A favorite adjective in describing the Jews was “superstitious.” Strangely enough, another, perhaps even more general, was “irreligious.” The Jews were frequently stigmatized as ??e??, 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 seemed 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 surrounding 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 divinity. The term itself, ??e??, 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 ?e?f???? and ?e??s??, i.e. what the gods hate and what the gods love. So the various Greek adjectives compounded with “a privative,” a??fe???, “useless,” ??????, “thoughtless,” are really used in a positive sense contrary to that of the positive adjective. So a??fe??? is rather “harmful” than merely “useless”; ?????? is “ill-advised”; etc. The word ??e?? would, by that analogy, rather denote one that opposed certain gods than one who denied them. A man might be ??e?? 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 ??e?? 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) ??e?tat?? ?a? pa??????tat??, “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. ??e??, ?f???? ????a?, 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; ??e?? ?a? ?s?????p??, he calls the Jews, “hateful to gods and men,” and other rhetoricians follow suit. As a term of abuse, ??e?? 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 ??e??. 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 ??e?? 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 (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 that 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 different 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 judge 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. Undoubtedly possessed of fluency and charm as a speaker, he was a most thoroughgoing charlatan, a noisy pedant wholly devoid of real critical skill. He boasted of magical power, through which he was enabled to converse with the shade of Homer. His vanity prompted the most ludicrous displays of arrogance. Tiberius Caesar dubbed him the cymbalum mundi, “the tom-tom of the world,” a characterization that seems to have been generally accepted.^[222]

In the appeal of the Jewish residents of Alexandria against the maladministration of the prefect Flaccus, argued before the emperor, he represented the Alexandrian community, whose acts were the basis of the charge made by the Jews. As such he no doubt delivered an anti-Jewish invective, and it is at least likely that this speech formed the substance of his book on the subject, just as the defense of the Jews and the attack upon Flaccus are contained in the two extensive fragments of Philo, the Legatio ad Gaium, and the In Flaccum.

It has been doubted whether he really wrote such a book, although there are express statements that he did. It is true enough that those who assert it may easily have been misled by the fact that certain books of his History of Egypt may have contained these anti-Jewish passages or most of them. None the less, the fact that he must have prepared a set speech in the case mentioned, coupled with the statements of Clemens of Alexandria and Julius Africanus, renders the older view the more probable.^[223] There would of course be nothing strange if the books of the History of Egypt and a special monograph contained essentially the same material.

As to other similar pamphlets, we hear of a pe?? ???da??? by a certain Nicarchus, son of Ammonius, which may have had an “Egyptian” bias, in that Moses is said to have been afflicted with white scales upon his body—an assertion that seems to be a revamping of Manetho’s “leprous outcasts.” But the title of the book does not point to a wholly hostile attitude, nor does the passage referred to necessarily imply such an attitude.^[224]

Taking all these passages together, from Manetho to Apion, one thing must be evident: Manetho himself, Mnaseas, Agatharchidas, Chaeremo, Lysimachus, Apion, are either Egyptians or are trained in Alexandria, and represent the Egyptian side of a bitter racial strife, as intense and lasting as was generally the case when the same community contained several compact groups of different political rights and privileges.

The conditions of the population of Alexandria have been previously discussed. It was the great market center of the East, and as such of the Mediterranean world, since the commercial and intellectual hegemony was always east of the Aegean Sea. The population had been a mixed one since its foundation. The warped notions that have often been held of the position of the Jews there are due to a failure to realize concretely how such a city would be likely to grow. The Greeks and Macedonians that were originally settled there undoubtedly constituted a real aristocracy, and made that attitude very thoroughly felt. One thing further is clear, that the native Egyptians, who probably formed the mass of the populace, looked upon these Greeks as they did upon all foreigners, with intense dislike. We have a document in which a Greek suitor in court impugns the credibility of Egyptian testimony against him because of the well-known hatred Egyptians bear toward Greeks.^[225]

Egyptian animosity toward Jews had been of longer standing simply because intercourse in close proximity was much older. Further, the Jewish colonies from early Persian times had always represented the foreign master. It was as natural, therefore, for this animosity to express itself in street-conflicts in Alexandria as for anti-Greek feeling to be manifested there. Those modern investigators who have confidently asserted that Alexandrian “anti-Semitism” was of Greek origin and leadership have permitted the rattle of the cymbalum mundi to confuse their minds. For it is Apion and Apion alone that makes the claim that the Jews are especially embittered against Greeks, and seeks to create a general Greek feeling against them. His motives are too apparent to need comment, and there is no evidence whatever that he was successful.

