The Growth of Anti-Judaism
in the Greek Period
The Greek's late "discovery" of the Jews
Jewish irritation, at being so long ignored by the Greeks
Possible References to the Jews, in older Greek Writings
Greek explanations of Jewish Sacrificial Rites
Theophrastus, the first certain Greek reference to Judaism, c.315
Did Aristotle regard the Jews as Philosophers?
Greek historiography mainly ignored the Jews
Diodorus' favorable portrayal of the Jews (late 4th c., BCE)
Hecateus' association of the Jews with the Egyptians
Manetho's 'Aegyptiaca' treats the Jews as a polluted people
The Septuagint
Tensions between Jews and Egyptians, in Alexandria
Most basic reason for the emergence of anti-Semitism
The confrontation between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria
A new literature, to defend the Jewish identity
Early Judaism idealised by Eupolemus and Artapanus in the 2nd c. BCE
Polybius, on the Jews in the Syrian War of 200 BCE
Anti-Judaism in the Seleucid kingdom
Judaism lauded in the Letter of Aristeas
Anti-Jewish polemic by Apollonios Molon in the Hasmonean era
The influence of Apollonios' treatise in Roman quarters?
Rome's view of the Jews, in Pompey's time (63 BCE, conquest)
Polyhistor's pro-Jewish version of their history
Lysimachus' negative account of Jewish History (post-30 BCE)
In general, the Greco-Roman view of Judaism was filtered through Egyptian prejudice
The Greek's "discovery" of the Jews
The first clear evidence of the Greeks beginning to notice the Jewish people, and the Jewish way of life, comes from the last two decades of the fourth century BCE. This new awareness was one of the direct results of the eastern world being thrown open to the enquiring spirit of the Greeks, in the wake of Alexander the Great's victorious expedition (Phoenicia and Syria were conquered in 332 BCE). That huge expansion of human and geographical horizons prompted a new departure in Greek ethnographic studies, which had been enriched, since their first flowering in the period of colonial expansion, by developments in philosophical and theoretical thought. Cultural history, science and religion provided perspectives by which the endless mass of newly available fact could be accommodated in theories based on precise concepts, and judged by carefully formulated canons of interpretation.
It is in this context that we should consider the awakening of interest in the Jews and their customs. To establish the chronological sequence in which the first Greek authors reflected and wrote about the Jews is difficult, if not impossible, not only because of our fragmentary knowledge of their works, and because our only clues come from brief excerpts, but also because it is difficult to date the works themselves with any precision. Besides, the need to establish such a chronological priority is greatly diminished, when we consider that these first Greek authors wrote about the Jews quite independently of each other - a fact which seems fairly well established.
Theophrastus, Clearchus of Soli, Hecateus of Abdera and Megasthenes appear to us as original, independent witnesses of the Greek discovery of the Jewish world, and they are all the more important for that. The coincidences and the divergences in their accounts indicate on the one hand an interesting similarity of reaction to the novelty of their subject, on the other hand the diversity of their sources of information and points of view.
The information is still uncertain and sometimes mistaken. Although the purely geographical data seem reliable by and large, we must wait a little longer for the distinctions between the various peoples of the Syrian and Phoenician regions to emerge, so that the characteristics of each race may be correctly attributed. Information about those geographical regions, subject of course to exaggeration and distortion could have reached Greece and Asia Minor for some time beforehand, brought by travellers and merchants. The character of these accounts must have been casual and fragmented. In the age of Alexander, earlier accounts were supplemented by those of the soldiers returning from the expedition. They obviously had ample opportunities to establish closer contact with the various peoples of the area, but their reflections on this experience would be dictated by curiosity or casual observation, rather than a scientific spirit of research. Interest in the Eastern world had always been an important feature of Greek historical writing, from Hecateus of Miletus to Herodotus, Ctesias and the historians of the fourth century BCE.
It is not necessary to dwell here on the influence of Eastern philosophy, science, and religious and historical traditions on the critical thought of the Greeks: it is enough to remember that this influence seems to have grown more important during the fourth century, as can be seen from Plato's later works and the early Aristotle. So, at the end of the fourth century BCE, there was a strong predisposition in the Greek world to accept and assimilate those new data which recent historical developments had brought to the notice of historians and philosophers alike.
Information on certain aspects of the physical geography of Palestine had, of course, been available for some time before this. Aristotle mentions the peculiar properties of a Palestinian lake, whose salty waters prevent men and animals from drowning, but also prevent fish from living there. This fact, however, is given with an air of incredulity which would be quite inconceivable after 332 BCE. Theophrastus, in his Historia plantarum, gives information in several places about the palm-trees, aromatic plants and incense of Syria, and gives the precise geographical locations where these may be found in Coele-Syria, the great valley which runs from the source of the Orontes to the gulf of Aqaba. It is possible that he got this information from veterans of Alexander's expedition (the date-palm was an important element in the army's logistics), but the theory advanced by J. Bernays is equally plausible, that a botanist like Theophrastus could have collected data on such important plants well before the Macedonian king's expedition. In any case, we may suppose that Theophrastus' account of the Jewish people, which we will discuss later, derives from a similar source.
Jewish irritation, at being so long ignored by the Greeks
The Greek authors' delay in 'discovering' Judaism was a source of worry and irritation to the Jews in the Hellenistic age, who soon found themselves arguing that their civilization was older, and therefore superior, to that of the Greeks. The author of the Letter of Aristeas, towards the close of the second century BCE, attempting to prove the perfect compatability of Judaism with the surrounding Greek culture, and to explain the origins of the Greek translation of the Pentateuch, attributes to Demetrius of Phalerum a quotation from Hecateus of Abdera, in which it is suggested that the sacred majesty of the doctrines contained the Mosaic Law had inhibited writers, poets and historians from mentioning them. This idea is repeated at the end of the Letter, where the same Demetrius, answering a direct query of King Ptolemy II, cites from his own experience the cases of Theopompus and Theodectes, who wished to insert passages from Scripture in their own works, but were prevented from divulging sacred truths to common men by grave illnesses sent by God. These passages show that it had not been possible to find any references to the Jews in Greek literature before the Hellenistic age.
Much later, Flavius Josephus, in his 'Contra Apionem' (whose correct title is 'On the Antiquity of the Jewish People'), following the tradition of earlier pro-Jewish polemical writings, returns to the problem of the Greeks' failure to mention the Jews, which in the meantime had become a well-established argument against the Jewish claim to antiquity. Josephus makes the valid point that there could not have been direct contact between the Greeks and the Jews, since the latter did not live along the coast, nor did they engage in commerce like the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and other seafaring nations. Equally forceful is the parallel he draws with the Romans, awareness of whom among the Greeks came comparatively late (Josephus, of course, is not referring to the Sicilian historians) and also his comparison of the Jews with the peoples of the western world, who were insufficiently known and incompetently described even by famous historians. Passing on to the later period, however, Josephus strives to convince the reader that the Greek historians suppressed all mention of the Jews out of sheer malice, and cites the case, of Hieronymus of Cardia, who wrote nothing about the Jews in his book, even though he had occasion to do so. In fact Hieronymus, who wrote about the Dead Sea and placed it in the land of the Nabateans, probably had no clear knowledge of the various peoples of that region.
Possible References to the Jews, in older Greek Writings
The undoubted silence of Greek writers on the subject of the Jews before the age of Alexander did not prevent Josephus, and others before him, from pointing out several passages in classical Greek authors where real or imagined references to the Jews could be found. This was done in the case of Herodotus, and also of the epic poet Choerilus. In a passage of his Histories, Herodotus refers to the Egyptian origin of the inhabitants of Colchis, and among other pieces of evidence he adduces the practice of circumcision, which is found only among the Egyptians, the inhabitants of Colchis, and the Ethiopians. He goes on to mention that, the Phoenicians and the 'Syrians of Palestine' have adopted this practice in imitation of the Egyptians. But if we compare this passage with another section of the Histories, where Palestine is the name given to the coastal region of Syria, stretching down as far as Egypt, some doubt arises whether Herodotus intended this as a precise reference to the Jewish people. It must be remembered, however, that this identification seems much older than Josephus or his source, and probably dates back to Hecateus of Abdera. In the Egyptian section of the first book of Diodorus, which in all probability is the work of Hecateus, the same practice is attributed quite definitely to Colchis and Judea alike, both being described as colonies of Egypt. The next example in Josephus' text comprises five verses by the poet Choerilus from his description of Xerxes' Persian troops going on an expedition against Greece.
Josephus identifies as Jews the people described there, who speak the Phoenician language and live in the Solymoi mountains beside a great lake. They are distinguished by their close-cropped hair and wear hoods made out of the hide of horses' heads, Josephus' identification is ingenious, but for various reasons unacceptable. It is obvious that the principal reason for identifying these people with the Jews was the similarity between the name of their mountains and Jerusalem. Other alleged references to Jews in Greek classical authors are based on even weaker premises, and are sometimes quite simply misreadings. They only serve to show how doggedly every possible reference was ferreted out.
The first Greek author who, as far as we know, spoke of the Jews with real interest was the peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus. But the passage which interests us is not the quotation reproduced by Josephus from Theophrastus' 'Laws' where he sees a detail about the laws of the Tyrians as a reference to a Hebrew word (Qorban) and a Jewish institution. Rather, J. Bernays discovered an important fragment from Theophrastus in Porphyry's 'De Abstinentia, 'which is the source of Eusebius' reference. While Eusebius correctly opens his discussion of Greek authors on the Jews with this very passage, the original statement by Theophrastus seems to have escaped the notice of the Jewish researchers, who ransacked the texts of Greek authors for references to their own people. This is a very odd omission, especially as we have seen, and will continue to see, examples of real or supposed references dug out of quite unimportant writers. One cannot help suspecting that Theophrastus' account was deliberately ignored, because it stated that the Jews had performed human sacrifices. The passage certainly escaped the notice of the anti-Jewish controversialists, who would have been glad of so eminent an authority as Theophrastus to bolster up their case. When the charge that the Jews offered human sacrifices finally emerged in the second century BCE, it came from quite different sources. Theophrastus' comment, which is included in a general survey of the history of civilization, had no bearing on the later allegations.
