The author of Sefer Yosippon (SY), to whom I will refer in this chapter as “Yosippon,”¹ is possibly the only true mediaeval historian to have written on par with the best of modern historiography, at least according to his modern editor David Flusser.²

From the aspect of Hebrew and world literature, Josippon is a classical work, both in its content and in its literary achievements; and there can hardly be found in contemporary European literature a historical book with such outstanding qualities. One of the exceptional qualities of the author of Josippon is his critical approach to the sources, which is based upon a realistic understanding of the forces operating in human history … His realistic world view makes the author of Josippon an excellent historian … As has already been noted, he is a gifted historian, who is aware of his responsibilities and endowed with excellent historical insight.³

Not only does Yosippon examine a number of sources which were available to him but he creates—or recreates—a “sublimely” readable history of the Second Temple period. His main sources are the Hebrew and Latin Bibles, 1 and 2 Maccabees, De excidio Hierosolymitano (DEH), i.e. Pseudo-Hegesippus, and the Latin version of Flavius Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicae, as well as a sprinkling of midrashic texts and Roman rhetoricians and historians. Since his major source (DEH) is a decidedly anti-Jewish critique of the period,⁴ the author of SY reworks his source from a hostile disparagement into a positive nationalistic praise of the Jews who were swept up first in a civil war and then into a fight to a death-struggle with the Romans. Yosippon’s style is biblical and his text is peppered with apt citations that establish the text as clearly modeled on a biblical and midrashic style.

In writing history, the historian becomes part of a continuing history, something separate from received history (though connected to it). As Isaac Asimov put it, “the observer influences the events he observes by the mere act of observing them or by being there to observe them.”⁵ The author of Sefer Yosippon, or whatever the author called his work,⁶ composed a history that he made his own and in turn has become his own name in history.

So much for the obvious. Yosippon had mastered two language traditions, which he used creatively in composing his history of the Second Temple period—namely Hebrew and Latin, a rare combination among the surviving remnants of the first millennium CE.⁷ He had learned both languages in his youth. The Tanakh he will have memorized, since that was the format of his education. He apparently did not study Talmud, since the little evidence that is suggested could well have come from his environment. But who taught him Latin? And when?

Perhaps Yosippon learned Latin in his youth, maybe as preparation for a career as a physician, as David Flusser argued. In any case, Yosippon was sufficiently talented in the late imperial Latin of the later 4th-century authors he uses: Pseudo-Hegesippus, Jerome, Orosius, and others. My argument for his history being an innovative and creative masterpiece rests on style rather than on source analysis, however; namely, his use and expansion of received topoi.

Yosippon’s first chapter is an extended description of 10th century geography and its ethnic inhabitants created, it seems, by the author himself, as Flusser argued; or, as Shulamit Sela and others have countered, this was at least the work of the redactor of the 10th century contribution.⁸ As I have suggested elsewhere, he had access to written as well as oral material for his descriptions of the newly appearing peoples whom he wove into a commentary on the family of nations he found in the Bible (Genesis 10) and Josephus (SY 1 [א]). Nor was he the first, or the last, to contemporize this ancient geographic tradition (note, e.g., Joseph ha-Cohen in the 16th century).⁹ Despite the arguments that Yosippon is not the author of the first chapter’s ethnic geography, the question remains open. Assuming he did write it, he used source materials of variegated media. Talmudists such as Saul Lieberman treated Yosippon as a children’s book and not worthy of study, a theme continued by Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi in his work on history and memory.¹⁰ Ben Zion Wacholder related to me that he first read Yosippon at age six and continued from that point to pursue an understanding of history that perplexed him as a talmudist confronting bereshit,¹¹ a concept that perplexed mediaeval kabbalists such as Ramban.¹² Others, beginning with Rabbenu Gershom Me’or HaGolah and Rashi, recognized and utilized SY for its history in their schools. Scholars like Azariah de Rossi criticized Yosippon, while others since Yehudah ibn Mosqoni and Joseph ha-Cohen revered its lessons. If one were enterprising and had the time, one could assemble two parallel lists of well-known scholars throughout the past millennium, which would illuminate those who were pro and those con vis-à-vis Yosippon.

