CHAPTER XIII

THE OPPOSITION IN ITS SOCIAL ASPECT

If the rivals and opponents of the Jews had nothing more to say of them than that they worshiped the head of an ass, it is not likely that their opposition would have been recorded. But they would have put their training to meager use, if they could not devise better and stronger terms of abuse.

The very first Greek historian who has more than a vague surmise of the character and history of the Jews is Hecataeus of Abdera (comp. above, p. 92). As has been seen, his tone is distinctly well-disposed. But he knows also of circumstances which to the Greek mind were real national vices. He mentions with strong disapproval their credulity, their inhospitality, and their aloofness.

Credulity is not a vice with which the Jews were charged in later times. That may be due to Christian tradition, in which of course the sin of the Jews is that they did not believe enough, as stated in Christian controversial writings. But Greeks and Romans were quite in accord, that the Jews were duped with extraordinary facility; especially that they were the victims of the deception of their priests, so that they attached importance to thousands of matters heartily without importance. We may remember Horace’s jibe, _Credat_ _Iudaeus Apella_, “Tell it to the Jew Apella”;[185] and nearly two hundred years later Apuleius mentions the _Iudaei superstitiosi_, “the superstitious Jews.”[186]

Among the Greeks particularly the quality of εὐήθεια, “simplicity,” had rapidly made the same progress as the words “silly” and “simpleton” have in English.

Sharpness and duplicity were the qualities with which non-Greek nations credited the Greeks, and whether the accusation was true or not, “naïveté,” εὐήθεια, excited Greek risibilities more quickly than anything else. The εὐήθεια of the Jews lay of course not in their beliefs about the Deity. On that point all educated men were in accord. But it lay in believing in the sanctity of the priests, and in the observance of the innumerable regulations, particularly of abstention, which had already assumed such proportions among the Jews. The line of Meleager of Gadara, about his Jewish rival,

ἕστι καὶ ἐν ψυχροῖς σάββασι θερμὸς Ἔρως,[187]

Even on the cold Sabbaths Love makes his warmth felt,

contains in its ψυχρὰ σάββατα “cold Sabbaths,” an epitome of the Greek point of view, ψυχρός, “cold,” was almost a synonym for “dull.” That a holiday should be celebrated by abstention from ordinary activities and amusements seemed to a Greek the essence of unreason. Their own religious customs were, like those of all other nations, full of tabus, but they were the less conscious of them because they were wholly apart from their daily life. Jews avoided certain foods, not merely as an occasional fast, but always. Their myths were not irrelevant and beautiful stories, but were firmly believed to be the records of what actually happened. The precepts of their code were sanctioned, not merely by expediency, but by the fear of an offended God.

An excellent example of how the rhetorical τόπος of “naïveté” was handled is presented by Agatharchidas of Cnidus, who wrote somewhere near 150 B.C.E.[188]

He tells us of Stratonice, daughter of Antiochus Soter and wife of Demetrius of Macedon, who was induced by a dream to remain in a dangerous position, where she was taken and killed. The occasion is an excellent one to enlarge upon the topic of superstition, and Agatharchidas relates in this connection an incident that is said to have happened one hundred years before Stratonice, the capture of Jerusalem by Ptolemy Soter through the fact that the Jews would not fight upon the Sabbath. “So,” says Agatharchidas, “because, instead of guarding their city, these men observed their senseless rule, the city received a harsh master, and their law was shown to be a foolish custom.” One cannot reproduce in English the fine antitheses of the related words φυλάττειν τὴν πόλιν balanced by διατηρούντων τὴν ἄνοιαν, νόμος answering to ἐθισμόν; but, besides the artificiality of the phrases, the total absence of any attempt to make the words fit the facts is shown by the conclusion to which Agatharchidas, by rule of rhetoric, had to come. Now a “harsh master” is just what Ptolemy was not to the Jews, and Agatharchidas of all men must have been aware of that fact, for he wrote not only at Alexandria, but at the court of Philometor, an especial patron of the Jews individually and as a corporation.