Greek explanations of Jewish Sacrificial Rites
Theophrastus traces the evolution of sacrificial practices: the first offerings consisted of the fruits of the soil, which were the food of men. When the fruits failed to grow, men resorted to cannibalism on the one hand, human sacrifices on the other. These were later replaced by sacrifices of animals, which eventually became the food of men in their turn. In this context Theophrastus mentions the Jews, who are geographically classified as part of the Syrian nation: they still perform holocausts, that is to say, they do not eat the flesh of their victims, who are sacrificed, covered in wine and honey, during the night (to hide this horrible deed from the all-seeing eye of God). When they perform this ritual, they fast on the intervening days, and during the sacrificial period, being a nation of philosophers, they speak together of the deity, looking to the stars at night and invoking God in their prayers. They are supposed to have been the first people to offer up human and animal sacrifices, compelled by necessity rather than greed.
The question whether Theophrastus' account corresponds to the truth is much less important than the picture which it paints of the Jews. Their religious outlook, manifesting itself principally in the observation of the order and movement of the stars (obviously seen as proof of the existence of God, who is sought in the skies) appeared to Theophrastus very close to the Greek philosophical tradition, and the Jews are firmly classified as philosophers. The fact of their monotheism is not yet stated, but this concept is implicit in his account. The sacrificial practices are quite marginal to Theophrastus' description. His reference to human sacrifices, which it is clear from the context he considers a thing of the past, may be explained in various ways, but it is probable that the philosopher was simply told by his informant about these ancient customs. It seems superfluous to search here for a precise allusion to the episode of Abraham and Isaac. As Theophrastus remarks slightly later that human sacrifices were still being offered in his own lifetime in Arcadia, to Zeus Lykaios,' and in Carthage, it may be that, since he classifies the Jews among the Syrian nation, he is simply attributing to them a custom which was well known and still very much alive among the Phoenicians of Carthage.
Theophrastus, the first certain Greek reference to Judaism, c.315
The origin of Theophrastus' information is a very important historical problem, which goes far beyond the normal scope of the criticism of sources. The most widely-held theory is that of W. Jaeger, who maintains that Theophrastus, both in his treatise 'On Stones' (where he quotes from official Egyptian documents) and in his treatise 'On Piety' (from which our fragment is taken) based himself on Hecateus of Abdera's 'Egyptian History', where similar documentation is used. This theory, however, runs into chronological difficulties. The treatise 'On Piety' can be dated to 319-314 BCE; 'On Stones' was written about 315-314 BCE, while Hecateus' work is either contemporary or, more probably, later. Besides, Hecateus' information is intrinsically different and shows a clear divergence in geographical and cultural slant. Theophrastus' account, as in his botanical books, comes directly from people who saw the Jews in Palestine and were struck by their customs. How much of his material comes from his informant and how much is due to his own personal elaboration cannot be precisely determined, but it is clear that the information is presented as part of an enquiry into cultural and religious history, and it is significant that this is the context of the first certain reference to Judaism in Greek literature, reflecting the new direction of Greek ethnographic studies. It is equally significant that this interpretation is not an isolated case.
Did Aristotle regard the Jews as Philosophers?
A fragment of the treatise 'On Sleep' by Clearchus of Soli narrates a curious episode in the life of Aristotle, who was the author's teacher. Aristotle had been in Asia Minor for some time after Plato's death, and this story is told in his own words. At that time he encountered a Jew from Coele-Syria. "The Jews are descendants of the Indian philosophers, and just as philosophers in India are called Kalanoi, we are told, so in Syria they are known as Jews, from the name of the region where they live. Their city has a very difficult name: Hierusaleme." This Jew had come down to the coastal area of Asia Minor, and he was a Greek not only in language but also in spirit. He arranged a meeting with Aristotle and other philosophers of his school, in order to put their wisdom to the test. But having contacts with many sages, it was the Jew who gave some of his wisdom to Aristotle and his followers, rather than the other way around. Clearchus further reports that Aristotle found the Jew admirable for his resistance and his temperance.
We cannot tell whether this fragment should be linked to another passage from the same work by Clearchus, which tells of an experiment performed before Aristotle by a magician, who drew the soul out of a sleeping young man, thus convincing the philosopher that the soul is separate from the body. At any rate it seems likely that Josephus cut short his quotation from Clearchus at a point where the sequel would have contained material which went against the drift of his argument. The unreliability of this anecdote from Clearchus need not concern us much (although the presence of Jews in Asia Minor towards the middle of the fourth century BCE may be supported by the mention of Sepharad, identified with Sardis, in Obadiah 20). But the setting in which Clearchus places the Jews is highly significant. They are presented as the caste of philosophers in Syria - though they are also defined in geographical terms---and they are compared to the caste of Indian philosophers: indeed the Jews are said to be their descendants. Clearchus is recalling a tradition by which the Indian philosophers were called Kalanoi, in a misunderstanding or generalization of the name of the 'philosopher' Kalanos, whose encounter with Alexander had made a considerable impression on the Greeks, being reported in the very earliest histories of the Macedonian king's exploits. What Clearchus and his source probably had in mind was the caste of Gymnosophistai in India, whom Clearchus believed to be descendants of the Magi: in the passage from Diogenes Laertius where his opinion is recorded, it is also mentioned that some people trace the ancestry of the Jews back to the Magi. That is obviously another ancient tradition which saw the Jews in the same perspective. The importance of the passage from Clearchus would appear to lie precisely in this profile of the Jews, which confirms the philosophical and cultural context in which the newly-identified race was examined by the Greeks. And if the wise Jew is described by Aristotle-Clearchus as a Greek in mind and language, then it seems that the traditional Greek search for wisdom in the East is combined with some kind of meeting between the Greek and Jewish civilizations, a meeting which was seen as a mutual exchange and discovery of affinities.
With Clearchus, too, we must face the problem of his source of information. The most widely-held theory, that he was following Megasthenes' analogous description of a meeting between Greek and Indian sages, was already quite difficult to sustain because, even considering the poor credibility assigned to Clearchus, one had to suppose that he had misread or distorted Megasthenes' report. But the recent discovery in Bactriana of a Greek inscription, with an accurate transcription of Delphic proverbs made by one Clearchus, and the certain identification of this Clearchus with Clearchus of Soli, proves that our Clearchus must have travelled, probably in the first decade of the third century BCE, in those countries which had recently been opened up to the curiosity of the Greeks. His information must therefore be considered independent of the writings of Megasthenes, and the encounter which he describes must derive from independent reflection on things which he saw personally, and which he understood with a certain amount of inevitable confusion.
Megasthenes' opinion is more complex in a certain way, because the brief fragment about the Jews, which comes from his 'Indian History', bears witness to the combination - of an ethnographic interest in problems of history and religion with the philosophical or scientific spirit of enquiry into the origins of civilization. Megasthenes, in fact, says that 'all the opinions expressed by the ancients about nature may also be found in philosophers outside Greece: some expounded in India by the Brahmins, others in Syria by those people known as Jews'. The traditional theme of the non-Greek origin of wisdom both in philosophy and in science (one need only recall Herodotus) is here extended, albeit without any alleged priority and rather as an example of coincidence, to the Indians and the Jews. Megasthenes' treatment of the Jews does not appear to have gone beyond a simple comparison, whereas his discussion of Indian thought was fully articulated, as we can see from the fragments,' and formed part of a vast interpretation of the history of civilization. But it is interesting none the less that a writer with direct knowledge of Indian society and civilization (even though his account contains some strange exaggerations) should also present the theme of the Jews as a class of philosophers comparable to the Brahmins. Megasthenes was a contemporary of King Seleucus I Nicacor of Syria; he had served as his ambassador to the Indian King Sandrakottos; his knowledge of the Jews can have been little more than superficial. His 'Indian History' seems to date from about 290 BCE.
Thus, from the evidence of Theophrastus, Clearchus and Megasthenes we find that the Greeks' first impression of the Jews, whom they met in their own country, was of a people of philosophers whose heritage of wisdom was comparable and similar to their own. The ethnographic comments on the Jews are part of a religious and philosophical context, and the comparison with the best-known Indian thinkers may have been designed to illustrate a social fact which was not easily understandable at the time. In these early fragments we find no trace of concern or acquaintance with the history of the Jewish people. The confusion of the Jews with the surrounding Syrian population may explain this strange omission. Theophrastus presents his data in the course of an anthropological reconstruction, which can stand without reference to the separate identity of the Jewish people. And it is noteworthy that even later on, both in the friendly and hostile accounts of Judaism, the actual history of the race is unknown and ignored, except in so far as it impinges on Egyptian history. It is obvious that quotations from Berossus, or any of the Tyrian historians, are used by Josephus simply, or at least mainly, to confirm the antiquity of the Jewish race by foreign testimony, even though the Chaldean historian, writing about the fortunes of his own country and the conquests of his king, had occasion to mention Judea and the Jews quite frequently in the course of his narrative. (Berossus seems to have been very little read outside the Jewish, and later the Christian world.)