To return to bereshit, Flusser argued that a date in an internal colophon of the fifteenth-century manuscript attributed to Rabbenu Gershom established 953 as the date of SY’s composition.¹³ Reuben Bonfil already challenged this date in his seminal review of Flusser’s edition.¹⁴ While Flusser responded in strong defense of his dating, scholars still challenge it as a later redactor’s contribution. I have argued that the use of the verb heʿetakti in the colophon in the middle of the text (Ch. 47) has more meanings than one. At that moment in history, it could mean “I copied” and “I wrote” and even “I translated.” In fact, all three meanings appear as translations of this polysemic usage in a medieval Hebrew translation of an Arabic version of Alexander’s res gestae recently published by Wout van Bekkum!¹⁵ Indeed, the root meaning of the word is ‘I copied.’ On the other hand, the reference in SY may have been the comment of a mid-10th century copyist—several such copyists are known to us, e.g., Samuel, the envoy of some Hasdai to Italy to copy SY and Zakaria, the Yemenite translator of SY.¹⁶ This colophon could be from an Ashkenazi or a Sephardi scribe who edited an older Romaniote text of Yosippon. As noted, scholarly consensus now opts for an early 10th-century Vorlage.¹⁷

Moving on to the text: my first example of Yosippon’s creativity is his treatment of Genesis 10. He follows his update of this chapter with the genealogy of Roman Jews. This includes a retelling of the rape of the Sabine women, which also recalls the rape of the Shilo women by the remnant of the tribe of Benjamin (which he will have known as a child before he found the parallel story in Livy). Livy places the story at the foundation of Rome dated to 753 BCE while the Book of Judges was edited shortly after the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians in 722.¹⁸ Is Yosippon suggesting that the mixture of tribal blood in Judges resonates with the union of Roman criminals and Sabine chastity? In both cases, the next generations produced warrior nations: Romans and the wild Banu Yamina (= Benjamin) of later Midrash. The point is that he traces one origin of Roman culture to the Israelites, albeit to Esau and an ancestral animosity that destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple. While Flusser suggests that Yosippon’s sources are no longer extant; we might surmise that he rewrote his ancient sources accordingly to his own thesis.

His treatment of women parallels and exceeds contemporary and later medieval interest. Five women emerge as role models in Yosippon, two of whom are midrash-style expansions based on biblical verses, the Maccabean mother of 7 sons (cf. 1 Samuel 2) and the mother who fêted her son (Deut 28:56–57). The latter’s satiric discourse to the rebel leaders—“whereas you sacked my house I was forced to fête this feast”—is a demonstration of the author’s sardonic alliterative style.¹⁹ The others include Tamara queen of the Scythians, whose blood-curdling revenge against Cyrus is possibly metaphoric [Cyrus was identified as a messiah by Isaiah, see below], and Maryami (or Marimi), whose demise reminds me of Mary queen of Scots, both eulogized as beheaded martyrs, and Queen Alexandra, wife of Alexander Yannai, a model of leadership in the author’s encomium “for she did not covet additional territory (היא לא חמדה ארץ אחרת),” contrary to Cleopatra, who coveted Herod’s kingdom and appears as the powerful and seductive ruler of the Ptolemaic kingdom. While the Bible has its roster of female role models, no previous or subsequent Jewish scholar (aside from Josephus), so emphasizes heroic and tragic women, Judith and Shoshanah notwithstanding. And even as Yosippon restores exemplary women to his readers, contemporary Byzantines too had their own exceptional women, e.g., the empresses Irene, Zoe, and Kassia the poet, not to mention Mary, mother of Jesus.²⁰

And what of Herod the paranoid messiah? Falsely (?) accused of killing male toddlers à la Pharaoh in Exodus (1:16), his portrait is a conflation of David and Solomon, the conqueror and the builder, yet also that of a false messiah like that of Yosippon’s contemporary oppressors’ Christos. I admit to a curiosity that has perplexed me since I discovered the sources for the tradition that Herod was considered a messiah. It is no more than a sentence in Greek by Epiphanius and another in tandem by Jerome.²¹ Clearly the tradition was still alive in late antique Palestine, where the latter studied and translated. Such a discovery led me to reinterpret a strange passage in SY.²²

We have the biographies of David in the Books of Samuel and Chronicles in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin Bibles. These are unique in the biblical record and recall the mythological style of the Mycenean traditions of the early Greek heroic families. This approach suggests a relationship between Greek and Hebrew parallel origins.²³ Greek versions of Samuel were available in Jerusalem, Qumran, and Herod’s library in Masada. The biography, indeed panegyric, written by Nicholas of Damascus, Herod’s secretary and confidant, has been preserved, partly rewritten in Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum with parallels in his Antiquitates Judaicae.²⁴