Further, it is the Egyptians Manetho and Apion whose tirades have a fiercely personal coloring. The Greek Alexandrians make their anti-Jewish polemics on the basis of general theories, and particularly lay stress on what was to them the perfectly irrational separatism which the Jews had made a part of their religion. As has been frequently shown, the relatively small fragments of these writers do not enable us to say how far this Jewish characteristic is used to point a moral, much as the modern clergy takes chauvinistic commonplaces to illustrate the evil results of doctrines they are attacking.

In the case of two Greeks, Posidonius of Apamea in Syria, and Molo, no Egyptian influence can be shown. Both were among the most influential men of their time. Molo’s career and importance have been briefly sketched. To Posidonius must be assigned a still more powerful intellectual influence over his generation and those that followed.^[226] The leader of the Stoic school or, as it may well be called, sect, he so reorganized its teaching that the Stoa became nothing else than the dominant faith among cultivated men, a situation perhaps paralleled by Confucianism in China, which is also an ethical philosophy that finds it possible to dwell on terms of comity with various forms of cruder popular belief.

What Molo’s philosophic affiliations were is not easy to determine. The Stoics were nearer than most other schools to rhetoricians and grammarians, but many men of these professions acknowledged allegiance to the Academy, to Epicureanism, or even to the revived Pythagoreanism of the first century B.C.E. Of the extensive writings of the Rhodian rhetorician there is not enough left to give even a probable answer.

But most philosophic sects laid stress on the universality of their teachings, and were marked by an intense intellectual rationalism. The crude psychology of those days made the formation of categories a simple thing. Thinkers could scarcely be expected to admit that inherited instincts could qualify the truth of a philosophic dogma. More particularly, the philosophic movements were powerful solvents of nationalism. Even the distinction between Greek and barbarian did not exist in theory for them.^[227] The notion of the state and the maintenance of its ancestral rites became for them a meaningless but innocuous form, which men of common sense would not despise, but to which one could attach no great importance.

Face to face with congregations like those of the Jews, which enforced their separation by stringent religious prohibitions, the Stoics more than others found their opposition roused. More than others, because many Stoics adopted from the Cynical school the methods of the diatribe, the popular sermon, and, indeed, made an active attempt to carry the universality of their principles into practice. And the Stoics, more than others, would find the height of irrationality in the stubborn insistence on forms for which only an historical justification could be found.

A highly interesting document, which gives a certain phase of the controversy, or perhaps even fragments of an actual controversy, between the general philosophic and the Jewish doctrine, has come down to us in the tract known as the Fourth Book of Maccabees. The author announces his purpose of setting forth a most philosophic thesis, to wit, whether the pious reason is sovereign over the passions. The philosophic argument, which fills the first three chapters, is Stoic in form and substance. Then, to illustrate his point, he cites certain vaguely remembered stories of II Maccabees, which he expands into highly detailed dramatic forms. In the mouth of Antiochus Epiphanes are placed the stock philosophic arguments against the Jews, which are triumphantly refuted by the aged Eleazar and the seven sons of Hannah.

So we hear Epiphanes reasoning with Eleazar and urging him to partake of swine’s flesh (IV Macc. v. 8 seq.):

For it is obviously a senseless proceeding to refrain from enjoying those pleasures of life which are free from shame: it is even wicked to deprive oneself of the bounties of nature. And it seems to me that your conduct will be still more senseless, if you provoke my anger because of your zeal for some fancied principle. Why do you not rid your mind of the silly doctrine of your people? Discard that stupidity which you call reason. Adopt a form of thought that suits your age, and let your philosophic principle be one that actually serves you.... Further consider this: If in the Deity you adore there is really a power that oversees our deeds, it will grant you full pardon for all transgressions which you have been forced to commit.

