HATRED OF THE JEWS IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

IT is at once curious and painful to perceive how strange was the mixture of curiosity, disgust, and contempt, with which the Jews were regarded in pagan antiquity. From Manetho the Egyptian priest, with whom seems to have originated the calumny that they were a nation of lepers,1 down to Annæus Floras, who brands them as an impious race,2 the references to them in secular literature are a tissue of absurd calumnies or biting sarcasms. Chæremon alludes to them as unclean and polluted;3 Lysimachus, as diseased and unsocial;4 Diodorus Siculus, as addicted to strange rites, and hostile to strangers;5 Apollonius Molon, a Greek rhetorician of the time of Cicero, as “godless and misanthropical;”6 Cicero heaps scorn and indignation upon them in his Oration for the extortionate and tyrannous Flaccus,7 and in that on the consular provinces calls them “a race born for slavery;”8 Horace sneers at their proselytism, and their circumcision, and their Sabbaths;9 Seneca calls them “a most abandoned race;”10 Martial, besides odious allusions to their national rite, pours his contempt on their poverty, their mendicancy, their religion, and their low trade of selling sulphur matches and buying broken glass, and he seems to be the first to originate the slander repeated by Sir Thomas Browne in his “Popular Errors;”11 Quintilian, gentle as he was, yet admits a very bitter remark against the Jews and Moses;12 Lucan alludes to their “uncertain Deity;”13 Petronius Arbiter seems to think, as did many of the ancients, that the Jews did not abhor, but actually worshipped the pig;14 Tacitus, in his History, reproaches them with gross sensuality, low cunning, and strong hatred of all nations but their own, and gives at full length, and with all gravity, the preposterous story about their veneration for the ass.15 In his Annals he speaks with equal horror and equal ignorance of Jews and Christians, and considers that if the thousands of Jews who were deported to Sardinia died it would be a cheap loss;16 Juvenal flings scornful allusion at their squalor, beggary, turbulence, superstition, cheatery, and idleness;17 Celsus abused them as jugglers and vagabonds;18 Ammianus Marcellinus as “disgusting and noisy;”19 Rutilius Numatianus closes the long line of angry slanderers by a burst of abuse, in which he characterises Judæa as a “lying slave–cage.”20 Jeremiah had bidden the Jews to seek the peace of, and to pray for, the city of their captivity, “for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.”21 Better had it been for the ancient Jews if they had lived in the spirit of that large advice. But the Gentiles were well aware that in the Jewish synagogues there was an exception to the dead uniformity of the Romish Empire, and that they and their customs were there treated with open and bitter scorn, which they repaid tenfold.22