and Jews ensconced in the origins of Christianity, Christian apologists make out that anti-Semitism was a function of the Enlightenment rather than of religion. Although inadvertently, Carl Schmitt gave them the lie when he argued that “there is no rational end.… no programme, however ideal.… that could justify human beings killing one another over it.…. If such a physical annihilation of human life does not occur out of the proper assertion of one’s own form of existence against a likewise proper negation of this form, that annihilation plainly cannot be justified.”7 Only ideology (of which monotheism is the ur-form) renders killing, for the sake of one’s faith, both excusable and “necessary.” Christian diabolization of “the Jews” made their slaughter and dispossession a profitable duty. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “ideal” anti-Semite decides who, essentially, he is by recognizing himself as a man who hates Jews. The socialism of fools is also the paranoia of the crowd which, in Elias Canetti’s view, elides the individual conscience into a mass mentality without memory or remorse.8

  René Girard argues that the capacity to embody evil—the scapegoat role—is by nature ambiguous. The pariah’s social use is as the vessel that evacuates pollution from the community. By objectifying and then removing its sins, the outcast appears to be an instrument of magic redemption. Girard explains how Oedipus, for particular instance, played the part both of the polluted tyrant and, later, of the revered guru. Since, solely by his self-sacrifice, he had the power to dispel the plague that had fallen on Thebes, the guilty one became graced with what seemed to be magical potency. Endowed with supernatural karma, the tyrant and pariah was transformed into the exile at Colonus whom men came to consult as a prophet.

  The Jew as demon and miracle worker, and later as medical man, takes on a similar aura of election. According to Vidal-Naquet, Josephus was regarded in pre-Reformation Germany as the author of something close to Holy Writ: he was seen as the “magic healer” who had sustained his community. The archetypal Jew, feared or respected, shunned or solicited, is never just one more ordinary human being. “Jewish self-hatred” can as well be interpreted as the ingestion of Christian attitudes. The prisoner of an alien notation, the Jew stands away from himself and evaluates himself like the stranger that others insist on making him.

  Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1947 panacea for anti-Semitism (based on small acquaintance with actual Jews or their history) would have the Jew “assume” the character his enemies wish upon him and, by doing so voluntarily, transcend it. He may have been inspired by the story, told by David Pryce-Jones, of the French playwright Pierre Wolff, who, in 1941 Paris, on hearing that Jews had to wear a yellow star, pinned one prominently on his breast, lit a cigar, and hailed a fiacre in order to ride down the Champs Élysées.9 When a friend murmured that it was not a wise moment to do so, he replied, “My dear fellow, this is no time to hide one’s light under a bushel!” Chapeau, indeed.

  Sartre’s clever advice ignores the specificity of Jewish history. The actual fate of Europe’s Jews down the centuries renders his prescription condescending and irrelevant. Why “should” Jews be required to conform to what others say they are? On this reasoning, they alone are to be denied the right to existential choice. Aware of Vichy France’s complicity in the Holocaust, Sartre became and—unlike most of the rest of the Left—remained a qualified supporter of Israel, never permitting himself the enthusiasm that he displayed for Stalin’s Russia or, later, for Mao’s China. Sartre’s long-serving acolyte Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film, Shoah, was an unmitigated middle-aged declaration of identity, rage and specificity. An epic of retrieval, as was The Jewish War, his nine-hour film passed judgment, if only en passant, on his master’s pronounced reticence. Lanzmann’s resumption of his Jewishness was social, political and artistic, never religious; to that extent he remained a Sartrean as well as a modernized mutation of Flavius Josephus, unflaggingly persistent in the retrieval and recording of painful memories.t Accurate reminiscence is another way of getting one’s own back.

  Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, impersonated Jewish persistence. As with Judas (and Oedipus), what began as a stigma became a distinction. Because his calvary came to be seen as disproportionate to his offense, the wanderer’s pariahdom casts doubt on the justice of the God who ordained it and on the church whose pope claimed to be the “Vicar of Christ.” Romek Marber concludes his memories of a Polish childhood during the Shoah by saying:

  What had I been witness to? A Catholic Church that had complete control over the Polish Catholic population yet kept silent. Individuals and sometimes small groups of Christians did help, but they were the exception. Jews escaping from ghettos feared Polish Catholics as much as they feared the Germans. The great corporate body, the Catholic Church, which maintains its universal claim to Christian values, was silent.10

  Marber’s English prose, like Josephus’s Greek, is poignant with the stress between the modesty of its expression and the matter he is recalling, after decades of London life, during which he designed dust jackets for Penguin Books. The horror he experienced in his native Poland is so far outside the scope of his mature vocabulary that it issues in a knot of decorum. The stress of writing at all, after so long an interval, and in a language alien to the author’s at the time of what happened, fills his autobiography with an air of terse anguish like that to be found in Josephus’s Vita.

