THE OPPOSITION IN ITS SOCIAL ASPECT
If the rivals and opponents of the Jews had nothing more to say of them
than that they worshiped the head of an ass, it is not likely that their
opposition would have been recorded. But they would have put their
training to meager use, if they could not devise better and stronger
terms of abuse.
The very first Greek historian who has more than a vague surmise of the
character and history of the Jews is Hecataeus of Abdera (comp. above,
p. 92). As has been seen, his tone is distinctly well-disposed. But he
knows also of circumstances which to the Greek mind were real national
vices. He mentions with strong disapproval their credulity, their
inhospitality, and their aloofness.
Credulity is not a vice with which the Jews were charged in later times.
That may be due to Christian tradition, in which of course the sin of
the Jews is that they did not believe enough, as stated in Christian
controversial writings. But Greeks and Romans were quite in accord, that
the Jews were duped with extraordinary facility; especially that they
were the victims of the deception of their priests, so that they
attached importance to thousands of matters heartily without importance.
We may remember Horace’s jibe, _Credat_ _Iudaeus Apella_, “Tell it to
the Jew Apella”;[185] and nearly two hundred years later Apuleius
mentions the _Iudaei superstitiosi_, “the superstitious Jews.”[186]
Among the Greeks particularly the quality of εὐήθεια,
“simplicity,” had rapidly made the same progress as the words “silly”
and “simpleton” have in English.
Sharpness and duplicity were the qualities with which non-Greek nations
credited the Greeks, and whether the accusation was true or not,
“naïveté,” εὐήθεια, excited Greek risibilities more quickly
than anything else. The εὐήθεια of the Jews lay of course
not in their beliefs about the Deity. On that point all educated men
were in accord. But it lay in believing in the sanctity of the priests,
and in the observance of the innumerable regulations, particularly of
abstention, which had already assumed such proportions among the Jews.
The line of Meleager of Gadara, about his Jewish rival,
ἕστι καὶ ἐν ψυχροῖς σάββασι θερμὸς Ἔρως,[187]
Even on the cold Sabbaths Love makes his warmth felt,
contains in its ψυχρὰ σάββατα “cold Sabbaths,” an epitome
of the Greek point of view, ψυχρός, “cold,” was almost a
synonym for “dull.” That a holiday should be celebrated by abstention
from ordinary activities and amusements seemed to a Greek the essence of
unreason. Their own religious customs were, like those of all other
nations, full of tabus, but they were the less conscious of them because
they were wholly apart from their daily life. Jews avoided certain
foods, not merely as an occasional fast, but always. Their myths were
not irrelevant and beautiful stories, but were firmly believed to be the
records of what actually happened. The precepts of their code were
sanctioned, not merely by expediency, but by the fear of an offended
God.
An excellent example of how the rhetorical τόπος of
“naïveté” was handled is presented by Agatharchidas of Cnidus, who wrote
somewhere near 150 B.C.E.[188]
He tells us of Stratonice, daughter of Antiochus Soter and wife of
Demetrius of Macedon, who was induced by a dream to remain in a
dangerous position, where she was taken and killed. The occasion is an
excellent one to enlarge upon the topic of superstition, and
Agatharchidas relates in this connection an incident that is said to
have happened one hundred years before Stratonice, the capture of
Jerusalem by Ptolemy Soter through the fact that the Jews would not
fight upon the Sabbath. “So,” says Agatharchidas, “because, instead of
guarding their city, these men observed their senseless rule, the city
received a harsh master, and their law was shown to be a foolish
custom.” One cannot reproduce in English the fine antitheses of the
related words φυλάττειν τὴν πόλιν balanced by
διατηρούντων τὴν ἄνοιαν, νόμος answering to
ἐθισμόν; but, besides the artificiality of the phrases, the
total absence of any attempt to make the words fit the facts is shown by
the conclusion to which Agatharchidas, by rule of rhetoric, had to come.
Now a “harsh master” is just what Ptolemy was not to the Jews, and
Agatharchidas of all men must have been aware of that fact, for he wrote
not only at Alexandria, but at the court of Philometor, an especial
patron of the Jews individually and as a corporation.
