A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (5 page)

The Persians did not immediately respond to the petition, perhaps because they knew that both the Egyptian priests on the island and the Jewish high priests in Jerusalem strongly objected to the sacrifices that were carried out on Elephantine. They may have feared that granting permission to rebuild the temple would lead to more conflict. So they looked for a compromise. In the end, the Persians allowed the Jews to restore their temple but ruled that they could no longer sacrifice animals there. Only the high priests at the Temple in Jerusalem were to have that privilege.

Was the destruction of the temple an act of hatred toward Jews? Was it retaliation for the Jews’ religious sacrifices that Egyptians saw as insults to their god? Or was the attack motivated by the loyalty of Elephantine’s Jews to Egypt’s hated Persian conquerors? It is not uncommon for people to act out their anger toward a powerful ruler by attacking a weaker person or group allied with that ruler. Most historians believe that the incident arose from a clash of cultures, political disagreements that were expressed in religious form, or a combination of the two, rather than from antisemitism as we think of it today. They point out that once the Persians resolved the issue of temple sacrifices, life on Elephantine returned to normal.

A portion of the petition sent by the Jews of Elephantine to the Persian governor in what was later known as Palestine.

Yet Jews continued to differ from their neighbors on Elephantine in important ways. They continued to worship God rather than the gods of the Egyptians, and they continued to work as soldiers for the Persians. From the Egyptians’ point of view, it must have seemed that Jews were choosing to be outsiders.

Whole families, husbands with their wives, infant children with their parents, were burnt in the heart of the city by these supremely ruthless men who showed no pity for old age nor youth, nor the innocent years of childhood.
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The author of this powerful statement is Philo, a Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He wrote an eyewitness account of the violence against Jews in the city in 38
CE
—more than 400 years after the destruction of the Jewish temple on Elephantine. Who were the “supremely ruthless men who showed no pity”? Why did they attack Jews?

By 38
CE
, the city of Alexandria was more than 300 years old. It had prospered because of its unique location; it was a bustling port on the Mediterranean Sea, linked by a canal to the Nile River. In 38
CE
, Alexandria, like the rest of Egypt, was part of the Roman Empire. Many in the city resented Roman rule, particularly their Roman governor, Avillius Flaccus. He had won the job because he was a friend of Tiberius, the Roman emperor. Nevertheless, in his first years in office, Flaccus managed to keep the peace and make important reforms. Then, in the year 37
CE
, Tiberius had died and a new emperor took the throne. Flaccus was now understandably anxious about his future.

The new Roman emperor was Caligula, widely known as the “mad emperor.” (The writers of his time all mention his insanity.) Caligula demanded that everyone in his empire worship him as a god. This was not an unusual demand from Roman emperors, but it put Jews, with their belief in the one God, in an impossible situation.

Meanwhile, a few Alexandrians of Greek descent—who considered themselves the only true Alexandrians—saw Caligula’s madness and Flaccus’s uncertainty as an opportunity to regain control of the city. They also wanted to limit the political and economic power of Alexandria’s Jews. To achieve those goals, they needed to stir up tensions in the city.

Why were there Greeks in an Egyptian city? They were descendants of the city’s founders, who had arrived when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in about 331
BCE
. The Greeks took pride in the fact that Alexandria had become a major center of Greek culture. It was home to two of the world’s earliest and largest public libraries—one in a temple to the Greek god Zeus and the other in a museum. The two buildings housed at least 500,000 scrolls at a time when each scroll was painstakingly written by hand. The first university in the Middle East developed around the museum and attracted scholars in mathematics, medicine, and literature from Asia, Africa, and Europe.

The Jews of Alexandria were equally proud of the city. They too saw themselves as true Alexandrians, and they made up about 40 percent of the city’s population. During the 300 years that the Greeks ruled Egypt, Jews had taken an active part in the city’s economic, political, and cultural life. Among them were merchants, scholars, bankers, government officials,
and army officers. A few Jews had become generals and trusted advisers to Egypt’s Greek rulers; many more were ordinary people—peasant farmers, artisans, sailors, soldiers, and traders.

In many respects, the Jews of Alexandria, like the Jews of Elephantine 400 years earlier, could not be distinguished from their neighbors, particularly their Greek neighbors. They too had Greek names, wore Greek clothing, and spoke the Greek language. In fact, so many Jews in Alexandria spoke only Greek that the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek for their benefit. Yet they remained Jews.

After the Romans conquered Egypt in 30
BCE
, Roman emperors continued to recognize the right of Jews to practice their religion, even though this meant that they would not honor the many gods of Rome. Jews, like other groups in the city, also had some political rights, including a degree of self-government as a separate ethnic group within Alexandria. But they were not full citizens; only Greeks and Romans had that status under Roman law.

A glass base from Alexandria. The Greeks and later the Romans welcomed Jews to Alexandria and other cities because of their skill as glassmakers. In Alexandria, Jews turned that craft into a major industry.

Alexandria’s Jews were, however, permitted to send money to Jerusalem for the upkeep of the Temple. Many of them also made the long, often dangerous journey to Jerusalem for Passover, Shavuot, or Sukkot—the great pilgrimage festivals of ancient Judaism.