  The ancient world heels into the modern with the improbable, and unpopular, return of the Jews to Palestine. However dependent it may have been on the aid and muscle of post-Christian powers, the Jewish state of Israel threatens Christian mythology: it offers the unapologetic Ahasuerus a permanent home. The Zionists’ recapture of Jerusalem could never (as at least some of them hoped) be taken to be a merely pragmatic event in world history. As Josephus might have forecast, it carried theological implications. Crusaders had slaughtered all the Jews they could find; the Arabs had put one of their finest mosques where Herod’s Temple once stood, and maintained that Muhammad flew from there into the heavens, as Elijah had. Against the odds, the Jews returned and claimed their primacy. The abiding, if seldom admitted, case against Israel is that it threatens the mythological machinery of both Christendom and Islam (and, as the New Left has proved, chimes discordantly with meta-Marxism).

  The recapture of Jerusalem in 1967 and the subsequent victory over the combined Arab powers signaled the moment at which the Jews, who had enjoyed the favor of most Europeans, even those on the political left, were transformed, in quite short order, into the oppressors of the Palestinians. General de Gaulle was free to call the Jews “un peuple d’élite, sûr de lui-même, et dominateur.” In London, during World War II, de Gaulle had remarked, wryly, that he had appealed for the French to rally to him, and it was mainly Jews who had responded to his call. He himself had been condemned by the Vichy état français as a traitor for deserting his post. At least slightly like Josephus, he preferred to live to fight, and write, another day.

  Since, in the end, de Gaulle prevailed and returned to power in France, with the aid of the British and the Americans, Vichy’s charge against him lost all merit: he had the last word. Pierre Mendès-France, who had left France with the authority of his commanding officer, was arraigned for desertion by a Vichy government which tried to make him into a second Dreyfus (the Right never accepted that the first one had been innocent). Mendès-France escaped from Vichy custody to join the Free French air force, in which he served as a navigator with rare courage and, according to Romain Gary, some eccentricity. Mendès-France was always conscious that, in many French eyes, he was hardly more than a metic “curieusement surnommé France,” as his Fascistic enemies were so often pleased to say.

  Raymond Aron, who was among the most assimilated of Frenchmen (and, according to Isaiah Berlin, the most intelligent), reacted with measured scorn to de Gaulle’s 1967 remarks, but the general had said what many of his political opponents would soon endorse: the Jews in the new Jerusalem were bot
h domineering and exceptional—they stood out against the “universalism” that was, or should be, the mark of virtuous post-monotheistic ideologies: first Marxism and later “universal human rights,” René Cassin’s post–World War II recension of Woodrow Wilson’s notion of self-determination. The Palestinians were certainly as ill-used as they were ill-advised, by a series of strident demagogues. Yasser Arafat was only the most self-assertive of those whose room for negotiation was hedged by the knowledge that, if they agreed to any reasonable settlement, they would almost certainly be killed.

  The increasing isolation of Israel, and the routine of disparagement to which it has been subject in the Western media, coincided with the confidence of the Jewish state that it can be responsible for its own defense. The secularization of what used to be Christendom made it seem that hostility to Israel was either pragmatic (the French sought to endear themselves to the Arabs by cold-shouldering Israel) or moral (which sanctioned the fabrication of Jewish atrocities).u Neither the Quai d’Orsay11 nor the bien-pensant press would be likely to concede that it was affected by the symbolic significance of the Jews taking command once again of the whole of the city that Titus had captured and burned; but Israel’s insolence, in claiming exclusive control of Jerusalem, damaged the myth of Christian hegemony on which the vanity of Europe continued to repose. The Israeli victory incidentally refuted the age-old Christian belief that the ejection of the Jews from Jerusalem had proved that God had deserted them.

  The authors of the Gospels, from the Jew Mark to the Gentile Luke, read the fall of Jerusalem as if it were the fulfillment of a prophecy by Jesus. The claim, renovated by Richard Bauckham, that the Gospels derive from contemporary documents and testimony, implies that such evidence is itself a verification.12 He disregards the degree to which a witness’s description wishes significance, and interpretation, onto “the facts.” What men say they have seen, or choose to recall, is as often founded on what they believe as the other way round. As Géza Vermès has shown, almost everything reported about Jesus of Nazareth, including the place and manner of His Nativity, is colored by partisanship, however honest.13 The notion that Christian evidence can validate the Gospel stories requires an a priori conviction that they are beyond question. A myth can be fruitful, morally and aesthetically, without its produce—artistic or moral—in any way confirming its truth. Chateaubriand’s Le génie du Christianisme is a compendium that arrays the splendor of doctrines that it does nothing to prove. Its author did not conduct himself, in his private life, as if in fear of adamantine chains or penal fire.

