THE PHILOSOPHIC OPPOSITION
A favorite adjective in describing the Jews was “superstitious.”
Strangely enough, another, perhaps even more general, was “irreligious.”
The Jews were frequently stigmatized as ἄθεοι, a word
generally translated “atheist,” and undoubtedly often used in the sense
of the modern term. It remains to be seen whether the term meant, in its
application to the Jews, all that the corresponding modern term implies.
That is particularly necessary here, since to the modern world the
devotion of the nation to its Deity is its most striking characteristic,
and at least one of the key-notes of its historical development. Upon us
it has almost the effect of a paradox to read that this people impressed
some Greeks as a nation of “atheists” or “godless.”
The modern term and the ancient partly cover each other. Both often
denote the speculative negation of a supernatural direction of the
world. Now it simply cannot be, in view of the wide distribution of the
Jews and their successful propaganda, that even the unthinking could
associate the people whose claims to direct divine guidance were so many
and so emphatic, with a term that implied the non-recognition of any
god. We may remember how even the very first contact had seemed to
emphasize the religious side of the Jewish communal life.
The usual explanations will not bear analysis. It is frequently asserted
that “atheist” was applied to the Jews because of their imageless cult.
The natural inference, we are told, from the fact that there were no
statues was that there were no gods. But that is to assign to the statue
a larger importance in ancient religious theory than in fact belonged to
it. We meet, to be sure, cases where the identification of the statue
and the resident deity seems to be complete. Especially in such scoffers
as Lucian,[210] or in the polemics of the philosophic sects, or in those
of Jews and Christian writers, Romans and Greeks are often charged with
the adoration of the actual figure of stone or bronze. That, however,
was surely not the general attitude of any class. The passages that seem
to show it are generally figurative and often imply merely that the god
had taken his abode within the statue, and might leave it at will.
Indeed, just for the masses, the most intense and direct religious
emotions were always aroused, not by the great gods whose statues were
the artistic pride of their cities, but by the formless and bodiless
spirits of tree and field and forest that survived from pre-Olympian
animism. And these latter, if adored in symbolic form, were represented
generally by pillars or trees, and not by statues at all.
Nor were the Jews the only imageless barbarians whom the Greeks and
Romans encountered. Most of the surrounding nations can scarcely have
possessed actual statues at first. And the Greeks or Romans drew no such
inference as atheism from the fact that they found no statues of gods
among Spaniards, Thracians, Germans, or Celts. On the contrary, we hear
of gods among all these nations, many of them outlined with sufficient
clearness to be identified promptly with various Greek deities. What a
Greek would be likely to assume is rather that these barbarians lacked
the skill to fashion statues or the artistic cultivation to appreciate
them. If it occurred to him to explain the imageless shrine at Jerusalem
at all, he would no doubt have offered some such statement, especially
as it was quite common to assume lack of artistic skill in barbarians.
Atheism as a philosophic doctrine was relatively rare. Diagoras of
Melos, a contemporary of Socrates, and Theodore of Cyrene,[211] a
contemporary of the first Ptolemy, were said to have held that doctrine,
and the former was known from it as “the Atheist.” However, even in this
case we cannot be quite sure of our ground. Some of the poems of
Diagoras seem to have a distinct, even a strong, religious feeling.
Josephus asserts that Diagoras’ offense in Athenian eyes was scoffing at
the mysteries.[212] If that is true, he received his sobriquet less from
atheism, as we understand it, than from the same facts that brought
Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates himself within the ban of the
Athenian police. That is, he was charged rather with contempt of the
actually constituted deities of the Athenian state than with a general
negation of a divinity. The term itself, ἄθεος, is not
necessarily negative. In fact, Greek had very few purely negative ideas.
