Daniel R. Schwartz Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich

# Daniel R. Schwartz Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich

Seven Studies

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Cover image: Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, XI (1870), p. 406, with marginal note, "gut gelogen!" (well lied!) by Heinrich von Treitschke. Image courtesy of the SUB Göttingen, where the volume's shelfmark is 8 H E UN 122/33:11. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck

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Dedicated to the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at the outset of its second century

## Foreword

A good number of scholars of modern German-Jewish history have devoted attention to works of history written by German Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and those few scholars who have specialized in the study of such works of historiography have, addressing them both broadly and deeply, contextualized and interpreted them within modern Jewish and German history.<sup>1</sup> The present volume, in contrast, is offered by an encroacher, who hopes, in return for having had the fun of dabbling in others' fields, and the pleasure of learning from them, to offer them some circumscribed case-studies that they might find interesting and useful.

My own field is the philologically-oriented study of Jewish history and historiography in Greco-Roman antiquity. Usually I work on materials that were written, mostly in Greek, some two thousand years ago. Often, however, my work naturally brings me to read what has been written on the same subjects and sources by earlier scholars—among whom German-Jewish scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were prominent. Apart from the introductory essay, the studies collected in this volume all began incidentally in the course of such reading, when my curiosity was piqued by something odd, no matter how picayune, in the text of one of their publications on antiquity. What generated a superficial comma in Heinrich Graetz's description of Josephus in the 1878 edition of his Geschichte der Juden (Ch. 2)? Why, after skipping a certain Josephan story in the first two editions of his work, would Graetz report it in the last three? And what made him change the characterization of some massacres as Racenkampf, in his first three editions, into Religionskampf in the next two (Ch. 3)? Who was the author of a nasty 1871 review of Graetz signed only by initials, M. L., and why would two frighteningly gründlich German scholars both misspell, the same way, the title of a certain journal (Ch. 4)? What engendered the chaos in the numbering and paragraphing of the chapters of an important 1928 article by Elias Bickermann on the Books of Maccabees (Ch. 5)? What lies behind Isaak Heinemann's use of a neologism (Gleichschaltung) in his characterization of Antiochus IV's persecution of the

The major general works include: Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994); Nils H. Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Studies in German Jewish Cultural History and Literature; Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2005); Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives (ed. A. Gotzmann and C. Wiese; Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Michael Brenner, Propheten der Vergangenen: Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 2006; English: Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History [Princeton: Princton University Press, 2010]).

Jews (Ch. 6)? And why in the world did Abraham Schalit, writing about Josephus in Hebrew in 1943/44, refer his readers to a "forthcoming" article in German that never appeared, without even mentioning a detailed study that he had already published, in Hebrew, on the very same topic, ten years earlier (Ch. 7)?!

That is, these studies began as detective projects apropos of some seemingly petty textual issue. I undertook these projects on the assumption that such issues, be they mistakes or misformulations, omissions or additions, should not lightly be dismissed as flukes—the result of random inattention, "typos," or the like. Rather, since they are products of human activity, in a context in which the human mind is supposed to be very awake and engaged, our first working hypothesis should be that they resulted from some intended action, whether by an author, an editor, or a printer—and if the result was a text that is less than smooth and consistent, that is the natural result of what every writer knows, namely, that it is very difficult to change an extant manuscript without leaving loose ends or rough edges. Indeed, it is usually such inconcinnities that alert us to the fact that the text has been revised, and thus raise the question, why that was done. The second and third working hypotheses are that the relevant intention might be accessible to the historian and might be interesting.

True, people, including historians, are not machines, and editing is not mathematics; it is quite usual that an author or editor with something on his or her mind will intervene for that reason at one point in the text but fail to do so at another, although the issue there is the same. That does not vitiate the validity of our observation, and interpretation, of changes that were made. Thus, for example, if Graetz used "race" of the Jews in his early editions but eliminated it in a prominent context in his 1888 edition, that fact begs for an explanation despite the fact that "race" remained here or there, in less prominent contexts, in his 1888 edition. Similarly (for another example), if Bickermann, in revising an early draft, reflected in one section of it a newfound insight into the Second Book of Maccabees, the fact that he did not similarly revise another passage, where the same revision would have been just as apposite, does not divest the revision he did make of its significance as a pointer to the development of his thought. Rather, the resultant contradiction, or tension, between the two passages serves as a pointer to the fact that the text has been revised.

This type of work is typical of much that is usual in the study of ancient and medieval history, especially the philological work that historians are often first required to do in order to establish the texts that they will then use as sources for their reconstruction of history. Such work, which often entails historical research and analysis in order to explain, or explain away, something in the textual record, is not so usual in the study of an era that began centuries after the invention of printing, for printing, which made it possible to produce and circulate many copies of an original text, eliminated the need for much of what philologists must do with the surviving witnesses to the text of ancient and medieval sources. Nevertheless, these studies show, I believe, that similar questions and methods can be productive concerning modern sources as well.

The main tool used in these studies is comparison: comparison with other writings by the same author can often clarify what begat the particular problem that piqued our curiosity. Thus, to return to the picayune issues listed above, the explanations of their etiologies offered in these studies were made possible by our ability to compare, to the texts that troubled us: (a) other editions of the same volume of Graetz's Geschichte (chs. 2–3), (b) scores of reviews signed by M. L. in the same journal as his review of Graetz (Ch. 4), (c) a review Bickermann wrote on a commentary on Second Maccabees a few months before his chaotic article of 1928 (Ch. 5), (d) Heinemann's other writings on Hellenism and on Leo Baeck (Ch. 6), and (e) Schalit's publications and letters before and after the publication that referred to the phantom article (Ch. 7). The result of such comparisons is that, apart from suggesting answers to the riddles with which we began, these studies also contribute to broader understandings of the oeuvres of the scholars who are the objects of our attention. Those understandings build upon what we know about German Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, in turn, may add new material to the dossiers of those who plow that field.

Alongside scholars of modern German Jewry, and others interested in that field, I hope this collection will find readers among my colleagues who work in ancient history, especially ancient Jewish history, and among others who are interested in antiquity. Detailed case-studies of the work of some of our prominent predecessors may interest such readers, and may also encourage them to reflect on what in their own modern contexts impacts upon their understanding of antiquity. To make the book somewhat accessible to those who do not specialize in German history and/or do not read German, I have regularly added English translations alongside citations in German in the main text, and sometimes in the footnotes as well.

Of the book's seven chapters, the first is a schematic introductory survey of trends in the modern study of ancient Jewish history beginning with nineteenthcentury Wissenschaft des Judentums. It is meant to offer some basic orientation to readers who are not familiar with the study of ancient Jewish history. The other six chapters are case-studies of the ways their modern context, in the era of the Second and Third Reich, affected German-Jewish historians and their work, especially with regard to their understanding of Jewish life in the days of ancient Greek kingdoms and the Roman Empire. One of the studies (Ch. 4) focuses on Philipp Jaffé (1819–1870), a medievalist whose work can only be understood in the context of the blooming interest in German history that accompanied, and in some measure led to, the founding of the Second Reich. This study shows how Jaffé's career made a significant, if indirect and unwilling, contribution to paving the road to the antisemitism that would characterize the Third Reich.

Alongside the philological assumptions set out above, I will relate to the volume's premise as a work of historiography. That premise is the truism that any historian's work, although based primarily on evidence that survives from, and/ or concerns, the places and times he or she studies, is informed by the historian's contemporary circumstances, and by the issues that occupy historians in their own places and times.

Recognition of this does not, in and of itself, delegitimize their work or vitiate the historical truth of what they wrote. If "all genuine history is contemporary history," as Croce observed,<sup>2</sup> much history is also the history of the period to which it is devoted. Current contexts and events can bring an historian to recognize or understand something true about antiquity that earlier scholars, or scholars elsewhere, had no impetus to notice, just as easily as current contexts and events can bring an historian to hypothesize, or even to believe and publish, something about antiquity that has no basis apart from his or her contemporary experience. In the latter event, other members of the guild, if not already the historian's own second thoughts or students, will be quick to point that out.

Recognition that historians live and work in particular places and times should, however, encourage modern historians of such times and places—such as historians of German Jewry in the fateful nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to supplement their dossiers of relevant evidence by studying what historians who lived then and there wrote about other periods, on the assumption that the assumptions and models that they applied may point to those of their own context. Much such work has been done. It is my hope that the studies in the present collection will be received as a contribution to such research and, in particular, to illustrate the value, for such studies, of close attention to textual issues.

Following the introductory survey, the other six studies are presented according to the chronological order of their topics. Ch. 2, on Heinrich Graetz on Josephus, deals, by analyzing Graetz's changes from edition to edition in the text and footnotes of the third volume of his Geschichte der Juden, with Graetz's response to criticism of his work in the 1870s. That criticism first appeared in the very month, January 1871, in which the Second Reich was created, and it had everything to do with that. Ch. 3, which employs the same methodology, points to the significant changes Graetz made, between his early and late editions, in his assessment of the relative roles of the central government, on the one hand, and

Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia della storiographia (7th ed.; Bari: Laterza, 1954), 4.

the Jews' Greek neighbors, on the other, in the Jews' troubles in first-century Judea, and suggests that his changing interpretation reflects shifts in this regard in Germany of the 1870s and 1880s.

Next come two studies that bridge the period from Graetz's day to the period of the Third Reich. Ch. 4, which began as a footnote to Ch. 2, and which is dedicated to the genesis of the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit (controversy about antisemitism) of 1879–1881, shows how Philipp Jaffé's career gave rise, indirectly but ineluctably, and in a very specific way, to the appearance of respectable (salonfähig) German antisemitism and of what would be adopted, a few generations later, as Der Stürmer's daily slogan, Die Juden sind unser Unglück ("The Jews are our misfortune"). That study is followed by Ch. 5, which was catalyzed by the egregious disorder in Elias Bickermann's 1928 article on the Books of Maccabees in the central compendium of German Altertumswissenschaft. The chapter suggests that a view that Catholics developed in response to Bismarck's persecution of them, in the so-called Kulturkampf of the 1870s, eventually (via a survivor of that episode) provided Bickermann, writing in the mid-1930s in the shadow of Nazi persecution, the essential elements for his explanation of Antiochus IV's persecution of the Jews in the second century BCE.

This collection is concluded by studies of how two Jewish historians—one writing just before World War II and one in its midst and in its wake, the former a German Jew who was there while it was all happening, the latter a Galicianborn and Vienna-trained Israeli hearing about it all from afar—interpreted the responses of some prominent Jews of antiquity to the kingdoms that ruled them. Ch. 6 analyzes Isaak Heinemann's 1938 critique of Bickermann's theory that it was Jews who brought Antiochus Epiphanes to impose his decrees against Judaism, and Ch. 7 points out that Abraham Schalit's attitude toward Herod and Josephus, who collaborated with Rome, changed radically between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s. In both cases, I argue, based on vocabulary and other considerations, that it was the Jews' experience under the Third Reich that guided the modern historian's interpretation of Jewish history under the ancient Hellenistic and Roman regimes.

Of the seven studies in this collection, Ch. 3 is new. The other six are based on published papers: three in English, two in Hebrew, and one in German, as is indicated in the list at the end of the volume. I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to reprint them here. Apart from translating the three non-English papers, I have also, however, freely made numerous changes in all of them, including major rewriting, especially in those cases in which subsequent work, published or not, supplemented or corrected the original publications. Republishing these papers in a single collection also entailed the elimination of some duplications, especially in the two chapters that deal with Graetz (Chs. 2 and 3) and the two that deal with Bickermann (Chs. 5–6).

Many people have helped me along the way to this volume, and I hope I have remembered to thank them in the appropriate notes. I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Stefan Rebenich (Bern), Hannah Teddy Schachter (Jerusalem), and Cary Schachter (Dallas), who read and commented on the entire manuscript; to my friends at De Gruyter who, as usual, made this process such a pleasant and efficient one; and to the Herbst Family Chair of Judaic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which participated in the requisite financing. I have dedicated the book to the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is about to celebrate the completion of its first hundred years, of which it has been my privilege to work with its support, of all kinds, as a student, a teacher, and now a retiree, during the past more than fifty.

> Daniel R. Schwartz Jerusalem, November 2023

## Contents

Foreword IX

#### Abbreviations XIX

#### 1 The Modern Study of Ancient Jewish History: Two Centuries and Three Stages 1


#### 2 Graetz on Josephus: On Jewish Traitors and Cowards in the 1870s 31


#### 3 A Changing Tale of Two Cities: Graetz on Jews and Greeks in Roman Judea 53


#### 4 From Feuding Medievalists to the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit of 1879–1881 71


Appendix I: Berndt Schaller's List of Marginalia in Lehmann's Copy of Graetz, Geschichte XI 102 Appendix II: Treitschke Used Lehmann's Copy of Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 11 105 Appendix III (to n. 106): Max Lehmann Authored the Review of the Third Volume of Pertz's Gneisenau in LCD, 19 March 1870, cols. 332–335 107

#### 5 From Bismarck to Antiochus: On the Chaotic and "Worthless" Prehistory of Elias Bickermann's Gott der Makkabäer 109


#### 6 Hitler and Antiochus, Hellenists and Rabbinerdoktoren: On Isaak Heinemann's Response to Elias Bickermann, 1938 129


#### 7 Abraham Schalit on Herod and Josephus, before and after the Holocaust 149


#### 8 Summary and Final Reflections 169

Original Publications 171

Illustrations 173

Index of Authors Cited 175

Index of Names and Subjects 179

## Abbreviations


## 1 The Modern Study of Ancient Jewish History: Two Centuries and Three Stages

In this short survey I will delineate, in a schematic fashion, three stages in the study of ancient Jewish history in the past two centuries. I will begin with an anecdote that will pave the way for the presentation of the first two stages. Then, after a discussion of those stages, I will turn my attention to the third, which is now in full swing.

#### I A Straw Man?

My doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979, dealt with Jewish approaches to the sacrificial cult in the generations before the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE.<sup>1</sup> I submitted it after six years of study in Jerusalem and about two more in New York City, where I did the actual writing. In New York, however, I was only able to work on the dissertation during my free time, while making a living in a seemingly unrelated job that took up most of my time: I was a research assistant on a team that was preparing a biographical dictionary of German-speaking emigrés during the years of the Third Reich.2 That compendium included emigrés from all walks of life, but as my part of the project I was assigned, given my training and interests, the preparation of skeleton biographies of every rabbi, historian, and philologist among the emigrés.

Among the scholars whose biographies were assigned to me, many were in Jewish Studies. So it happened, that while working on my doctorate on an aspect of Jewish antiquity I became fairly familiar with the literature of Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Science of Judaism") as practiced in the German-speaking world, and I came to appreciate the legacies of Wissenschaft scholars—and all this during years in which I was far from Jerusalem and working on my doctorate, for the most part, in isolation, without (in those pre-email years) much contact with colleagues in my field. And so it happened, that the dissertation that I eventually submitted was, in a very significant way, in the tradition of Jewish scholarship in pre-Holocaust Germany. I fashioned my dissertation as a response to a German monograph published in 1932: Hans Wenschkewitz's Die Spiritualisierung der Kultusbegriffe: Tempel,

"Priesthood, Temple, Sacrifices: Opposition and Spiritualization in the Late Second Temple Period" (PhD diss.; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1979).

International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés, 1933–1945 (ed. H. A. Strauss and W. Röder; 2 vols. in 3; Munich: Saur, 1980–1983).

Priester und Opfer im Neuen Testament ("The Spiritualization of Cultic Concepts: Temple, Priests and Sacrifice in the New Testament"). In that book, which was published as a supplement to a periodical dedicated to New Testament studies,3 the author,4 following the Pauline tradition of historical-theological Protestant research in Germany,5 claimed that Jewish temple worship had become a dead letter, a wooden ritual bereft of vitality and meaning, well before the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, namely, by the time Christianity was born. This, in turn, gave rise, among the Jews of the first century, to much criticism of the Temple cult and catalyzed a process of spiritualization, which resulted in the creation of spiritual replacements for the Temple of Jerusalem, the priesthood, and sacrifices—such as those in evidence in such New Testament passages as 2 Corinthians 6:15, Ephesians 2:19–22, 1 Peter 2:9, and Romans 12:1.

My dissertation, of which the title (n. 1) intentionally mirrored Wenschkewitz's, was built as a response to his thesis. With all the enthusiasm of a tyro, I tried to prove that there is virtually no evidence that supports the claim that non-Christian Jews, even towards the end of the Second Temple period, related to the Temple and its cult in the way that Wenschkewitz claimed was widespread. True, I admitted, there was a considerable amount of circumstantial opposition to the priests who administered the Temple cult—considerable evidence for Jews who, although they had no objection in principle to the Temple, the priesthood, or the cult, were unhappy with many of the priests who were then in office. Moreover,

Aggelos: Archiv für neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, Beiheft 4, Leipzig 1932. So too the other main work to which I responded, in my dissertation, was in German and appeared in a New Testament series: Georg Klinzing, Die Umdeutung des Kultus in der Qumrangemeinde und im Neuen Testament (Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments 7; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1971).

For his career, as a pastor and in the training and supervision of clergy, see the listing of his Nachlass in the online Kalliope-Verbund database.

See George F. Moore, "Christian Writers on Judaism," HTR 14 (1921): 197–254; E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 33–59 (chapter on "The persistence of the view of Rabbinic religion as one of legalistic worksrighteousness"); Karl Hoheisel, Das antike Judentum in christlicher Sicht: Ein Beitrag zur neueren Forschungsgeschichte (Studies in Oriental Religions 2; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1978); Roland Deines, Die Pharisäer: Ihr Verständnis im Spiegel der christlichen und jüdischen Forschung seit Wellhausen und Graetz (WUNT 101; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (Studies in European Judaism 10; Leiden: Brill, 2005). Deines's study deals extensively and in detail with the character of the Pharisees and the Torah in works by Christian scholars and with Jews who sparred with them; more recently, see the essays collected in The Pharisees (ed. J. Sievers and A.-J. Levine; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2021), esp. "The Pharisees in Modern Scholarship" by Suzanne Heschel and Deborah Forger (ibid., 361–383).

while there is also evidence for the seeking of substitutes for Temple worship, this expressed, I argued, not opposition to the Temple cult but, rather, lack of participation in it—whether because of geographical circumstances (in the Diaspora) or due to ideological or political disagreements with those who were in charge (as in Qumran). It was important for me to stress in my research that there were no reservations towards or objections to the Temple in principle; rather it was circumstances of time, place, and politics that accounted for the creation of replacements for the Temple.

In the present context, the details are irrelevant, and so is the question, how I would relate to the same issue today. What is important is that I understood my dissertation as a link in the chain of the Wissenschaft tradition: Whenever a Christian theologian published a work on ancient Judaism that repeated Pauline and Protestant dogma and theses about Judaism, especially insofar as those were derogatory about Jewish law and about the Pharisees/rabbis who were devoted to it, a Jew arose and challenged him. If in the past, in the days of the greats of Wissenschaft, these were Abrahams against Schürer, Perles against Bousset, and Baeck and Elbogen against Harnack,<sup>6</sup> now the time had come for Schwartz against Wenschkewitz.

This brings me to the anecdote: a while after I submitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem my dissertation, which was modeled on Wenschkewitz's monograph but argued with him point for point, I heard from a few people that one of the dissertation's judges, a respected Jerusalem scholar who was among my teachers, felt the need to go to the National Library and verify that Wenschkewitz's monograph indeed existed. He wanted to be sure that I had not fabricated him as a straw man in order to have someone with whom to spar.

This anecdote illustrates the fact that the Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition of studying ancient Judaism in light of Christian studies on the same topic, or the very act of writing research in reaction to Christian scholarship, was a tradition that was not very alive and well in Jerusalem scholarship of the 1970s.

Israel Abrahams, "Professor Schürer on Life under the Jewish Law," JQR 11 (1899): 626–642; Felix Perles, Bousset's Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter kritisch untersucht (Berlin: Peiser, 1903); Leo Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums (Schriften der Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums; Berlin: Rathausen und Lamm, 1905; for an English translation, see Ch. 6, n. 61). These responded, respectively, to Emil Schürer's chapter on "Das Leben unter dem Gesetz" in his great work cited in n. 47, to Wilhelm Bousset's Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1903), and to Adolf von Harnack's Das Wesen des Christentums: Sechzehn Vorlesungen vor Studierenden aller Facultäten im Wintersemester 1899/1900 an der Universität Berlin gehalten (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1900). Note also, inter alia, Baeck, "Harnacks Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums," MGWJ (1901): 97–120, and Ismar Elbogen's response to Harnack with regard to the Pharisees, cited below, n. 31.

Whether I came to write my dissertation on ancient Judaism in a way once prevalent in Germany because of my work on the biographical dictionary of German emigrés, or rather because of all the time I spent in the libraries of Jewish and Christian theological seminaries in New York, the fact remains that the context in which I wrote was very different from that common in Jerusalem, both in the generation of my teachers and my own, i.e., in the latter half of the twentieth century.

In what follows, I will delineate three stages of the study of ancient Judaism, of which those—German-Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums and Israeli "Jewish Studies"—were the first two.

#### II The First Stage: Wissenschaft des Judentums vs. Christian Theology

To begin to analyze the difference between the approaches, and for example, what brought my teachers' teacher in Jerusalem, Victor (Avigdor) Tcherikover, to complain about "the theologians who have arrogated to themselves a monopoly of the study of Jewish history," <sup>7</sup> it is useful to point out a certain ambiguity of the term Judentum. To what did the Wissenschaft des Judentums apply? How should Judentum be translated? Does it refer to "Judaism," a religion classed alongside other religions, such as Christianity and Islam? Or does it refer, rather, to Jews, regarding them not necessarily as adherents of a religion, but rather as members of an ethnic group or nation? If in English there is a separate word for that, "Jewry," in German Judentum, as yahadut in Hebrew, serves for both.8

Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, and Jerusalem: Magnes, 1959), 206 (where "who . . . history" is enclosed in parentheses). See also ibid., 39–40: "the Persian period was for the Jews a time of concentration of intellectual, rather than the development of material, forces, although there is of course no indication that the Jews ceased to be a nation and became a religious community, as most of the theologians have thought." For similar complaints about theologians from Tcherikover's teacher in Berlin, Eduard Meyer, and about "Christian theologians and Jewish feuillitonists" from Bickermann's friend Hans (Johanan) Lewy, see: Albert I. Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman as a Historian of the Jews: A Twentieth Century Tale (TSAJ 131; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 181. Cf. below, at nn. 69–72, on Efron. For a view from the other side (theologians looking at the historians as trespassers), see Arnaldo D. Momigliano, "Introduction to a Discussion of Eduard Schwartz," in idem, Studies on Modern Scholarship (ed. G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191.

As in, for example, "das deutsche Judentum" = Yahadut Germania = "German Jewry." Similarly, Yahadut is used in the Hebrew name of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's "Institute of Contemporary Jewry."

A focus on that issue readily allows us to identify a certain tension within Wissenschaft des Judentums's program of research, as originally set forth programmatically in the introduction to the first issue of its pioneers' Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums ("Journal for the Science of Judaism"):

If we are to talk of a science of Judenthum, then it is self-evident that the word Judenthum is here being taken in its comprehensive sense—as the essence of all the circumstances, characteristics, and achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, history, law, literature in general, civil life and all the affairs of man—and not in that more limited sense in which it only means the religion of the Jews. True, it is the religious idea that conditions all the ramifications of Judenthum and is the one on which they are based. But the more this idea has everywhere penetrated human life and combined and incorporated itself with life, the more difficult it is to recognize and comprehend it as a whole, unless one strives to understand it in all its forms and modifications. In the diverse unfolding of the whole life of a people there do, of course, exist aspects and tendencies that are remote from the sphere of religion; but in Judenthum, more than anywhere else, the influence of the basic religious idea is visible in all the circumstances of human life.9

Wolf's words are a clear call for the study of Jews and Judaism from many points of view, not only that of their religion. True, he views such breadth as instrumental: Wolf lays down the axiom that what is really essential about all that pertains to the Jews is religion, so a true understanding of the religion requires examination of all of those manifestations. However, it is clear that pursuit of the latter— "all the circumstances, characteristics, and achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, history, law, literature in general, civil life and all the affairs of man"—can itself arouse boundless scholarly curiosity and fill up a multitude of scholarly lives. And it is also obvious that such scholarship need not confirm Wolf's assumption that whatever they find will be evidence for what Judaism, the religion, is. Not all Jews are adherents or representatives of Judaism, and even those who are are also human beings, whose concerns need not always be governed by Judaism, or related to it.

Given this tension, it is not surprising that Wissenschaft des Judentums study of ancient Judentum took two directions. One remained largely focused on religion, Judaism, and accordingly, found itself in constant dialogue or debate, as illustrated above, with Christian scholarship, which, when dealing with antiquity, naturally focused on the Jewish religion in antiquity, in the context of which

Immanuel Wolf, "Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums," Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 1 (1823): 1–2. The translation offered above is my slightly revised version of Lionel E. Kochan's: Immanuel Wolf, "On the Concept of a Science of Judaism (1822 [sic])," LBIYB 2 (1957): 194. The italicized words are emphasized in the original German text.

Christianity was born; for a prominent example, see below, n. 47. The other focused more on the various fields to which Wolf pointed—which, especially in the nineteenth century, meant they turned to the history of the Jews.

This split had an institutional basis: however schematically, it appears that one can meaningfully divide the German-speaking institutions of Wissenschaft des Judentums into two schools.10 One, represented by the Breslau Seminary (founded in 1854), focused on history, and the same is true of its offshoots in Budapest (founded 1877) and Vienna (1893).11 This focus may be seen already in the name of the Breslau seminary's house journal (founded in 1851/52): Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Monthly for the History and Science of Judaism"; henceforth: MGWJ). The special mention of history is explicit enough, but the focus is all the more salient when one recalls that this journal, which would continue to appear regularly until 1939, came in the wake of three defunct predecessors: the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums ("Journal for the Science of Juda-

For an analysis that is similar to what follows, see Michael A. Meyer, "Two Persistent Tensions within Wissenschaft des Judentums," in: Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives (ed. A. Gotzmann and C. Wiese; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 73–89. His discussion, however, although it too contrasts scholars who focus on religion to those who focus on history, includes Wissenschaft scholars (such as Leopold Zunz, Isaak Markus Jost, and Moritz Steinschneider) who were not associated with rabbinical seminaries; that pushes the Breslau seminary, which was a religious institution, towards the middle. The coming discussion, which focuses on the institutions, leaves a more polar contrast between the Breslau seminary and those in Berlin. As Meyer underlines, "Wissenschaft des Judentums for most of its history was to varying degrees and in very different ways predominantly a religious enterprise . . . Zunz, Jost, and Steinschneider, however, represented a minority view" (ibid. 74, 77).

On these seminaries, see, in general, Werner Schochow, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichtswissenschaft (Einzelveröfffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin 3; Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1969), 49–59; M. Brann, Geschichte des jüdisch-theologischen Seminars [Fraenckel'sche Stiftung] in Breslau: Festschrift zum fünfzigjährigen Jubiläum der Anstalt (Breslau: Schatzky, n.d. [1904?]); Das Breslauer Seminar: Jüdisch-theologisches Seminar (Fraenckelscher Stiftung) in Breslau, 1854–1938: Gedächtnisschrift (ed. G. Kisch; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1963); The Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest,1877–1977: A Centennial Volume (ed. M. Carmilly-Weinberger; New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1986); and Peter Landesmann, Rabbiner aus Wien: Ihre Ausbildung, ihre religiösen und nationalen Konflikte (Wien: Böhlau, 1997), 123–263. I term them "offshoots" of Breslau because the main scholars in their first generations studied there. Of the first teachers at the Budapest Seminary, David Kaufmann and Wilhlem Bacher had studied for a decade at Breslau; as Graetz, in his address at the founding ceremony in 1877 (in English in Carmilly-Weinberger, Rabbinical Seminary, 50–51), pointed out, "in a certain sense, the Breslau Theological Seminary may consider itself the mother of this newly created institute." As for the Jewish Theological Institute in Vienna: of its first teachers, David Heinrich Müller, Adolf Schwarz, and Adolf Büchler had studied at Breslau, in 1867, 1867–1873, and 1889–1890, respectively. Moreover, most of Büchler's training had been under Breslau graduates at the Budapest seminary (1882–1889).

ism," 1821–1823), Abraham Geiger's Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie ("Scientific Journal for Jewish Theology," 1835–1847), and Zacharias Frankel's Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judenthums ("Journal for the Religious Interests of Judaism," 1844–1846). None of them focused on history, and the latter two focused explicitly on "theology" and "religion," so the MGWJ's specific spotlight on Geschichte was quite demonstrative. Indeed, the journal was edited for decades by Breslau's chief historians, Heinrich Graetz (1869–1887) and Marcus Brann (1892–1920), and that both confirmed and guaranteed its orientation.

If, for example, one were to ask Immanuel Wolf, or Zacharias Frankel or Abraham Geiger what place a long study on Herod's sons (who governed parts of Palestine after Herod's death) might have in any project dedicated to furthering our understanding of "Judentum," presumably they would have been hard put to offer any positive response. But Graetz's disciple (and successor), Marcus Brann, wrote a Breslau dissertation on them in Latin in 1873 and that same year a fuller German version of it appeared in six installments in MGWJ, totaling some eighty-five pages.12 The same goes for numerous studies that appeared in MGWJ during the nine decades in which it appears, just as for so many works by Adolf Büchler in Vienna (and, later, at Jews's College in London), by Samuel Krauss (at the Budapest seminary 1894–1906, then [when Büchler moved to London] in Vienna 1906–1938), and by a small host of lesser figures. Here it is enough to point to the next chapter of the present collection, which examines several Breslau studies concerning Josephus's stance vis-à-vis Jewish rebels, Rome, and King Agrippa II. As with Herod's sons, so too with Josephus: it is nigh impossible to imagine anyone writing on "What is Judaism?" finding much use for him and his politics.

The other main school, which focused on Judaism as a religion, was centered in Berlin, where it was represented by two institutions: the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums ("College for the Science of Judaism"), founded in 1872, and the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar für das Orthodoxe Judentum ("Rabbinical Seminary for Orthodox Judaism," popularly known as "the Hildesheimer Seminary") founded, in reactionary response, a year later. It seems that the very fact that there were two such institutions, indeed, eventually, on the same street (Artilleriestrasse 9 and 31),<sup>13</sup> guaranteed a focus on religion. Had they focused on the academic study of history it would have been difficult to explain to sponsors and funders why two were needed, while the focus on religion ensured that each in-

M. Brann, De Herodis, qui dicitur, magni filiis patrem in imperio secutis: pars prima (Diss. Breslau, 1873). "Die Söhne des Herodes," MGWJ 22 (1873): 242–256, 305–321, 345–360, 407–420, 459–474, 497–507.

Today: Tucholskystrasse, where the former building of the Hochschule is now "Das Leo-Baeck-Haus."

stitution would serve a different community. True, their notions of religion were very different: if the Hochschule focused on religious thought and was typically liberal with regard to religious practice, the Hildesheimer Seminary focused on rabbinic literature and Jewish law, to which it strictly adhered. Nevertheless, for our present purposes what is important is that it was on religion that both focused.

Turning first to the Hildesheimer Seminary,14 it is easy to show, beginning with its title (". . . fur das orthodoxe Judentum"), its orientation on religious law; it is to that that Jewish "orthodoxy" relates. The heads of the Seminary during the sixtyplus years of its existence—in turn: Esriel Hildesheimer (1820–1899), David Zvi Hoffmann (1843–1921), and Jehiel Jacob Weinberg (1884–1966)—were rabbis who, almost ex officio, were the main decisors of Jewish law for German orthodoxy;15 the curriculum of the Seminary centered around the Talmud and codes of rabbinic law;16 and, on the negative side, the Seminary's scholars devoted virtually no attention to ancient Jewish history or literature, apart from rabbinic literature. Probably all would agree that the main works produced by the abovementioned heads of the Seminary, throughout its existence, were their legal responsa, in Hebrew.<sup>17</sup> For Hoffmann, some might point, instead, to his commentaries on the Pentateuch,18 but in the present context, where our concern is only to emphasize the religious orientation, that would not change anything—apart from supplying the opportunity to note that Hoffmann's work in those books was explicitly devoted to refuting the source-critical claims of Christian biblical scholarship and to justifying traditional

On it, see Schochow, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichtswissenschaft, 52–53; Mordechai Eliav, "Das orthodoxe Rabbinerseminar in Berlin: Ziele, Problem und geschichtliche Bedeutung," in Wissenschaft des Judentums: Anfänge der Judaistik in Europa (ed. J. Carlebach; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 59–73; and David Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Judaic Studies Series; Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), esp. 141–149.

On them, see Ellenson, ibid.; Mosche Baumel, Orthodoxie und Wissenschaft: Der Weg von Rabbiner David Zwi Hoffmann (Berlin: Lit, 2013); and Marc B. Shapiro, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884–1996 (London: Littman Library, 1999).

The course offerings may be seen in the annual Jahres-Bericht des Rabbiner-Seminars für das Orthodoxe Judent(h)um.

These legal discussions and decisions, issued in their lifetimes in response to issues that arose, are collected in: Hildesheimer's Sheelot u-Teshuvot Rabbi Azriel (1975/76), the three volumes of Hoffmann's Melammed Leho'il (1926), and the four volumes of Weinberg's Seridei Esh (1961–1969).

