by Simon Schama
Who indeed but the Historian of the misfortune? The gruesome tragedy unfolds, yet the last of the executioners does not, like Josephus, walk to the enemy, but contemplates a gory carpet of 960 bodies, then sets fire to the palace and ‘with the great force of his hands ran his sword entirely through himself ’. Among the Jews, only an old woman and five children, who hid in a cave, survive to tell the story.
Perhaps there were moments when Josephus did indeed wish for himself the fate of Eleazar, but he resolves instead, and perhaps to greater effect, to resist in an entirely different way. The Antiquities of the Jews and Against Apion were written probably twenty years after The Jewish War, by which time the middle-aged Josephus had time to take the measure of how Rome, and how its writers, in particular, felt about the Jews in their midst. There were about 30,000 of them, a sizeable number the descendants of captives taken on Pompey’s original campaign, although an expulsion order of 139 BCE makes it clear that there was already a substantial community of Jewish merchants in Rome at that early date, another colony of the already widely dispersed settlement of Jews around the Mediterranean world.62 Crowded insulae apartment blocks on the island of Trastevere had become home to many of the poorer families, as it would be for nearly another two millennia until the razzia of October 1943. Although the satires of Juvenal and the comedy of Petronius both have fun at the expense of circumcised, pork-averse Jewish beggars, what seems already to have been a synagogue first went up in the port city of Ostia during the reign of Claudius, so that there was again a more mercantile-oriented community of Jews settled further off from the press of the densest Roman streets.
Josephus was not among them, of course, but lodged in altogether grander style, courtesy of his patron Titus, the new emperor after his father, Vespasian, died in 79 CE. But any thought that he would be the sort of Jew who (like the Herodian family) might fit snugly and unproblematically into imperial society and culture must have been dispelled by the nose-holding distaste he would have noticed coming from at least some of his natural peers: the writing and speechifying classes of Rome. In some respects the Flavians’ house historian would have been protected from the behind-the-hand sniggering, for there is no doubt that the imperial house had a love–hate thing about the Jews, starting with Titus himself who famously fell hard and deep for the older but devastatingly glamorous, Jewish, thrice-married sister of Agrippa II, Berenice (also said to be her brother’s lover), to the point where some of the horrified patriciate assumed he might marry her.63
From Seneca to the playwright Martial and the satirist Juvenal, the refrains had been, and remained, depressingly predictable. Even though Judaism had been officially declared a religio licita, a tolerated religion, writers like Tacitus would insist on its being more in the nature of a low and degraded superstitio.64 Socially, it was said that Jews were misanthropes who sedulously kept themselves apart from the rest of society, refusing to eat with them, or (in a reversal of the Greek stereotype), despite their notorious addiction to lust, sleep with women of other nations. Tacitus would go even further in this paranoia about Jewish self-separation, claiming that while loyal to each other they showed ‘only hate and enmity to the rest of mankind’ (‘sed adversus omnis alios hostile odium’).65 They circumcised to mark difference but also to enhance their bestially insatiable sexual appetites. They avoided pork because they worshipped the pig as the first animal who dug furrows in the soil with its snout. And they worshipped donkeys – erecting a golden ass in their Temple – because during the wanderings that followed their expulsion from Egypt as leprous and scabies-carrying pariahs, a donkey had led them to water when they were dying of thirst. Likewise their vaunted Sabbath (a pretext for idleness, many implied) originated in the disfiguring tumours of the groin which had afflicted the Israelites in the first six days of their wandering, becoming so disabling that they were forced to rest on the seventh!
