Arb adds to the English equivalent of the original Attawrat the element the truth which preceeds the Torah in the translated text. This attitude of the translator

A Chapter in the History of Antisemitism

First Encounters

The first encounters between Jews and Greeks known to us generally left among the Greeks a rather positive impression of the Jews. There is, for instance the well-known passage in the work of Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus, in which, towards the end of the fourth century BCE, he calls the Jews ‘philosophers.’1 Unfortunately, this earliest testimony is problematic because of a number of text-critical and other problems, so we cannot attach too much value to it.2 We do not have to wait very long, however, before the same sentiment is expressed again, now by another pupil of Aristotle, Clearchus of Soli (about 300 BCE), who tells us in his dialogue De somno that Aristotle had told him he had met a Jew who had a remarkably philosophical mind. This man, said Aristotle, not only spoke Greek, he also had a Greek soul. “During my stay in Asia, he visited the same places as I did and came to converse with me and some other scholars, to test our learning. But as one who had been intimate with many cultivated persons, it was rather he who imparted to us something of his own.”3 One can reasonably doubt the historical trustworthiness of a story about a meeting between Aristotle and a learned Jewish philosopher,4 but that is irrelevant. The point at issue is the fact that at the beginning of the

1 In a fragment from his De pietate preserved by Porphyry, De abstinentia 2.26. This is nr. 4 in the great collection of M. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols., Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974–1984, 1:10. Henceforth I will refer to this work with the usual abbreviation GLAJJ followed by the number of the fragment.

Theophrastus’ fragment is fr. 584A in the new edition with translation by W. Fortenbaugh et alii (eds.), Theophrastus of Eresus. Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought and Influence, vol. 2, Leiden: Brill, 1992, 404–429.

2 See the extensive discussion of these problems in J. Bouffartigue & M. Patillon (edd.), Porphyre, De l’abstinence, livres II–III, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1979, 58–67.

3 Quoted by Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.176-181 = GLAJJ nr. 15.

4 See, e.g., the skepticism voiced by U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der Glaube der Hellenen, vol. 2, Darmstadt: WBG, 1955, 253 n. 1; also H. Lewy, ‘Aristotle and the Jewish Sage according to Clearchus of Soli,’ Harvard Theological Review 31 (1938) 205–235. See now esp. B. Bar-Kochva, The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature, Berkeley – Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010, 40–89.

Hellenistic era Greek intellectuals were not reluctant to speak about Jews in a positive tone.5

Still relatively free from anti-Jewish sentiments are the fragments of Hecataeus of Abdera (beginning of the Hellenistic era) in which he describes the origins and early history of the Jewish people and does not hide his admi-ration for Moses – he called him a man that excelled in wisdom and cour-age. However, halfway through his excursus on the Jews Hecataeus remarks that, due to their experience of having been expelled as foreigners from Egypt, they do foster a somewhat asocial way of life that is characterized by a certain xenophobia (apanthrôpon tina kai misoxenon bion).6 So a first critical note is already there.

Positive and Negative Voices

It is important, for that reason, to point out that, alongside positive voices, right from the beginning of the Hellenistic era anti-Jewish voices are to be heard as well. It is true that the phenomenon of sympathy for Jews and Judaism on the part of Greeks and Romans continues to exist through the end of antiquity – the best proof being the well attested groups of pagan sympathizers called

‘Godfearers’ (in Greek theosebeis, sebomenoi or phoboumenoi ton theon), that is, gentiles who were in close contact with the local synagogue without becoming

5 Also from the beginning of the third century BCE is a passage from the Indika by Megasthenes in which he says that what the Brahmans are in India, the Jews are in Syria (GLAJJ no. 14). Clearchus, too, has Aristotle say (in the fragment rendered in an abbreviated form above in the text) that what the Kalani are in India, the Jews are in Syria. See further on this topic M. Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus. Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter beson-derer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jh.s v. Chr., Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1969, 464–473 (‘Die Juden als Philosophen nach den frühesten griechischen Zeugnissen’);

L.H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, 201–207; Bar-Kochva, The Image of the Jews 136–163.

6 Quoted by Diodorus Siculus, Bibl. Hist. 40, 3, 3 = GLAJJ nr. 11. On the question of which of the other fragments preserved as authored by Hecataeus are authentic see, among others, B. Bar-Kochva, Pseudo-Hecataeus, “On the Jews.” Legitimizing the Jewish Diaspora, Berkeley – Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996, and D.R. Schwartz, ‘Diodorus Siculus 40.3 – Hecataeus or Pseudo-Hecataeus?.’ in M. Mor et al. (eds.), Jews and Gentiles in the Holy Land in the Days of the Second Temple, the Mishnah and the Talmud, Jerusalem: Yad Izhak ben-Zvi, 2003, 181–197.

