A Jew Among Romans Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Volatic Limited

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Raphael, Frederic, [date]

  A Jew among Romans : the life and legacy of Flavius Josephus / Frederic Raphael.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90783-7

  1. Josephus, Flavius. 2. Jewish historians—Biography. I. Title.

  DS115.9.J6R37 2012 933.0072′02—dc 23 [B] 2012009744

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover image: Flavius Josephus, The Print Collector/Alamy

  Cover design by Linda Huang

  v3.1

  For Peter Green

  Cui dono lepidum novum libellum

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Introduction

  A Jew Among Romans

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  PROLOGUE

  In the late 1970s, more than thirty years after I had read classics at Cambridge, I happened, after a chance cull in a bookshop in Périgueux, to get to know the work of the Parisian Hellenists Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne and, in particular, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. I was drawn to him not only because of his exhilarating scholarship; I had already read his early, brave pamphlet L’affaire Audin, about the disappearance and torture by French paratroopers of a young mathematics professor in Algiers in 1957. His reward for telling the truth was to be sacked from his academic post.

  In a later volume, La torture dans la république, Vidal-Naquet analyzed the pernicious use of torture by the French army during its war with the Algerian FLN. A subsequent edition—published in English as Torture: Cancer of Democracy—expanded the indictment to include the conduct of the British in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising and, later, in Cyprus when Colonel Grivas was conducting his guerrilla campaign for Enosis (union with Greece). In his obituary of the scholar, who died in 2006, Oswyn Murray recalled how P.V.-N. had written to a retired French general requesting a copy of his book about the “truth” of the Algerian war.1 The general had replied that it was “free to the general public, eighty francs for traitors and forty francs to you.” P.V.-N. had sent a check for eighty francs.

  Even in his treatment of the ancient world, Vidal-Naquet combined academic punctilio with a sense of mission. The past was a key to the present. Interpreting it correctly was a matter not of pedantry, but of honor; scholarship was a department of truth, not of dandyism. If partisan, P.V.-N. was never dogmatic; if polemic, always humane. He was, he said, “vaccinated against orthodoxy.”

  I discovered that we were both Jews, born within a year or so of each other, of fathers born in the same year. It hardly made us brothers, but it did produce an illusion of affinity. Later, I learned that Vidal-Naquet père had been a constitutional lawyer who was active in the French Resistance. Arrested and tortured, he was, like his wife, murdered by the Germans at Auschwitz. Their son had spent the war in the rural department of the Drôme, protected by the Protestant community around him, but always under the shadow of murderous anti-Semitism. Pierre’s awareness both of his Jewishness and of the menace of totalitarian regimes was never merely theoretical.

  One detail of his childhood memories I found especially poignant: he never forgave the Germans for making his father “dance.” I was not sure what precisely that sinister phrase meant, but it stuck in my mind. Recently, while reading Christopher R. Browning’s Remembering Survival, I noticed that, in Poland, a camp commandant called Schroth, when urged to shoot a young girl, replied “the beast must dance first.”a No further details are given. In his youth, my own father was the amateur tango champion of the world. He danced only when he chose.

  On one occasion when I was in Paris in the early 1980s, I found Vidal-Naquet’s number in the telephone book. Against my usual habit when it comes to approaching strangers, I called him. If he had not been a Jew, would I have been as bold? P.V.-N. and I spent a rather formal hour together. His flat was large, not copiously furnished or carpeted; but there were many books. We exchanged flattering pleasantries, but I cannot claim that, as the French say, “the current passed” between us.

  At the end of our conversation, I gave him a copy of one of my books and he took from his wide, sagging shelves a fat volume La guerre des Juifs, by Flavius Josèphe. He inscribed it, with practiced briskness, “Pour F. Raphael avec la sympathie de P.V.-N.” It was, I confess, the first I had ever heard of Titus Flavius Josephus: he had never figured in the classical curriculum. The translation (by another hand) was preceded by P.V.-N.’s long prefatory essay “Du bon usage de la Trahison.” When I got home, I read his contribution, which had the pace and punch I had come to expect, but I cannot swear that I finished Josephus’s text.

  I returned to read Titus Flavius Josephus only in the last six or seven years. When I mentioned him to that great contemporary classicist, my old friend Peter Green, he said, “He’s your ideal subject.” I remembered Vidal-Naquet’s pugnacious essay and was not so sure; but Peter’s encouragement sent me back to the archetypal turncoat’s lively narrative. I began the long process of reading which had to accompany any attempt to revisit his life and times.

  My encounter with Vidal-Naquet was sans lendemain: we never met again. But, in the 1990s, I did by chance review the first volume of his autobiography. He wrote to tell me that mine was the only review he had read with pleasure; I had understood him. He had seemed gruff in person; on paper, he became a friend. Later, in another note, he wrote to say that he had been reading the translation Kenneth McLeish and I had done of the works of Aeschylus and that he thought it the best he had ever read in English (he was a keen Anglophile and, Oswyn Murray noted, had an exceptional knowledge of Shakespeare). His kind words about our Aeschylus may have been a courtesy. I prefer to assume that he was exercising the rigor that was his trademark.

