Sei sulla pagina 1di 4

Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World

(review)

Robert Goldenberg

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 17, Number


3, Spring 1999, pp. 157-159 (Review)

Published by Purdue University Press


DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.1999.0047

For additional information about this article


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/472671/summary

Access provided at 8 May 2019 22:06 GMT from Lunds universitet


General Book Reviews 157

General Book Reviews

Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, by Peter Schafer.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 306 pp. n.p.l.

The subtitle notwithstanding, this volume seeks to examine one particular ancient
"attitude toward the Jews." Professor Schafer examines the circumstances under which
antisemitism arose and studies recent attempts to distinguish this fateful animosity from
other forms of ethnic rivalry and dislike.
Part I of Professor Schafer's study examines the major rubrics of ancient curiosity
about Jews: their alleged expulsion from Egypt, Jewish monotheism, abstention from
pork, Sabbath observance, circumcision, and proselytism. Part II examines two
outbreaks of hostility against the Jews, the destruction in 410 B.C.E. of the Jewish
temple in Elephan~e and the riots in Roman Alexandria that occurred in August of 38
C.E. Part III examines stages in the development of antisemitism in Egypt, then Syria-
Palestine, and finally Rome.
The chapters in Part I depict in great detail the hatred, fascination, revulsion, fear,
and admiration that went into ancient "attitudes toward the Jews." Professor .Schafer
surveys the ancient evidence and modem discussion, often briskly dismissing previous
opinions while taking due nvte of questions which the evidence does not allow us to
answer (e.g., whether Hadrian forbade circumcision before or after Bar Kokhba began
his uprising, indeed whether he did so at all). It is in Part II, however, that Professor
Schafer's own theory of antisemitism begins to emerge.
People from Judah had originally come to Elephantine as a border garrison for the
pharaohs who ruled the country, but by continuing in this role their descendants now
served to uphold foreign rule over the native Egyptians. The stories connected with the
main Jewish festival of Passover naturally irritated Egyptians as well, while the main
Passover rite, the slaughter of a lamb, profoundly offended Egyptian sensibilities,
especially those of Egyptian priests. The priests of Khnub in Elephantine were able to
bring about the destruction of the Jewish temple in that city and prevent its reconstruc-
tion, and the hostility that led to this outcome was from the beginning a fateful
combination of ethnic rivalry, political resentment, and religious abhorrence.
In the environment of Hellenistic Syro-Palestine, the original Egyptian mixture was
strengthened with themes from Greek culture, mainly the idea that Jews are by nature
misanthropic xenophobes, inveterately hostile to outsiders and unavoidably alien when
settled among others. This admixture turned native Egyptian Jew-hatred into a cultural
158 SHOFAR Spring 1999 Vol. 17, No.3

force that could spread throughout the Hellenistic world, but Schafer emphasizes that
even this development fIrst appeared in Ptolemaic Egypt.
Antisemitism gained yet another potent ingredient when it was fused with the
growing concem of Roman aristocrats that ancestral virtues were being subverted by
a flood of Eastem captives: such people were overwhelming the capital with their alien
customs and enticing young Romans to follow them. Of these Oriental invaders, the
Jews were the most alarmirig. Terrified by conversions to Judaism among high-ranking
Roman families, elements in the Roman elite became convinced that Jews were engaged
in a conscious campaign to take over the world through religious proselytism. Jews
were no longer merely dislikable, they now were frightening, and in his very last
paragraph Schafer notes that "this fear was well-founded" (p. 211; his emphasis).
Schafer's claim that antisemitism emerged early in an Egyptian matrix conflicts
with a widely accepted view that Jew-hatred was a reaction to Maccabean aggressive-
ness, "the poisonous fruit of the conflict between Judaism and Hellenism and its result"
(C. Habicht, quoted on p. 178). Schafer lays out his evidence with patience and care,
and he has added a new dimension to the range of possibilities that scholars must now
consider. It is very difficult, however, to determine scientifIcally when an earlier mix
ofrivalry, hostility, and misunderstanding became "antisemitism"; this determination
remains a matter of judgment and semantics.
Schafer is aware of this problem and devotes his final chapter to it. He examines
G. Langmuir's analysis of antisemitism and applauds Langmuir's effort to refute the
notion that ancient Jewry brought this fearsome hatred down on itself, but he remains
unconvinced that Langmuir has persuasively distinguished antisemitism from ordinary
ethnic hostility or accounted for its unmatched fierceness. Schafer also examines a
recent attempt by S. Cohen to address the same issue, and notes that Cohen settles for
a defInition of antisemitism that is essentially a matter ofproportion: "justifIable" hatred
becomes antisemitism when real-world tensions and rivalries can no longer account for
the "scale and severity" of the incidents they are said to have caused. Schafer dismisses
this argument with a rhetorical question: "Doesn't this introduce a dangerous, easily
misunderstood, quantitative element?" (pp. 203-204).
Schafer makes one very important contribution to this evolving discussion. He
readily agrees that Jews were an identifIable bloc, strange and separate and proud of it,
in ancient society. There is no point in denying this, and there is no need to justify it,
because this strangeness was not the real cause of antisemitism in any case. "The only
crucial question is what the Greco-Egyptian and Greek authors made out ofit. ... [I]t
is therefore their attitude which determines anti-Semitism" (p. 210; Schafer's
emphasis). This is a key point: throughout history antisemites have explained their
hatred by pointing to real characteristics of the Jews, but these explanations have always
been after the fact, rationalizations that accounted for nothing. The hatred came fIrst and
General Book Reviews 159

predisposed the Jews' enemies to make more of their flaws and peculiarities than was
strictly necessary.
Schafer has given us a masterly account of the early history of antisemitism, but he
has not really dissipated the mystery of this terrible enmity. He has described the
circumstances in which it first appeared and examined the ingredients out of which it
was originally put together. Why this concoction should have been brewed in the first
place, however, why the Jews should have been its victims, and how the brewmasters
have managed to protect their product from countless attempts to drive it off the market:
these all remain questions to which no convincing answer has yet emerged.
Robert Goldenberg
Program in Judaic Studies
State University of New York
at Stony Brook

Psychiatrie im Nationalsozialismus: Das Philippshospital in Riedstadt (Hessen), by


Idisor J. Kaminer. Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse Verlag, 1996. 390 pp. DM 48.00.

Rudolf Hess, deputy Fuhrer in Germany, once remarked that National Socialism was
applied biology. This viewpoint was responsible not only for the mass murder of Jews
and gypsies, groups defmed as alien races whose mere existence was threatening to
Germany, but also of forced sterilization and killing 'of physically and mentally
defective German individuals. This euthanasia program (T-4) was an integral part of the
Nazi system.
We have now available valuable studies of the German euthanasia program: in
English, most notably Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From
Euthanasia to Final Solution, Benno Muller-Hill, Murderous Science, and G6tz Aly,
Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland. Not only are other studies
of various aspects of this program available in German, but histories of the implementa-
tion of this program in specific mental hospitals have also been published.
The study under consideration, a doctoral dissertation, examines the Philipps-
hospital in Riedstad (Hessen). Following some general discussions of Nazi medical
practices-particularly sterilization and the killing of mentally defective or incurable
patients-the author then, basing himself on the available archival sources of the
hospital, attempts with some measure of success to reconstruct the events that took
place during the Nazi period. It is quite clear that efforts were made by the staff of the
Philippshospital near the end of the war to destroy documents that might prove
incriminating. This has made the reconstruction of some events difficult and in some
cases impossible. Systematic killings of patients did not take place at this hospital as

Potrebbero piacerti anche