Greek historiography mainly ignored the Jews
Greek historiography, interested mainly in politics and institutions, is on the whole ignorant of the Jews and their history right up to the Roman era (with the possible exception of local or third-rate authors), while on the other hand there is a growing interest in certain aspects of Jewish life and customs, on the part of minor historians concerned with propaganda or polemics. The initial cultural and religious image of Judaism does not disappear completely from later writings: in fact, it was the indirect source of several attempts at imaginative reconstruction. Hermippus, towards the end of the third century BCE, was probably the first writer to see Pythagoras as a descendant of the Jewish philosophical tradition-a new idea which was later developed in various directions. And since Hermippus, a pupil of Callimachus, must have worked in Alexandria, he could well have been influenced personally by Jewish theories, which were possibly current in Alexandria already at that time. The philosophical-cultural profile recurs in those writers of the first century BCE who were relatively free from polemical considerations. It was taken up in somewhat superficial fashion by the Hellenistic Jewish writers, still trying to establish the chronological primacy of their people and their faith. They were prompted by Greek practice to invest figures from their ancient history with ideal qualities of philosophical wisdom, scientific knowledge, and inventiveness in the arts and technology. But when the author of the Letter of Aristeas imagines the discussions of monarchy that were supposed to have taken place between Ptolemy II and the 72 Jewish sages, he was returning more or less consciously to the philosophical image of the Jews which had prevailed among the first Greek writers.
The picture of Judaism drawn by Hecateus of Abdera is quite different from anything we have so far examined, although chronologically speaking the author is close to Theophrastus. A fundamental feature of Hecateus' account is its partial concentration on the Jews of the Alexandrian Diaspora, and all his information is coloured by this new slant in the point of view. Hecateus is the first exponent of that distortion in describing the Jewish world which grew up, so to speak, from the barriers in Egyptian and Greco-Alexandrian society. Our information on the Jews from the third century BCE onwards, in so far as it derives from Greek sources, is all conditioned to a greater or lesser extent by this original distortion, which also seriously affected Hellenistic Jewish literature, forcing it into a defensive, self-justifying mould. The growth and development of anti-Jewish themes is directly related to the co-existence of Greek and Jewish communities in Egypt, especially in Alexandria. This co-existence, all the more significant for being set in the peculiar cultural and historical context of Egypt, heavily conditioned the themes and attitudes of Hellenistic Jewish writing as well. In studying the texts from both sides, the principal danger is that of projecting on to the earliest writings the themes and more especially the tones which developed and intensified with the passage of time.
Information concerning the Jews was included in Hecateus of Abdera's 'Egyptian History'. It seems probable that this work was composed between 312 and 305 BCE. An earlier dating (320-315) is less acceptable, although its supporters (O. Murray and others) feel that some of the work's central themes are more easily explained within the context of the first phase of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt, when a policy of conciliation with Egyptian culture and traditions was still in vogue, and Ptolemy I's Greek tendencies in cultural and political matters had not yet become clear-cut. These themes are: the idealized description of the rule of the ancient pharoahs; the unmistakeable presence of. Egyptian nationalist elements, arising from the author's priestly sources; the ambiguous meaning of the implied comparison of the conquests of King Sesostris and those of Alexander, which puts the Egyptian king in the better light; the description of priestly power outweighing royal power, which must have been rather embarrassing in the Ptolemaic setting. The significance of Hecateus' book is certainly unclear. On the one hand, there is evidence of some royal patronage, but the opposite view, that it is aimed against the Ptolemies, has also been put forward. It has also been suggested that the 'Egyptian History' was a piece of propaganda, promoting a certain idea of Egypt in Greek public opinion, and that the works of Megasthenes and Berossus should be seen as replies on behalf of India and Babylon. In any case, the explanation of Hecateus' ideological or political significance has little bearing on his account of the Jews. But it is important to note that Egyptian history is presented in this work according to the schemata of the new Greek ethnography.
A far more serious and fundamental task is to determine the consistency and authenticity of the information about the Jews which has come down to us under the name of Hecateus. A large fragment from book xl of Diodorus has been passed down to us by Photius. The account is actually attributed to Hecateus of Miletus, but this is certainly a mistake by Diodorus, and it really comes from Hecateus of Abdera. A description of the origins, political institutions and religious customs of the Jews is inserted by Diodorus into book xl, on the occasion of Pompey's wars in Judea in 63 B.C.33. Diodorus must have taken this account from Hecateus' Egyptian narrative, which he follows in his own book i, transferring it to a position better suited to his requirements.
Extensive fragments from a work by Hecateus entitled 'On the Jews' are reproduced by Josephus in 'Contra Apionem. A 'mention of Hecateus from the 'Letter of Aristeas, quoted in a letter supposedly by Demetrius of Phalerum, probably refers to the same work. Lastly, a book by Hecateus entitled 'On Abraham and the Egyptians' is cited by Clement of Alexandria. But as this contains fake verses from classical Greek poets, it is obviously counterfeit.
Diodorus' favorable portrayal of the Jews (late 4th c., BCE)
Any consideration of authenticity must involve the treatise 'On the Jews', and the doubts expressed on this score take as their point of departure a statement by Philo of Byblus, a writer from the time of Hadrian. Philo was uncertain about Hecateus' authorship of this work, and added that if it really were by Hecateus, then he must have been seduced by the Jews' persuasiveness, and have joined their sect. Philo's remarks must be considered in the anti-Jewish climate of his times; the work which he wrote 'On the Jews', from which the above-mentioned passage is taken, may itself have been anti-Jewish in tone. The pro-Jewish attitude, which surprised Philo in Hecateus' treatise, is also present, on the other hand, in the fragment from Diodorus, if we consider it apart from the later polemics against the Jews. It must be observed that Diodorus' fragment and the one reproduced by Josephus come from different parts of Hecateus' writings, and also that Josephus must have known the fragment, which he quoted, already excerpted from the 'Egyptian History' and with its own particular title. The fragment in 'Contra Apionem' is logically and chronologically situated after the battle of Gaza in 312 BCE, in which Ptolemy I defeated Demetrius I Poliorcetes, and to which Hecateus seems to have been an eye-witness. The rest of the fragment is completely taken up by a series of statements and reflections about the Jews of Palestine, many of whom were said, after the battle, to have moved to Egypt, drawn by Ptolemy's benevolence and humanity. This information about the Palestinian Jews is derived partly from a personage of considerable importance in priestly circles (Hezekiah, who followed the king into Egypt), and partly from the author's personal knowledge acquired more or less directly on the spot (although his description of Jerusalem is not drawn from personal observation).
The origin of Diodorus' fragment in book xl is completely different. Although we cannot be quite certain, in all probability Hecateus was writing about the Jews in that section of his Egyptian history which dealt with the great Egyptian colonization, found in Diodorus 1.28.2. The colonization which concerned the Jews was of a special type, because Hecateus says that, in the wake of an oubreak of pestilence, the Egyptians, convinced that the scourge was divinely ordained on account of the presence in the country of foreigners who practised different cults, drove all foreigners out of Egypt. The most worthy of these came to Greece with Danaos and Cadmos, while the majority made their way to Judea. On the basis of information which he certainly obtained from Egyptian priestly sources (and which we will find later on in other authors, developed in greater detail and then distorted), telling of a great expulsion of foreigners from Egypt, the Greek historian weaves together on the one hand the Greek tradition which named Danaos and Cadmos as the carriers who bore the inventions of Egyptian civilization into Greece, and on the other hand the Jewish traditions of Exodus and other parts of the Pentateuch, which he probably heard from Jewish priestly sources in Alexandria.
Later in Diodorus' selections from Hecateus we meet the figure of Moses, represented in the Greek style as the man who conquers the land, founds cities, establishes the Temple, institutes the cult, organizes the constitution and government of his people. The taboo against representing the divinity is, according to Hecateus, the consequence of identifying God, the lord of the universe, with the sky (we have seen a similar idea in Theophrastus). The priestly class forms a capable elite, invested not only with religious duties but also with judicial functions and political power. The law-giver had planned and organized the military education of young people, and promoted the necessary virtues. Territorial conquests had made possible the allocation of equal plots of land, with larger plots only for the priests. The system of non-transferable land tenure was intended to keep the population at a high level. The laws governing marriages and funerals were different from those of other peoples. Hecateus concluded that in the aftermath of Persian and Macedonian domination, the Jews had been compelled to make considerable modifications to their traditional institutions.
Hecateus' association of the Jews with the Egyptians
It is quite possible to compare and substantiate Hecateus' description with passages from Scripture. At one point, in fact, where Hecateus says 'at the end of the laws it is written that Moses, having heard these things from God, transmits them to the Jews', it has even been suggested that he had direct knowledge of the biblical text (in a translation earlier than the Septuagint'), but it is more likely that Hecateus is repeating, not quite literally, a formula which he had heard from his Jewish informant. There are inaccuracies, as when his insistence on the predominant power of the priests is accompanied by the statement that the Jews never had kings. This is not his mistake: the age of the kings had been deliberately left out of Jewish history by Hecateus' source.
