A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  y It reached its theological acme in the “proof” for the existence of God “e consensus gentium” (from the general agreement of the people)—metaphysics by referendum.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could never have written this book without the help, guidance and generosity of scholars and friends. Of these the first was Zuleika Rodgers, of the School of Religions and Theology at Trinity College Dublin, who listed for me a large number of works, without which I should have been fatally unequipped to understand the complexities of the world of Joseph ben Mattathias / Flavius Josephus. Dr. Rodgers has saved me from several inaccuracies and unintentional anachronisms. To call Peter Green, my friend for sixty years, a great scholar of ancient Greece and Rome is to state the obvious. He is also a novelist, an essayist and a translator of wide culture and precise style, and an unflagging enemy of received ideas and ideological elaboration. His advice was first encouraging, then unsparing, and always invaluable. His imprimatur capped three years of work. Paul Cartledge, professor of ancient history at Cambridge, read an obese version of the manuscript and made accurate marks and remarks that saved me from many errors. George Walden was as alert in his comments as I should have expected and as encouraging as I could have hoped. David Goldberg put me right in a number of places; dissented, gently, from some of the things I said; but did not, of course, question my right to say them. I am also indebted to Mark Glanville and Stephen Raphael for their comments. My agent and friend Steve Wasserman has been vigilant and punctual with support, both intelligent and practical. Keith Goldsmith, my editor at Pantheon Books, has been a model of accurate, if not pitiless, patience and persistence. His help in shaping the text may, at times, have been less than graciously received, but he has been a tireless advocate of conciseness and clarity. Bonnie Thompson has proved a dauntless copy editor and has saved me from a number of ineptitudes. Whatever errors or provocations remain are certainly my own. As with all my work, the various versions of this text have been read with unsighing patience, sharp intelligence and pencil in hand by my wife, Beetle, to whom I owe so much more than she will care to read.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1 Oswyn Murray, Independent (London), April 8, 2006.

  I

  1 Jewish Antiquities, XIV: 4.

  2 See Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007).

  3 Jewish War, I: 431 and following.

  4 Ibid., I: 660 and following.

  5 Ibid., II: 16.

  6 Ibid., II: 74.

  II

  1 S. G. F. Brandon in Jesus and the Zealots.

  2 Jewish War, II: 264 and following.

  3 In Tessa Rajak, Josephus.

  4 See chapter 17 of F. W. Walbank’s Polybius, Rome and the Hellenistic World. Martin Goodman (in The Ruling Class of Judea) endorses the notion of the elitist Sadducee style (with its Epicurean savor) being particularly agreeable to the well-off. They had the leisure and means to be more liberally educated and widely read.

  5 Jewish War, I: 87 and following.

  6 Ibid., 1: 103.

  7 Géza Vermès (with Martin Goodman), The Essenes According to the Classical Sources (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1989).

  8 Géza Vermès, in the introduction to the Folio Society edition of The Dead Sea Scrolls (London: 2000).

  9 Jewish War, II: 145.

  10 And Steve Mason, in his Life of Josephus, politely doubts.

  III

  1 Acts of the Apostles 24:25. Steve Mason (Life of Josephus, p. 176) suggests that bribery may also have been on their agenda.

  2 Seneca said that external feelings remind us of simple mortality; such reactions, Paul Veyne says in Sénèque, are “slight and skin deep, like dread of the tunnel but excite no violent emotion and no fear. Nothing is to be feared.”

  IV

  1 For Jewish War, II: 247 and following.

  2 Jewish War, II: 467 and following. “Thirteen thousand” is a recurrent number, suggesting that it signifies a great many people rather than any kind of accurate count.

  V

  1 Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization.

  2 Jewish War, II: 259 and following.

  3 See T. P. Wiseman’s 1979 inaugural lecture, “Titus Flavius and the Indivisible Subject,” reprinted in H. W. Stubbs, ed., Pegasus: Classical Essays from the University of Exeter (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, 1981).

  VI

  1 Jewish War, II: 587 and following.

  2 Ibid., II: 607 and following.

  VIII

  1 Jewish War, III: 407 and following.

  IX

  1 See Harold Bloom’s introduction to Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, p. xv.

  2 Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judea, p. 202.

  3 Ibid., p. 180 and following.

  X

  1 See Idinopulos, in “Religious and National Factors in Israel’s War with Rome.”

  2 Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judaea, p. 198.

