Chapter 2: Diaspora and Anti-Semitism

While the Hebrew word galout (exile) was used in a theological perspective and implied an eschatology of uprooting and return, the Greek term diaspora referred to an historical phenomenon: the dispersion of the Jews across the world.

In the beginning, the Jews of Judea and Samaria were chased from Palestine by a conjuration of violence and political constraints. In 722 [B.C.E.], Israel, the Kingdom of the North, fell to the power of Babylon; in 586 [B.C.E.], the Kingdom of Judea succumbed in its turn.

A part of the population submitted to deportation, drawing from its unhappiness the hope of a return under the leadership of a hero chosen by God so as to help his people, sanctified by ordeals.

The realities of the situation, however, had the upper hand over the tortuous designs of Providence. Many exiled Jews — little concerned with regaining their homeland because they were lodged in comfortable places — created communities, practiced their cult, instaurated among them a politics of mutual assistance in which the affluent supported the poorest.

Thus, the first Diaspora began as a voluntary movement of dispersion. It accented itself after the conquest by Alexander, when Palestine — inserted into the Greek world — participated in its intense commercial activity. The Jews thus propagated themselves in regions that were subjected to Ptolemy and the Seleucideans, of whom they were the subjects.

To the communities long since installed in Egypt and Babylon were added those of Syria, Asia Minor, and soon the entire Greco-Roman Empire.

The second Diaspora extended from the Second Century before the Christian era to the beginning of 135 [C.E.], when Hadrian’s crushing of the revolt of Bar Kochba marked the beginning of a third and dramatic exodus. The flame of persecution, revived by the relapses of Judaism that were embodied by the Greco-Roman Christians of the Second Century and the Catholics of the Fourth Century, would consume the Jews all the way to the Twentieth Century.

In the course of the Second Century before the Christian era, the Asmonean dynasty cemented diplomatic relations with Rome, where the Jewish communities were multiplying.

“One would not easily find,” wrote Strabon, who lived from 58(?) to 25(?) B.C.E., “a spot on the inhabited world that hasn’t given asylum to these people and that isn’t mastered by them.” And Agrippa, in a letter to Caligula, wrote: “Jerusalem is the metropolis not only of the country of Judea, but of many others due to the colonies that it has sent out, according to the occasion, in neighboring countries, [including] Egypt, Phenicia, many parts of Asia, as far away as Bythinia, equally in Europe, Thessaly, Beotia and Macedonia.”[25]

As in the majority of the great towns of South Gaul, there were Jews in Lyon, where, mixed with Christians of the New Prophecy, they were the victims of the pogroms of 177.

The statuettes in baked earth that caricatured Jews with circumcised phalluses — which attest to the presence in Treves, around 275, of a quite ancient community — were intended to stir up anti-Semitism.

The Jewish implantations in the towns explains the urban character of Judeo-Christianity and the Hellenized and de-judaicized Christianities that succeded them. Thus the insulting qualification goyim, which designated non-Jews (nonbelievers), would be applied to the anti-Semitic Christians of the Second Century because of the towns’ scorn for the conservatism of the countryside, through the use of terms such as pagani, “peasants,” “hicks,” “bumpkins,” and, in French, pagans. (Without scruple, historians have adopted the scorn that monotheism nourished with respect to polytheism, by speaking of pagans and paganism.)

Among the population of the Roman Empire, Jews constituted 7 to 10 percent of the total, [which was] around six million people, a number that exceeded the number of inhabitants in Judea.

In the First Century of the Christian era, the Jewish colony in Rome numbered 40,000 to 50,000 people; it possessed fifteen synagogues in which there often grew rival sects, Sadduceans, Pharisaians, Essenes, Nazarenes, Ebionites, Naasenes, Sethians and converts to Judaism from all nationalities, a diversity in which the Zealot movement and its terroristic struggle against the Romans would introduce trouble.

For six centuries, the propagation of Judaism appeared to be a form of conquest. In a difference from future epochs, which were headed for a decrease, a very active proselytism multiplied the adepts among the dominant classes as well as in the disadvantaged milieus. Excited by monotheistic intransigence, by incessant nationalistic and extremist revolts, the hostility of the State was accentuated under Tiberias and culminated in the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 and the annihiliation of the Jewish nation in 135.