The practice of the Sabbath was one of the first things that struck foreigners. It is likely that the congregations of Sabbatistae in Asia Minor were composed of Jewish proselytes.[189] The name of the Jewish Sibyl Sambethe,[190] the association of Jewish worship with that of the Phrygian Sabazios,[191] were based upon this highly peculiar custom of the Jews. But its utter irrationality seemed to be exhibited in such instances as Agatharchidas here describes, the abstention from both offensive and defensive fighting on the Sabbath.

Whether the incident or others of the same kind ever occurred may reasonably be doubted. The discussion of the question in Talmudic sources is held at a time when Jews had long ceased to engage in warfare.[192] Their nation no longer existed, and their legal privileges included exemption from conscription, if they chose to avail themselves of it. In the Bible there is no hint in the lurid chronicles of wars and battles that the Sabbath observance involved cessation from hostilities during time of war, and the supposition that no resistance to attack was offered on that day is almost wholly excluded. It is not easy to imagine one of the grim swordsmen of David or Joab allowing his throat to be cut by an enemy because he was attacked on the Sabbath.

That any rule of Sabbath observance which demanded this had actually developed during the post-Exilic period is likewise untenable. The Jews served frequently in the army under both Persian and Greek rule. This is amply demonstrated by the Aramaic papyri of Elephantine and the existence of Jewish mercenaries under the Ptolemies.[193] The professional soldier whose service could not be relied upon one day in seven would soon find his occupation gone.

Several passages in the Books of Maccabees have often been taken to imply that the strict observance of the Sabbath was maintained before the Hasmonean revolt, and deliberately abrogated by Mattathiah (I Macc. ii. 30-44; II Macc. viii. 23-25). But upon closer analysis it will be seen that the incidents there recorded do not quite show that. The massacre of the loyal Jews in the desert was a special and exceptional thing. They were not rebels in arms, but hunted fugitives. Their passive submission to the sword was an act of voluntary martyrdom (I Macc. ii. 37). ἁποθάνωμεν οἱ πάντες ἐν τη ἁπλότητι ἡμων: μαρτυρει ἐφ’ ἡμας hὃοὐρανος καὶ ἡ γἡ ὁτι ακριτως ἀπόλλυτε ἡμας, “Let us all die in our innocence. Heaven and earth bear witness for us that ye put us to death wrongfully.”

Again, it is not Mattathiah, but the sober reflection of his men, that brings them to the resolution that such acts of martyrdom, admirable as they are in intention, are futile. The decision is rather a criticism of their useless sacrifice than anything else.

Similar acts of self-devotion on the part of inhabitants of doomed cities were not uncommon. As final proofs of patriotism on the part of those who would not survive their city, they received the commendation of ancient writers.[194] But to kill oneself or allow oneself to be killed for a fantastic superstition, could have seemed only the blindest fanaticism.

Now there is no reason for doubting the essential accuracy of the report in I Maccabees, to the effect that one group of Jewish zealots chose passive resistance to the attempt of Antiochus, and by that nerved the Hasmoneans to a very active resistance. And it is very likely that in this event we have the basis for the stories that related the capture of Jerusalem—almost in every case—on the Sabbath. The story is told of the capture by Nebuchadnezzar, by Artaxerxes Ochus, by Ptolemy, and by Pompey. It is a logical inference from the non-resistance of the refugees mentioned in I Maccabees. The conditions of ancient warfare make it highly improbable that it was more.

