A favorite adjective in describing the Jews was “superstitious.” Strangely enough, another, perhaps even more general, was “irreligious.” The Jews were frequently stigmatized as ?θεοι, a word generally translated “atheist,” and undoubtedly often used in the sense of the modern term. It remains to be seen whether the term meant, in its application to the Jews, all that the corresponding modern term implies. That is particularly necessary here, since to the modern world the devotion of the nation to its Deity is its most striking characteristic, and at least one of the key-notes of its historical development. Upon us it has almost the effect of a paradox to read that this people impressed some Greeks as a nation of “atheists” or “godless.”
The modern term and the ancient partly cover each other. Both often denote the speculative negation of a supernatural direction of the world. Now it simply cannot be, in view of the wide distribution of the Jews and their successful propaganda, that even the unthinking could associate the people whose claims to direct divine guidance were so many and so emphatic, with a term that implied the non-recognition of any god. We may remember how even the very first contact had 192seemed to emphasize the religious side of the Jewish communal life.
The usual explanations will not bear analysis. It is frequently asserted that “atheist” was applied to the Jews because of their imageless cult. The natural inference, we are told, from the fact that there were no statues was that there were no gods. But that is to assign to the statue a larger importance in ancient religious theory than in fact belonged to it. We meet, to be sure, cases where the identification of the statue and the resident deity seems to be complete. Especially in such scoffers as Lucian,[210] or in the polemics of the philosophic sects, or in those of Jews and Christian writers, Romans and Greeks are often charged with the adoration of the actual figure of stone or bronze. That, however, was surely not the general attitude of any class. The passages that seem to show it are generally figurative and often imply merely that the god had taken his abode within the statue, and might leave it at will.
Indeed, just for the masses, the most intense and direct religious emotions were always aroused, not by the great gods whose statues were the artistic pride of their cities, but by the formless and bodiless spirits of tree and field and forest that survived from pre-Olympian animism. And these latter, if adored in symbolic form, were represented generally by pillars or trees, and not by statues at all.
Nor were the Jews the only imageless barbarians whom the Greeks and Romans encountered. Most of the 193surrounding nations can scarcely have possessed actual statues at first. And the Greeks or Romans drew no such inference as atheism from the fact that they found no statues of gods among Spaniards, Thracians, Germans, or Celts. On the contrary, we hear of gods among all these nations, many of them outlined with sufficient clearness to be identified promptly with various Greek deities. What a Greek would be likely to assume is rather that these barbarians lacked the skill to fashion statues or the artistic cultivation to appreciate them. If it occurred to him to explain the imageless shrine at Jerusalem at all, he would no doubt have offered some such statement, especially as it was quite common to assume lack of artistic skill in barbarians.
Atheism as a philosophic doctrine was relatively rare. Diagoras of Melos, a contemporary of Socrates, and Theodore of Cyrene,[211] a contemporary of the first Ptolemy, were said to have held that doctrine, and the former was known from it as “the Atheist.” However, even in this case we cannot be quite sure of our ground. Some of the poems of Diagoras seem to have a distinct, even a strong, religious feeling. Josephus asserts that Diagoras’ offense in Athenian eyes was scoffing at the mysteries.[212] If that is true, he received his sobriquet less from atheism, as we understand it, than from the same facts that brought Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates himself within the ban of the Athenian police. That is, he was charged rather with contempt of the actually constituted deities of the Athenian state than with a general negation of a 194divinity. The term itself, ?θεο?, is not necessarily negative. In fact, Greek had very few purely negative ideas. In Plato’s Euthyphro[213] the only alternatives that are admitted are θεοφιλ?? and θεομισ??, i.e. what the gods hate and what the gods love. So the various Greek adjectives compounded with “α privative,” ανωφελ??, “useless,” ?βουλο?, “thoughtless,” are really used in a positive sense contrary to that of the positive adjective. So ανωφελ?? is rather “harmful” than merely “useless”; ?βουλο? is “ill-advised”; etc. The word ?θεο? would, by that analogy, rather denote one that opposed certain gods than one who denied them. A man might be ?θεο? in one community and not in another. Indeed his “atheism” might be an especial devotion to a divine principle which was not that recognized by the state.
In ordinary literary usage ?θεο? is denuded even of this significance. It means little more than “wicked.” It is used so by Pindar, by Sophocles, and in general by the orators. Often it runs in pairs with other adjectives of the same character. Xenophon calls Tissaphernes (An. II. v. 29) ?θε?τατο? κα? πανουργ?τατο?, “most godless and wicked,” in which the superlative is especially noteworthy. As a matter of fact it is often used of a man whom the gods would have none of, rather than one who rejects the gods. ?θεο?, ?φιλο? ?λο?μαν, cries the chorus in Oedipus Rex, “May I die abandoned by gods and men.”[214]
When it is first used of the Jews by Molo, it is as part of just such a group; ?θεοι κα? μισ?νθρωποι, he calls the Jews, “hateful to gods and men,” and other rhetoricians 195follow suit. As a term of abuse, ?θεο? was as good as any other.
But there may have been a more precise sense in which the Jews might by an incensed Greek be properly stigmatized as ?θεοι. To the thoroughgoing monotheists, the gods of the heathen are non-existent. They are not evil spirits, but have no being whatever. The prophets and the intellectual leaders of the Jews held that view with passionate intensity. But even they used language which readily lends color to the view that these gods did exist as malignant and inferior daemonia. The “devils” of Leviticus xvii. 7 are undoubtedly the gods of other nations.[215] The name “Abomination,” which for the Jew was a cacophemism for “god,” equally implies by its very strength a common feeling of the reality of the being so referred to. Likewise the other terms of abuse which the Jews showered upon the gods of the heathen indicate a real and fiercely personal animosity.
