A Jew Among Romans Read online

  Josephus purported to follow Polybius in making his history “pragmatic.” His avowed emphasis was on pragmata: acts, deeds, things. As far as the gods were concerned, Polybius ascribed Rome’s success entirely to Tyche (Greek for “chance”), a post-Olympian Hellenistic deity, worshipped by Romans under the rubric of Fortuna. Tyche brought good and bad luck,i but she had no moral agenda for mankind and made no compacts. Under her widespread aegis (Tyche is mentioned seventy-eight times in The Jewish War), life was a twenty-four/seven casino. Unlike Homer’s Zeus in archaic Hellas, Polybius’s prevailing deity was never an active moral force supervising the world’s game. Here Judaism differed: in the eyes of the priest that Joseph ben Mattathias was proud to proclaim himself, Yahweh had persistent and jealous expectations of His chosen. The Torah promised that the Holy One played a controlling and judicial part in human affairs. Provided His people honored His commandments,j offered due sacrifices, made pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the great festivals, especially Passover, and paid their tithes to the priesthood, there was no limit to His favor; nor to His displeasure if they did not.

  Yahweh was nothing if not a hands-on God. The Book of Daniel, one of the last in the official Old Testament, repeated that the Holy One conferred earthly powers on those who deserved them and confiscated them from transgressors. Justice, not luck, would have the last word, which—so the same text promised—would soon be said. The Ethiopian Enoch, probably around the mid-second century B.C.E., announced the imminent end of the world: of the ten “weeks” of human history, eight had already passed. The next two would see the conversion of the world to Judaism and the Final Judgment. Daniel too threatened apocalypse, and soon.

  Yahweh’s fattened rule book demanded that Jews respect Him at all times, especially by abstaining from any activity other than prayer on the Sabbath. On the seventh day, purists insisted, men were forbidden even to defend themselves. When, in 63 B.C.E., the legions of Pompey the Great attacked Jerusalem on the Sabbath, the faithful were at prayer in the Temple. The barefoot priests continued with their office as they and their congregation were cut to pieces.

  In Josephus’s eyes, God was a moral enforcer, not a celestial croupier. It followed that Jerusalem would never have fallen, on any occasion, if He had not had reason to withdraw His sympathy. Why would the God of the Hebrews turn His face from His chosen people? The answer had to be that they had sinned. However scrupulous Josephus might be with regard to sources and evidence, for him there was more to human history than Polybius’s concatenation of pragmata.k For the first modern Jewish historian, facts and moral reckonings were seldom separate. Yet his situation, when living on pensioned probation in Flavian Rome, required him to tread delicately, especially when telling the truth. His most genuine sentiments had to be understated. As the founder of the BBC, Lord Reith, once said, “When people feel deeply, impartiality is bias.”

  In The Jewish War, Josephus resembles his fifth-century B.C.E. model, the revered Thucydides, by figuring in his own history as a less than successful—though more flamboyant—general, and only in the third person. While both writers assess their own military performances with affectations of objectivity, Josephus sees himself in a more indulgent, sometimes heroic light. Only in the autobiographical Vita, while revisiting events already described, more soberly, in book III of The Jewish War, does he abandon his dispassionate posture. In self-defense, he composed the first example of prose written in the first person to reach posterity.l

  Josephus’s Greek revision of the now lost original Aramaic version of The Jewish War was intended (by him, if not by the Flavians who commissioned it) to set the record straight: he is at pains to make it clear that the Jewish rebellion also involved a civil war between Jews. It is likely, however, that the text was published by the Romans to serve as a warning to Gentile readers in the eastern Mediterranean who might be of a mind to challenge their presence. Its critics accused the author of inaccuracy and distortion. The only one named by Josephus was a certain Justus, whom he had encountered years before, when campaigning in Galilee.m Justus and his father had been notables in Tiberias, a modernized city—named for Tiberius, the Roman emperor from 14 to 37 C.E.—on the Sea of Galilee. Joseph ben Mattathias tried repeatedly to attach its mixed population to the Jewish cause in the nervous weeks before Vespasian marched into Judaea.