The rationalist Greek or Roman felt it a point of honor to hold in equal contempt the “old-wives’ tales” of his own countrymen as to the supramundane facts with which the myths were filled,[195] and the vain and foolish attempts by which barbarians, and Greeks and Romans too, sought to dominate the cosmic forces or tear the secret from fate. These attempts generally took the form of magic, not, however, like the primitive ceremonies, of which the real nature had long been forgotten, but in the elaborate thaumaturgic systems which had been fashioned in Egypt, Persia, and Babylon. In their lowest forms these were petty and mean swindling devices. In their more developed forms they contained a sincerely felt mysticism, but under all guises they aroused the contempt of the skeptic, to whom the most ancient and revered rites of his own cult were merely ancestral habits which it did no harm to follow. The tone such men adopted toward the complicated Oriental theologies and rituals was very much like that of modern cultivated men toward the various “Vedantic philosophies,” which at one time enjoyed a certain vogue. Those who seriously maintained that by the rattling of a sistrum, or the clash of cymbals, or by mortifications of the flesh, influences could be exerted upon the laws that governed the universe, so as to modify their course or divert them, were alike insensate fools, whose chatter no educated man could take seriously. The Jews, who observed, even when they were less rigorous, a number of restrictive rules that gravely hampered their freedom of action, who seriously maintained that they possessed a direct revelation of God, were fanatics and magicians, and exhibited a credulity that was the first sign of mental inferiority.

“Senseless,” “nonsense,” ἀνοητός, ἄνοια, are terms that are principally in the mouths of the Philopator of III Maccabees and the Antiochus of IV Maccabees, in whose words we may fairly see epitomized all the current abuse as well as criticism which opponents to the Jews, from philosophers to malevolent chauvinists, heaped upon them.

Hecataeus says of Moses that he instituted an “inhospitable and strange form of living.”[196] The two words μισόξενον and ἀπάνθρωπον form a _doublette_, or rhetorical doubling of a single idea. That idea is “inhospitality,” lack of the feeling of common humanity, a term which for Greeks and Romans embodied a number of conceptions not suggested by the word to modern ears.

The word ξένος, which is the root of the words for “hospitality” and its opposite, has no equivalent in English. A ξένος was a man of another nation, who approached without hostile intent. The test of civilization was the manner in which such a ξένος was dealt with. The Greek traditions, even their extant literature, have a very lively recollection of the time when hospitality was by no means universal, when the ξένος was treated as an enemy taken in arms or worse. The one damning epithet of the Cyclops is ἄξενος, “inhospitable.”[197] The high commendation bestowed upon the princely hospitality of the Homeric barons itself indicates that this virtue was not yet a matter of course, and that boorish nations and individuals did not possess it.

Legally, of course, the ξένος had no rights. Such claim as he could make for protection rested upon the favor of the gods, especially of Zeus, who was frequently addressed by the cult title of Ξένιος, the Protector of Strangers. The uncertain aid of the gods was soon displaced by personal relations between individuals and groups of individuals in different states, who were mutually πρόξενοι to each other, a title that always created a very definite moral obligation and soon a legal one as well. So, when Alexander destroyed Thebes, he spared the πρόξενοι of his own family and of the Macedonians in general.[198]

The institution and the development had practically gone on in similar ways all through the Mediterranean world. The Bedouins still maintain the ancient customs of their fathers in that respect. The Romans had the word _hospes_, of which the history is a close parallel to that of ξένος.

Of the Jews the same thing may be said. The Bible enjoins the protection of strangers as a primary obligation. They were the living symbols of the Egyptian bondage. So Exodus xxiii. 9, “Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” One of Job’s protests of righteousness is his hospitality (Job xxxi. 32).

In these circumstances just what could the charge of μισοξενία, of “inhospitality,” have meant? We shall look in vain in Greek literature for an injunction to hospitality as finely phrased as the passage just quoted from Exodus. To understand the term as applied to the Jews we shall have to examine the words that are used for the acts connected with hospitality.

In Homer the word ξεινίζω[199] is frequently found. Strictly of course it means simply “to deal with a stranger,” but it is used principally in the sense of “entertain at dinner.” The wandering stranger might as such claim the hospitality of the people among whom chance had brought him, and claim it in the very concrete sense that food and lodging at the master’s table were his of right. Indeed it would almost seem that he became _pro hac vice_ a member of the family group in which he partook of a meal, protected in life and limb by the blood-vengeance of his temporary kinsmen.