Some Egyptians lived in Alexandria as well, and they too considered themselves the only true Alexandrians even though they had even fewer rights than Greeks or Jews. As a result, they were increasingly resentful of their Roman conquerors and also of the Jews, Greeks, and other foreigners who supported those conquerors. They were outraged that outsiders had a higher status than they did.

Over the years, religious issues had heightened political tensions among these various groups in Alexandria. For example, Jews regarded the story of their ancestors’ exodus from Egypt, led by Moses, as a key event in their history. Each year at Passover, then as now, Jews recalled the days when they were slaves of the pharaoh in Egypt.

Not surprisingly, many Egyptians disliked this story; it made their ruler, the pharaoh, seem weak. In fact, in the third century
BCE
, Manetho, an Egyptian priest in Alexandria, wrote an alternative version of history in which the pharaoh was the hero and Moses the villain. It was the first of several such accounts by Egyptian writers that conflicted with Jewish beliefs.

In the first decades of the Common Era, Apion, a Greek lawyer in Alexandria, wrote and spoke against Jews. He claimed that they were a “diseased race of lepers” and a “godless” people who worshipped the head of an ass in their Temple in Jerusalem. He insisted that once a year, Jews kidnapped a Greek and fattened him up so that he could be sacrificed to their deity.
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These and other false charges would find their way from Alexandria to Rome and, eventually, into the works of Roman and, later, Christian writers.

But even as some Greeks, like Apion, concocted false accusations about the Jews, many other Greeks were attracted to Jewish life. In much of the Middle East, life, particularly public life, was lived outdoors. When Jews gathered to pray or read from the Torah, they often did so in Greek, not Hebrew. Passersby could not only listen to the service but also understand its meaning. Many non-Jews attended Jewish services regularly, and a number of them traveled to Jerusalem for the great pilgrimage festivals. The Temple even had a special section set aside for their use. Some non-Jews in Alexandria and elsewhere became Jews; others observed Jewish festivals and commandments without a formal conversion.

A few Greeks and, later, Romans were alarmed by the interest of ordinary Alexandrians in Jewish religious practice. They viewed that
interest as a threat to the state. They expected everyone in the city to pay homage to the emperor’s gods as an expression of loyalty. They saw the refusal of Jews—and, later, Christians—to participate as both foolish and potentially disloyal.

Still, many historians note that for the most part, neither Greek nor Roman writers singled out Jews as targets for hatred; they had similarly negative views of other minority groups. Historians also point out that most writers at that time, including Jewish writers, tended to praise the virtues of their own group while denying the virtues of others. It was part of the usual style of rhetoric of the times, and, indeed, the same kind of hate-filled rhetoric can be heard today in places where groups are in conflict.

Nevertheless, Jews were different in certain ways from the people around them. They were the only group that consistently refused to acknowledge the gods of their neighbors, send gifts to their temples, or participate in festivals honoring those gods. Jews alone insisted on worshipping the one God. And they alone refused to work on one particular day each week; to some outsiders, Jews’ insistence on observing their Sabbath was a sign of laziness or even religious absurdity. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that malicious lies about Jews gained acceptance among many people.

Tension between Jews and their neighbors was heightened in August of 38
CE
, when Agrippa I, the Roman-appointed Jewish king of Judea, stopped in Alexandria on his way to Rome. Jews celebrated his visit, but Greeks and Egyptians responded with riots and demonstrations. According to Philo, three prominent Greeks in the city—Isidoros, Dionysios, and Lampon—told Flaccus, the city’s Roman governor, that Agrippa’s visit was a sign that Flaccus’s own days in power were numbered. They accused Agrippa and other Jews of causing trouble and questioned their loyalty to Rome.

Flaccus, worried about his own relationship with Caligula, the new emperor, did nothing to stop the violence that the Greeks incited. In fact, he encouraged it by ordering that statues of Caligula be placed in every Jewish house of worship. The Jews of Alexandria were outraged; they closed their synagogues rather than allow them to be desecrated in this way. Flaccus retaliated by taking away the political and religious privileges that Jews had enjoyed for more than 300 years. He declared that Jews were aliens in Alexandria—which meant that they were considered outsiders with no right to government protection.

The Greeks and Egyptians in Alexandria understood Flaccus’s announcement to mean that they could now treat Jews as they pleased.
After all, people without rights cannot appeal to the authorities for help or seek justice on their own. In the days that followed, well-organized mobs attacked Jews with stones and clubs and forced them into a single section of the city. According to Philo, Flaccus encouraged the rioting by publicly executing a number of Jewish leaders.

When the emperor Caligula learned what was happening in Alexandria, he ordered Flaccus’s arrest. Flaccus was brought to Rome, where he was tried and convicted. To the surprise of many, his main accusers were Isidoros, Dionysios, and Lampon, the same Greeks from Alexandria who had encouraged his attacks on the Jews. The attack on the Jews and the one on Flaccus were part of an effort to restore power to the city’s Greek community.

The removal of Flaccus did not calm Alexandria. Both the Jews and the Greeks sent delegations to Rome to plead their case before the emperor. For Jews, the issue centered on their political and religious rights. They had been second-class citizens under the Greeks. Many now wanted to become full citizens of Alexandria.