  I have never subscribed, except for politeness’s sake, to any God, including that of the Jews. In my youth, I blamed Him for failing to prove that He existed by doing the right thing rather more often than history showed. And yet, by no brave decision, I am a Jew. What it means to me is the deposit of many of the things it has meant to others. There is comedy of a kind in the fact that the only people who might now insist that I am not really a Jew—since I neither pray nor abstain from forbidden foods—are other Jews.

  I do not go to synagogue; nor do I adhere to any kind of codified morality. I do not believe that the Jews (or anyone else) have some privileged connection with any kind of supernatural power. I neither seek nor shun Jewish company. And yet this concatenation of negatives links me, somehow, with what has happened, and is happening, to Jews in the world into which we have all been pitched. I would not have w
ritten about Titus Flavius Josephus (and alluded to other Jews who, in one way or another, followed his errant footsteps) if being a Jew did not mean something to me, at once indelible and imprecise, but I have not done so with any preconceived scheme or demonstrative intent.

  With me, as with Vidal-Naquet, orthodoxy makes unquestionable demands, which I can never honor. P.V.-N. was a frequent pamphleteer on Jewish matters. He engaged deeply, sometimes furiously, always sharply with the complexities of French attitudes to Jews and to the rampant particularism Israel came to stand for. Combative against anti-Semitism, he also deplored Zionist chauvinism. Entertaining his contradictions without embarrassment or reticence, he could, it seemed, be both a French socialist intellectual and a Jew sans complexes. Irony and indignation slung a bridge between scholarship and gauchisme.

  I have been an observer, rarely a participant, when it came to the events that, in my own lifetime, have made being a Jew, of whatever brand and by whatever definition, a perilous condition. As a child, I learned, from a safe distance, of the mass murder of millions of men and women and more than a million children with whom I had at least something in common. What kind of a Jew I have been, or have failed to be, is not my subject here. Yet this book reflects on me and I on it, to a degree that others will judge.

  As will be seen from the bibliography, I have relied on a large number of books on the subject of Josephus and his times. Specialists will notice that my references are nearly all literary and biographical. Since my principal interest is in Josephus’s character and works, and then in a selection of Jews who, in one way or another, resemble him in having been alienated, in a variety of ways, I have concentrated on personalities rather than, for instance, on archaeological evidence. Isaac Newton said that he owed the scope of his vision to “standing upon the shoulders of giants.” I confess only to having sometimes profited from standing on scholars’ toes.

  a In Le crime et le silence, Anna Bikont reports on the massacre, in July 1941, of some six hundred Jews by their Polish neighbors. An eyewitness reported, “On tuait les nourrissons qui tétaient le sein de leur mère, on frappait à la mort et on obligeait à chanter et à danser” (They killed babies who sucked at their mothers’ breast, they beat people to death and made people sing and dance).

  INTRODUCTION

  In a volume published in 1989, Lee Friedlander broke precedent by allowing his shadow to fall into the frame of his photographs. Normally, photographers stalk, and shoot, an image without blotting it with their own phantom intrusion. Historians are schooled to similar unobtrusiveness. A man’s style may grace his material, but it should not distort it. The first-person pronoun is discouraged; reliable accounts should appear to have been assembled by a dispassionate recorder. According to “Freedom for History,” proclaimed by Pierre Nora and others in 2005, “History is not morality.… the role of the historian is not to excite or to condemn but to explain.…. The historian does not introduce current sensibilities into the events of the past.…. History has no judicial purpose.” In practice, the most enduring historical narratives are salted with personality. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for instance, is a prolonged pageant conducted by an eighteenth-century impresario whose point of view shades every page. Hardly a phrase fails to convey gentlemanly disdain for cant, cruelty and credulity.

  Of all historians, ancient or modern, Titus Flavius Josephus is the one whose own shadow falls most obviously across his work. Yet if the Judaean Jews had not embarked on the rebellion against Rome that broke out in 66 C.E., and reached its climax with the capture and destruction of Jerusalem in 70, no librarian would ever have cataloged an author of that name. Joseph ben Mattathias was the younger of two sons of a substantial landowner.a He was away from Jerusalem on a diplomatic mission to Rome during the turbulent months preceding the outbreak of hostilities, but he must have assumed that he would spend most of his life in and around his native city. He gives no indication that he was any kind of a writer during the years preceding his appointment, at the age of thirty, as governor-general of Galilee. Born in 37 C.E., the historian certainly lived well into the reign of Domitian (81–96) and is generally thought to have survived till at least 100 C.E. Joseph ben Mattathias’s life was broken in half by the war of which he supplied the sole extant account. Only some time after his surrender to the Romans did he elect, or consent, to become the historian of the catastrophe that, unlike so many other Judaeans, he outlived.