In any case it is quite clear that the attitudes and tone of this fragment are entirely Greek. The themes which Hecateus brings out correspond to the interests of Greek ethnography in his day: institutional, political and religious problems predominate. The progression of Moses' work is presented quite differently from the scriptural account, and repeats the typical schema of Greek foundations. It is obvious that this is a highly idealized representation of the Jewish world, and equally obvious that it is congruent with the description of Egyptian society, with its monarchy dominated and supported by priestly power. More debatable is the opinion, put foward by W. Jaeger, that the Mosaic Law, the structure of Jewish society and the virtues which presided over it, are for Hecateus the embodiment of the Platonic ideal in politics and education. Others have suggested an ideal Spartan model. But there can be no doubt that Hecateus' tone, in this fragment from Diodorus, is highly favourable and sympathetic towards the Jews. And it is, therefore, on the basis of this observation that we must judge that passage from the fragment which has been interpreted as a note of disapproval, or as an indication of anti-Jewish attitudes. Hecateus says that 'as a consequence of having been driven out (of Egypt), Moses introduced a way of life which was to a certain extent misanthropic and hostile to foreigners'. This sentence follows as a corollary to the statement that the Jewish sacrificial rites and way of life were different from those of other peoples (the same idea recurs later in f9 of the fragment, in connection with the laws for marriages and funerals). Taken in its context, Hecateus' remark is not at all negative, and serves to explain the peculiarity of certain religious and social customs. Hecateus notes an ethnographic peculiarity, without adding any value judgement. The misanthropic reserve of the Jews must have caused all the more amazement as the idea, if not of the oneness of the human race, at least of the universality of law outweighing the differences between the laws of individual peoples, was gaining ground in Greek philosophy and ethnography. However, the Jewish misanthropic reserve is actually justified by Hecateus, when he refers to the injuries which had previously been suffered. A very different justification was later advanced by the Jewish author of the 'Letter of .Aristeas, 'who had to answer precise anti-Jewish accusations.
Hecateus' remark arose from direct observation, and is explained by a setting in which the Jews were thrown together with other peoples at close quarters, where differences in religious and social customs and their misanthropic way of life must necessarily impinge on their neighbours: Alexandria, the capital where different peoples had gathered together and where the presence of Jewish elements from the earliest period of the city is well attested. This is where Hecateus must have made his observations and obtained his information.
In the fragment from Hecateus in 'Contra Apionem,' this theme does not recur, for obvious reasons; instead, the attachment of the Jews to their customs, despite the scorn of neighbours and foreigners and the outrages committed by the kings and Persian satraps, is emphasized. So, too, Hecateus' remark about the peculiar Jewish way of life may be explained in the context of his ethnographic portrait of the Jews, which is very sympathetic if not exactly idealized, and drawn from the Alexandrian experience and information derived from that quarter. The anti-Jewish polemic does not begin with Hecateus, but what does begin with Hecateus, in the literary and historiographical sphere, is the dangerous correlation of the Jewish world with Egypt. The fragment in 'Contra Apionem' is set in a new historiographical context; it has an occasional character in the aftermath of the Syrian war of 312 BCE, and it refers particularly to the Palestinian Jews and their territory.
The description of the Jews in Hecateus presents some points of contact with the fragment from Theophrastus, notably where the Jewish divinity seems to be identified or sought in the skies. But apart from this the authors offer no further coincidences, which is quite understandable when we consider how different are their criteria of observation and how geographically distant their points of view. There is no possibility of either of them following the other's account, and this hypothesis is also rejected by the chronological data.
Manetho's 'Aegyptiaca' treats the Jews as a polluted people
The 'Egyptian History' of Hecateus was a work in the Greek style, following the tastes and interests of the times. The 'Aegyptiaca 'or 'Egyptian History' of Manetho is totally different. This author was an Egyptian high priest, probably in the temple of Heliopolis, who had already reached an important position in the court of Ptolemy I, and who had been partly responsible for introducing the cult of Serapis. His historical opus, apparently dedicated to Ptolemy Philadelphus (and therefore dating from after 285 BCE), was probably designed to play the same role as Berossus' histories of Chaldea and Babylon, that is, to inform the Greek public by means of qualified representatives of local cultures, about the most ancient phases of the history of those countries which had recently come into the Greek orbit. It is reasonable to doubt whether this aim was achieved, since neither Manetho nor Berossus seem to have been known to Greek and Roman historians, but notwithstanding this, the political intention of the authors, and of the patrons who commissioned these histories, remains the same. Manetho had at his disposal the material from the priestly archives and official Egyptian documents. Those sources which Herodotus, and indeed Hecateus, could use only indirectly and therefore with errors and misinterpretations (Manetho was critical of Herodotus) were available to the Egyptian priest for consultation at first hand. This documentation was essential above all for establishing a precise chronological framework, within which the history of the pharaonic dynasties could be situated. Besides this official documentary material, Manetho drew perhaps most heavily on the heritage of traditional, anonymous popular tales, which were often legendary; but he distinguishes this material conscientiously from that based on official sources. The legendary material, in so far as it has come down to us, has kept its typical Egyptian colouring, and it is not easy to extract the basic historical facts, which are buried in a rich texture of fiction and serious anachronisms.
Manetho comes into the question of the relations between the Greek and Jewish worlds, because some episodes from his 'History' have been compared, or even identified, with episodes from Jewish history. To derive these comparisons or identifications, the text of Manetho has been subjected to manipulation and distortion from the very earliest times, so that the original meaning of the historical text has been disfigured. Reconstructing the original is made all the more difficult by the fact that our tradition, which derives essentially from Flavius Josephus, first met those passages from Manetho which were concerned (or so it was thought) with Jewish history, shorn of their context and already manipulated and confused. On the other hand, Manetho's text was exploited for controversial ends both by the Jews and their enemies, so that contradictions were created which cannot necessarily be resolved simply by eliminating one or other of the two tendencies. In this state of affairs, the reconstruction of the original text and of Manetho's genuine opinions is a difficult and controversial task.
The episodes from Manetho's 'History' which furnished material for Jewish and anti-Jewish distortion were two: the story of the 'shepherds' and the story of the 'polluted'. Manetho tells in the second book of his History about an invasion of Egypt by an unknown people from the East, who conquered the land and ruled it harshly for a long time. The city of Avaris became the conquerors' centre of power, and it was here that the 'shepherds' took refuge when their dominion was threatened by the opposition of the Theban kings and a rebellion of the Egyptian people. From Avaris, following a treaty, the 'shepherds' (who were known as the 'prisoners' in another copy of Manetho's History) left Egypt for Syria, and when they reached Judea they stopped and founded the city of Jerusalem. It is obvious that this passage from Manetho refers to the period when Egypt was ruled by the Hyksos.
The second episode is much more complicated. Manetho himself declared that it was not derived from the sacred books. The historian tells how during the reign of a certain King Amenophis, the desire to rid the country of lepers and polluted people (and there were some priests among the lepers) led firstly to their being forced to work in the stone caves, and then to their being given the city of Avaris, which according to the theological tradition was dedicated to the god Typhon. Here the lepers and polluted people, under the guidance of a priest named Osarseph, unleashed a rebellion. Their leader was said to have overthrown the religious traditions and the customs of Egypt and to have established new customs and practices. Then he called on the 'shepherds' for aid, and they came to Avaris. King Amenophis retired to Ethiopia for thirteen years, with many Egyptians and the sacred animals. Meanwhile the 'shepherds' and the 'polluted' established a cruel, sacrilegious regime in Egypt, destroying temples and killing sacred animals. At last Amenophis and his son Ramses were said to have returned from Ethiopia to launch a counter-attack; they defeated the 'shepherds' and the 'polluted', killed many of them and drove the others into Syria.
It is not clear whether this story, which is rich in imaginative colouring, refers to any precise historical facts. It has been suggested that the story combines and confuses two historical events which were chronologically quite distinct: a Syrian invasion at the time of the Pharaoh Merneptah, which was reversed by a campaign of Rameses III, and the religious revolution of Amenophis IV. It is certain, at any rate, that the theme of Manetho's story, which I have summarized, its constituent elements and its narrative technique are all in the purest Egyptian tradition, probably from the period of the New Empire, but with some elements from a later era.
According to the reconstruction of Manetho's text proposed by F. Jacoby, the Jews had as yet no part in this narrative or in its themes, or at least not in any explicit manner, although Manetho's text, where it spoke of the foundation of Jerusalem by the 'shepherds', did provide one very important clue. The correlation of the two episodes from Manetho with Jewish history is therefore a later development, in all probability. It has been maintained with considerable acumen by J. Yoyette that the Jews had already been inserted into this Egyptian tradition of a war against invaders from the East, before Manetho and the Hellenistic age. According to this theory, anti-Jewish feeling dates back to the Persian age, and to the part played by Jewish troops (for example at Elephantine) in the final phase of Achemenid rule towards the end of the fifth century BCE, when they remained faithful to the Persian king during the Egyptian rebellion. This is undoubtedly an ingenious theory, but on the one hand it has to overestimate the importance of the Elephantine colony, generalize the local conflict with the Egyptian priests, and magnify the extent of Jewish nationalism at the time, while on the other hand it has to push the date of the original story behind Manetho's account too far back, dating it to the period of the Achemenids. Neither must we forget the fact that Jewish soldiers had been brought to Egypt while there were Egyptian kings. It is true that a local xenophobic tradition lies behind Hecateus' account of the foreigners being driven out of Egypt, but this tradition is still at a rather vague stage compared with Manetho's story, and such a feature of Hecateus' account cannot be. ascribed solely to the intervention of a Greek interpretation.
The connection of Manetho's account with the Jews is a later development, and Manetho is in no way responsible for the insertion anti-Jewish elements into his 'History'. This connection presupposes at least three factors: Manetho's own text with the report of Jerusalem being founded by the 'shepherds'; the necessity for the Jews who lived in Egypt in the third century BCE, in a particular political and social context, to explain their presence in Egypt and Egyptian history in relation to their own traditions of Genesis and Exodus; the diffision of the Jewish version of Exodus, strongly anti-Egyptian in tone, which resulted from the Greek translation of the Pentateuch (although something of it was known already before that, naturally).
