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Old October 4th, 2012 #3
Karl Radl
The Epitome of Evil
 
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Default Part III

Part III


Josephus continues his abuse of Apion thus:

'As for Ptolemy Philometer and his wife Cleopatra, they committed their whole kingdom to the Jews, when Onias and Dositheus, both Jews, whose names are laughed at by Apion, were the generals of their whole army. But certainly, instead of reproaching them, he ought to admire their actions, and return them thanks for saving Alexandria, whose citizen he pretends to be; for when these Alexandrians were making war with Cleopatra the queen, and were in danger of being utterly ruined, these Jews brought them to terms of agreement, and freed them from the miseries of a civil war. "But then (says Apion) Onias brought a small army afterwards upon the city at the time when Thorruns the Roman ambassador was there present." Yes, do I venture to say, and that he did rightly and very justly in so doing; for that Ptolemy who was called Physco, upon the death of his brother Philometer, came from Cyrene, and would have ejected Cleopatra as well as her sons out of their kingdom, that he might obtain it for himself unjustly. For this cause then it was that Onias undertook a war against him on Cleopatra's account; nor would he desert that trust the royal family had reposed in him in their distress. Accordingly, God gave a remarkable attestation to his righteous procedure; for when Ptolemy Physco had the presumption to fight against Onias' army, and had caught all the Jews that were in the city of Alexandria, with their children and wives, and exposed them naked and in bonds to his elephants, that they might be trodden upon and destroyed, and when he had made those elephants drunk for that purpose, the event proved contrary to his preparations; for these elephants left the Jews who were exposed to them, and fell violently upon Physco's friends, and slew a great number of them; nay, after this Ptolemy saw a terrible ghost, which prohibited his hurting those men; his very concubine, whom he loved so well, (some call her Ithaca, and others Irene,) making supplication to him, that he would not perpetrate so great a wickedness. So he complied with her request, and repented of what he either had already done, or was about to do; whence it is well known that the Alexandrian Jews do with good reason celebrate this day, on the account that they had thereon been vouchsafed such an evident deliverance from God. However, Apion, the common calumniator of men, has the presumption to accuse the Jews for making this war against Physco, when he ought to have commended them for the same. This man also makes mention of Cleopatra, the last queen of Alexandria, and abuses us, because she was ungrateful to us; whereas he ought to have reproved her, who indulged herself in all kinds of injustice and wicked practices, both with regard to her nearest relations and husbands who had loved her, and, indeed, in general with regard to all the Romans, and those emperors that were her benefactors; who also had her sister Arsinoe slain in a temple, when she had done her no harm: moreover, she had her brother slain by private treachery, and she destroyed the gods of her country and the sepulchres of her progenitors; and while she had received her kingdom from the first Caesar, she had the impudence to rebel against his son and successor and she corrupted Antony with her love-tricks as well as rendered him an enemy to his country, and made him treacherous to his friends, and by these means despoiled some of their royal authority, and forced others in her madness to act wickedly.' (25)

Once again this passage from Josephus at first glance is difficult to extract meaningful information from, but if we but review what it is actually telling us then we can learn something of both Apion's argument and Josephus' attempts to combat it.

Now the ostensible narrative of this passage is to chart the infighting of the Egyptian royal family between the famous Cleopatra, her sister Arsinoe and her brother Ptolemy Physco. In it we learn that the Alexandrians had sided with Physco in that struggle and that two of Cleopatra's principle commanders; Onias and Dositheus, were; according to Josephus, jewish. Further part of Cleopatra's army had been lead north by the jew Onias (after having deserted Ptolemy Physco's service for Cleopatra's) to besiege that city and that Ptolemy Physco having lead his army from Cyrene had defeated Onias and saved the city.

Further we are told that Ptolemy Physco targeted the jews as his enemies; as supporters of Cleopatra (remember Josephus tells us that the jews of Alexandria made a compact with Cleopatra while the rest of the population supported Ptolemy Physco), and lead them from Alexandria to a place to execution where they were stripped naked and were to have their heads crushed by drunken elephants (per the famous Indian method of execution). Now something obviously panicked or enraged the elephants at this point and elephants; as they were notorious for doing when they deployed by the armies of Carthage against Rome, and they rampaged through Ptolemy Physco's army rather than performing the executions as planned.

Josephus naturally interprets this as a miracle wrought by Yahweh to save the jews and further Ptolemy Physco's mistress; Irene, was allegedly much disturbed by a dream she had had; dreams at this time were believed to be one of the principle mediums through which the gods communicated their intentions and wishes to their worshippers and further a nightmare could forewarn a person of disaster on horizon, and she; by her relation to Ptolemy Physco, managed to persuade him to commute the death sentence of the jews. Josephus does not say precisely what Ptolemy Physco did with the jews afterwards, but it may reasonably suggested that he probably heavily fined them or confined himself to just executing the open partisans of Cleopatra rather than the whole jewish community as originally intended.