  3 Jewish War, V: 324 and following.

  XI

  1 See, for example, Rajak, Josephus, p. 187.

  2 Jewish War, V: 548 and following.

  3 Ibid., VI: 207.

  4 Ibid., VI: 423 and following.

  5 In Kenneth Atkinson’s contribution to Zuleika Rodgers, ed., Making History: Josephus and Historical Method.

  6 Ibid.

  XII

  1 See Idinopulos, “Religious and National Factors in Israel’s War with Rome.” Johanan ben Zakkai’s salute to Vespasian, and his amiable reception, is unmentioned by Josephus, never a man to share credit.

  2 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Du bon usage de la Trahison,” p. 94.

  3 Honora Howell Chapman, in “Spectacle in Josephus’s Jewish War.”

  4 Ronald Syme’s early, skittish paper on the subject is reprinted in his Roman Papers, vol. 5.

  5 See Wiseman, in Stubbs, Pegasus.

  6 Jewish War, VI: 230 and following.

  7 See Mason’s “Figured Speech and Irony in Titus Flavius Josephus,” in Edmondson et al., Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome.

  8 Hannah M. Cotton and Werner Eck, “Josephus’s Roman Audience.”

  9 Josephus, Vita, 429.

  10 Cotton and Eck, “Josephus’s Roman Audience.”

  11 Vasily Rudich, Political Dissidence Under Nero (London: Routledge, 1993).

  XIII

  1 In Goodman, “The Fiscus Judaicus and Gentile Attitudes to Judaism in Flavian Rome,” in Edmondson et al., Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome.

  2 Daniel R. Schwartz, “Herodians and Ioudaioi in Flavian Rome,” in Edmondson et al., Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome.

  3 Suetonius, Life of Domitian, 12.2.

  4 Wiseman, “Titus Flavius and the Indivisible Subject,” in Stubbs, Pegasus, p. 15.

  5 Goodman, in “The Fiscus Judaicus and Gentile Attitudes to Judaism in Flavian Rome,” cites Cassius Dio (68.1.2) on Nerva’s formal rejection of accusations for following a “Jewish life-style.”

  6 In Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism.

  XIV

  1 For the complete meaning of logos in Greek, see Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind.

  2 See Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, p. 84ff.

  XV

  1 Leo Strauss (1899–1973) made an emphatic feature of such discontinuities. Cf., Faith and Political Philosophy, his correspondence with Eric Voegelin (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993).

  XVI

  1 In Paschal Homily. Cited by John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism.

  2 Jewish Antiquities 18: 310.

  3 In Uriel Rappaport’s contribution to Zuleika Rodgers, ed., Making History.

  XVII

  1 See Hillel Halkin, Yehuda Halevi (New York: Schocken Books, 2010).

  2 Ibid., p. 170.

  3 See María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World (New York: Little, Brown, 2002).

  4 See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 61.

  5 See Yose
f Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto.

  6 See Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life.

  XVIII

  1 See Evelyn Juers, House of Exiles, p. 217.

  2 Quoted from Michael Hofmann’s 2012 translation of Roth’s letters (see Roth, A Life in Letters).

  3 See, for instance, There Was Once a World by Yaffa Eliach (London: Little, Brown, 1998).

  4 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons.

  5 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  6 Ibid.

  7 David G. Stern and Béla Szabados, Wittgenstein Reads Weininger. See also Szabados’s Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender and Cultural Identity: Philosophy as Personal Endeavour (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010).

  8 See Jacques Bouveresse, La force de la règle (Paris: Èditions de Minuit, 1987).

  9 Romek Marber, No Return: Journeys in the Holocaust (Nottingham, UK: Richard Hollis, 2010).

  10 Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival.

  11 See A. J. Ayer, Ludwig Wittgenstein (London: Penguin, 1986).

  12 Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 34.

  13 See Timms, Karl Kraus, vol. 2, p. 21 and following.

  14 See Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (New York: Little, Brown, 1955).

  XIX

  1 Foreword to Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, p. xvii.

  2 See Peter Kielmansegg et al., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss.

  3 Leo Strauss quoted in ibid.

  4 Ibid.

  5 In the introduction to David Bergelson, The End of Everything, p. x.

  6 Jewish War, I: 7.

  7 See Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue by Heinrich Meier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  8 In Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).

  9 In David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich (London: Collins, 1981), p. 140.

  10 Romek Marber, No Return.

  11 For the pro-Arab history (and delusions) of French foreign policy, see David Pryce-Jones, Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews (New York: Encounter Books, 2006).