  Justus survived the war to become secretary to King Agrippa II, the ethnarch of Judaea. It was as an indignant reply to his criticn that the elderly Josephus was prompted to write his autobiographical apology. His Vita is limited to its author’s early, active years. Only toward the end of his prolific literary career did he come round to writing about his youth, in the tones of a man speaking for himself, if never quite freely. Looking back in anger and anguish, some twenty years after his arrival in Rome, he has the snap of a survivor with a long memory for the dirty tricks of his enemies, not least those on his own side. Old wounds continued to arm his bow.

  Josephus’s long retrospective survey, Jewish Antiquities, appears more impersonal than his other works. Yet it too was part of an extensive effort to sustain the reputation of the Jews. They might have turned their backs on him; he never turned his on them. Like the solitary Sisyphus, he rolled on, in twenty volumes. Composed, as were the Gospels, in the post-classical Greek (derived from the classical Athenian) known as Koine, the common language of the Gentile eastern Mediterranean, Jewish Antiquities demystifies, but never debunks, the biblical and subsequent history of the Jews. Advertising their ancient origins and their intimate association with the Creator of the world, Josephus portrays them as a people who, like the ancient Athenians and Spartans, had lost a war but whose qualities merited lasting admiration.

  The early sections of Jewish Antiquities are a paraphrase of the Hebrew Scriptures. Josephus then continues the story, through the rebellion of the Maccabees against the Seleucid Greeks, to the death of Herod the Great, in 4 B.C.E., when The Jewish War (which was, in fact, written first) latches on to it. Josephus’s other substantial work, and the last he was able to complete, is his sustained and outspoken counterattack against Apion, an Alexandrian Greek academic and polemicist. A generation earlier, Apion had mounted a campaign against the Jews who had a large and long-established community in his city. He mocked their absurd beliefs and subversive habits. The Jews, he declared, worshipped a God whose commandments required them to behave in irrational ways.

  In Against Apion, Josephus responded that if the Jewish laws had been proposed by some mythical sage or lawgiver, such as the Spartans’ founding father Lycurgus, they would be regarded as eminently wise. In taking this line, he was the prototype of liberal Jewish apologists who give Yahweh credit for putting health warnings on shellfish and pork and attribute to Him the salutary rule that men should rest from their labors, as He did, on the seventh day. It is nice to think that everybody’s weekend owes something to the Torah.o Josephus was the first Jewish writer to advertise his people’s merits and religion to an alien audience and to retort robustly when they were disparaged. That he was writing, in Rome, at much the same time as the authors of the four Gospels and in the same public language made him the first Jew not only to challenge Apion but also to anticipate the dogmatic anti-Semitism which the Christian Fathers would sanctify in later centuries.

  It is commonly assumed that Josephus’s Greek translation of The Jewish War trots along with his original (now lost) Aramaic version; but even if his command of Koine was not yet fluent, the use of a foreign language involved a certain liberation. Because he was employing an alien terminology, the revision of his text has to have doubled as a commentary on it. To write in Greek enrolled him, to some degree, in a Gentile logic. Like fancy dress, pastiche dispels inhibitions. Men can both lose and discover themselves in another tongue: Baruch/Benedict Spinoza in Latin,p Joseph Conrad in English, Samuel Beckett in French. Even Edward Gibbon’s English derives its Latinate cadences from the French that he learned during his boyhood in Geneva.

  Joseph
us was a Judaean Jew of a kind that never existed before the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple. The war he regarded as a reckless folly had ended with the mass suicide of the zealot garrison of Masada and the eviction of the Judaeans from their social and spiritual capital. Hundreds of thousands died in the war. Joseph ben Mattathias decidedly did not. Apology, of one kind and another, is at the heart of his history. His involvement in the ruin of his people, first as their general, then as a captive spectator, both certifies its vividness and compromises its neutrality. A hyperactive social animal became a caged and passive solitary; yet exile also brought him to life as a writer.