Now the reader may notice a similarity between this tale that Josephus tells and the Book of Esther as in it a gallows is erected by non-jewish minister Haman to kill the jews of Persia; lead by Mordechai, and the Persian king; at the insistence of his jewish mistress Esther, hangs Haman on those gallows and the jews massacre thousands of anti-jewish Persians in open reprisal.

If we compare this biblical archetype to the story that Josephus is peddling we can see that it fits it quite closely with Ptolemy Physco's (Haman's) plan to execute Onias (Mordechai) and the jews of Alexandria (Persia) is stayed at the point of execution and the intervention of Ptolemy Physco's mistress Irene (Esther), which then saves the jews from execution and kills many of the prosecutors of the jews by the means of execution they had set up for the jews in the form of the elephants (Haman's gallows). The execution of Ptolemy Physco is then performed by the ruler of Egypt (the Persian king) Cleopatra some years later.

As we can see while the story line is not exactly the same it does closely mirror the archetype laid out by the book of Esther. The parallel is made even more obvious when Josephus tells us that down to the day he wrote the jews of Alexandria celebrate a religious festival to honour this deliverance and the execution of their enemies, which of course can be taken as allusion to a form of the Purim festival that is celebrated to mark the jewish victory of Haman in Persia.

This intellectual convergence tells us two things.

Firstly that the story which Josephus is spinning about the episode with the jews of Alexandria is very likely contrived out of thin air by him; as he cites no actual sources for it, in order to give him an avenue to attack Apion's comment about the jews of Alexandria betraying the city to its enemies in this conflict.

Secondly that Josephus was a pious fraudster as he is using jewish religious stories from a completely different era and transliterating them into a time closer to his own as 'historical fact' in order to cover up and defend the behaviour of the jews of Alexandria.

We can see what Josephus is up to when we note that he doesn't deny the power of the jews in Egypt and in fact goes as far as to openly state the jews were integral to Cleopatra's campaign of succession as well as later noting that they were key supporters of the tyranny of Julius Caesar, (26) which is also confirmed by Suetonius (27) and suggested by the conduct of his nephew Augustus (or Octavian). (28)

This tells us that what I have termed the 'Ancient Israel Lobby' may have been in significant operation as early as the later years of the Roman Republic and that it may have learned its craft in Egyptian power politics and migrated; with the gradual shift in the balance of power in the Mediterranean, to Rome.

Apion seems to have argued something like this as Josephus clearly tells us that Apion charged that the jews worked in the interests of pointless factionalism at the Egyptian royal court and that as such they supported the weakest claim; that of Cleopatra, in the hope of causing the maximum amount of chaos and dissension in Egypt forcing both factions to increasingly rely upon them as mediators and leaders; which Josephus also explicitly states, and thus place them in a powerful position to exert influence upon Egyptian policy-making for their own benefit.

This is further illustrated by Josephus' assertion that Apion; correctly in his view, argued that the jews then betrayed Cleopatra when it suited them causing her ire to fall upon them as well. This nicely demonstrates that the jews did not 'believe' per se in any particular faction and were not engaging in the normal run-of-the-mill political factionalism; which dominates most societies and governmental systems, but rather were deliberately manipulating the political situation to their perceived benefit and trying; by supporting the weaker faction at any given time, to prolong the civil war and maximize their political and economic gain from it.

That Apion argued this seems all the more likely once we recall that Josephus tells us that Apion argued that the jews were a fifth column inside Alexandria and Egypt and worked not its interests, but rather their own and followed the commands and dictates of their religious leaders who were still; at this time, based in Jerusalem, but who had local representatives in Alexandria.

So thus we can see that Apion was arguing that the jews were exerting a disproportionate amount of political and social influence in relation to their numbers in the Egyptian kingdom and that further they were not interested in the welfare of the Egyptians or Greeks who lived there, but only in the welfare and furtherance of jews and international jewish interests.

Now before we leave this section of Josephus' text we have one more point that needs to be brought in Josephus' contradictory argument against Apion, which helps indicate the desperation of this jewish religious fanatic in his attacks on the anti-jewish intellectual school of thought emanating from Alexandria. This is to be found in what precisely Josephus says about Apion's argument that the jews worked against Ptolemy Physco and supported Cleopatra and then what he says about the jewish involvement with Cleopatra.

Now Josephus snorts in reply to Apion that the Greeks of Alexandria should be commending the jews for supporting Cleopatra as Ptolemy Physco was; due to the story of the miraculous escape of the jews from execution at his hands, the worst kind of tyrant (suggesting that the Greeks of Alexandria supported tyranny rather democracy, which is a snide and fairly vicious political dig at them).

Josephus then moves on to Cleopatra and again snorts derisively at Apion's contention about how the jews then proceeded to work against Cleopatra and she; understandably, became irate in regards to their activities and took unspecified actions against them in her kingdom. Josephus proceeds to claim that once again Apion should commend the jews as Cleopatra; per the Roman political propaganda about her put out later by Augustus, had deceived Anthony by her love-tricks (much like the goddess Circe tried to do with Homer's Machiavellian hero Odysseus in 'The Odyssey') and was an example of the listless and unmanly decadence of the East.

