The Blood Libel and the Leper Libel: Ancient Antisemitism?
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Erich S. Gruen The Blood Libel and the Leper Libel: Ancient Antisemitism? Wasthere a “Jewishproblem” in antiquity?¹ Did Jews make themselvessufficient- ly offensive to generate resentment,fear,orhostility?Or, regardless of Jewishac- tions or intentions, werethey perceivedasdistasteful, objectionable, or danger- ous?Discussionsofantisemitism in the Greco-Roman world are legion, and the bibliographyseems to grow monthly. Imake no effort to summarize it all, let alone to engagewith anyofitindetail in the shortspace available. Nor will I endeavortoconstruct adefinition of “antisemitism” which would inevitably be arbitrary,disputable, and probablyunhelpful. One can, of course, always re- sort to the comfortable evasion of saying what was said of pornography, “Ican’t define it but Iknow it when Isee it.” On anyreckoning, Jews, at least thoseinthe diaspora, were outside the mainstream, usually marginal, and often separatist. That could getthem into trouble on occasion, for they wereconspicuous,con- spicuouslydifferent,and, in the event of turbulent circumstances, vulnerable. Scholarship on the subject,which began as earlyasthe eighteenth century, featured by luminaries like Johann GustavDroysen, Theodor Mommsen,Eduard Meyer,and Elias Bickerman, has labored mightilytoidentifyreasons whygen- tiles might have found Jews to be odious or menacing.² The most common rea- sons postulated by researchers are the social non-conformism of the Jews, their supposedshunning of the majority culture, their isolationism which slid into xenophobia and misanthropy,their monotheism that scorned civic cults, not to mentionemperor worship, their peculiar customs like circumcision, dietary laws, and observance of the Sabbath that pagans found especiallybizarre and subjecttomockery,their religious beliefs that setthem apart from the rest of so- ciety,theirclaim to be achosen people, their proselytism that threatened the co- herenceand stability of traditionalGreco-Roman values, indeedtheirfundamen- tal ethnocentricity which, as the influential Israeli scholar Victor Tcherikover put it ageneration ago, made their very existenceaforeign bodyamong other peo- See A. S. Lindemann, “The Jewish Question,” in Antisemitism:AHistory,ed. A. S. Lindemann and R. S. Levy (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2010), 17– 33.W.Schmitthenner, “Kennt die hel- lenistisch-römische Antikeeine Judenfrage?” in Die Juden als Minderheit in der Geschichte,ed. B. Martin and E. Schulin (Munich:Dt. Taschenbuch Verlag,1981), 9–29,questions the applicability of the term to the Jews of classical antiquity. See the excellent studyofC.Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk deutscher Althistoriker des 19.und 20.Jahrhunderts (Brill: Leiden, 1988). OpenAccess. ©2021 Erich S. Gruen, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-005 80 Erich S. Gruen ples. These have loomed as the principal elements identified by scholars as grounds for the animositytoward Jews that manifests itself in classical litera- ture.³ Some moderns, however,havequestioned the extent of Judenhass in the pagan world or soughttobalance pro-and anti-Jewish sentiments in the surviv- ing texts.⁴ Abrief studycannot possiblyprofess to resolve the largerproblem of wheth- er or how far antisemitism playedarole in the perceptions of Jews by Greeks and Romans. It represents onlyastep in thatdirection but anot insignificant one. This essaylooks at perhaps the two most celebrated or notorious slanders per- petrated by pagans on the Jews and seeks to deconstruct their implications and their reverberations. The first is the so-called blood libel, the allegation that Jews indulgedinthe practice of sacrificing human victims to their god, even engaginginritual cannibalism. That accusation, ostensiblyinitiated in an- tiquity,proceeded to haunt Jews as atoxic smear throughout much of the Middle Ages and beyond.⁵ The second is what one might call the leper libel. It refers to The scholarship on this subject is vast and cannot possiblybesummarized here. Amongthe moreimportantcontributions in recent decades areR.R.Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: TheTheo- logical Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury,1974); J. N. Sevenster, TheRoots of PaganAnti- Semitism in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 1975); J. L. Daniel, “Anti-Semitism in the Hellenistic- Roman Period,” Journal of Biblical Literature 98 (1979): 45 – 65;N.deLange, “The Origins of Anti- Semitism: Ancient Evidenceand Modern Interpretations,” in Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis,ed. S. L. Gilman and S. T. Katz (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 21–37;J.G.Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1983); L. H. Feldman, Jewand Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1993); Z. Yavetz, “Judeophobia in Classical Antiquity:ADifferent Approach,” Journal of JewishStudies 44 (1993): 1–22;P.Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 1993); B. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton:Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2004), 440 –91;D.Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Nor- ton, 2013), 13–47.OnTcherikover,see D. R. Schwartz, “Antisemitism and Other-isms in the Greco-Roman World,” in Demonizingthe Other: Antisemitism, Racism, and Xenophobia,ed. R. S. Wistrich (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic,1999), 73 – 75. See, e.g.,Ruether, Faith and Fratricide;Gager, Origins of Anti-Semitism,39–88;L.H.Feldman, “Pro-Jewish Intimations in Anti-Jewish Remarks Cited in Josephus’ Against Apion,” JewishQuar- terly Review 78 (1988): 187–251; Feldman, Jewand Gentile, 84–287; E. S. Gruen, “WasThereJu- deophobia in Classical Antiquity,” in Constructs of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism: EssaysonEarly JewishLiterature (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 313–32. On the subsequent historyofthe blood libel, see G. I. Langmuir, Toward aDefinition of Anti- semitism (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1990), 263–81;D.Biale, Blood and Belief:The Circulation of aSymbolbetween Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2007), 111–17;J.Cohen, “The Blood Libel in SolomonIbn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah,” in Jewish Blood: Reality and Metaphor in History, Religion, and Culture,ed. M. B. Hart (New York: Rout- ledge,2009), 116–35;Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism,202– 7. The Blood Libel and the Leper Libel: AncientAntisemitism? 81 the notion that the origins of the nation did not derive from abold exodus from Egypt by heroic rebelswho thwarted the Egyptian oppressors and went on to set- tle the promised land but from ignominious flight by abunch of wretched lepers and purveyors of disease who wereexpelled from Egypt as ascourge and pro- ceeded to ravage and plunder wherever they could. That defamatory story,invar- ious versions, found echoes in anumber of narrativesbyEgyptian, Greek, or Roman writers.Towhat degree did the mud-slinging exemplified by these two slandersactuallystick?⁶ I The idea thatJews practicedhuman sacrifice first surfaces in amostunlikely source: the fourth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher and most famous pupil of Aristotle, Theophrastus.The relevant passageispuzzling and provocative.It comes to us secondhand, from atreatise On Piety composed by Theophrastus but transmitted by the Neoplatonist Porphyry more than five centuries later.⁷ That is not very reassuring.The quotation, if accurate, has Theophrastus say that the Syrians,ofwhom Jews wereapart,sacrifice live victims. They do not eat them but burnthem whole at night,pour honey and wine on them, and quickly destroy them, lest they be seen by day. They fast in the course of it, and, he adds, they werethe first to conduct sacrificesboth of animals and of themselves, thus evidentlyofother human beings.⁸ How tellingaclaim was this?The passageispacked with problems. Theophrastus is evidentlynot very well informed about Jews. They do not,in fact,eat their sacrificial victims, they don’tpour honey on them, they don’tburn them at night to avoid being observed, and they don’tfast in the performance of the ritual. The reliability of Theophrastus or of the transmission of his text is thus doubtful. And thatdoubtcarries over to the statement about the performance of Iomit here athirdnotorious accusation, the so-called “ass libel,” which surfaces in diverse versions as the statue of an ass or the golden head of an ass or arepresentation of Moses seated on an ass,evidentlyasanobject of worship in the Temple. Not onlyisthe allegation absurd on the face of it,reported onlyinafew and contradictory stories, but pagans, whothemselvesmade images of their deities,would hardly find this adamagingcharge to be levelled against others. On the “ass libel,” see now the treatment,with full bibliography, of B. Bar-Kochva, TheImage of the Jews in Greek Literature: TheHellenistic Period (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2010), 206–49. Theophrastus,inPorphyry, De Abstinentia,2.26=M. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem:The Israel AcademyofSciences and Humanities, 1974), 1:10 –12. κατήρξαντο γὰροὗτοι πρῶτοι τῶντελοιπῶνζῷων καὶ σφῶναὐτῶν. 82 Erich S. Gruen human sacrifice.Whyshould we believeit? To reconstruct Theophrastus’ sources requires pure guesswork. But it appears thatthe philosopher himself wasnot fullycomfortable with the idea thatJews indulgedinhuman sacrifice.For he adds the statement that they did so under compulsion and not because they had anyenthusiasm for