Notes from Limmud 2015

Josephus and the Jews

Martin Goodmann

[Standard disclaimer: All views not in square brackets are those of the speaker, not myself. Accuracy of transcription is not guaranteed.]

[I'm not bothering to take notes on this talk of anything I don't know already; so the first half of these notes (about Josephus) might be of less interest to anyone bar myself; this doesn't apply to the second half (about the later reception and historiography of Josephus).]

Contemporary attitudes to Josephus amongst Jews today are strong and conflicting. On the one hand, archaeological sites in Israel make much use of his material; OTOH he's viewed as a traitor, and not to be trusted.

Josephus was in Jerusalem and amongst those who declared war at the start (War).

Suetonius, Vespasian's biographer, corroborates the story of Josephus' prophecy of Vespasian's becoming emperor.

Josephus was given lodging in (not necessarily the whole of) Vespasian's old house before he became emperor.

War Book VII might have been written after the death of Titus, as Domitian's role is played up, whereas he'd had no role in Judaea, having been in Rome the whole time.

Antiquities: Josephus takes it for granted that no Roman would read the LXX. He's probably right: there's only one non-Jewish or Christian reference to it before the fourth century, and that's because it's written in horrible Greek.

The first (Biblical) and second halves are supposed to be of equal length, which is why he had to pad the second half out with, frex, the death of Caligula. Why twenty books: because the one comparable Roman work, written by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, written eighty years earlier, was also in twenty books.

Josephus coins the term "theocracy" in Against Apion (which is probably not the title Josephus would have given it).

In War Josephus has an army of 100k men trained in Roman techniques, but in his autobiography the largest force he ever has is of just 500. In the former, he was magnifying his account to make him sound more important.

We only know of how contemporary Jews reacted from what he himself says in his autobiography. We know some (i.e. Justus of Tiberias) got annoyed by his downplaying his anti-Roman stance before the war.

After the first century, we don't know whether any Jews read anything of Josephus'. Search for parallels in the Babylonian Talmud, e.g. the Jonathan b. Zakkai story. Nothing however points to a correct knowledge of Josephus: stories were circulating, but no one was reading Josephus' writings. (Though we know the Aramaic original of The Jewish War looked nothing like the Greek version, which adhered to Greek and Roman literary techniques.)

Josephus was so important to the early Church because it provided background to the time of Jesus, and secondly because by the fourth century it was believed Book XVIII provided the only non-Christian reference to the life of Jesus. For Eusebius and all later Christian writers, he became a source of immense authority who must be correct in everything he says.

Book VI of War from a Latin translation, added to with all sorts of other bits, by a fourth-century writer, was in the tenth century translated into Hebrew by Josippon. Josippon provided the main influence on the way mediaeval rabbinic authorities thought of the destruction of the Temple throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed to an extent all the way to now.

Jews rediscovered what they sometimes called "The Christian Josephus" during the Renaissance (along with Philo). This coincided with the treatment of Josephus as a classic text in the Christian humanist tradition: 1544, edited along with Sallust: just one more Greek classical text, not properly edited, by the scholars who had come over after the fall of Constantinople.

Jews too became aware of it. Azariah de Rossi couldn't read Greek, but he did realise the Latin version was much closer to the Greek texts than the Hebrew Josippon, so decided to print it. So Jews started taking seriously the Christian versions and translating them into various vernaculars, including English.

Since then there have been different uses of the different works of Josephus by Jews. Different writings get focused on or ignored. So, the Vitae has been almost totally ignored, largely by Jewish scholars, even thugh he was the Jew who told us more about himself than any other first-century Jew apart possibly from the Apostle Paul.

One reason is because the Vitae has never been printed as a single volume for anyone to read. It was always appended to the Antiquities, and not even listed on the contents page: it's clear that the printer only discovered it at a late stage!

Similarly, Jews haven't read much of Against Apion, though it had huge influence on the philosophy of Spinoza (though it's more difficult to say what influence Spinoza had on the further development of Judaism: his influence was principally on Christian thought).

The main influence on Jews has been from the early nineteenth century and has come from the two other works.

Antiquities was what made Josephus so important in Jewish life. Germany from the 1820s onwards needed to find a story to link the Bible to the rabbinic tradition. The only way to do it was to use Josephus: there was no other narrative. Without it, it was very patchy.