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members but nonetheless supporting the Jewish community in various ways.7 But this phenomenon was accompanied constantly by a never-ending stream of anti-Jewish propaganda on the part of Greek and Roman authors.8

Anti-Jewish Propaganda

The starting point of this anti-Jewish propaganda literature is to be found in the work of Manetho, an Egyptian priest from Alexandria who wrote a his-tory of Egypt in Greek around the beginning of the third century BCE, and the zenith (or rather: nadir) of this literature is reached when in the first century CE Apion, again an Egyptian from Alexandria, launches an utterly venomous defamation campaign against the Jewish people that most probably contrib-uted to the great outburst of physical violence against the Jews of Alexandria in the year 38 CE, which constituted the first pogrom in history.9 His contempo-rary and fellow-citizen Chaeremon, again an Egyptian scholar and Jew-hater, whose work I published almost 30 years ago,10 is from Alexandria as well. Also some of the other anti-Jewish authors from the three centuries in between were of Egyptian descent. What is the background of this remarkable fact?

Here it should be kept in mind that at the beginning of the third century BCE, in Manetho’s days, the first Greek translation of the most important part of the Hebrew Bible – the Torah – was made in Alexandria. It also contained the book of Exodus with the story of Israel’s liberation from bondage in Egypt.

In that story the Egyptians play the role of God’s enemies. Whether Greek-speaking Egyptians knew this story because they had read the book of Exodus in Greek or whether they knew it only by hearsay, we do not know, but the fact is that they immediately launched a counter-attack by retelling this story in an anti-Jewish sense.

Manetho set the tone. This priest paid ample attention to the exodus in his history of Egypt, but in his version things are markedly different than in the

7 The scholarly literature is vast; see, e.g., B. Wander, Gottesfürchtige und Sympathisanten.

Studien zum heidnischen Umfeld von Diasporasynagogen, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998.

8 A good survey of the motifs in this literature is available in P. Schäfer, Judeophobia. Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Cambridge MA – London: Harvard University Press, 1997.

9 See my book Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom, Leiden: Brill, 2003.

10 P.W. van der Horst, Chaeremon. Egyptian Priest and Stoic Philosopher. The fragments collected and translated with explanatory notes, Leiden: Brill, 1984, second edition 1987.

Bible.11 To summarize it briefly: Pharao Amenophis wanted to have a vision of the gods. He is advised that, in order to attain that goal, he should rid the country of lepers and other contaminated persons. He collects some 80.000 of them, among whom former priests, and sets them to work in the quarries of the Nile valley. At their requst they are later transferred to Avaris, the old and now abandoned capital of the Hyksos, where one of the former priests appoints himself their leader. This leader, named Osarsiph but later renamed Moses, decrees that the gods of Egypt should no longer be worshipped, that the sacred animals should be butchered, and that the members of the group should avoid contact with anyone outside the group. He himself does contact the inhabit-ants of Jerusalem, inveterate enemies of the Egyptians, and requests them to collaborate with his group in an attack on Egypt, which indeed takes place.

Pharao Amenophis makes the best of a bad job and withdraws with his army to Ethiopia. Thereafter a real reign of terror is exercised in Egypt by the victors:

villages and cities are set on fire, temples are plundered, sacred animals are roasted, the priests of these animals are forced to slaughter and eat their own gods, whereafter they are thrown naked out of their temples. When finally this group of criminals are driven out of the country, they found their own villain state in and around Jerusalem.12

All this sounds already bad enough as a downright distortion of the bibli-cal story, but this is only the beginning of a long process of demonization of the Jewish people which will become more and more grim in the centuries that follow. The most conspicuous trait in that process is that of a generaliza-tion in which dislike of Egypt and its gods is broadened into hatred of human-kind in general and a total denial of the divine world. To put it succinctly:

misanthropy and atheism have become the hallmark of the Jewish people.13 Hatred of humankind and godlessness thus became the standard elements in the anti-Jewish propaganda in Alexandria (and elsewhere). What kind of consequences that had for the relations between Jews on the one hand and Greeks and Egyptians in that city on the other hand becomes painfully clear in a revealing papyrus from circa 20 BCE, in which a Greek-Alexandrian official

11 There is much debate on the question of whether the anti-Jewish elements in Manetho’s story go back to himself or are later interpolations. In my opinion, Menachem Stern has convincingly defended the authenticity of these elements in GLAJJ 1.62–65. See also J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Cambridge MA – London: Harvard University Press, 1997, 34, 224 note 22.