  While Josephus was adopting a largely secular way of looking at and explaining events, the writers of the Gospels sought to reorient creation. In due time, “the Jews” were depicted as the authors not only of their own misfortunes but of everybody’s. Both the Gospels and Josephus’s writings hinge on the fall of Jerusalem. The Gospel authors had no more interest in a historically truthful account of events preceding the Crucifixion than pious Jews, in the Diaspora, would show in Gentile history outside the ghetto or the shtetl. The ambition of the evangelists was to portray Jesus of Nazareth—who, for the large majority of Jews in his lifetime, had failed to prove himself the Messiah—as the sole and miraculously resurrected son of God.v

  James S. McClaren has declared that it would be “intriguing to consider the type of narrative which Josephus would construct if the [Judaean] revolt had concluded with increased Jewish autonomy.”14 As a rhetorical exercise, such a composition might be entertaining, but the likely answer is, in truth, that Josephus would not have constructed any type of narrative whatever. If the putative Jewish success had come after he had already surrendered at Jotapata, he would almost certainly have been done away with by one side or the other. The retreating Romans would have had no further use for him; the victorious Judaean leaders, such as John of Gischala, would have disposed of him as a traitor. He would have had neither time nor impulse to become a writer whose sole exercise was to retrieve what had been lost to his people and to himself.

  It would be no less “intriguing” to consider what type of narrative the evangelists would, or could, have “constructed” if Yahweh had (or could be believed to have) come to the aid of His people and evicted the Romans from Judaea. Would Christianity have been aborted? If the Jews had been historically justified in their dependence on the Holy One, their religion and reputation would have shriveled the appeal of what turned into Christianity. The humiliation of “the Jews” became, and remains, essential to an evangelic reading of the Jewish War. The resurrection of Jesus would not have been “disproved” by the success of the Jews, but its consequences could not have been so plausibly interpreted to be of world-historical import. Had the Jewish rebellion succeeded, the myth of Jesus’s betrayal by His own people, and its divinely ordained punishment, would have no terrestrial correlative. The abiding Christian need to abuse Judaism and humiliate its “stiff-necked” faithful remains evidence of how great a rival any triumphant form of Jewish community, in an independent Jerusalem, might have been.

  It is part of the usual construction of the “Jewish character” (and of “the survivor”) that Josephus should be depicted as a man haunted by guilt, as Judas and the Wandering Jew are alleged to have been. His unashamed defense of himself is taken to be proof that he was concealing his shame. He was certainly pained; any kind of exile was experienced, in the ancient world, as an amputation from the body politic. For Greeks, Romans and Hebrews, communal connection gave meaning to life. An exile’s punishment, especially if he was an ostracized public figure, lay merely in exclusion. Yet expulsion could lead, if never automatically, to literary innovation and prolificity: Bacchae, Euripides’s most challenging (because ambiguous) play, was written in exile, as was much of the work of Thucydides and Xenophon.w

  Like some prosaic anti-Ovid, the exiled Titus Flavius Josephus spent the last three decades of his life in Rome, regretting the loss of what Pliny the Elder called “by far the most famous city of the East.” If he was safe in Rome, he had no future there, only his past. Early in his biography of Isaiah Berlin, Michael Ignatieff reported “His memory is freakish, so unusually fine-grained as to seem scarcely human, and so effortlessly in command of his past that he gives the impression of having accumulated everything and lost nothing.… in the labyrinthine archive of his mind.…. It was a virtuoso display of a great intelligence doing battle with loss.” Einstein said of him that he was “a kind of spectator in God’s big but mostly not very attractive theater.”x If Flavius Josephus was an early candidate in the same class of scribe, the closed tradition of Jewish thought put him under the stress of having to compose his work, at least at first, in parochial terms. The breach between Second Temple ceremonial and what came to be done and said and written in later years opened the pain-filled space in which so many Diaspora Jews stayed true, in one fashion or another, to the old religion. George Steiner designates the “separation of ‘word’ and ‘world’ as one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history.” Josephus by himself, with pen and paper in Rome, is the first man to take a spiritual spin in that direction. He had lost his world; he had only the word.

  In the early Middle Ages, even the relatively enlightened Maimonides (who tried to square Judaism with Aristotle) regarded the reading or writing of mundane history as “a waste of time.” Harold Bloom says that after the year 500, commemorative lists of martyrs and fast days, in atonement for catastrophes, together with the law, and its Talmudic annexes, “subsumed all the possibilities of history.”15 In that sense, Arnold Toynbee’s reference to Judaism as a “fossil religion” had petty pertinence. Freud put a more generous face on it in August 1938, when he wrote to his daughter Anna: “the only possession [the Jews] retained after the destruction of the Temple, their scripture.… the Holy book and the intellectual effort applied to it.… kept the people together.” These are singular words from the author of The Future of an Illusion. Even the avowedly irreligious sage, on his way to
exile, seems to say that, for Jews at least, the future lies in the past.

  Whatever posture of resigned ruefulness he adopted, Josephus never shed the assumption that God was the literally overall explanation of what happened in history. The God of the Jews was still in control; if He had punished His people, they would have to wait for, and first deserve, His forgiveness. Josephus’s view of God as an active, judging agent in the world was alien to the Greeks and the Romans but, in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem, no longer uniquely Jewish. As the Christians detached themselves from the defeated and despised Jews, they became the antagonists of the people to whom Jesus had addressed Himself. In the second century C.E., the Christian Origen quoted the Greek philosopher Celsus as saying, “See how much help God has been to both them [the Jews] and to you. Instead of being masters of the world, they have been left with no land and no home of any kind.” The more recruits Christianity enrolled, the stronger became the urge to parade the growth of the church as proof that God was with them.y