Hatred and bitterness formed almost a religious duty. An implacable war was to be waged with the abominable thing, and it is not likely that dictates of courtesy would stand in the way. The retort of ?θεοι would mean no more than a summary of the fact that the Jew was the declared enemy of the constituted deity, whose anger he provoked and whose power he despised.[216]
Something of this appears in the statement of the Alexandrian Lysimachus, that the Jews were enjoined to overturn the altars and temples which they met 196(Josephus, Contra Ap. i. 34), and in the phrase of the elder Pliny (Hist. Nat. XIII. iv. 46), gens contumelia numinum insignis, “a race famous for its insults to the gods.”
Most of the phrases that have been quoted have been taken from works where they were little more than casual asides imbedded in matter of different purport. Rhetoricians, in attempting to establish a point, use some phrase, either current through popular usage or a commonplace in their schools. In this respect the Jews fare no better and no worse than practically all nationalities of that time. Individual writers disliked or despised various peoples, and said so in any manner that suited them. Slurs against Romans, Athenians, Boeotians, Egyptians, Cappadocians are met with often enough. The Cretans were liars, the Boeotians guzzlers, the Egyptians knaves, the Abderitans fools; antiquity has furnished us with more than one entertaining example of national hate and jealousy.[217] The epithets which the Acheans showered on their Aetolian rivals certainly leave nothing to be desired as far as intensity is concerned.[218] The various panders of Roman comedy often are represented as particularly choice specimens of Agrigentine character.[219] Cicero particularly knew from his rhetorical masters how to use national prejudices in the conduct of his business. If Celts are the accusers of his client, as they were in the case of Fonteius, they are perjurers, murderers, enemies of the human race. “Tribes,” he says, “so far removed from other races in character and customs 197that they fight, not for their religion, but against the religion of all men.”[220] If they are Sardinians, these are a “tribe whose worthlessness is such that the only distinction they recognize between freedom and slavery is that the former gives them unlimited license to lie.”[221]
To take this seriously is to misconceive strangely both the functions of an advocate and the license of rhetoric. Now the abusive paragraphs directed against the Jews are quite of this type. And it is in the highest degree extraordinary that these phrases, which, in the instances just cited, are given no weight in determining national attitude, should be considered of the highest importance in the case of the Jews. Whether it was Syrian, Greek, or Celt that was attacked, the stock epithet means no more than the corresponding terms of our own day mean.
But besides these occasional flings there were whole books directed against the Jews, and to that fact a little attention may be given.
It is a relatively rare thing that a writer should nurse his bile against a particular people to the extent of expanding it into a whole book. We must of course remember that a “book” was sometimes, and especially in this polemical literature, a single roll, and we are not to understand it in the sense of a voluminous treatise. However, there were such books and these we must now consider.
What such a book was like, recent anti-Semitism has made it very easy to imagine. There is no reason to suppose that this type of pamphlet was appreciably 198different in those days. It consisted of a series of bitter invectives interspersed with stories as pièces justificatives. Now and then an effort is made to throw it into the form of a dispassionate examination. But even in very skilful hands that attitude is not long maintained.
Of several men we know such treatises. All have already been mentioned—Apollonius Molo, Damocritus, and probably Apion.
Apollonius, either son of Molo, or himself so named, was one of the most considerable figures of his day. He taught principally, but not exclusively, at Rhodes, and numbered among his pupils both Cicero and Caesar. As a rhetorician he enjoyed an extensive and well-merited influence. It was during his time that the reaction against the florid literary style of Asia culminated in the equally artificial simplicity of the Atticists—a controversy of the utmost importance in the history of Latin literature no less than Greek. The doctrine of mediocritas, “the golden mean,” set forth by Molo, moulded the style of Cicero and through him of most modern prose writers. The refined taste and good sense which could avoid both extremes justify his repute and power.
He was a voluminous writer on historical and rhetorical subjects. Only the smallest fragments remain, not enough to permit us to form an independent estimate of his style or habits of thought. Just what was the incentive for the pamphlet he wrote against the Jews it is impossible to conjecture. But it is not likely that it contained many of the specially malignant charges. To 199judge from Josephus’ defense, it seems to have concerned itself chiefly with their unsociability, and may have been no more than a sermon on that text. Josephus’ charge against him is that of unfairness. There is none of the abuse in Josephus’ account of Molo which he heaps upon Apion. We may accordingly infer that Molo’s pamphlet was considerably less offensive. It may have been, in effect, a mere declamatio, a speech in a fictitious cause, or the substance of an oration delivered in an actual case. Or perhaps a single instance of personal friction produced it as an act of retaliation. The rhetoricians of those days were essentially a genus irritabile, and their wrath or praise was easily stirred.
Of Damocritus we know almost nothing. Suidas, a late Byzantine grammarian, mentions a short work of his on Tactics, and one as short, or shorter, on the Jews. The reference to human sacrifice (above, p. 189), might be supposed to indicate a strong bias. While it is likely enough that it was hostile in character, that single fact would not quite prove it, since we do not know whether Damocritus represented these human sacrifices as an ancient or a still-existing custom.
The third name, Apion, has become especially familiar from the apology of Josephus. The latter refers to him throughout as an Egyptian, and in spite of certain very warm and modern defenders, he very likely was of Egyptian stock. From the Oasis where he was born, he came to Alexandria, where he established a great reputation. Und............