Blame the Greeks: a closer look at the roots of anti-Semitism.
Finally resumed my sloooooow slog through Anthony A. Barrett's Caligula: The Corruption of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990 [first published in the UK in 1989 by B.T. Batsford Limited]; trade paperback; ISBN: 0-300-07429-8; 334 pps.); I'd set it aside out of frustration at how many frickin' highlighters I was using on it (five, all told; don't ask) and at how disjointed it was: it seemed to me that, in lieu of a narrative, Barrett's book was one interminable chain of conflicting accounts and countervailing interpretations, briskly seasoned with every variation of "it is difficult to know" and "the records don't show" you can think of. It struck me that it would scan better as a spreadsheet-cum-database than as a book: certainly it should be easier sorting out which ancient historian (by no means all of whom were primary sources for -- meaning contemporaries of and participants in -- the emperor Gaius's reign) or modern (well, "modern" from Mommsen onwards, at any rate) practitioner said what in a columnar format. But, anyway, for one reason and another, I'm back.
I was prompted to read Caligula largely by my having finally read Robert Graves's novel I, Claudius at the beginning of the year: I thought it'd be nice to fill in a bit of the background before plunging onward to the sequel, Claudius the God.
Essentially Barrett's thesis (setting aside epistemological hand-wringing over how little we know and how little we can hope to know) is that the emperor Gaius -- styled Caligula ("little [soldier's] boots," a nickname bestowed upon him as mascot of his father's Rhineland armies) -- is by no means as bad as history has painted him, although he was far from being an ideal sort of princeps. Barrett's alternate explanations for Caligula's policies and behaviors, always refracted through disharmonious ancient sources, are nuanced and usually persuasive; however, that's not what I want to dwell on now.
No, what caught my eye this time out was the fact that a goodly of what we now think of as anti-Semitism can be traced back to Caligula's day, although not specifically to him or to the Romans in general; one has to "blame the Greeks." Which puts quite a different spin on Matthew Arnold's posited tensions between the Hellenic and the Hebraic in Western culture.
From Chapter 12: "Caligula and the Jews:"
"Serious anti-semitism was in fact a prejudice not of the Romans, but more typically of the Greeks, and its most serious manifestations seem to have been in Alexandria. The association between the Jews and Egyptians was a very ancient one, going back to the second millennium and the period of the captivity, and there had been a sizeable Jewish community in Egypt since at least the early sixth century BC. The arrival of the Ptolemies and the foundation of Alexandria, with its enormous commercial potential, encouraged extensive Jewish immigration from the third century on. The Jews seem to have enjoyed the favour of the Ptolemies, being especially prominent in the army [emphasis added], which may account for the undercurrent of hostility noticeable in Alexandrian literature from as early as the third century BC. The annexation of Egypt after the battle of Actium aggravated this situation. The Greeks felt offended that their proud and independent kingdom, with its illustrious capital of Alexandria, had come to an end, to be replaced by foreign domination. There remained a hostility towards the alien ruler, and while in the main it expressed itself in merely passive contempt, there also grew up a great tradition of Alexandrian martyrdom, hallowing the memory of those who died in active opposition to the Romans. [A "secular" precursor to the suicide bombers of today..?] This could not fail to affect the Jews also. As H.I. Bell observed, anti-Jewish feeling grew among the Greeks because it offered a 'safer and less direct way of attacking the authority of Rome.' The Jews for their part must have welcomed the arrival of the Romans, and with it a degree of protection. Indeed, after the annexation, Augustus had erected in Alexandria a bronze stele to announce the safeguarding of Jewish political and religious rights."
-- pps. 184-85
The tensions between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria erupted into outbursts of horrific violence in or around October 38; this violence seems to have been exacerbated by the governor of Egypt, Aulus Avillius Flaccus, confining the Jews into one quarter, the Delta section ("Alexandria had long been divided into five quarters, each named after a letter of the Greek alphabet;" while Jews were allowed to live in only one quarter, prior to 38 they "had been concentrated into two quarters, with a scattering in the three remaining;" p. 187), thereby creating "history's first forced Jewish ghetto" (p. 187). The Greeks saw this resettlement as their golden opportunity for revenge:
"Even allowing for exaggeration in Philo's account there is no doubt that [the Jews] were subjected to cruel treatment. Jews were set upon by the mobs, who haunted the edge of the ghetto for their victims and, according to Philo, beat them or burned them to death, or, perhaps worst of all, bound them together and dragged them through the market, kicking and trampling them until their bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. There is no hint in Philo that the Jews took any kind of retaliatory action whatsoever, but the subsequent conduct of Flaccus (and the attitude demonstrated later by Claudius) suggests that this is a false picture."
-- p. 187
So: the anti-Semitic wheeze about Jews being dominators, agents of a foreign power, fifth columnists, so forcefully dramatized by Christopher Marlowe in his play The Jew of Malta (c. 1589; first performed in 1592) -- which I thought stemmed from the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand II in 1492 -- can be traced back to the Julio-Claudian Dynasty? Specifically to the darlings of Western culture (particularly of the Enlightenment), the Greeks?
Oy vey.