Nevertheless, four centuries later, the political principle of monotheism — “One God, One State, One Nation” — would seduce Roman power at the end of a long evolution that would see the Jews despoiled of the sacred texts by the Greco-Roman Christianities, which were themselves for the most part excluded from the Roman and Byzantine Churches, whose reign began in Nicaea in 325 [C.E.]

Jewish Proselytism and Anti-Semitism

The Bible of the Septante [the Seventy], the Greek version of the sacred texts, formed the iron lance of Jewish proselytism in the Greco-Roman Empire. It responded to a will for opening to the world of the goyim; Pharisaism expressed it first, before pitting itself against the modernism of certain Judeo-Christian sects that, not content to reject the sacrifices and priests of the Temple (as Essenism did), put into question the hairsplitting rituals of Mosaic law and especially circumcision, which was a major obstacle to conversion.

Jewish orthodoxy wasn’t deceived; it held the Greek translation to be a betrayal of the spirit and the letter [of the law].

With the Bible of the Septante, a civilization dominated by commercial capitalism seized hold of an agrarian civilization, which was walled up in its immobility and its mythical thought. Here began the despoilation of the Jewish nation’s sacred writings. Did not the apologist Justin affirm around 160 that these texts had ceased to belong to the Jews because they were no longer comprehended by them? For the first time, Adonai became Kyrios, the Savior; Joshua was transformed into Jesus; and Messiah became Christos, Christ.

To the extent that Hellenized Judaism distanced itself from the Judean tradition — a tendency that anti-Judean Essenism clearly prepared — Pharisaism, the only orthodox Jewish sect that survived the disaster of 70 [C.E.] — to engage a movement of falling back on the traditional biblical corpus, the Talmud. Attacked from all sides, the Pharisian community took refuge in a defensive attitude; it surrounded itself with dogmatic ramparts, but not without opening the great window of Kabbalah for the cosmic visions of Gnosticism.

Hellenized Judaism was easily rooted in Samaria, where the old refusal of YHWH still smoldered. From the Kingdom of the North would radiate the Baptist Dunstan/Dosithee, Nazorism, Essenism, and the philosophy of Simon, “father of all heresies.”

Alexandria, the hot-bed of erudition and curious spirits, possessed an important Jewish colony. Greek anti-Semitism occasionally released upon it ferocious pogroms. It was a crucible in which mixed and clashed the most diverse opinions. Here there gushed — alongside a powerful Hermetic current that brewed the mysteries of Egypt — apologetic texts such as the Letter from Atistee, the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, Flavius Joseph’s Against Apius, the work of Philo (who lived around 20 [B.C.E.] to 50 [C.E.]), in which Judaic faith absorbed Greek wisdom and was absorbed by it.

Even if Philo kept to the heart of Jerusalem, a metropolis and spiritual homeland, his conception and language were Greek. Philosopher of the Diaspora, he threw the seeds of Judaism on the foreign soils where there abounded the stones of anti-Semitism and where anti-Judean Essenism had already been confused with Judeo-Christianity.

From the beginning of the First Century, the idea of a renewed and Mosaic-law-renewing Judaism coincided with the dynamism of a market in full expansion, where the racketeering of the Diaspora assisted and by turns competed with the places of Greek and Roman business.

“For a merchant,” Josy Eisenberg wrote, “to be or become Jewish is the assurance of easily establishing business relations in a number of countries, to benefit from a warm welcome and great hospitality. For the poor, belonging to Judaism can represent the guarantee of assistance and regular aid [...] There are in Alexandria shipowners and bankers of great Jewish fortunes. But to consider the entirety of the Empire, the Jewish population includes a majority of people of small means. There are many slaves among them. To Rome, neither the Trastevere nieghborhood, nor those of the Capere Port and Subure can pass for distinguished. What one most often reproaches the Jews for is not being sewn from gold, but rather being in tatters and sordid.”[26]

Around the beginning of the Third Century, the historian Dion Cassius (155–235 [C.E.]) asked himself about the phenomenon of Jewish expansion: “From whence comes this denomination? I do not know; but it comes from all men, even those issued from other peoples, who follow the law of the Jews. This species even exists among the Romans. Many times repressed, they have always mended their forces and ended up conquering the right to freely practice their customs.” For Dion Cassius — and this two hundred years after the supposed birth of Christianity — no notable difference existed between Pharisaians and Marcionite Christians, Christians of the New Prophecy, Valentinian Christians, Naasseans, Sethians and Gnostics of all types.