12 This fragment is found in Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.228–252 = GLAJJ no. 21.

13 Sie, e.g., K. Berthelot, Philanthrôpia judaica. Le débat autour de la ‘misanthropie’ des lois juives dans l’antiquité, Leiden: Brill, 2003, 79–184.

177 The Myth of Jewish Cannibalism

expresses the wish, on behalf of his Greek fellow-citizens, that the city coun-cil “will take care that the pure citizen body of Alexandria is not corrupted by people who are uncultured and uneducated.”14 To put it simply, Jews should not be allowed to become citizens of Alexandria because the citizen body has to be kept ‘Judenrein.’ ‘People without culture and education’ are here almost certainly the Jews; I will come back to that motif presently.15

Apion

For reasons of space I have to refrain from sketching the development of Jew-hatred (or Judaeophobia) in the centuries after Manethon, and I now jump immediately to its nadir in the work of Apion, the Alexandrian scholar already mentioned. This Jew-hater was a widely respected scholar who had earned fame with a wide-ranging oeuvre concerning fields such as Homer exege-sis, grammar, and many other subjects.16 His attacks on the Jewish people in his work on Egypt were so vicious, and so influential, that several decades after his death the Jewish historian Josephus still found it necessary to devote a whole book to the refutation of the slander of this arch-antisemite, in his work Contra Apionem. The story Apion tells is as follows (much abbreviated):

The Seleucid king Antiochus IV entered the Jerusalem temple and found there a man reclining on a couch and looking with bewilderment at a sumptu-ous banquet of meat and fish on the table before him. As soon as the king came in, the man hailed him as his liberator. Prostrating himself before the king, he stretched out his hands and begged for his help. The king assured him that he would help him and asked who he was, why he was in this place, and what was the meaning of the rich dish. Thereupon the man told him in tears his sad story. He said that he was a Greek and that travelling through this country he had suddenly been kidnapped and locked up in this temple. He was seen by nobody except by servants who fattened him up with meals of extreme luxuri-ousness. Initially, he derived some pleasure from this bit of luck, but gradually he began to be suspicious and finally alarmed. He then asked the servants what

14 V. Tcherikover & A. Fuks (edd.), Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, 3 vols, Cambridge MA – London: Harvard University Press, 1957–1964, vol. 2, no. 150, 5–6.

15 That ‘people without culture and education’ (athreptoi kai anagôgoi) is a reference to Jews here is a widely accepted interpretation; but see K. Blouin, Le conflit judéo- alexandrin de 38–41, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005, 109–110.

16 See P.W. van der Horst, “Who Was Apion?” in my Japheth in the Tents of Shem. Studies on Jewish Hellenism in Antiquity, Leuven: Peeters, 2002, 207–222.

was going on here and they told him that all this was done in fulfilment of a secret law of the Jews. Annually, at a fixed time, they caught a Greek whom they fattened up during a whole year. Then they led him into a forest where they killed him and sacrificed his body with the customary ritual of eating his entrails. And while sacrificing the Greek, they swore an oath of enmity to all Greeks.17

In evaluating this horror story by Apion we should not overlook the fact that the author was a man who, during the reign of Caligula (37–41 CE), was not only honoured by the citizens of Alexandria with the grant of citizenship of this city (an exceptional honour for an Egyptian!), but who was also asked by this city to act as leader and spokesman of the Alexandrian-Greek delegation to Rome after the conflict between Jews and Greeks, the pogrom that had caused so much suffering to the Jews in 38 CE. When this man was so prestigious, it should not surprise us that his incredible accusations of an annual cannibal-istic rite among the Jews, in which – nota bene – a Greek was slaughtered and eaten, were believed by these Greeks.18 And that will certainly have evoked intense hatred and contributed to the outburst of violence in 38 CE.

Cannibalism and the Goddess Isis

But why cannibalism? Were misanthropy and atheism not serious enough as accusations? One could of course say that cannibalism would always and everywhere count as the most devastating accusation possible, so there is no need to adduce a special motive for it. Also is it well-known that the combi-nation of eating human entrails and swearing an oath is a topos in ancient propaganda literature that served to convey the message that the opponents were criminal conspirators.19 But if one were to think that this is sufficient as an explanation – the Jews as conspirators against the paragons of civilization,

17 Quoted by Josephus, Contra Apionem 2.91–96 = GLAJJ nr. 171. An excellent commentary to this passage is J.M.G. Barclay, Flavius Josephus, Translation and Commentary, vol. 10:

Against Apion, Leiden: Brill, 2007, 216–220.

