THE OPPOSITION
The ancient state was based on community of _sacra_, of
cult-observances. Anything that tended to destroy them or impair general
belief in their necessity, went to the very roots of the state, was
therefore a form of treason, and was punished as such. The state rarely
was interested in the honor of the gods themselves. Roman law had a
maxim, which was very seriously stated, but which makes upon us the
impression of a cynical witticism: _Deorum iniuriae dis curae_, “Let the
gods attend to their own wrongs.” Since the kinship of members of the
state was generally known to be a legal fiction, the bond that took its
place was common worship. The state could not look without concern upon
anything that threatened to weaken its formal structure.
Most Greek states made ἀσέβεια, “impiety,” a criminal
offense. But just what acts or omissions constituted impiety was in each
case a question of fact, to be determined specially in every instance.
At Athens various persons of greater and less distinction were
prosecuted under that indictment—Socrates, Theophrastus, Phryne. In
every one of these cases, the gravamen of the charge was that the
defendant did not regard as gods those whom the state so regarded
(μὴ νομίζειν θεοὺς οὓς ἡ πόλις νομίζει, Plat. Apol. 24B and
26B), and taught so. In general, individual prosecutions such as these
were deemed sufficient to repress the spread of dangerous doctrines. It
was not believed necessary to consider membership in any sect or
community as _prima facie_ evidence of such impiety, punishable without
further investigation. In later times, however, even this step was
taken. Certain philosophic sects—which, we may remember, were
corporately organized—were believed to be essentially impious. The city
of Lyctos in Crete forbade any Epicurean to enter it under penalty of
the most frightful tortures.[164]
We shall have to distinguish these police measures, which, when aimed at
religious bodies, constitute an undoubted religious persecution, from
the mutual animosity with which hostile races in any community regarded
each other and the bloody riots that resulted from it. In the new city
of Seleucia in Babylonia, the Syrians, Jews, and Greeks that lived there
were very far from realizing the purpose of the city’s founder and
coalescing into a single community. Sanguinary conflicts, probably on
very slight provocation, frequently took place. Sometimes the Jews and
Syrians combined against the Greeks; sometimes the Greeks and Syrians
against the Jews, as recounted by Josephus.[165] The situation in
Alexandria, where Egyptians hated Greeks, Jews, and doubtless all
foreigners with a scarcely discriminating intensity, is peculiar only
because we are well informed of conditions there by the papyri. When any
one of these nationalities gained the upper hand, there was likely to be
a bloody suppression of its foes, often followed by equally bloody
reprisals. Salamis, in Cyprus, is a grim witness of the frenzy with
which neighbors could attack each other, when years of hostility
culminated in a violent outbreak.[166]
The attitude of Greek states toward the Jewish congregations in their
midst was certainly not uniformly hostile. But in many cases there could
not help being a certain resentment, owing to the fact that these
congregations were by special grant generally immune from prosecution
for impiety, although as a matter of fact they very emphatically “did
not regard as gods those whom the state so regarded.” Of itself this
circumstance might have been neglected, but the active and successful
propaganda they undertook made them a source of real danger to the
state. We therefore hear of attempts made sporadically to abrogate the
immunity, to compel the Jewish corporations to conform to the local law
of ἀσέβεια. Nearly always, however, the immunity was a
royal grant, and therefore unreachable by local legislation, a fact that
did not tend to alleviate friction where it existed.[167]
At Rome police measures to suppress irreligion were long in existence.
However, the Roman attitude toward any form of communion with gods or
_daemonia_ was so uniformly an attitude of dread, that prohibition of
religious rites and punishment of participants in them were not a task
lightly assumed by a Roman magistrate. The suppression of the
Bacchanalia in 186 B.C.E. was nothing short of a religious persecution,
but the utmost care was taken to make it appear to be directed against
certain licentious practices alleged against the Bacchae, and the
senate’s decree expressly authorizes the Bacchic rites, under certain
restrictions deemed necessary to insure their harmlessness.[168] Very
early the Isiac mysteries and other Eastern cults came within the
animadversion of the urban police.[169] Here too the theory was that the
crimes and immorality of the communicants were the sole objects of
punishment, especially that species of fraud which took the form of
magic and unofficial fortune-telling. In reality, however, all these
pretexts covered the fact that the Romans felt their state ritual
endangered, not by the presence, but by the spread, of such rituals
among Romans; and in this their alarm was very well grounded indeed. But
to proceed openly and boldly against any manifestation of a divine
numen, was more than the average Roman board of aediles ventured to do.