Many of these detestable absurdities, Josephus wrote, had been perpetuated by the Alexandrian grammarian-librarian Apion. ‘It is a great shame for a grammarian not to write true history.’ But then it was sadly typical of someone coming from a culture that worshipped asps and crocodiles to imagine the Jews venerating donkeys. ‘Asses are the same with us which they are with other wise men, viz creatures that bear the burdens we lay on them.’66 Apion had left his mark on Roman memory when he had come before Caligula in the first century ce to explain why the Jews of Alexandria had drawn to themselves the opprobrium and indeed violence of the Egyptians. Opposing him was the Jewish philosopher Philo, brother of a tax collector-treasurer of the Ptolemies and uncle of Tiberius Julius Alexander who would later be second in command to Titus in the Jewish War. In an uphill effort, Philo attempted to make Caligula aware that his determination to have a statue of himself as god erected in synagogues as well as elsewhere was forbidden by Jewish law and tradition, and that the refusal had been a pretext for appalling violence visited on an innocent community, abetted by the Roman governor of Egypt, Flaccus. Not only had Egyptian Jews been suddenly deprived of the long-established autonomy of their communities and redefined as aliens in the land of their birth, but mobs had driven Jews from four of their five districts in Alexandria into a single crowded quarter. They had then plundered and burned houses, assaulted families and razed synagogues to the ground.
Apion’s retort had been to recycle the abusive, mythical version of Jewish history invented by the third-century BCE priest-grammarian Manetho: their expulsion during a plague year as unclean and infirm, the story of the helpful ass and the like. Such nonsense, Josephus writes in Against Apion, must be countered not just by righteous indignation but by an irrefutable indication of their impossibility, especially since the more sensationally vicious they are, the more likely they are to hold a grip on popular imagination. The myth of the Greek traveller, abducted by Jews and fattened for slaughter and cannibalistic consumption (repeated by, among others, the severe historian Tacitus), was a case in point. ‘King Antiochus’ (it is not clear which but presumably the ‘civilising’ Antiochus IV) was said to have made this discovery of a Greek tied up in the innermost court of the Temple howling for release, a table of fish, fowl and dainties laid before him. The legend had it that when properly plump and juicy he would be led to a deep wood and killed, after which a secret mass gathering of Jews would picnic on his entrails. Just for a start, wrote Josephus in grimly mordant if idiotically literal mood, was it likely that ‘the entrails of one man be sufficient for thousands?’67 Josephus’ appalled dismay identifies the start of a demonology (secret, cannibalistic conclaves of Jews drawn from far and wide battening on the bodies of helpless Gentiles) that would run and run.
Josephus seems to have thought that the intensity of Roman phobia was a defensive response to the appeal of a single, invisible, even unnameable, deity. The attractiveness of Jewish monotheism to Gentile Romans at this time is often overstated, but it evidently was a concern of Roman writers and rhetoricians. Even in the reign of Nero, Seneca had written of the presumptuous superiority of Jewish monotheism that ‘the vanquished give the law to the victors’. How could there not be anxiety about Judaism winning converts when the emperor’s wife was said to be a sympathising ‘God-Fearer’, and other women from high imperial and court culture were likewise tempted? An expulsion of Jews in the year 19 CE was triggered by shock that a Roman noblewoman, one Fulvia, had been converted. And it may have been startling to learn that the royal dynasty in Adiabene in north-eastern Assyria, a region where Roman legions were chronically embattled, had been converted to Judaism – its queen, Helena, was famously a visitor to Jerusalem and patroness of its Temple and people.
At the other end of society, slaves belonging to Jews were said to be offered liberty in exchange for conversion. Bravely if singularly, the scholar Marcus Terentius Varro attempted to approximate Judaism and Roman paganism by suggesting that the single, formless Jewish God was in fact identical with a proto-Jupiter, equally a summum deum who in the earliest, purer, days
of Rome had likewise been aniconic and formless.