It's been remarked that virulent, bone-deep anti-Semitism was largely unknown in Muslim lands prior to coming of the Western powers; many point to the British Mandate of Palestine in the wake of World War I, and the subsequent creation of the state of Israel, as being the matrix for Islamic, and particularly Arabic, anti-Jewish sentiment. But Barrett makes me think that anti-Semitism is built into the very foundations of Western culture, over and above the religious anti-Semitism which the Catholic Church promulgated for nigh-on two thousand years. It has roots in religious (the "Hebraic" culture of Matthew Arnold; boy, those Jews sure love to hate themselves, don't they..?) and in secular ("Enlightened") thought: the "Hellenic" bit.
The Greeks.
"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."
'Cause sometimes? Sometimes the Trojan horse doesn't disgorge its unpleasant surprise until thousands of years later.
I was prompted to read Caligula largely by my having finally read Robert Graves's novel I, Claudius at the beginning of the year: I thought it'd be nice to fill in a bit of the background before plunging onward to the sequel, Claudius the God.
Essentially Barrett's thesis (setting aside epistemological hand-wringing over how little we know and how little we can hope to know) is that the emperor Gaius -- styled Caligula ("little [soldier's] boots," a nickname bestowed upon him as mascot of his father's Rhineland armies) -- is by no means as bad as history has painted him, although he was far from being an ideal sort of princeps. Barrett's alternate explanations for Caligula's policies and behaviors, always refracted through disharmonious ancient sources, are nuanced and usually persuasive; however, that's not what I want to dwell on now.
No, what caught my eye this time out was the fact that a goodly of what we now think of as anti-Semitism can be traced back to Caligula's day, although not specifically to him or to the Romans in general; one has to "blame the Greeks." Which puts quite a different spin on Matthew Arnold's posited tensions between the Hellenic and the Hebraic in Western culture.
From Chapter 12: "Caligula and the Jews:"
"Serious anti-semitism was in fact a prejudice not of the Romans, but more typically of the Greeks, and its most serious manifestations seem to have been in Alexandria. The association between the Jews and Egyptians was a very ancient one, going back to the second millennium and the period of the captivity, and there had been a sizeable Jewish community in Egypt since at least the early sixth century BC. The arrival of the Ptolemies and the foundation of Alexandria, with its enormous commercial potential, encouraged extensive Jewish immigration from the third century on. The Jews seem to have enjoyed the favour of the Ptolemies, being especially prominent in the army [emphasis added], which may account for the undercurrent of hostility noticeable in Alexandrian literature from as early as the third century BC. The annexation of Egypt after the battle of Actium aggravated this situation. The Greeks felt offended that their proud and independent kingdom, with its illustrious capital of Alexandria, had come to an end, to be replaced by foreign domination. There remained a hostility towards the alien ruler, and while in the main it expressed itself in merely passive contempt, there also grew up a great tradition of Alexandrian martyrdom, hallowing the memory of those who died in active opposition to the Romans. [A "secular" precursor to the suicide bombers of today..?] This could not fail to affect the Jews also. As H.I. Bell observed, anti-Jewish feeling grew among the Greeks because it offered a 'safer and less direct way of attacking the authority of Rome.' The Jews for their part must have welcomed the arrival of the Romans, and with it a degree of protection. Indeed, after the annexation, Augustus had erected in Alexandria a bronze stele to announce the safeguarding of Jewish political and religious rights."
-- pps. 184-85
The tensions between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria erupted into outbursts of horrific violence in or around October 38; this violence seems to have been exacerbated by the governor of Egypt, Aulus Avillius Flaccus, confining the Jews into one quarter, the Delta section ("Alexandria had long been divided into five quarters, each named after a letter of the Greek alphabet;" while Jews were allowed to live in only one quarter, prior to 38 they "had been concentrated into two quarters, with a scattering in the three remaining;" p. 187), thereby creating "history's first forced Jewish ghetto" (p. 187). The Greeks saw this resettlement as their golden opportunity for revenge:
"Even allowing for exaggeration in Philo's account there is no doubt that [the Jews] were subjected to cruel treatment. Jews were set upon by the mobs, who haunted the edge of the ghetto for their victims and, according to Philo, beat them or burned them to death, or, perhaps worst of all, bound them together and dragged them through the market, kicking and trampling them until their bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. There is no hint in Philo that the Jews took any kind of retaliatory action whatsoever, but the subsequent conduct of Flaccus (and the attitude demonstrated later by Claudius) suggests that this is a false picture."
-- p. 187
So: the anti-Semitic wheeze about Jews being dominators, agents of a foreign power, fifth columnists, so forcefully dramatized by Christopher Marlowe in his play The Jew of Malta (c. 1589; first performed in 1592) -- which I thought stemmed from the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand II in 1492 -- can be traced back to the Julio-Claudian Dynasty? Specifically to the darlings of Western culture (particularly of the Enlightenment), the Greeks?
Oy vey.
It's been remarked that virulent, bone-deep anti-Semitism was largely unknown in Muslim lands prior to coming of the Western powers; many point to the British Mandate of Palestine in the wake of World War I, and the subsequent creation of the state of Israel, as being the matrix for Islamic, and particularly Arabic, anti-Jewish sentiment. But Barrett makes me think that anti-Semitism is built into the very foundations of Western culture, over and above the religious anti-Semitism which the Catholic Church promulgated for nigh-on two thousand years. It has roots in religious (the "Hebraic" culture of Matthew Arnold; boy, those Jews sure love to hate themselves, don't they..?) and in secular ("Enlightened") thought: the "Hellenic" bit.
The Greeks.
"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."
'Cause sometimes? Sometimes the Trojan horse doesn't disgorge its unpleasant surprise until thousands of years later.