If the official attitude of various communities toward outside cults and
toward the Jews in particular can be brought under no general rule, we
may be sure that the personal attitude of individual Greeks toward them
varied from enthusiastic veneration to indifference and determined
antagonism. In certain cities the Jews as foreigners could not hope to
escape odium nor the jealousy of competing individuals and
organizations. In Egypt particularly, the feud between Egyptians and
Jews existed before the coming of the Greeks there, and grew in
intensity as time went on. As far as definite attacks upon the Jews and
their institutions went, many of them had an Egyptian origin, and many
others were wholly confined to that country.
These attacks are not essentially different from the methods that
generally obtained when one group of men found itself in frequent
opposition to another group on the field of battle or otherwise. The
populace needs no rhetorical stimulation to represent its enemies as
wicked, cowardly, and foolish. That is a human weakness which exists
to-day quite as it has existed for many centuries. However, even for the
populace, such phrases were accepted conventions. They were not quite
seriously meant, and could be conveniently forgotten whenever the former
foe became an ally.
Among professional rhetoricians this particular method of argumentation
formed a set rhetorical device, one of the forms of _vituperatio_[170]
as classified in the text-books. Certain τόποι,
“commonplaces,” were developed concerning all nations, and used as
occasion required. Historical facts, popular gossip, freely imagined
qualities, were all equally used to support the statements made or to
illustrate them. Now it is in the works of professional rhetoricians
that most of the attacks on the Jews are to be found. Further, we have
their works wholly in the form of citations taken from the context. We
cannot even be sure to what extent the authors themselves were convinced
of what they said. Wherever we meet what is plainly a rhetorical
τόπος, we have little ground for assuming that it
corresponds to any feeling whatever on the writer’s part. Often it was
mechanically inserted, and has all the effect of an exercise in
composition.
With a laughter-loving people one of the first resources in controversy
is to render the opponent ridiculous. It was especially on the side of
religion that the Jews maintained their difference from their neighbors,
and claimed a great superiority to them. A Greek enemy would be much
inclined to heap ridicule, first on the pretensions to superiority, and
then on the religious form itself. That may be the basis of a story,
which soon became widely current, to the effect that the Jews worshiped
their god in the form of an ass.
The story is of Egyptian origin. Just where and when it began, cannot be
discovered. Josephus in combating Apion refers to a writer whose name
the copyists have hopelessly jumbled. It is not unlikely that he was a
certain Mnaseas, perhaps of Patara in Lycia, or Patras in the
Peloponnesus, a highly rhetorical historian of the second century
B.C.E.[171] He wrote therefore before the establishment of the Maccabean
state. Wherever he was born, he was a pupil of Eratosthenes, and
therefore a resident of Alexandria.[172]
We have his words only at third hand, in Josephus’ account of Apion’s
reference. Each citation is of substance, not the _ipsissima verba_;
and, besides, of this part of Josephus we have only a Latin translation,
not the original. The story, whether it is Mnaseas’ or Apion’s, is to
the effect that a certain Idumean, named Zabidus, duped the Jews into
believing that he intended to deliver his god, Apollo,[173] into their
hands, and contrived to get into the temple and remove “the golden head
of the pack-ass.”
The uncertainty and indirectness of the citation makes it dubious
whether Mnaseas understood this ass to be the actual divine symbol or,
as others said, merely one of the figures of a group. The absurdity of
the story seems so patent that its existence is almost incredible. It
indicates the extreme strictness with which gentiles were excluded from
even the approach to the temple at Jerusalem that the baselessness of
the ass-legend was not immediately discovered.[174]
Josephus’ indignation and his frequent reference to the “pretended wit”
of Apion or of Mnaseas make the tone and intention of the story quite
plain. It can have had no other purpose than that of holding the Jews up
to ridicule. But just what the point of the jest is, is by no means
quite so easy to discover. We cannot reconstruct even approximately the
words of Mnaseas. It is, however, at least likely that if he had
attributed the adoration of an ass to the Jews, a somewhat less
equivocal statement to that effect would appear. Other writers do make
that statement plainly enough. The point of Mnaseas’ raillery seems
rather to be the easy credulity of the people, a characteristic that was
at all times attributed to them in the ancient world, from the earliest
references, as they are found in Hecataeus, to the latest. It is curious
that this quality, which to Greeks and Romans seemed the most striking
trait of the Jews, is the very last that modern observers would ascribe
to them.