These Wissenschaft [des Judentums] scholars inherited the attitude of the scholars who had been working on Josephus from the sixteenth century onwards in the Christian tradition, helped by the vernacular translations amongst Protestants: William Whiston. (Whiston was a very strange man with a strange Christian theology behind him.) His translation became a standard part of Protestant homes in the UK and USA alongside a Bible almost through the nineteenth century.

It spread too to Jews. When the Jewish Chronicle wanted to give a prize to its young readers for their best historical essay on Jewish history, the prize they offered was a copy of Whitston's translation of Josephus.

This coincided with what was becoming a central period for studying in German universities in classical history. It would be terribly embarrassing if Jews didn't have a clue about this. So Antiquities began to be cited in rabbinic commentaries, and the history of Heinrich Graetz.

War was translated into Hebrew by Karl Schulmann in ?1862. This created an instant problem among Russian Jews because of its relation to Josippon. Josippon continued in use as a rival version all the way down to now, especially, today, in Chareidi circles.

This expressed itself in art, poetry and drama, from the 1820s onwards as the stories came to epitomise the struggles of the Jews for their emancipation. For example, the play The Ghetto, or the novels of [lacuna] rewrote Josephus' accounts, which changed according to his [lacuna]. Or the poetry about "Masada shall not fall again" were based on Josippon, not Josephus.

Use of War is problematic, though, because of Josephus' career. Some have treated it as significant in its own right. In 1802 ?Louise ?Hett wrote about the maskilim where we have the first biography of Josephus written by a Jew. [I think I got this a bit garbled; the Net of a Million Lies thinks the 1802 biography was by one Lessing; Louise Hecht is a present-day writer.]

Josephus was put on trial in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Israeli youth movements, particularly Bnei Akiva, have had trials of whether he was a traitor from the 1930s onwards. The most unlikely was that held by the French resistance in 1942, which went on for a considerable period, and ended up with Josephus' condemnation.

A big question is what connection there should be between that career and his written works. It isn't obvious that because you change sides that you can't tell the truth about what happened—though the only work that tells us how he did so was written by Josephus himself. We only know about it because he thought it was evidence that God meant him to change sides because He intended Vespasian to become emperor and for the Jews to be punished for their sins by the destruction of the Temple. This of course resonates with the Bible.

So, should he not be believed?

Graetz got worried towards the end of his life. He wrote a famous chapter in which he questioned precisely that... but then left his history as it was. From that struggle within historiography, we end up where we are now.

The only historiographer doing this responsibly in the nineteenth century was an Orthodox historian called Isaac Halevi, who came to the conclusion that it was impossible to ignore Josephus altogether, and to treat it as reliable whenever it disagreed with his own professed views—a stance remarkably close to that of modern scholars (on Josephus and others).

Where are we left with in contemporary Jewish society? The answer is conveyed best through Israeli street names. In [city], there is a Josephus Street. This was set up during the British Mandate period; the British thought there should be one. The plaque on the street sign says he was the great Jewish priest and rebel. In Beer Sheva there is also a Josephus Flavius Street; the plaque on this one describes him as the great Jewish historian.

The Jews now have the best of both worlds: when they don't want to believe him, he's a traitor and can't be trusted on anything, but most of the time, and most probably correctly, they decide he is an incredibly helpful amd most useful historian of events two thousand years ago.

[After the talk, I put my question about attitudes to his changing sides (which I state in my own Josephus talk): Why is Josephus so vilified when he was not the only one to change sides or side with the Romans (for example, King Agrippa II)? Indeed, whole cities defected to the Romans, notably Tzippori and Tiberias, which had both already rebelled against Josephus once. The cities which surrendered were those which had a history in the second century; those which didn't were destroyed and their inhabitants killed or enslaved. The following century or two was critical in rabbinic history, with the writing of the Mishna in the Galilee, but the people who wrote it were by this criterion the grandchildren of those who had changed sides in the First Jewish War. So why is Josephus so vilified when so much important Jewish history and religious developments hinged on the fact many others had done the same?

The speaker said Moses Mendelssohn agreed with me. Throughout the nineteenth century, Josephus was regarded as a fine example of how you should adapt—at precisely the point that Jews had to work out how he adapted.]

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