Some of the most phobic writing betrays a streak of acknowledgement that the Jewish loyalty to a single God whose nature transcended anything that could be fashioned from even the most precious materials, might indeed be attractive to, say, Platonists for whom the essential creative force lay in the realm of pure spirit. In a ferocious digression during his brief description of the Jewish War, Tacitus describes Jews as ‘conceiving one god . . . with the mind alone . . . their supreme and eternal being is to them incapable of representation and without end. Therefore they set up no statues in their cities much less in their temples; this flattery is not paid their kings nor this honour given to Caesars.’68 So although Tacitus characterises their rites as ‘base and abominable’, their manners ‘sordid and mean’, their ‘earliest lesson’ to ‘despise the gods, to disown their country’ and insists that ‘the Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred [while] permitting all we abhor’, there is nonetheless a grudging sense of the not entirely contemptible peculiarity of their worship. The anxiety did not go away. Two further expulsions in the reign of Claudius, in 41 and 49 CE, were made in the name of ‘public order’, although Jews who were citizens and freemen seem to have been protected from the eviction.
The kind of backhand compliment represented by Tacitus’ later admission of the mysterious power of invisible monotheism allowed Josephus his opening to educate the Gentiles on the truth of Jews and Judaism. They were humans not monsters (this evidently needed spelling out) – goodness, they might be toga’d like him – and their observances and rituals were humane and noble, not squalid and sinister. Assuming that Tacitus’ belief that Jewish parents were not honoured by their children, and vice versa, was already common among the Roman elite, Josephus was at pains to point out that the opposite was in fact true: that the joy and principal virtue of Jews was ‘to educate our children well’ and to ‘observe the laws that have been given to us and keep those rules of piety handed down to us’.69 Robbery, he goes on, contesting the early defamatory reputation for Jewish economic unscrupulousness, is alien to us, as are wars for enrichment, since ‘we delight not in merchandise or the world of trade, our homeland being far from the sea and a fruitful country which we delight in cultivating’.
Moses, he patiently clarified, was not the leader of a horde of contaminated reprobates and lepers but ‘the most ancient of legislators’ moved by a vision of the immutable God that would be shared by Plato and the Stoics; God ‘superior to all mortal conceptions of beauty and though known to us by his power yet unknown in his essence’. In the laws he passed were united the cultures of words and practices, while the Athenians had only the former and the Spartans the latter. The heart of being a Jew was inculcation in those laws, taught from early infancy. Ask ‘our people about our laws and any one will more readily tell you them than he will his own name’. This is the consequence of having learned them almost as soon as Jews became conscious of anything, so that they were ‘engraven on our souls’.
More surprisingly for the historian who had made so much of Jewish discord in the revolt (and rather implausibly), Josephus contends that the permanence of the Torah determined ‘a wonderful agreement of minds amongst us all’. There was, moreover, nothing obscure or sinister, much less ridiculous or ‘superstitious’, about those laws. They prohibited drunken and sodomitic vices, the violation of virgins and adultery; they commanded prayer for the common welfare of all and the decently modest burial of the dead rather than the extravagance of funerary monuments; they required the honouring of parents and the avoidance of usury and (on pain of death) the taking of bribes by judges.
And though these social and religious precepts arose first among the Jews and are their particular and imperishable treasure, all civilised peoples including the Greeks have followed their guiding principles so that they have become to a degree universal property, starting with the invention of the weekend. ‘There is not any city of the barbarians nor any nation whatsoever where our custom of resting on the seventh day . . . is not observed.’70 Other nations have followed the Jewish obligation to charity and ‘mutual concord’ and the moral strictures of justice in economic dealing. And all this has impressed itself without resort to conventional power but prevails merely ‘by its own force’, which Josephus emphasises as distinctively Jewish. The laws, he says, scarcely require further defence or elaboration, even in the cause of demystifying baseless defamations laid at the door of the Jews, for those laws are ‘visible in their own true nature and teach not impiety but the truest piety in the world’. And as if replying to the imprecations of Tacitus, ‘they do not make men hate each other but encourage people to communicate what they have to one another freely; they are enemies to injustice, they take care of righteousness, they banish idleness and luxury and instruct men to be content with what they have . . . they forbid men to make war from a desire of getting more but make men brave in defending the laws’.71
And at last, Flavius Josephus – who has lost his own people, and is so obviously and painfully estranged from those who had adopted him – addresses himself proudly and defiantly to the likes of Seneca, Martial and Tacitus who presumed they had nothing to learn from the barbaric superstitions of the low, rapacious, lubricious, secretive, conspiratorial, mankind-hating Jews, and gives voice to the only boast a Jew finds worthy of uttering: ‘we are become the teachers of other men in the greatest number of things’.
