A Jew Among Romans Read online

  q In the Diaspora, the story of the belligerent Maccabees was equally shunned by the rabbinate but remained vivid in folklore. The Cathars, who resembled the Essenes, have been similarly deleted from Christian history except as a parenthetic warning of what happens to heretics.

  r Shemaryahu Talmon (see p. 26) says that the Teacher of Righteousness, whose name remains unknown, was “born out of the existential stress generated by the non-realisation of.… millenarian expectations.” Hartmut Stegeman (in the same volume) claims that Jesus had little in common with the Teacher of Righteousness. Jesus “never initiated a close circle of followers nor anything resembling a ‘community’ or ‘church.’…. [Christianity’s] organizational framework [arose] only after his death.” Martin Goodman points out that charismatic figures such as Jesus (including Choni the Circle Drawer and Theudas) were admired “precisely because of their lack of institutional authority or social status.” And, it might be said, because they were untainted by official compromises.

  s Orthodoxy has generated scholars and sages, but Jews have usually had to become in some sense protestant before making names for themselves, whether in science, art and literature or in commerce. Modern Jewish artists, such as Mark Gertler, could be regarded (sometimes even by themselves) as transgressors, because they depicted the human face and figure.

  t Since he was known as “the unique teacher,” the Teacher of Righteousness may also have served as the prototype of Muhammad, the (last) Prophet.

  u Strabo adds that the surrounding people were won over by the excellence of Moses’s government and beliefs. Strabo, who died a few years before Joseph ben Mattathias was born, was a welcome source for Josephus when he came to the Hasmonaean and Herodian periods. Like Herod’s propagandist and another of Josephus’s now lost sources, Nicolaus of Damascus, Strabo belonged to one of the Levantine elites which were content to prosper under the Roman aegis.

  v The narrow range of names in ancient Judaean society can make it difficult to distinguish individuals. Was it hoped that the young would reproduce the characteristics of their namesakes in earlier generations? Despite their innovations, the church fathers shared the ancient desire for impressive antecedents. Jesus’s alleged descent from King David aligned him with the Messiah of whom the prophet Isaiah was presumed to have spoken. Although the Jews were diabolized, their fundamental standing could not quite be denied without damaging Christianity’s biblical credentials. In the evolution of human religions and social institutions, there are few clean sheets.

  w Antony Kamm, in The Israelites, points out that “Moses” occurs in the names of pharaohs such as Thutmosis and Rameses, and alone “as a shortened form of the name of a ruler.” This does little to prove the Egyptian origin of the Moses of Exodus, who is said to have become aware of his heritage when he killed an Egyptian overseer who was maltreating a Hebrew slave. To trump Freud’s theory, other writers have postulated an anonymous Hebrew elder who taught monotheism to Akhenaten.

  x In Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, Heinrich Meier says that as early as 1923, Leo Strauss observed, “When cultural Zionism understands itself, it turns into religious Zionism. But when religious Zionism understands itself, it is in the first place Jewish faith and only secondarily Zionism. It must [then] regard as blasphemous the notion of a human solution to the Jewish problem.” Cf. Joseph Roth in The Wandering Jews. The music goes round and round.

  y Baghdad remained a venerable Jewish center for centuries after Cyrus gave leave to its Jews to return to Palestine. Baghdad rabbis were consulted from all over Europe. It was the main source of more outspoken defenses of Judaism than that of Josephus. Living outside Roman or, later, Christian jurisdiction, Jewish apologists in Parthia dared to classify Jesus as a false Messiah and the Christian Trinity as self-contradictory. In due time, Sigmund Freud declared the doctrine of the Trinity to be a “lightly veiled” regression to polytheism.

  z Josephus does, however, mention a certain John, an individual Essene general who was in charge of the toparchy of Thomna, Lydda, Joppa and Emmaus, early in the war. He was killed at the disastrous siege of Ascalon (Jewish War III: 9).

  aa Unless attributed elsewhere, the translations from Josephus’s Greek are my own.

  bb Elias Canetti accused Karl Kraus of “dithyrambic bearing” when he preached self-righteously against European injustices (and Jewish journalism). W. B. Yeats was said to blow himself up like a Celtic bullfrog when delivering public recitations of his poetry.

  cc Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s Le chasseur noir (Paris: Maspero, 1980) tells how young Athenians took time out to live rough in the hinterland in order to learn survival skills before being admitted to full citizenship.