If we follow the story as it appears in later writers, we shall meet it
next in the history of the Syrian Posidonius, who lived about 100 B.C.E.
Again, we have his statement only in quotation, this time in a fragment
of the work of Diodorus, a Sicilian contemporary of Augustus. Posidonius
does no more than make the assertion that the innermost shrine of the
temple contained the statue of a long-bearded man, assumed to be Moses,
riding on an ass (λίθινον ἄγαλμα ἀνδρὸς βαθυπώγωνος
καθήμενον [sic] ἐπ’ ὄνου.[175] This is very far from
accusing the Jews of worshiping an ass. Indeed it is likely enough that
nothing was further from the mind of the writer. Perhaps Mnaseas too
told the same or a very similar story, since his anecdote would fit in
just as well with the account of Posidonius as with the later version.
The story appears again in the writings of Molo, the tutor of Caesar and
Cicero; but Molo’s statement is wholly lost. In the next generation we
find it in the writings of the Egyptian Apion, and in Damocritus, of
whom we know nothing, but who, it is likely enough, was a resident of
Alexandria.[176]
Here the statements are unmistakable. According to Damocritus, if he is
accurately cited by the late Byzantine lexicographer Suidas, the Jews
adored the gilded head of an ass (χρυσ ῆ ν ὄνου κεφαλὴν
προσεκύνουν). Apion, in the Latin translation of Josephus,
asserts that the Jews “adored this ass’ head, and worshiped it with much
ceremony” (_id_ [_i.e. asini caput_] _colere ac dignum facere tanta
religione_).[177]
Probably from Apion it got to Tacitus, 120 C.E., who in his Histories
(v. 4) uses the words, _effigiem_ [_asini_] _penetrali sacravere_, “they
consecrated the figure of an ass in their inner shrine.” Tacitus
expressly avoids the allegation of worshiping this statue. He probably
intentionally modified the words of Apion to fit the statement into the
then abundantly proven fact that the Jews worshiped an imageless and
abstract deity (Hist. v. 5).
The Greek essayist Plutarch, almost a generation before Tacitus, makes a
similar reference, though in his case without the least hostile or
satiric intention. The ass is according to him the animal most honored
among the Jews (τὸ τιμώμενον ὑπ αὐτῶν μάλιστα θηρίον), a
statement which, it may be said incidentally, is by no means without
foundation.[178]
It is generally assumed that the use of an ass as an object of adoration
necessarily aroused derision. That would probably be true of our own
times in Europe or in America, but it would not obtain in the ancient
world. Veneration of an ass was no more extraordinary to a Greek than
veneration of any other animal symbol. Nor was the ass associated in
men’s minds only with contemptuous and derisive images. He played a
large part in the economy of the people, and was in many places
correspondingly esteemed. The very first reference to him in Greek
literature is in the Iliad (xi. 558), where Ajax’s slow retreat is
compared to the stubborn and effectual resistance of an ass in the
fields—surely no dishonoring simile. The ass was a part of the sacred
train of Dionysus,[179] long before the latter was identified with the
Phrygian Sabazios. Again, the ass was transferred to heaven, where he
still shines as a constellation. At Lampsacus and Tarentum he was a
sacrificial animal.[180] At Rome he was associated with Vesta, and
crowned at the Consualia.
Among the Jews, as among all the people of that portion of Asia, his
importance is such as to justify in a large measure the words of
Plutarch. Generally in the Bible he is preferred to the horse (Prov.
xxvi. 3; Psalm xxxii. 9). In the ancient song of Deborah (Judges v. 10)
those who sit on white asses are the princes of the people. The Anointed
of God would ride into the city upon an ass. It is not without meaning
that asses, but not horses, appear on Assyrian sculpture.