VII. The End of Days?
How can God permit such a thing to happen to His People? That’s what we always ask when cinders smart the eyes and we begin to spit soot. What happened to the covenant, to the promises that we should prevail over those who seek to annihilate us? Back comes the answer, time after time. Read the fine print! See the bit about the Righteous? What’s been going on? Transgressions! Iniquities! Abominations, self-destructive malarkey, that’s what! Time for a proper clean-out! Didn’t you listen to the prophets? Don’t say you weren’t warned. But, we protest, we are humans; has there ever been a time when we have not strayed, diet-wise, Sabbath-wise, from the strict and narrow? Look at David and his lusts, Solomon and his polygamous vanities. They weren’t trampled in the dust, were they? So give us a break, won’t you? A few uncloven-hoofed, uncudded meals, the odd bag-carrier on the Day of Rest, and Jerusalem is destroyed, multitudes incinerated? Honestly? Again?
The question won’t go away. If YHWH is the master of all things and of Jewish history in particular, how come always such tsurus, such trouble?
Jews of the Second Temple and of the time of its obliteration did have an answer. It was unorthodox, unauthorised, not strictly biblical, but it too was written and read, and not just by fringe eccentrics. This we know, from fragments of fifteen separate copies of the Book of Jubilees, further pieces of seven copies of the Book of Enoch, a ‘Genesis Apocryphon’ with a startlingly different version of how and when the Jews received their Law (at Creation), and many other pieces of a parallel or rather alternative scripture, all revealed amid the 850-odd manuscripts discovered between 1947 and 1955 in the caves of Qumran.72 The books of what would become the canon of the Hebrew Bible are all there with the exception of Esther and (more mysteriously, given its deep importance for the history of the Torah) Nehemiah. One of them, Isaiah, is there in its completeness. Multiple copies of Isaiah, Psalms and Deuteronomy were found, probably a guide to what was most important to the yachad. Most are written in Hebrew; one, the Book of Job has an Aramaic targum translation, and there are commentaries (pesharim) on books such as Habakkuk and Isaiah. There are telling differences in some of these Hebrew texts from both the Greek Septuagint and the Masoretic (pronunciation added) text authorised by the rabbis almost a thousand years later towards the end of the ninth century.
But that, it turns out, is not the end of the story. Included among the Qumran scrolls are also books of the Apocrypha: Tobit; the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach; Judith; the two thrilling pieces of history writing that are the Maccabees; th
e Serekh, working Rule for the ascetic community or yachad; a whole litany of Thanksgiving Hymns and Psalms; and most grippingly, a number of scripture-texts, most of them written in the third and second centuries BCE, which, until their discovery in the desert caves, were known (and not widely) only from Ethiopian manuscripts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ce, written in the Judeo-Ethiopian Ge’ez language (a startling connection in itself ). To discover them in Hebrew, a millennium and a half older, changed the story utterly, for this strand of belief could not now be fitted into the narrative of East African monotheisms, but tracked back to the forming heart of Judaism. And it was among those books, at once abstruse and instantly spellbinding, that an answer to the question of wickedness in the world was ventured.
It is, to be sure, in the literal sense, a fantastic answer: one steeped in a Jewish story that seems closer to other ancient pagan religions; and to the dualistic battles between good and evil, light and dark, characteristic of Persian Zoroastrianism and which would persist in Gnostic texts. If these texts survived in any abundance (and there is no reason to assume they did not), it is easy to see why the rabbis excised them even from apocryphal memory. For on the face of it, it seems impossible for Jews to have read, still less believed, both the authorised story of the covenant-led Bible, and the version given in Jubilees, 1 Enoch (including the Book of Watchers and the Book of Giants) and the Genesis ‘Apocryphon’.