That however seems to have been the general rule in the older communities of the East, in Palestine just as in Greece and Asia. There was no feeling against entertaining a stranger at table among the Jews, although the relation could not well be reversed. And there was the rub. It was not in Palestine (where the Jew was likely always to be the host), but in the communities in which Jew and non-Jew acknowledged the same civic bond that the refusal of the Jew to accept the hospitality of his neighbor would be a flagrant instance of μισοξενία, of dislike of strangers. We need not suppose that it needed careful investigation and the accumulation of instances to produce the statement. A few incidents within anyone’s experience would suffice. We shall have to remember further that we are dealing with a literary tradition in which many statements are taken over from the writer’s source without independent conviction on his own part.

However, among the great masses the general feeling that the Jews disliked strangers, and so were properly to be termed μισόξενοι, was in all likelihood based on an observation of more obvious facts than dietary regulations. It is principally in meat diet that the separation is really effective, and meat diet was the prerogative of the rich. Then, as now, the great majority of the people ate meat rarely, if at all, and surely could take no offense at a man’s squeamishness about the quality or nature of the food he ate. But what everybody was compelled to notice was that the Jews deliberately held aloof from practically all public festivities, since these were nearly always religious, and that they created barriers which seemed as unnecessary as they were foolishly defended. That in itself could be interpreted by the man in the street only as a sign of deep-rooted antipathy, of μισοξενία.

This accusation, as has been shown, was more than the reproach of unsociability. The vice charged by it was of serious character. Those individuals who in Greek poetry are called inhospitable are nothing short of monsters. It implied not merely aloofness from strangers, but ill-usage of them, and that ill-usage was sometimes assumed to be downright cannibalism. So Strabo (vii. 6) tells us that the “inhospitable” sea was called so, not only because of its storms, but because of the ferocity of the Scythian tribes dwelling around it, who devoured strangers and used their skulls for goblets. That was of course to be inhospitable with a vengeance, but the term covered the extreme idea as well as the milder acts that produced at Sparta and Crete frequent edicts of expulsion (ξενηλασίαι)[200] and a general cold welcome to foreigners.

In very many cases, especially in the rhetorical schools, “inhospitality,” “hatred of strangers,” was a mere abusive tag, available without any excessive consideration of the facts. And when intense enmity was to be exhibited, the extreme form of “inhospitality” was naturally enough both implicitly and expressly charged against the objects of the writer’s dislike.

There are many instances in which the hereditary enemy was credited with human sacrifice or cannibalism. Indeed it was currently believed that cannibalism had universally prevailed at one time, and with advancing civilization was gradually superseded.[201] As far as human sacrifice was concerned, many highly civilized states knew of vestiges or actual recurrences of it in their own practice. Rome is a striking example. But in Rome such things were rare exceptions, employed in times of unusual straits to meet a quite unusual emergency.[202] In Greece there were many traces frankly admitted to be such—if not actual instances of such sacrifices. But here, as at Rome, the act was admittedly something out of the ordinary, a survival of primitive savagery.[203]

Accordingly when Greeks and Romans spoke of human sacrifices, it was not of an inconceivable form of barbarity, which placed those who took part in it quite out of the human pale, but as a relic of a condition from which they had themselves happily grown, and to which they reverted only in extremities. Its presence among other tribes was a demonstration that they were still in the barbarous stage, and especially was it deemed to be so when all strangers who chanced to come upon the foreign shore were the selected victims of the god.