18 The same accusation is repeated later (?) in the first century CE by a certain Damocritus, but with some differences: according to this author the cannibalistic ritual did not take place annually but once every seven years, and it was not a Greek but a foreigner (xenos) that was eaten; see GLAJJ no. 247.

19 E. Bickerman, ‘Ritualmord und Eselskult,’ in his Studies in Jewish and Christian History, vol. 2, Leiden: Brill, 1980, 225–255; in the new Leiden 2007 edition (AJEC 68/1) pp. 497–

527. That Jews could also level this accusation against non-Jews is proved by Sapientia

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the Greeks20 – one overlooks the fact that this accusation, although phrased in Greek, has been thought up by an Egyptian. What is at the background here is in my opinion an Egyptian motif that has to do with the cult of the goddess Isis.21

Till late antiquity, the goddess Isis remained the most popular Egyptian deity, not only in her homeland but also far beyond it. There is practically no country in the ancient world where no traces of the spread of her cult have been found.22 One of the more specific manifestations of the Isis cult in the

Salomonis 12:3–7, with the commentary by D. Winston, The Wisdom of Solomon, Garden City: Doubleday, 1979, 239–240.

20 Almost identical accusations were levelled against Christians in the second century CE by Greeks and Romans. See A. McGowen, ‘Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism Against Christians in the Second Century,’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994) 413–442; from the older literature see esp. F.J. Dölger, ‘“Sacramentum infanticidii.” Die Schlachtung eines Kindes und der Genuß seines Fleisches als vermeintlicher Einweihungsakt im ältesten Christentum,’ in his Antike und Christentum IV, Münster: Aschendorff, 1934, 188–228, and W. Schäfke, ‘Frühchristlicher Widerstand,’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II 23, 1, Berlin – New York: W. de Gruyter, 1979, 460–723, esp. 579–596. The study by H.H. Chapman, ‘“A Myth for the World.” Early Christian Reception of Cannibalism in Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 6.199–219,’ Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers 2000, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2000, 359–378, has nothing to do with our topic.

21 Bickerman’s theory that Apion here uses an element from Seleucid political propa-ganda is not impossible (‘Ritualmord’ 240–245), but he takes insufficiently into account that the only version of this horror story is from the pen of an Egyptian and that also another element in Apion’s anti-Jewish polemic, namely that the Jews worship the head of an ass (C.Ap. 2:80), has an Egyptian background; see J.W. van Henten & R. Abusch,

‘The Depiction of the Jews as Typhonians and Josephus’ Strategy of Refutation in Contra Apionem,’ in: L.H. Feldman & J.R. Levison (eds.), Josephus’ Contra Apionem: Studies in its Character and Context with a Latin Concordance to the Portion Missing in Greek, Leiden:

Brill, 1996, 271–309.

22 L. Vidman, Isis und Sarapis bei den Griechen und Römern, Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1970;

F. Dunand, Le culte d’Isis dans le basin oriental de la Méditerranée, 3 vols., Leiden: Brill, 1973; F. Solmsen, Isis among the Greeks and Romans, Cambridge MA – London: Harvard University Press, 1979; R.E. Witt, Isis in the Ancient World, Baltimore – London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 (= 1971); R. Merkelbach, Isis Regina – Zeus Sarapis: Die griechisch-ägyptische Religion nach den Quellen dargestellt, Stuttgart – Leipzig: Teubner, 1995. For a general survey of the spread and diffusion of Egyptian cults outside Egypt see M. Malaise, ‘La diffusion des cultes égyptiennes dans les provinces européennes de l’empire romain,’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.17, 3, Berlijn – New York:

W. de Gruyter, 1984, 1615–1691, and J. Leclant, ‘Aegyptiaca et milieux isiaques. Recherches sur la diffusion du matériel et des idées égyptiennes,’ ibidem 1692–1709. R. Turcan,

Graeco-Roman World are the so-called Isis aretalogies, that is, texts, either as inscriptions on stone or written on papyrus, in which the great feats and the superb qualities of this goddess are praised, either by herself in the first person

Graeco-Roman World are the so-called Isis aretalogies, that is, texts, either as inscriptions on stone or written on papyrus, in which the great feats and the superb qualities of this goddess are praised, either by herself in the first person