1. Cicero, 59 BCE 2. Gaius Caligula, 37 CE Philo, Flaccus, 33-35
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Jewish Conflicts With the Roman Empire Dr. Malka Simkovich ASBI; December 16, 2015 1. Cicero, 59 BCE1 It was the practice each year to send gold to Jerusalem on the Jews’ account from Italy and all our provinces, but Flaccus issued an edict forbidding its export from Asia. Who is there, gentlemen, who cannot genuinely applaud this measure? The Senate strictly forbade the export of gold on a considerable number of previous occasions, notably during my consulship. To oppose this outlandish superstitition was an act of firmness, and to defy in the public interest the crowd of Jews that on occasion sets our public meetings ablaze was the height of responsibility. Pro Flacco 66–67 in C. Macdonald, trans., Cicero: In Catilinam 1–4; Pro Murena; Pro Sulla; Pro Flacco (LCL 324; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) 514–517. 2. Gaius Caligula, 37 CE Philo, Flaccus, 33-35 For the lazy and unoccupied mob in the city, a multitude well practiced in idle talk, who devote their leisure to slandering and evil speaking, was permitted by him to vilify the king, whether the abuse was actually begun by himself or caused by his incitement and provocation addressed to those who were his regular ministers in such matters. Thus started on their course they spent their days in the gymnasium jeering at the king and bringing out a succession of gibes against him. In fact they took the authors of farces and jests for their instructors and thereby showed their natural ability in things of shame, slow to be schooled in anything good but exceedingly quick and ready in learning the opposite. Why did Flaccus show no indignation? Why did he not arrest them? 53–55: When then his attack against our laws by seizing the meeting-houses without even leaving them their name appeared to be successful, he proceeded to another scheme, namely, the destruction of our citizenship, so that when our ancestral customs and our participation in political rights, the sole mooring on which our life was secured, had been cut away, we might undergo the worst misfortunes with no cable to cling to for safety. For a few days afterwards he issued a proclamation in which he denounced us as foreigners and aliens and gave us no right of pleading our case but condemned us unjudged. What stronger profession of tyranny could we have than this? He became everything himself, accuser, enemy, witness, judge and the agent of punishment, and then to the two first wrongs he added a third by permitting those who wished to pillage the Jews as at the sacking of a city. Having secured this immunity what did they do? The city has five quarters named after the first letters of the alphabet, two of these are called Jewish because most of the Jews inhabit them, though in the rest also there are not a few Jews scattered about. So then what did they do? From the four letters they ejected the Jews and drove them to herd in a very small part of one. The Jews were so numerous that they poured out over beaches, dunghills and tombs, robbed of all their belongings. Their enemies overran the houses now left empty and turned to pillaging them… 1 Translations of Roman sources: Loeb Classical Library; Translations of Talmudic sources: Soncino Talmud; Translations of Josephus: Whiston; Translations of Philo: de Jonge. 1 Jewish Conflicts With the Roman Empire Dr. Malka Simkovich ASBI; December 16, 2015 62–64 After the pillaging and eviction and violent expulsion from most parts of the city the Jews were like beleaguered men with their enemies all round them. They were pressed by want and dire lack of necessities; they saw their infant children and women perishing before their eyes through a famine artificially created, since elsewhere all else was teeming with plenty and abundance, the fields richly flooded by the overflow of the river and the wheat-bearing parts of the lowlands producing through their fertility the harvest of grain in unstinted profusion. Unable any longer to endure their privation, some of them contrary to their former habits went to the houses of their kinsmen and friends to ask for the mere necessities as a charity, while those whose high-born spirit led them to avoid the beggar’s lot as fitter for slaves than for the free went forth into the market solely to buy sustenance for their families and themselves. 