In Plato’s Euthyphro[213] the only alternatives that are admitted are
θεοφιλές and θεομισές, _i.e._ what the gods
hate and what the gods love. So the various Greek adjectives compounded
with “α privative,” ανωφελής, “useless,”
ἄβουλος, “thoughtless,” are really used in a positive sense
contrary to that of the positive adjective. So ανωφελής is
rather “harmful” than merely “useless”; ἄβουλος is
“ill-advised”; etc. The word ἄθεος would, by that analogy,
rather denote one that opposed certain gods than one who denied them. A
man might be ἄθεος in one community and not in another.
Indeed his “atheism” might be an especial devotion to a divine principle
which was not that recognized by the state.
In ordinary literary usage ἄθεος is denuded even of this
significance. It means little more than “wicked.” It is used so by
Pindar, by Sophocles, and in general by the orators. Often it runs in
pairs with other adjectives of the same character. Xenophon calls
Tissaphernes (An. II. v. 29) ἀθεότατος καὶ πανουργότατος,
“most godless and wicked,” in which the superlative is especially
noteworthy. As a matter of fact it is often used of a man whom the gods
would have none of, rather than one who rejects the gods. Ἄθεος,
ἄφιλος ὀλοίμαν, cries the chorus in Oedipus Rex, “May I die
abandoned by gods and men.”[214]
When it is first used of the Jews by Molo, it is as part of just such a
group; ἄθεοι καὶ μισάνθρωποι, he calls the Jews, “hateful
to gods and men,” and other rhetoricians follow suit. As a term of
abuse, ἄθεος was as good as any other.
But there may have been a more precise sense in which the Jews might by
an incensed Greek be properly stigmatized as ἄθεοι. To the
thoroughgoing monotheists, the gods of the heathen are non-existent.
They are not evil spirits, but have no being whatever. The prophets and
the intellectual leaders of the Jews held that view with passionate
intensity. But even they used language which readily lends color to the
view that these gods did exist as malignant and inferior _daemonia_. The
“devils” of Leviticus xvii. 7 are undoubtedly the gods of other
nations.[215] The name “Abomination,” which for the Jew was a
cacophemism for “god,” equally implies by its very strength a common
feeling of the reality of the being so referred to. Likewise the other
terms of abuse which the Jews showered upon the gods of the heathen
indicate a real and fiercely personal animosity.
Hatred and bitterness formed almost a religious duty. An implacable war
was to be waged with the abominable thing, and it is not likely that
dictates of courtesy would stand in the way. The retort of
ἄθεοι would mean no more than a summary of the fact that
the Jew was the declared enemy of the constituted deity, whose anger he
provoked and whose power he despised.[216]
Something of this appears in the statement of the Alexandrian
Lysimachus, that the Jews were enjoined to overturn the altars and
temples which they met (Josephus, Contra Ap. i. 34), and in the phrase
of the elder Pliny (Hist. Nat. XIII. iv. 46), _gens contumelia numinum
insignis_, “a race famous for its insults to the gods.”
Most of the phrases that have been quoted have been taken from works
where they were little more than casual asides imbedded in matter of
different purport. Rhetoricians, in attempting to establish a point, use
some phrase, either current through popular usage or a commonplace in
their schools. In this respect the Jews fare no better and no worse than
practically all nationalities of that time. Individual writers disliked
or despised various peoples, and said so in any manner that suited them.
Slurs against Romans, Athenians, Boeotians, Egyptians, Cappadocians are
met with often enough. The Cretans were liars, the Boeotians guzzlers,
the Egyptians knaves, the Abderitans fools; antiquity has furnished us
with more than one entertaining example of national hate and
jealousy.[217] The epithets which the Acheans showered on their Aetolian
rivals certainly leave nothing to be desired as far as intensity is
concerned.[218] The various panders of Roman comedy often are
represented as particularly choice specimens of Agrigentine
character.[219] Cicero particularly knew from his rhetorical masters how
to use national prejudices in the conduct of his business. If Celts are
the accusers of his client, as they were in the case of Fonteius, they
are perjurers, murderers, enemies of the human race. “Tribes,” he says,
“so far removed from other races in character and customs that they
fight, not for their religion, but against the religion of all
men.”[220] If they are Sardinians, these are a “tribe whose
worthlessness is such that the only distinction they recognize between
freedom and slavery is that the former gives them unlimited license to
lie.”[221]
To take this seriously is to misconceive strangely both the functions of
an advocate and the license of rhetoric. Now the abusive paragraphs
directed against the Jews are quite of this type. And it is in the
highest degree extraordinary that these phrases, which, in the instances
just cited, are given no weight in determining national attitude, should
be considered of the highest importance in the case of the Jews. Whether
it was Syrian, Greek, or Celt that was attacked, the stock epithet means
no more than the corresponding terms of our own day mean.