Das Buch Leviticus (2 vols.; Berlin: Poppelauer, 1905–1906); Das Buch Deuteronomium (2 vols.; Berlin: Poppelauer, 1913–1922).

rabbinic interpretation of the Torah.19 That too is what is expected from scholars engaged in the study of Judaism as a religion, one that, as such, competes with Christianity.

Down the street at the Hochschule<sup>20</sup> as well, it is very simple to demonstrate the focus on religion. This emerges easily from the titles of the main works of its leading figures in the seven decades of its existence.

Abraham Geiger began his scholarly career in 1833 with his dissertation on Judentum's influence on Mohammed,21 a study that, by focusing on the comparison with Islam, obviously treats Judentum as a religion, Judaism.<sup>22</sup> Indeed, in the work's introduction Geiger makes it clear that his purpose is to compare similar "religiöse Ansichten" ("religious views") of Judentum and Islam in order to see in which cases the similarity points to influence. Two years later, in 1835, Geiger began publishing his Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie; in 1845 he published a textbook of Mishnaic Hebrew which, as its preface makes clear, is meant to be useful both for Jewish children and for Christian scholars, especially so as to enable the latter better to understand the principles of the Mishnah;23 in 1857 there appeared his major contribution to the study of Judentum in antiquity, dedicated to what what the biblical and early postbiblical tradition teach about

See esp. his Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese, I (Berlin: Itzkowski, 1904), which originally appeared in the Hildesheimer Seminary's annual report for 1902/3. See, more generally, Baumel, Orthodoxie und Wissenschaft, 71–80 and Alexander A. Dubrau, "A Jewish Orthodox Response to the Hostility towards the Morality of Jewish Law and the Jewish God at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century in Germany: Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann (1843–1921) on the Relationship between Jews and Gentiles," in Transfer and Religion: Interactions between Judaism, Christianity and Islam from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (ed. A. A. Dubrau, D. Scotto, and R. V. Sanseverino; Sapientia Islamica 3; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 273–304.

On it, see Marianne Awerbuch, "Die Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums," in Geschichtswissenschaft in Berlin im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (ed. R. Hansen and W. Ribbe; Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin 82; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 517–551 and Herbert A. Strauss, "Die letzten Jahre der Hochschule (Lehranstalt) für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Berlin: 1936–1942," in Wissenschaft des Judentums: Anfänge der Judaistik in Europa (ed. J. Carlebach; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 36–58. Note that during many years of its history the Hochschule was forced, by the government, to knock its name down to "Lehranstalt." I use "Hochschule" throughout, apart from the titles of publications that use "Lehranstalt."

Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (Diss. Bonn; Bonn: Baaden, 1833).

So as to eliminate all doubt about that, note that (as is reported ibid., i) the title of the original Latin question, to which his dissertation responded, asked what elements in Islam "ex Iudaismo derivandi sunt" (my emphasis).

A. Geiger, Lehr- und Lesebuch zur Sprache der Mischnah (Breslau: Leuckart, 1845), v–vi.

"the inner development of Judaism"; <sup>24</sup> and that was followed, finally, in 1864, with a volume of lectures that, although entitled Judentum und seine Geschichte, devotes its first chapter to Das Wesen der Religion ("the essence of religion"), declaring near the outset (p. 2) that Das Judenthum, so sagt man zunächt, ist Religion ("let it first be said that Judenthum is [a] religion") and concluding (p. 12) with the verdict that "if Judaism had influence as a religion, and still exercises such influence, it is, for that reason, one of humanity's noblest life-forces." <sup>25</sup> That is, from beginning to end Geiger's field was Judaism as a religion, as was quite appropriate for a rabbi who was so active in the reform of Judaism in contemporary Germany.<sup>26</sup>

The Hochschule's attitude toward history is well illustrated by the fate of Geiger's position after his death in 1874. His position was first given to David Cassel, who, although he did teach some courses in history,27 specialized in biblical commentaries and medieval Jewish literature.<sup>28</sup> And then when Cassel died, in 1893, he was replaced by Martin Schreiner—whose fields were, as the Hochschule's 1894 annual report blithely reports, religious philosophy and systematic theology.<sup>29</sup> So much for history at the Hochschule.

True, after Schreiner was forced to retire young in 1902, due to health issues, Ismar Elbogen was appointed in his stead and his position was defined as "History and Literature of the Jews and Judaism." <sup>30</sup> For decades, Elbogen would remain, alongside Leo Baeck, one of the main pillars of the Hochschule. But his focus was on religious history, beginning with his work on the Pharisees, which

A. Geiger, Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der innern Entwickelung des Judenthums (Breslau: Hainauer, 1857).

Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte, I: Bis zur Zerstörung des zweiten Tempels (Breslau: Schletter, 1864). In English: Judaism and Its History, I: Closing with the Destruction of the Second Temple (New York: Thalmessingen, 1866).

On Geiger's orientation, see Michael A. Meyer, "Abraham Geiger's Historical Judaism," in: New Perspectives on Abraham Geiger: An HUC-JIR Symposium (ed. J. J. Petuchowski; New York: Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion, 1975), 3–16; Harvey Hill, "The Science of Reform: Abraham Geiger and the Wissenschaft des Judentums," MJ 27 (2007): 329–349.

For a good sample of teaching at the Hochschule, see BHWJ 1885: 30–33 (a list of all the courses offered at the Hochschule from its opening in 1872 until 1885).

On Cassel, see Ismar Elbogen, "Die Hochschule: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung," in I. Elbogen and J. Höniger, Lehranstalt fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums: Festschrift zur Einweihung des eigenen Heims (Berlin: Hermann, 1907), 27–28; Blumenthal, "Zu David Cassels 100. Geburtstag," AZJ 1918, no. 10: 114–116.

BHWJ 1894: 67.

"Bericht des Curatoriums" in BHWJ 21 (1903): 3.

was a response to von Harnack.<sup>31</sup> His major work was in the field of liturgical history: his Studien zur Geschichte der jüdischen Gottesdienst (1907) opened the Hochschule's series of monographs (Schriften; see Appendix I), and his study of pilgrimage to the Temple of Jerusalem was one of the last studies to appear in an annual report of the Hochschule.<sup>32</sup> Elbogen's Der jüdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (1913; 19242 ) remains, alongside a work of philosophy, Julius Guttmann's Die Philosophie des Judentums (1933), the prime work produced by a Hochschule scholar, unless one also counts another work of philosophy: Hermann Cohen's Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1919; 1929<sup>2</sup> ).<sup>33</sup> Cohen taught at the Hochschule off and on beginning in 1904 (after the death of another philosopher, Heymann Steinthal, who taught there from its opening in 1872 until his death in 189934), and regularly between his retirement in 1912 and death in 1918, whereupon he was succeeded by Guttmann, who taught there from 1919 until he moved to Palestine and the Hebrew University in 1934.<sup>35</sup> In short, philosophy and liturgy were well taken care of at the Hochschule.

Leo Baeck taught at the Hochschule from 1913 until the end, alongside his service as a rabbi in Berlin; during the Hochschule's last years he was also the head of the national representative organization of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden).36 His main works were, first, of all, his 1905 monograph on "the essence" of Judentum, which is a response to Adolf von Harnack's lectures on the essence of Christianity;37 here, in its contrast with Christianity, Judentum clearly refers to Judaism as a religion. Indeed, although the work opens with a chapter on

 For his lectures at the Hochschule, see his two volumes of essays, Zu Bibel und Religionsphilosophie: Vorträge und Abhandlungen (Berlin: Reimer, 1890). On him, see Naoki Mukai, "H. Steinthal: A Psychologist of the Jewish People," European Journal of Jewish Studies 6 (2012): 275–296.

See above, n. 6.

Ismar Elbogen, "Die Religionsanschauungen der Pharisäer, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Begriffe Gott und Mensch," in BHWJ 22 (1904).

Ismar Elbogen, "Die Feier der drei Wallfahrten im zweiten Tempel," BHWJ 1929: 25–48.

English translations of these three works: Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993); Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964); and Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985).

On the study of philosophy at the Hochschule, with a focus on Cohen and especially Guttmann, see Fritz Bamberger, "Julius Guttmann: Philosopher of Judaism," YLBI 5 (1960): 3–34.

Much has been written on Baeck. See, inter alia, Leonard Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews (New York: Macmillan, and London: Collier, 1978); Lexikon deutschjüdischer Autoren, I (München: Saur, 1992), 289–298; and esp. Michael A. Meyer, Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (Jewish Culture and Contexts; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

the characteristics of Judentum, it moves very quickly, without notice, to deal with the Israelite religion (die israelitische Religion) and "the Jewish faith-community" (die jüdische Glaubensgemeinschaft), as if these were all synonymous terms. That volume was followed by numerous studies on this or that aspect of ancient Judaism, including, most notably, Baeck's essay on the Pharisees (a version of ancient Judaism), which began as a supplement to an annual report of the Hochschule38 and was, eventually, republished in English in a volume in which it was accompanied by essays on such religious topics as "Judaism in the Church," "Origin of Jewish Mysticism," and "Greek and Jewish Preaching." <sup>39</sup> That volume was complemented, a decade later, by another English collection of essays on Judaism and Christianity40 and also a German compendium, of which the sections are devoted to midrash, Jewish-Christian topics, history of religion, "the language of faith," mysticism and the philosophy of religion, and Jewish religious and ethical education.41 In other words, Baeck too worked on Judaism as a religion –just as his teaching at the Hochschule was defined, from the outset, as "das homiletische Lehramt" <sup>42</sup> ("the homiletical chair") and, indeed, usually concerned homiletics, both ancient (midrash) and modern.

As opposed to the Breslau Seminary, that had its MGWJ, the Hochschule did not have a house journal. But it did publish annual reports, most of which included one or more pieces of work by its scholars, and also a series of volumes (Schriften der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums). Perusal of the titles of the latter, assembled in Appendix I, clearly confirms their categorization as studies of Judaism as a religion.

Similarly, a comparison of the titles of the scholarly contributions regularly included in the annual reports of the Breslau seminary and the Berlin Hochschule easily fleshes out the same contrast between their orientations.43 Among the titles of the thirty-nine that Freimann lists for the Hochschule for the years 1874–1928, the word "Juden" never appears, but many deal with Jewish literature, rabbinic literature, Karaitic literature, and philosophy. As for Greco-Roman antiquity, there is next to nothing: apart from one study (by Eugen Täubler) that addresses Jewish po-

BHWJ 1913: 8.

Leo Baeck, "Die Pharisäer," BHWJ 44 (1927). Republished without the footnotes as idem, Die Pharisäer: Ein Kapitel jüdischer Geschichte (Bücherei des Schocken Verlags 6; Berlin: Schocken, 1934).

Leo Baeck, The Pharisees and Other Essays (New York: Schocken, 1947).

Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958).

Leo Baeck, Aus drei Jahrhunderten: Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte des jüdischen Glaubens (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1958).

Aron Freimann, Katalog der Judaica und Hebraica, Stadtbibliothek Frankfurt am Main: Band Judaica (1932; reprinted Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1968), 24–27.

litical history in the Hellenistic Roman period, the closest we get are two apologetic studies (by Elbogen and Baeck44) that defend an ancient religious sect (the Pharisees) and two (by Baeck and Sigmund Maybaum) that deal with ancient sermons. In contrast, the Breslau reports (listed for 1854–1927) include numerous studies of Jewish-Hellenistic literature (by Heinrich Graetz, Jacob Bernays, Jacob Freudenthal, and Isaak Heinemann), two technical pieces (one on chronology, one on a rabbinic law concerning land-ownership) by Graetz that eventually became excursuses in his Geschichte der Juden, two by Benedict Zuckermann on ancient Jewish coins and measures and three others by Zuckermann on the history of the Jewish calendar, not to mention six separate pieces by Brann on the history of the Jews of Silesia. While there are, in each list, some titles that could fit into the other, in general the difference between the interests represented by these lists is quite clear.

In sum, it is evident that at the Hochschule, which was, in the heart of Berlin, the most German of all the institutions of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the focus was on Judaism, not Jews. Four reasons for this focus may be noted. First, as noted above, it reflected the Hochschule's proximity to the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar. That institution clearly defined itself religiously, and that, of course, naturally required the neighboring institution, which had so much in common with it, to adopt just as clearly a different self-definition as being another species of the same genus, i.e., one devoted to the study of Judaism as a religion. Second, and most generally, the focus on religion reflected the realization of German Jews, liberal as Orthodox, that they could be accepted as citizens of the Reich only if they were "German citizens of the Jewish faith," <sup>45</sup> something that put the accent on religion and sidelined Jewish peoplehood.46 Third, with regard to the study of antiquity, the focus on religion reflected the fact that the agenda was set, for the most part, by Christian theologians, for whose purposes, naturally, it was, of all possible aspects of Jewish Studies, specifically the religion of the Jews, especially

Mentioned above, nn. 31, 38–39.

As, for example, in the name (and program) of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, which, prior to World War II, "represented the mainstream majority among German Jews . . . the most representative group of German Jews" (Herbert A. Strauss in Classified List of Articles Concerning Emigration in Germany: Jewish Periodicals, Jan. 30, 1933 to Nov. 9, 1938 [comp. D. R. Schwartz and D. S. Niederland; Jewish Immigrants of the Nazi Period in the USA 3/2; New York: Saur, 1982], xvi–xvii). On it, see Avraham Barkai, "Wehr dich!": Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C.V.), 1893–1938 (München: Beck, 2002).

See Michael Brenner, "Religion, Nation oder Stamm: Zum Wandel der Selbstdefinition unter deutschen Juden," in Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (ed. H.-G. Haupt and D. Langwiesche; Frankfurt: Campus, 2001), 587–601; Hartwig Wiedebach, The National Element in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy and Religion (Supplements to the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 16; Leiden: Brill, 2012).

in antiquity, that was the most relevant and important.<sup>47</sup> Anyone who wanted to participate in this discourse, especially if coming to dispute their claims, had to focus specifically on the areas that they did.<sup>48</sup> Fourth, in the age of Wissenschaft, Jewish Studies, and even Jewish professors in other fields, hardly entered the universities,<sup>49</sup> and so virtually the only venue for Jewish research was rabbinical seminaries, whatever their orientation. That meant that the Wissenschaft scholars' students were preparing themselves for jobs within the Jewish community and since those communities were religious, and so it was their religious needs that needed to be served, the institutions of higher learning had to focus on appropriate instruction. As Elbogen would put it, in a speech in honor of the Hochschule on its sixtieth anniversary (1932):50

In diesem Punkte wenigstens stimmen wir überein, daß die Wissenschaft des Judentums ohne Beziehung zum lebendigen Judentum ihre Daseinsberechtigung verliert.

(At least in this we all agree, that the Wissenschaft des Judentums loses its raison d'être if it is not connected to living Judaism.)

Interestingly enough, Elbogen immediately went on to compare his institution's commitment to contribute to contemporary "life" with the lack of such commitment in Jerusalem:

For surveys of such scholarship, see above, n. 5. Here I will note for, example, the opening of the introduction to the classic and most popular handbook by Emil Schürer, that Christianity grew "in the fullness of time" (Mark 1:15!) from within Judaism ("aus dem Schoosse des Judenthums ist in der Fülle der Zeiten die christliche Religion entsprungen"), and that it is therefore obvious that Christian theologians should study that context. See: Emil Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, 1 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 19013–<sup>4</sup> ), 1.

For the leading role of Christian scholars in the study of Jewish antiquity (reflected in the complaints assembled above, n. 7), note Graetz's expression of bitter frustration about how difficult it was to become accepted as an equal in academic (= Christian) debates regarding ancient Jewish history: GdJ.III/24 , 629–630, n. 1 = III/25 , 631, n. 1. Note also that Schürer, down to the last edition of his great handbook, marked the surnames of Jewish scholars with an asterisk; see, for example, Schürer's references to Jost, Graetz, and other Jewish scholars in his Geschichte (above, n. 47), 5–6.

See: Schochow, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichtswissenschaft, 49–50; David L. Preston, "The German Jews in Secular Education, University Teaching and Science: A Preliminary Inquiry," Jewish Social Studies 38 (1976): 99–116; Ismar Schorsch, "The Religious Parameters of Wissenschaft: Jewish Academics at Prussian Univesities," LBIYB 25 (1980): 3–19; and Alfred Jospe, "The Study of Judaism at German Universities before 1933," LBIYB 27 (1982): 295–319.

Ismar Elbogen, "Zum Begriff 'Wissenschaft des Judentums,'" BHWJ 1932: 34.

Ganz wenige Beziehungen zum Leben sind vorläufig dort festzustellen, wo man sie am ehesten erwartet und wo sie sich aus der Umgebung am leichtesten ergeben, am Jüdischwissenschaftlichen Institut der Universität Jerusalems.

(Very few links to life can, for now, be seen there where one would most expect them, and where they most easily arise from the surroundings, namely, at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the [Hebrew] University of Jerusalem.)

That brings us to the next chapter of this story.

#### III The Second Stage: The Impact of Zionism and the Holocaust

Two factors, Zionism and the Holocaust, changed the situation and created the second stage in Jewish research on ancient Jewish history. I argued above that Immanuel Wolf posited the understanding of religion as the heart and goal of Wissenschaft des Judentums, while the study of all that pertains to Jews was only a means to understand the religion, and that the world of Wissenschaft split between those who focused on Wolf's goal and those who found enough to do with Wolf's means. Zionism, however, directly opposed the opening axiom that Judaism, the religion, was at the heart and center of things Jewish. In its stead, Zionism placed the land and the people. Whether or not, with regard to the study of history, we call this school of thought "the Jerusalem School," <sup>51</sup> it became more and more prevalent to perceive Jews not as a people of shared religion, but rather as a nation—and what unifies them, like other nations, is their land.

See: David N. Myers, "Was There a "Jerusalem School"? An Inquiry into the First Generation of Historical Researchers at the Hebrew University," Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994): 66–92; idem, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On medieval scholarship, see Ivan G. Marcus, "Israeli Medieval Jewish Historiography: From Nationalist Positivism to New Cultural and Social Histories," Jewish Studies Quarterly 17 (2010): 244–285. Concerning the terminological issue, I can relay the following story. Once in the early 1980s, after giving a lecture about separation between religion and state in the Second Temple period, I was called to something of a hearing by one of the prominent professors in my department (on its name, see below at n. 97). He complained that things that I had said, which pointed to a willingness on the part of ancient Jews to view Jerusalem as only a religious capital, or not even as a religious capital since religion is universal and does not need a capital, constitute a deviation from the ideology of "the Jerusalem School." I answered him, honestly, that in my decade-plus in the department, as student and as a lecturer, I never once heard that term used.

The focus on nation is not new with Zionism; it was already firmly in place with Graetz.52 But Zionism's focus on the nation's linkage with its ancient land is the novum.<sup>53</sup> Zionism claims that this linkage should be viewed as primary for Jews throughout their history, but the claim was all the more natural concerning the Second Temple period, when the Jews still maintained a major presence in Palestine. Moreover, in the course of that period there was, in the Hasmonean period (second and first centuries BCE), close to a century of Jewish sovereign statehood in Palestine, just as the century and a half that followed the Roman conquest of that state in 63 BCE saw numerous expressions of the Jews' desire to restore their sovereignty in Palestine.

This change in the understanding of the object of study built easily on Breslau-style scholarship, which, as we have seen, focused on the history of the Jews, what Graetz pointedly termed a Volk, and, accordingly, alongside its attention to the history of Judaism, concerned itself with much that pertains to Jews but not, or hardly, to Judaism.<sup>54</sup> Note, especially, that in his third volume Graetz adumbrated the Zionist focus on the land by moving, by the third (1878) edition of that volume, from terming his protagonists Juden—as remained their name in all subsequent volumes and was their name in the the first two editions of vol III—to terming them Judäer (Judeans). And his interest in that period was quite intense; already in the preface of vol. III's first edition, he declares that the period it discusses, from 161 BCE to 70 CE, is "the most interesting and attractive" of all of Jewish history.55

Obviously, however, in Palestine itself, and in the decades in which statebuilding was in the air, this focus on the land and the people was all the more to

On Graetz's insistence on Jewish peoplehood, as a departure from his predecessors, see Marcus Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz (Jüdische Religion, Geschichte und Kultur 5; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009), 252–255.

This is more or less a truism. For its implications for historians see, for example, Yitzhak Conforti, Past Tense: Zionist Historiography and the Shaping of the National Memory (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2006), 97–122 (in Hebrew). For Graetz as a nationalist historian but not a Zionist historian, see ibid. 79, also below, Ch. 3, n. 16. For Zionist criticism even of Graetz as having not been nationalist enough, for he wrote in German rather than Hebrew, see Yitzhak Conforti, "Integrating National Consciousness into the Study of Jewish History," in: Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship: Expanding Origins, Transcending Borders (ed. A. O. Albert, N. S. Gerber, and M. A. Meyer; Jewish Culture and Contexts; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 142.

See esp. Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 23–35.

". . . ist die Geschichte dieser Zeit die interessanteste und anziehendste, aber auch die reichste der ganzen jüdischen Geschichte" (GdJ.III1 , 1). On the way vol. III grew from edition to edition, see Ch. 2, at n. 14.

be expected. Note, for example, Joseph Klausner's history of the Second Temple period,56 or his collection of biographical essays, in Hebrew, entitled "When a Nation Fights for Its Liberty," which went through eleven editions between 1937 and 1960; among those heroes to whom chapters are devoted, anti-Roman rebels are very prominent. Or note Gedaliah Alon's Hebrew volumes on The History of the Jews of the Land of Israel in the Mishnaic and Talmudic Period, which, quite appropriately, were eventually published in English under the demonstrative title The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age.<sup>57</sup> Similarly, although a major Englishlanguage contribution of my teachers in Jerusalem regarding the ancient period is entitled The Jewish People in the First Century, a title with no geographical parameters, it opens with three chapters on historical geography: one on Palestine, one about the Diaspora, and one on the relationship between them.58 The notion, that a book about the Jewish people in antiquity should begin with three chapters about historical geography, would have been an eloquent statement of the Jerusalem School's approach to Jewish history even if the first of the three had been entitled "Historical Geography of Palestine" rather than, as it is, "Historical Geography" simpliciter—as if it were obvious that a book about the Jewish people should focus on Palestine.59 Moreover, that chapter opens by characterizing Palestine as "the centre of Jewish life" and "the homeland," not long before assuring readers that "the various ties outlined above created in the people the sense of being one nation, in spite of being uprooted and dispersed. They felt themselves one nation . . ." 60

This, then, is the Jerusalem context in which Tcherikover protested that the theologians had claimed a monopoly over ancient Jewish history (above, n. 7), and this is the new orientation that came to dispossess these theologians of that monopoly. And this is the context in which it is easily understood that a Jerusalem scholar would wonder why one of his students would bother to respond to a monograph published by a Christian theologian fifty years prior to his own work, a volume published as a supplement to a periodical dedicated to the New Testament.

Of the four volumes of his Historia Yisraelit ("Israelite history"), which appeared between 1909 and 1925, most of the first and all the rest are devoted to the Second Temple period; a second edition, with the more appropriate title Historia shel habayyit hasheni ("History of the Second Temple [Period]"), appeared in five volumes ca. 1949–1951.

Jerusalem: Magnes, 1980–1984.

The Jewish People in the First Century: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions (ed. M. Stern and S. Safrai; 2 vols.; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974–1976), 1.78–215.

For another example of this focus, see below, after n. 65.

Jewish People in the First Century, 1.184, 213–214.

Along with the general Zionist orientation, three more factors can be discussed that propelled the shift of attention to the nation and the land. First: the generally non- or even anti-religious orientation of Zionists that lay behind the establishment of a secular university in Jerusalem, in which Jewish Studies were pursued without the need to gear studies to the religious needs of those who funded it or would be served by its graduates. That is, the Hebrew University, and the other Israeli universities that were to be founded in its wake, were not (and are not) rabbinical seminaries. On the contrary, if Jewish Studies scholars at the Hebrew University or its offspring in Israel would have to define themselves in contrast to any other institution (as the Hochschule and the Hildesheimer Seminary defined themselves by reference to one another), it would be vis-à-vis yeshivas, of which there are many —and since those are eminently religious institutions, the universities are easily defined as non-religious.61 Second, as a result of the Holocaust, many Jews lost their religious faith and interest in Judaism, but the fact of living in a Jewish national state keeps interest in the history of the Jews alive and well; this is especially the case with regard to their history in antiquity, when, as today, Palestine was the scene of much of that history and that history was often political. Third—and not so obvious and therefore in need of some illustration—the need to confront Christian scholarship waned, both because of living in a state in which Christian presence is very minor and, more importantly, because, in the wake of the Holocaust, Christian scholarship on ancient Judaism lost its primacy, and, for some, even its legitimacy.

Obviously, I can paint only a general view of this process. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the decades that followed the Holocaust saw the genesis of a widespread Christian recognition that Christian scholarship on ancient Judaism had contributed significantly to antisemitism, and was, therefore, partly to blame for the Holocaust.<sup>62</sup> Therefore, as many concluded, there is a need for a reexamination, and many outlooks needed to be changed. One of the decisions made was to give Israelis and Jews the lead on scholarship in this area, or to

In Berlin, as noted above, competition between an Orthodox rabbinical seminary and the Hochschule put pressure on the latter to adopt another version of the Jewish religion, namely a liberal version. In Israel, where the option of non-religious Judaism was viable and posited, the contrast between the university and yeshivot is simpler and more sweeping, leaving it to the various religious institutions to fine-tune the distinctions among them. Cf. Albert I. Baumgarten, "The Rule of the Martian as Applied to Qumran," Israel Oriental Studies 14 (1994): 121–142.

See, for some prominent examples, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974); Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity (ed. A. Davies; New York: Paulist Press, 1979). In the latter, note especially Lloyd Gaston's allusion to the "search for a new and better understanding of Paul on the part of those whose eyes have been shocked open" ("Paul and the Torah," ibid., 54).

allow them to take it—a decision that, in turn, was taken to free Israeli and Jewish scholarship from needing to take Christian scholarship into account.<sup>63</sup> I will point to several indications of both sides of this phenomenon.

(1) Already in the 1950s, Martin Hengel (1926–2009)—who was, in his day, the foremost German scholar of the Second Temple period64—thought it appropriate to quote frequently from Klausner's Hebrew History of the Second Temple Period, and to cite it, and other Jewish sources, in the original Hebrew. The constant reference to Hebrew scholarship and its citation in Hebrew letters, for example in his book on the Zealots, something virtually unheard of in earlier German scholarship, granted Israeli scholarship legitimacy and, in turn, granted legitimacy to Hengel's own work.65

(2) A few years later, Peter Schäfer (born 1943) studied at the Hebrew University from 1964 until 1966. In time he became one of the founders of Jewish Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin and, following that, a professor at Princeton. Already in the 1980s, responding to the perceived need for a survey on the Jews in antiquity, he published his Geschichte der Juden in der Antike: Die Juden Palästinas von Alexander dem Grossen bis zur arabischen Eroberung (1983), a highly successful volume that also appeared in in English (as The History of the Jews in Antiquity: The Jews of Palestine from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest [1995]) and French. Its title is striking, from the present point of view, insofar as it embodies three elements that are clearly products of Jerusalem scholarship: (a) The book is a history of "the Jews," not of "Judaism"; (b) the subtitle clarifies that "the Jews in antiquity" were in fact "the Jews of Palestine" (and that "the Arab Conquest" was that of Palestine), as if that focus were self-understood; and (c) the assumption that the Arab conquest of Palestine was a watershed in Jewish history. Yitzhak Baer and Ben-Zion Dinur, the main pillars of the so-called "Jerusalem School" (see n. 51), could not have thought of a more fitting title for such a volume.

This was all the more so in light of the common stereotype of Germans in general, among Jews, in the post-Holocaust era; see Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80.

On him, see Martin Hengels "Zeloten": Ihre Bedeutung im Licht von fünfzig Jahren Forschungsgeschichte (ed. H. Lichtenberger; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).

See, for example, Martin Hengel, Die Zeloten: Untersuchungen zur jüdischen Freiheitsbewegung in der Zeit von Herodes I. bis 70 n. Chr. (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Spätjudentums und Urchristentums 1; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1961), 206–207.

(3) In this context we should also note, more broadly, the death and burial of the term Spätjudentum ("Late Judaism").<sup>66</sup> This term, which was once the usual way to denote Judaism in antiquity,67 has gone by the board, being replaced by a term that expresses, literally, the exact opposite: antikes Judentum ("Ancient Judaism"). In other words, instead of a term that implied that the Second Temple period was the end of Judaism, the end of a phenomenon that was legitimate in its time but ought to have disappeared with the advent of Christianity, so that if it nonetheless continues to exist today that is anomalous, even against God's will—instead of all that, today antiquity is considered a time in which Judaism began a long journey, that in itself is legitimate.

A glance at the evolution of the title of the series in which Hengel's book on the Zealots was published will suffice to illustrate this shift. If in its first volume, in 1961, the series's title was still a traditional one, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Spätjudentums und Urchristentums ("Works on the History of Late Judaism and Ancient Christianity"), in 1968 the title underwent some tweaking and, beginning then with sixth volume in the series, turned into Arbeiten zur Geschichte des späteren Judentums und des Urchristentums (". . . of later Judaism . . ."), which is not so terminal. But even that was not enough, and some two years later, beginning with the eighth volume of the series, the name became Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums. So it has remained, the only subsequent change being the addition, a quarter of a century later, of the corresponding English title: Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity.<sup>68</sup> This constitutes a very visible and demonstrative rejection of the older view, recognizing both the continued vitality of Judaism and hinting at the error, and horrendous consequences, of the earlier Christian view.

(4) The other side of that coin was a growing willingness of Jewish scholars to ignore Christian research. If Christians in general, and Germans in particular, found themselves, following the Holocaust, needing to be far more conscious of

See esp. Konrad Schmid, "The Rise and Fall of the Notion of 'Spätjudentum' in Christian Biblical Scholarship," in Protestant Biblical Scholarship (ed. A. F. Bakker et al.; Supplements to the JSJ 200; Leiden: Brill, 2022), 63–78.

Note, for example, the regular reviews of literature about "Altes Testament, Neues Testament, Spätjudentum, Urchristentum" in the Orientalistische Literaturzeitung until 1986, also such works as Gerhard Kittel, Urchristentum, Spätjudentum, Hellenismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1926); Hans Bietenhard, Die himmlische Welt im Urchistentum und Spätjudentum (WUNT 2; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck] 1951); Bent Noack, Spätjudentum und Heilsgeschichte (Franz Delitzsch Vorlesung 1968; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970).

On these changes see: Daniel R. Schwartz, "Zeloten, Martin Hengels Die Zeloten und Dichotomie im antiken Judentum," in Martin Hengels "Zeloten," 135–137.

the Jews' feelings, many Jews, perhaps especially Israelis, felt freed from the need to consider the feelings of others, especially Germans. Two examples:

(a) A lengthy article by Joshua Efron (1919–2011), of Tel Aviv University, published in Hebrew in 1963 and in English in 1987, is dedicated to proving that virtually all of Christian research about "Hasidim" (a movement of "pious" Jews mentioned in the Books of Maccabees and elsewhere) was fundamentally flawed.

There is, Efron insists, no basis for the widespread thesis that those "pious" people were interested in Judaism as a religion but not in a Jewish state.<sup>69</sup> Efron's theme is eminently Zionist, for no Zionist would like to believe that good ("pious") Jews might not want a Jewish state. Efron's article is basically a restatement, although with regard to the Hasidim rather than the Pharisees, of Gedaliah Alon's study, first published, in Hebrew, in 1938, that attacked the notion that ancient religious Jews were not interested in a state.70 If Alon's essay, however, published prior to the Holocaust, adhered to the usual rules concerning academic discourse, Efron's article is phrased in what he himself characterizes, in the preface to his volume (p. ix), in something of an understatement, as a "sometimes sharp tone." After focusing at some length on the origin and growth of the specifically Christian tradition that underlies the thesis he is attacking, he then turns to a section on the "Development of the Dominant Method" and, after summarizing the famous Julius Wellhausen's view with the observation that "the distorted picture turns the straight into crooked . . . Wellhausen and his disciples . . . painted an absurd image of Jewish pietism," he goes on to proceed to focus on German antisemitism:

The polyphonic chorus did not lack the discordant notes of scourgers who sharpened the stings of the research in order to lash out at Judaism. A dense atmosphere of nationalism and antisemitism encouraged some scholars to identify in crude or mild language with the oppressors of Hasmonean times . . . Hugo Willrich viewed the Jewish masses of the period as almost exclusively perjurers, scoundrels and forgers. The most prominent of the group, Edward (sic) Meyer, debases the Hasmoneans to the level of a gang of bandits, robbers and murderers . . . These are just a modest bundle of the thorns and nettles from the fields of the German schools.71

Joshua Efron, "The Hasmonean Revolt in Modern Historiography," in idem, Studies on the Hasmonean Period (Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 39; Leiden: Brill, 1987), 1–32. The Hebrew original first appeared in the conference volume cited in Ch. 7, n. 57, and then in Efron's own collection: Studies of the Hasmonean Period (Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, 1980 [in Hebrew]). G. Alon, "The Atttitude of the Pharisees to Roman Rule and the House of Herod," in English in idem, Jews, Judaism and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977), 18–47.

Efron, Studies on the Hasmonean Period, 10–11.

