The Story of the Jews Read online

  All this crossover culture was possible in the Hellenic–Egyptian world of the Ptolemies and the Syrian north-eastern empire of the Seleucids, because the sovereigns of both realms had continued the Persian policy of tolerating and subsidising local religions. In fact the internecine conflict between the diadochi – Ptolemies and Seleucids contesting the succession of Alexander the Great – often made them compete for the allegiance of the Judaean population lying strategically between their realms. Antiochus IV Epiphanes may well have committed all the infamies chronicled in the Maccabees and in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, written two centuries later; but he and whichever of the Ptolemies it was who ordered Alexandrian Jews trampled to death in the hippodrome by drunken war elephants were the exception, not the rule. There was nothing about the conduct of the first Seleucid to rule Palestine, Antiochus III, to suggest intolerance, much less persecution. And even Antiochus IV, defeated and dying somewhere in the wildernesses of Asia Minor, is said by the author of 2 Maccabees to have undergone deathbed repentance, ordering his government to restore its protection and tax subsidy for the Jewish Temple. Once the fiercest fighting between Jews and Greeks was over, it was perfectly possible for the older working mutualism to be restored. The Greek ruler would once again accept the autonomy of Jewish laws and religious traditions, and the Jewish leader, the Hasmonean Jonathan, in a gesture implying formal submission, would receive the high priesthood from the hands of the Seleucid king.

  Though the Jewish and classical worlds (both Greek and Roman) would end up locked in murderous, catastrophic conflict with each other, culminating in the Roman obliteration of Jerusalem, there was no presumption on the part of Jews that the cultures were so mutually hostile, that the apocalypse was just a matter of timing. Quite the opposite was the case. Almost from the beginnings of their experience of the dominant Greek world, Jews wanted to believe they had much in common. In the minds of many of their writers and philosophers, Judaism was the ancient root and Hellenism the young tree. Zeus was just a paganised version of the Almighty YHWH, and Moses was the moral legislator from whom all ethical law-giving had originally sprung. The Jewish Aristobulus of Paneas, writing in the mid-second century BCE, wanted his readers to believe that Plato had painstakingly studied the Torah and that Pythagoras owed his theorem to ancient Jewish learning. Given this common trunk of wisdom, it must have seemed eminently possible that the two worlds would understand each other.

  For the most part, this was a one-way passion. Before Alexander’s conquests, Greeks would have encountered Judaeans as fellow mercenaries in Elephantine, or as soldiers serving Judaean officers in coastal forts like Mazad Hashavyahu at the end of Josiah’s reign in the seventh century BCE. It is a fact – though to modern instincts a surprising one – that to much of the ancient world west of Babylon, the Jews would have been most familiar as spears for hire. But there are occasional glimpses in the ancient literature of another kind of early-Greek curiosity in Jews as finders and keepers of ancient oriental wisdom. In the nineteenth century the scholar Jacob Bernays – son of a famously devout chief rabbi of Hamburg and uncle of Sigmund Freud’s wife, Martha – first noticed that Aristotle’s prize student and successor as head of the Peripatetic Academy, Theophrastos of Eresus, had expressed fascination with the Jews, whom he characterised as a subset of ‘Syrians’. In his book On Piety, Theophrastos characterises the Jews as ‘philosophers by birth’ (a phrase that must have made Jacob Bernays happy) who ‘talked constantly to each other about the deity and who at night made observations of the stars, gazing at them and calling on God in prayer’.5 Despite the fact that Theophrastos could fantastically assert that Jews engaged in live sacrifices, basting the roasting carcasses with honey and wine, Jews did not entirely run away from this early reputation as custodians of ancient cosmology and divination. It made them the guardians of an esoteric oriental wisdom (even if some Greeks insisted on supposing they had originated in India). Mostly, though, Jewish writers in the classical world represented their religion as simultaneously ethics, history and prophecy, all of which, if they knew what was good for them, ought to command the attention of pagan empires.

  In this slightly self-congratulatory spirit, Josephus offers the legendary story of Alexander the Great, in 332 BCE, the year of his Palestine and Egyptian campaigns, being so moved by the pious humility of the Jerusalem priests and people that he proclaims the unity of God.6 Though we have no absolute proof that in the year of his long siege of Tyre, Alexander did not go to Jerusalem, it seems prohibitively unlikely. But Josephus’ picturing must have owed something to an already long-established story tradition, and as is often the case when he wanders from documented truth, the narrative is brilliantly vivid.

