Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (review)

Book Reviews 159 serve as a handbook for refutation of the preposterous claims of Holocaust denial. Stephen C. Feinstein University of Wisconsin at River Falls Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian, by Louis H. Feldman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. 679 pp. $59.50. This is a work of vast erudition whose author is at home both in Jewish and Classical sources. It falls into three sections: chapters 1 and 2 deal with Jewish-Gentile relations in the Land of Israel and the Diaspora; chapters 3, 4, and 5 cover anti-Jewish attitudes, official, popular, and intellectual; chapters 6, 7, and 8 discuss the "attractions" of the Jews, i.e., their antiquity, their possession of the cardinal virtues, and their ideal leader, Moses; chapters 9-11 report on the successes of the Jews in winning converts and sympathizers; these are followed by a concluding chapter summing up the results of the inquiry. There are 124 pages of notes, an ample bibliography, and elaborate indexes. No brief review can possibly deal with such a body of material and the radical interpretation offered. It is, unfortunately, a work whose problematic nature outweighs its learning. Indeed, its learning is a source of its problems, for everything the author knows has somehow to be fitted together into his thesis that the Jews were, despite the hatred of the masses and the contempt of the intellectuals, the most attractive and successful people in the ancient Mediterranean world and its neighbors, garnering a multitude of proselytes and "sympathizers." Had Feldman been content to combat the lachrymose view ofJewish existence frequently portrayed with a more balanced view that can be derived from his sources, one could not cavil. But he has moved to the opposite pole, ending with a picture that is as much a distortion as the other. Almost every incident or governmental action that has previously been understood as anti-Jewish is shaken out to disclose something favorable. He writes regularly of the "vertical relation" between the Jews and the various rulers and governments from Alexandria to Home: Jews are not part of the oppressed peoples of various empires. They are Hofjuden with imperial Schutzbriefen , occasionally made uncomfortable but always returning to favor. If this was indeed the status of the Jews in antiquity, one need not wonder 160 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 at the "virulent anti-Jewish feeling of the masses." One ought not to be astonished by this interpretation, for the author's major source, Josephus, was such a person, a retired Jewish general living off imperial Roman bounty. Further, writing of the prejudice of the intellectuals, he concludes: "In short, the vertical alliance ofJews and rulers was unaffected by the writings or speeches of philosophers or rhetoricians or poets or satirists." To all this one must ask, who then were the proselytes and "sympathizers" in great numbers attracted to Judaism, of whom Feldman writes? Who were those attracted by Jewish antiquity, virtues, and ideal leader? Members of the ruling class? There is, however, more involved than this. The devil is in the details. On page 13 we read: "But Diodorus (34.5.1), Tacitus (Histories 5.8.2), and 2 Maccabees indicate that Antiochus . . . attempted to abolish Jewish observance completely, thereby ensuring substantial resistance.... Many Jews resisted Antiochus' decrees even at the cost of martyrdom." On page 18 we are told: "Ostensibly, the Maccabean revolt against the Syrian Greeks was a reaction against the attempt of the latter to enforce Hellenization on the Jews. Yet Antiochus Epiphanes had not the slightest interest, any more than his father had had, in stamping out local culture as such, let alone in proselytizing for Hellenism, a role that, ab initio, was alien to the Greek mind and seems to be a modern invention." In the index under Antiochus IV Epiphanes it is indicated the "motives for anti-Judaism" are found on page 18. But as just noted, the discussion on that page rejects any such idea. Again, on pages 91-92 (referred to in the same index entry) we are told: "The infamous and atypical persecution of the Jews ofJudaea by Antiochus IV...