If one wonders what endowed Efron, as it were, with the license to adopt such a style (which comes through despite the evident difficulty the translator faced in rendering his Hebrew rhetoric into English), the answer is given clearly by the dedication with which his book opens, in both its Hebrew and English editions: "A memorial for my father Ephraim, my mother Rivka, my sister Manya—dust and ashes among the ruins of Polish Jewry." <sup>72</sup> Such underlining of the great injustice done to the Jews in the twentieth century functions both to explain and to legitimize the severe attack on non-Jewish scholars, and especially Germans, with regard to what they posited about Jews in the second century BCE; Efron opens his volume with the proclamation that he owes them no consideration.

(b) In 1971 Yigael published an article with the innocuous title "Pesher Nahum (4Q pNahum) Reconsidered." <sup>73</sup> In this study, Yadin argued, by interpreting and emending a passage in a well-known Dead Sea Scroll (Pesher Nahum) on the basis of one, previously unknown, in a scroll he was then editing (the Temple Scroll), and which he would publish in 1977, that members of the Qumran sect believed crucifixion was the proper punishment for someone who betrays the Jewish people. The context in Pesher Nahum is the days of the Hasmonean King Alexander Jannaeus (early first century BCE), not the first century CE, and so it is, admittedly, impossible to prove beyond doubt that Yadin, in writing his article, was aware that his conclusion had implications for the age-old question whether the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. But it is quite difficult to assume that he was not; for in Hebrew, as in English, any reference to crucifixion, with or without a definite article or a capital C, immediately entails an association with Jesus.74

Yadin's desire to write an article, in English, demonstrating the willingness of ancient religious Jews to posit crucifixion as a mode of execution, and the fact that he hastened to publish this article even years before he completed editing the Temple Scroll, offer an extreme example of the willingness of Israeli scholarship on Jewish antiquity to ignore—or even thumb its nose at—Christian scholarship in particular,

Ibid., vi. In the Hebrew original the end of the text is more pointed: ". . . of the Polish galut (exile)."

Israel Exploration Journal 21 (1971): 1–12.

Note, in this connection, that Abraham Schalit's Hebrew translation of Josephus's Antiquities renders ἀνασταύρω ("crucify") merely by tlh ("hang") in the passage in which a Jew, King Alexander Jannaeus, is said to have done it (Ant. 13.380), although when the same verb appears at 12.256, where Seleucid persecutors are the perpetrators, he used ṣlb ("crucify"). When I asked Schalit why he did that, he responded that he translated all the passages the same way, but his Jerusalem publisher was squeamish about admitting that any Jews crucified anyone. Yadin, evidently, did not share that squeamishness.

and the Christian world in general.75 After so many generations in which Jews had made every effort to prove that crucifixion was never a legitimate form of punishment in Jewish eyes, and so if Romans crucified Jesus it was their crime and had nothing to do with the Jews, an Israeli general stepped up and published a study, in English, in which he argued that, in antiquity, religious Jews viewed crucifixion as a legitimate punishment. In so many words, Yadin threw down the gauntlet to the Christian world, declaring he could not care less about what it might infer from his conclusion; if it makes it likelier that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and so encourages those who would prefer that conclusion, so be it.

#### IV The Third Stage: Israeli Scholarship vs. Diasporic Jewish Scholarship

Yadin's article brings us to the third stage of the research surveyed in this paper. In its first stage, we saw the study of Jewish religion in antiquity according to the Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition of responding to Christian research, which focused on Judaism, the Jewish religion. That tradition, especially associated with the Hochschule in Berlin, competed with another, at home in Breslau and its daughter institutions, that focused much more on the Jews and their history. That latter orientation, as we saw, bloomed in a big way with the rise of Zionism, which added a focus on the land to that focus on the people, and also sidelined religion by creating secular institutions of advanced Jewish Studies in Israel—Hebrew University's Institute of Jewish Studies (founded in 1924/25) and similar units in the other Israeli universities that were later created in its wake. This sidelining of religion was also facilitated by the perceived recession of Christian scholarship, as a result of the Holocaust, from its earlier status as the main player that dictated the agenda of scholarship and needed to be confronted.

Now, however, in the third stage, which has been developing over the past few decades, a new player has emerged: Jewish scholars in the Diaspora. This player inherits in a certain way, in fact in a natural way, the place of Christian scholarship in this development. But although Jewish scholars of Judaic studies in the Wissenschaft stage were also in the Diaspora, there is quite a difference between the Diaspora in

As an indication of this article's significance beyond the specific philological point that it addresses, due to the associations of "crucifixion," note that although there were many articles to choose from, this article was included, a decade after it first appeared, in a small collection of articles, edited by German theologians, on the history of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. See: Qumran (ed. K. E. Grözinger et al.; WdF 160; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), 167–184.

the Wissenschaft era, which did not have a competing Israeli center,76 and the Diaspora of today, which does. Some examples will illustrate this new phenomenon.

First, to continue the story from where we left off with Yadin on Pesher Nahum and crucifixion, I will note that the person who, first and more than anyone else, grappled with Yadin's argument was a rabbi and a scholar in Baltimore: Joseph M. Baumgarten. Immediately upon the publication of Yadin's article, Baumgarten prepared and saw to the publication of a detailed response, with a polemical title, in the world's leading periodical for biblical studies.77 The article was devoted to undermining Yadin's thesis from a few different perspectives. This controversy, between a Baltimore rabbi and an Israeli general, although a serious philological debate, amounts to a diasporic protest against an Israeli scholar's willingness to write, in English, in a way that violates the sensitivities that are part of the rules of the game of Jewish life in the Diaspora. But Baumgarten was not at all alone.

I refer, first and foremost, to the many studies of Jacob Neusner, a prolific American Jewish scholar who, already in the 1960s, began to insist on the need to study Judaism, not Jews. His shift from writing a biography on Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai in the early sixties—that is, his move from a book on the life of a specific Jew in Palestine in a specific time period—to his study of the history of the rabbinic traditions concerning Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai in the late sixties78 was a kind of declaration of independence from Israeli research. Neusner was well aware of this, and his studies included direct and sometimes blunt polemics with Israeli historiography.<sup>79</sup> There were several reasons for this.<sup>80</sup> Nevertheless, I think that in essence it boils down to the difference in the orientation and con-

Cf. Elbogen's complaint about nascent Jewish studies in Palestine (above, end of Part II).

Joseph M. Baumgarten, "Does TLH in the Temple Scroll Refer to Crucifixion?," Journal of Biblical Literature (1972): 472–481. See also Baumgarten's review of the controversy, a decade later, in his 1982 "Hanging and Treason in Qumran and Roman Law," now in his Studies in Qumran Law and Thought (ed. R. A. Clements and D. R. Schwartz; Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 138; Leiden: Brill, 2022), 261–276.

J. Neusner, A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, ca. 1–80 C.E. (Leiden: Brill, 1962); Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: Brill, 1970).

For an egregious case, see his "Methodology in Talmudic History," Biblical Theology Bulletin 14/3 (1984): 99–109, reprinted in his Lectures on Judaism in the History of Religions (South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism 2; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 341–363.

On Neusner's troubled relationship with Israeli academia, see Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York: New York University Press, 2016), esp. 49, 182–188, 253–254, also Part V of Albert I. Baumgarten's 2017 review of that volume on the website of the Enoch Seminar. Cf. my partial correction of Neusner's account of the most fateful episode in his squabbling with Israeli historians: "From Alexandria to Rabbinic Literature to Zion: The Jews' Departure from History, and: Who It is Who Returns to It," in Zionism and the Return to History: A Reappraisal (ed. S. N. Eisenstadt & M. Lissak; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 1999), 54–55 (in Hebrew).

text of an Israeli scholar who works with Jews in an Israeli landscape and within the framework of a department or institute of Jewish Studies, within an institution and society in which most others are Jewish, on the one hand, and the orientation of a Jew in the diaspora who is defined by Judaism and works among gentiles, on the other. The departments in which such scholars work are typically departments of Religion or Near Eastern Studies, and if their colleagues work on Christianity or Buddhism, or on Egypt and Assyria, and their students come to them after classes in such other fields, it is natural for them to focus on concepts and ideas, including -isms such as Judaism, that can be compared with those arising, similarly, from very disparate contexts. It is, for example, completely natural to analyze Josephus's account of the Roman siege of Jerusalem as describing the Roman siege of Jerusalem when one looks out of the classroom's window onto Mt. Scopus, where Titus set up his camp; it is more natural to take Josephus's account as a statement of his notions of the eschaton and apocalypse<sup>81</sup> when one does not have such a view but one's students are between a class on the Revelation of John and one on Anabaptist millennialism or on Zoroastrian dualism.

I will add to this that Israeli scholarship, like most of the Israeli public, usually adopts a perception of the Diaspora through the lens of the Holocaust, and thus views the Diaspora as a threatening place, one that is dangerous and unnatural for Jews. This, of course, naturally arouses some resentment among Jews of the Diaspora, who are unhappy both with the implication that they are secondrate Jews and with Israeli rhetoric that indicates to them, their neighbors, and their governments that they are not really at home where they live. In recent years one sees more and more publications, especially by American Jews, in which their starting point for what characterizes the Diaspora is vastly different. Here are some prime examples, which speak for themselves.

– Neusner's call upon Jews to recognize that "America is the promised land"; 82

See, for example, Otto Böcher, "Die heilige Stadt im Völkerkrieg: Wandlungen eines apokalyptischen Schemas," in Josephus-Studien: Untersuchungen zu Josephus, dem antiken Judentum und dem Neuen Testament, Otto Michel zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet (ed. O. Betz, K. Haacker, and M. Hengel; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1974), 55–76.

Jacob Neusner, "Now We're All Jews—Again." Response, 20 (Winter 1973–1974): 151–155; idem, "Is America the Promised Land for Jews?," Washington Post, 8 March 1987. The first article was published in response to the Yom Kippur War, which showed Israel is not invulnerable, and the second, upon the sentencing of Jonathan Pollard, whose espionage for Israel raised the specter of American Jews being suspected of loyalty to Israel rather than to America. More generally, see Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "Promised Land(s): Zion, America, and Ameican Jewish Writers," Jewish Social Studies 3 (1996/97): 111–131.

– the books of Erich Gruen, of which a major premise is that Jews of the Hellenistic Diaspora were so well at home, and so far from being afraid of what non-Jews might think or do about them, that they could laugh at themselves;<sup>83</sup>

– Adele Reinhartz's complaint, in 2014, that, because of all of the discussion and writing on "Judeans" in antiquity (see the next paragraph), we no longer hear of "Jews." Given the fact that a—or the—major impetus for others' turn to "Judeans" instead of "Jews" is the fact that the esistence of the State of Israel shows it is possible for people to define themselves by reference to the state (ancient "Judea," like modern "Israel"), Reinhartz's protest amounts to one directed against the location of the state, rather than the people or the religion, at center stage in the study of the Jews of antiquity.84

– Steve Mason's detailed case for "Judean" rather than "Jew" with regard to antiquity85 provoked trenchant criticism from Seth Schwartz,<sup>86</sup> who is one of the foremost scholars of ancient Jewish history in the USA today.

– Seth Schwartz himself wrote a book on the Jews from Alexander to Mohammed87—–a book that can be understood as a response to and a replacement for Schäfer's book (which deals with the exact same period), which basically was, as argued above, a product of the "Jerusalem School."

– One important and indeed seminal thesis of Schwartz's book, which he first posited in detail in his Imperialism and Jewish Society (2001), minimalizes the influence and indeed the vitality of rabbinic Judaism in Palestine following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE—a thesis that runs counter to Israeli historiography of what, in Hebrew, is still named, as in Alon's day (see above, at n. 57), according to the main books of rabbinic Judaism: "the period of the Mish-

Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (HCS 30; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); idem, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002). Note especially Gruen's challenge in his introduction (p. ix) to the former: "Some Israeli friends have twitted me for approaching the subject from the skewed perspective of a liberal, secular, diaspora Jew. I plead guilty to the characterization; others can judge how skewed is the perspective."

See Reinhartz's and others' comments in the discussion she stirred up in 2014: "Jew and Judean: A Forum on Politics and Historiography in the Translation of Ancient Texts" on the website Marginalia (August 2014).

See especially: Steve Mason, "Jews, Judaeans, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History," Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 457–512.

Seth Schwartz, "How Many Judaisms Were There? A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization," Journal of Ancient Judaism, 2 (2011): esp. 221–227. Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

nah and the Talmud." Schwartz's thesis, indeed, encountered much resistance in mainstream Israeli historiography.<sup>88</sup>

– Another major, and more vociferous, practitioner of Jewish Studies in America, who often takes a stance that is demonstratively non-Israeli, is Daniel Boyarin, of Berkeley; suffice it here to cite his detailed work undermining the historicity of the rabbinic traditions about the reconstruction of Judaism at Yavneh following the destruction of the Second Temple and placing them within the context of fourth-century rabbinic competition with Christianity.89 This pulls in the same directions as Neusner's and Seth Schwartz's work summarized above, and does so by taking aim at a central element of standard Israeli historiography.<sup>90</sup>

Every few years another scholarly episode pops up and illustrates the conflicting tendencies. Two examples:

– In the mid-1980s the late Aryeh Kasher of Tel-Aviv University voiced, in a few venues and contexts, the thesis that when ancient Jews who lived in non-Jewish cities sought to be endowed with isopoliteia ("equal civic status"), as is reported, for example, of the Jews of Caesarea (Josephus, Ant. 20.173), they wanted it as a collective. That is, they wanted to be recognized, and to be endowed with rights, as a community of Judeans living in a foreign city, not as indivicual citizens of the Greek city. Kasher had positive arguments for his thesis, but here what is important is his main negative one: he argued that earlier, European-raised scholars who thought ancient Jews wanted to enjoy, as individuals, equality as citizens of

For a sample of views, in English, see the six studies collected in the section entitled "In the Wake of the Destruction: Was Rabbinic Judaism Normative?" in Jewish Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern (ed. L. I. Levine and D. R. Schwartz; TSAJ 130; Tübingen: Mohr Siebec, 2009), 163–265.

Daniel Boyarin, "A Tale of Two Synods: Nicaea, Yavneh, and Rabbinic Ecclesiology," Exemplaria 12 (2000): 21–62.

See Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (70–640 C.E.) (2 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1980), esp. 1.86–131, 253–287; idem, Jews, Judaism and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977), 269–343; Shmuel Safrai, "The Recovery of Jewish Life in Palestine in the Yavneh Generation," in Eretz Israel from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the Muslim Conquest (ed. Z. Baras et al; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 1982), 18–39 (in Hebrew); Avraham Aderet, From Destruction to Restortion: The Mode of Yavneh in Re-Establishment of the Jewish People (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990, 1997<sup>2</sup> [in Hebrew]). Note that already Neusner addressed an appendix to "Allon on Yavneh," criticizing him for comparing the Romans to Nazis. See Jacob Neusner, A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, 243–245.

the non-Jewish cities in which they live were misled by the experience of Jews of the Diaspora in their own modern age.<sup>91</sup>

Kasher's argument required him to posit the existence of some Jewish collective body that could aspire to be recognized, and to do that he pointed to evidence for local Jewish communities being organized as a politeuma.<sup>92</sup> But that evidence was, when he wrote, very limited and not without ambiguities, and thus Kasher laid himself open to criticism from a French-Jewish scholar, Constantin Zuckerman, who argued, quite trenchantly, that the almost total absence of evidence for the existence of Jewish politeumata means that they did not exist, so Kasher's theory related to a "non-entity" and depended only on "historiographic legend." <sup>93</sup> We are not concerned, here, with another round of this debate occasioned by the publication of new material.94 What is important for us, in the present context, is to note how difficult it is to read Zuckerman's acerbic response without sensing diasporic Jewish resentment at or scorn for an Israeli's unawareness of the realities of Jewish life abroad, and hence inability to imagine, much less to respect, the desire of Jews to be recognized as citizens of the non-Jewish states in which they live.

– The linchpin of the notion, that Jerusalem was the center of the world for all Jews, was the fact that the Temple, which the Bible often refers to as God's house, was there. However, there was, in Egypt, another Jewish temple, and it lasted from sometime in the second century BCE until the first century CE. Israeli historiography has always assumed that the existence of that temple was nigh universally taken to be anomalous and wrong, and also insisted—pointing to the paucity of references to it in extant literature—that it enjoyed virtually no support; rather, the Jews of Egypt remained loyal to the Temple of Jerusalem.95

For the German example of such modern Jews, see above, n. 45.

For Kasher's first publications on this, see below, Ch. 3, n. 10.

Constantin Zuckerman, "Hellenistic politeumata and the Jews: A Reconsideration," Scripta Classica Israelica 8–9 (1985–1988): 171–185.

See Aryeh Kasher, JQR 93 (2002/3): 257–268.

See, for example, V. Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1959), 281: "There is no doubt that the 'House of Onias' awoke the curiosity of the Jews of Egypt . . . But the phenomenon should not be accorded more importance than it really possessed, nor should Onias's temple be regarded as 'the temple of the Jews of Egypt.' Egyptian Jewry never officially recognized the shrine, and as long as the Temple of Jerusalem remained intact their gaze was directed toward it." In emphasizing that the Temple of Onias was not "the temple of the Jews of Egypt," Tcherikover might have been thinking of Graetz's statement that the Jews of Egypt considered it their religiöse Mittelpunkt ("religious center"; GdJ.III1 , 36–37 = III/1<sup>5</sup> , 32). But even Graetz went on to qualify that and emphasize that they nevertheless considered Jerusalem their heilige Metropole ("sacred metropolis").

In 1997, however, Erich Gruen published an article that denied there was anything schismatic about the Oniad temple, and concluding that "the Jewish sanctuary in Egypt was a reinforcement, not a rival, of Jerusalem." 96

These developments affect Israel as well. I would not hesitate to guess that most of the members of my department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which is still called, in Hebrew, "the Department of History of the People of Israel," <sup>97</sup> render the first part of that, when writing in English, as the "Department of Jewish History," thus toning down the reference to peoplehood and using an adjective that can be used of the Jewish religion. Similarly, although the name of the veteran Israeli journal of Jewish history is still Zion, as it was established in the 1930s, and its English subtitle still defines it as a "Quarterly for Research in the History of Israel," which means ". . . of the People of Israel," already in 1986 a competing journal, in English, named Jewish History, was established in Haifa. Its founders were immigrants from the United States and two of them eventually left Israel and returned to live and work in the USA.98 But the journal remains and flourishes.

✶

"The Origins and Objectives of Onias's Temple," Scripta Classica Israelica 16 (1997): 47–70.

In recent years "and Contemporary Jewry" was added to the name as part of a reorganization within the Faculty of Humanities.

See: Kenneth Stow, "Editor's Reflections: At the End of a Quarter-Century," Jewish History 25 (2011): esp. p. 261. Of the founding editors, David Goodblatt (1942–2019) specialized in antiquity. In hindsight, one can point to his article, "The Jews of Palestine, 70–132" (in: Judea and Rome: The Jews' Revolts [ed. U. Rappaport; The History of the Jewish People; Jerusalem: Am Oved, 1982/83], 155–184, 365–377 [in Hebrew]) as a harbinger of his adopting a diasporic point of view. The article begins by questioning the assumption that the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem (70 C.E.) was a watershed moment in Jewish history. Moreover, Goodblatt then goes on specifically to reject the assessment of Gedaliah Alon—the grand old man of Israeli historiography of the post-70 period—that the destruction of Jerusalem was a very great blow, for Jerusalem was, alongside the Temple, the high priest, and the Temple, one of the "the four pillars of their national existence"; indeed, "far more than simply the capital, Jeusalem had been since the return from Babylonian captivity the 'head and heart' of the country" (Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age [2 vols. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1980–1984], 1.42). Goodblatt's response, in contrast, refers to Jerusalem only as an economic center and stresses that there were also others: "The destruction of Jerusalem, which was the metropolis of Judea, without a doubt damaged the economy, but the quick economic recovery that happened throughout the province, including Judea, shows that this was not a fatal blow. In any case, Jewish life sprouted in many other places throughout the province" (p. 162). In Israeli scholarship, that response to Alon, and that characterization of the importance of Jerusalem, is nothing less than amazing. It was, inter alia, this type of thing that Uriel Rappaport, the editor of Judea and Rome, meant when referring, in his preface to the volume (p. xvii), to the fact that Goodblatt's article "presents an approach that is not widespread in the study of Jewish history in general and in Hebrew in particular . . . a more

In summary, with all the generalizations necessary in this limited framework, it appears that we are now in the beginning, or perhaps the midst, of a third stage in the study of the history of Jews and Judaism in antiquity. In the first stage, in which circumstances and academic frameworks dictated the need to compete with Christian scholarship, and to serve the religious needs of Jews living in the Diaspora, much of Wissenschaft des Judentums scholarship about ancient Judaism—the Judaism out of which Christianity emerged— dealt mainly with religious content. In the second stage, with Zionism bringing on a greater focus on the land and the people, and the Holocaust engendering a loss of respect both for religion and for non-Jews, the focus shifted to the nation and the land, the assumption being that Jews are defined by their connection to Palestine. Now, in a third stage, whose extent we still cannot know, we are witnessing a significant intensification of historiography of ancient Jewish history that raises doubts regarding the centrality of the Palestine, and is again attempting to reorient the field around the Jewish people and religion, as in the heydays of the Wissenschaft institutions in Breslau and Berlin. Those are very natural orienations for scholars who do not live in a Jewish state, and whose relationship towards the Jewish state is more complex than it was in the past.

#### Appendix I: Titles of the Volumes of the Hochschule's Series: Schriften der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judent(h)ums

I/1-2 (1907): Elbogen, Studien zur Geschichte des jüdischen Gottesdienstes I/3–4 (1909): Wiener, Die Anschauungen der Propheten von der Sittlichkeit II/2-4 (1912): Gärtner, Komposition und Wortwahl des Buches des Weisheit III/1–2 and V/1-3 (1914, 1916): Lewi ben Gerson, Die Kämpfe Gottes, ed. B. Kellermann IV/1-2 (1914): Poznański, Babylonische Geonim im nachgaonäischen Zeitalter: Nach handschriftlichen und gedruckten Quellen

IV/3–4 (1916): Berger, Das Problem der Erkenntnis in der Religionsphilosophie Jehudah HaLewis

IV/5–6 (1920): Lichtenstein, Das Wort nefesh in der Bibel: Eine Untersuchung über die historischen Grundlagen der Anschauung von der Seele und die Entwickelung der Bedeutung des Wortes nefesh

critical attitude toward sources in general and talmudic sources in particular." Goodblatt wrote his doctorate under Neusner; see above, nn. 79–80.

## 2 Graetz on Josephus: On Jewish Traitors and Cowards in the 1870s

## I Introduction

Just as historical philologists who work with sources from the pre-print age frequently compare manuscripts of them in an effort both to reconstruct the lost original version and to understand what caused different copyists to produce different texts, historians who have access to the original edition of a printed work can compare the text as it appears in successive editions in order to analyze the differing tendencies of those (the original author or later editors) who prepared them. Sometimes such comparisons are undertaken deliberately, on the basis of an expectation to find changes in light of what we know of the conditions and circumstances in which the different editions were produced. Thus, for example, if we know a certain edition was censored, we will assume that there will be differences and that we can fruitfully compare the editions in order to discover and understand the censor's agenda. In other cases, however, such comparisons are simply forced upon readers, when something problematic in the text they are reading directs them, as it were, to compare it to an earlier edition.

The present study is of the latter type. It was born when a superfluous comma in an 1878 edition of Heinrich Graetz's Geschichte der Juden turned out to be a remnant of a longer text in the previous (1863) edition, a discovery that set me off on a quest to understand why Graetz revised that text fifteen years later.

## II Graetz and "The Classic Conception" of Josephus

Josephus (37 CE–ca. 100), a priest of Jerusalem who at the beginning of the Judean rebellion against Rome in 66 CE was appointed the rebels' military governor of the Galilee, but soon became a Roman prisoner rather than committing suicide with the last of his men, and who went on to collaborate with the Romans and to become a protégé of the Flavian emperors who destroyed Jerusalem—which was his own home and his people's capital city and central religious shrine—is the type of historical figure who arouses controversy.<sup>1</sup> Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891),

On him, see, in general, Per Bilde, Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome (Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series 2; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), and A Companion to Josephus (ed. H. H. Chapman and Z. Rodgers; Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World;

the author of the eleven-volume Geschichte der Juden ("History of the Jews") who was in general, as Michael Brenner observed, "the most important and influential of the German Jewish historians," <sup>2</sup> is universally taken to be the founder of what Per Bilde would term "the classic conception" of Josephus, which was damning.<sup>3</sup> Thus, as Louis Feldman put it in 1984:

Few have been neutral in the debate as to whether Josephus was a traitor or patriot. The great majority of scholars—Graetz (404), Bentwich (405), Laqueur (406), and Eisler (407), among others—have condemned him as an absolute traitor to the Jewish people.<sup>4</sup>

Just as Feldman began his list with Graetz, so too Bilde, a few years later, pointing to "the detection of unpleasant tendentious features in the writings" of Josephus, including "servile flattery of the Flavians" and "Josephus' own morally suspect career," refers to Graetz even before Marcus Jost, whose long discussion of Josephus actually appeared before Graetz's.<sup>5</sup> Similarly, apart from such broad surveys, the two scholars who devoted specific studies to Graetz's assessment of Josephus as an individual, which is our topic in this chapter,<sup>6</sup> have similarly concluded, or assumed, that it was quite negative.7 True, one of those studies (Pyka's) is devoted to showing the roots of Graetz's view in the works of some of his predecessors earlier in the nineteenth century. But that does not at all undermine the conclusion that it was with Graetz that those roots came to fruition and popularity, and so condemnation of Josephus became the rule.

Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). On his image, see also Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture (ed. A. Schatz; Studies in Jewish History and Culture 55; Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 73. On Graetz, see, in general, Brenner, ibid., 53–78 and M. Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz (Jüdische Religion, Geschichte und Kultur 5; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009).

Bilde, Flavius Josephus, 126–128.

Louis H. Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1937–1980) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984), 89. The parenthetical numbers refer to items in Feldman's bibliography.

Bilde, Flavius Josephus, 126. On Jost on Josephus, see Pyka's study cited in n. 7.

Ch. 3, in contrast, will study some cases of Graetz's use of Josephus's writings as an historical source.

Leopold Treitel, "Flavius Josephus bei H. Graetz," MGWJ 61 (1917): 385–389; Marcus Pyka, "In the Shadow of Napoleon: The Reception of Josephus in the Writings of Jost, Salvador and Graetz," in Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture (ed. A. Schatz; Studies in Jewish History and Culture 55; Leiden: Brill, 2019), 185–217. Neither study actually deals with Graetz in any great detail; Treitel instead focuses on Josephus himself, and Pyka's study is devoted to tracing nineteenth-century adumbrations of Graetz's view of Josephus and, therefore, as he notes at the outset (p. 186), deals with Graetz himself only briefly.

Indeed, Graetz's view of Josephus, as an individual, was quite negative. In the third volume of Graetz's Geschichte, Josephus is of course the main figure in the chapter on the revolt in the Galilee,8 and, from the first (1856) edition to the last (fifth, 1905/6), Josephus is attacked from beginning to end. Thus, on the one hand, when first introducing Josephus as having been appointed governor of the Galilee, Graetz opens by commenting that "Unglücklicher Weise war Josephus nicht der Mann, eine so riesige Aufgabe glücklich zu lösen, und er trug durch sein Benehmen zum Untergange des jüdischen Staates wesentlich bei" (Unfortunately, Josephus was not cut out to complete such a huge task successfully, and by his behavior he contributed significantly to the downfall of the Jewish state).<sup>9</sup>

That is bad enough. From that condemnation of Josephus as merely incapable, however, Graetz proceeds to portray him as dishonest, for although he realized Roman rule was here to stay, he hypocritically pretended to support the revolt ("heuchelte Josephus Sympathie für die Freiheit").10 And from there Graetz moves on to condemn Josephus roundly as being fundamentally characterized by Eitelkeit, Verstellung, and Gesinnungslosigkeit ("vanity, pretense, and lack of principles").11

Similarly, the end of Graetz's account of Josephus, which comes in a most prominent location, namely, the very end of vol. III, is a thoroughgoing condemnation. There, after reviewing Josephus's other works and characterizing Josephus's Antiquities as a praiseworthy national monument (Nationaldenkmal) and his Against Apion as a laudable response to antisemites, Graetz goes on to comment that, in contrast, with his autobiography (Life), which especially details his behavior during the war, "stellte er sich ein Denkmal der Schande" (he erected, for himself, a monument of shame). So it happened that, according to the very last lines of the book, in all editions (GdJ.III1 , 457 = III5 , 558):<sup>12</sup>

I.e., ch. 14 of Geschichte der Juden III in its first edition; ch. 15—after the addition of a chapter on messianism and Christianity—in editions 2–5.

GdJ.III1 , 399 = GdJ.III<sup>5</sup> , 482. References to Graetz's Geschichte der Juden open with GdJ. and are followed by a Roman numeral for the volume, a superscripted number for the edition, and a page-number. The use of an equal sign concerning the text in different editions may ignore miniscule differences in orthography.

GdJ.III1 , 400–401 = III5 , 484.

Ibid. Below, in Part III, §7, I will discuss a fourth character trait mentioned here in the first two editions but missing beginning with the third.

The text in both editions (and those between them) is identical, apart from the fact that the first two editions have Jeremiah in Ungemach ("discomfort," punning with Gemächern and contrasting with Josephus's gemächlicher Ruhe ["leisurely leisure"]), while beginning with the third edition Jeremiah's discomfort was replaced, as cited here, by chains and Josephus's "leisurely" leisure became "comfortable leisure."

Als Schriftsteller gebührt ihm der Lorbeerkranz, aber die Bürgerkrone des Patrioten hat er verwirkt. Jeremias, der in Fesseln auf den Trümmern Jerusalems seine Klagelieder aushaucht, bildet den Schluß des ersten Zeitraumes; Josephus, der in den Gemächern der Cäsaren in behaglicher Ruhe die Geschichte seines Volkes schreibt, bildet den Schluß des zweiten Zeitraumes.

(As an author he is deserving of laurels, but he forfeited the civic crown of a patriot. Jeremiah, breathing out his laments in shackles on the ruins of Jerusalem, constitutes the end of the first era [of Jewish history]; Josephus, writing the history of his people in comfortable leisure in the emperors' chambers, constitutes the end of the second era.)

It is difficult to think of a more damning contrast.13

The present study does not, therefore, take issue with the consensus that Graetz's view of Josephus was quite negative. It will, however, suggest that there was some significant change in it, between the 1850s and the late 1870s: that Graetz suppressed two central items in Josephus's bill of indictment because they involved sensitivities that German Jews of his day needed to consider.

#### III Graetz's Changing Evaluation of Josephus

A priori it is unlikely that Graetz's attitude toward Josephus remained the same throughout. Graetz's third volume, on the latter half of the Second Temple period, underwent many changes throughout his life, from one edition to the next, and apart from numerous additions (which made the volume grow from 572 pages in

Surprisingly, two modern scholars have taken the comparison with Jeremiah to be relatively laudatory. Harold W. Attridge (The Interpretation of Biblical History in the Antiquitates Judaicae of Flavius Josephus [Harvard Dissertations in Religion 7; Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1976], 8, n. 1) states that Graetz, responding to scholars who scorned Pharisaism and thought Josephus was a Pharisee, offers a "more positive assessment of Josephus" and "compares the historian, only somewhat unfavorably, to Jeremiah," and Pyka ("In the Shadow of Napoleon," 215–216) observes that "here [scil., in the comparison with Jeremiah], Josephus finally finds a place of pride in the grand scheme of Jewish history, although some negative connotations linger." To me it appears (a) that "only somewhat unfavorably" and "some negative connotations linger" are quite understated; (b) that Attridge and Pyka do not give enough weight to the immediately preceding lines (about "Denkmal der Schande"), which, especially given the contrast to "Nationaldenkmal" a few lines earlier, should govern the interpretation of this passage; and (c) that the English translation of Graetz, cited by Pyka, softens the stark contrast by omitting Jeremiah's chains and Josephus's "comfort" and by turning Jeremiah's "breathing his last breath" (aushauchen) into mere "uttering": "Jeremiah, uttering his lamentations amidst the ruins of Jerusalem, fitly ends the first period of Jewish history; whilst Flavius Josephus, writing the story of his people in the quiet of Caesar's palace, concludes the second period" (Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, II [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893], 320).

its first edition [1856] to 878 in the fourth [1888], which was the last published in his lifetime), Graetz also made some radical changes, of both omission and revision.14 All of that continued work reflects Graetz's great interest in the period; as we have seen (Ch. 1, n. 55), he considered it the most interesting period of all of Jewish history. But the works of Josephus were the prime source for most of this volume, and Josephus himself played an important role in its catastrophic final episode. It would, therefore, be surprising if all this continued work on the volume did not affect Graetz's attitude toward Josephus, or, perhaps, if such work did not in fact result, to some extent, from a change in Graetz's attitude toward Josephus.

True, much remained the same.<sup>15</sup> That is to be expected; in comparing editions of a given work in order to assess the author's changing views, the changes and additions are always more instructive than what is retained, for, it requires no thought to leave the text as is, while the introduction of changes and additions requires thought, initiative, and effort. Recall, moreover, that frequently what occasions the publication of a new edition is not so much a change in the author's views as market considerations, so there is no need to presume that the initiative for the new edition was the author's. This all creates something of a presumption that the text will remain the same—a presumpton that endows changes and additions with special significance.

In what follows, I will first identify nine differences between the way Graetz refers to Josephus in the first (1856) and second (1863) editions of the third volume of his Geschichte, on the one hand, and the third (1878) edition, on the other.<sup>16</sup> Following that, I will suggest an explanation for these differences, one that locates Graetz's editorial work in the context of his own day.