  Josephus describes the Jews of Jerusalem, gratefully faithful to the end to the collapsing Persian Empire, trembling before what they imagine will be a terrible Macedonian retribution. But their high priest Jaddua is visited by a dream in which he is told ‘to take courage, adorn the city and open the gates’. The people were to assemble before the Greek conqueror clad in the white of humility, while he and his Temple priests should dress themselves magnificently as befitted their sacred station. A combination of purity and majesty: how could the Greeks not be won over as Alexander’s triumphal progress halts before ‘a place called Sapha, meaning “prospect”’? So it is with that view of the towers and walls and the Temple on its hill that the victorious general encounters the white-garbed multitude, at their head the high priest attired in ‘scarlet and purple with his tiara sewn with a gold panel on which was inscribed the tetragrammaton name of God’. Greetings are exchanged. Alexander improbably blurts out that he ‘adores’ this God, for, as he explains to a surprised aide, he too had had a vision in which the high priest, dressed exactly in this manner, would bestow divine blessing on his conquest of the Persians. Alexander then ‘gives the priest his right hand’, and makes sacrifice to YHWH in the Temple ‘according to the high priest’s direction’. The next day, after being shown the Book of Daniel prophesying his triumph (tricky, since in 332 BCE it had yet to be written), he repays the confidence by guaranteeing, as all good Greek rulers did, ‘the laws of their forefathers’. Alexander waives Jewish tribute in the sabbatical year and promises (since the Jews were such accomplished soldiers) that those who joined his army would live undisturbed according to their traditions.7

  But this compliment to superior Jewish wisdom is nothing compared to another story in which a Greek ruler becomes such an admirer of Judaism that he showers every honour imaginable on its custodians. The Letter of Aristeas was a drama about a book, or rather, The Book. Written in the second century BC it purported to be the account given by the chief bodyguard and high counsellor to Ptolemy II Philadelphus, of how the Hebrew Bible came to be translated into Greek in Alexandria. Josephus includes an abbreviated version of the tale in his Antiquities, but the original manuscript was important enough to have survived in at least twenty copies into the early Christian era, when this Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint was, for all intents and purposes, treated as the definitive text of what had become called the ‘Old Testament’.

  The rabbis creating the Mishnah and the Talmud centuries later saw no reason to take any notice of The Letter of Aristeas. The Septuagint was a Christian Bible; theirs had been restored to Hebrew. The Letter of Aristeas, in which Greeks and Jews together ponder the wisdom of the Bible, would have jarred with rabbinical assumptions that the Torah was an exclusively Jewish possession. Modern scholars have thought that the Letter, with its idyll of inter-cultural harmony, might have been triggered by a need to defend Judaism from Egyptian calumnies that from time to time put the community in Alexandria in real peril. Imploring Jerusalem priests and scribes to come to Alexandria and make the translation, the king sounds an improbably sensitive note: ‘if ever evil has been done to your people through the passions of the mob I have made them reparation’. For the most part the Letter is written as if the mutual unde
rstanding and shared concerns of Greeks and Jews were the most natural thing in the world. Thus the mover of the whole enterprise, Alexandria’s royal librarian Demetrius of Phaleron, tells Ptolemy: ‘I have been at pains to discover the God who gave them the law is the same God who maintains your kingdom . . . they [the Jews] worship the same God, the Lord and Creator of the Universe though we call him by different names such as Zeus . . . He is the one through whom all things are endowed with life.’ Though there were certain markers that seemed to set Jews apart – the miniature scroll mezuzah on the doorpost and the tefillin hand phylactery, both containing the daily prayer in praise of the single God and passages from the Torah’s laws (the first mention of either object in any source) – they were simply prompts reminding YHWH’s devotees never to separate themselves from the presence of that God or His teachings.8

  The real Aristeas, of course, had no hand in the fictitious Letter, but the Jewish author was an astute impersonator of the voices of Greek courtiers and scholars, the better to persuade Greek-speaking Alexandrian Jews that there was indeed a fit between Torah and Greek philosophy. It helped that for more than a century after Alexander’s conquests, the Ptolemies ruled in Judaea as well as Egypt, so that it was perfectly plausible for the king to send an exploratory mission to his city of Jerusalem to persuade the high priest to come to Alexandria with his battalion of translators in tow.