  III

  OF HIS LIFE between the age of nineteen or twenty and his departure for Italy some six or seven years later, Josephus’s Vita says nothing. He resumes his self-portrait only after he has been called upon to take part in a delegation about to sail to Rome to argue for the release of a party of priests. They were friends of his who had been arrested on “trivial charges” by Antonius Felix, the Roman procurator from 52 to 60 C.E.a Felix had ordered them to be sent in chains to Nero for judgment. Since he was consistently rough with “the Jews,” Felix (who was of Greek origin) gets a good press from the Gentile Saint Luke, both in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, where the sympathetic Felix is said to have visited Saint Paul in prison. According to Scripture, they discussed “justice, self-control and judgment.”1

  Although Josephus did not write the Vita until Domitian was emperor, he was wise, when looking back, to deal delicately with whatever happened during Nero’s reign. The latter had been formally blackened by the Flavians, but Domitian is known to have condemned to death the author of a laudatory biography of Nero’s prime critic, Thrasea Paetus, and of his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus. The last of the Flavian emperors suspected that the eulogy of a long-dead opponent of autocracy veiled its composer’s distaste for his own sadistic tyranny. It may, therefore, be out of continuing caution that Josephus gives no details about why his friends the priests were arrested prior to the outbreak of war. If they had been accused of instigating the riots in Caesarea, it would be tactless, even two decades later, to remind Domitian that his house historian had been the advocate of suspected revolutionaries. In fact, Felix is likely to have arrested appropriate suspects to avoid being accused of fomenting the riots himself.

  Josephus may have insisted that his friends’ offense was trivial in order to excuse his own class from any responsibility for the outbreak of war. It could hardly offend Domitian’s paranoid sensibilities to say that the historian was impressed by the priests’ unwillingness to breach the dietary laws. They survived on figs and nuts, a diet later recommended, for no pious reasons, by the Greek medical pundit Galen. The Book of Daniel says that Jews exiled in Babylon lived on dates and vegetables, a solemn precedent that the orthodox might well imitate. Josephus’s applause for their abstinence suggests that, in his friends’ place, he might have been less fastidious.

  He must have had the means and rank, as well as the ambition, to volunteer for the mission to Rome. All sea journeys in the ancient world were perilous. Even the best captains preferred to sail within sight and, if possible, easy reach of land. However, the ship in which Joseph traveled from Alexandria was unusually large, probably a grain freighter, which needed deep water. With six hundred people on board, it foundered in the middle of the Adriatic. In order to survive, the passengers and crew had to swim all night. At dawn, the eighty strongest swimmers, who included Joseph, were picked up (thanks to God’s grace, he says) by a ship from Cyrene. Had his workouts with Bannus been based on a Greco-Roman curriculum, including marathon swimming?b

  Joseph’s Cyrenean rescuers put him and the other survivors ashore at Puteoli, the modern Pozzuoli, on the west coast of Italy, a few miles north of the radiant Greek city of Neapolis, today’s Naples. It was one of Rome’s busiest harbors. The fashionable seaside resort
of Baiae was a few miles away across the bay to the north. Joseph never says how, once landed in Puteoli, he happened to make friends with the mime actor he calls Aliturus, “a particular favorite of Nero’s and of Judaean origin.”c Whatever names and addresses he had been given before he set sail, he had landed in sodden clothes and with none of his luggage. He says nothing about how he acquired a wardrobe or access to the contacts he needed for his mission. If Aliturus helped him from his own hamper of costumes, it gave Joseph an involuntary taste of crossing the line into an alternative world.