Now the reader will quickly notice that Josephus is trying to have his cake and eat it here as he suggests that the jews supported the tyrannical 'temptress of the East' Cleopatra against another Egyptian tyrant Ptolemy Physco and this should be to their credit, but then as soon as Ptolemy Physco had been defeated the jews turned on Cleopatra as well.

Now this clearly means that the jews supported tyranny as long as they felt it was in their interest to do so and not; as Josephus would have it, that the jews were supporters of democratic ideas (which Josephus; we should remember, falsely believed Aristotle had gleaned from a study of the jews). Further the jews can and should be seen here; as I have previously argued, as supporting the less powerful faction in a civil war in order to prolong that civil war and thus place themselves in the most favourable political and economic situation as; essentially, king-makers.

Josephus is clearly trying to nitpick his way out of a blind alley into which Apion's argument has forced him and in doing so he cannot escape without taking some intellectual damage. His method of doing this is simply to try to use the bête noire of Greek and Roman political theory; the concept of tyranny, to suggest that the jews fought against Eastern tyrants (i.e. those Greeks and Romans commonly believed were manifestly decadent and despotic in equal measure), but in doing so he tacitly concedes that the jews had sided with the tyranny of one ruler against the tyranny of another (i.e. they clearly were not actually opposed to the concept of tyranny as the Greeks and Romans were).

To do this he tries to maximise the revulsion of his Greek and Roman audience with the contrived story based on the Esther literary archetype to illustrate the Eastern despotism of Ptolemy Physco, while he quickly glosses over the Eastern despotism of Cleopatra only stopping to mention the widely-accepted political slanders laid at her door by Augustan political propaganda before moving on to Julius Caesar's philo-Semitic policy-making.

Thus we can see both that Josephus is truly the ancient archetype for the modern Zionist propagandist as a fanatical and often highly contradictory partisan of the jews and that Apion was able to confound even so able an opponent as Josephus into making very damaging admissions when the latter tried to counter the anti-jewish intellectual school of thought that emanated from Alexandria.

Josephus continues thus:

'And if Germanicus was not able to make a distribution of corn to all the inhabitants of Alexandria, that only shows what a barren time it was, and how great a want there was then of corn, but tends nothing to the accusation of the Jews; for what all the emperors have thought of the Alexandrian Jews is well known, for this distribution of wheat was no otherwise omitted with regard to the Jews, than it was with regard to the other inhabitants of Alexandria. But they still were desirous to preserve what the kings had formerly entrusted to their care, I mean the custody of the river; nor did those kings think them unworthy of having the entire custody thereof, upon all occasions.' (29)

Now here we can see another of Josephus' rhetorical tactics on graphic display in so far as he seeks to imply that because Germanicus; the brother of Tiberius and stepson of Augustus, did not only distribute corn to the Greeks, Egyptians and Romans of Alexandria, but to the jews as well. This means that the jews could not have been a fifth column; as Apion argues they are, as if they were or were judged by Germanicus in any way to disloyal to the Empire then they would have not been allocated corn by him.

This argument is obviously fallacious as it presupposes the superior judgement of Germanicus and that he could not have made a mistake; being unfamiliar with the situation in Alexandria, or could have decided to allocate corn evenly to Roman subjects irrespective of their status in order o prevent any potential revolts caused by food shortages (i.e. a reason external to the preponderance or lack of virtue among the jews).

However the reason Josephus makes this claim is of interest to us in so far as it clearly indicates that he was having an extraordinary amount of difficulty in rebutting the argument that Apion had made against the jews in relation to their being a fifth column in every empire in which they have resided. In making his rhetorical counter using Germanicus Josephus is once trying to use Roman historical prejudices and common beliefs to his intellectual advantage in order to make up for the massive intellectual disadvantage he is facing in the lack of evidence he has to rebut the actual arguments of Apion and the anti-jewish intellectual school of thought emanating from Alexandria.

Germanicus; for those unacquainted with Roman history, was largely regarded as the superior brother of the two in relation to Tiberius and was held to embody the virtues that Tiberius was held to have lacked and while the latter was held to be a tyrant: the former was held to be a true Roman 'man of people' so-to-speak.

In essence it is rather like Josephus' claims about Aristotle in so far as its intention is that whether true or not: it would suggest to his contemporary Greek and Roman readership that the jews were a virtuous and much maligned people who had only been prosecuted by tyrants and those lacking in virtue. And that as such the jews were the direct or indirect source of all; or at least much, of what was good in the world and thus should be treated as social equals and religious betters.


References


(25) Joseph. Cont. Ap. 2:5
(26) Ibid.
(27) Suet. Jul. 84
(28) Harry Leon, 1960, 'The Jews of Ancient Rome', 1st Edition, Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia, pp. 9-10
(29) Joseph. Cont. Ap. 2:5

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...-part-iii.html
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