  The education of the Greek envoys in the marvels of Jewish Jerusalem starts almost as soon as they have arrived. Given the hydraulic tour, Demetrius and Aristeas express their astonishment at ‘the wonderful and indescribable cisterns underground’ that drained off blood from Temple sacrifices yet stored uncontaminated drinking water for the population. So much classical history can be written in its plumbing.

  Fancy costume was similarly likely to impress the Greeks. Eleazar the high priest is robed as majestically as any potentate: golden bells hanging from his gown, ringing delicate changes as he moves. His garment is sewn with pomegranates (whose 613 seeds were said to represent the commandments of the Torah), and on his gold pectoral is ‘The Oracle of God’ encrusted with jewels. His tiara bears the tetragrammaton name of God. Seven hundred priests go about their duties in the Temple with the utmost quiet and grave decorum. It is just as well, then, that the decorated triangular table sent by Ptolemy as a sweetener for the Temple is a calculated masterpiece of hybrid Graeco-Jewish style. Featuring ‘wreaths of wavework, engraved in ropes, marvellously wrought’ it also bears – what else? – the meander – the essence of Greece brought to Jerusalem – studded with rubies, emeralds, onyx, crystal and amber. The feet are carved in the forms of drooping lilies and acanthus.

  How could they decline the royal invitation? Eleazar and seventy-two scribes, six for each of the tribes of Israel, journey to Alexandria and are loaded with compliments and gifts by the awed king, and housed in elegant quarters on the island of Pharos, connected to the city by a causeway. Before they get to work on the translation in their airy quarters, they are treated to a week-long banquet which turns into a Greek-style symposium, albeit with kosher catering. The king asks courteously deferential questions about how best to reign, indeed how best to live, and receives decidedly Jewish answers:

  KING: What is the good life?

  ELEAZAR: To know God.

  KING: How to bear troubles with equanimity?

  ELEAZAR (sounding remarkably like Ecclesiastes and Jesus ben Sirach): Have a firm grasp of the thought that all men are appointed by God to share the greatest evil as well as the greatest good.

  KING: How to be free from fear?

  ELEAZAR: When the mind is conscious it has wrought no evil.

  KING: What is the grossest form of neglect?

  ELEAZAR: If a man does not care for his children or devote every effort to their education.

  There were also enough questions taken from the standard repertoire of political mentoring (as Aristotle had tutored Alexander) to leave no doubt that pseudo-Aristeas had the Greek stoic-epicurean truisms off pat:

  KING: What is the essence of kingship?

  ELEAZAR: To rule oneself well and not be led astray by wealth or fame to immoderate desires.

  KING: What is the most precious possession for a ruler?

  ELEAZAR: The love of his subjects.

  And together they move into the realms of Platonic mind-enquiry:

  KING: How can one sleep without disturbing thoughts?

  ELEAZAR: You have asked me a difficult question for we cannot bring our true selves into play during the hours of sleep but are held fast by our imaginations which cannot be controlled by reason. For our souls possess the feeling that they actually see the things that enter into our consciousness during sleep. But we make a mistake if we suppose we are actually sailing in boats or flying through the air.

  This is exactly what pseudo-Aristeas’ home readers in Alexandria must have wanted: confidence that not only were the Jews on a level intellectual footing with the Greeks, but that from the storehouse of their own venerable wisdom they might even have something to teach the Gentiles. There is a strong sense in the tone of the Letter that Hellenised Egyptian Jews wanted to go beyond a reputation for arcane devotion to an abstract ‘God Most High’ and to demonstrate the rationality of the Bible as wisdom literature. Hence the urge to insist that even its more baffling minutiae – the dietary laws, for example – are not just arbitrary taboos, or vulgar forms of pest control concerned with ‘weasels and mice’. Rather, in banning predators and scavengers like kites and eagles, they followed the natural human abhorrence of eating creatures that had already eaten other creatures. It was altogether more wholesome to consume ‘clean’ grain-nibbling birds like ‘pigeons, turtle doves, partridges, geese and . . . [according to Leviticus] locusts’.9 ‘All the rules laid down as to what is permitted in the case of these animals and birds he has laid down with the object of teaching us a moral lesson.’ And then quite bafflingly, ‘the rules governing the division of claws and hoof are meant to teach us to discriminate in our individual actions’. In the same spirit of asserting the natural ethical wisdom of the Torah, Eleazar points out that while other nations were capable of violating even their mothers and daughters, such abhorrent practices – along with homosexual copulation – was forbidden to Jews.10 (This last might not have gone down so well with the Hellenes.) The same compulsion to make Greek sense of the Bible moved ‘Demetrius the Numerologist’, the nearest thing to a Jewish-Alexandrian historian, to subject the fantastic genealogies and chronologies of the Bible to logical enquiry. Was it credible for Jacob starting at the age of seventy-seven to have sired twelve children in seven years? By Demetrian calculation, most certainly!