To a Greek, and no doubt to many modern men, the reasoning is conclusive. It presents the Greek point of view very well indeed, and is doubtless the epitome of many conversations and even formal disputes in which these matters were discussed between Greek and Jew. And just as the argument of Epiphanes seems strangely modern in its appeal to common sense and expediency, so the answer of Eleazar rings with a lofty idealism that is both modern and ancient:

We, whose state has been established by God, cannot admit that any force is more powerful than that of the Law. Even if, as you assume, our Law were not divine, yet, since we suppose that it is, we durst not set it aside without gross impiety.

Eleazar then proceeds to elaborate upon the Stoic paradox that the slightest and the greatest transgressions are equally sinful;^[228] and that in so far as abstention is a form of self-control, it is an admirable and not a contemptible act. After a detailed account of the hideous sufferings heroically endured by the priest, the author breaks out into a panegyric of him as a maintainer of the Law, in which the fundamental Stoic proposition with which he begins is less prominent than his intense Jewish piety.

For us, however, the prime importance lies in the sharp contrast between the Greek and the Jewish attitude. Upon the philosophically cultured man, the reasoning of Epiphanes could not fail to produce a certain impression. In the case of the seven sons of Hannah, while many elements are repeated (IV Macc. viii. 17 seq.), the writer has in mind the appeal to the flesh, which Hellenism made. “Will you not change your mode of life for that of the Greeks and enjoy your youth to the full?” asks Antiochus (ibid. viii. 8); and that no doubt was the whisper that came to the heart of many a young man, surrounded by the bright and highly colored life of the Hellenic communities in which he dwelt. There is no exchange of vituperation. The denunciations hurled against Antiochus are impersonal, indeed are generic. He is the type of tyrant, another Busiris or Phalaris, a bowelless despot. And the one word which alternates with “senseless” in the mouths of Antiochus and his executioners is “mad.”

The actual events described are of course quite unhistorical. But we do not find here any of the various forms in which racial animosity or personal spleen exhibited itself against the Jews. In spite of the setting, the controversy is, judged by disputation standards, quite decorous. The terms that qualify the Jewish doctrine as “irrational” are almost controversial commonplaces. The martyrs do not resent the epithet. They seem to accept it as the logical inference of the carnal philosophy of their oppressors and claim to be justified by a higher wisdom.

Jewish and Greek life began to touch each other at many points in the six or seven generations that intervened between Alexander and Caesar. Hellenism dominated the political and social culture of the Eastern Mediterranean, although the nationalities it covered were submerged rather than crushed. In Egypt the indigenous culture maintained itself successfully, and forced concessions from the conqueror, which made the Hellenism of that country a thing quite different from that of the other lands within the sphere of Greek influence. The resistance of the Jews also took the form of successful insurrection, and in their case enabled an independent political entity to be constituted.

The dispersal of the Jews was already considerable at this time. It differed from the dispersal of the Syrians in the fact that the bond of union of the Jewish congregations existed in the common cult and the common interest in the fortunes of the mother-country. On the other hand, the Syrians of Rome and of Naples shared nothing except the quickly effaced memory of a common racial origin.^[229]

The propaganda of the Jews was also well under way. Since it was believed that they possessed a mystery, initiation into which gave promise of future beatitude, they were strong rivals of the Greek and Oriental mysteries that made similar claims. It was chiefly among the half-educated or the wholly unlettered that these claims would find quickest belief. However, the Jewish propaganda had also its philosophic side, and competed with the variously organized forms of Greek philosophic thought for the adherence of the intellectually advanced classes as well.

Through the Diaspora and this active propaganda an opposition was invited. In Egypt the opposition was older, because the presence of Jews in Egypt was of considerably earlier date than the period we are considering. The occasions for its display were various, but the underlying cause was in most cases the same. That was the fact of religious separatism, which in any given community was tantamount to lack of patriotism. It does not appear, however, that this opposition found voice generally except in Egypt. Elsewhere racial friction was relatively rare.

The literature of the opposition falls into two classes: first, that which scarcely knows the Jews except as a people of highly peculiar customs, and uses these customs as illustrations of rhetorical theses; and second, that which is inspired by direct animosity, either personal or, in the case of the Egyptians, racial in its character.