The question is to test whether Nicholas of Damascus constructed his sycophantic panegyric of Herod using the model of David in the biblical texts available to him. We know Nicholas was a competent biographer. His portrait of Augustus was read in later Byzantine times and we have his Herod in Josephus. So, what are the parallels to David? There are perhaps five at least that we should note as a basis for our argument. First: David and Herod both died at 70, a coincidence to be sure disregarding the disease that destroyed Herod. Second: both had extraordinary difficulties within their large families, both over the question of inheritance of the title of king and the murder of rivals by would-be successors, whether worthy or not. Third: both created empires that went beyond the traditional borders of Israelite settlement. Fourth: the Temple. David prepared all the resources for the Temple that Solomon built. Herod, however, succeeded in creating the eighth wonder of the ancient world, at least as the rabbis later praised it. Both temples, of course, paralleled their contemporary architecture. Five: both were considered messiahs in tradition. And perhaps the rhetorical development of the loss of a loved one: David’s Absalom and Herod’s Mariamme, a parallel that stretches the imagination in terms of gender and Greek psychology, but which could be compelling nonetheless.

Yosippon also, in Chapter 57 (נז) on Paulina, satirizes the birth traditions of the latter messiah through his rewriting of DEH’s hint at her scandalous seduction in his allusion to Miriam’s (Mary’s) reputation worthy of a Molière touch.²⁵ Herod, we know, was considered a messiah, albeit crowned by Rome and not by God, and recognized by the Herodian party and no doubt other sycophants. He failed miserably in that role, and died at 70 like David, after trying to commit a sacrificial suicide—a mock Aqedah (see SY 43 [מג]). He attempted to use an Abrahamic ma’akhelet from a priestly allusion לטהר, but this attempted sacrifice was snatched away by a servant rather than by an angel. Yosippon wrote of the vicissitudes of Herod and his failures, most of all his sin against Jerusalem and its holiness despite his admirable Greek Temple complex (the site still worshipped today by Jews and Arabs). A question to consider is whether Yosippon had any notion of Nicholas of Damascus’ massive history, still available at Yosippon’s time of writing in Constantinople and cited in Constantine Porphyrogenitus’ encyclopedia. We know that some Jewish scholars had access to the great royal library in the Blachernai palace in Constantinople.²⁶

It is in the author’s rhetoric that he shows his mastery of biblical style and his innovation. This is how Yosippon, a conservative sympathizer of the Maccabean Revolt, praises in his pithy style the influence of Matityahu, the priestly leader of the Israelites of Modi’in and a faithful representative of the Temple in Jerusalem, the House of God’s Name, now polluted by the revolutionary Hellenists who had bought the priestly tiara from Antiochus IV. “Enough of words, there is naught else than prayer and fighting. Let us strengthen ourselves and die fighting, and we shall not die as sheep led to slaughter!” This phrase, unique to the author, has a long and influential history during the following millennium. It is the author’s own creation and is a conflation of two biblical verses (Isa 53:7 and Ps 44:23), a biblical literary technique also practiced by contemporary Greek scholars of Yosippon’s time. It will take nearly a millennium before this call to arms would be pointedly appropriated by Rabbi Haim Berlin of Moscow: in the wake of the 1882 pogroms in Russia, he openly made the distinction between the prayer for martyrs ‘tzon letivḥah’ and Yosippon’s ‘tzon latevaḥ yuval’!²⁷ The latter phrase, with which Rabbi Berlin was no doubt familiar from Yosippon’s rendition of the Hanukkah story, was adjusted by Abba Kovner during WWII to a clarion call to resist the Nazi slaughter of Jews. More likely Kovner got it directly from the popular SY; yet it was well known to Zionists since the early part of the twentieth century. After the Holocaust it became an insulting slur that continues today as a negative phrase in Israel, a rebuke to the slaughtered Jews of the diaspora and a polemic against the Diaspora.²⁸

Yosippon continued to draw phrases from the Bible to enhance his style, as in Matityahu’s directive to his son Yehudah to stir up the Israelites to fight, citing 1 Kgs 12:16 and 2 Chr 10:16. Flusser carefully cites the biblical sources throughout his notes in the critical edition for readers. Strangely, he does not comment on the “sheep to slaughter” exhortation of Matityahu, especially odd given the phrase’s prominence in Israeli discourse in the wake of the Shoah.²⁹ Rather, Flusser notes without comment wherever the author generates his own new phrases.