  12 See Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

  13 See Vermès’s Jesus the Jew and his subsequent works on the same theme.

  14 “Delving into the Dark Side: Josephus’ Foresight as Hindsight,” in Zuleika Rodgers, ed., Making History: Josephus and Historical Method, p. 66.

  15 In Harold Bloom’s 1998 introduction (p. xviii) to Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor.

  16 Cf. www.jewsagainstzionism.com/rabbi-quotes/vayoelmoshe1.cfm#6million.

  17 Quoted in ibid., pp. 90–91.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Adler, Laure. L’insoumise. Paris: Actes Sud, 2008.

  Balsdon, J. P. V. D. Romans and Aliens. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

  Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2006.

  Benda, Julien. Exercice d’un enterré vif (Juin 1940–Août 1944). Paris: Trois Collines, 1944.

  Bergelson, David. The End of Everything. Translated and with an introduction by Joseph Sherman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

  Bikont, Anna. Le crime et le silence: Jedwabne 1941, la mémoire d’un pogrom dans la Pologne d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Denoël, 2011.

  Binet, Laurent. HHhH. Translated by Sam Taylor. London: Harvill Secker, 2012.

  Birnbaum, Pierre. Géographie de l’espoir: L’exil, les lumières, la désassimilation. Paris: Gallimard, 2004.

  Boardman, John, Jasper Griffin and Oswyn Murray. The Oxford History of the Classical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

  Bosworth, A. B. “Vespasian and the Provinces: Some Problems of the Early 70s A.D.” Athenaeum 51 (1973): 49–78.

  Bouretz, Pierre. Témoins du futur: philosophie et messianisme. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

  Bowersock, G. W. “Foreign Elites at Rome.” In Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome, edited by J. C. Edmondson, Steve Mason and J. B. Rives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  ———. Roman Arabia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

  Brandon, S. G. F. Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity. New York: Scribner, 1967.

  Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

  Browning, Christopher R. Remembering Survival. New York: Norton, 2010.

  Caird, G. B. Paul’s Letters from Prison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

  Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews—A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

  Cartledge, Paul. Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

  ———. The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece. London: Pan Books, 2003.

  Casson, Lionel. Travel in the Ancient World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

  Cavafy, Constantine. Collected Poems. Translated by Philip Sherrard and Edmund Keeley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

  Chapman, Honora Howell. “Spectacle in Josephus’s Jewish War.” In Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome, edited by J. C. Edmondson, Steve Mason and J. B. Rives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Cohen, Shaye. Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian. Leiden: Brill, 1979.

  Cohn, Norman. Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom. St. Albans, UK: Paladin, 1976.

  Collins, J. J. Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora. New York: Crossroad, 1983.

  Coser, Lewis A. Functions of Social Conflict. New York: Free Press, 1968.

  Cotton, Hannah M., and Werner Eck. “Josephus’s Roman Audience: Josephus and the Roman Elites.” In Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome, edited by J. C. Edmondson, Steve Mason and J. B. Rives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Davies, Philip R., George J. Brooke and Phillip R. Callaway. The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

  Davis, John A. The Jews of San Nicandro. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

  Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.

  Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

  Dodds, Jerrilynn, Maria Rosa Menocal and Abigail Krasner Balbale. The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

  Edmondson, J. C., Steve Mason and J. B. Rives, eds. Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Ferrill, Arther. Caligula: Emperor of Rome. London: Thames & Hudson, 1991.

  Finkielkraut, Alain. Une voix vient de l’autre rive. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.

  Finley, Moses. Politics in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

  Forrest, W. G. The Emergence of Greek Democracy, 800–400 BC. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966.

  Gager, John G. The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

  Goldstein, Rebecca. Betraying Spinoza. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.

  Goodman, Martin. “The Fiscus Judaicus and Gentile Attitudes to Judaism in Flavian Rome.” In Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome, edited by J. C. Edmondson, Steve Mason and J. B. Rives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  ———. “Kosher Olive Oil in Antiquity.” In A Tribute to Géza Vermès: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History, edited by Philip R. Davies and Richard T. White. Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1990.

  ———. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civiliz
ations. London: Allen Lane, 2007.

  ———. The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt Against Rome, A.D. 66–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

  Grafton, Anthony, Glenn W. Most and Salvatore Settis, eds. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

  Green, Peter. Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993.

  Griffin, Miriam T. Nero: The End of a Dynasty. London: Batsford, 1984.

  Gruen, Erich S. The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

  Gubar, Susan. Judas: A Biography. New York: Norton, 2009.

  Hay, Malcolm. Europe and the Jews. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960.