See: D. R. Schwartz, Judeans and Jews: Four Faces of Dichotomy in Ancient Jewish History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 62–82. In the present context, it is enough to point out that between the second and third editions of the third volume Graetz moved throughout, beginning with the volume's title page, from Juden and jüdisch to Judäer and judäisch (from "Jews" and "Jewish" to "Judean[s]" and "Judean") when discussing the Jews of the last centuries of the Second Temple period.

As we saw in the preceding section. Indeed, Pyka states (Jüdische Identität, 275), in general, that the main text of the Geschichte remained unchanged from edition to edition, and in "In the Shadow of Napoleon," 213, n. 94, he says, specifically, that vol. III remained "largely the same" from edition to edition. But "largely" is not "totally" and, as I will argue and illustrate below, there are interesting exceptions to Pyka's assessment that the changes that were made "only elaborate rather than change the narrative" or concern only "rather technical matters."

Η. Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, III<sup>1</sup> (Leipzig: Schnauß, 1856); III<sup>2</sup> (Leipzig: Leiner, 1863); III<sup>3</sup> (Leipzig: Leiner, 1878).

1. Deletion of "treasonous." In the first part of Graetz's description of Josephus in the Galilee we find the following sentence: "Wegen dieser zweideutigen, Haltung lähmte er die Bewegung, anstatt ihr Nachdruck zu geben" (Because of this ambiguous, attitude, he hobbled the [rebellious] movement instead of supporting it). That is how the sentence appears in the third edition (GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 517), which is the one I happened to be reading when this project was born; it made me stumble, as it were, for there is no justification for the comma between the third and fourth word. When I checked the parallel passage in the preceding editions (GdJ.III<sup>2</sup> , 368) to see if anything there might explain it, I found that where the third edition has one adjective, the second edition had two, and therefore needed the comma: "Wegen dieser zweideutigen, verrätherischen Haltung lähmte er die Bewegung, anstatt ihr Nachdruck zu geben" (Because of this ambiguous, treasonous, attitude, he hobbled the [rebellious] movement instead of supporting it).

That is, in preparing his 1878 edition Graetz decided to delete the characterization of Josephus's attitude as "treasonous," a fact that I noticed only because the printer who executed the change failed to delete the comma that second adjective had entailed.<sup>17</sup> This, of course, raises the historical question: Why did Graetz seek to erase this categorization of Josephus?

In order to answer that question, and also to check whether the issue was one that occupied Graetz more broadly, I systematically compared his discussions of Josephus in the first two editions as opposed to the third. While much remained the same, as is natural, I found eight more passages in which similar changes were made.

2. Attenuation of Josephus's two-facedness. Just before the text quoted in the preceding paragraph, Graetz states, in all the editions, that Josephus, in the Galilee, was two-faced. According to the first two editions: "dem Volke gegenüber zeigte er sich als römerfeindlicher Zelote, den Römern und ihren Freunden dagegen als heimlicher Anhänger" (to the people he made himself appear as an anti-Roman Zealot; to the Romans and their supporters, in contrast, as a secret adherent [GdJ.III1 , 403 = III2 , 368]). According to the third edition (GdJ.III3 , 517), in contrast: "dem Volke gegenüber geberdete er sich als Zelote, den Freunden der Römer dagegen gab er sich als heimlichen Gesinnungsgenossen zu erkennen" (vis-à-vis the people he behaved as a Zealot, while, in contrast, he let the friends of the Romans perceive him as a secret sympathizer). The changes are small, but evidently Graetz felt the need to do

It is interesting to note that while Graetz's first edition (GdJ.III1 , 403) had the same wording as the second, it had no comma between the two adjectives. Had Graetz not inserted it into the second, it would not have been there in the third and the whole change might have gone unnoticed.

what he could: on the one hand, Graetz leaves Josephus a "Zealot" but omits "anti-Roman," and on the other hand he turns Josephus from a supporter of Rome to one who only sympathizes with Rome; an Anhänger (as in the first two editions) is much more supportive than a mere Gesinnungsgenosse (as in the third edition). From both points of view, the gap between Josephus's two contrasting self-portrayals is much narrower, hence less reprehensible; Graetz's Josephus of 1878 is less anti-Roman, but also less pro-Roman, and so less hypocritical, than Josephus of the first two editions.

3. Deletion of Josephus's tendency to support his nation's enemies. Just before that passage, Graetz refers, in the first and second editions (GdJ.III1 , 402 = III2 , 367–368), to Josephus's "Neigung für die Feinde der Nation" (tendency in favor of the nation's enemies), demonstrating it by citing Josephus's report in his autobiography (Life, ch. 35, §175) that, while still military governor of the Galilee, in a moment of honesty he told his guests "daß er nur um die vielen 'Räuber' nicht gegen sich zu reizen, Vorkehrungen gegen die Römer treffe, im Grunde aber sei er überzeugt, daß gegen deren Allmacht nichts auszurichten sei" (that it was only to avoid provoking against himself the numerous "bandits" that he made arrangements to confront the Romans, but his basic conviction was that nothing could be done to oppose Rome's absolute power). That is, Josephus reports that, while in charge of defending the Galilee, he admitted to a clearly defeatist view. This entire passage was excised from the parallel passage in the third edition (GdJ.III3 , 517), where instead, in a footnote (515–516, n. 2), which will be discussed below in §8, Graetz declares that Josephus's report in Life 35, §175 "is certainly false" ("Unwahr ist gewiss . . .").

4. Replacement of an admonition against anti-Roman hostilities by responsible fulfillment of duty. According to all three editions (Gesch III1 , 402; III2 , 367; III3 , 517), when Josephus arrived in the Galilee, he organized an army but instructed his men neither to take up arms nor to engage in looting unless he ordered them to do so. Graetz's account here is based on Josephus's own report at Judean War 2.581–583. Following this, Graetz goes on to report, but only in the first and second editions (III<sup>1</sup> , 402; III<sup>2</sup> , 367), that Josephus drummed it into his men ("schärfte er ihnen ein") that they were not to engage in any hostilities with the Romans. This is not found in War; rather, Graetz copied it from a passage in Josephus's "monument of shame," his Life (§78). The fact that this report does not reappear in the third edition amounts to the deliberate deletion of a detail that could easily be interpreted as shameful and treasonous sabotaging of the revolt, what Graetz termed "hobbling" in the first of the passages in the present list. On the contrary, the third edition adds here several lines, not found in the second, that give details about the troops Josephus raised and his other work on preparing the Galilee for war, concluding with the new assessment that "Er machte also Anfangs mit der Vertheidigung der Landschaft gegen die Römer Ernst" (Thus, at first he was serious about defending the region against the Romans; GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 517).

5. Replacement of unequivocal "criminality" by several alternatives. A few pages later, we find, in the third edition, the following summary (GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 525): "Josephus trifft die ewige Schmach, daß er das starke Bollwerk Judäa's, das kräftige, kriegerische Galiläa durch Ungeschicklichkeit, Selbstsucht und Unverträglichkeit oder durch sein falsches Spiel zersplittert und entmannt hat" (Josephus is forever stained by the disgrace of having splintered and emasculated Judea's strong bulwark, namely, the powerful and militant Galilee, by his lack of skill, pursuit of self-interest, and intolerance, or by playing a double game). This list of alternative explanations of Josephus's behavior, with no commitment to any of them, is a reworking of a much more concise and unambiguous verdict in the first two edition (GdJ.III1 , 410 = III2 , 373): "Josephus trifft die ewige Schmach, daß er das starke Bollwerk Judäa's mit frevelhafter Hand zerstört, das kräftige, kriegerische Galiläa zersplittert und entmannt hat" (Josephus is forever stained by the disgrace of having criminally destroyed Judea's strong bulwark; he splintered and emasculated the powerful and militant Galilee). That is, Graetz dropped the unambiguous characterization of Josephus as simply "criminal" ("mit frevelhafter Hand") and replaced it with four alternatives, of which the first (lack of skill) means he was simply incapable of doing better and none of the other three is an unequivocal moral condemnation. Indeed, the very employment of multiple alternative adjectives, in the new text, amounts to equivocation.

6. Josephus as an impostor: From a probability to a question. Graetz begins his discussion of Josephus with the following question: How did it come about that Josephus, of all people, was chosen to command the revolt in the Galilee? His response, in 1856 and 1863, was as follows (GdJ.III1 , 401= III2 , 366): "Indessen ist es nicht unwahrscheinlich, daß er seine Verstellung so weit getrieben, sich als Zelote zu gebahren" (However, it is not improbable that he went so far in his dissimulation as to behave like a Zealot). Fifteen years later, in GdJ.III3 , 514, he downgraded that response into another question: "Sollte er seine Verstellung so weit getrieben haben, sich als Zelote zu geberden?" (Could it be that he went so far in his dissimulation as to behave as a Zealot?). Here too we see Graetz backing away from characterization of Josephus as a traitor.<sup>18</sup>

My thanks to my friends and advisors concerning German style—Dafna Mach, Hermann Lichtenberger, and Felix Oehmichen—who agree that, in contrast, the change from "gebahren" to "geberden," whatever explains it, does not have any implications for Graetz's evaluation of Josephus.

7. Deletion of "cowardice." Immediately following that, in the first two editions, Graetz justifies his opinion ("it is not improbable that . . .") by saying (GdJ.III1 , 401 = III2 , 366): "Denn nächst Eitelkeit und Feigheit machten Verstellung und Gesinnungslosigkeit Josephus' Grundcharakter aus" (For along with vanity and cowardice, Josephus's fundamental character consisted of dissimulation and lack of principles). In 1878 (GdJ.III3 , 514), however, the same text appears as follows: "Nächst Eitelkeit machten allerdings Verstellung und Gesinnungslosikeit Josephus' Grundcharakter aus" (Indeed, alongside vanity, Josephus's fundamental character consisted of dissimulation and lack of principles). Here Graetz not only omitted the opening "denn" (for) as was required by the change of the preceding sentence from a claim into a question; he also omitted Feigheit (cowardice) from the roster of elements of Josephus's "fundamental character."

8. New expansion on Josephus's character and activity. Following this first discussion, Graetz continues, in all three editions (GdJ., 401 = III2 , 366; III3 , 515), and elaborates broadly on the theme that Josephus was not a respectable person; he was a petty individual (Kleingeist), a dishonorable liar who sought only his own personal advantage. But at this point the editions diverge quite significantly. In the first two editions, Graetz appended a very short note (GdJ.III1 , 401, n. 2 = III<sup>2</sup> , 366, n. 5) that refers readers to a work by Joseph Salvador for more about Josephus's "Charakter und Thätigkeit" (character and activity),19 while he himself continues the historical narrative of Josephus's mission to the Galilee. In the third edition, in contrast, Graetz omitted the reference to Salvador and instead added sixteen lines of text (GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 515) and a new footnote that fills another thirty-six lines (515–516, n. 2). That new note is on the same topic as its short predecessor in the first two editions (Josephus's "character and activity"), but while there Graetz was content to refer to Salvador for all one might want to know, here he begins by announcing that the matter is not so simple:

Josephus' Charakter und Thätigkeit sind äußerst schwer zu beurtheilen, weil die beiden Quellen, der jüdische Krieg und die Selbstbiographie (Vita), grelle Widersprüche darüber enthalten . . . muß man davon ausgehen, daß er sich in der Vita schwärzer gemalt hat, als er war

(It is extremely difficult to assess Josephus's character and deeds because the two [relevant] sources, Josephus's War and Life, are glaringly contradictory on these points . . . we must assume that, in Life, he painted himself blacker than he really was.)

See below, 22–23.

9. New expansion on how dangerous Josephus's situation was in Rome when he wrote the Life. In his concluding discussion of Josephus's writings, in every edition of vol. III, Graetz contrasts (as cited at n. 12) Antiquities, which was a Nationaldenkmal ("national monument") that justifiably made Josephus immortal, and Life, which was a Denkmal der Schand ("monument of shame"). In the first two editions (GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 457; III<sup>2</sup> , 413) that is explained by a single sentence, in which Graetz briefly remarks that, since, in his Life, Josephus wanted to defend himself against Justus of Tiberias's accusation (which we shall discuss in the next section) that he had opposed Rome, he portrayed himself in a worse light. Beginning with the third edition, however, that single sentence is preceded by seventeen new lines (III<sup>3</sup> , 595 = III4 , 556–557; III5 , 557–558) in which Graetz expands on how mortally dangerous Josephus's situation was in Rome as a result of Justus's work. That, of course, serves to mitigate the severity of the critique of Life as a "monument of shame," for Josephus wrote it in order to save his skin.

So many changes and so much new material, in the body of the text and the footnotes, challenge us to analyze Graetz's changing view of Josephus and what the change might reflect.

#### IV A New Theory about Josephus's Role in the Rebellion

With the new additions in GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 515–516, Graetz adopted a certain improvement of a theory that he himself developed between the second (1863) and third (1878) editions of this volume. In order to understand the theory, and its eventual improvement, one must recall the basic pervasive issue that complicates any attempt to reconstruct and assess Josephus's role as military governor of the Galilee at the outset of the revolt against Rome in 66/67 CE. As Graetz notes, that issue is the contradiction between War and Life: While Josephus claims in War that he defended the Galilee honestly and vigorously, as best he could, and surrendered to the Romans only when there was no choice apart from suicide, in Life he claims that from the outset he was sure the revolt had no chance of success and therefore hoped the Romans would soon suppress it and restore order. In other words, in War he portrays himself as a patriot, in Life—as a defeatist and traitor, and it is up to the historians to choose between the two.20 Until the middle of the

See for example: Uriel Rappaport, "Where Was Josephus Lying: In His Life or in the War?" in: Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period (Studia Post-Biblica 41, ed. F. Parente and J. Sievers; Leiden: Brill, 1994), 279–289.

nineteenth century it was widely held that Life's version was more reliable, mainly on the basis of the natural assumption that no one would voluntarily portray him- or herself as a traitor unless it was true.21 For example, Salvador's chapter on Josephus in the Galilee, in his book on Roman rule in Judea, assumes from start to finish that Josephus was a lowly traitor;22 Shaye Cohen observes that Salvador's position remained regnant until the 1870s;<sup>23</sup> and, correspondingly, as noted above, Salvador's book was the only one to which Graetz, in his 1856 and 1863 editions (GdJ.III1 , 401, n. 2 = III2 , 366, n. 5), referred readers interested in reading more about Josephus's character and deeds.

As we have seen, however, by 1878 Graetz was backing away from that position. Now we may add that, in fact, already in 1856 he was backing away from it. Namely, already at GdJ.III1 , 457, the very last page of the volume, there appears a sentence that remained throughout all editions of the work:

Um sich gegen die Anklagen des Justus von Tiberias zu rechtfertigen, beschrieb er sein eigenes Leben und sein Verhalten in dem Kriege, und um sich von dem Verdachte zu reinigen, als habe er aus eigenem Antriebe gegen die Römer gehandelt, stellte er sich in ein noch ungünstigeres Licht.

(To defend himself against the accusations raised by Justus of Tiberias, he described his own life and behavior in the war, and in order to free himself from the suspicion, that it was of his own initiative that he had opposed Rome, he presented himself in an even more uncomplimentary light.)

Here, Graetz proposes, in nuce, a new theory: that Josephus should not be viewed as a traitor. Rather, alluding to Justus of Tiberias's accusation (cited by Josephus at Life 340) that it was Josephus who brought Tiberias to join the rebellion against Rome, Graetz argues that Josephus, in Life, deliberately gave a false picture of himself as a traitor to the Jewish cause, in order to defend himself in Roman eyes.

Another natural reason to prefer Life's portray of Josephus's stance in the rebellion is the assumption that shortly after the war, when he wrote War, he must have been very concerned to portray his role in the rebellion in a respectable way, but some twenty years later, when he wrote Life, events of the late 60s were viewed with more perspective and no longer constituted open wounds that required Josephus to pose in a way that deviated from the truth.

See J. Salvador, Geschichte der Römerherrschaft in Judäa und der Zerstörung Jerusalems (2 vols. in 1; Bremen: Schlodtmann, 1847), 2.34–60. Salvador's treatment of Josephus's agenda opens at 2.37 with the summary that Josephus wanted to use his authority in the Galilee to undercut the rebellion in order to win Roman gratitude. On Salvador's views on Josephus, see Pyka, "In the Shadow of Napoleon," 194–200.

Shaye J. D. Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 8; Leiden: Brill, 1979), 8–13.

That is, if (as explained above) it had long been accepted that the version of Life was to be believed (as "a monument of shame") because Josephus would not have lied in order to condemn himself as a traitor, here Graetz begins to turn things on their head, offering a reason why Josephus would do so.

However, this suggestion, which appears almost the same way at the end of vol. III in the second edition as well,<sup>24</sup> is obviously only a half-baked afterthought. That is clear, first of all, insofar as, despite this rejection of the veracity of Life, Josephus depended (as we have seen in Part III, §§3–4) on Life's testimony in his first and second editions, only dismissing it in the new note inserted into the third edition (GdJ.III3 , 515–516). Moreover, it is evident in the way Graetz, in observing that Josephus presented himself, in Life, "in an even more uncomplimentary light," failed to say, in the first edition, what that other way was. It was only beginning with the second edition that he added a few more words to the text cited above, namely, "als habe er von Anfang an es verrätherisch mit den Römern gehalten" (as if he had, from the outset, dealt treasonously with the Romans).

But the half-baked nature of Graetz's proposal, in the first two editions, is especially evident in the superficial way in which he deals with Justus of Tiberius. Namely, in the first and second editions, Graetz devoted only a few lines to Justus's attack on Josephus (which Josephus reports and rebuffs, as best he can, at Life 336–367), and Graetz also made a gross misstatement about the chronology of Josephus's and Justus's works: the way Graetz tells the story (GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 456 = III<sup>2</sup> , 413), Justus published his response to Josephus's War right after Josephus published it, and Josephus did not immediately respond. Both points are wrong. As Josephus reports, and beginning with the third edition Graetz accepts Josephus's report, although Justus composed his work in the early 70s (i.e., well before Josephus completed his War), he abstained from publishing it for twenty years.25 These mistakes show that Graetz's interest in Justus was very minor and superficial in the first two editions of his work. It grew greatly by the third, in which he devotes some thirty lines to Justus, his oeuvre, and his career. In sum, in his first two editions, Graetz had little use for or interest in Justus, using him only to explain Josephus's admission, in Life, that he had been a traitor from the outset. Indeed, as we saw in Part III, Graetz at first accepted that admission without hesitation.

From that first brief and superficial formulation of the theory, retained until 1863, Graetz moved on, by 1867, to a much fuller version, as is shown by a publica-

GdJ.III<sup>2</sup> , 413–414. For an addition here to the text inherited from the first edition (GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 457), see the end of the present paragraph.

See Life 360, followed in GdJ.III3 , 593, where Graetz (supplementing the first and second editions) dates War to 75–79 and the completion of Justus's work already to 73, and also (correcting the first and second editions) reports that Justus left his work unpublished for twenty years.

tion that has not hitherto been ascribed to Graetz. Namely, in 1867 there appeared a new German translation of Josephus's Life, accompanied by a seven-page introduction.<sup>26</sup> The translation is signed only "M.J." and the introduction is unsigned. As I have argued elsewhere, it seems that the translation was produced by Manuel Joël, Graetz's colleague at the Breslau rabbinical seminary, and that Graetz himself either authored the introduction or heavily influenced (or was plagiarized by) whoever did author it.27 Moreover, a few years later the same new theory would lie at the heart of a detailed study by one of Graetz's students at the Breslau rabbinical seminary, Isaac Prager.<sup>28</sup>

The fundamental pillars of this theory are (a) that, as Graetz suggested at the end of the third volume already in 1856, it was in Life that Josephus was lying; (b) that in fact Josephus was a patriot and a true rebel at the outset of the revolt; and (c) that it was Justus's accusation, that Josephus had been responsible for the anti-Roman revolt in Tiberias (Life 340), that brought Josephus to present himself in Life as a traitor. But the 1867 introduction, and then Prager in 1873, devoted much more space and prominence to the theory.<sup>29</sup> Moreover, they argued in support of the theory that it can explain the otherwise anomalous fact that Josephus's "autobiography" deals almost exclusively with the less than a year in which he was military governor of the Galilee, and they also draw the explicit conclusion that,

Die kleineren Schriften des Flavius Josephus (Bibliothek der griechischen und römischen Schriftsteller über Judenthum und Juden 2; Leipzig: Leiner, 1867).

D. R. Schwartz, "A Breslau Translation of Josephus's Minor Works," in Juden und Christen unter römischer Herrschaft: Selbstwahrnehmung und Fremdwahrnehmung in den ersten beiden Jahrhunderten n. Chr. (ed. N. Förster and Cor de Vos; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2015), 187–200. Hitherto scholars have either assigned this translation (and others by M.J. in the same collection) to Isaak Markus Jost or left M.J. unidentified. But Jost seems always to have used his first name (Isaak) or initial (I); there is not much in his dossier to indicate that he might have wanted, or been able, to translate works in Greek; and he died in 1860—seven years before the volume appeared. Joël taught Greek at the Breslau Seminary, alongside Graetz, right where we would expect the seed of this theory to have been sown.

I. Prager, "Über das Verhältniß des Flavius Josephus zur Zelotenpartei beim Ausbruch des jüdischen Krieges," Jahresbericht über die Religions-Unterrichts-Anstalt der Synagogen-Gemeinde (Breslau: Sulzbuch, 1873). According to Brann (Geschichte [Ch. 1, n. 11], 189), Prager studied at the Breslau Seminary from 1869 until 1877.

Thus, for example, the short statement quoted above (at n. 24) from the first two editions of GdJ.III now becomes (Die kleineren Schriften, 12): "Um also die Freundschaft der Römer nicht zu verlieren, schilderte er sich in der Selbstbiographie schlimmer als er wirklich gewesen war und sich auch in der Geschichte des Krieges dargestellt hatte: nämlich als einen vorbedachten Verräther an dem großen Volkstamme, dessen Führung ihm anvertraut worden war" (Therefore, so as not to lose the Romans' friendship, Josephus portrayed himself in his autobiography worse than he really had been and also worse than he had portrayed himself in War, namely, as a premeditated traitor to the great people, whose leadership had been entrusted to him.)

contrary to the earlier consensus, when War and Life contradict one another, it is the former that should be preferred.<sup>30</sup>

True, such a new self- representation by Josephus amounted to him portraying himself falsely as having been a traitor to his nation. That Josephus was willing to go so far demonstrates, according to the proponents of the theory, the extent to which his status was at risk in Rome in the wake of Justus's portrayal of him as having been responsible for the revolt in Tiberias. But the truth is, according to this theory in its fuller form, as offered by Prager in 1873, that Josephus was an honest patriot:

Es läßt sich vielmehr mit einiger Sicherheit nachweisen, daß — um das Resultat unserer Untersuchungen vorweg auszusprechen—Josephus beim Ausbruche des Krieges als entschiedener Revolutionsmann und Anhänger der später von ihm so sehr verleumdeten Zeloten aufgetreten und . . . auch dieser Gesinnung gemäss thätig gewesen sei"

(It may rather be shown with some degree of certainty that—to state at the outset the conclusion of our study—at the outbreak of the war Josephus was a committed rebel and follower of the Zealots (whom later he would so harshly defame), and that he acted in accordance with that attitude . . .) 31

Despite the enthusiasm with which this theory was offered, by M.J. and then by Prager, it was, and is, difficult to claim the theory is convincing, or even to understand why anyone ever thought it was. Josephus's role as commander of the Galilee must have been known to many in Rome, and he himself freely and even proudly described it in his War, which appeared already within a decade of the Judean revolt, when the wounds were still open. Nonetheless his status in Rome was secure.32 Should we really imagine that an accusation regarding his responsibility for the revolt of a single provincial city, an accusation voiced more than twenty years after the end of the revolt, would undermine his status in the eyes of the Romans so seriously as to require such a revision of his narrative and selfsullying of his good name?

Die kleineren Schriften, 13 (". . . ist dann immer der Geschichte des Krieges der Vorzug zu geben"); Prager, "Über das Verhältniß," 4 ("Überall, wo sich Differenzen zwischen den beiden Berichten, dem B.J. [Bellum Judaicum/Judean War] und der Vita vorfinden, ist unbedingt die Darstellung des ersteren als glaubwürdiger vorzuziehen").

Prager, "Über das Verhältniß," 6. I omitted, in the ellipsis in the midst of the German text and the end of the English translation, Prager's observation that Josephus changed his colors just before the episode mentioned below at n. 36.

See esp. Life 414–429, also W. den Hollander, Josephus, the Emperors, and the City of Rome: From Hostage to Historian (AJEC 86; Leiden: Brill, 2014).

Given the weakness of the first version of this theory, as set out in the 1867 introduction and by Prager in 1873, it is not surprising that a revised one would soon appear, in the work of yet another student of Graetz—more proof that the issue was alive and well and troubling. According to this revised theory, suggested in 1877 by Aron Baerwald<sup>33</sup> and followed by Graetz the next year in GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 515–516, the basic points of the original theory remained the same: Josephus was an enthusiastic patriot from the outset of the rebellion, and his self-presentation in Life as a traitor from the outset is not to be believed. According to Baerwald too, Josephus was not a traitor, but—and this is where Baerwald went beyond the 1867 introduction and Prager—since Josephus realized that Rome could not be overcome, he made a secret pact, not with Rome, since that would have constituted treason, but, rather, with King Agrippa II. Agrippa was Herod the Great's greatgrandson and was, at the time, ruler of a minor principality in northern Palestine and Lebanon/Syria.34 According to Baerwald's theory, Agrippa hoped to exploit the hostility between the Jews and the Romans in order to position himself as Rome's middleman in Judea, thus leading the Romans to appoint him king of Judea, the position formerly held by his father (Agrippa I) and great-grandfather, Herod. Agrippa was, therefore, interested in the maintenance of a certain level of tension and violence that would bring the Romans to understand that their way of ruling Judea, through non-Jewish governors, was not working, and so they should try another approach: the re-establishment of an autonomous Jewish vassal kingdom in Palestine, with him on its throne. But it was crucial for Agrippa that the war not spin completely out of control, for that would force Rome to intervene on a massive scale.

According to Baerwald's theory, Josephus was Agrippa's secret ally almost from the very beginning of his time in the Galilee, and thus his ambiguous actions, which maintained anti-Roman hostility but kept it restrained, should be understood as precisely what Agrippa expected of him. Only when both of them, Agrippa and Josephus, understood that their plan had failed and that Rome was indeed about to intervene on a massive scale, did they abandon their plan and submit fully to the might of the empire.

Aron Baerwald, Josephus in Galiläa: Sein Verhältniss zu den Parteien, insbesondere zu Justus von Tiberias und Agrippa II. (Breslau: Wilhlem Koebner, 1877). (Also published as his doctoral dissertation, with the same pagination but two additional words in the title: Flavius Josephus . . . König Agrippa II.). Baerwald was a student at the Breslau Seminary between 1873 and 1881 (Brann, Geschichte, 144).

On Agrippa II, see E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135) (new English ed. by G. Vermes et al.; 3 vols. in 4; Edinburgh: Clark, 1973–1987), 1.471–483.

This version of the new theory, which featured devious and manipulative politics that would have made any Realpolitiker proud, was new, insofar as it made Agrippa II the linchpin,<sup>35</sup> and it was impressive. After all, if the original version of the theory, proposed by Graetz (briefly at the end of GdJ.III1–<sup>2</sup> and then more fully in the 1867 introduction to M.J.'s translation of Life) and Prager (1873), which posited only two sides, Judeans and Romans, rehabilitated Josephus somewhat by claiming that Josephus's self-portrayal as a traitor from the outset, in Life, was not true, it still admitted that Josephus changed sides very quickly. That was shown, in particular, by an event—on which scholars focused in this context from early in Josephus's time in the Galilee: both War (2.595–597) and Life (68–69, 126–131) report that Josephus saved Agrippa II's property from the hands of Jewish bandits and secretly returned it to the king.36 According to the first version of the theory, which posited only two sides to the conflict, Judeans and Romans, and aligned Agrippa II firmly with the Romans, Josephus's intervention constituted a plainly treasonous betrayal of the Judeans' cause in favor of the Romans. In contrast, the revised version of this theory, which portrays Agrippa II as a third and Janus-faced figure and the pursuit of his interests as a way of avoiding direct Roman rule and maintaining a significant measure of autonomy under a Jewish king, allows Josephus's intervention, in rescuing the king's property, to be seen as loyalty to his original agreement and to his understanding of the national interest, not to Rome. As Graetz declares as part of his new text at GdJ.III3 , 515: "Für Agrippa hat Josephus in der That gearbeitet, und insofern hat er nicht ganz unehrlich und verrätherisch gehandelt" (The one for whom Josephus worked was in fact Agrippa, and, that being the case, Josephus's behavior was not entirely dishonest and treasonous).

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that even this revised version of the theory is unconvincing. It assumes that everything we know (from the works of Josephus) about Agrippa II's behavior, which shows him to have collaborated with Rome, as was expected from a vassal, was intended to conceal Agrippa's main agenda and to divert the Romans' attention from his true aim, which was the subversion of Roman rule. True, defenders of the theory could claim that Josephus naturally had to ensure that Agrippa's true plan was kept secret, so the lack of evidence is no objection. However, a theory for which no evidence can be adduced, and which

Note that while the new theory focuses on Agrippa II, the abovementioned introduction from 1867 (that we have attributed to Graetz) mentioned Agrippa only once, as a traitor to the Jews (Die kleineren Schriften, 13). Similarly, Prager too mentioned Agrippa II only once, namely, as someone against whom Josephus, the faithful rebel against Rome, caused Gamala to rebel ("Über das Verhältniß," 10). Thus, Baerwald's contribution was significant.

The central role this episode plays for all scholars interested in evaluating Josephus's political orientation was emphasized by Baerwald, Josephus in Galiläa, 43.

therefore cannot potentially be refuted, and which runs counter to all of the available evidence, cannot be accepted. Immediately upon the appearance of Baerwald's dissertation its central theory was rejected out of hand in the strongest terms by an anonymous reviewer, who characterized it as arbitrary and "fantastic"; <sup>37</sup> the next year Emil Schürer rejected it without hesitation, stating simply that "Josephus knew nothing about any of this"; <sup>38</sup> in 1910 another scholar cursorily rejected it out of hand as being built on too many false premises;39 and the score after a century was summarized by Cohen by the observation that the "extraordinarily confused" theory "has not won support." 40

But Graetz, although a reasonable man and a seasoned historian, adopted this theory with open arms. Just as we have seen him adumbrating the basic thesis, about the account in Life being untrue, so too may we assume that he gave his stamp of approval to Baerwald's doctoral thesis in 1877, and a year later we see him adopting it as the core of his lengthy new discussion at GdJ.III3 , 515–516. Indeed, this theory accounts for all the editing noted above in Part III. What caused Graetz to adopt such an unconvincing theory? Why was it so important for him to delete characterizations of Josephus as treasonous and cowardly?

Since, as seen in Part II, it is not the case that Graetz portrayed Josephus positively, even in the third edition,41 it seems that we should concentrate on the two main characteristics that Graetz edited away: that Josephus was treasonous and that he was cowardly.

#### V German-Jewish Treason and Cowardice, 1856–1878

The first three editions (1856, 1863, 1878) of GdJ.III appeared in very different climates. If "it is incontestable that anti-Semitism was on the wane in Germany during the two decades before the Reichsgründung [foundation of the Second Reich,

AZJ 1877, no. 51: 808–809 ("Was wir über Agrippa II. wissen, erweist ihn auf Seiten der Römer: es ist deshalb durchaus willkürlich und phantastisch, durch eine Reihe von kühnen Hypothesen das Gegentheil construiren zu wollen").

E. Schürer, Theologische Literaturzeitung 1878, cols. 208–210.

Heinrich Luther, Josephus und Justus von Tiberias: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des jüdischen Aufstandes (Diss. Halle-Wittenberg; Halle a.S.: Wischan & Burkhardt, 1910), 9.

Cohen, Josephus in Galilee, 13.

Where we still find various pejorative adjectives, even including "treasonous" (GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 520, 537, 542). All three of the latter were in the second edition (GdJ.III<sup>2</sup> , 370, 382, 386). Given Graetz's avoidance of such language when he did intervene, allowing these formulations to remain must not point to his true attitude but, rather, to the difficulty, especially in a world without electronic "find" commands, of making a consistent revision of an extant text.

in 1871]," <sup>42</sup> the next decade was a different story.<sup>43</sup> The 1870s opened with the foundation of the Second Reich and were to conclude with a protracted public debate about what if any place the Jews should have within it;<sup>44</sup> the decade began with a wave of nationalism associated with the Franco-Prussian War and the foundation of the empire and soon moved on to the major wave of antisemitism that followed the stock market crash of 1873 and festered for years. While the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit ("Dispute about Antisemitism"), on the specific genesis of which we shall focus in Ch. 4, was still a year in the future when Graetz published his GdJ.III3 in 1878, its antecedents were already in the air.45 It is, in short, easy to realize that, for Jews, the atmosphere in which the third edition of GdJ.III appeared in 1878 was quite different from that of the first two editions.

In the present context, it is especially important to note that the canard, that German Jews were traitors and cowards, was very widespread in the 1860s and 1870s.<sup>46</sup> The claim that Jews were cowardly was not limited to Germany, nor was

See Ch. 4, at nn. 6–14.