There is one more phrase that Flusser credits to the author but does not discuss. It appears in SY 42 (מב), where Marc Antony writes to Hyrcanus a victory letter after the battle of Philippi, in which the assassins of Julius Caesar had been defeated and killed. He recalls Roman alliances and friendships with the Jewish kingdom and sends an offering to Jerusalem announcing his order to release all Jewish slaves wherever found in areas under his control, “from the sea beyond India to the sea beyond Britain.” What follows is a phrase which was to become a national Jewish blessing in some quarters and in translation is widely recognized as a Galactic salutation. One finds the 6 words throughout Yiddish literature and among Yiddish speakers in partial form: תחיה ותצליח אתם וכל אנשי שלומינו (“Live and prosper, you and all men of our pax (romana);” SY 42 [מב]). Flusser merely notes that this is the author’s addition.³⁰ There is no precedent to the phrase in Anthony’s letter to Hyrcanus in Josephus, nor any hint as to the phrase’s origin in the Bible, save for a brief mention of אנשי שלומך, made by Jeremiah in another context. The whole sentiment belongs purely to the author of SY. Since Flusser most likely never watched Star Trek, he never witnessed Leonard Nemoy in his uniquely defined character of Spock the Vulcan uttering the phrase he coined—‘Live long and prosper’—accompanied by the special hand sign of the Cohen. Yosippon would have been thrilled to note how the two Jewish stars of the program sent his blessing throughout the galaxy (reminiscent of Cleopatra’s two Zaddokite generals mentioned in SY!).

Elsewhere, an interesting innovation is Yosippon’s treatment of the Ḥasidim, the fierce fighters who formed the backbone of the Maccabean army and are mentioned in connection with Herod. He traces their origin to the period of Alexander the Great, a claim for which no other source provides support; but then, not much history has survived (see SY 10 [י]).

Yosippon also critically expanded the stories of Queens Tamara and Mariamme with his literary skills, as well as the tragic story of the woman who ate her son during the famine that consumed much of the population during Titus’ siege of Jerusalem.³¹ The latter story, pictured in many manuscripts of Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum, without doubt fueled the canard of Jewish cannibalism and even the blood libel accusation that still exists today.³² Several examples should suffice here. First is his appropriation of Roman history.

Virgil, as we know, poetically Latinized Homer’s epic of the fall of Troy and panegyrized the family of his Princeps Augustus through Rome’s eponymous founder Aeneas. Yosippon cleverly invented the parallel to Aeneas in the epic of Zepho (צפו), grandson of Esau the arch rival of Israel, who came to represent Rome, later the scourge of Israel.³³ He also Judaized in Zepho the hero of Greek and Roman society Hercules, a major icon in Carolingian society, already a long continuing tradition in Roman art and literature.

Hercules was well represented in Carolingian and Visigothic literature, and the author of Yosippon likely read some of the literature circulating in the Italian peninsula, e.g., Hincmar of Reims, Teodulf’s Contra Iudices, and reports of the Hercules ivories on the throne of Charles the Bald.³⁴ How apt for the Jewish historian to adapt Virgil’s tale of Hercules’ killing of Cacus into the epic success of Zepho, ultimately to become the hero of Rome and also the god Janus.³⁵ Thus Esau/Edom and his descendant became the origin of Israel’s first protector and the ultimate destroyer of Israel.

In his appropriation of Roman history, Yosippon showed himself to belong to the tradition of ancient historiography, as an author following the lead of Flavius Josephus (aka De excidio), his main source and inspiration. At the very beginning of his account of the Jewish War against the Romans Josephus had critiqued the fallacies of Greek historians and philosophers, many of whom long term antisemites, some ethnic, others rhetorical:

Of these, however, some having taken no part in the action, have collected from hearsay casual and contradictory stories which they have then edited in rhetorical style; while others, who witnessed the events, have, either from flattery of the Romans or from hatred of the Jews, misrepresented the facts, their writings exhibiting alternately invective and encomium, but nowhere historical accuracy.³⁶

Josephus no doubt was aware of Thucydides’ comments on truth and accuracy, however much scholars have commented on the former’s apologetic and tendentious arguments. Yosippon, as student and tradent of Josephus, belonged to this same tradition.