  The combination of ancestral wisdom and rational criticism works its spell. The company of translators, greeted by Ptolemy every morning prior to starting their work, complete their task in seventy-two days (six times the twelve tribes – the same number as the translators), and are honoured by the king who, genuflecting seven times before the Book, declares it unthinkable (and possibly illegal) to change a word. But then, in these wishfully thought literary creations, Egyptian rulers are constantly bowing to the moral rectitude, political astuteness and learned authority of Clever Jews. Before Moses, according to Genesis, Joseph had risen to commanding power in the government of Pharaoh. (Indeed in a work called the Ioudaikon, the Jewish author gets carried away by crediting Joseph with the Egyptian system of canals and irrigation – probably in response to Egyptian histories like that of the priest-grammarian Manetho that characterised the Israelites as indigents and lepers.

  In the story of Joseph and Asenath (sometimes called ‘the first Greek novel’ and certainly a romance), the upwardly mobile young Israelite, a power in the land, is to be married to Asenath, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Pharaoh’s counsellor Poti-Phar, or Pentephres. Veiled and secluded Asenath, a notorious man-hater, is not delighted by the prospect until a peep at the Jew, as hunky as he is wise, throws her into an amorous swoon
. At which point, of course, the Jew plays hard to get, demanding her full conversion as the price of the match. Trapped in a quandary, Asenath gets timely help from a pair of angels who show up in the nick of time to foil a plot by Pharaoh’s son to rape her, kill his father and ascend the throne. Having established their problem-solving credentials, the angels feed Asenath the Bible in the form of a sacred honeycomb, from which a swarm of bees inconveniently emerge. But wait! The angels reappear, and transform the bees into stingless little accomplices of Asenath’s connubial happiness and religious epiphany. What a miracle! The Pharaoh, unharmed thanks to the Jew and his team of angels, gives the bride away and bestows blessings on the happy Jewish couple. Mazel tov, let’s drink.

  The Alexandrian honeymoon between Judaism and Hellenism wouldn’t last, but for two and a half centuries it was as vigorous, busy and creative a world as any of the diaspora cultures that would follow. It was possible to rise as high as Joseph and less fictitiously. The philosopher Philo’s younger brother became royal tax collector for the Ptolemies, and his nephew Julius Tiberius Alexander would become Roman governor of the city in the first century CE, albeit as an apostate. Another who wandered on the fringe of the Jewish community, Dositheos, son of Drimylos, climbed into the heights of the court, becoming royal archivist.

  Well before these famous success stories, in the middle of the third century BCE there were established Jewish communities in Schedia, south-east of Alexandria, up the Nile in the ancient city of Krokodopolis, at Heracleopolis, in the districts of Kerkeosiris, Hephaistias and Trikomia, and in Thebes, Leontopolis (where Onias the priest, in flight from Jerusalem, established a rival Temple like Elephantine before it, in defiance of Jerusalem). Often Jews settled where their specialities called, which were often military and bureaucratic: cavalry in Thebes (including the perfectly named Sabbathaios, ‘born on the Sabbath’, who comes down to us from a mid-second-century BCE papyrus); customs guards in Schedia; infantry at Leontopolis. As was the custom they were paid for their service by grants of land which they in turn often rented out to peasant cultivators. The suburban districts on the edge of Krokodopolis were said to be green with flower and vegetable gardens where the Jews strolled with dangerous lordliness amid the toil of their tenants. They were themselves well off and populous enough to build a synagogue and dedicate it to Ptolemy III.