In Egypt, however, the ass was a symbol of evil. He was associated with
the demoniac Typhon, and was an object of superstitious fear and
hatred.[181]
For most of the Mediterranean nations the worship of an ass was only in
so far contemptible as the worship of any animal was so considered.
Romans and Greeks take very lofty ground indeed when they speak of
Egyptian theriolatry, although innumerable religious practices of their
own were associated in some way or other with animals.[182] It is not
likely accordingly that the allegation of this form of fetichism against
the Jews arose among Greeks or Romans or Syrians or Palestinians. For
Egyptians, on the contrary, this particular story would charge the Jews
with “devil-worship,” or, at least, the veneration of a deity hostile to
them. In Egypt, and in Egypt alone, the story would have a special
point.
It may further be noted that in Manetho’s account the Jews are brought
to Avaris, a site consecrated to Typhon.
As it appears in Posidonius, perhaps in Mnaseas and Molo, and certainly
in Plutarch, the story is based upon a real Jewish tradition and actual
custom. In Damocritus and Apion, on the other hand, it is a malicious
slander, needing no basis in observed fact. It is one of the many
developments of the mutual hatred of Jew and Egyptian, of which there is
such a wealth of other evidence.
This story has been dealt with in some detail because it illustrates in
very many ways the character, sources, and methods of the literary
anti-Semitism of ancient times. Wholly without basis from the beginning,
it becomes almost an accepted dogma, as well grounded as many another
facile generalization in those days and ours. Further, it will be
observed that it does not everywhere necessitate the inference of
hostility on the part of the writer. The historians of those days were
_ex professo_ rhetoricians. Every form of literary composition had as
its prime object a finished artistic product. Since the subject of
literature, or artistic verbal expression, was human life, history,
which is the record of human life, was eminently the province of the
word-fancier, the rhetorician. The trained historian has no words of
sufficient contempt for the mere logographer whose object is the
recording of facts. That “pretty lies” do not in the least disfigure
history, is the opinion of the Stoic Panaetius and his pupil and admirer
Cicero. And that was particularly the case when the history was, as it
often became, an expanded plea or invective, in which case the tricks of
trade of the advocate were not only commendable but demanded.[183]
Most of the accounts of the Jews or the fragments of such accounts come
to us from just these rhetorical historians. If the whole book were
extant in any case, we should be in a position to determine the occasion
for the account and the source of its color. As it is, we are on
slippery ground when we endeavor to interpret the fragments in such a
way as to discover the facts of which they present so distorted an
image.
Not all historians, however, were of this type. Even among the rhetors,
many had, or at any rate professed to have, a passion for truth. And
among the others there is manifested from time to time a distinct
historical conscience, a qualm as to the accuracy of the assertion so
trippingly written.
It is for this reason an especially painful gap in our sources to find
that portion of Polybius missing in which he promised to treat at length
of the Jews. Polybius of Megalopolis, a Greek who lived as an Achean
hostage in Rome, in the second third of the second century B.C.E., was
the nearest approach the ancient world had to an historian in the modern
sense, one whose primary object was to ascertain the truth and state it
simply. Polybius could, for example, feel and express high admiration
for Roman institutions and at the same time do justice to the bitter
hater of the Romans, Hannibal. And this too in the lifetime of men who
may themselves have heard the dreadful news of Trasimene and Cannae.
In his sixteenth book, Polybius briefly relates the conquest of Judea
among other parts of Coele-Syria, first by Ptolemy Philometor’s general,
then by Antiochus the Great. “A little while after this, he [Antiochus]
received the submission of those of the Jews who lived around the temple
known as Jerusalem. About this I have much more to tell, particularly
because of the fame of the temple, and I shall reserve that narrative
for later.”
An evil chance has deprived us of that later narrative. If we possessed
it, we should probably have a very sane and, as far as his sources
permitted, an accurate account of the condition of the Jews during the
generation between Antiochus the Great and the Maccabees. Polybius,
however, wrote before the establishment of the Jewish state and the
spread of its cult had focused attention upon the people, and roused
opposition. And he wrote, too, at the very beginning of Roman
interference in the East, which reduced Egypt to a protectorate before
another generation. When he speaks therefore of the “great fame of the
temple” (ἡ περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν ἐπιφάνεια), he is an especially
important witness of what the name meant to the Romans and Greeks, for
whom he wrote.[184]
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