The practice of the Sabbath was one of the first things that struck
foreigners. It is likely that the congregations of Sabbatistae in Asia
Minor were composed of Jewish proselytes.[189] The name of the Jewish
Sibyl Sambethe,[190] the association of Jewish worship with that of the
Phrygian Sabazios,[191] were based upon this highly peculiar custom of
the Jews. But its utter irrationality seemed to be exhibited in such
instances as Agatharchidas here describes, the abstention from both
offensive and defensive fighting on the Sabbath.
Whether the incident or others of the same kind ever occurred may
reasonably be doubted. The discussion of the question in Talmudic
sources is held at a time when Jews had long ceased to engage in
warfare.[192] Their nation no longer existed, and their legal privileges
included exemption from conscription, if they chose to avail themselves
of it. In the Bible there is no hint in the lurid chronicles of wars and
battles that the Sabbath observance involved cessation from hostilities
during time of war, and the supposition that no resistance to attack was
offered on that day is almost wholly excluded. It is not easy to imagine
one of the grim swordsmen of David or Joab allowing his throat to be cut
by an enemy because he was attacked on the Sabbath.
That any rule of Sabbath observance which demanded this had actually
developed during the post-Exilic period is likewise untenable. The Jews
served frequently in the army under both Persian and Greek rule. This is
amply demonstrated by the Aramaic papyri of Elephantine and the
existence of Jewish mercenaries under the Ptolemies.[193] The
professional soldier whose service could not be relied upon one day in
seven would soon find his occupation gone.
Several passages in the Books of Maccabees have often been taken to
imply that the strict observance of the Sabbath was maintained before
the Hasmonean revolt, and deliberately abrogated by Mattathiah (I Macc.
ii. 30-44; II Macc. viii. 23-25). But upon closer analysis it will be
seen that the incidents there recorded do not quite show that. The
massacre of the loyal Jews in the desert was a special and exceptional
thing. They were not rebels in arms, but hunted fugitives. Their passive
submission to the sword was an act of voluntary martyrdom (I Macc. ii.
37). ἁποθάνωμεν οἱ πάντες ἐν τη ἁπλότητι ἡμων: μαρτυρει ἐφ’ ἡμας
hὃοὐρανος καὶ ἡ γἡ ὁτι ακριτως ἀπόλλυτε ἡμας, “Let us all die in
our innocence. Heaven and earth bear witness for us that ye put us to
death wrongfully.”
Again, it is not Mattathiah, but the sober reflection of his men, that
brings them to the resolution that such acts of martyrdom, admirable as
they are in intention, are futile. The decision is rather a criticism of
their useless sacrifice than anything else.
Similar acts of self-devotion on the part of inhabitants of doomed
cities were not uncommon. As final proofs of patriotism on the part of
those who would not survive their city, they received the commendation
of ancient writers.[194] But to kill oneself or allow oneself to be
killed for a fantastic superstition, could have seemed only the blindest
fanaticism.
Now there is no reason for doubting the essential accuracy of the report
in I Maccabees, to the effect that one group of Jewish zealots chose
passive resistance to the attempt of Antiochus, and by that nerved the
Hasmoneans to a very active resistance. And it is very likely that in
this event we have the basis for the stories that related the capture of
Jerusalem—almost in every case—on the Sabbath. The story is told of the
capture by Nebuchadnezzar, by Artaxerxes Ochus, by Ptolemy, and by
Pompey. It is a logical inference from the non-resistance of the
refugees mentioned in I Maccabees. The conditions of ancient warfare
make it highly improbable that it was more.