The Septuagint
The causes which led to the Greek translation of the Pentateuch are not clear. The ancient tradition maintained that the translation was commissioned by King Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 BCE), on the grounds that the royal library would have been incomplete without a copy of the Jewish laws, or else as a gesture of goodwill towards the Jews of Egypt and of his other territories; but more probably because the Pentateuch was a source for the history and customs of the Jewish subjects of the Egyptian king. A comparison with the histories composed under royal patronage by Berossus and Manetho, and an analysis of the meaning and practical commitment of such a translation, make the ancient explanation of a royal decision appear most plausible. In any case, the Greek translation spread a wider knowledge of the history of the Israelites, particularly the Egyptian phase, and it also facilitated comparison with the Egyptian version of the same facts, now available in Manetho, although at first this was done only in Jewish circles. We are certain of the existence of a Graeco-Jewish school in Alexandria at the end of the third century BCE, which was interested mainly in problems of chronology. In Manetho's account the Jews found an excellent opportunity to identify themselves with the 'shepherds', who ruled Egypt for a long time and then left the country honourably, to go and found Jerusalem. But working on the same text of Manetho, which incidentally implicated those same 'shepherds' in the rebellion of the 'polluted', the Jews' adversaries, no doubt irritated by the biblical version of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt, had little trouble in finding a new identity for the Jews, casting them this time in the role of the 'polluted' and the lepers, who were driven out by Amenophis. The rebel priest Osarseph, naturally, was cast as Moses.
Tensions between the Jews and the Egyptians, in Greek Alexandria
In other words the sojourn of the ancient Jews in Egypt, and especially the Exodus, became bones of contention, not only in the cultural and historiographical fields, between the Jews and the Egyptians (even Alexander the Great was caught up in the controversy). It is hard to say who first started misreading, and then distorting, Manetho's text according to their own interests. Perhaps indeed the identification of the Jews with the 'shepherds' came about in good faith, towards the end of the third century BCE, although it seems certain that even the chronology of Manetho's first two books was tampered with, in order to find parallels with biblical chronology. The Jewish Hellenistic writers certainly concentrated their attention on the problem of the Jews in Egypt.
The historical-cultural conflict takes on a new dimension in the political and social framework of Egypt from the third century BCE onwards, and in the context of relations between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria. The concentration of power in the hands of the Graeco-Macedonian ruling class, and the distinction of the two cultures, Greek and Egyptian, which although they influenced each other remained essentially strangers, characterized the Ptolemaic regime from the very start. After the middle of the third century BCE, the weakening of the central power enhanced the first tentative stirrings of anti-Hellenic opposition, linked to priestly circles and the lower classes.
Manifestations of cultural and religious nationalism blended with social upheavals caused by food shortages, and with outbreaks of genuine revolution. A popular literature, coming perhaps from priestly sources and often apocalyptic in tone, contrasted the present with the golden age of the great Pharaohs of the past, and encouraged xenophobic feelings. The deterioration of the kingdom's position is apparent most of all during the second century BCE, as for example from its diminished capacity to engage in foreign policy. It is not always easy to make out the position of the Jews in this context, scattered as they were all over Egypt. One very significant feature, however, was their participation in the army, from which the Egyptians were excluded (recruitment for the Syrian war, which ended with the victory at Raphia, provoked a nationalist revival among the native soldiers, causing them to rebel). The Jews had already served as mercenaries in the Egyptian armies of the last native kings, and then later under the Persians, always distinguishing themselves by their faithfulness.
According to the Letter of Aristeas, Ptolemy I had enrolled 30,000 Jews, chosen from among the prisoners taken in the Syrian wars, and had distributed them in various garrisons around the country. Well paid and highly trustworthy, they served to keep the native population at bay, and the natives apparently retaliated against them from time to time. When Flavius Josephus and Philo speak of the traditional hostility to the Jews among Egyptians, they are referring not only to the distant past, but also to the Ptolemaic period. This factor was of course useful to later generations of Jewish controversialists in distinguishing the Jews from the mass of Egyptians in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans. The conflict between Jews and Egyptians had its roots, therefore, in hard political reality, and the quarrels about history are merely a reflection of this conflict. Anti-Judaism in its origins is an Egyptian phenomenon, and it remained such for a long period of time. The Jewish - Egyptian controversy takes on greater importance when it transcends its local setting and combines with other hostile elements in the Greek polemic. Hostility among the Greeks had its origins in Alexandria in the third century BCE, when Hecateus already had occasion to mention the different way of life and the misanthropic reserve of the Jews. However, it was during the second century BCE, with the increasing political and military importance of Jews in the kingdom, that the Greek anti-Jewish polemic acquired consistency, and was then fused with hostile elements which had grown up in the Syrian camp, following the revolt of the Maccabees.
Basic reason for the emergence of anti-Semitism
The fundamental reason for the emergence of anti-Semitism was the clash between the religious, political, administrative, economic and cultural organism which formed the basis of Greek (and classical) social co-existence, that is to say, the 'polis,' and the religious and political organization of the Jewish communities of the Diaspora, founded on total adherence to the traditional laws and special customs of the Jewish people, which were, as a rule, guaranteed by special privileges granted by the Hellenistic kings, and later by the Roman government. So the ethnic Jewish community lives side by side with the Greek community in the same city, and enjoys the advantages of Greek civic life, in which indeed it is anxious to play a part. But it cannot renounce its own traditions and obligations, which means that it does not take its fair share of the city's burdens, nor of course can it recognize the religious foundations of Greek city life. There must have been daily causes for annoyance, arising from the Greeks' inability to understand such an attitude, and the Jews' inability to stop themselves. Thus the phenomenon of anti-Judaism can be readily explained in an urban society where social life is organized on the basis of the 'polis'. In Egypt, for example, anti-Jewish manifestations are quite comprehensible in Alexandria (and also in Memphis, for example, in the first half of the first century BCE). In the country areas, where the Jews were also quite numerous, anti-Jewish outbreaks are much smaller in scale, late to develop, and inspired rather by political reasons of a general, nature.
The confrontation between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria
In Alexandria the confrontation between Greeks and Jews must have been present from the start, and as we can infer from Hecateus' observations, must have given rise above all to curiosity. The Greeks must have had no idea what the Jews were like, with their way of life, their history, their customs. If they did begin to learn something about them subsequently, this information came through an Egyptian filter and was therefore hostile in tone. On the other hand the Jewish community was in good standing with the Ptolemaic kings, since it was useful to them, and it is possible that the Jews enjoyed a special 'charter' of privileges from the time of Ptolemy I (if we may interpret thus an ambiguous passage from Hecateus in Flavius Josephus).
A new literature, to defend the Jewish identity
The Jewish community in Alexandria, in the course of the third century BCE, found itself having to defend its own identity and history in the face of the generally hostile traditions of Egyptian history, and also having to establish its own historical tradition on an equal footing, in competition with the much better known traditions of Egypt and Greece. This defence of history and traditions also meant the need consciously to reinforce its total commitment to the Law and traditional customs, against the threat of assimilation into a Greek culture. The emergence of a Jewish literature in Alexandria, at the end of the third century BCE, does not betoken a missionary or apologetic campaign directed towards Greek readers, but rather an internal need of the Jewish community itself, since it aims to strengthen the Jews' own consciousness of their religion and nationality. Later, Josephus asked himself whether there had been a Jewish tradition of spreading a knowledge of the Law among the Gentiles, but all he could quote in support of this hypothesis was Ptolemy II and the Greek translation of the Pentateuch.
However, the new Jewish literature cannot be understood unless its subject-matter is compared to the historical and cultural themes of Greek (and Egyptian) opposition to Judaism, as these are known to us from later apologetic works (especially the anti-Jewish accusations reported in 'Contra Apionem), 'but which must be considered as much earlier, since they already provoke a response from Jewish writers in the third and second centuries BCE. Only in this context are these authors comprehensible. It now appears that Hellenistic Jewish literature, answering the needs of the Jewish community, provided in a Greek literary form the necessary materials and arguments for defending Jewish identity, and at the same time for proving through historical arguments the Jews' right to coexist in the Hellenic world; so that literature, although it remained unknown to Greek contemporaries, played a very important practical role in the political and cultural controversy from the third century BCE onwards. However, Jewish culture, by acting in this way, ended up by consciously venturing into the territory of Greek culture.
The first task for Jewish scholarly research in Alexandria was to insert Jewish history into the framework of Greek, Egyptian and oriental history. This was made all the more urgent because of the existing works of historical chronology by Manetho, Berossus and Eratosthenes. The last-named had, in Alexandria itself, laid the foundations for a chronology of Greek history. The Jewish chronological enquiry, which has its first exponent at the end of the third century B.C.E. in Demetrius (who takes his place in the tradition of Alexandrian studies in chronology and chronography, and possibly sees himself as a counterpart of Manetho), intended to establish the greatest possible antiquity for the origin of its own people in comparison to the other chronological systems, and thus to demonstrate the priority of the Jewish Law, which could not be based on previous models, and of the Jewish system of organized social life. It also exploited a Greek idea, often applied to Sparta, and argued that the Law must be good because of the continuity and unswerving perseverance in its application. From chronological exercises of this type, many logical developments were promoted in Alexandria and elsewhere. One could argue, as Aristobulus did, that Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato all derived their ideas from Moses:^3 this assertion picked up a statement which Hermippus had just put into circulation concerning Pythagoras, and thus the attempt was made to insert Jewish culture into the history of Greek culture, in the shape of a primary source. It may be that this theory played on the tradition of Greek sages visiting Egypt. After all, Eratosthenes had already suggested that ethnic controversies could be solved by a positive evaluation of quite independent civilizations.