But besides these occasional flings there were whole books directed
against the Jews, and to that fact a little attention may be given.
It is a relatively rare thing that a writer should nurse his bile
against a particular people to the extent of expanding it into a whole
book. We must of course remember that a “book” was sometimes, and
especially in this polemical literature, a single roll, and we are not
to understand it in the sense of a voluminous treatise. However, there
were such books and these we must now consider.
What such a book was like, recent anti-Semitism has made it very easy to
imagine. There is no reason to suppose that this type of pamphlet was
appreciably different in those days. It consisted of a series of bitter
invectives interspersed with stories as _pièces justificatives_. Now and
then an effort is made to throw it into the form of a dispassionate
examination. But even in very skilful hands that attitude is not long
maintained.
Of several men we know such treatises. All have already been
mentioned—Apollonius Molo, Damocritus, and probably Apion.
Apollonius, either son of Molo, or himself so named, was one of the most
considerable figures of his day. He taught principally, but not
exclusively, at Rhodes, and numbered among his pupils both Cicero and
Caesar. As a rhetorician he enjoyed an extensive and well-merited
influence. It was during his time that the reaction against the florid
literary style of Asia culminated in the equally artificial simplicity
of the Atticists—a controversy of the utmost importance in the history
of Latin literature no less than Greek. The doctrine of _mediocritas_,
“the golden mean,” set forth by Molo, moulded the style of Cicero and
through him of most modern prose writers. The refined taste and good
sense which could avoid both extremes justify his repute and power.
He was a voluminous writer on historical and rhetorical subjects. Only
the smallest fragments remain, not enough to permit us to form an
independent estimate of his style or habits of thought. Just what was
the incentive for the pamphlet he wrote against the Jews it is
impossible to conjecture. But it is not likely that it contained many of
the specially malignant charges. To judge from Josephus’ defense, it
seems to have concerned itself chiefly with their unsociability, and may
have been no more than a sermon on that text. Josephus’ charge against
him is that of unfairness. There is none of the abuse in Josephus’
account of Molo which he heaps upon Apion. We may accordingly infer that
Molo’s pamphlet was considerably less offensive. It may have been, in
effect, a mere _declamatio_, a speech in a fictitious cause, or the
substance of an oration delivered in an actual case. Or perhaps a single
instance of personal friction produced it as an act of retaliation. The
rhetoricians of those days were essentially a _genus irritabile_, and
their wrath or praise was easily stirred.
Of Damocritus we know almost nothing. Suidas, a late Byzantine
grammarian, mentions a short work of his on Tactics, and one as short,
or shorter, on the Jews. The reference to human sacrifice (above, p.
189), might be supposed to indicate a strong bias. While it is likely
enough that it was hostile in character, that single fact would not
quite prove it, since we do not know whether Damocritus represented
these human sacrifices as an ancient or a still-existing custom.
The third name, Apion, has become especially familiar from the apology
of Josephus. The latter refers to him throughout as an Egyptian, and in
spite of certain very warm and modern defenders, he very likely was of
Egyptian stock. From the Oasis where he was born, he came to Alexandria,
where he established a great reputation. Undoubtedly possessed of
fluency and charm as a speaker, he was a most thoroughgoing charlatan, a
noisy pedant wholly devoid of real critical skill. He boasted of magical
power, through which he was enabled to converse with the shade of Homer.