Yosippon lived in an age of Christian animosity toward Jews, especially rampant in his major source Pseudo-Hegesippus, and he responded to this reality. Throughout his history Yosippon rewrote De excidio, reversing his polemic into an apology for Israel. A fine illustration of this comes in Carson Bay’s paper on SY 81 (פא) in the present volume. Earlier in his work, he raises the question of truth in his attack on pagan idolatry in the scene of the three riddles concerning the question what is the strongest power (SY 6 [ו]). The account begins with the rise of Zerubavel quickly challenging the power of the autocrat, the king himself. The answers to the three riddles follow: first, the absolute power of the king; second, the king succumbs to wine; finally, the king is defeated by a woman, his concubine who sits on his lap and takes his crown for her head, albeit playfully, while no one else would do so for fear of losing his own. Lastly all three solutions are superseded by Truth, which overcomes everything since that is the essence of the Creator of everything (Pantokrator), or as the Hebrew daily service cleverly conflates: the Lord our God is Truth:אדוני אלוהינו אמת . Yosippon was both innovative and polemical.

Another major innovation of Yosippon is his variant epitome on Masada, which appears first in the shorter of two published endings of the book. It raises the final scene to the level of noble death so characteristic of Greek and Roman memory. Rather than the mutual slaughter of the grieving men, as in Josephus’ “noble death” scene at Jotapata, they first sacrifice their wives and children, then attack the Romans and die fighting, (a parallel to Japanese suicide attacks).³⁷ Josephus’ ending parallels the tradition of ‘noble death’ common among barbarians in the writing of ancient Roman and Greek historians. Yosippon, on the other hand, advocates another tradition of military heroic death as reported in his classical sources.³⁸

Here I make a final tribute to a learned intellectual, steeped in his people’s cultural tradition based on the Hebrew Scriptures, who set out to reclaim his people’s honor through his tale of the Second Temple period. Yosippon was clearly aware of the anti-Jewish polemic of his major sources and alludes to this frequently by his apt use of his biblical references (compare the rhetorical device of ekphrasis and the poetic Hebrew shibutz), which restores his source to a Jewish theme. No longer a saga of a disgraced deicidal people, the story reshaped by Yosippon has become more a plaint for the suffering of Israel in the depths of a civil war and a powerful external enemy.

We know that Yosippon successfully Judaized his sources, which were openly anti-Jewish. This fact was pointed out by Baer and other scholars.³⁹ And indeed, SY’s popularity throughout the last millennium attests to the author’s success. But the question is: how did he do it? He did it done by means of the traditional method he learned from the Scriptures, midrash, and piyyut tradition, namely the use of phrases that resonated for the Hebrew reader of the Scriptures, and that illuminated sacrifice and suffering. And this was the goal of the author: to obviate anti-Jewish themes and deicidal implications and thus create a model of Jewish suffering based on biblical typologies.

…

1948–1949 was an important period in the reestablishment of a Jewish state that fought for its survival against its Arab enemies. Such a struggle was reminiscent of Herod’s victories over Edom and the Nabataeans. Yet, at the end of Herod’s story, Jerusalem was lost to Rome (Edom), the city burnt, its Temple destroyed, its people slaughtered and the survivors enslaved and exiled. How to restore dignity to the victims, against whom Christian authors had for a millennium polemicized, mocking the Jews for their alleged role in the murder of God’s son and pronouncing them sentenced to eternal punishment?

In 1949 Yitzhak Baer, a major historian at the Hebrew University, engaged in a comprehensive comparison of the two major sources for studying SY: Abraham Conat and Yehudah ibn Mosqoni (the last major editions before Flusser’s return to the manuscripts).⁴⁰ Mosqoni’s tome was a massive compilation of sources that had become the standard history of the Second Temple period for Jews for nearly half a millennium.⁴¹ Baer brought into his study a broad array of Latin Stoic sources from Cicero, Macrobius, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius.⁴² He emphasized DEH’s anti-Jewish tropes and its relationship to centuries of Christian propaganda. He showed this by Yosippon’s sage use of rabbinic commentary, using carefully selected quotes from his biblical reservoir to parse out the broader Jewish story in Josephus and DEH. Each phrase pointed to a broader tale in Scripture that reminded the reader that his was a Jewish story of Israel’s glory and tragedy, a constant stimulus to Yosippon’s biblically-educated audience. (While Yosippon’s counter to the Christian polemic of DEH became better known in the latter part of the twentieth century, it has been recently the subject of more recent and more explicit research, such as Carson Bay’s detailed analysis of DEH’s Maria chapter in SY.)⁴³ This traditional style of Jewish scholarship, developed over millennia by Jewish scholars (and paralleled by Greek and Roman scholars, rhetoricians, and poets),⁴⁴ in Yosippon issues in a successful rewrite of the Second Temple period as a biblically structured eulogy to and history of the vicissitudes of Israel’s past, and contemporary life, as God’s people engaged in a (sometimes internecine) fight for survival.