Henry Wasserman, "On the Construction of Anti-Semitism," Aschkenas—Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 13 (2003): 241.

For the foundation of the Reich as a caesura in the history of German antisemitism, see, for example, Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press and Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972); Donald L. Niewyk, "Solving the 'Jewish Problem': Continuity and Change in German Antisemitism, 1871–1945," LBIYB 35 (1990): 335–370; Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Jewish Society and Culture; Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 85–105 (chapters on "The Liberal Epoch" and "Bismarck's Change of Course and the Rise of Anti-Semitism").

To paraphrase the subtitle of Karsten Krieger (ed.), Der "Berliner Antisemitismusstreit" 1879–1881: Eine Kontroverse um die Zugehörigkeit der deutschen Juden zur Nation – Kommentierte Quellenedition (2 vols.; München: Saur, 2003).

See for example: George L. Mosse, "The Image of the Jew in German Popular Culture: Felix Dahn and Gustav Freytag," LBIYB 2 (1957): esp. 219, on Felix Dahn's Ein Kampf um Rom (1867), "one of the most popular German novels of the century"; it featured a stereotypical Jew as both a traitor and cowardly. For some straws in the wind in the years between Graetz's second and third edition, see, for example, AJZ 1871, no. 32: 647 (Gottfried Schmelkes's poem, ". . . Man nennt uns feig—o dieser schnöden Lüge"); ibid. no. 33: 656 (the complaint that "for too long have the Jews been accused of Feigheit"); and ibid. no. 36: 713–716 (a long review of an ethnological study by Karl Röder's discussion of "Die Juden" in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 27 [1871]: 426–428, which claimed that Jews are characterized, inter alia, by Feigheit), also, for example, a front-page review, in AZJ 1877, no. 8: 115–118, of Friedrich von Hellwald's Culturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung bis zur Gegenwart, I (2nd ed.; Augsburg: Lampart, 1876): the review opens with an extended rebuttal of Hellwald's claim (at p. 291) that the Jews, as other Semites, and as opposed to Aryans, were characterized by Feigheit. For more of the same, see below, nn. 52–55.

it necessarily related to their relation to any state.<sup>47</sup> But when it came together with the accusation of disloyalty to the state, or treason, as it did in support of the accusation that Jews typically avoided military service, the combination was particularly potent.

This is a general topic, but it is most relevant to note, here, that Graetz himself was, very early in 1871, a victim of harsh criticism in relation to these two issues. This happened due to a bit of bad luck: the eleventh and final volume of Graetz's Geschichte der Juden happened to appear just a month or two before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870.<sup>48</sup> The volume deals with the age of Emancipation, and the way Germany tended to roll it back after the fall of Napoleon, and Graetz frequently had nice things to say about France and complaints about Germany—and so when the book came up for review, in the course of the war, it was of course natural, for Germans, to condemn Graetz for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Indeed, an angry review of the volume,49 that appeared in a prominent literary journal on 14 January 1871 while the war was raging and just as the Second Reich was being founded, enraged Graetz<sup>50</sup> and even caused him some public embarrassment.51

Along with the review's main general complaint, that Graetz. and German Jews in general, viewed themselves as Jews, not as Germans, and to illustrate it,

See, for example, Elliott Horowitz, "'They Fought Because They Were Fighters and They Fought Because They Were Jews': Violence and the Construction of Modern Jewish Identity," in Jews and Violence: Images, Ideologies, Realities (ed. P. Y. Medding; Studies in Contemporary Jewry 18; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23–42.

On 7 February 1870 Graetz was still complaining that the volume had not yet appeared, but by 1 June 1870 he was sending out copies to his friends. See: Heinrich Graetz, Tagebuch und Briefe (ed. R. Michael; SWALBI 34; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1977), Letters 83 and 88.

LCD 1871: 29–31. The article is signed "M. L." For the identification of the author and his circumstances when he wrote it, see Ch. 4.

Graetz's anger is evident in his letter of 23 January 1871 to Friedrich Zarncke, editor of the LCD (preserved in the Friedrich Zarncke Nachlass in the special collections department of the University of Leipzig; Signatur: NL 249/1/G/938): Graetz complains that the review has "einen denunciativischen Charakter" and asks for permission to respond. I do not know whether Zarncke answered Graetz's letter, but although the LCD now and then included rejoinders (see, for example, LCD 1871: 190–191, 470), none by Graetz appeared, nor have I found one elsewhere. Perhaps Graetz decided that totschweigen was the best policy. My thanks to Steffen Hoffmann, of the Special Collections division of the Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek, for his help with locating and copying letters in Zarncke's Nachlaß that are cited in the present study and in Ch. 4.

See Josef Meisl, Heinrich Graetz: Eine Würdigung des Historikers und Juden zu seinem 100. Geburtstage 31. Oktober 1917 (21. Cheschwan) (Berlin: Lamm, 1917), 127–128, n. 51. See also Graetz's attempt to respond to such criticism, when it resurfaced in 1879, in Krieger, Der "Berliner Antisemitismusstreit," 1.190.

the review's most specific and focused section is devoted to rejecting Graetz's claim (esp. at GdJ.XI<sup>1</sup> , 334, 349) that the Jews of Prussia played an active and respectable role in their country's war against Napoleon. Citing, against Graetz, data that show that relatively few Jews served in the Prussian army between 1813–1815, given their ability to buy their way out of service, the reviewer goes on to report, in the penultimate sentence of the review, that Jewish evasion of military service was a massive phenomenon: "in 1813, the Jews in West Prussia bought their way out of military service so massively (massenhaft), that the money that brought in nearly sufficed to equip the province's entire militia" (LCD 1871: 30–31). Evasion of military service, when the homeland was invaded by Napoleon, was the height of cowardice and/or treason, and the additional reference to Jewish money, no matter how useful it admittedly was, nevertheless adds its own spice to the condemnation.

As other Jews, Graetz saw a need to respond to such criticism. Indeed, already in 1870, in the eleventh volume of his Geschichte, he had emphasized, with great pathos, that, especially in Prussia, Jews fighting in the Napoleonic wars were happy to erase with their blood, in the tumult of battle, the calumny of cowardice with which the opponents of emancipation had so often besmirched them.52 This was the historian's version of the efforts of Jewish newspapers, war veterans, and decorated soldiers to publicize and attain recognition for their service and sacrifice.<sup>53</sup> Here, similarly, special mention should be made of Graetz's and Joël's support for a Jewish student organization established in Breslau in 1886, on the background of accusations of cowardice and the exclusion of Jews from other stu-

". . . froh in die Reihen aufgenommen zu werden und im Schlachtgewühl mit ihrem Blute den Makel der Feigheit auszuslöschen, den die Gegner der Gleichtstellung ihnen so oft vorgeworfen hatten" (GdJ.XI1 , 320). On the emphasis that Graetz put on the Jews' manly military heroism, already in 1846, in the "second phase" of his Konstruktion, which includes the Second Temple period (The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays [ed. I. Schorsch; Moreshet 3; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1975], 89), see Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz, 269–270.

On this generation, see especially: Ludwig Philippson, Gedenkbuch an den deutsch-französischen Krieg von 1870/71 für die deutschen Israeliten (Bonn: Redaktion der Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judenthums, 1871) (on the widespread Jewish support for the project that underpinned that volume, see Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013], 71); Christine G. Krüger, "Sind wir denn nicht Brüder?": Deutsche Juden im nationalen Krieg 1870/71 (Krieg in der Geschichte 31; Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006); and Die Juden als Soldaten (Berlin: Comité zur Abwehr antisemitischer Angriffe, 1896). As the latter explains in its introduction, it presents material collected to support a lawsuit for defamation filed by a Jewish war veteran, who had been awarded the Iron Cross, against a newspaper editor who had accused the Jews of Feigheit. As for the years between 1860 and World War I, see: Michael Berger, Eisernes Kreuz und Davidstern: Die Geschichte Jüdischer Soldaten in Deutschen Armeen (Berlin: Trafo, 2006), esp. 91–128.

dent organizations. The organization, Viadrina, focused—like the institutions from which Jews were excluded—on physical education and fencing.54

On the background of such a post-1870 climate, and especially the need to defend German Jews against charges of treason and cowardice, we can understand that while German Jews suffered from such accusations, Graetz's Josephus actually benefited from them. This was because it was the order of the day, for the Jews of Germany in general and Graetz among them, to do whatever they could to prevent the impression that adjectives like verrätherisch or feig might characterize any Jew.55 So if in the 1850s and 1860s Graetz had no problem in writing, in the first two editions of GdJ.III, that Josephus treasonously tended to support his nation's enemies and was cowardly, by the late 1870s such words were becoming, for Jews, extremely sensitive, even when applied to the most despicable of Jews. This seems to explain the rise of the theory that, both in its original version in the fifties and sixties and in its improved version in the seventies, set aside the story Josephus told in Life. While Graetz could still say that Josephus was not very talented, and that he was vain, "traitor" and "cowardly" were out of bounds. Indeed, Graetz underlines that, however much Josephus was a despicable Römling (collaborator with Rome), nevertheless he was enough of a patriot that he could not tolerate that his people be accused of Feigheit (cowardice)—and that is, according to Graetz, why Josephus, in his War, emphasized Judean heroism, even that of anti-Roman rebels (GdJ.III1 , 456 = III5 , 555).

✶✶✶

The goal that Graetz was feeling his way toward already in 1856 and 1867, and which was sought more fully by his students Prager and Baerwald, was the rehabilitation of Josephus: his exoneration from the charge of having been a traitor. But that goal was not achieved; it was simply too difficult to make their case convincing. Rather, it soon became accepted, even within Jewish circles, that Josephus was indeed a traitor from the outset; as was noted by Jacob N. Simchoni, who translated Josephus's War into Hebrew and reviewed scholarly literature some fifty years later, "Most scholars of Josephus's works until today tend to side

See: Adolph Asch and Johanna Philippson, "Self-Defence at the Turn of the Century: The Emergence of the K.C.," LBIYB 3 (1958): esp. 132–135. For the support of Graetz and Joel, see ibid. 135, which is presumably based on Alfred Goldschmidt, "Zur Geschichte der Freien Verbindung 'Viadrina,'" K. C. Jahrbuch 1906: 29–30. For the emphasis placed in the organization on courage and heroism, and for the insistence that these were demonstrated by Jewish soldiers in the war of 1870–1871 see: Oskar Magen, "Festrede, gehalten beim ersten Stiftungsfest der Viadrina," K.C. Jahrbuch 1908: 19–20, 33.

Note, similarly, Graetz's complaint in GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 268 (= III<sup>5</sup> , 323; so too 325) that Greek antisemites in antiquity included "Feiglinge" among the pejorative terms they used in describing Jews.

with his Galilean comrades, and like them consider him to be a coward and a traitor to his people." <sup>56</sup> These are precisely the same two foci that so bothered Graetz! Instead of attempting to redeem even Josephus from these accusations, Jewish historiography found another way to deal with him: it cast him as a foil for others who were heroes, using him as the villain to point up the rebels' heroism. And so it happened, that the couplet "Josephus"—"traitor" became a cornerstone of Hebrew and Jewish culture in general.<sup>57</sup>

Only a half-century after Simchoni, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War (1973) a war that, together with the long attritition and Lebanese conflicts that followed it, brought Israelis and Jews face to face with the reality that not all wars can be won—would it become common for Jewish historians to revise, as Graetz and his students a century earlier, their evaluation of Josephus's character and morality. However, for the most part, their attempts were not based on revising the reconstruction of his actions and his political program, such as by positing a secret alliance with Agrippa II. Rather, they derived from a revision of the values that should be applied when evaluating Josephus, or other Jews who have to choose between a nation's yearning for independence and a powerful empire's demand to submit—and that is a very different story.<sup>58</sup>

Jacob N. H. Simchoni, "Introduction" in Josephus: History of the Jewish War against the Romans (Warsaw: Stybel, 1922/23), 15 (reprinted: Tel Aviv: Masadah, 1968, 13 [in Hebrew]). See Feldman's similar summary, sixty years later, cited above at n. 4. For some representative views of ca. 1933, see Ch. 7, at n. 38.

See, for example, the anecdote with which Pyka opens his "In the Shadow of Napoleon," 185, along with numerous other contributions to the volume in which it appeared, cited in n. 7. For consistent use of Josephus as a foil for heroic anti-Roman rebels, see, for example, Klausner's collection mentioned in Ch. 1, at n. 56. For modern Jewish debate about Josephus's character, see also Martin Goodman, Josephus's The Jewish War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 72–82.

See Nachman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), and D. R. Schwartz, "From Masada to Jotapata: On Josephus in Twentieth-Century Hebrew Scholarship," in A Companion to Josephus (ed. H. H. Chapman and Z. Rodgers; Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 419–439. For part of the story, see below, Ch. 7.

## 3 A Changing Tale of Two Cities: Graetz on Jews and Greeks in Roman Judea

## I Introduction

As we saw in the preceding study, Graetz repeatedly revised and expanded the third volume of his Geschichte. The volume begins with the death of Judas Maccabaeus in 161 BCE, tells the history of the sovereign Jewish state until it was conquered by Rome in 63 BCE, and then takes the story down, over a century split between Herod's long rule as a Roman vassal and a longer period of direct Roman rule, to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE. That catastrophe came as the culmination of Rome's suppression of a Judean rebellion of which the slogan (as proclaimed by the rebels' coins) was "freedom of Zion."

The third volume of Graetz's Geschichte is dedicated, that is, to a period of more than two centuries in which the Jews either had a sovereign state of their own or actively strove for one. As such, the period was highly interesting, but also highly sensitive, in an era in which German Jews were often suspected of not really wanting to be part of the new German state, or even of being "a state within a state." <sup>1</sup> It is no surprise, therefore, that the volume grew, in Graetz's lifetime, by more than fifty percent.2

Sometimes the changes reflect Graetz's new interests, or notions of a topic as a result of his continued research; thus, many of the appendices (Noten) added along the way began as articles. Sometimes they reflect his desire to respond to the work of other scholars; thus, for example, in a letter of March 1877 he complains about all the new scholarship to which he needed to respond to in preparing the third edition of the volume.<sup>3</sup>

In numerous cases, however, the changes seem to reflect not so much new research (his or that of others) as Graetz's changing sensitivities and assessments—and these, we may expect, might well reflect his responses to the changing context within which he lived and worked. In the preceding chapter, we looked at how Graetz's successive editions reflect his changing views and sensitivities concern-

See J. Katz, "'A State within a State': The History of an Anti-Semitic Slogan," Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 4 (1969): 29–58, also below, Ch. 4, the end of Appendix II. See Ch. 2, at n. 14.

Heinrich Graetz, Tagebuch und Briefe (ed. R. Michael; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1977), 338, no. 130. For some details, see below, n. 18.

ing the author of his main source for the period, Josephus, and suggested those changes be understood in light of the rise of antisemitism in the 1870s. In the present chapter, we shall see how the successive editions show changes in the way Graetz used evidence supplied by Josephus, as also by Philo of Alexandria, about first-century events, and suggest that the changes reflect Graetz's shifting views concerning the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors in mixed cities. That was a topic that was especially sensitive after the official endowment of all German Jews with full civil rights, upon the establishment of the Empire in 1871. That change in the Jews' legal status meant that, henceforth, the Jews' difficulties in that regard would, or should, have more to do with their relations with their neighbors than with the state.

The history of Judea in the first century CE was punctuated, according to Josephus, by two major clashes between the Judeans and their Roman rulers. One, in 39–41 CE, was occasioned by the emperor Gaius Caligula's order to erect a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem; after diplomacy failed and the country was on the brink of war, the clash was avoided, and the project aborted, Deus ex machina, by the assassination of Gaius in January 41.4 Thus, that clash turned out to be something of a general rehearsal for the final catastrophe. The other clash brought about the real thing: the Jews' rebellion in 66 CE culminated in the Roman destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70, and ended with the fall of Masada in 73 or 74 CE.<sup>5</sup>

These two clashes were, by far, the major crises of first-century Roman Judea. It is indeed natural, and perhaps seems obvious, to view them, as we just did, as clashes between Jews and their Roman rulers. After all, in both episodes Jews confronted Roman armies led by Roman commanders sent by the Roman emperor. It is, however, also the case that, both times, the relations between Jews and their "Greek" (Greek or Hellenized) neighbors, in coastal cities of Palestine, played a significant role. In 39 CE it was, according to a contemporary witness, Philo of Alexandria (Embassy to Gaius 200–203), a clash between Jews and Greeks in Jamnia (Yavneh, a town south of present-day Tel-Aviv), that provoked Gaius's order to erect his statue in the Temple of Jerusalem. And in 66, as another con-

For the standard modern summary of the episode, see E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135) (new English ed. by G. Vermes et al.; 3 vols; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973–1987), 1.394–397. For an analysis that focuses more on the sources' agendas, see P. Bilde, "The Roman Emperor Gaius (Caligula)'s Attempt to Erect His Statue in the Temple of Jerusalem," Studia Theologica 32 (1978): 67–93.

For the most recent monographs on the revolt, see Steve Mason, A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66–74 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Guy M. Rogers, For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66–74 CE (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

temporary witness reports (Josephus, Judean War 2.284), it was upon the arrival of Nero's decision in favor of the Greeks of Caesarea Maritima (between Tel Aviv and Haifa), concerning their clash with the Jews of the city,<sup>6</sup> that "the war took its beginning." Correspondingly, Josephus reports (War 2.452–457) that when the real violence began in 66 CE, the first and massive scene of Greek slaughter of Jews was at Caesarea.

True, in both cases (Jamnia and Caesarea) the cities were under Roman rule. In fact, both were quite directly under Roman rule: Jamnia, due to a quirk of its administrative history, had its own Roman procurator,<sup>7</sup> and Caesarea was not only part of the Roman province of Judea but actually was the Roman capital of Judea and the governor resided there (as is shown, for example, by Paul's story in chs. 24–25 of the Acts of the Apostles). This raises the question whether the Jewish-Greek front was independent of the Jewish-Roman front, or, rather, subject to it. To what degree did the Roman governor rule the Caesareans? To what degree did they influence him?

In short, the questions arise: Should the Greeks and the Romans be viewed as basically one front? And, if so, who dominated it? Which Jewish confrontation, with local gentiles or with Romans, contributed more to the etiology of the rebellion and, therefore, to the final catastrophe? Modern historians debate these questions; arguments can be brought for both sides.<sup>8</sup> On the one hand, obviously the war of 66–73/4 was fought and won by Roman legions. On the other hand, there is a good bit of evidence (especially in the eighteenth chapter of Josephus's War 2) for Jewish-Greek hostilities at the outset of the war, just as there is evidence for Caesarean Greeks serving in the Roman forces in Judea. Moreover, there is also much evidence for severe violence between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria at just about the same time as the Judean events singled out above: in both 38 CE and 66 there was major Jewish-Greek violence in Alexandria.9

On that protracted dispute, about the Jews' rights in the city or perhaps about whether it should be considered a Greek city or a Jewish one, see the exchange between Lee I. Levine, "The Jewish-Greek Conflict in First-Century Caesarea," JJS 25 (1974): 381–397 and Aryeh Kasher, whose response is cited below, in n. 10.

See Schürer, History of the Jewish People, 2.109–110.

See, for example, Per Bilde, "The Causes of the Jewish War according to Josephus," JSJ 10 (1979): 179–202, esp. 189–190; Uriel Rappaport, "Jewish-Pagan Relations and the Revolt against Rome in 66–70 CE," The Jerusalem Cathedra 1 (1981): 81–95; Mason, History of the Jewish War, 199–280.

For 38, the main sources are Philo's Against Flaccus and Embassy to Gaius. For 66: Josephus, War 2.487–498. See, in general, Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt from Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 165–173, 187–189.

True, Alexandria was not in Palestine, and so whatever motivated the Jews there it was not the quest for sovereignty. But Alexandria, on the one hand, was not far away from Palestine, and, on the other hand, Caesarea, although in Palestine, was far from the Jewish heartland of the country, so, mutatis mutandis, dynamics in the two cities might have been similar. Thus, for example, several decades ago it was quite natural for a scholar who devoted a monograph to Jewish-Greek relations in Alexandria to compose, additionally, a detailed article on Jewish-Greek relations in Caesarea, in which he argued that the basic issue was the same in both cities.<sup>10</sup>

One might well expect to hear the same from Graetz as well, for towards the middle of his volume he gave much attention to the Alexandrian episode in 38 CE, just before turning to affairs in Judea in 39 and, later, moving on to the Caesarean story of 66. And with regard to Alexandria Graetz had a very clear position about who the villains were, referring, in all of his editions, summarily and demonstratively to "Diese aus Neid, Religionshaß und Nationalantipathie zusammengesetzte feindliche Stimmung der Alexandriner gegen die Juden, wie sie im Mittelater herrschte." <sup>11</sup> One might, therefore, well expect Graetz to focus on the Greek-Jewish front, especially where it is explicitly supplied by his sources, as it is in both cases.

In fact, however, it took Graetz more than two decades to focus on the Greeks of Judea with regard to the clashes of 39–41 and 66–73/4. That was despite his sources—which, as we shall see, Graetz either ignored or egregiously distorted in the first two editions of his work (1856, 1863). That Graetz radically turned things around in both instances, beginning with the third edition (1878), probably reflects, in large measure, the reality that, by then, the Jews of Germany's main confrontations were no longer so much with the government, which had for the most part given them, formally, what they wanted, as with their neighbors.

Aryeh Kasher, The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: The Struggle for Equal Rights (TSAJ 7; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1985); idem, "The Isopoliteia Question in Caesarea Maritima," JQR 68 (1977/78): 16–27. Note esp. ibid., 26, where, concluding his argument, Kasher writes: "Thus, it appears that the political order in Caesarea, like that in other large cities of the Greco-Roman world, was based . . ." On Kasher on isopoliteia ("equal civil status"), cf. Ch. 1, at n. 92.

"This hostile attitude of the Alexandrians toward the Jews, which was composed of jealousy, religious hatred, and national antipathy, as was the rule in the Middle Ages" (GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 270 = III<sup>5</sup> , 329 [with "Judäer"]).

#### II Graetz on Jamnia, 39 CE

Although both Josephus and Philo offer long narratives of Gaius's attempt to have his statue erected in the Temple of Jerusalem, Josephus (Antiquities 18.256, 261) ascribes the plan only generally to the emperor's desire to be viewed as a god and wrath at the Jews' refusal to do so. Philo, in contrast, reports in some detail about a specific episode in Jamnia that precipitated the emperor's project. According to Philo (Embassy to Gaius, 199–203), the episode began when, in the autumn of 39 CE, Jews in Jamnia destroyed an altar erected by non-Jewish residents of the town for the worship of the emperor. The local governor, Herennius Capito, reported the incident to Gaius, and he responded by ordaining the erection of a statue of himself, named and/or modeled after Zeus (Embassy 346), in the Temple of Jerusalem.

In the first two editions (1856, 1863) of the third volume of his Geschichte, Graetz omitted the Jamnia story. Although he follows Philo's Embassy quite closely in his accounts of the troubles of the Jews of Alexandria, and of Gaius's humiliating treatment of their ambassadors, and although he does report Gaius's order to erect the statue in Jerusalem, he simply skipped the Jamnia story when he got to that page in Philo's account,. The result is that, as Josephus, Graetz offers, apart from Gaius's wrath and hubris, no motivation for his order to erect the statue:

Caligula's Zorn, sich gerade von den Juden, denen er bisher nur Wohlwollen gezeigt hatte, als Gott verschmäht zu sehen, kannte keinen Grenzen. Nicht bloß in den Synagogen Alexandriens, auch im Tempel zu Jerusalem sollte seine Bildsäule aufgestellt und der Widerstand mit militärischen Mitteln gebrochen werden. Der Statthalter von Syrien Petronius erhielt den Befehl . . .12

(Gaius's wrath, that the Jews, of all people, to whom he had been so benevolent, would reject him as a god, knew no bounds. Not only in the synagogues of Alexandria, but also in the Temple of Jerusalem should a statue of him be erected, and any opposition should be broken by military force. The governor of Syria, Petronius, received the order . . .)

It is easy to point to two reasons that would lead Graetz to skip the Jamnia story. First: What German Jew would be happy with reporting, in German, that his ancestors destroyed a religious institution of their non-Jewish neighbors? Would that not be looking for trouble?<sup>13</sup> Indeed, note that when, in the 1890s, an English

GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 282 = III<sup>2</sup> , 268–269.

Note a modern commentator's argument that the Jews of Jamnia were totally out of line: "It was essential for the safety of the Diaspora communities that they should be restrained from expressing their scorn for paganism by attacks on the cults of the gentiles among whom they lived . . . The Jews' destruction of the Jamnian altar was an act of provocation and intolerance deserv-

version of Graetz's Geschichte was published, it too skipped the story although, as we shall see, by then Graetz had included it in the German original of his work.<sup>14</sup> Second, had Graetz told the story, he probably would have felt the need to explain, to his readers, what it was that motivated the Jews who destroyed the altar. But the explanation offered by his source was not the type of thing Graetz would like to report: according to Philo (Embassy 202), the Jews of Jamnia destroyed the altar because they held that, if allowed to exist, it would "effect the disappearance of the sanctity of the Holy Land." Graetz would not have been happy with that, for it implies that, for Jews, including German Jews, another land is "holy."

True, Graetz obviously had to admit, especially in this third volume, that Jews once had a state of their own, and that after they lost it they desired, and struggled, to restore it. But that was over and done with: the Judäer (Judeans, as he termed them in this volume, beginning with the third edition [1878]), had long since been replaced by Juden, who, in Germany, were now striving to be recognized as "German citizens of the Jewish faith" (see Ch. 1, n. 45). But if the ancient "Judeans" fought for a land not only because they were patriots (which even Germans might respect), but because they considered that land "holy," which is an adjective that locates the concept in the realm of religion, which is eternal, the implication would be that also modern adherents of Judaism, including German Jews, are bound by their religion to be loyal to that other country. In an age in which even the German Catholics' loyalty to Rome could elicit suspicion of non-German "Ultramontanism," <sup>15</sup> that was something German Jews had every reason to avoid.16

ing punishment" (E. Mary Smallwood, Philonis Alexandrini Legatio ad Gaium [2nd ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1970], 264).

Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893), 187–188. The episode is also omitted in the German abridgment: Heinrich Graetz, Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden, I (5th ed.; Leipzig: Leiner, 1914 [Graetz's preface: 1888]), 515–516. A systematic study of that abridgment, and its reception, is a desideratum.

On Bismarck's Kulturkampf in the 1870s, see below, Ch. 5, Part VI.

For Graetz on the Jews' heiliges Land ("holy land") being a metaphor for every Jewish house, see Pyka, Jüdische Identität, 157–158. On Graetz's concern to distance himself from Zionism, see his January 1885 letters to Leon Pinsker in Graetz, Tagebuch, 402–404 (nos. 230–232), in which he emphasizes his support for philanthropic activity for Jews in Russia but resents that being turned into support for colonizing Palestine, also Reuven Michael, Hirsch (Heinrich) Graetz: The Historian of the Jewish People (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and Leo Baeck Institute, 2003), 192–193 (in Hebrew). Note esp. Michael Brenner's observation (Prophets of the Past, 235, n. 50), that "it may be more than an accident that the Israeli researchers Ettinger and Shlomo Avineri regard Graetz chiefly as a trailblazer for the Jewish national movement, whereas the chancellor of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary, Schorsch, saw Graetz chiefly as one of the founders of a Conservative Judaism." But even Avineri, who devotes a chapter to Graetz in his The Making of

Between the desire to avoid portraying Jews who scorn their neighbors' religion and violently act out that scorn, on the one hand, and the desire to avoid portraying Jews acting out of devotion to a putatively "holy" land in the Orient, on the other, we can, then, easily understand that Graetz omitted the Jamnia story in the first two editions of his Geschichte. What is tantalizing, and sent me off on the present study, is the fact that Graetz does tell the story in some detail in the third (1878) edition of the work, and the same text reappears in the next two editions (1888, 1905/6) as well.<sup>17</sup> What accounts for this change?

As a matter of methodology, I will clarify that, had Graetz told the story in his first two editions, I would not tend to attach much weight to that fact. He was obviously following Philo's account, and he was an historian, whose mandate it was to report, on the basis of the relevant sources, what happened in the past (or, alternatively, to explain why he does not believe what his sources report; ignoring them will not do). The default was, therefore, to include the story, while it required some effort, hence some special reason, to omit it. Graetz did omit it in those first two editions, and that seems to demand an explanation, such as the one offered above about his sensitivities concerning religious tolerance and "Holy Land." But that perforce raises the question, why he nevertheless told the story in 1878.

Moreover, note that in 1878 there was, presumably, no need for Graetz to work with Philo's Embassy open on his desk. All he needed to do was reread his own second edition, in light of his own new thoughts and whatever he had been reading in the meantime,18 and the default was to do nothing. His decision to reopen Philo's work and include the story begs for an explanation.

Modern Zionism, stops short of "Zionism" in his account of Graetz, limiting himself to Jewish nationhood. Cf. above, Ch. 1, n. 54.

GdJ. III3 , 365; III<sup>4</sup> , 341–342; III<sup>5</sup> , 340. The text will be cited below, at n. 19.

Note, especially, that, as Graetz himself observed at GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , v–vi, the years just before Graetz's third edition saw the appearance of major works on the period, and both included, as a matter of course, accounts of the episodes in Jamnia: Adolf Hausrath, Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte (2nd ed.; 4 vols.; Heidelberg: Bassermann, 1873–1877) 2.232–233; Emil Schürer, Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1874), 257. Both discussions are quite brief, but Hausrath's includes the apparently disparaging comment that the Jews of Jamnia were sehr empfindlich ("very sensitive") concerning religious matters. Perhaps that contributed to Graetz's decision to relate the story and put the blame elsewhere. In his letter cited above, n. 3, he specifically refers to Hausrath among those to whom he needed to respond in revising the third volume. On Hausrath, see esp. Christhard Hoffmann, "Geschichte als Spiegel der Gegenwart: Die Erfindung des 'antiken Antisemitismus' im Deutschen Kaiserreich," in Ausschluss und Feindschaft: Studien zu Antisemitismus und Rechtsextremismus, Rainer Erb zum 65. Geburtstag (ed. M. Kohlstruck and A. Klärner; Berlin: Metropol, 2011), 38–50. Hoffmann shows that the new emphasis on ancient anti-Semitism, pioneered by Hausrath, served to bolster modern anti-

The obvious place to look for that explanation is in Graetz's version of the outset of the episode:

Gereizt wurde dieser wahnwitzige Kaiser gegen die Judäer in Judäa durch den Bericht eines seiner verworfenen Beamten Capito, welcher in Jamnia, dem Erbbesitz des kaiserlichen Hauses . . . für den Kaiser die Steuern eintrieb. Die Bewohner dieser Stadt waren meistens Judäer. Nichts destoweniger spielten die eingewanderten Griechen in derselben die Herren, suchten die Judäer zu kränken und legten es darauf an, deren religiöse Bräuche zu verhöhnen und zu stören. Sobald die heidnischen Jamnenser Kunde von Caligula's Selbstvergötterung vernahmen, errichteten sie einen Altar, um für ihn zu opfern, in der Absicht, die Judäer damit zu kränken. Diese versammelten sich und zerstörten ihn. Diesen Vorfall berichtete Capito dem Kaiser, übertrieb ihn und stellte ihn als Tempelschändung und Majestätsbeleidigung dar.19

(What aroused the insane emperor's anger against the Judeans in Judea was the report submitted by one of his depraved officials, Capito, who collected the imperial taxes in Jamnia, which belonged . . . to the imperial family. Most of the inhabitants of that city were Jews. Nevertheless, the Greeks who had settled there acted as if they ruled it; they provoked the Judeans and made every effort to scorn and disturb their religious practices. As soon as the pagan Jamnians heard of Caligula's self-deification, they constructed an altar upon which to sacrifice to him; what they intended was to provoke the Judeans. The latter gathered together and destroyed it. Capito reported the incident to the emperor, exaggerating it, and portrayed it as if it were temple-desecration and lèse-majesté.)

Here, although Gaius is insane and has corrupt officials, and the local Roman procurator is both verworfen (depraved, corrupt) and a malicious and self-serving exaggerator, nevertheless it is clear that die Griechen are the Jews' main antagonists. This is shown not only by the amount of space that Graetz devotes to them, but also, and perhaps more significantly, by what he omits. Namely, the source that was obviously open on Graetz's desk, Philo's Embassy (which is the only source for the Jamnia story), deliberately and explicitly frames the whole episode, in three ways, as one engineered by the local Roman governor, Capito: (a) At §199 Philo prefaces the story by reporting that Capito, who was corrupt, was afraid that after the conclusion of his term of office he would be accused by his erstwhile subjects, and therefore he sought to provoke them into criminality so as to deny them the imperial goodwill necessary to get them a hearing; (b) at §200 Philo defines the news of Gaius's desire to be worshipped as a god as a point of departure for Capito to achieve that which he planned; and (c) at §202, correspondingly, when Philo reports that Capito was informed that the Jews had de-

Semitism by indicating that the Jews' problems with their neighbors were inherent in the Jews' nature, not dependent on the nature of the society in which they lived. GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 365; III<sup>4</sup> , 341; III5 , 340.

stroyed the altar, he explicitly reminds his readers that Capito had been "the producer of the entire show" (ὅς ἦν τοῦ δράματος ὅλου δημιουργός).