His vanity prompted the most ludicrous displays of arrogance. Tiberius
Caesar dubbed him the _cymbalum mundi_, “the tom-tom of the world,” a
characterization that seems to have been generally accepted.[222]
In the appeal of the Jewish residents of Alexandria against the
maladministration of the prefect Flaccus, argued before the emperor, he
represented the Alexandrian community, whose acts were the basis of the
charge made by the Jews. As such he no doubt delivered an anti-Jewish
invective, and it is at least likely that this speech formed the
substance of his book on the subject, just as the defense of the Jews
and the attack upon Flaccus are contained in the two extensive fragments
of Philo, the _Legatio ad Gaium_, and the _In Flaccum_.
It has been doubted whether he really wrote such a book, although there
are express statements that he did. It is true enough that those who
assert it may easily have been misled by the fact that certain books of
his History of Egypt may have contained these anti-Jewish passages or
most of them. None the less, the fact that he must have prepared a set
speech in the case mentioned, coupled with the statements of Clemens of
Alexandria and Julius Africanus, renders the older view the more
probable.[223] There would of course be nothing strange if the books of
the History of Egypt and a special monograph contained essentially the
same material.
As to other similar pamphlets, we hear of a περὶ Ἰουδαίων
by a certain Nicarchus, son of Ammonius, which may have had an
“Egyptian” bias, in that Moses is said to have been afflicted with white
scales upon his body—an assertion that seems to be a revamping of
Manetho’s “leprous outcasts.” But the title of the book does not point
to a wholly hostile attitude, nor does the passage referred to
necessarily imply such an attitude.[224]
Taking all these passages together, from Manetho to Apion, one thing
must be evident: Manetho himself, Mnaseas, Agatharchidas, Chaeremo,
Lysimachus, Apion, are either Egyptians or are trained in Alexandria,
and represent the Egyptian side of a bitter racial strife, as intense
and lasting as was generally the case when the same community contained
several compact groups of different political rights and privileges.
The conditions of the population of Alexandria have been previously
discussed. It was the great market center of the East, and as such of
the Mediterranean world, since the commercial and intellectual hegemony
was always east of the Aegean Sea. The population had been a mixed one
since its foundation. The warped notions that have often been held of
the position of the Jews there are due to a failure to realize
concretely how such a city would be likely to grow. The Greeks and
Macedonians that were originally settled there undoubtedly constituted a
real aristocracy, and made that attitude very thoroughly felt. One thing
further is clear, that the native Egyptians, who probably formed the
mass of the populace, looked upon these Greeks as they did upon all
foreigners, with intense dislike. We have a document in which a Greek
suitor in court impugns the credibility of Egyptian testimony against
him because of the well-known hatred Egyptians bear toward Greeks.[225]
Egyptian animosity toward Jews had been of longer standing simply
because intercourse in close proximity was much older. Further, the
Jewish colonies from early Persian times had always represented the
foreign master. It was as natural, therefore, for this animosity to
express itself in street-conflicts in Alexandria as for anti-Greek
feeling to be manifested there. Those modern investigators who have
confidently asserted that Alexandrian “anti-Semitism” was of Greek
origin and leadership have permitted the rattle of the _cymbalum mundi_
to confuse their minds. For it is Apion and Apion alone that makes the
claim that the Jews are especially embittered against Greeks, and seeks
to create a general Greek feeling against them. His motives are too
apparent to need comment, and there is no evidence whatever that he was
successful.
Further, it is the Egyptians Manetho and Apion whose tirades have a
fiercely personal coloring. The Greek Alexandrians make their
anti-Jewish polemics on the basis of general theories, and particularly
lay stress on what was to them the perfectly irrational separatism which
the Jews had made a part of their religion. As has been frequently
shown, the relatively small fragments of these writers do not enable us
to say how far this Jewish characteristic is used to point a moral, much
as the modern clergy takes chauvinistic commonplaces to illustrate the
evil results of doctrines they are attacking.