The discredit that attached to many of the ancient and modern cults that were practiced in the Empire, the honors rendered to God as well as to despots, which offered the spectacle of the Jews’ degeneration and flavored their bloody caprices with their usual powerlessness to impose a politics coherent with the State, a derision contrasting with the protestations of austerity and patriotic grandeur — all [of this] incited nostalgia for a unity in which religious faith seconded the fervor of the citizenry, the charm of mystery allied with calculating reason, thereby ordering a new marriage of the heavens and earth, uniting audacious and mercantile modernity with the prudent virtues of agrarian conservatism.

Jewish monotheism exactly proposed the principle of a unity founded on a community practice dominated by solidarity. The businessmen as well as the poor classes of the towns discovered a communal interest. The high birth-rate — justified by the fact that not having children “reduces the image of God” — , after having favored emigration from Palestine, worked in favor of the rapid demographic growth of the Jewish colonies, of which the social and economic power grew.

“Even in the masses,” noted Flavius Joseph in the First Century, “there had long been a vivid desire for our religion, and there isn’t a single Greek or barbarian town into which has not penetrated the practice of the Seventh Day [the Sabbath], during which one rests and observes fasting and the usage of candles, and many of our alimentary prescriptions.”[27]

It is, nevertheless, on the reef of complex rituals that the proselytism of the Jews would run aground. Their intransigence proceeded from a conservatism that was irreconciliable with the Greco-Roman mindset. The history of Judeo-Christian and early Christian sects articulated itself according to the incessant visions of Jewish monotheism and Messianism, as dictated by the nostalgia for a State-ified God, strong with obedience from the nations.

Attractive due to its unitary doctrine, the Jewish religion irritated [others] by its intolerance and fanaticism. The destruction of the monuments of other cults in the name of YHWH’s disapproval of idolatry stirred up scandal and the racial hatred of the pogroms.

From the First Century onwards, everywhere that Jewish communities installed themselves, incidents and conflicts did not delay in exploding.

In 19 [C.E.], Tiberias, who reigned from 14 to 38, took as pretext the troubles in Rome caused by “three extravagant devoted Jews and a great woman converted to Judaism” to prohibit the Judaic cult in Rome and the entirety of Italy. Following Mommsen, “those who did not consent to publicly repudiate their faith and throw the sacred vessels into the fire were chased from Italy, unless one did not judge them suitable for military service; they were thus incorporated into the disciplined companies, but their religious scruples led a great number of them [to be brought] before the counsels of war.”[28]

Rome, which had up to 19 observed with respect to Judaism the tolerance applied to other religions, suddenly used anti-Semitism as a distraction from the real or imaginary menace that the frequency of Palestinian rebellions propagated in the Latium [central Italy]. Without doubt, the repression inaugurated by Tiberias was not foreign to the decision of the evangelical novelists to situate the historical existence of Jesus under his reign.

When Gaius, Tiberias’ successor, stirred up the great pogrom in Alexandria in 38, Philo did not hesitate in his In Flaccum to castigate the passivity of Flaccus and Roman power, which had favored the Greek party, superior in numbers to the Jews.

In a letter dated 41, Emperor Claudius threatened the Jews of Alexandria with chastisement if they did not renounce their subversive schemes. He accused them of “fomenting a communal nuisance to the entire universe.”

In 49, this same Claudius chased the Jews from Rome because they had provoked trouble there. In 64, taking the burning of Rome as a pretext, Nero organized a pogrom that official Catholic history would later present as the first persecution of the Christians.

Hatred for the Jews grew after the insurrection in Palestine, which ended the long guerrilla warfare of the Zealots. “In the neighboring Greek towns — Damascus, Cesarea, Askelon, Skytopolis, Nippos and Gadava — the Greeks massacred the Jews. In Damascus 10,500 to 18,000 Jews were put to death.”[29]

Other pogroms would take place in Alexandria, Antiochus and Pella. All of the persecutions of the First Century, which the Catholics registered in their martyrologies with a view towards accrediting their long history, were in fact pogroms. The refusal to “sacrifice to the idols,” so frequently recalled in hagiographical legends, belonged properly to Jewish religious obstinacy. By 38, Philo of Alexandria would intercede with the Emperor in favor of the Jews who refused to render homage to his statue. Up to the Third Century, the catacombs would serve as the sepulcher and refuge of the Jews and several truly Naasean Gnostics, whom the imperial power hemmed in without distinction.