That is, Philo heavy-handedly portrays Capito as a Roman governor who manipulated the local Greek population against the Jews in accordance with his own purposes, but nothing of that is repeated by Graetz. This makes very clear Graetz's desire to blame the Greeks of Jamnia. As we shall see in the next case as well, there is something of a zero-sum game here, with regard to the two options noted above: the more one blames the Greeks, the less one blames the Romans, and vice versa.

In summarizing Graetz's handling of this first city's tale, I would underline that between 1856 and 1878 he made four changes:


#### III Graetz on Caesarea, 66 CE

Concerning the Jamnian episode of 39 CE, our issue was, and still is, how to understand Graetz's decision to present the episode in his last three editions after skipping it in the first two. Turning now to the tale of the other city, the Caesarean episode of 66 CE, which Graetz recounts in all his editions, the issue is somewhat different: How should we explain the differences, which (as we shall see) are no less than astounding, between the account of the episode in the first two editions and that in the last three?

Josephus's account of the beginning of the Judean revolt of 66 CE reports, immediately after a perfidious Jewish massacre of Roman soldiers in Jerusalem, a massacre of thousands of Jews in Caesarea (War 2.18.1, §457):

On the same day and at the same time, as if from other-worldly foreknowledge, Caesareans began to do away with the Judeans among them. Thus more than 20,000 were butchered within a single hour, and all Caesarea was emptied of Judeans: for Florus [the Roman governor of Judea, drs] arrested those who were trying to escape and took them down into the dockyards as prisoners.<sup>20</sup>

Here, as in Philo's report about Jamnia, the Roman governor of Judea plays a role, but the Caesareans, who are identified as "Greeks" earlier in War 2 (§§266–268, 284–285), are clearly the main villains. Compare Graetz's version of the story in his 1856 and 1863 editions (in which, just as in Josephus's War, it comes right after his account of the massacre in Jerusalem):

Bisher blieb der Aufstand auf den Herd von Jerusalem beschränkt, das übrige Judäa, wiewohl in nicht geringerer Spannung, verhielt sich während der Vorgänge in der Hauptstadt ruhig und erwartete die Dinge, die daraus folgen würden. Florus, der ebenfalls ruhig in Cäsarea geblieben war, sorgte aber dafür, daß sich die Revolution, wie ein Feuerstrom mit verheerender Gewalt über das ganze Land und über diese Grenze hinaus verbreitete. Bei der Nachricht von dem Fortschritte der Zeloten führte er einen längst gehegten Racheplan gegen die Juden Cäsarea's aus. Er gab Befehl, daß sie sofort die Stadt verlassen sollten, und als sie, sich in das Unvermeidliche fügend, auszogen, ließ er auf sie einhauen, viele niedermetzeln, die übrigen fangen, in Fesseln schlagen und als Galeerensclaven auf Schiffe vertheilen. Von den 20,000 Juden blieb nicht ein einziger in Cäsarea übrig.<sup>21</sup>

(Until now the rebellion had been limited to its focus in Jerusalem. The rest of Judea, although in serious tension, remained quiet during the events in the capital and awaited to see how things developed. Florus, however, who too had [hitherto] remained quietly in Caesarea, saw to it that the rebellion spread out, with devastating violence, over the entire country and beyond its borders as well. When news arrived of the Zealots' moves. he executed a plan of vengeance, planned long in advance, against the Jews of Caesarea. [Namely], he ordered them to leave the city immediately, and when they accepted the unavoidable and were departing, he moved in on them, slaughtered many and took the others captive. Putting them into chains, he sent them off to serve as galley-slaves on ships. Of the twenty thousand Jews there remained in Caesarea not a single one.)

Graetz refers in a footnote, at the end of the penultimate sentence, to Josephus, War 2.18.1 (the only relevant source), which we cited just above. But Graetz's version of Josephus's account is astounding: although referring readers only to Josephus's report, which states that Caesareans butchered Jews and the Roman governor mishandled the refugees, Graetz offered his readers an account that does not even mention the Caesareans or their massacre of Jews! Rather, Josephus portrays the Roman governor as responsible for all of the trouble, trouble that all began with his decision (contrary to Josephus) to expel the Jews from the city; and where Josephus

The translation offered here is that of Steve Mason, Flavius Josephus: Judean War 2 (Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary 1B; Leiden: Brill, 2008), 337. GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 378; III2 , 347.

has the governor only enslaving Jewish refugees, Graetz states he first slaughtered many of them.

I cannot imagine how Graetz could possibly defend such a version of the story, and it may be that his revision of it, beginning in 1878 (as we shall see), came in response to his own or someone else's notice of the discrepancies. Be that as it may, what is important for us, in assessing Graetz's views, is that when preparing this text, in 1855<sup>22</sup> (when presumably Josephus's text was open on his desk), he did not want to blame the Jews' neighbors. Although they were the main actors, according to Josephus, Graetz ignored them, and their murderous treatment of their Jewish neighbors, placing all the blame, even beyond Josephus's report, on the Roman governor. And so his text remained in the second edition (1863) as well.

In 1878, in contrast, Graetz rewrote the passage entirely. After the second sentence quoted above, ending with "hinaus verbreitete," he continues as follows:

Bei der Nachricht von dem Kampfe der Zeloten gegen die römische Cohorte in Jerusalem überfielen die Griechen und Syrer Cäsarea's, ohne Zweifel auf dessen [=Florus's, drs] Weisung, die Judäer, welche wieder dahin zurückgekehrt waren.<sup>23</sup> Es muß ein grauenerregendes Gemetzel dabei vorgekommen sein, da mehr als 20,000 umgekommen sein sollen, und diese sich wohl nicht ohne Gegenwehr hatten abschlachten lassen. Cäsarea behielt nicht einen einzigen Judäer. Die Flüchtlinge ließ Florus einfangen, in Fesseln schlagen und als Galeerensklaven auf Schiffe vertheilen.<sup>24</sup>

(When news reached them of the Jewish attack on the Roman cohort in Jerusalem, the Greeks and Syrians of Caesarea, doubtless on the instructions of Florus, attacked the Judeans who had returned to the city. There must have been a terrible bloodbath, since 20,000 Jews are said to have been killed, and they certainly will not have let themselves be slaughtered without a fight. Not a single Jew remained in Caesarea. Florus had the refugees rounded up, put them into chains, and sent them off to be galley-slaves on ships.)

Graetz retains here something of his original account, insofar as he posits that Florus "doubtless" gave the sign for the massacre in Caesarea, just as Graetz blames Florus for mistreating those whom he now correctly describes as refugees. Nevertheless he clearly records the massacre and ascribes it solely to the non-Jewish population of Caesarea.<sup>25</sup> Similarly, he omitted his baseless statements, in

 GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 489; III<sup>4</sup> , 461–462; III5 , 463.

As is shown by a June 1855 letter; see Tagebuch, 228, no. 10.

Here Graetz alludes to the Jews' departure from Caesarea in the preceding round of hostilities (Josephus, War 2.291), reported in GdJ.III3 , 477.

In War, Josephus consistently terms the Caesareans "Greeks," with only one exception. In that exception (2.166), and more often in the Antiquities (20.173–175, 183–184), Josephus instead

his earlier version, that Florus initiated the troubles by ordering the expulsion of the Jews from the city and not only arrested Jews but also slaughtered many of them.

In return for those omissions, however, Graetz now added another claim without any foundation in his source, namely, that the Jews defended themselves: "there must have been a terrible bloodbath, since 20,000 Jews are said to have been killed, and they certainly will not have let themselves be slaughtered without a fight." Moreover, and in a similar spirit, Graetz omitted, in 1878, the first two editions' characterization of the Jews of Caesarea as having submitted abjectly to the decree of expulsion (sich in das Unvermeidliche fügend).

In all of these respects, what Graetz did about Caesarea is just what he did about Jamnia. Namely, whereas in 1856 and 1863 he had only Roman villains (Caligula, Florus) and Jewish victims, beginning with 1878 he (a) reduces the Romans' responsibility by recording the Caesareans' murderous crime and omitting the two (slaughter and expulsion of Jews) he attributed, without evidence, to the Roman governor, and (b) clearly reports a militant Jewish response. Indeed, not only does he report the latter, he also justifies it, insofar as he insists that it came as a response to persecution by their neighbors.

#### IV The Nature of the Jewish-Greek Conflict

It is clear that the Jews' troubles with their neighbors in mixed cities, exemplified especially by Alexandria, Jamnia, and Caesarea, constitute a major theme in the third volume of Graetz's Geschichte. It is reinforced, moreover, by the recurrence of specific claims: the Greeks of Alexandria and Caesarea were motivated by jealousy due to the Jews' prosperity<sup>26</sup> and wanted to wanted to deny the Jews their bürgerliche Gleichberechtigung (equal civil rights),<sup>27</sup> the Greeks of Jamnia and Caesarea wanted die Herren spielen ("to play the role of rulers").<sup>28</sup> The first two editions of his work show, however, that earlier Graetz neither tended to blame the Greeks nor felt a need, when he did (in Alexandria), to be specific about what motivated the Greeks' hostility. Although, for example, he opens his account of

terms them "Syrians." It is interesting to wonder what explains this (see Mason [above, n. 20], 217, n. 1681), but that does not appear to be relevant in the present context.

GdJ.III1 , 267–268, 270, 357; III/14 , 323, 330, 439–440.

GdJ.I<sup>1</sup> , 272, 282 (Alexandria ["bürgerliche Gleichberechtigung" ... "Gleichstellung"]), 357–358 (Caesarea ["die Gleichberechtigung . . . streitig machten" ... "Entziehung des Bürgerrechts" ... "büssten ihre Gleichstellung ein"]). Same in III<sup>4</sup> , 332, 341, 440.

GdJ.III1 , 357 (Caesarea); GdJ.III/24 , 341 (Jamnia), 439 (Caesarea).

antisemitism in the Roman world in general, and specifically in Alexandria, by saying it derived from jealousy (Neid),<sup>29</sup> he blithely summarizes it a few pages later by stating that it derived from Neid, Religionshaß und Nationalantipathie<sup>30</sup> ("jealousy, religious hatred, and national antipathy")—a formulation that touches several bases, which he makes no attempt to distinguish or to rank.

Regarding one particular term, however, "race," we can observe, in two prominent passages, some sensitivity on Graetz's part, and place it historically. Race has an interesting career in Graetz's writings. To begin with, it hardly appears; we can see Graetz adding it beginning with the third edition, that is, in 1878. Thus, for example, in the first two editions he characterizes antisemitism in the Roman world in general, and in Alexandria in particular, as deriving from jealousy (GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 268 = III2 , 256), but in the third edition he inserts a new characterization of it: "it was a combination of blind race- and religion-hatred" (eine Mischung vom blinden Racen- und Religionshaß; GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 344). Ten years later, however, in the fourth edition, he again revised the text, omitting "Religions-" and so leaving only blinden Racenhaß ("blind race-hatred"; III/14 , 323).

These changes, which obviously show Graetz's sensitivity concerning the term, should be juxtaposed with another, in the opposite direction. Namely, after Graetz tells the Caesarean story he describes, following Josephus (War 2.458–478), how the violence spread to other cities and regions as well—first with Jewish reprisals in the wake of the massacre in Caesarea, then, naturally, with massacres of the Jews by gentiles. After surveying the data, Graetz offers, this time in his first three editions (1856, 1863, 1878), quite a bombastic summary: "This was a race-struggle, such as never occurred in antiquity" (Es war ein Racenkampf, wie er im Alterthum sonst nicht vorgekommen).<sup>31</sup> In the fourth edition (1888), however, the same edition in which concerning antisemitism he eliminated "Religion," here he moved in the other direction, eliminating "Race" and referring to "Religion" in its stead: "Es war ein Religionskampf, wie er in dieser Ausdehnung im Alterthum sonst nicht vorgekommen ("This was a religion-struggle, such as never occurred, to this extent, in antiquity").<sup>32</sup>

GdJ.III1 , 267; III/I<sup>4</sup> , 323.

III<sup>1</sup> , 270; III/1<sup>4</sup> , 330.

GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 378 = III<sup>2</sup> , 348; III3 , 490. In the first two editions, correspondingly, the running header is "Racenkampf zwischen Juden und Heiden." In the third edition that changed, probably only due to different pagination, but now Graetz also hedged a little with his generalization about the lack of precedent, adding in dieser Ausdehnung ("to this extent").

GdJ.III/2<sup>4</sup> , 462 = III/25 , 463.

Picture Graetz in 1887 or 1888,<sup>33</sup> pencil in hand, rereading the third edition and deciding to change "blind race- and religion-hatred" into "blind religionhatred" with regard to the cause of antisemitism in the Roman world in general and Alexandria in particular, but "racial struggle" into "religious struggle" of Jews and their neighbors who were massacring each other. If we try to imagine why he made such changes about something so basic as what differentiates Jews from non-Jews (and if we assume, as I believe we should, that these were not simply random changes but, rather, reflect some thought or sensitivity), the obvious hypothesis seems to be that Graetz condemned, by the fourth edition, the notion of "race" as something that distinguishes Jews from non-Jews and should, therefore, condition and motivate their mutual relations. Accordingly, it could only motivate wicked people, like the jealous and "blind" Greeks of Alexandria, but could not motivate Jews who were killing their neighbors in 66 in the wake of the Greek massacre of Jews in Caesarea.

That "race," which Graetz used at times in his earlier editions, apparently without much thought<sup>34</sup> (just as, in general, he was indifferent about such terms and concepts),<sup>35</sup> became a reprehensible category in his eyes by 1888, is not at all surprising. As Wistrich roundly observed, after pointing to some adumbrations of racism and its antisemitic application, including Richard Wagner's role: "It was in the late 1870s . . . that such ideas became commonplace and served as the basis for organized political antisemitism in Germany." <sup>36</sup> That is, the years between Graetz's third and fourth editions, 1878–1888, were the years in which "race" came into its own, in German parlance, being transformed from being just another word like "Volk" or "Nation" or the like into one that pointed to something so specific and unchangeable that it was a reason to exclude Jews from the possibility of being Germans. If, therefore, in his earlier editions Graetz could use it now and then, without any particular intention or second thoughts, by the 1880s, especially under the impact of Wilhelm Marr's Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (1879),<sup>37</sup> the Berlin Antisemitusmusstreit (1879–1881),38 and Eugen

On which see Ch. 4, Part I.

The preface of the fourth edition is signed "im Juni 1888."

See, for example, "Racenhaß" at GdJ.III<sup>3</sup> , 349 and 351 (= III/1<sup>4</sup> , 327, 329) and the complaint that some scholars scorn the ancient Israelite "Volk" as if it were "eine verkommene semitische Race" (GdJ.I <sup>1</sup> [1874], x).

On Graetz's use of "Stamm," "Volk," and "Genossenschaft" of the Jews as interchangeable synonyms, without ever defining or distinguishing them, see Pyka, Jüdische Identität, 253–254.

Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Mandarin, 1992), 57.

On this tract on "Judaism's Victory over Germanism," see esp. Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Antisemitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 70–95.

Dühring's Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten-, und Culturfrage (1882),39Race (or: Rasse) had became a central term in the vocabulary of those who viewed the distinction between Jews and Germans as immutable,<sup>40</sup> and Jews would be increasingly sensitive to it.<sup>41</sup> So although the word could remain even in the fourth edition, here and there, when it referred to what wicked gentiles thought about Jews,<sup>42</sup> we can see that Graetz became more attentive to his diction when formulating programmatic statements about what made for antisemitism in the Roman world or about the nature of an unprecedented struggle in 66. Quite appropriately, here too he left "race" to those Greeks he condemned, adding "blind" to make the condemnation all the more explicit, but substituting "religion" to characterize the motivation of those Jews whose militant behavior he posited.

By substituting "religion" for race Graetz achieved two ends: he characterized the difference between Jews and others as no different from that between Catholics and Protestants, who all could be Germans, and he pointed to what was, for him, from the first edition to the last, the only legitimate object of Jewish struggles:

Dieser Riesenkampf [between Rome and the Jews, drs], der in der Weltgeschichte nur wenig Seitenstücke hat, galt aber nicht bloß der Freiheit, wie ihn die Gallier, Germanen und Briten ebenfalls gegen Rom führten, sondern hatte einen religiösen Charakter. Das jüdische Volk fühlte sich in seinen religiösen Gefühlen durch Roms Willkürlichkeit täglich gekränkt und wollte seine Unabhängigkeit nur zum Zweck unbeengter Religionsübung erkämpfen und behaupten.43

Dühring's work, on "The Jewish Question as a Question of Race, Customs, and Culture," is a major focus of Cobet's study cited in the next note.

For the rise of "Race" in this period see especially Christoph Cobet, Der Wortschatz des Antisemitismus in der Bismarckzeit (Münchner Germanistische Beiträge 11; München: Fink, 1973), with a long collection of citations ibid., 82–94, also Werner Conze, "Rasse," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 5 (ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), esp. 173–176. More generally, note also John W. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale, 1994), 13–32 (chapter on "German Race Science: The Jew as Essential Other"). My thanks to Christhard Hoffmann and Shulamit Volkov for their help with this note.

Note, for example, that computerized searches for "Race" in the 1850 and 1860 volumes of AZJ, on the "Compact Memory" website, turned up "hits" on only 3 pages each. By 1870, in contrast, the number jumped to 18, and in 1880 it was 31.

See above, n. 34.

GdJ.III<sup>1</sup> , 344; III/2<sup>4</sup> , 427. The same emphasis, regarding the entire period, is already prominent in the volume's introduction: "Indessen war das politische Streben nicht der Endzweck dieses Zeitabschnittes; die Nation wünschte weder Machtfülle, noch Einfluß auf die auswärtigen Völker, sondern ungestörte und unverkümmerte Ausübung ihrer Religionsgesetze . . . Das Ringen nach Unabhängigkeit und Freiheit gegen Syrer und Römer und die Erbitterung gegen diese Völker hatte im religiösen Triebe dieser Zeit ihren letzten Grund . . . Der Grundcharakter dieses Zei-

(This gigantic struggle [between Rome and the Jews, drs], which has only a few parallels in the world's history, was not for freedom in the sense that Gauls, Germans, and Britons struggled against Rome. Rather, it had a religious character. The Jewish people felt itself daily provoked, in its religious feelings, by Rome's arbitrariness, and it desired to fight for and assert its independence only for the purpose of allowing religious observance without restrictions.)

#### V Conclusions

A review of the way Graetz viewed Jewish-Greek relations in mixed cities under Roman rule indicates three salient shifts between the 1850s and 1860s, on the one hand, and the 1870s and 1880s, on the other, and each can be coordinated with what was happening around him.

In the earlier period, represented by the first two editions of his third volume, Graetz ignored the Jews' problems with their Judean neighbors in both episodes. In one case (Jamnia) he ignored the entire episode, while in the other (Caesarea) he recounted it only in an egregiously distorted way that ignores the neighbors. The result, in both cases, is that the only confrontation that matters is between the Jews and the Roman government, represented either by the emperor himself (Gaius) or his governors in Judea (Capito, Florus). Beginning with 1878, however, the Jews' main confrontation is with their non-Jewish neighbors, a revision Graetz achieves, in the first case (Jamnia), by recording their misbehavior and omitting most of his source's (Philo's) condemnation of the Roman governor (Capito), and, in the second case, by following his source's (Josephus's) condemnation of the non-Jews and giving up his own gratuitous indictment of the Roman governor. This would seem to indicate a growing recognition, by Graetz, of the extent of popular antisemitism. Having reached, in 1871, full legal equality, what was left for the Jews, more or less, was not a struggle with the government but, rather, with their neighbors. And all too often, in the world around Graetz, they were signing on to antisemitic views.44

traumes ist daher unstreitig ein religiöser . . ." (GdJ.III1 , 2). The text remained the same in III<sup>2</sup> , 2, apart from the omission of "und die Erbitterung gegen diese Völker," but beginning with the third edition a whole new introduction was substituted.

For the rise of popular antisemitism as filling a vacuum created by the government's dropping out of the job of repressing the Jews, see Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur "Judenfrage" der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 15; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975), also Ulrich Wyrwa, "Zur Entstehung des Antisemitismus im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ursachen und Erscheinungsformen einer wahnhaften Weltanschauung," in Antisemitismus im 19. Jahrhundert aus internationaler Perspektive (ed. M. König and O. Schulz; Schriften aus der Max Weber Stiftung 1; V & R Unipress, 2016), esp.

In response, secondly, we have observed Graetz's growing willingness to sign onto Jewish militant assertiveness. From Graetz's 1856 presentation of first-century Jews as people who did not defend themselves in Alexandria, whose mililtant reprisal against their non-Jewish neighbors' "Kränkungen" in Jamnia could be ignored, and who meekly submitted to an order of expulsion from Caesarea, by 1878 we read of Jews who respond violently to provocation in Jamnia and who defend themselves valiantly in Caesarea. This should easily be coordinated with what we saw in the preceding paper about Graetz's growing concern that Jews should not be considered wimps or cowards; his handling of ancient Jews is parallel to his support for Jewish fencing societies.45

Finally, if "race" was, early on, just another word for the Jewish collective, used without any precision or sensitivity, by the 1880s it was being used with a polemical point, one that meant that the gap between Jews and Germans could never be bridged.46 For Graetz, however, throughout, Jewish alterity was grounded in Jewish religion, which means the Jews, just as Catholics and Protestants, could be Germans. Hence, by 1888, the first edition of his work after Marr's Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum, Graetz took care to depict the Jews's struggle, in antiquity, as Religionskampf rather than Racenkampf.

Thus, both with regard to historical interpretation and diction, Graetz's handling of Roman Judea in the first century is firmly grounded in Bismarck's Germany of his own day. As in the other cases studied in this volume, this is only as should be expected.

<sup>25</sup>—where he cites Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-semitism: The Iberian and the German Models (Leo Baeck Memorial Lectures 26; New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982) on the rise of popular anti-Jewish racism in medieval Iberia in the wake of the officially full acceptance of the equality of Jewish converts to Christianity. For two other cases of around the same time as ours, see Sophie B. Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algiers, 1870–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 48–79, and note that, in the USA, the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865, the same year that the Confederacy lost the Civil War and so slavery was abolished. My thanks to Ulrich Wyrwa, David Guedj, and Yaron Tal for their help with this note.

See above, Ch. 2, n. 54.

See above, n. 40.

## 4 From Feuding Medievalists to the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit of 1879–1881

Academic feuding deserves investigation in its own right.<sup>1</sup>

#### I Introduction: The Antisemitismusstreit and Its Antecedents

In the November 1879 issue of the Preußische Jahrbücher, the editor, Professor Heinrich von Treitschke of the University of Berlin (1834–1896), published a review of current events entitled "Unsere Aussichten" ("Our Prospects"). After surveying and commenting upon other topics, in the essay's final five pages Treitschke turned to attacking the Jews of Germany in general, and the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in particular, for their insistence upon remaining apart and not fully integrating into Germany.2

Treitschke's essay, which included the infamous complaint about Germany being inundated by waves of young trouser-selling Polish Jews, and which popularized the slogan, "Die Juden sind unser Unglück" (The Jews are our misfortune)—the line that was later to grace the front page of every issue of Der Stürmer<sup>3</sup> —touched off a long public debate that is generally known as the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit ("Berlin Antisemitism Dispute"): an anthology of letters, articles, and essays written during the next year and a half fills more than 850 pages.4 This debate is generally recognized by modern scholarship as a watershed in the history of German antisem-

Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee, The Academic Marketplace (NY: Basic Books, 1959), 193.

Heinrich von Treitschke, "Unsere Aussichten," Preußische Jahrbücher 44 (1879): 559–576 (pp. 572–576 relate to Jews). For an English translation of those last pages (based on one by H. Lederer and edited by E. Rivkin), see Marcel Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck's Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2008), 311–316. On that slogan's "success," see esp. Ulrich Wyrwa, "Genese und Entfaltung antisemitischer Motive in Heinrich von Treitschke's 'Deutscher Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert,'" Antisemitische Geschichtsbilder (Antisemitismus: Geschichte und Strukturen 5; ed. W. Bergmann and U. Sieg; Essen: Klartext, 2009), 100–101.

Karsten Krieger (ed.), Der "Berliner Antisemitismusstreit" 1879–1881: Eine Kontroverse um die Zugehörigkeit der deutschen Juden zur Nation – Kommentierte Quellenedition (2 vols.; München: Saur, 2003). Krieger's collection also includes numerous unpublished letters. For an earlier and smaller anthology, see: Walter Boehlich (ed.), Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965). A new edition of the latter, by Nicolas Berg, was published by Suhrkamp Verlag/Jüdischer Verlag in 2023; it includes Berg's introduction and a thorough listing of relevant scholarly works.

itism, for Treitschke's status, and that of many of those who responded to him, both pro and con, endowed antisemitism with the respectability it had not previously enjoyed. As Theodor Mommsen put it in his 1880 response to Treitschke, "was er sagte, war damit anständig gemacht" (what he said thereby became respectable), just as, fifteen years later, Mommsen was to observe that Treitschke was der Vater des modernen Antisemitismus ("the father of modern antisemitism"), for his attack on the Jews made antisemitism salonfähig (socially acceptable).5

Due to the meteoric social and political success, and horrendous consequences, of German antisemitism during the next sixty-five years, much scholarship has been devoted to uncovering the roots of the Antisemitismusstreit. Scholarship has focused on two main fronts: on Treitschke's own writings, on the one hand, tracing the antecedents that would eventually blossom into the views, and tone, that he expressed in "Unsere Aussichten"; and, on the other, on more general developments in Germany in the years that preceded the appearance of that 1879 essay. Among the latter, four are especially important: (a) the emancipation of Jews, upon the founding of the Empire in 1871, allowed them to enter the economy and education to an extent hitherto unknown, and their success aroused jealousy;6 (b) the stock market crash of 1873, caused by wild entrepreneurs ("Gründer"), among whom some were Jews and it was convenient for many to view them as the chief villains;7 (c) the rise

Theodor Mommsen, Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum (1880), in Krieger, Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, I, no. 91, p. 704 (original italics), and idem, letter of 7 May 1895 to Heinrich von Sybel, published by Lothar Wickert, Theodor Mommsen: Eine Biographie, IV: Grösse und Grenzen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 239–240, n. 14. (Both of Mommsen's texts are reprinted in Wenn Toren aus der Geschichte falsche Schlüsse ziehen: Ein Theodor-Mommsen Lesebuch [ed. W. Nippel; München: DTV, 2017].) On the letter and its context, see Wilfried Nippel, "Wissenschaft und Deutungsmacht: Berliner Historiker im Kaiserreich," in Zwischen Licht und Schatten. Das Kaiserreich (1871–1914) und seine neuen Kontroversen [ed. B. Aschmann and M. Wienfort; Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, [2022], 357–362.) For similar assessments of Treitschke's fundamental impetus to modern antisemitism, see Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, IV (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1985), 21–22; Robert S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Thames and Mandarin, 1992), 59; Christhard Hoffmann, "Die Verteidigung der liberalen Nation: Mommsen gegen Treitschke im 'Berliner Antisemitismusstreit' 1879/80," in Theodor Mommsen: Wissenschaft und Politik im 19. Jahrhundert (ed. A. Demandt, A Goltz, and H. Schlange-Schöningen; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 82; Karsten Krieger, "Treitschke," in Handbuch des Antisemitismus II/2 (ed. W. Benz; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008) 839. On Treitschke's ability to sway German public opinion, see below, n. 10. My thanks to Wilfried Nippel and Stefan Rebenich for their help with this note.

See esp. Götz Aly, Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt Company, 2014), 13–41.

See esp. Norbert Kampe, "Von der 'Gründerkrise' zum 'Berliner Antisemitismusstreit': Die Entstehung des modernen Antisemitismus in Berlin, 1875–1881," Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin (ed. R. Rürup; Berlin: Hentrich, 1995), 85–100, also: Andreas Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke (New Haven: Yale, 1957), 242 ("The current outbreak of anti-Semitism had its origin, as had so many

of popular antisemitism, fanned by such figures as court preacher Adolf Stöcker8 and publicist Wilhelm Marr,9 who in the latter years of the decade were becoming more and more virulent and also popular; and, most basically and most generally, (d) the atmosphere of German nationalism that came along with the wars of the 1860s and the foundation of the Empire early in 1871—an atmosphere to which Treitschke himself, dubbed (in the wake of prestigious predecessors) Praeceptor Germaniae ("Teacher of Germany"), made a very serious contribution.10 Treitschke's lectures in the 1870s, which laid the groundwork for his five-volume Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1879–1889), are said to have been massively attended events accompanied by much patriotic excitement.11 That was an atmosphere that emphasized the importance of Germanenthum ("Germanism") <sup>12</sup> and

others, in the grave economic difficulties . . ."); Jacob Katz, "The Preparatory Stage of the Modern Antisemitic Movement (1873–1879)," in Antisemitism through the Ages (ed. S. Almog; Oxford: Pergamon, 1988), 279–289; and Krieger, Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 1.x–xi.

See Günter Brakelmann, Adolf Stoecker als Antisemit (2 vols.; Schriften der Hans-Ehrenberg-Gesellschaft 10–11; Waltrop, Germany: Hartmut Spenner, 2004).

On Marr, who founded the Anti-semiten Liga in 1879, see Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism (New York: Oxford Univ., 1986). See also below, n. 12.

See Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke, 226–269 and U. Wyrwa, "Heinrich von Treitschke: Geschichtsschreibung und öffentliche Meinung im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts," Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51 (2003): 781–792. For some contemporary recognition of Treitschke's impact, note that as early as 1870 a reviewer (M. L.) was terming Treitschke "unser großer Publicist" (LCD 1870: 1054; for the reviewer's identity, see nn. 25–30), and that one of Treitschke's students would later review together works by "the creator of the German Reich and his most likeminded (congenialster) and important disciple among scholars" (Hermann von Petersdorff, "Fürst Bismarcks 'Gedanken und Erinnerungen' und Treitschkes 'Politik,'" Bismarck-Jahrbuch 6 [1899]: 271–308; the quotation is from p. 271).

See Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke, 227–228. For Treitschke's employment of antisemitic caricatures in his lectures, see ibid., 244. On the blossoming and institutionalization of antisemitism among students in the wake of the Antisemitismusstreit, which "führte nicht nur zur Gründung der Vereine Deutscher Studenten (VDSt) sondern auch zur Verbreitung eines akademischen Illiberalismus, der jüdische Studenten schrittweise aus den bestehenden Verbindungen ausschloss" (Konrad H. Jarausch, "Wissenschaft und Politik," Mittendrin: Eine Universität macht Geschichte – Eine Ausstellung anlässlich des 200-jährigen Jubiläums der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin [ed. I. Thom and K. Weining; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010] 258), see Norbert Kampe, Studenten und 'Judenfrage' im deutschen Kaiserreich: Die Entstehung einer akademischen Trägerschicht des Antisemitismus (Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 76; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988).

As a straw in that wind, note that Marr's Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum, published early in 1879, went through twelve editions that same year. On the work, see W. Bergmann, "Ein 'weltgeschichtliches "Fatum"': Wilhelm Marrs antisemitisches Geschichtsbild in seiner Schrift: 'Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum,'" Antisemitische Geschichtsbilder (above, n. 3), 61–82.

left outsiders such as Jews all the more anomalous and, accordingly, all the more vulnerable.

These factors are, of course, quite appropriate, and scholarship that has pursued them has uncovered much that is relevant and valid. On the basis of such work, it is usual to trace the roots of "Unsere Aussichten," and of the outburst of antisemitism in its wake, back to the stock market crash of 1873 in particular, or to the mid-1870s in general, as is indicated, for example, by the studies cited in n. 7. As for Treitschke's own personal antagonism to the Jews, in 1879: apart from the other general factors it has also been traced, specifically, to his dissatisfaction with the way the press, which he thought was too heavily influenced by Jews, received the first volume of his Deutsche Geschichte, which appeared in March 1879.13 But there is also some evidence for earlier adumbration and even expression of such antipathy.14

Nevertheless, it seems that another context, intermediate between Treitschke himself and German society at large, and also one that goes somewhat further back, to the 1860s and even 1850s, should be brought into the discussion.

To understand that additional context, we need only recall that both Treitschke and Mommsen, who was his most prominent opponent in the Antisemitismusstreit, were professors of history at the same university, the University of Berlin.<sup>15</sup> This

See Boehlich, Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 259, who alludes to Treitschke's complaints about the "Judenpresse" (or: "verjudete Presse") and its "semitische Schamlosigkeit" in the spring and summer of 1879 – Heinrich von Treitschkes Briefe, III/2 (ed. M. Cornicelius; Leipzig: Hirzel, 1920), 468, 503.

According to Dorpalen (Heinrich von Treitschke, 241), "throughout the 1860's" Treitschke generally avoided antisemitism, his attitude changing only in the late 1870s. Others, however, put the change earlier: as Wyrwa indicates ("Genese und Entfaltung," 95), already in 1870, with Bismarck's foundation of the Empire ("das Ziel seiner Vision") coming into sight, Treitschke began to express criticism of the Jews, attributing to them too much power in society (especially in the press) and mocking those who complain about persecution of them. Similarly, Boehlich (Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 242) points to an article by Treitschke on constitutional monarchy as his first published expression of "wirklich dezidiert antisemitische Äusserungen"; that article was first published in 1871, but is listed, in Treitschke's Historische und politische Aufsätze, III (5th ed.; Leipzig: Hirzel, 1886), 427, as having been written in "Heidelberg 1869–71." Hermann von Petersdorff, who was a student of Treitschke's, reports (in ADB 55 [1910]: 306) that Treitschke's hostility toward Jews grew especially in the wake of the economic crisis of 1873.