In the case of two Greeks, Posidonius of Apamea in Syria, and Molo, no
Egyptian influence can be shown. Both were among the most influential
men of their time. Molo’s career and importance have been briefly
sketched. To Posidonius must be assigned a still more powerful
intellectual influence over his generation and those that followed.[226]
The leader of the Stoic school or, as it may well be called, sect, he so
reorganized its teaching that the Stoa became nothing else than the
dominant faith among cultivated men, a situation perhaps paralleled by
Confucianism in China, which is also an ethical philosophy that finds it
possible to dwell on terms of comity with various forms of cruder
popular belief.
What Molo’s philosophic affiliations were is not easy to determine. The
Stoics were nearer than most other schools to rhetoricians and
grammarians, but many men of these professions acknowledged allegiance
to the Academy, to Epicureanism, or even to the revived Pythagoreanism
of the first century B.C.E. Of the extensive writings of the Rhodian
rhetorician there is not enough left to give even a probable answer.
But most philosophic sects laid stress on the universality of their
teachings, and were marked by an intense intellectual rationalism. The
crude psychology of those days made the formation of categories a simple
thing. Thinkers could scarcely be expected to admit that inherited
instincts could qualify the truth of a philosophic dogma. More
particularly, the philosophic movements were powerful solvents of
nationalism. Even the distinction between Greek and barbarian did not
exist in theory for them.[227] The notion of the state and the
maintenance of its ancestral rites became for them a meaningless but
innocuous form, which men of common sense would not despise, but to
which one could attach no great importance.
Face to face with congregations like those of the Jews, which enforced
their separation by stringent religious prohibitions, the Stoics more
than others found their opposition roused. More than others, because
many Stoics adopted from the Cynical school the methods of the diatribe,
the popular sermon, and, indeed, made an active attempt to carry the
universality of their principles into practice. And the Stoics, more
than others, would find the height of irrationality in the stubborn
insistence on forms for which only an historical justification could be
found.
A highly interesting document, which gives a certain phase of the
controversy, or perhaps even fragments of an actual controversy, between
the general philosophic and the Jewish doctrine, has come down to us in
the tract known as the Fourth Book of Maccabees. The author announces
his purpose of setting forth a most philosophic thesis, to wit, whether
the pious reason is sovereign over the passions. The philosophic
argument, which fills the first three chapters, is Stoic in form and
substance. Then, to illustrate his point, he cites certain vaguely
remembered stories of II Maccabees, which he expands into highly
detailed dramatic forms. In the mouth of Antiochus Epiphanes are placed
the stock philosophic arguments against the Jews, which are triumphantly
refuted by the aged Eleazar and the seven sons of Hannah.
So we hear Epiphanes reasoning with Eleazar and urging him to partake of
swine’s flesh (IV Macc. v. 8 seq.):
For it is obviously a senseless proceeding to refrain from enjoying
those pleasures of life which are free from shame: it is even wicked
to deprive oneself of the bounties of nature. And it seems to me
that your conduct will be still more senseless, if you provoke my
anger because of your zeal for some fancied principle. Why do you
not rid your mind of the silly doctrine of your people? Discard that
stupidity which you call reason. Adopt a form of thought that suits
your age, and let your philosophic principle be one that actually
serves you.... Further consider this: If in the Deity you adore
there is really a power that oversees our deeds, it will grant you
full pardon for all transgressions which you have been forced to
commit.
To a Greek, and no doubt to many modern men, the reasoning is
conclusive. It presents the Greek point of view very well indeed, and is
doubtless the epitome of many conversations and even formal disputes in
which these matters were discussed between Greek and Jew. And just as
the argument of Epiphanes seems strangely modern in its appeal to common
sense and expediency, so the answer of Eleazar rings with a lofty
idealism that is both modern and ancient:
We, whose state has been established by God, cannot admit that any
force is more powerful than that of the Law. Even if, as you assume,
our Law were not divine, yet, since we suppose that it is, we durst
not set it aside without gross impiety.