The rationalist Greek or Roman felt it a point of honor to hold in equal
contempt the “old-wives’ tales” of his own countrymen as to the
supramundane facts with which the myths were filled,[195] and the vain
and foolish attempts by which barbarians, and Greeks and Romans too,
sought to dominate the cosmic forces or tear the secret from fate. These
attempts generally took the form of magic, not, however, like the
primitive ceremonies, of which the real nature had long been forgotten,
but in the elaborate thaumaturgic systems which had been fashioned in
Egypt, Persia, and Babylon. In their lowest forms these were petty and
mean swindling devices. In their more developed forms they contained a
sincerely felt mysticism, but under all guises they aroused the contempt
of the skeptic, to whom the most ancient and revered rites of his own
cult were merely ancestral habits which it did no harm to follow. The
tone such men adopted toward the complicated Oriental theologies and
rituals was very much like that of modern cultivated men toward the
various “Vedantic philosophies,” which at one time enjoyed a certain
vogue. Those who seriously maintained that by the rattling of a sistrum,
or the clash of cymbals, or by mortifications of the flesh, influences
could be exerted upon the laws that governed the universe, so as to
modify their course or divert them, were alike insensate fools, whose
chatter no educated man could take seriously. The Jews, who observed,
even when they were less rigorous, a number of restrictive rules that
gravely hampered their freedom of action, who seriously maintained that
they possessed a direct revelation of God, were fanatics and magicians,
and exhibited a credulity that was the first sign of mental inferiority.
“Senseless,” “nonsense,” ἀνοητός, ἄνοια, are terms that are
principally in the mouths of the Philopator of III Maccabees and the
Antiochus of IV Maccabees, in whose words we may fairly see epitomized
all the current abuse as well as criticism which opponents to the Jews,
from philosophers to malevolent chauvinists, heaped upon them.
Hecataeus says of Moses that he instituted an “inhospitable and strange
form of living.”[196] The two words μισόξενον and
ἀπάνθρωπον form a _doublette_, or rhetorical doubling of a
single idea. That idea is “inhospitality,” lack of the feeling of common
humanity, a term which for Greeks and Romans embodied a number of
conceptions not suggested by the word to modern ears.
The word ξένος, which is the root of the words for
“hospitality” and its opposite, has no equivalent in English. A
ξένος was a man of another nation, who approached without
hostile intent. The test of civilization was the manner in which such a
ξένος was dealt with. The Greek traditions, even their
extant literature, have a very lively recollection of the time when
hospitality was by no means universal, when the ξένος was
treated as an enemy taken in arms or worse. The one damning epithet of
the Cyclops is ἄξενος, “inhospitable.”[197] The high
commendation bestowed upon the princely hospitality of the Homeric
barons itself indicates that this virtue was not yet a matter of course,
and that boorish nations and individuals did not possess it.
Legally, of course, the ξένος had no rights. Such claim as
he could make for protection rested upon the favor of the gods,
especially of Zeus, who was frequently addressed by the cult title of
Ξένιος, the Protector of Strangers. The uncertain aid of
the gods was soon displaced by personal relations between individuals
and groups of individuals in different states, who were mutually
πρόξενοι to each other, a title that always created a very
definite moral obligation and soon a legal one as well. So, when
Alexander destroyed Thebes, he spared the πρόξενοι of his
own family and of the Macedonians in general.[198]
The institution and the development had practically gone on in similar
ways all through the Mediterranean world. The Bedouins still maintain
the ancient customs of their fathers in that respect. The Romans had the
word _hospes_, of which the history is a close parallel to that of
ξένος.
Of the Jews the same thing may be said. The Bible enjoins the protection
of strangers as a primary obligation. They were the living symbols of
the Egyptian bondage. So Exodus xxiii. 9, “Also thou shalt not oppress a
stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers
in the land of Egypt.” One of Job’s protests of righteousness is his
hospitality (Job xxxi. 32).
In these circumstances just what could the charge of
μισοξενία, of “inhospitality,” have meant? We shall look in
vain in Greek literature for an injunction to hospitality as finely
phrased as the passage just quoted from Exodus. To understand the term
as applied to the Jews we shall have to examine the words that are used
for the acts connected with hospitality.
In Homer the word ξεινίζω[199] is frequently found.
Strictly of course it means simply “to deal with a stranger,” but it is
used principally in the sense of “entertain at dinner.” The wandering
stranger might as such claim the hospitality of the people among whom
chance had brought him, and claim it in the very concrete sense that
food and lodging at the master’s table were his of right. Indeed it
would almost seem that he became _pro hac vice_ a member of the family
group in which he partook of a meal, protected in life and limb by the
blood-vengeance of his temporary kinsmen.