On Mommsen's role in the Antisemitismusstreit, see Lothar Wickert, "Theodor Mommsen und Jacob Bernays: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums zu Mommsens 150. Geburtstag, 30.11.1967," HZ 205 (1967): 265–294 (esp. 267–272); Hoffmann, "Die Verteidigung der liberalen Nation," 62–88; Jürgen Malitz, "'Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum': Theodor Mommsen und der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit," in Theodor Mommsen: Gelehrter, Politiker und Literat (ed. J. Wiesehöfer; Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), 137–164; and Gangolf Hübinger, Gelehrte, Politik und Öffentlichkeit: Eine Intellektuellengeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), esp. 88–91.

suggests that along with study of Treitschke as an individual, and of German society at large, it might be fruitful to look at the Antisemitismusstreit in the context of academic debates and feuds of the day. After all, it is clear that the Antisemitismusstreit had implications within the academic world. Note, for example, that in its wake Mommsen insisted on excluding Treitschke from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and when finally (1895) Treitschke was accepted, Mommsen resigned in protest, explaining (as cited above) that Treitschke was "der Vater des modernen Antisemitismus." <sup>16</sup> Similarly, Mommsen responded to Treitschke's 1895 appointment as editor of the Historische Zeitschrift by declaring that he would not write even a line for that prominent historical journal—a refusal Meinecke explained as deriving from the same issue.17 The possibility that the Antisemitismusstreit also had roots in the academic world should not be ignored.

I hope that a student of ancient history may be forgiven for barging into the province of specialists in the history of nineteenth-century Germany. I offer three justifications: (a) it was in the course of minding a bit of my own business, namely, wondering why Graetz, between the mid-1860s and the late 1870s, changed his views about some important matters concerning Jewish history of the Second Temple period,18 that I came across the evidence to be presented below concerning people and relationships that seem to be relevant for the understanding of the antecedents and context of the Antisemitismusstreit but have not yet been introduced into that discussion; (b) the people involved were philologists and historians whose work focused on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, fields close to my own and relatively distant from those of most who have studied the Antistemitismusstreit; and (c) as anyone who has been in academia for several decades, I too have some understanding and experience concerning competition, animosity, and feuds among academics—especially historians and philologists.

It is convenient to present the material first by working back from the 1879 publication of "Unsere Aussichten" to 1870 (Part II) and then further back to the 1850s–1860s (Part III), and then to work forward again, from 1870, in Parts IV and V.

See above, n. 5.

Friedrich Meinecke, Erlebtes, 1862–1901 (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1941), 197: "Das waren die Nachwehen seines einstigen Streites mit Treitschke in der Judenfrage." On the antagonism between Mommsen and Treitschke see esp. Stefan Rebenich, "Eine Entzweiung: Theodor Mommsen und Heinrich von Treitschke," in Berlins wilde Energien: Porträts aus der Geschichte der Leibnizischen Wissenschaftsakademie (ed. S. Leihfried et al.; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 262–285, 491–493.

Such as those discussed in Chs. 2–3. On Graetz's periodization of Jewish history, see my Judeans and Jews: Four Faces of Dichotomy in Ancient Jewish History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 62–82. It was work on the latter that led me to discover the LCD 1871 review of Graetz, discussed below in Part II, that was the point of departure for the present study.

#### II From 1879 back to 1870

Tracing the 1870 roots of "Unsere Aussichten" is best presented in a number of steps.

1. What precipitated Treitschke's outburst? According to a letter Treitschke wrote from a Swiss mountain resort late in August 1879, his vacation reading included the eleventh volume (1870) of Heinrich Graetz's Geschichte der Juden. That volume deals with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Treitschke was reading it in the context of preparing his own Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. As he reports, Graetz's book infuriated him: he could, he writes, hardly find words to express his Ekel ("disgust") and anger about what he termed Graetz's Todhaß ("mortal hatred") of Christianity and the German nation, especially insofar as they were accompanied by persistent complaints, nonetheless, about the Germans' failure to accept the Jews with brotherhood.19 As scholars have noted, that fury was the immediate impetus for Treitschke's composition of that part of "Unsere Aussichten" that focused upon Jews.<sup>20</sup> The connection is obvious, for example, in the line in the letter complaining about Graetz's "Todhaß gegen 'den Erzfeind', das Christenthum, und gegen die deutsche Nation," ("mortal hatred of the arch-enemy [Christianity] and of the German nation"), which corresponds to the opening of Treitschke's comments on Graetz in "Unsere Aussichten," quoted in the table below.

2. Treitschke used an 1871 review of Graetz. Although the similarity of Treitschke's vituperative response to GdJ XI to one published almost nine years earlier in a review of the same volume in the Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland has been noted,<sup>21</sup> it seems that we should go further and realize that Treitschke was directly influenced by that review in that prominent literary periodical. The Centralblatt indicates the author of that review only by his initials: M. L. After first

". . . Ich habe hier oben den 11. Band von Grätz Gesch. der Juden gelesen und finde kaum Worte um meinen Ekel auszuprechen . . ." (Treitschkes Briefe, III/2, 502–503 [no. 878], excerpted in Krieger, Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, I, 3–5 [no. 1]).

See, inter alia, Wyrwa, "Genese und Entfaltung," 96–97; M. A. Meyer, "Heinrich Graetz and Heinrich von Treitschke: A Comparison of Their Historical Images of the Modern Jew," MJ 6 (1986): 1–11.

LCD, 14 January 1871: 29–31. The similarity of views expressed here to those later expressed by Treitschke was noted by Michael A. Meyer, "Great Debate on Antisemitism: Jewish Reaction to New Hostility in Germany, 1879–1881," LBIYB 11 (1966): 154. On the LCD, which was one of the most prestigious literary reviews of the day, and which will play a central role in the controversies examined in the present study, see Thomas Lick, Friedrich Zarncke und das "Literarische Centralblatt für Deutschland": Eine buchgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Buchwissenschaftliche Beiträge aus dem Deutschen Bucharchiv München 43; Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1993).

allowing the following table to demonstrate M.L's impact upon Treitschke, I will turn to identifying M. L. The left column of the table presents all of Treitschke's comments on Graetz; the right column gives excerpts from M. L.'s review of GdJ XI. I have printed the literal agreements in bold type (Tab. 1).


Tab. 1: Treitschke, 1879 vs. M. L., 1871.

Both writers characterize Graetz as "fanatic"; both open their discussion by ascribing to him "hatred" of both Christianity and Germanism, in that order; both go on to focus on the latter; and both take particular umbrage at Graetz's "selfoverestimating" preference for Jews such as Börne and Heine rather than Luther, Lessing, Goethe and Fichte, and at Graetz's claim that it was Jewish "education" of the Germans that endowed the latter with their fine literary style. Given the fact that Treitschke's attack on Graetz addresses only these themes with regard to a volume of more than six hundred pages, and given the verbal agreements, it is, I believe, highly unlikely that the similarity of Treitschke's comments to M. L.'s is a matter of chance. The only major element of M. L.'s review missing from Treitschke's

PrJb 44 (1879): 573–574 = Krieger, Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, I, no. 2, p. 12.

attack is M. L.'s focus on Graetz's preference for the French—something that was not so important anymore by the time Treitschke wrote, nearly a decade after the Franco-Prussian War.

Further proof of Treitschke's use of M. L.'s review is offered by a passage in the second volume of the former's history of Germany, published in 1882.<sup>23</sup> Here, after reporting that only a relatively small number of Jews served in the Prussian army in the war against Napoleon, Treitschke offers, in a footnote, references to two publications, respectively of 1843 and 1858, in support of that claim:

Fig. 1: Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, II (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1882), 418, note ✶ .

The very same two references are offered in support of the very same statement in col. 30 of M. L.'s LCD review of Graetz:

Fig. 2: M. L., Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland 1871: col. 30.

The only differences between Treitschke's references and those offered by M. L. are that M. L. (a) also referred to pp. 112 and 118 of the 1858 publication and (b) did not give its title, instead referring to it only in the way Treitschke does in parentheses.

I find it quite difficult to imagine that Treitschke's footnote comes from anywhere apart from M. L.'s review. This impression, which derives from the relative obscurity of the items in question, is bolstered impressively by the fact that both writers' references to the 1843 item exhibit the same peculiarities. First of all, and—as a common error—most importantly, both misspell the title of the journal, as Militär-

H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, II (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1882), 418 with n. ✶ .

Wochenblatt; even as late as 1875, it was still spelled Militair-Wochenblatt, although by 1878 the spelling was Germanized into Militär-Wochenblatt. Moreover, both omit the title of the article cited ("Über die Zahl der Juden in der preußischen Armee während der Kriegsjahre 1813, 14 und 15") as well as the number (44) and date (4 November 1843) of the issue, and both refer only to the second of the article's two pages. It is very difficult to imagine that Treitschke, who had no special interest in military history, and who only rarely uses footnotes or cites bibliography in this work,<sup>24</sup> would have independently taken an interest in this particular point and independently located and cited this 1843 piece. Beyond that, I believe it nigh impossible that, without dependence upon M. L., Treitschke would cite it in the very same partial and erroneous way. True, the fact that Treitschke added the title of the 1858 volume indicates some new work in comparison to M.L's review, but not much, and one can also wonder who did that work; see immediately below.

3. The author of the 1871 review. M. L. was Max Lehmann (1845–1929), who was still only twenty-five when he reviewed Graetz in January of 1871, but would eventually become a professor of modern German history at the University of Göttingen.<sup>25</sup> This identification,<sup>26</sup> which was generally unknown at the time the review was published<sup>27</sup> and first suggested to me on the basis of the review's focus on military history,<sup>28</sup> was later bolstered by the discovery that Lehmann

As he himself notes, Deutsche Geschichte, II, v. For example: apart from this footnote on p. 418, between p. 400 and p. 429 there are only five scattered footnotes (pp. 402, 410, 419 [bis], and 422), of which the last is only an internal cross-reference to an appendix.

On Lehmann, see his autobiographical memoir, "Max Lehmann," in Die Geschichtswissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, I (ed. S. Steinberg; Leipzig: Meiner, 1925), 207–232; his daughter's biographical introduction to his posthumous Bismarck: Eine Charakteristik (ed. G. Lehmann; Berlin: Arnold, 1948), 5–25; the obituary by Friedrich Meinecke in HZ 141 (1930): 449–450; Waltraut Reichel, Studien zur Wandlung von Max Lehmanns preußisch-deutschem Geschichtsbild (Göttinger Bausteine zur Geschichtswissenschaft 34; Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1963); Günter Vogler, "Max Lehmann," Studien über die deutsche Geschichts-Wissenschaft, II (ed. J. Streisand; Berlin: Das europäische Buch, 1965), 57–95; and – alongside the more expected handbooks – R. Heuer (ed.), Lexikon deutsch-jüdischer Autoren, XV (München: Saur, 2007), 265–269. Lehmann also figures very frequently in Theodor Schieder, "Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im Spiegel der Historischen Zeitschrift," HZ 189 (December, 1959) 1–104.

Already posited, without argument or evidence, by Meisl, Heinrich Graetz (Ch. 2, n. 51), 127, n. 50.

See Meisl, ibid., who reports that at the time it was published many (although not Graetz) suspected that the author was Moritz Lazarus, a prominent Jewish philosopher.

My thanks to Dennis E. Showalter of Colorado College, who immediately suggested Lehmann's name when I asked him if he knew of any German M. L. of ca. 1870 who specialized (as he himself) in modern German military history. For Lehmann's interest in military history, see his auto-

demonstrably wrote scores of reviews for the LCD in those years,<sup>29</sup> and especially by the modestly restrained way in which M. L. refers to Lehmann's work in some of those reviews.<sup>30</sup> Eventually, moreover, it was confirmed by the discovery, in the library of the University of Göttingen (where one would expect to find a Göttingen professor's Nachlaß), of Lehmann's review copy of the eleventh volume of Graetz's Geschichte, with numerous marginal notes in his handwriting.<sup>31</sup>

4. Lehmann and Treitschke. Lehmann's close relationship with Treitschke beginning in the 1870s is easily demonstrated. It is testified to by more than twenty surviving letters from him to Treitschke and thirty from Treitschke to Lehmann,<sup>32</sup> by several articles by Lehmann in Treitschke's Preußische Jarhrbücher between 1872

 Three examples: (1) In a review in LCD 1871: 1170–1171, M. L. complains that although the work under review cited a certain "ausführliche Untersuchung" about a Cologne chronicle it nonetheless ignored its arguments. But M. L. does not give any bibliographical details about that "detailed study" that was ignored, although his similar complaint about another work that is cited but ignored comes with the author's full name, Conrad Varrentrapp. In such cases, an obvious guess is that the unidentified work was by the reviewer himself (who modestly abstained from explicitly mentioning his own name)—and, indeed, following the references easily identifies the "detailed study" as Max Lehmann's dissertation on the Cologne chronicle, cited below in n. 46. (2) Similarly, in reviews in LCD 1873: 1002 and 1065, M. L. refers with approval to articles in HZ 1873, without mentioning the name(s) of their author(s); both are by Max Lehmann. (3) At LCD 1871: 1233, M. L. refers to his own study "an einer anderen Stelle" of the battle of St. Privat (August 1870) and his conclusion about the dangers to which the Saxon infantry was exposed because their artillery was not used to weaken the French defenses; M. L. reverts to that battle in three other LCD reviews (1871: 680, 1335 and 1872: 625). Max Lehmann does the same in HZ 30 (1873): esp. 124.

#### See Appendices I–II.

 These letters, from the 1870s to 1895 (Treitschke died in 1896), are found, respectively, in Kasten 7 and Kasten 16 of the Treitschke papers in the manuscript division of the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin. Treitschke's are all addressed "Lieber Freund;" Lehmann's move, over the years, from "Hochverehrter Herr Professor" to "Hochverehrter und lieber

biographical memoir (above, n. 25), 208 ("Zwischen zwei Kasernen geboren, fand ich fast täglich Auge und Ohr erlabt durch die mit Musik vorbeimarschierenden Truppen und faßte eine lebhafte Neigung für alles, was mit dem Militär zusammenhing. Sie ging so weit, daß ich die Novitäten des Militär-Wochenblatts in die Rang- und Quartierliste hineinkorrigierte"), also the end of the foreword of his Scharnhorst (1886). For this focus in his review of Graetz, note that when, after concluding his general comments and complaints, he turns toward the end of his review to reporting the results of those few points where he checked Graetz's narrative in detail, they all pertain to military history (including the abovementioned discussion of the number of Jews in the Prussian army).

See Lehmann's autobiographical memoir (above, n. 25: 216), where he complains that, in the early 1870s, he was spending too much time writing reviews for the LCD and other journals. I found more than sixty reviews by M. L. in LCD 1869–1873, virtually all on works on modern German history, mostly military history.

and 1874, by Treitschke's praise for Lehmann in an 1876 review in that same journal,33 by Lehmann's frequent flattery of Treitschke in his LCD reviews,34 as also by their letters to others, including one by Treitschke just a year before "Unsere Aussichten" in which he praises the first volume (1878) of Lehmann's archival collection on Prussia and the Catholic Church as vortrefflich ("outstanding") and also recommends Lehmann himself as "quite a guy" (der ist mal ein ganzer Kerl).35 Similarly, note that Lehmann, who would later underline the friendship and dilate upon it in his autobiographical memoir,36 memorialized it in 1886 in the dedication of his Scharnhorst ("Heinrich Treitschke in Dankbarkeit und Treue gewidmet" ["dedicated to H.T. in gratitude and faithfulness"]) and sat next to Treitschke at the 1888 Berlin going-away party for Lehmann on the eve of his departure for a new position in Marburg.<sup>37</sup> A few years later Lehmann would note, in a letter to a younger colleague, that he not only respected Treitschke, but also loved (geliebt) him.38

5. Treitschke used Lehmann's copy of Graetz. For anyone who wonders where Treitschke found a copy of Graetz's Geschichte XI it is, therefore, quite a safe guess that it was Lehmann who, perhaps in the course of one of the many visits between the two that he recalls in his autobiographical memoir,<sup>39</sup> directed his patron's attention to the volume and lent him his copy, along with his own review of it in LCD 1871 (which was perhaps, as was and is usual for reviewers, folded up inside his copy). This is a priori likely in view of the evidence that Lehmann was supplying materials to Treitschke during these years.<sup>40</sup> Beyond that, however, an

Freund." For two published letters from Treitschke to Lehmann, see nos. 935 and 997 in Cornicelius' volume cited above, n. 13.

PrJb 37 (1876): 451–455 (= H. von Treitschke, Historische und politische Aufsätze, IV [Leipzig: Hirzel, 1897], 325–330). This essay, about Lehmann's 1875 Knesebeck und Schön, opens with praise for him in general and, near the end, claims that although those attached to old prejudices may resist Lehmann's views, those who take the time to check his arguments will find themselves forced to accept them.

See, inter alia, LCD 1869: 169; 1870: 1054; 1872: 448, 648; 1873: 426. See also his "Die Wehrkraft Frankreichs im Vergleich mit der deutschen," Grenzboten 29 (1870): 329–340: at p. 300 he found it important to reinforce a certain point by noting that it is "wie H. v. Treitschke treffend bemerkt."

Treitschke to H. Hirzel in Cornicelius (above, n. 13), no. 868. "Max Lehmann" (above, n. 25), 215, 219–220.

Meinecke, Erlebtes, 147.

Lehmann to Paul F. Kehr, 1894, quoted by Reichel, Studien zur Wandlung, 95–96, n. 16.

"Max Lehmann" (above, n. 25), 219.

According to a letter from Treitschke to his publisher in July 1876, "Durch Max Lehmann's Gefälligkeit erhielt ich eine Menge höchst merkwürdiger Papiere" ("By courtesy of Max Lehmann I have acquired a lot of very important papers"; Treitschkes Briefe [above, n. 13], III/2, 429 [no. 833]); to Salomon Hirzel, 5 July 1876). Indeed, many of Treitschke's letters to Lehmann in the Berlin dossier cited in n. 32 ask him for help with bibliography; note especially that in no. 9 (5 Sep-

examination of Lehmann's review copy of the Graetz volume, preserved in the library of Lehmann's university, shows that, apart from Lehmann's marginalia, it has marginalia in Treitschke's hand as well; see Appendices I and II. That is, the very copy of Graetz that Treitschke read in the summer of 1879 was lent to him by Lehmann—the copy Lehmann had reviewed nine years earlier.

#### III From Lehmann back to Jaffé, Pertz, and Mommsen

The preceding section showed that, to a significant degree, Treitschke's attack on the Jews in "Unsere Aussichten" may be traced directly, in terms of both impetus and content, including its focus on Graetz's eleventh volume, to a January 1871 review of that volume by Max Lehmann, just as the very copy of that work that Treitschke read, which disgusted him and thus touched off the Antisemitismusstreit, was Lehmann's review copy. That means that the road that led Treitschke to write as he did about Graetz, and thus to touch off the Berlin Antisemitusmusstreit, went via Lehmann. Now we shall ask what Lehmann's context, a few years earlier than the Gründerkrise of 1873, might have to offer in explaining the attitudes later to be echoed by Treitschke.

1. The war. The immediate background of Lehmann's outrage against Graetz was the Franco-Prussian War, which began in mid-July 1870. Graetz's eleventh volume, the last of his Geschichte, deals with the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century and, understandably, gives significant and enthusiastic space to the French emancipation of the Jews. It was, therefore, quite unfortunate that, as we have seen,41 it appeared in the spring of 1870 and came up for review just as the war was breaking out or already in its midst. Lehmann's review, which appeared in January 1871, was written in the context of a wave of German wartime patriotism, and the combination of a Jewish author and a Francophilic stance could not help but elicit a wrathful review. As Lehmann would himself comment retrospectively, in another context, "Unter der Kriegsgetümmel der Jahre 1870 und 1871 . . . hat sich auch der Gelehrte im stillen Studierzimmer nicht entziehen können" (even a scholar in a quiet study could not escape the warlike atmosphere of 1870–1871). 42

tember 1878) Treitschke asks his younger friend to see if he can find material on a certain topic for him in the Militär-Wochenblatt. This shows well who Treitschke's "referent" for such topics was. For Lehmann's great familiarity with that journal, see the citation from his memoir in n. 28. See above, Ch. 2, n. 48.

LCD 1872: 133. For Lehmann's own pronounced hatred of and contempt for the French in 1870/ 71, see numerous comments in his "Die Wehrkraft Frankreichs" (above, n. 34, signed August 1870)

2. Lehmann's mentor's suicide. Apart from that immediate but general background, however, another point is very suggestive: Just a few years earlier (1867), Lehmann had completed his Berlin doctorate under the supervision of a Jewish advisor, Prof. Philipp Jaffé (1819–1870), and since then Lehmann had remained in close contact with Jaffé and collaborated with him in scholarly work, as we shall see in Part V. That is especially interesting in light of the fact that Jaffé committed suicide early in April 1870, a few months before Lehmann wrote his review. Although Jaffé's name is hardly recalled today,<sup>43</sup> in his day he was a very prominent editor of medieval Latin texts and, apart from medicine, the first Jewish professor at the University of Berlin.<sup>44</sup> His suicide, moreover, was something of a cause célèbre that invited people to take sides. It seems likely that Lehmann's review, which came out so strongly not only against Graetz but also against German Jews in general, must be understood, one way or another, on this background as well.

and, especially, his angry rejection of the notion that France was a "große Nation" with a "civilisatorischer Mission" (LCD 1871: 479 – in a review of a volume that chronicled German suffering under corrupt Napoleonic occupiers). Those lines sound like Lehmann was still upset about Graetz's volume (his review of which appeared four months earlier); cf. esp. Graetz's comment, with reference to the eighteenth century, that the French, the Dutch, the English, and the Italians were "die civilisirten Völker" in contrast to the Germans, who were uncivilized and stuck in medieval crudeness ("an der von Frankreich ausgegangenen Civilisation gar keinen Antheil hatten und überhaupt in mitterlalterlicher Roheit steckte[n]"; Geschichte XI1 , 62)! See also other reviews by Lehmann at LCD 1871: 279–280 and 1008–1009, and Lehmann's complaint, in "Die Wehrkraft Frankreichs," 330, that the French employed "Barbaren" ("Kabylen, Araber und Neger") in their war "mit civilisirten Nationen," i.e., with the Germans. As for the sensitivities that concerned the issue of Jewish loyalty in those days, cf. Ch. 2, Part V.

Note, for representative examples of "sic transit gloria" from both of the two worlds between which Jaffé lived, that if in 1884 he rated twenty-nine lines in the thirteenth edition of Brockhaus' Conversations-Lexikon, by 1931 (the fifteenth edition, now entitled Der große Brockhaus) the entry was down to fourteen lines; by 1970 (the seventeenth edition) only five lines were left; and by 1990 (the nineteenth edition) the entry was gone. Similarly, although the 1904 Jewish Encyclopedia and 1929 Jüdisches Lexikon had substantial entries about Jaffé, there was none in the 1931 German Encyclopedia Judaica or the 1971 English one.

See C. Pinn, "Jüdische Dozenten an der Berliner Universität," Ost und West 10 (1910): 639–654. On Jaffé's life and career, which took him from the provincial and traditional Jewish Posen, via false starts in business and medicine in Berlin, to the heights of German philological scholarship, a professorship in Berlin (beginning in 1862), baptism (in February 1868), and suicide (April 1870), see esp. Alfred Dove, "Philipp Jaffé," ADB 13 (1881): 636–642 (= idem, Ausgewählte Schriftchen, vornehmlich historischen Inhalts [Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1898], 353–360) and BJPSB.

3. Lehmann was not Jewish. Since handbooks that cite an 1868 baptismal record claim Lehmann had been born Jewish and baptized only in his twenties,<sup>45</sup> I at first thought that his angry review of Graetz should be understood as an expression of an apostate's zeal, proving to himself and others just how far he had left Judaism behind. That went well with the suspicion that Lehmann's emphasis, in his own writings, upon having been born and bred Protestant,<sup>46</sup> was a lie, a case of protesting too much. However, upon examination it turned out the handbooks were wrong, although the origin of their mistake was understandable. Namely, since the brief autobiography appended to his doctoral dissertation (n. 46) reports that he was born in Berlin on 19 May 1845, when the 1868 baptismal record of a Max Lehmann born in Berlin on 19 July 1845 was discovered it was assumed that this was the same person, with a mistake in the baptismal record concerning the month of his birth.47 However, although that assumption was not unreasonable, upon my inquiry the Evangelisches Landeskirchliches Archiv in Berlin located the baptismal record of another Max Lehmann, born in Berlin on 19 May 1845 and baptized shortly thereafter—and that date of birth, and the names of the parents given in that record, are the same as those given by our Max Lehmann in the c.v. in his doctoral dissertation.48 That is, the Max Lehmann who reviewed Graetz in early

See esp. Heuer (above, n. 25), as also the brief entry in eadem (ed.), Bibliographia Judaica, II (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1984), 21.

According to the c.v. appended to his doctoral dissertation, "Berolini a.d. XIV Kal. Iun. anno huius saeculi XLV natus sum patre Carole philos. doctore, matre Clara e gente Knappiana . . . Fidei addictus sum evangelicae" (Maximilianus Lehmann, De annalibus qui vocantur Colonienses maximi quaestiones criticae [Diss. Berlin 1867], 71). Similarly, the first page of his autobiographical memoir (above, n. 25) underlines his Protestant upbringing: "Luthers Geist war es, der die Eltern vereinte und in ihrem Hause waltete." Note also his daughter's reference to his "ausgesprochene protestantische Religiosität" (Bismarck, 24), and the two essays on Luther in his Historische Aufsätze und Reden (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1911), 1–37.

My thanks to Renate Heuer, the editor of the reference works mentioned in nn. 25 and 45, who confirmed to me that the assumption that, given the identity of the names and day of the month, the month of birth stated in the 1868 baptismal entry must be mistaken, was the only basis of the assertion that Max Lehmann was of Jewish birth.

My thanks to Bert Buchholz of the Evangelisches Landeskirchliches Archiv, who located the records. According to the first page of Lehmann's autobiographical memoir (above, n. 25), "mein Vater war ein geborner Eislebner . . . Er hatte in Halle Philologie studiert und dort auch promoviert." Although she was not able to confirm the claim that any C/Karl Lehmann "hatte . . . promoviert" (and he is not listed in Bibliographie der Universitätsschriften von Halle-Wittenberg 1817–1885 [ed. W. Suchier; Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1953]), Ms. Karin Keller of that university's archives kindly informed me that a Karl Lehmann of Eisleben registered there in 1823 as a theology student (which almost certainly implies he was a Protestant), at the age of seventeen and a half, and studied there until 1825.

1871 was born a Christian and baptized shortly after his birth, and there is no reason to doubt his explicit statements about his Protestant upbringing.

4. Jaffé at the MGH: A romance sours. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to imagine that a scholar whose Jewish Doktorvater (doctoral "father" [advisor]) and close collaborator had committed suicide just a few months earlier could write so angrily about Jews without there being some larger story.

That story was not, apparently, one of hostility between Lehmann and Jaffé, for they remained close right up to the time of Jaffé's death, as we shall see in Part V. Rather, the story is one of an acerbic and protracted scholarly feud that dominated Jaffé's last years and, in the end, overcame him. A century ago, Harry Bresslau pieced part of this episode together (although without relating it to the Antisemitismusstreit); here I will summarize it only briefly, supplementing it with material relevant to our own topic.<sup>49</sup>

The story revolves around the relationship between Jaffé and Georg Heinrich Pertz (1795–1876), the director of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (henceforth: MGH) project virtually since its establishment in 1819.50 Jaffé originally got along famously with Pertz, who was also chief librarian of the royal library in Berlin. obsequiously dedicating a book to him in 1845<sup>51</sup> and thanking him lavishly

On this feud, see Harry Bresslau, Geschichte der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, 42; Hannover: Hahn, 1921), 378–385, 462–468; BJPSB 38–41 and 57–59; and Horst Fuhrmann, "Sind eben alles Menschen gewesen": Gelehrtenleben im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, dargestellt am Beispiel der Monumenta Germaniae Historica und ihrer Mitarbeiter (München: Beck, 1996), 108–115. Jaffé's drafts and other papers relating to this episode are preserved in Dossier B78 (entitled "Streit Jaffé-Pertz, 1854–1869") in the MGH archives (located in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich), which Bresslau used. My thanks to Arno Mentzel-Reuters of the MGH for his kind help with the use of its archives.

On the MGH and Pertz, see the works by Bresslau and Fuhrmann cited in n. 49, also Wilhelm Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, I (3rd ed.; Berlin: Hertz, 1873), 14–25; Michael D. Knowles, "Great Historical Enterprises, III: The Monumenta Germaniae Historica," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 10 (1960): 129–150; Zur Geschichte und Arbeit der Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Ausstellung anlässlich des 41. Deutschen Historikertages . . . (München: MGH, 1996); and—with a special focus on Jews—Zwischen Vaterlandsliebe und Ausgrenzung: Die jüdischen Mitarbeiter und Mitarbeiterinnen der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (ed. M. Hartmann, A. Marquard-Mois, and M. Becker; Studien zur Geschichte der Mittelalterforschung 2; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2023).

"Dem Herrn Geheimen Regierungsrath und Oberbibliothekar Dr. G. H. Pertz aus innigster Verehrung gewidmet vom Verfasser" (P. Jaffé, Geschichte des deutschen Reiches unter Conrad dem Dritten [Hannover: Hahn, 1845]).

in the preface of his 1851 magnum opus.<sup>52</sup> Pertz, similarly, for his part, helped Jaffé find a publisher for the 1845 volume, publicly took pride in the fact that Jaffé's massive 1851 compendium of papal documents was written in the royal library,<sup>53</sup> and, beginning in 1854, employed Jaffé at the MGH. Jaffé worked there for nearly a decade, contributing to numerous MGH publications and becoming the project's mainstay; in 1861, at his peak, his contributions amounted to more than 40% of vol. XVII of the MGH's Scriptores series.54

In 1862, however, the relationship between the two soured and degenerated into war. This may be traced, it seems, to two reasons, of which one was more or less structural and the other, personal. The structural reason was anchored in the fact that Pertz (b. 1795) was getting old and, in thinking about a successor at the helm of the MGH, was dead set on appointing his own son, Karl (b. 1828). The notion of such nepotism created resentment, of course, among the senior and seasoned MGH scholars,55 who naturally considered themselves much more proficient and better qualified for the job. This resulted in several episodes in which Karl's work was held up to general scorn in learned reviews. Two of these came already in the 1850s and early 1860s, and they are surprisingly similar: In both cases the elder Pertz discovered a manuscript and entrusted the editing and publication to Karl, and in both cases the vociferous consensus of scholarship was that Karl botched the job.

I cannot point to any involvement of Jaffé in the first episode, which related to a text by Granius Licinianus.56 But when, in 1861, Karl published an edition of

Regesta pontificum romanorum (Berlin: Veit, 1851), iv ("Atque inprimis Pertzii, inclyti monumentorum Germaniae historicorum editoris, summa in me meumque librum sunt beneficia praedicanda . . .").

Both of these points are emphasized by Jaffé in a draft letter preserved as p. 86 of the MGH dossier mentioned in n. 49, in which Jaffé proudly quotes Pertz's report: Die königliche Bibliothek in Berlin in den Jahren 1846–1850 (Berlin: Decker, 1851), 15.

For a summary of Jaffé's work for the MGH, especially in volumes 12, 16–20 of the Scriptores, see Dove, ADB 13 (1881): 638–639 (= Ausgewählte Schriftchen, 356–357); Ottokar Lorenz, "Philipp Jaffé ϯ," Zeitschrift für die österreichischen Gymnasien 21 (1870): 276–283; and BJPSB 29–31.

For the assessment that Pertz senior attempted to keep down the more talented workers at the MGH so as to enhance Karl's chances of succeeding him, see Wilhelm Wattenbach, "Georg Heinrich Pertz," ADB 25 (1887): 409. For a similar assessment, see the comments in Ranke's diary entry following Pertz's death: "Aber er war zugleich zurückstoßend und herrisch. Ein gutes Verhältnis zu den jungen Beamten wurde dadurch unmöglich, daß er seinem ältesten Sohne die Achtung, die ihm seine Gelehrsamkeit versprach, doch im persönlichen Verkehr nicht zu sichern wußte" (Leopold von Ranke, Aus Werk und Nachlaß, I: Tagebücher [ed. W. P. Fuchs; (München): Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1964], 428). On Ranke, see also below, n. 122.

For the severe storm of criticism of K. Pertz's 1857 edition of this text, see Nicola Criniti, "Granio Liciniano," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II/34.1 (ed. W. Haase; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993), 125–136.

the Annales maximi Colonienses (of the twelfth/thirteenth century) in vol. XVII of the MGH's Scriptores, and it too was trashed by numerous scholars,<sup>57</sup> it is very difficult not to see Jaffé's hand in, or behind, one of the longer and more detailed condemnations of the work (just as we shall see, in Part IV, Jaffé' initiative of and intimate involvement in a much more intense attack upon the same work). Namely, an anonymous review of the MGH's Scriptores XVII in January 1862 (LCD 1862: 24–27) divides into a long first section praising Jaffé for his manifold and wonderful contributions to the volume; two more paragraphs that praise other prominent MGH veterans, Wilhelm Wattenbach (1819–1897) and Georg Waitz (1813–1886), for their contributions to the volume; and a long concluding section dedicated to trashing Karl Pertz's edition of the Cologne chronicle. The review was published anonymously, but its degree of detail about Jaffé's work and the way it is phrased contrasts Jaffé so diametrically to Pertz junior that it must have angered Pertz senior as well and probably led him to suspect (or more), as I do, that it was written in collaboration with Jaffé.