  The attachment, in midlife, of “Titus Flavius” to the Latinized equivalent of the author’s original name symbolized the indenture of a Judaean notable to the service of the upstart Flavian dynasty. He would be marked forever as having accepted the favors, and taken the brand, of those who had destroyed his native city and massacred or enslaved its citizens. Not the least of Josephus’s sins is that he survived to report news no one wanted to hear. The verbose individual who, from the time he left his native Judaea, never stopped writing about the past of his people, and about himself, has been stigmatized as the incarnation of an uneasy consciousness. Accused of treachery to the cause he once served, he has something in common both with the Wandering Jew and with Judas Iscariot, archetypal embodiments of the Jew as guilt-laden pariah.

  The notion, propagated by the Gospels, that “the Jews” had the power to coerce the conscience-stricken Roman prefect Pontius Pilate into executing the innocent Jesus was a key element both in the anathematization of the Jews by Christianity and in the exemption of imperial Rome from the charge of deicide. Orthodox and Roman Catholicism attached that crime only to the Jews, in perpetuity.q No one has ever accused Italians, ancient or modern, of being Christ-killers. As Susan Gubar has said, “Judas is the principal figure through whom Christians have understood Jews and Jewry.”r

  Judas was turned into the hate figure in a myth that required God to be an innocent victim whose blood would redeem those who put their faith in Him. The Jew as treachery incarnate is struck from his mold. Titus Flavius Josephus is rarely so cruelly stigmatized, but his survival, capped by his accepting a stipend from the Romans, has made him, in some eyes, a cousin of Judas Iscariot. Yigael Yadin, the Israeli general and archaeologist who excavated the mountain redoubt of Masada, where the Judaean rebels made their last stand, in 73 C.E., said of Josephus, “He was a great historian and a bad Jew.”s Is that a verdict which deserves to stand? How are good or bad Jews to be defined or recognized? Yadin’s assertion tells us more about the do-or-die ethos with which the Israeli general hoped to inculcate his paratroopers than about Joseph ben Mattathias / Titus Flavius Josephus. Yet the latter’s life and work raise questions of morality and of the value of personal identity and testimony. No one—especially, no Jew—can read Josephus without a certain apprehension that Josephus is also reading him. Our shadows too fall across his pages.

  a According to Jewish law, members of the ruling class of priestly origin were not supposed to own land at all, but Martin Goodman (in The Ruling Class of Judaea) says that they clearly did. Roman senators were, similarly, not supposed to engage in business or trade. They often presided over consortia of surrogates who acted for them in such profitable activities.

  b While Joseph ben Mattathias gave diplomatic help to the Romans, not least by encouraging the Jews inside Jerusalem to come to terms when there was still time, there is little evidence (though no shortage of allegations) that he served as a military adviser. Certainly he was never an active combatant on the Roman side.

  c To rewrite the scriptures in the form of secular history, as he did in his work The Jewish Antiquities, was itself tantamount to apostasy.

  d In 494 B.C.E., Darius, the Persian king of kings, meted out similar treatment to the rebellious Ionian Greek city of Miletus, on the shore of Asia Minor. In time, it too recovered its prosperity.

  e By “the Greeks,” here and elsewhere, I mean only the men, of different cities and allegiances, who spoke Greek and “worshipped the same gods” (though not all worshipped all of them). It has been argued—for instance, by Roderick Beaton in An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)—that there was no Greek “nation” until the declaration of independence from the Turks in 1821.

  f The elder Pliny, a well-connected Roman, would be much more outspoken on that subject, but much later and never at his peril.

  g Although they did so very rarely, the Romans themselves are said to have resorted to human sacrifice when the gods appeared to have deserted them—for instance, after their humiliating defeat by Hannibal at Cannae in 216 B.C.E. The Athenian leader Themistokles sacrificed three noble Persian youths before the battle of Salamis in 480 B.C.E.

  h In Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), David Bellos says that the Hebrew citations read aloud from the Torah by the Temple priests were incomprehensible to almost all of the Jews in the congregation and had to be translated simultaneously into whispered Aramaic, the current vernacular.

  i In modern Greek slang, phortouna can mean a violent storm.

  j The original ten ordinances handed to Moses on Mount Sinai had been amplified into 613 bylaws. It is said that Yahweh could be offended if a man broke wind without uncovering his head.