Early Judaism idealised by Eupolemus and Artapanus in the 2nd c. BCE
A Samaritan writer like Pseudo-Eupolemus who was an exponent of a Hellenized Palestinian tradition, writing towards the first half of the second century BCE, could happily describe Abraham as a scientist and philosopher who taught astrology to the Phoenicians and Egyptians, thus blending biblical, Greek and Babylonian traditions.' Jose-phus was quick to pick up this idea, since the figure of Abraham as a wise inventor allowed him to refute vigorously the typical Greek allegation, which was already in circulation in the second century BCE and frequently repeated thereafter, that the Jews had produced no men worthy of admiration or famous for their wisdom and inventions. This charge was already well known to the author of the Letter of Aristeas, who attacked all those inventors who had done nothing but combine elements which were already present in creation. The message of this description of Abraham was all the more controversial, in that teaching the Egyptians meant, at one remove, teaching the Greeks, who from Herodotus to Hecateus of Abdera had always been ready to concede priority to the Egyptians in the history of civilization.
This idea reverberated in Eupolemus' writings and reached paradoxical heights in Artapanus. Eupolemus, who is probably the personage sent to Rome in 166 BCE by Judas Maccabeus,' declared that Moses was the first sage and invented the alphabet for the Jews, from whom it passed to the Phoenicians and then at last to the Greeks. He knew of an exchange of letters on an equal footing between Solomon and an Egyptian pharaoh, and also with the king of Tyre. To praise Solomon's power was a sign of political awareness after the Maccabees' struggle.
The story told by Artapanus is so strange that it has been suggested that it was a romance. In the first fragment Abraham instructs the Egyptians in astrology; in the second fragment it is Abraham's descendant Joseph's turn to come to Egypt: he is nominated as governor of the country by the king, and improves the state of agriculture, which had previously been very disturbed on account of the bad distribution of land, and because the strong were oppressing the weak. He starts by making a new division of the land and establishing frontiers, assigns special holdings to the priests, invents a system of measurements, and marries the daughter of a priest of Heliopolis; his father and brothers come to Egypt and found temples there. At his death, Joseph can truly be described as lord of Egypt. In the third fragment there is a long discussion of Moses, who is identified with the personage known to the Greeks as Museus. Moses is said to have been Orpheus' teacher, and to have given mankind very useful inventions, including ships, machinery for lifting stones, Egyptian weapons, hydraulic and warlike engines, and philosophy. He divided the country into 'nomoi, 'laid down for everyone which divinity was to be adored, and invented the sacred alphabet for priests. Among the deities were sacred animals. Finally, he assigned special lands to the priests. In this way, he won the people's hearts and the superior esteem of the priests, who identified him with the god Hermes (Thoth). It is of no importance to follow the further history of Moses in Egypt and the Exodus.
Even admitting that Artapanus' narrative is extravagant, all the same it does not seem to derive purely from a conciliatory or syncretistic attitude, which has led some people to suggest that it derives from the circle of the temple at Leontopoiis. Jewish superiority is asserted in the spheres of religion, thought and politics, to the ridiculous extent of crediting Moses with the introduction of the cult of animals, which was a strong point in the Jewish polemic against the Egyptians. The whole argument is. a reaction to anti-Jewish tendencies, if not writings. The political setting is obvious: the allusion to agrarian unrest cannot but refer to the grave situation in the Egyptian countryside, and the peasants' revolts of the second century BCE. One statement which Artapanus makes is particularly interesting: he says at one point that 'Moses had done all these things to lend greater stability to the monarchy' of the pharaoh. This is possibly an allusion to the military support which the Jews of Leontopoiis lent to the Ptolemaic kings in the second half of the second century BCE. It could also be a reply to those charges of disloyal feelings towards the state which were contained both in the Greek reworking of Esther (written towards the first decades of the first century BCE) and in 3 Maccabees where they are refuted. In the edict of Artaxerxes against the Jews in the Greek Esther, as well as the usual allegations that the Jews have peculiar laws and customs, different from other peoples, and that they are anti-social, a new accusation is added: they are disobedient to the king and disturb the public peace. These accusations, purely political, in character, are explained by the dynastic struggles in Egypt: in the second and first centuries BCE, when the political and military commitment of the Jews was very deep and naturally controversial. On a more general level, remembering the revolt of the Maccabees, such an accusation could be seen as a normal consequence of Jewish exclusiveness, which it was easy to present as injurious to the state in order to undermine the policy of royal privileges. It is not for nothing that the author of the Letter of Aristeas advances purely philosophical and moral explanations for Jewish exclusiveness, and interprets the much-criticized dietary regulations in an allegorical manner. At the same time the general tone of this little work is full of respect for the king, and it tries to show that the Ptolemaic policies are perfectly acceptable to the Jews.
The general subject-matter of this Hellenistic Jewish literature is substantially nationalist in the Palestinian authors, and anti-Egyptian as well in the Alexandrian authors. In so far as it claims chronological priority and therefore inventions for ancient Jewish figures, it also appears anti-Greek in tone, although this cannot be said to have been the main objective. All the same, it allows us to catch a glimpse of a complex of anti-Jewish themes which are much more substantial than the banal, ridiculous accusations which we have seen, although the latter also gain much wider diffusion because they are now embodied in striking formulae of propaganda. Although this controversy with its attendant literature seems important to us, it did not spread at the time beyond the local confines of Egypt, and, as we shall see, of Syria and Palestine. The Greeks carried on in complete ignorance of the Jews and their history. Greek historiography in the second century BCE, starting with Eplybius, had much more serious problems to handle, as for instance the Romans' expansionism towards Greece, the Greek-controlled orient, and the west.
Polybius, on the Jews in the Syrian War of 200 BCE
Polybius refers to the Jews in relation to the progress of the Syrian war in 201 - 200 BCE, when the Egyptian general Scopas temporarily conquered Judea. Soon afterwards, defeated by Antiochus, he had to retire, and 'the Jews who live around the temple known as Hierosolyma' surrendered to the Syrian king. The formula used to define Jerusalem and the Jews is administratively correct. Polybius added that he was reserving for a later occasion the other things which he had to say about this, and especially about the magnificence of the Temple. What the later occasion was to be, we can only guess: probably the sack of 168 or the events of 167 BCE, connected with the new cult of Zeus Olympios introduced by Antiochus IV. It is not necessary to suppose that Polybius had seen the city for himself. In any case, this description did not pass into later tradition (which is all the more strange since the passages quoted from Polybius are alluded to by Flavius Josephus), and so we do not know how Polybius dealt with the revolt of the Maccabees. Very brief descriptions of the city, probably in connection with the warlike deeds of Antiochus IV Epiphanes or Antiochus VII Sidetes, were given by two almost unknown historians, Timochares and Xenophon. A fragment falsely attributed to the geographer Polemon of Ilium spoke of an Egyptian army which was driven from the country and established itself 'in.the Palestine which is known as Syria' under the rule of Apis, son of Phoroneus. This must be interpreted as an attempt to fuse Greek and oriental mythical traditions. More important is the passage from Agatharchides of Cnidus, a prominent historian in the middle of the second century BCE, who told how Ptolemy's capture of Jerusalem in 320 BCE was accomplished on a Saturday, the day which the inhabitants set aside for prayer and rest. The narrative is accompanied by moralizing comments: the Jews' attitude is senseless, their Law is obviously bad and superstitious. However, since the author feels it necessary to explain about 'those people known as Jews, who live in a city which is exceptionally well protected, which the inhabitants of that place call Hierosolyma', and so on, we may infer that the average reader knew nothing about the Jews. This appears to be the first reference in a historical work to the Sabbath controversy. The episode may have had a certain importance as an example, because Pompey was able to capture the city in 63 BCE by taking advantage of the Sabbath, and the same was said of Herod and Titus.
The uninterested silence of Greek historiography about Jewish history is confirmed by the fact that the chronographical field of study remained exclusively Greek for a long period. Works such as those of Berossus, Manetho, and Jewish attempts at history remained in the long run without much influence. Lists of Eastern kings were first taken into consideration by Pseudo-Apollodorus, Castor and Alexander Polyhistor. The latter was also to be the compiler who sought to bring Jewish history to the attention of the Roman world.
Anti-Judaism in the Seleucid kingdom
Another hotbed of anti-Judaism of a strictly political kind gew up around the middle of the second century BCE in the Seleucid kingdom, following the revolt of the Maccabees. Seleucid propaganda is responsible for circulating charges of infamy against the Jews, drawing on anti-Jewish material from Egyptian sources, and wilfully distorting Jewish traditions and customs, as well as indulging in sheet-invention.
The rumour about the Jews worshipping a donkey's head (or, in later versions, a whole donkey), was encouraged by the difficulty for the average Greek or Egyptian in understanding how the Jewish god could exist without being in any way depicted. The charge of atheism against the Jews derives from the same cause. The origin of the rumour about the donkey almost certainly lies in the equation of the Jews with the lepers and polluted of Avaris. The god of Avaris, Typhon or Set, who was the god of evil, was represented by a donkey's head. On this Egyptian base is superimposed, in the first half of the second century BCE, a strange story told by a pupil of Eratosthenes, the historian Mnaseas from Patara in Lycia, and known to us through Josephus, but dating to a much earlier period. The story concerns the capture by an^ Idumean of the image of an enemy god (a. donkey's head). This story had been jeeringly applied to the Jews, and Seleucid propaganda adopted it for its own ends. Thence it passed into and-Jewish propaganda from the first century BCE onwards. Posidonius records the story, told in a manner less than totally hostile, that Antiochus Epiphanes, entering the Temple in the year 168, had found that a statue of a bearded man, holding a book and seated on a donkey, was honoured there. This obviously refers to Moses.