68 Indeed, 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. And when they lacked wood for fire they would collect brushwood and dispatch them with smoke rather than fire, thus contriving a more pitiable and lingering death for the miserable victims whose bodies lay promiscuously half-burnt… [Cf. Philo, Embassy to Gaius, 352–353] 3. Edict of Claudius (41–54 CE) As for the question, which party was responsible for the riots and feud (or rather, if the truth be told, the war) with the Jews, although in confrontation with their opponents your ambassadors, and particularly Dionysios the son of Theon, contended with great zeal, nevertheless I was unwilling to make a strict inquiry, though guarding within me a store of immutable indignation against whichever party renews the conflict. And I tell you once and for all that unless you put a stop to this ruinous and obstinate enmity against each other, I shall be driven to show what a benevolent Prince can be when turned to righteous indignation.2 4. 48 CE: The War of Simon and Judas: Josephus, Jewish War, 2.118: The territory of Archelaus was now reduced.to a province, and Coponius, a Roman of the equestrian order, was sent out as procurator, entrusted by Augustus with full powers, including the infliction of capital punishment. Under his administration, a Galilaean, named Judas, incited his countrymen to revolt, upbraiding them as cowards for consenting to pay tribute to the Romans and tolerating mortal masters, after having God for their lord. This man was a sophist who founded a sect of his own, having nothing in common with the others. 2 P. London 1912, CPJ I 151; Select Papyri, Volume II, ed. A. S. Hunt and G. C. Edgar (LCL [fill in]; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934) 78–79 2 Jewish Conflicts With the Roman Empire Dr. Malka Simkovich ASBI; December 16, 2015 4. Tension During Nero’s Reign (54–68 CE) Josephus, The Jewish War, 2.487 On one occasion, when the Alexandrians were holding a public meeting on the subject of an embassy which they proposed to send to Nero, a large number of Jews flocked into the amphitheatre along with the Greeks; their adversaries, the instant they caught sight of them, raised shouts of “enemies” and “spies,” and then rushed forward to lay hands on them. The majority of the Jews took flight and scattered, but three of them were caught by the Alexandrians and dragged off to be burnt alive. Thereupon the whole Jewish colony rose to the rescue; first they hurled stones at the Greeks, and then snatching up torches rushed to the amphitheatre, threatening to consume the assembled citizens in the flames to the last man. And this they would actually have done, had not Tiberius Alexander, the governor of the city, curbed their fury. The troops, thereupon, rushed to the quarter of the city called “Delta,” where the Jews were concentrated, and executed their orders, but not without bloodshed on their own side; for the Jews closing their ranks and putting the best armed among their number in the front offered a prolonged resistance, but when once they gave way, wholesale carnage ensued. Death in every form was theirs; some were caught in the plain, others driven into their houses, to which the Romans set fire after stripping them of their contents; there was no pity for infancy, no respect for years: all ages fell before their murderous career, until the whole district was deluged with blood and the heaps of corpses numbered fifty thousand; even the remnant would not have escaped, had they not sued for quarter. Alexander, now moved to compassion, ordered the Romans to retire. They, broken to obedience, ceased massacring at the first signal; but the Alexandrian populace in the intensity of their hate were not so easily called off and were with difficulty torn from the corpses. 5. 66-72: The “Jewish War” Gessius Florus (Roman Procurator of Judea, 64–66) Josephus, Jewish War, 2.14: On the following day, which was a sabbath, when the Jews assembled at the synagogue, they found that one of the Caesarean mischief-makers had placed beside the entrance a pot, turned bottom upwards, upon which he was sacrificing birds. This spectacle of what they considered an outrage upon their laws and a desecration of the spot enraged the Jews beyond endurance. The steady-going and peaceable members of the congregation were in favour of immediate recourse to the authorities; but the factious folk and the passionate youth were burning for a fight. The Caesarean party, on their side, stood prepared for action, for they had, by a concerted plan, sent the man on to the mock sacrifice; and so they soon came to blows. Jucundus, the cavalry commander commissioned to intervene, came up, removed the pot and endeavored to quell the riot, but was unable to cope with the violence of the Caesareans. The Jews, thereupon, snatched up their copy of the Law and withdrew to Narbata, a Jewish district sixty furlongs distant from Caesarea.