That however seems to have been the general rule in the older
communities of the East, in Palestine just as in Greece and Asia. There
was no feeling against entertaining a stranger at table among the Jews,
although the relation could not well be reversed. And there was the rub.
It was not in Palestine (where the Jew was likely always to be the
host), but in the communities in which Jew and non-Jew acknowledged the
same civic bond that the refusal of the Jew to accept the hospitality of
his neighbor would be a flagrant instance of μισοξενία, of
dislike of strangers. We need not suppose that it needed careful
investigation and the accumulation of instances to produce the
statement. A few incidents within anyone’s experience would suffice. We
shall have to remember further that we are dealing with a literary
tradition in which many statements are taken over from the writer’s
source without independent conviction on his own part.
However, among the great masses the general feeling that the
Jews disliked strangers, and so were properly to be termed
μισόξενοι, was in all likelihood based on an observation of
more obvious facts than dietary regulations. It is principally in meat
diet that the separation is really effective, and meat diet was the
prerogative of the rich. Then, as now, the great majority of the people
ate meat rarely, if at all, and surely could take no offense at a man’s
squeamishness about the quality or nature of the food he ate. But what
everybody was compelled to notice was that the Jews deliberately held
aloof from practically all public festivities, since these were nearly
always religious, and that they created barriers which seemed as
unnecessary as they were foolishly defended. That in itself could be
interpreted by the man in the street only as a sign of deep-rooted
antipathy, of μισοξενία.
This accusation, as has been shown, was more than the reproach of
unsociability. The vice charged by it was of serious character. Those
individuals who in Greek poetry are called inhospitable are nothing
short of monsters. It implied not merely aloofness from strangers, but
ill-usage of them, and that ill-usage was sometimes assumed to be
downright cannibalism. So Strabo (vii. 6) tells us that the
“inhospitable” sea was called so, not only because of its storms, but
because of the ferocity of the Scythian tribes dwelling around it, who
devoured strangers and used their skulls for goblets. That was of course
to be inhospitable with a vengeance, but the term covered the extreme
idea as well as the milder acts that produced at Sparta and Crete
frequent edicts of expulsion (ξενηλασίαι)[200] and a
general cold welcome to foreigners.
In very many cases, especially in the rhetorical schools,
“inhospitality,” “hatred of strangers,” was a mere abusive tag,
available without any excessive consideration of the facts. And when
intense enmity was to be exhibited, the extreme form of “inhospitality”
was naturally enough both implicitly and expressly charged against the
objects of the writer’s dislike.
[Illustration: GREEK INSCRIPTION, FOUND ON SITE OF TEMPLE AREA,
FORBIDDING GENTILES TO PASS BEYOND THE INNER TEMPLE WALLS AT JERUSALEM
(Now In the Imperial Ottoman Museum Constantinople)]
There are many instances in which the hereditary enemy was credited with
human sacrifice or cannibalism. Indeed it was currently believed that
cannibalism had universally prevailed at one time, and with advancing
civilization was gradually superseded.[201] As far as human sacrifice
was concerned, many highly civilized states knew of vestiges or actual
recurrences of it in their own practice. Rome is a striking example. But
in Rome such things were rare exceptions, employed in times of unusual
straits to meet a quite unusual emergency.[202] In Greece there were
many traces frankly admitted to be such—if not actual instances of such
sacrifices. But here, as at Rome, the act was admittedly something out
of the ordinary, a survival of primitive savagery.[203]
Accordingly when Greeks and Romans spoke of human sacrifices, it was not
of an inconceivable form of barbarity, which placed those who took part
in it quite out of the human pale, but as a relic of a condition from
which they had themselves happily grown, and to which they reverted only
in extremities. Its presence among other tribes was a demonstration that
they were still in the barbarous stage, and especially was it deemed to
be so when all strangers who chanced to come upon the foreign shore were
the selected victims of the god.