  In cosmopolitan Italy, Judaism had a modest but modish Gentile following. Jews had established communities in Rome and in many cities around the Mediterranean, all the way to Spain. Upper-class females—Nero’s second wife, the delicious Poppaea Sabina, among them—were among the cultural visitors who frequented the synagogues (Gentile “tourists” were welcome, as they were not in the Temple in Jerusalem). Poppaea and her friends could sample an exotic morality. There was even a taste of “democracy” in the proceedings: any male Jew might volunteer, or be called upon, to read from the Torah by whoever had been elected to lead the devotions. The lack of an officious hierarchy made synagogues attractive, as churches would be, to marginal congregants.

  No character called Aliturus is mentioned anywhere except in the Vita. The name sounds like a nickname (“Salty Cheese”) earned by a capacity for crisp repartee.d It could be a pseudonym for Paris, Nero’s favorite mime actor until he had him executed, perhaps for no greater crime than threatening to upstage him; then again, for the emperor perhaps there was no greater crime. Domitian was the fan of another actor called Paris (the name was used generically for pretty fellows, in honor of Helen of Troy’s lover). He too was later put to death. Josephus may have slapped camouflage on Nero’s darling to avoid seeming to allude to Domitian’s disgraced thespian. To be insensitive to the emperor’s feelings was a form of treason. Survival under the principate resembled a game of hopscotch; one had to be nimble when crossing a line.

  In the golden years of the republic, witty actor-playwrights, such as Plautus, who had once been a baker, and Terence (whose nickname Afer hints that, coming from North Africa, he was dark-skinned) were prize exhibits for smart hostesses. As Aliturus could have told Joseph, neither of these great comic playwrights of the second century B.C.E. had Latin as his mother tongue. Satire and flattery played heads and tails in their repertoire; effrontery was sweetened by clowning. When Plautus’s smart slaves outwitted their betters on the stage, their bravado appealed to the plebs; it was a cheerful way of, as it were, singing the blues. The Roman theater, like the Greek, instructed spectators of all classes how to amuse friends and ridicule enemies. Theater people held up entertainingly warped mirrors to propriety.

  As Steve Mason emphasizes in his meticulous commentary on the Vita, successful performers were often very popular with their mass audience, who appreciated the liberties that talent allowed them to take.e Theatrical clowning often verged on insolence; laughter and applause allowed malcontents in the audience to vent their repressed hostility to the ruling elites. Since showpeople were most commonly of alien and low-class origin, the Roman upper class affected scorn for their crowd-pleasing performances. Equated with prostitutes and other louche company, actors were at once despised by the best people and also somewhat feared, since their words and gestures could so promptly excite the insolence of the groundlings. The bohemian way of life also had a certain appeal for sensation-seeking members of the aristocracy, of whom Nero himself was the grandstanding instance.

  All the Greco-Roman world was a stage: imposture, bluff and a gift for repartee were part of the armory of success. Joseph had already proved himself a quick study. The time he spent with Aliturus offered him a sight, and the sounds, of a world unavailable in Judaea. He spent longer in Italy during that first visit than he later would as governor-general of Galilee. What did he do and whom did he meet? He says only that Aliturus introduced him to Poppaea Sabina. “Jewish” only by association,f she helped him secure the release of the priests, whose crimes, we may guess, were too boring to merit Nero’s attention. She then gave Joseph “large presents” and sent him on his way. Generosity was a routine I-can-afford-it gesture of nobility rather than a sign of particular favor.g If Poppaea resembled other historical princesses, she may well have been seduced as much by her own seductiveness as by the young stranger’s importunity. Joseph’s record promises that he knew how to make a good impression on females. Jewish lineage would do nothing, at that stage, to make him unpresentable in royal circles, where anything rare can alleviate the banalities of protocol.

  However much Joseph may have prided himself on finding favor in Nero’s Rome, he had no occasion to write publicly about it until after the Flavian dynasty was in power. What might once have added luster to his CV was by then a black mark. The pregnant Poppaea had only a few months to live before Nero, in a fit of rage, kicked her so fiercely, perhaps because she refused him his pleasure, that she miscarried and later died. Like Herod the Great after the execution of Mariamne, her husband was then overwhelmed by remorse, if not for very long.