More serious and insidious was the charge of ritual murder which was levelled against the Jews, with a great wealth of detail, by anti-Jewish literature from the first century BCE onwards, but which goes back to Seleucid propaganda. This story too was connected to the violation of the Temple by Antiochus Epiphanes. He was supposed to have found a Greek there, captured in Judea and fattened up prior to being slaughtered. This sacrifice was said to happen every year: the Jews tasted the victim's entrails and swore eternal enmity to the Greeks. This narration, clearly Greek in tone, combines several diverse elements: the classical theme of a conspiracy founded on an oath of hatred, linked to a human sacrifice; and the ancient ethnographical tradition of the annual slaughter, on a fixed day, of a human being. In Seleucid propaganda this accusation against the Jews served a dual purpose: it reinforced the ideas of exclusiveness and hostility to foreigners which had, been established in Egyptian anti-Jewish stories, and it also excused Antiochus from the possible charge of sacrilege for having sacked the Temple of Jerusalem in 168 BCE Subsequently, in 167, the Temple was desecrated and the traditional customs and ceremonies of Jewish worship were forbidden. Discredit and ridicule were heaped on these ceremonies, and this was certainly the starting-point for the hostile propaganda against those features of Jewish life which seemed particularly susceptible to jokes and crude parody (circumcision, the Sabbath, dietary prescriptions: the Letter of Aristeas was to attempt to give an allegorical and moral interpretation to the Mosaic prescriptions of purity). In its accusation of ritual murder, Seleucid propaganda was probably building on existing pretexts, perhaps exploiting Scriptural references to human sacrifices in Israel, and linking them to the anti-Greek feelings which grew up during the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes. This charge was destined to make a huge impression, and to have a wide circulation even after the persecution stopped. (Later, the Alexandrian author of the 'Wisdom of ''Solomon, 'who echoes passages from Greek tragedy in his writings, was to reproach the Canaanites. who were the previous inhabitants of Judea, with child sacrifices, cannibalism and other barbarous rites signifying religious mysteries.)
Judaism lauded in the Letter of Aristeas
The Letter of Aristeas implicitly rejects charges of exclusivism and anti-social behaviour when it says that the Law commands that all men be treated justly, and that justice is the basis of social co-existence between men. After all, the author of this little work presents himself as a pagan convinced of the superiority of the Jewish God. In the same perspective should be considered the theory, dating from the time of the Maccabees and possibly deriving from Cyrenaican circles, that the Jews and the Spartans are related through Abraham, and the story of an ancient friendship, in the time of Abraham, between Jews and Greeks of Pergamum. The Jewish colony in Rome was said to have carried on proselytizing activities towards the middle of the second century BCE, and they were driven out of the city for this in 139 BCE, along with Chaldean soothsayers. However, according to Posidonius, in 134 BCE the counsellors of King Antiochus Sidetes advised the king to destroy the Jews, for they alone among all peoples refused all relations with other races, and saw everyone as their enemy; their forebears, impious and cursed by the gods, had been driven out of Egypt. The counsellors repeated the legend of the lepers and the polluted, and of the Jews' hatred of all mankind, sanctioned by their very laws, which forbade them to share, their table with a Gentile or give any sign of benevolence. These are the same charges which the Letter of Aristeas rebuts in the name of justice, the basis of human co-existence. The counsellors' appeal to the example of Antiochus Epiphanes confirms the role played by Seleucid propaganda in spreading these accusations, where the anti-Jewish traditions of Egypt were taken up and developed.
Anti-Jewish polemic by Apollonios Molon in the Hasmonean era
All the evidence tends to show that by the second half of the second century BCE the anti-Jewish controversy had entered an acute phase, which prepared the ground for the emergence in the next century of the first unmistakable libels against the Jews. This new phase must: have been encouraged by a hardening of postures within the Jewish Diaspora, due to the presence of the Hasmonean state, which could not but be reflected in the practical attitudes of the Jews towards the Greek world, intent now on strengthening their own self-consciousness by accentuating all differences and distances.
The first publication which directly attacked the Jewish people was that of Apollonios Molon. This writer was a politically and culturally influential figure in Rhodes during the first decades of the first century BCE. He had been to Rome as an ambassador in the year 81 BCE after the Mithridatic war. A master of rhetoric and grammar, his audience at Rhodes included Cicero, who had already heard him in Rome and praised him highly, as well as Caesar and other prominent Romans. We do not know why be wrote a polemical historical work 'Against the Jews', but it is not difficult to imagine that he was influenced by the Greek experience of living with the Jews in the cities of Asia Minor, if not indeed at Rhodes itself, where the privileges granted by the Roman government to the Jewish communities were already in force.
His treatment was undoubtedly insidious, because the hostile criticisms were not bunched together but were scattered thinly through the historical content. The fact that this appears to have been the only and-Jewish work exploited by Alexander Polyhistor suggests that it was the best available text in 63 BCE. Josephus combats it strongly in his 'Contra Apionem,' along with Apion's more recent work, and one has the impression that Apollonios was on a higher level than the Egyptian historian. Apollonios traced a history of the Jewish people after the Flood; he spoke of Abraham and his descendants, one branch of whom had settled in Arabia, while another branch were ancestors of Joseph and Moses. He spoke of the expulsion from Egypt and gave a date different from that proposed by Manetho, and from the other date which was later suggested by Lysimachus (the reign of Bocchoris); it could be that he was not referring to the identification of the Jews with the 'polluted'. Moses was probably accused of charlatanry, and his laws were said to be contrary to justice and truth. Apollonios accused the Jews of atheism and misanthropy, of not wishing to associate with other peoples with different customs and religious beliefs; he charged them with laziness (the Sabbath problem again), but also with desperate rashness (because of the Maccabees' revolt); and he revived the charge that the Jews had not co-operated in the progress of human civilization. It seems that Apollonios' tone was far from the sharpest edges of the controversy, and that his work did not include the most outrageous charges against the Jews, which were also the most ridiculously factitious and grotesque.
The influence of Apollonios' treatise in Roman quarters?
We cannot tell whether Apollonios' little treatise had any influence in Roman quarters, although it is possible that Varro's demonstrable knowledge of the Jewish religion could have come partly from this source. In Jewish circles, quite a lot of importance seems to have been rightly attributed to Apollonios' attack, as can be seen, for instance, from the reaction of Flavius Josephus. One could probably identify a counterblast to Apollonios' account in the source of Strabo's excursus on the Jews. This passage has usually been attributed to Posidonius, mainly because of a certain coincidence which it presents with Posidonius' religious ideas, as these are known to us from other sources. Furthermore, later in the same passage of Strabo, Posidonius is quoted in connection with the Dead Sea. Thus, in Jacoby's collection, Strabo's excursus is printed among the fragments from Posidonius. It was not clear to what part of Posidonius' writings the excursus had originally belonged (Strabo apparently knew of it only through an intermediate source). Jacoby inclined to the opinion that it was brought into the account of the capture of Jerusalem by Antiochus Sidetes in 134 BCE: as we have seen, another fragment which certainly comes from Posidonius treated of this episode, and reported the anti-Jewish advice of the royal counsellors. A less probable source would be the monograph dedicated by Posidonius to Pompey: in this case, the occasion would be the conquest of 63 BCE.
The attribution itself is uncertain. The tone of Strabo's excursus is clearly pro-Jewish. But Posidonius appears in Josephus among the anti-Jewish historians, along with Apollonios Molon. Although it is very probable that Josephus was referring to the events of 134 BCE, it does seem rather unlikely that he could have been unaware that Posidonius in fact held opposite views, as would be the case if Strabo's excursus came from him. A more likely theory is that Strabo followed the text, or at any rate the ideas, of a Hellenized Jew who had some knowledge of Posidonius' theories.
The contents of Strabo's chapters, in summary, are as follows. Moses, a priest of Lower Egypt, disapproving of the Egyptian cult of animals, and also of the Greeks' anthropomorphic worship, and believing in one single Godhead, incapable of being represented because coextensive with the heavens, the universe and all Creation, left Egypt with a large following and came into judea. His teaching was that the deity must not be represented, but should be honoured without a temple, in a sacred enclosure with a suitable altar. Only those who had lived with wisdom and justice should expect to receive blessings, gifts and signs from God. (From a parenthesis which is not well connected with the context, it appears that the deity manifests himself in dreams; but it is suspected that this sentence is a comment by Strabo himself.) Quite a few sensible people followed Moses. He led them to the place where Jerusalem now stands, a very rocky area, although supplied with water, and therefore not desired by other people or worth fighting a war over. The territory nearby and for some way is also rocky, sterile and without water. Instead of arms he put forward as defences sacrifices and his deity, declaring his intention of finding a suitable place for them, and promising to establish a worship and ritual which would not afflict its devotees with expenses, divine inspirations or similar nonsense. Honoured by his own people, he established an unusual kind of government, and all the neighbouring peoples came to him naturally out of fellowship and because of his promises for the future. This state of affairs lasted with his successors for some time. Then superstitious people occupied the supreme priesthood, and these were followed by tyrants. From superstition arose the prescriptions of dietary purity, and male and female circumcision was established along with other rules of the same sort. The tyrannical power gave rise to policies of violence and depredation in both their own and other countries, while others, by agreement with the ruling clique, stole other people's property and overran much of Syria and Phoenicia. There^ remained however a sense of respect and reverence for the Temple itself, which was not seen as the seat of tyranny.
The following two chapters seem rather to be comments and comparisons made by Strabo himself: they recall legislators who claimed divine origins for the rules which they laid down, in order to increase their authority, and all the more so when this happened with the prophets, whose commandments are valid even after their death.
In its portrayal of Moses, Strabo's account does not follow the Greek ethnographic model as used by Hecateus, but retraces in part: the outlines of the Egyptian narrative, distilling them from the mass of accusation and slander. Moses is an Egyptian priest, he disapproves of the cult of animals and idols (but wreaks no destruction), he leaves the country voluntarily with many respectable folk (instead of being driven out with a horde of lepers and 'polluted' people). Other elements then come in. The country to which he goes is not the one described in the 'Letter o'Aristeas 'as a paradise of fertility: it is sterile and stony. But. his simple religious laws and his government attracted the neighbouring peoples (instead of isolating the Jews; their enemies said that the worst people among their neighbours joined them). Thus far, this tradition is able to vindicate the origins of the Jewish people, the present Moses as a priest driven by religious motives and lofty ideals, and to defend the justice of his laws and their relation to the outside world. The movement from contemporary historical reality is made without recourse to strained.interpretations or allegory, but rather with dignified respect.