  First, he had had to make his peace with the Roman commanders, Vespasian and his son Titus. After almost three years of collaboration,b he said good-bye, forever, to the “unhappy city” of Jerusalem and took ship, with the conquerors, to Rome. He never set foot again in his devastated and depopulated homeland. Having witnessed Titus’s triumphal procession, he was pensioned and repackaged as the Roman citizen Titus Flavius Josephus. Thenceforth he was nothing but a writing man. Like Edward Gibbon, “scribble, scribble, scribble” was his consuming activity; the past was his present. His “damned, thick, square” books (actually manuscript scrolls) were advertisements, and laments, for the Jews and apologies for himself. He remained an unflagging defender of the people among whom he would never again find it safe to live. Only nominally a Roman and no longer at one with the Jews,c he was doubly alienated. Recalling the past was a way of keeping himself company: “I am never less alone,” he wrote, “than when by myself.”

  No previous losing general in an ancient war had ever crossed the lines to describe the defeat of his own side. The only near precedent was Polybius, a Greek who composed his Roman history in the mid-second century B.C.E. He had been commissioned as a cavalry commander in the Achaean League, when it sided with Macedonia in its war with Rome, but he never went into battle. After the decisive defeat of King Perseus of Macedon at Pydna in 168 B.C.E., Polybius (whose name means “well-to-do”) was among a thousand notables taken as hostages to Italy, where they were held, without charge or trial, for seventeen years.

  Polybius was soon befriended by Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, a grandee who took him on campaign, as a privileged observer, in the Third Punic War, which started in 149 B.C.E. Three years later, despite their brave resistance, he saw the Carthaginians slaughtered and their city set on fire. After it had burned for seventeen days, the site was leveled and, it is said, sown with salt, with the ritual purpose of rendering it unable ever to grow again. In fact, a century later, Julius Caesar sponsored the resurrection of what then became a prosperous, docile city in the Roman province of Africa.d

  Victory entitled the Romans to call the Mediterranean “mare nostrum”: our sea, though the Phoenicians and the Greekse had been the first to sail it. In now voluntary and pampered exile, Polybius chose as his theme the irresistible rise of the Roman republic. Its social anatomy was designed, as if by fate, to foster military discipline; its mixed constitution—a hybrid of oligarchic and democratic elements—kept its citizens in step. Patricians and plebeians, officers and men had one common and binding purpose: conquest. Under the leadership of two quasi-regal, annually elected consuls, the Romans held virtue and success to be all but synonyms.

  Foreign triumphs brought luxury, and conceit, to Rome. As a resident foreigner, Polybius had to be cautious about criticizing the extortionate greed of the conquerors of Africa, Spain and Asia Minor.f Only by praising his patron, Aemilius Paullus, and his family for their “abstinence” did the Greek historian imply revulsion from the depredations of less fastidious Roman commanders. He seems to have had no qualms about living in the household of a general who—according to ancient statistics—had sold 150,000 Greeks into slavery after his victory in the Macedonian war. Slave labor supplied energy in the ancient world as oil does in the modern.

  Unlike Josephus when he sought to account for the fall of Jerusalem, Polybius never hints that Carthage’s fate was due to the moral iniquity of its citizens. Child sacrifice was integral to the worship of Moloch, the “Baal” of the Phoenicians, of whom Carthage was originally
a colony, but what commentator ever suggested that the Carthaginians were punished because their barbarities excited divine abhorrence?g Their city’s obliteration proved only that the Romans were winners; triumph was the proof that they deserved it. As Montesquieu would say, “The ancients conquered without reason, without utility. They ravaged the earth in order to exercise their virtue (that is, their manliness) and to demonstrate their excellence.” Homer’s Achilles had set the style in the race for primacy.

  Who has ever called Polybius a “bad Greek” because he stood for, and exemplified, reconciliation between Rome and Hellas? Mythological affinities bridged contemporary antagonisms. Although Hellenes might be despised for being too clever by half, they were the perennial teachers and counselors of Roman dignitaries. Despite their military superiority, the Romans remained in awe of Greek culture, as Americans used to be of European. Greek art became fashionable in Rome as early as the mid-third century B.C.E., after Sicily had been overrun and pillaged in the First Punic War. By the end of the second century B.C.E., that ardent Hellenist Marcus Tullius Cicero could say, “Italy was full of the arts and literature of Greece.” Hellas produced an inexhaustible supply of antique treasures and the texts to enliven them. The official Roman gods were curiously congruent with Zeus and Hera, Poseidon and Aphrodite, Athene and Artemis. Treading in Homer’s hexametrical footsteps, Virgil’s Aeneid attached the Romans to Greek epic myth by depicting them as the descendants of the defeated Trojans. The Mediterranean world was a Greco-Roman seesaw.

  After Judaea was finally reduced, in 73, there was no cultural merger. The Jews shared their God, Yahweh, with no one; He lacked any Latin equivalent. The Jews sported no comely statues, no emblematic heroes, no versatile or amorous deities and demigods. Their sacred language, Hebrew, was an inaccessible code;h their Scriptures unamusing and parochial; their diet odd. Judaism had just one crucial, if belated, influence on Roman history: it was a principal source of the Christian churches that would become the ideological enemies of the Jews.