Eleazar then proceeds to elaborate upon the Stoic paradox that the
slightest and the greatest transgressions are equally sinful;[228] and
that in so far as abstention is a form of self-control, it is an
admirable and not a contemptible act. After a detailed account of the
hideous sufferings heroically endured by the priest, the author breaks
out into a panegyric of him as a maintainer of the Law, in which the
fundamental Stoic proposition with which he begins is less prominent
than his intense Jewish piety.
For us, however, the prime importance lies in the sharp contrast between
the Greek and the Jewish attitude. Upon the philosophically cultured
man, the reasoning of Epiphanes could not fail to produce a certain
impression. In the case of the seven sons of Hannah, while many elements
are repeated (IV Macc. viii. 17 seq.), the writer has in mind the appeal
to the flesh, which Hellenism made. “Will you not change your mode of
life for that of the Greeks and enjoy your youth to the full?” asks
Antiochus (_ibid._ viii. 8); and that no doubt was the whisper that came
to the heart of many a young man, surrounded by the bright and highly
colored life of the Hellenic communities in which he dwelt. There is no
exchange of vituperation. The denunciations hurled against Antiochus are
impersonal, indeed are generic. He is the type of tyrant, another
Busiris or Phalaris, a bowelless despot. And the one word which
alternates with “senseless” in the mouths of Antiochus and his
executioners is “mad.”
The actual events described are of course quite unhistorical. But we do
not find here any of the various forms in which racial animosity or
personal spleen exhibited itself against the Jews. In spite of the
setting, the controversy is, judged by disputation standards, quite
decorous. The terms that qualify the Jewish doctrine as “irrational” are
almost controversial commonplaces. The martyrs do not resent the
epithet. They seem to accept it as the logical inference of the carnal
philosophy of their oppressors and claim to be justified by a higher
wisdom.
Jewish and Greek life began to touch each other at many points in the
six or seven generations that intervened between Alexander and Caesar.
Hellenism dominated the political and social culture of the Eastern
Mediterranean, although the nationalities it covered were submerged
rather than crushed. In Egypt the indigenous culture maintained itself
successfully, and forced concessions from the conqueror, which made the
Hellenism of that country a thing quite different from that of the other
lands within the sphere of Greek influence. The resistance of the Jews
also took the form of successful insurrection, and in their case enabled
an independent political entity to be constituted.
The dispersal of the Jews was already considerable at this time. It
differed from the dispersal of the Syrians in the fact that the bond of
union of the Jewish congregations existed in the common cult and the
common interest in the fortunes of the mother-country. On the other
hand, the Syrians of Rome and of Naples shared nothing except the
quickly effaced memory of a common racial origin.[229]
The propaganda of the Jews was also well under way. Since it was
believed that they possessed a mystery, initiation into which gave
promise of future beatitude, they were strong rivals of the Greek and
Oriental mysteries that made similar claims. It was chiefly among the
half-educated or the wholly unlettered that these claims would find
quickest belief. However, the Jewish propaganda had also its philosophic
side, and competed with the variously organized forms of Greek
philosophic thought for the adherence of the intellectually advanced
classes as well.
Through the Diaspora and this active propaganda an opposition was
invited. In Egypt the opposition was older, because the presence of Jews
in Egypt was of considerably earlier date than the period we are
considering. The occasions for its display were various, but the
underlying cause was in most cases the same. That was the fact of
religious separatism, which in any given community was tantamount to
lack of patriotism. It does not appear, however, that this opposition
found voice generally except in Egypt. Elsewhere racial friction was
relatively rare.
The literature of the opposition falls into two classes: first, that
which scarcely knows the Jews except as a people of highly peculiar
customs, and uses these customs as illustrations of rhetorical theses;
and second, that which is inspired by direct animosity, either personal
or, in the case of the Egyptians, racial in its character.
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