The idea of decadence in religion and religious institutions (and the pantheistic account of Jewish monotheism) need not necessarily derive from Posidonius. This theme was widespread in Greek and Jewish circles in the first century BCE, and anyway it was already present in Hecateus. Strabo's tradition recognizes that superstition has cramped an original religious freedom with a host of ritual requirements. Implicitly it seems to admit the negative consequences of these isolatory prescriptions. Superstition in the high priesthood chronologically precedes the advent of tyranny, by which is undoubtedly meant the regime of the Hasmoneans. We are faced here with a complex tradition which shares the objections to the expansionist policies of the Hasmoneans, at least from John Hyrcanus onwards, to the violent conversion to Judaism of neighbouring populations, and to the pillaging and confiscation of enemy property by the Jewish aristocracy, especially in the time of Alexander Janneus. Some of these notes may also be heard in certain lamentations from the book of Enoch. On the other hand, the theory that superstition had added new restrictions to the Mosaic Law seems to agree with certain criticisms made against the Pharisees, as these are known to us through Josephus. The idea of distinguishing between ancient laws and recent institutions of a worse kind was also present in the anti-Jewish tradition.
In any case, the tradition which we are discussing, faced with hostile criticism of some considerable weight, as in the case of Apollonios Molon, re-emphasized the purity of the origins of Judaism, and indicated the causes of decadence, which were fundamentally political.
Rome's view of the Jews, in Pompey's time (63 BCE, conquest)
The year 63 BCE is fundamental not just to the political history of Judea, on account of Pompey's conquest, but also for the knowledge which the Romans acquired of the Jews and their history. The good relations which had been established in the course of the second century BCE between Rome and the Hasmoneans had not prevented the expulsion of the Jews in 139 BCE, and turned out to be nothing but a diplomatic device, which produced no visible consequences in the first half of the first century BCE Pompey's conquest in the year 63 is at the root of at least two historical works on the Jews, probably designed to furnish the Romans with facts and information about the new people with whom they had come in direct contact, and many representatives of whom had arrived in Rome as slaves.
Nothing is known of the 'Jewish History' in six books by Teucer of Cyzicus; but we are well informed on the treatise 'On the Jews' by Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor. This must have been an anthology, similar to other works of history and ethnography by the same author, which were intended to introduce the Romans to peoples and literatures of which they knew little or nothing, and which had just come into their political orbit. His treatise 'On the Jews' must certainly have fulfilled its task of popular information, but on a literary level it is never quoted before Clement of Alexandria. Thereafter, it was used extensively by Eusebius of Caesarea in his 'Praeparatio Evangelica. 'It is very odd that Josephus had no knowledge of it. The latter historian does quote from Polyhistor a passage by the historian Cleodemus Malchus on the descendants of Abraham, especially. concerning Africa and a possible relationship with Heracles (an allusion to the Phoenician colonization of Africa, and a preface to the theory of a Jewish - Spartan relationship'), but it seems likely that his source in this was the 'Libyka' by Polyhistor, not the work 'On the Jews'. Josephus himself shows that he had no knowledge of the Hellenistic Jewish literature which Polyhistor used.
Polyhistor's pro-Jewish version of their history
Polyhistor expounded Jewish history by combining extracts from other authors, and we cannot tell whether he added his own linking material between the various extracts. If we accept the use that Eusebius made of it, we must say that the work was a mosaic of quotations arranged according to chronology and not according to author. Eusebius used this work up as far as the Babylonian captivity, but Polyhistor certainly brought the narrative up to 63 BCE. Going by Eusebius, one must conclude that the authors which Polyhistor used were all Jewish with the exception of Apollonios Molon and Timo-chares: we owe to him our knowledge of Hellenistic Jewish literature from the third to the first century BCE. Apollonios was undoubtedly an anti-Jewish author.
It is probable that Polyhistor knew others, although the story of the two sons of Semiramis, Iouda and Idoumaia, which probably presupposes the union of the two territories under John Hyrcanus (126 BCE), does not seem to be an argument in this direction. Besides, in this work on Rome he manages to mention that a Jewish woman, Moso, had written the Law of the Jews. It is certain that despite his knowledge of anti-Jewish traditions, Polyhistor practically never exploited them in his work, just as he refrained from using non-Jewish traditions. It is unlikely that this conclusion arises solely from the knowledge that we have of his work through Eusebius, given the arrangement of the material. It may be that he used anti-Jewish sources for the more recent period, although it is not clear what these might be unless he drew on Seleucid propaganda. Nor does it seem likely that he would have described the Jews to the Romans, who were their allies in the Maccabean period, in hostile terms. Perhaps, in order to justify the Roman intervention, he may have given a harsh judgement on the last Hasmonean kings. In any case, for the origins of the Jewish people he steered clear of the Egyptian anti-Jewish traditions: and that was the most controversial subject of all. Given this state of affairs it does not seem that Polyhistor was just an objective or neutral anthologist: as far as we know he was pro-Jewish.
We still do not know how Polyhistor came to know of such obscure figures as the Jewish-Hellenistic writers. As these writers were Judean and Samaritan, it has been suggested that Polyhistor was drawing on a manuscript collection which bore witness to the controversy between the two groups, and which he used without noticing its polemical character. This hypothetical collection, of Alexandrian origin, would date from the period of Ptolemy Philometor (according to Freuden-thal), or Ptolemy Physcon (according to Susemihl). But the basis of this theory, an Egyptian journey by Polyhistor, remains dubious, all the more so because he also quoted obscure authors in his other historical and ethnographic works. Jewish and Samaritan documents must have been available in Rome after 63 BCE.
Polyhistor's work must have spread a certain knowledge of Judaism among educated Romans. Judging from the references in Roman writers from the end of first century BCE, one might also remark that they are rather familiar with the commonplaces of the anti- Jewish controversy.
Lysimachus' negative account of Jewish History (post-30 BCE)
This controversy had not by any means abated, and indeed took on a new lease of life after the Roman conquest of Egypt (30 BCE). To the second half of the first century BCE probably belongs Lysimachus, whose 'Jewish History' includes an anti-Jewish version of the Exodus. Lysimachus' narrative brings further proof that the genuine tradition of Manetho has nothing precise to say against the Jews. For Lysimachus calmly shifts the expulsion of the 'polluted', with its attendant identification of the Jews, into a completely new historical context: the reign of King Bocchoris, whom he seems to have dated some 1,700 years before his own period. The reign of Bocchoris was later given as the date of the Exodus by Apion, who furnished the date of the seventh Olympiad (752 - 749), and by Tacitus, who quoted in this regard the consensus of 'plurimi auctores. 'For Lysimachus, of course, the leader of the 'polluted' is Moses. King Bocchoris is a historical character: he was a king of the fourteenth dynasty, and reigned from 720 to 715 BCE .Under his reign occurred an Ethiopian conquest of Egypt, and the king himself came to a tragic end. The king is remembered in the Greek tradition too, with widely differing characterizations: sometimes he is a wise ruler, sometimes a cruel king who slights the gods. He had a role to play in Egyptian apocalyptic literature, which linked his reign with the famous 'prophecy of the lamb', which is known to us through the Greek tradition,' but mainly from a demotic text of the year 4-5 CE in this fragmentary demotic papyrus there is a mention of Assyria (Iowar), source of the many ills which plague the country. It is possible that the version of the episode in Pseudo-Plutarch is based on Manetho, but in any case it seems that the 'prophecy of the lamb', which concerned the reign of Bocchoris, was current at the beginning of the Christian Era, and that might be enough to explain why writers from this period or slightly later (Lysimachus, Apion, Tacitus' source) fastened the story of the 'polluted' on to this king, rather than follow the tradition of Manetho, who incidentally was to find a follower in Chaeremon, another writer of Egyptian history.
In general, the Greco-Roman view of Judaism was filtered through Egyptian prejudice
The case of Lysimachus lends itself to the formulation of final conclusions, being almost symbolic in character. Until the middle of the first century BCE, and in some cases even later, the Greek and Roman view of Judaism continued essentially to pass through the filter of Egyptian history, that is to say, through a hostile tradition. Direct knowledge of biblical texts is lacking, and the solitary quotation by the writer 'On the Sublime' is the exception which proves the rule; that quotation may be explained by a more or less direct derivation from a Jewish source. There were in practice no works dedicated to the history of Judea, and Polyhistor's anthology does not seem to have attracted many readers. The initial Greek interest in the religious-political bios of the Jews, when this was first discovered, quickly dwindled away, only to be revived in the middle of the first century BCE by a few students of religious history such as Varro. Hecateus' account, inserted in a context of Egyptian history, was however to be used by Diodorus. There remained the polemical works on both sides. The one by Apollonios must have reached a wide readership; later a pro-Jewish work came down to Strabo, though we do not know exactly how. There were also the commonplaces that hostile propaganda had put into circulation and which, like all slanders, had taken toot and prospered. Greek and Egyptian propaganda in Alexandria soon had a fresh opportunity to thrive with the establishment of Roman government in Egypt, and the new political, administrative and social problems which this provoked in the former capital city. That propaganda was a prime source for historiography when the Jewish revolt of 66 CE threw Judea suddenly and violently into the forefront of Roman politics. But the roots of anti-Judaism in the imperial age go deep down into the preceding Hellenistic age.
From the Cambridge History of Judaism
|
These Courses