That charge, as we know, was made against many Scythian and Thracian tribes. The story of Iphigenia in Tauris is an example of it. It was made against the Carthaginians, at least in the early stages of their history. The Gauls, according to both Greek and Roman writers, had made of it a very common institution.[204] We do not know very much of the evidence in the case of the Thracians, Scythians, and Gauls. It is not impossible that customs like certain symbolic rites found in many places were misinterpreted. Or it is highly likely that, if human sacrifices existed, they were, as among Greeks and Romans, a rare form of expiation. For the Carthaginians the story is almost certainly a by-product of national hatred, and rests upon the same foundations as the “cruelty” and “perfidy” of Hannibal.

Human sacrifices, similar to those of Greece and Rome, existed in Palestine. Children were sacrificed to the nameless god or gods that bore the cult title of _melech_, _i.e._ “king.” As in the rest of the Mediterranean world such sacrifices were exceptional and grisly forms of expiation, used when ordinary means had failed. Among the Jews, on the other hand, they seem to have been prohibited from the very beginning of their history as a community. It is a purely gratuitous theory that makes _melech_, or _molech_, a cult-title of Yahveh in Israel. There is simply no evidence of any kind that it was so. On the contrary, the oldest traditions of the Jews represent the abolition of human sacrifices as one of the first reforms instituted by the founders of their faith. The Mosaic code made these sacrifices a capital offense (Lev. xviii. 21; xx. 2). The very name _molech_ indicates an intense abhorrence, if, as has been plausibly suggested, it is simply מלך, or “king,” with the vowels of בשת, “the Abomination.”[205]

With so old a tradition on the subject, the Jews must have felt, as peculiarly irritating, the transference of this vituperative tag to them. That it might be so applied was of course an inevitable expansion of the belief that the Jews were μισόξενοι, “haters of strangers.” However, it must not be supposed that the statement was widely current. On the contrary, we have only two references to it. Damocritus, who lived perhaps in the first century B.C.E., as quoted by the late Byzantine compiler Suidas,[206] asserts that the Jews captured a stranger every seven years, and sacrificed him to their god; and Apion, in the first century C.E., relates the circumstantial story of the captured Greek who was found immured in the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes.

The latter story is an amusing instance of rhetorical method. Of its baselessness of course no proof need be adduced. It is almost certainly the concoction of Apion himself, perhaps based upon some such statement as this just quoted from Damocritus. Its melodramatic features, the fattening of the stranger, the oath sealed by blood, are highly characteristic of Apion’s style.

It cannot be said that this particular charge against the Jews had any real success. The later writers do not mention it. Tacitus and Juvenal, both of whom are very likely to have read Apion, pass by the story in silence. And Juvenal, who in his Fifteenth Satire expresses such detestation of a similar act among the Egyptians he abominated,[207] would certainly not have let off the Syrian fortune-tellers, whom he equally disliked, with an allusion to their unsociability.

_Non monstrare vias nisi eadem sacra colenti_,[208] “They are instructed not to point out a road except to those who share their rites.” It might almost seem as though even rhetorical animosity demanded more for its terms of abuse than the authority of Apion.

The tragic importance of the “ritual murder” in the modern history of the Jews since the Crusades has given the account of Apion a significance to which it is by no means entitled. The least analysis will show that the “ritual murder” of modern times is not really like the ancient story at all. The latter is simply an application to the Jews of the frequent charge of ξενοθυσία, “sacrifice of strangers,” such as was made against the Scythians. And Apion’s fable found practically no acceptance. There is of course no literary transmission between Apion and the chroniclers of Hugh of Lincoln, but we cannot even suppose that there was a popular one. In the fearful struggles of the rebellions under Hadrian and Trajan, it is impossible to believe that the mutual hatred, which found such expression as the massacre at Salamis and the reprisals of the Greeks, would have failed to register this charge against the ἀνόσιοι Ἰουδαῖοι, “the wicked Jews,” if it were known.

The early Middle Ages, at any rate from the Crusades on, devised the “ritual murder” without the aid of older authorities. It is one of the many cases in which parallel developments at different times and in different places produce results that are somewhat similar, although only superficially so.[209]