  k The only other ancient historian who could claim to be a practicing priest was Plutarch. A decade younger than Josephus, Plutarch gained kudos from officiating at Delphi, but his many historical studies, including even his so-called Moralia, were not influenced by a faith that carried anything approaching the theocratic overtones of Judaism. Plutarch was the first historian to portray Alexander the Great as the cosmopolitan missionary of the rule of Reason, which meant, in practice, the universalization of Greek hegemony. See Maurice Sartre, D’Alexandre à Zénobie, p. 113.

  l Zuleika Rodgers points out, in “Justice for Justus,” that one of Josephus’s main sources, Nicolaus of Damascus, appended a (now lost) autobiography to his universal history. Hence it is not innovative that Josephus should do the same to his Jewish Antiquities. Priority is often a matter of luck. Herodotus is generally regarded as “the father of history,” but he was preceded by Hecataeus of Miletus, whose many works survive only in fragments. The Parian soldier of fortune Archilochos wrote poems in the first person in the seventh century B.C.E.

  m The standoff between Josephus and Justus about the origins of the Jewish war prefigures, for recent instance, that between the Oxford historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alan Taylor concerning the causes of the Second World War. Trevor-Roper also mounted a polemic against Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1994) and another against Arnold Toynbee, the author of A Study of History and an overt anti-Semite. Elie Kedourie’s The Chatham House Version (New York: Praeger, 1970) is a no less abrasive treatment of bien-pensant ideas about Middle Eastern history. An Iraqi Jew by origin, Kedourie regretted that Britain and France had conspired, in 1919, to dismantle the Ottoman Empire. Idleness and indulgent corruption had served the region’s populations better than gimcrack nationalism and aggressive sectarianism.

  n The stylish precision of Justus’s history, now lost, won praise from the ninth-century Byzantine scholar and patriarch Photius. In his original text, Josephus had taken pains to emphasize how much the Jews had in common with other Mediterranean civilizations, but Justus’s criticism stung him into adopting the haughtiness of a sophisticated Roman writer to whom Levantines stood for slyness and verbosity.

  o In truth, however, the ratio of working to nonworking days in pagan ancient Rome was roughly the same as in Jerusalem; there were fifty days of public holidays in the year, though they were not spaced out on a weekly basis.

  p Michel de Montaigne’s first language, on the other hand, was Latin; his thoughts were liberated when he wrote his essays—spiced with many Latin references—in his second languag
e, French. Like Josephus, he took a dispassionate and dismayed attitude to the sectarian violence of his times. As a result, he has been regarded, by severe critics, as a trimmer and even as a coward, since he declined to go into plague-ridden Bordeaux, even though he was the city’s ex-mayor. Montaigne was descended, on his mother’s side, from Sephardic Jews.

  q For a specific modern instance, see Anna Bikont’s Le crime et le silence, in which the town of Jedwabne’s Catholic priest is shown to have incited his Polish congregation to do God’s work by massacring their Jewish fellow citizens in July 1941, which they did.

  r In Judas: A Biography, Gubar quotes Karl Barth, a much-venerated modern (anti-Nazi) theologian, when he sustains the myth of Jewish guilt: “Like Esau the rejected of God, the Jews sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. They did so not with closed eyes but with open eyes. Yet these were obviously the eyes of the blind.…. Israel always tried to buy off Yahweh with thirty pieces of silver.”

  s Yadin’s determination to make Masada a place in which Israeli soldiers should pledge themselves to stand or die perpetuates a myth of Jewish solidarity that is also self-destructive. In something of the same spirit of antiquarian sentiment, Greek air force cadets are known generically as “Ikaroi,” even though the original Ikaros was the first flier to plunge to his death, because he flew too near the sun.

  I

  OBSERVED ACROSS THE ABYSS OF YEARS, the rebellion in which Joseph ben Mattathias was to play a leading part appears like a remake of the story of David and Goliath. Despite the fact that, this time, Goliath won, the Jews’ defiant last stand, in 73 C.E., while defending the gaunt mountaintop fortress of Masada, in the southern desert, has been used, especially in modern Israel, to illustrate how the flower of the Jewish nation, having risen en bloc against imperial oppression, resisted to the last man. For some Zionists at least, the lesson of “the Jewish War” is that the only people Jews can trust are other Jews. The long story that Flavius Josephus lived to tell is less romantic and more complicated.