That charge, as we know, was made against many Scythian and Thracian
tribes. The story of Iphigenia in Tauris is an example of it. It was
made against the Carthaginians, at least in the early stages of their
history. The Gauls, according to both Greek and Roman writers, had made
of it a very common institution.[204] We do not know very much of the
evidence in the case of the Thracians, Scythians, and Gauls. It is not
impossible that customs like certain symbolic rites found in many places
were misinterpreted. Or it is highly likely that, if human sacrifices
existed, they were, as among Greeks and Romans, a rare form of
expiation. For the Carthaginians the story is almost certainly a
by-product of national hatred, and rests upon the same foundations as
the “cruelty” and “perfidy” of Hannibal.
Human sacrifices, similar to those of Greece and Rome, existed in
Palestine. Children were sacrificed to the nameless god or gods that
bore the cult title of _melech_, _i.e._ “king.” As in the rest of the
Mediterranean world such sacrifices were exceptional and grisly forms of
expiation, used when ordinary means had failed. Among the Jews, on the
other hand, they seem to have been prohibited from the very beginning of
their history as a community. It is a purely gratuitous theory that
makes _melech_, or _molech_, a cult-title of Yahveh in Israel. There is
simply no evidence of any kind that it was so. On the contrary, the
oldest traditions of the Jews represent the abolition of human
sacrifices as one of the first reforms instituted by the founders of
their faith. The Mosaic code made these sacrifices a capital offense
(Lev. xviii. 21; xx. 2). The very name _molech_ indicates an intense
abhorrence, if, as has been plausibly suggested, it is simply
מלך, or “king,” with the vowels of בשת, “the
Abomination.”[205]
With so old a tradition on the subject, the Jews must have felt, as
peculiarly irritating, the transference of this vituperative tag to
them. That it might be so applied was of course an inevitable expansion
of the belief that the Jews were μισόξενοι, “haters of
strangers.” However, it must not be supposed that the statement was
widely current. On the contrary, we have only two references to it.
Damocritus, who lived perhaps in the first century B.C.E., as quoted by
the late Byzantine compiler Suidas,[206] asserts that the Jews captured
a stranger every seven years, and sacrificed him to their god; and
Apion, in the first century C.E., relates the circumstantial story of
the captured Greek who was found immured in the temple by Antiochus
Epiphanes.
The latter story is an amusing instance of rhetorical method. Of its
baselessness of course no proof need be adduced. It is almost certainly
the concoction of Apion himself, perhaps based upon some such statement
as this just quoted from Damocritus. Its melodramatic features, the
fattening of the stranger, the oath sealed by blood, are highly
characteristic of Apion’s style.
It cannot be said that this particular charge against the Jews had any
real success. The later writers do not mention it. Tacitus and Juvenal,
both of whom are very likely to have read Apion, pass by the story in
silence. And Juvenal, who in his Fifteenth Satire expresses such
detestation of a similar act among the Egyptians he abominated,[207]
would certainly not have let off the Syrian fortune-tellers, whom he
equally disliked, with an allusion to their unsociability.
_Non monstrare vias nisi eadem sacra colenti_,[208] “They are instructed
not to point out a road except to those who share their rites.” It might
almost seem as though even rhetorical animosity demanded more for its
terms of abuse than the authority of Apion.
The tragic importance of the “ritual murder” in the modern history of
the Jews since the Crusades has given the account of Apion a
significance to which it is by no means entitled. The least analysis
will show that the “ritual murder” of modern times is not really like
the ancient story at all. The latter is simply an application to the
Jews of the frequent charge of ξενοθυσία, “sacrifice of
strangers,” such as was made against the Scythians. And Apion’s fable
found practically no acceptance. There is of course no literary
transmission between Apion and the chroniclers of Hugh of Lincoln, but
we cannot even suppose that there was a popular one. In the fearful
struggles of the rebellions under Hadrian and Trajan, it is impossible
to believe that the mutual hatred, which found such expression as the
massacre at Salamis and the reprisals of the Greeks, would have failed
to register this charge against the ἀνόσιοι Ἰουδαῖοι, “the
wicked Jews,” if it were known.
The early Middle Ages, at any rate from the Crusades on, devised the
“ritual murder” without the aid of older authorities. It is one of the
many cases in which parallel developments at different times and in
different places produce results that are somewhat similar, although
only superficially so.[209]
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