  Steve Mason suggests that, by the time the Vita was written, many of its readers would have been hostile to the memory of Nero and of Poppaea. Hence Joseph could hope to entertain them with the story of how a Judaean arriviste made fools of them. Mason even wonders whether the resourceful Aliturus was an invention. This seems a speculation too far: in no other passage does Joseph concede that, in Roman eyes, he could have looked like some kind of uncouth hick. The success of his diplomacy figures among his claims to fame and served to qualify him as governor-general of Galilee. Since Mason never questions that Joseph did indeed secure the release of his friends, he must have needed an inside track of the kind Aliturus was well placed to provide. Why would a historian fabricate an episode featuring leading figures in a discredited regime in order to dress a narrative devised to prove his veracity?

  The brevity of the Roman interlude in Josephus’s Vita leaves the impression that he fulfilled his mission and returned promptly to his native Judaea. He seems, in fact, to have dawdled for some time in Italy. Who would not? Rome was at the zenith of its power and elegance. Augustus had boasted that he found the city brick and left it marble. Despite the effects of the fire, the imperial capital was calculated to dazzle provincial aliens such as Joseph ben Mattathias as he wandered in the polyglot crowds, asking directions in that Jewish accent he never lost. Yet in the last days during which Jerusalem stood as one of the poles of the Mediterranean world, Joseph need not have had any sense of inferiority while he was in loud, often loutish Rome. There is a wide ditch between the bright young tourist, who returned to Jerusalem in order, for a brief spell, to play a commanding part in the Jewish War, and the obsessive and solitary scribbler in Flavian Rome; but the appetite for a Latin life may have lodged in the young Judaean’s mind as he tasted the delights of a world elsewhere.

  There is no certainty about what (or who) kept Joseph ben Mattathias in Italy so long. What he learned of its history and saw of its conquests is spelled out only in the speech he put into Agrippa II’s mouth when the king addressed his appeal to the Jerusalem Jews not to risk everything by all-out war on the superpower. Joseph may have been no less of a Jew by the time he sailed back to Palestine; he can hardly have failed to be more of a Roman.

  If only the dates could be made to stretch so far, it would nice to suppose that a ranking actor such as Aliturus, pseudonymous or no, might have introduced Joseph to the most eminent writer, and the richest man, of the time. Since Seneca was a playwright, he must have had friends and clients in the theatrical profession. He had certainly already retired from public life before Nero forced him to bring an abrupt curtain down on his own life in the wake of Calpurnius Piso’s conspiracy of 65 C.E., with which the old writer is unlikely to have had any active connection. In the meantime, Seneca had found Stoic philosophy much more preferable than proximity to the increasingly paran
oid emperor. It is tempting to imagine a conversation, even a friendship, between the clever young Judaean visitor and the morose elder statesman who had enjoyed the perilous privilege of eminence under a paranoid tyrant. The Pharisee and the Stoic may have had affinities, but any Jew, however self-centered, observed a God-given scheme that implicated him in a community, which Stoicism did not. Although he need have had no premonition of it, Joseph would soon have solitude thrust upon him; Seneca had already chosen it. His long letters to his friend Lucilius were heavy with introspection. Stoicism was not a religion, nor even a morality; it was, he hoped, a recipe for serene resignation. It also disposed him to flirt, at length, with the blandishments of easeful death.

  If Joseph ben Mattathias could ever have met Seneca, and if the old philosopher delivered a measure of his habitual sententiousness, the young Jew might well have congratulated himself on being ineligible to climb what Benjamin Disraeli, in Victorian England, would call the “slippery pole” of political ambition. But was Joseph, at the same time, drawn to metropolitan life? And if he did not yet have an inclination to be a writer, might contact with Seneca have sparked it? Did the famous author happen to have a copy of some of his work in an attendant’s keeping? He can be imagined dedicating it to a smart provincial, not unlike his young self, with plenty of time, it seemed, to profit from his example. The morbid millionaire philosopher was nothing if not didactic. One piece of quasi-paternal advice would have been typical of him: don’t do what I did.