Next, and more personally, came an episode first reconstructed by Bresslau,<sup>58</sup> which brought about the final break between Jaffé and Pertz. Jaffé's work for the MGH had taken him to several Italian libraries in 1860 and 1861,<sup>59</sup> and his contacts there turned into an attractive invitation to him to direct the Florence archives. Jaffé loved Italy and was excited by the prospect.60 For reasons unknown to Jaffé, however, that invitation somehow fizzled out and disappeared. When, in the summer of 1862, Jaffé discovered (or at least became convinced) that the explanation was that Pertz, preferring to keep his star editor in his own stable, had torpedoed the Florence appointment, he understandably became enraged. Perhaps on the background of earlier provoking slights as well, real or imagined,<sup>61</sup>

Geschichte der MGH, 381–383; BJPSB 33–41.

Rudolf Usinger, in: Siegfried Hirsch, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reichs unter Heinrich II., I (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1862), 450, n. 2; Georg Waitz, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reichs unter Heinrich I. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 18632 ), 225, n. 1, and idem, "Ueber die Vita Ezonis oder Historia fundationis monasterii Brunwilarensis," Nachrichten von der Georg-Augusta Universität zu Göttingen, 1863: 13; Reinhold Pallmann, Geschichte der Völkerwanderung, II: Der Sturz des Weströmischen Reiches durch die deutschen Söldner (Weimar: Böhlau, 1864), vi; Wilhelm Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter (2nd ed.; Berlin: Hertz, 1866), 498, n. 4 and 500, n. 3.

As is reported by Dove, ADB 13 (1881): 639 (= idem, Ausgewählte Schriftchen, 357) and Bresslau, Geschichte der MGH, 349.

On this episode, see BJPSB 34–36, with n. 141 on Jaffé's love of Italy.

So Dove, in his obituary for Jaffé on the first two pages of the Berlin Nationalzeitung of 12 April 1870. True, Bresslau (Geschichte der MGH, 380) had his doubts about there having been any other "Kränkungen," but Jaffé may have seen things differently; see the next footnote. Note, in this connection, that an anonymous reviewer in LCD 1860: 36 was petty enough to complain

and certainly on the basis of resentment of the fact that Pertz preferred his own son, whom Jaffé considered a second-class scholar, over him and other MGH veterans, Jaffé immediately gave notice, and in the spring of 1863 he left the MGH.<sup>62</sup>

5. Jaffé vs. Pertz, 1863–1870. At that point, Jaffé might have gone back to work as a private scholar, as he had been prior to his decade at the MGH. Luckily, however, powerful patrons had stepped in and organized for him, beginning already with the first semester of 1862/63, an adjunct professorship at the University of Berlin in such auxiliary historical fields as Latin paleography, chronology, and "diplomatics" (the study of formal documents).63 One of those patrons was Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who had been Jaffé's teacher and was among the grand old men of German historiography; another was Mommsen, himself professor of history at the University of Berlin and secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, a great and powerful scholar with whom Jaffé was friendly—a point to which we shall return.

When Jaffé first accepted the appointment at the University of Berlin, in the spring of 1862, he had thought he would work there alongside his position at the MGH. After his break with Pertz, however, the university position became his only one—until Mommsen also helped Jaffé to find the funds and the publisher to begin his own series of editions of medieval texts Thus was born Jaffé's series, Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum (henceforeth: BRG), of which six volumes would eventually appear.64

that although the heading of the index of an MGH volume (Scriptores 16, 1859) states properly that it was prepared by K. Pertz and Jaffé, the volume's table of contents omits Jaffé's name. Those familiar with academic egos and gossip can imagine the genesis of the complaint.

Adding insult to injury, Pertz had insisted that Jaffé stick to the terms of his contract, which required six months' notice before quitting. As Bresslau points out, this intensified Jaffé's resentment toward Pertz all the more. See Bresslau, Geschichte der MGH, 383. Bresslau refers there to the memoirs of a friend of Jaffé, who reports an April 1863 conversation with Jaffé who was "heftig erbittert gegen Pertz" but now happy to be free of his hold upon him (Hermann Hüffer, Lebenserinnerungen [ed. E. Sieper; Berlin: Reimer, 1912], 125). Lorenz ("Philipp Jaffé," 283), similarly, summarizes that Jaffé's years at the MGH were "keine freudige Zeit für ihn" and that it was "mit aufrichtigem Vergnügen" that he left it in 1863, although he could not free himself from resentment of "dem Kampfe, den Pertz heimlich und offen gegen ihn führte."

The professorship was created especially for him; see E. Henning, "Die historischen Hilfswissenschaften in Berlin," Geschichtswissenschaft in Berlin im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Persönlichkeiten und Institutionen (Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission zu Berlin 82; ed. R. Hansen and W. Ribbe; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992) 370–371.

The last volume (BRG 6) was completed and published posthumously in 1873 by W. Wattenbach and E. Dümmler (the first two of Jaffé's friends listed on the distribution list reproduced in BJPSB 363–364; he had dedicated to them, respectively, the third and fifth volumes of his BRG). See the enthusiastic review of BRG 6 in LCD 1873: 1581–1583. Wattenbach also completed another volume

As already the pompous Latin title suggests, Jaffé's Bibliotheca was meant to compete directly with the MGH. His volumes were organized by topics, not by genres, a difference that many historians found welcome; more relevantly to our theme, his volumes included, inter alia, texts already published by the MGH, and thus afforded Jaffé ample opportunity to offer devastating criticism of Pertz's work.<sup>65</sup> Pertz, for his part, of course found opportunities to complain about Jaffé's work, and even attempted to consign Jaffé's editions to oblivion, urging MGH scholars to use earlier and inferior editions of works rather than those prepared by Jaffé.66 The feud between Pertz and Jaffé thus remained alive, well, and notorious throughout the 1860s, and the fact that it is preserved for us, today, only in footnotes (of which many are in Latin) and long-forgotten reviews<sup>67</sup> should not

begun by Jaffé: Ecclesiae Metropolitanae Coloniensis Codices Manuscripti (descripserunt Philippus Jaffé et Guilelmus Wattenbach; Berolini: apud Weidmannos, 1874). On Wattenbach and Dümmler see also below, n. 67.

See, for example, P. Jaffé (ed.), Monumenta Carolina (BRG 4; Berolini: apud Weidmannos, 1867), 503–505 (the volume is dedicated "Theodoro Mommsen"). Here, in his introduction to his own edition of Einhard's life of Charlemagne, Jaffé first observes that of the more than twenty editions of the work, the one Pertz produced for the MGH in 1829 is the "most miserable" ("aerumnosissimam"), and then he proceeds to justify that assessment by offering a long list of mistakes in Pertz's edition. For the observation that although Jaffé's edition is indeed better than Pertz's, this particular attack on Pertz was unfair, as most of the orthographical errors in the latter's edition matter little and amount to Pertz's retaining the orthography of his main manuscript, see Theodor von Sickel's review of BRG 4 in HZ 19 (1868): 182. For another positive view of Pertz's edition of Einhard, in perspective, see Horst Fuhrmann, "Die Monumenta Germaniae Historica und die Frage einer textkritischen Methode," Bullettino dell'Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 100 (1995/6): 26–27.

See Bresslau, Geschichte der MGH, 463–464, referring, inter alia, to Pertz's review of some of Jaffé's work in GGA 1868, no. 43 (21 October 1868): 1687–1688. In this review, when Pertz suggests a correction of a reading offered by Jaffé he adds that in this case too, as in "hundert ähnliche Fällen," he would not have so pettily drawn attention to Jaffé's error were it not necessary to controvert Jaffé's numerous adulators and expose, once and for all, the true weakness of their hero's purported skill with documents ("einmal zu zeigen, welche Bewandtniss es mit der diplomatischen Meisterschaft hat, womit 'die Schüler aller Orten,' die Kameraderie der grossen Kenner ihren Propheten freigebig zu bekleiden nicht müde wird;" Pertz's "die Schüler aller Orten" is an allusion to a scene in Faust [line 1934] that shows how easy it is for a charlatan to make the naïve think he is a great scholar).

For some other items in this file, note especially the complaint about the MGH's "irresponsible" failure to publish letters, and the material in praise of Jaffé's work in general and the BRG in particular in the 1866 edition of Wattenbach's Deutschlands Geschichtsquelllen im Mittelalter (2nd ed.; Berlin: Hertz, 1866), 17, 26; nothing of the kind appears in the first edition of 1858. See also Dümmler's reviews of Wattenbach's 1866 volume (which was dedicated to Dümmler!) and of Jaffé's BRG 3 (1866) and 4 (1867) – respectively in LCD 1866: 771–772; 1866: 689–691; and 1867: 1268–1269. (All three are signed only with a Greek delta [Δ], but Dümmler's authorship of the first, and of other LCD reviews

lead us to think that it was not the talk of academic circles—which often relish such controversies.

6. Mommsen's involvement. Mommsen's support for Jaffé, in finding him the university position and establishing his BRG, is of cardinal importance in the present context, because it fits into a pattern of events that gives it broader meaning:


signed Δ [such as LCD 1870: 1004–1006], is shown by the list of his publications supplied by Robert Holtzmann in "Ernst Dümmler," Mitteldeutsche Lebensbilder, V [Magdeburg: Historische Kommission, 1930] 448–449; ibid., 432 and 434, Holtzmann underlines Dümmler's support for Jaffé in his struggle with Pertz.) Of these three reviews, the first especially praises Wattenbach for that criticism of the MGH; the second heaps praise upon Jaffé's work and underlines the advantages of Jaffé's edition of Wilibald's life of St. Boniface as compared to Pertz's; and the third explicitly praises Jaffé for using a certain text by Walafrid which, although its value had long been recognized, was consistently ignored by Pertz in his editions, and complained that Pertz – as opposed to Jaffé – depended upon a mass of inferior witnesses rather than discovering the best one. Note also a review of BRG 5 in LCD 1869: 991–992. It too heaps praise upon Jaffé and does not pass up the opportunity to make some snide remarks about the MGH (which limited and damaged historical scholarship by its "Vernachlässigung" of letters) and Pertz senior: even with regard to a text first made accessible by Pertz, it was, the reviewer states, only Jaffé's work that gave it its historical worth. This reviewer, who signed as "W," was probably Wilhelm Wattenbach (on whose relationship with Jaffé see n. 64), who frequently signed his name that way (e.g., in his notes to the second edition of Jaffé's Das Leben der Königin Mathilde [Leipzig: Dysche, 1891]. Georg Waitz, in contrast, used "G. W.;" see, for example, his quite positive review of a volume by Jaffé in HZ 11 [1864]: 427).

Referring to Pertz and his son Karl, Mommsen wrote Bernays complaining about "den alten und den jungen Bibliotheksdrachen, die ich beide nicht leiden kann" (Lothar Wickert, Theodor Mommsen: Eine Biographie, III [Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1969], 671–672). For another scholar the Pertzes treated the same way, see Theodor von Sickel, Die Urkunden der Karolinger I: Urkundenlehre (Wien: Gerold's Sohn, 1867), vii-viii.

Lothar Wickert (ed.), Theodor Mommsen – Otto Jahn: Briefwechsel, 1842–1868 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1962), 290, no. 247. This was in response to Jahn's complaint (ibid., p. 287, no. 241) that Pertz had, in the past, obstructed the copying of such materials. For a more general account of Pertz's authoritarian and singlehanded management of the library, see Horst Kunze


and Werner Dube, "Zur Vorgeschichte der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek," Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, 1661–1961, I (ed. H. Kunze, W. Dube, and G. Fröschner; Leipzig: Veb, [1961]), 28–29.

See Oswald. Redlich, "Mommsen und die Monumenta Germaniae," Zeitschrift für die österreichischen Gymnasien 67 (1916): 865–875, reprinted in idem, Ausgewählte Schriften (Zurich: Amalthea, 1928), 141–155.

Theodor Mommsen, "Die Chronik des Cassiodorus Senator vom J. 519 n. Chr. nach den Handschriften herausgegeben," Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Classe der königlichsächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 3 (1861): 677–689.

For details about this and other such cooperation, see BJPSB 40, n. 170.

These letters are preserved in Mappen 1–2 of the Jaffé file of Mommsen's papers at the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Jaffé's letters to Mommsen are reproduced in BJPSB.

Theodor Mommsen, "Die deutschen Pseudodoctoren," PrJb 37 (1876): 17–22 = idem, Reden und Aufsätze (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912), 402–409 = Wenn Toren (above, n. 5), 225–235. Other evidence of Mommsen's closeness to Jaffé is cited below, at nn. 91 and 108.

See esp. Wickert, "Theodor Mommsen und Jacob Bernays."

See Malitz, "'Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,'" 154, 158.

Adelheid Mommsen, Mein Vater: Erinnerungen an Theodor Mommsen (München: Matthes und Seitz, 1992), 109–111.

See Malitz, "'Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,'" 158. Concerning Mommsen on the Jews, see also Christhard Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk deutscher Althistoriker des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Studies in Judaism in Modern Times, 9; Leiden: Brill, 1988), 87–132; Wickert, "Theodor Mommsen und Jacob Bernays;" and Stanley Zucker, "Theodor Mommsen and Antisemitism," LBIYB 17 (1972): 237–241.

Mommsen himself asserted (in his response to Treitschke cited in n. 5) that German Jews should be baptized as part of the price of becoming part of the German nation, it is difficult—as both contemporary observers and more recent scholars have underlined—to discern a disagreement in principle between him and Treitschke. This conclusion indicates that, instead, the distinction between them was one of style, a point that makes the importance of these friendships all the more salient. Indeed, a great scholar who was Mommsen's son-in-law explicitly reported that Mommsen's response to Treitschke derived not so much from abstrakten liberalen Theorien ("abstract liberal theories") as from his personal friendship with Jews.79

e. In the mid-1870s, Mommsen directed the manipulations and the coalition that led, finally, to the removal of Pertz from the directorship of the MGH.<sup>80</sup>

7. Jaffé's suicide. When, late in February 1868, Jaffé somehow lost a medieval manuscript belonging to the royal library, which he had used for teaching a paleography class,81 Pertz had a field day. Even after Jaffé made good the loss by purchasing and donating to the library a manuscript more valuable than the one he had lost, Pertz denied Jaffé library privileges, defied the repeated instructions of Heinrich von Mühler (the Prussian official who oversaw the library) to restore Jaffé's privileges, and even spread the accusation that Jaffé had once worked as a spy for the secret police. Jaffé, who took it all very badly,82 spent hours agonizing over drafts and letters complaining to von Mühler about Pertz's persistent chicanery83 and, eventu-

See Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erinnerungen, 1848–1914 (Leipzig: Koehler, 1928<sup>2</sup> ), 181, n. 1. Similarly, Treitschke himself asserted, in a letter to Mommsen (Cornicelius, Treitschkes Briefe, III/2, no. 895 = Krieger, Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, II, no. 102), that "unsere Ansichten sachlich nicht sehr weit aus einander gehen und wir uns eigentlich nur über die Opportunität streiten;" see also Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews, 125, and Malitz, "'Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum,'" 155.

See Bresslau's detailed account of the reorganization of the MGH during 1872–1875 (Geschichte der MGH, 478–521), based upon rich archival material, summarized succinctly by Fuhrmann as "unter der Federführung Mommsens" ("Sind eben alles Menschen gewesen," 50).

The identity of the manuscript is unknown; according to Jaffé, it was worthless and no one could identify it, beyond the fact that it was of liturgical nature (p. 75b of the MGH dossier mentioned above, n. 49). My attempts to identify the manuscript, and/or locate it, remained fruitless. For details, see BJPSB 59.

As early as 27 June 1868 Lehmann wrote Sybel that Jaffé was "durch einen neuen, sehr heftigen Konflikt mit Pertz in einer Weise aufgeregt worden ist, daß ich für seine Gesundheit ernstlich besorgt bin" (cited by Reichel, Studien zur Wandlung, 115–116, n. 74).

These documents are found in the MGH file mentioned in n. 49.

ally, in preparing and circulating, early in May 1869, a public broadside denying Pertz's allegation and denouncing him.84 When that brought no results, he began after venting some of his spleen in yet another LCD salvo against Pertz and the MGH85—to devote himself to the preparation of drafts of a long complaint against Pertz, detailing once again the entire story, pedantically formulated in painstaking detail,86 with numerous documentary appendices and a list of witnesses to call in the trial of the libel suit to which he looked forward. In the end, however, for whatever reason(s)87—perhaps he had his doubts as to how many people would take his complaint or his document seriously,88 perhaps due to his foreknowledge of another impending embarrassment,89 or some other reason—Jaffé put an end to his troubles another way, by shooting himself on 3 April 1870, while staying at a guest-

The broadside, Jaffé's handwritten mailing list, and my transcription of the latter, are printed as Appendices 2a–2b in BJPSB, 361–364. The list is something of a "Who's Who" of German medieval scholarship of Jaffé's day – apart from Berliners, to whom Jaffé could distribute the broadside by hand.

LCD, 22 May 1869: 634–635. This piece—formally a review of a work by Karl Fr. Stumpf, a protégé of Jaffé—is anonymous, but Jaffé's authorship is guaranteed by his 9 May 1869 letter to Zarncke (BJPSB 351, no. 221), written four days after the broadside, in which he promises to submit his piece about Stumpf with alacrity. (In that same letter Jaffé also asks if Zarncke would be interested in a more detailed review of "das Unwesen das P. treibt und über seinen Tod hinaus treiben will"). Jaffé could submit the Stumpf review so quickly because it relates to no details of Stumpf's work. Rather, apart from some opening praise of Stumpf and a closing description of Stumpf's larger project of which the volume was a part, the body of the review is devoted to denouncing the MGH and Pertz; Jaffé summarizes Pertz's own work in this field as "die von Pertz mit plumper Hand zusammengestoppelten Capitularien." (For the standard complaint, that Pertz threw materials together without editing, see Appendix III.)

These drafts fill pp. 74–87 of the MGH dossier mentioned in n. 49. Jaffé invests much effort to proving that, although Pertz claimed to have received his information about Jaffé's past as a spy by the mid-1850s, in fact their relationship had been cordial until the Florentine job fiasco.

According to a survey of research, "hopelessness" and "social isolation" figure prominently among factors consistently linked to suicide; see Thomas E. Joiner, Jr., Jessica S. Brown, and LaRicka R. Wingate, "The Psychology and Neurobiology of Suicidal Behavior," Annual Review of Psychology 56 (2005): 301–302. These seem to fit the circumstances summarized in the next three footnotes, just as awareness of "ineffectiveness" (ibid., 303–304) seems to be what the next footnote suggests. My thanks to Henri Zukier for referring me to this survey.

I make that suggestion because after the suicide even Jaffé's closest disciples and admirers opined that he had been overly sensitive. As Dove put it (ADB 13 [1881]: 641 = Ausgewählte Schriftchen, 360), everyone who knew Jaffé thought it should have been beneath his dignity ("unter seiner Würde") to respond to Pertz; Lorenz ("Philipp Jaffé," 283) characterizes Jaffé, near his end, as paranoid. If his friends tried to convince Jaffé that his campaign of self-vindication was overdone and/or hopeless, we may assume that was terribly frustrating for him, for the matter obviously burned in his bones.

See below, n. 107.

house in Wittenberge, a few hours northwest of Berlin. The Wittenberge police's notice thereof, which asked the Berlin police to notify those close to Jaffé's (his Angehörige) was copied and—given the fact that Jaffé was a bachelor and also estranged from his Jewish family, especially since his baptism in 186890—forwarded to Mommsen. It remains in the file of Jaffé material in Mommsen's papers at the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, a most poignant testimony to Mommsen's friendship with the otherwise "more and more self-isolating" scholar.91 Jaffé was buried in the Wittenberge churchyard on April 6; his grave can no longer be located.92

#### IV Max Lehmann in 1870

Apart from its functioning in Jewish-Christian debates about baptism, and from its consequences for the Pertzes and the MGH,<sup>93</sup> it seems that Jaffé's suicide had direct implications for Lehmann, and so, in due course, for Treitschke's "Unsere Aussichten." For if we now return to our question concerning the genesis of Lehmann's angry review of Graetz, it will be of fundamental importance to recognize that as long as Jaffé was alive, Lehmann had been his faithful disciple, collaborator, and soldier in the war against Pertz. That meant both that Lehmann would not have written such an angry review about the Jews of Germany as long as Jaffé was alive, and that, in taking his own life, Jaffé left Lehmann an orphan, professionally. Although, in the long run, Jaffé's suicide contributed to his faction's victory over Pertz (for it made Jaffé into a martyr, whose suffering and death testified to Pertz's tyrannical nature), that victory was half a decade in the future and not at all forseeable in the months following the suicide—months in which Lehmann must have been thinking hard about his own future. But that was around the same time he was composing, inter alia, his review of Graetz, which happened to be referred to him among the scores of books he reviewed for the LCD in those years.

On Jaffé's baptism and relations with his family, see BJPSB 59–62.

That characterization ("immer stärker vereinsamend") is Fuhrmann's, "Sind eben alles Menschen gewesen," 114. The Wittenberge police's notice is no. 35 in the Berlin file cited above (n. 73) and is reproduced and transcribed in BJPSB 359–360. On Jaffé's isolation, see also Theodor von Sickel's review of BRG 6 in HZ 32 (1874): esp. 352–353.

As I was informed by Mr. Bert Buchholz of the Evangelisches Landeskirchliches Archiv in Berlin and Ms. Christine Walter of the Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Wittenberge; Ms. Walter also added that there is no record as to who paid for the burial expenses. My thanks to both for their friendly and efficient help.

In the original publication of this article, the present section was preceded by one on "The Aftermath," devoted to those two topics. That section has been omitted here.

To grasp the severity of Lehmann's situation after Jaffé's suicide, it is important to realize, first of all, that Lehmann's 1867 doctoral dissertation, De annalibus qui vocantur Colonienses maximi quaestiones criticae, was part and parcel of the Pertz-Jaffé feud. It is no coincidence that the text that Jaffé suggested to Lehmann94 as the focus for his dissertation was, out of all the medieval texts he could have suggested, the Cologne chronicle most recently (1861) edited, for an MGH volume, by none other than Karl Pertz—an edition that, as we have seen, was met with a chorus of harsh criticism.95 And it is no surprise that Lehmann's dissertation offers very sharp criticism of both Pertzes' work. From the very opening of his dissertation (p. 1), where Lehmann notes (referring to reviews and other comments96) that the consensus of scholarship is that K. Pertz was not "clever" enough to edit the work properly ("non eam, quam deceret, solertiam adhibitam esse"),97 to the conclusion (pp. 46–47), where Lehmann declares that K. Pertz's views about such a fundamental issue as the authorship of the chronicle are both unfounded and wrong, Lehmann repeatedly takes the Pertzes, father and son, to task about matters large and small.98 We may assume he was helped and encouraged in this by his advisor, Jaffé, who had, from his work at the MGH, first-hand knowledge of the younger Pertz's work, and had also put together the index to the volume in which the latter's edition of the Cologne chronicle had appeared (MGH Scriptores XVII, 1861). Thus, Jaffé knew Karl Pertz's work well, and he was certainly aware of the disparaging reviews of it that had already been published; indeed, above it was suggested that Jaffé collaborated, at least, in producing one of the harsher ones.99

It is, accordingly, not going too far to say that, from the outset, Lehmann's dissertation was a hatchet job. And Lehmann delivered the goods: as reviewer

That the suggestion was Jaffé's is noted by Lehmann in the opening sentence of his dissertation (De annalibus, 1).

Note an 1866 letter to Heinrich von Sybel (quoted in Reichel, Studien zur Wandlung, 115, n. 74), in which Lehmann explains that he and Jaffé chose the topic precisely because they knew that Pertz junior had "nicht eben mustergültig" edited the text and therefore left him a fertile field for his research.

See the list above, n. 57.

A Latin formulation which is reminiscent of the German of the review we linked (directly or indirectly) to Jaffé (LCD 1862: 26): the importance of the text "entspricht nicht ganz die Sorgfalt des Herausgebers, Karl Pertz."

Such as: the demonstrative correction on p. 3 (the first page of the text) of a statement by K. Pertz concerning which manuscript a certain editor had followed; p. 5 (correction of K. Pertz's translation of a Latin date); p. 8, n. 2 (Lehmann says he cannot follow K. Pertz's argument); p. 10, n. 3 (Lehmann corrects a reading by G. H. Pertz); ibid. n. 3 (Lehmann notes another disagreement with K. Pertz); p. 19 (the similarity between two texts is greater than K. Pertz imagined); pp. 38–39, n. 6 (demonstration that G. H. Pertz misdated a letter to 1159 instead of 1164); etc. In LCD 1862: 26–27; see above, just before n. 58.

after reviewer noted, Lehmann's work was far superior to K. Pertz's.100 That is, Lehmann's dissertation functioned the same way as the earlier trashing of the younger Pertz's editions of Granius Licinianus and the Cologne chronicle and Jaffé's sniping at the Pertzes in his BRG.

On that background, moreover, it was only to be expected that, after the completion of his doctorate as well, Lehmann would remain Jaffé's disciple. In 1868 Jaffé asked him to join him in his work on the BRG,<sup>101</sup> and Lehmann later reported that he had, at the time, the impression that Jaffé was grooming him to be his own successor.<sup>102</sup>

True, Lehmann's work on the BRG did not come to much. Its most direct fruit is the index he prepared for the fifth volume of that series, the last to appear in Jaffé's lifetime.103 But there was more. First, in a move that seems quite amazing by our standards, and only to be understood on the background of Jaffé's war with Pertz senior, Lehmann proceeded to publish a long, detailed, and highly favorable review of that BRG volume,<sup>104</sup> ignoring the fact that he himself worked for Jaffé and on the volume but not omitting to throw several barbs at the older Pertz's work on the same material. Then, that same year, Lehmann proceeded to publish a substantial piece of his own concerning a text in that BRG volume, building upon and defending an emendation and a dating suggested by Jaffé in order to reconstruct an episode of the tenth century.<sup>105</sup> Finally, just two weeks

Note the favorable and detailed anonymous review of Lehmann's dissertation in LCD 1867: 624–626, which opens by noting it is well known that the MGH's editor of the Cologne chronicle (= K. Pertz) had not lived up to the standards of care and certainty that otherwise characterized the MGH, and ends by concluding that Lehmann had conclusively handled ("erledigt") the essential questions pertaining to the chronicle. So too A[dolf] Cohn's longer and more detailed review in GGA 1867: 1982–1991: it opens with a long complaint about MGH work not being as good as it used to be and ends with an expression of sorrow that Lehmann was not employed by the MGH. Even the review of Lehmann's volume by C. V. in HZ 17 (1867): 406–408, while less enthusiastic than the other two, opens by noting that the work is "durch Fleiß und Scharfsinn ausgezeichnet" and aimed to make good all that K. Pertz had failed to do. C. V. was presumably Conrad Varrentrapp; see HZ 32 (1874): 365–371. Not surprisingly, Cohn and Varrentrapp are included among Jaffé's friends in the mailing list cited in n. 84.

As Lehmann happily reported ("Eine der größten Freuden . . .") in his June 1868 letter to Sybel cited above, n. 82.

So according to an 1874 letter from Lehmann to Treitschke quoted by Vogler, "Max Lehmann," 60, n. 17, as well as according to Lehmann's autobiographical memoir (above, n. 25), 215.

Monumenta Bambergensia (BRG 5, ed. P. Jaffé; Berlin: apud Weidmannos, 1869), 846–865. HZ 22 (1869): 173–182.

"Das Aufgebot zur Heerfahrt Ottos II. nach Italian," Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte 9 (1869): 435–444. For his defense of Jaffé's emendation ("wird . . . über jeden Zweifel erhoben") and dating, see the first three pages of the article.

before Jaffé's suicide there appeared what appears to have been Lehmann's last contribution to Jaffé's cause: a lengthy and terribly nasty LCD review of a book by Pertz senior, which opens, guns blazing, with the declaration that "this volume too does not belie the well-known shortcomings of Pertz's historical writing" (Die bekannten Untugenden Pertzischer Geschichtschreibung verleugnet auch dieser Band nicht). Having stuck that knife in, the review then proceeds to twist it mercilessly, demonstrating Pertz's errors, confusion, and sloppiness.106

That nasty review, by a twenty-five-year-old whippersnapper of a book by a septuagenarian, was published in Leipzig on Saturday, March 19, and will have arrived in Berlin mailboxes on Monday. The next day, Tuesday the 22nd, was the Kaiser's birthday, celebrated at the University with a public ceremony that was, apparently, attended by most or all of the University's historians. Jaffé left Berlin the next day, never to return: after checking into a Wittenberge guesthouse, he remained there for a week and a half and then shot himself on April 3.

It is natural to speculate that there was some embarrassing scene at the public ceremony, catalyzed by his protégé's review, and that is what finally drove Jaffé out of Berlin and to take his own life. However, it appears to be impossible to do anything beyond speculating.107 Whatever did or did not happen in Berlin on March 22, 1870, Jaffé's death was no great surprise to those who knew him. As Mommsen wrote a friend, a few days after the suicide, Jaffé had long been fed up with life.108

Jaffé's suicide left Lehmann out in the cold. He had lost his mentor-employerpatron, and with the folding of Jaffé's BRG (for apparently no one considered the possibility of entrusting the grand master's project to his young would-be successor), the MGH was again the only similar project around that might employ an expert in medieval German history and Latin manuscripts. But Lehmann, by his own hand, had destroyed, and smashed into smithereens, any chance he ever had of finding employment there. We can thus understand that Lehmann realized he needed to hitch his wagon to a new star, and as early as August 1870 we can clearly see that he targeted Treitschke.<sup>109</sup> This is shown by the highly flattering review of a volume of Treitschke's Historische und politische Aufsätze that Leh-

LCD, 19 March 1870: 332–335. For the assumption that this anonymous review (of Georg H. Pertz, Das Leben des Feldmarschalls . . . Gneisenau, III) was authored by Lehmann, see below, Appendix III.

For correspondence early in March 1870 that made it clear that a philological error of Jaffé's would soon be exposed publicly, correspondence that seems to have led him to draw up his will, see BJPSB 67–71.

For Mommsen's assessment, that "il y a longtemps, qu'il était brouillé avec la vie," see BJPSB 86, n. 364. In general, on Jaffé's isolation and mood, see above, n. 88.

For the following episode, see my "A Desperate Postdoc and the Emergence of Modern German Antisemitism," in The Individual in History: Essays in Honor of Jehuda Reinharz (ed.

mann published in the LCD, along with a letter he sent the next week to the journal's editor, Friedrich Zarncke.<sup>110</sup> In his letter, Lehmann expresses his chagrin that the review had appeared totally anonymously, without his initials, M. L.; he asks Zarncke to correct the omission the following week, explaining that "es liegt mir außerordentlich viel daran, ich wünsche den Inhalt meiner Anzeige nach allen Seiten hin zu vertreten" (this is extraordinarily important for me, [for] I wish to show the contents of my review all around.)

That pathetic request, which shows how important it was for Lehmann to bring (directly or indirectly) his adulation of Treitschke to the latter's attention, was apparently ignored by Zarncke. But if that specific move did not go as planned, another, more general move, would bear fruit. Namely, Lehmann, despite his doctoral and postdoctoral specialization in medieval German philology and history, moved back to his first love (see n. 28), one that fit in well with the times: German military history. Indeed, already in 1869 he had published a long article in that field in the Historische Zeitschrift, and numerous book reviews indicate the same interest111—and, if not otherwise, it was via that HZ article that he came to Treitschke's attention and entered his circle.<sup>112</sup> That was at the very time that Treitschke was beginning to reveal his own antisemitic leanings.113

However, it was in the nature of things that Lehmann's old-new orientation around Prussia and militarism, and his new friendship with Treitschke, could not sit well with pietas toward a Jew. A young scholar is often identified as a student of his or her Doktorvater, and being identified as the disciple and collaborator of a Jew was, for Lehmann, a liability.

Thus, if it was natural for any young red-blooded German—even if he did not grow up, as Lehmann, across the street from an army barrack—to take a nationalist stance in 1870, and that would in any case entail some degree of antagonism toward German Jews, for Lehmann the problem was all the more acute. He was,

C. Y. Freeze, S. F. Fried, and E. R. Sheppard; Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2015), 447–459.

The article appeared on August 6 in LCD 1870: 908–911. Lehmann's letter, of 17 August 1870, is preserved in the Friedrich Zarncke Nachlass in the special collections department of the Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek; Signatur: NL 249/1/L/602. Its text is reproduced on p. 458 of the article mentioned in the preceding footnote.

Note Lehmann, "Der Krieg in West-Deutschland und die vorangehenden Unterhandlungen des Jahres 1866," HZ 22 (1869): 80–147, also Lehmann's 1870 article mentioned in n. 34. Concerning his reviews, see nn. 29–30. For fairly complete chronological lists of Lehmann's publications, see the end of his autobiographical essay (above, n. 25) and Reichel, Studien zur Wandlung, 194–197.

See Lehmann's autobiographical memoir (above, n. 25), 215.

See above, n. 14.

personally, under some pressure to take a stand dissociating himself from Jews. He also may well have felt betrayed by Jaffé, who had left him to fend for himself on the anti-Pertz front. One way or another, however we explain his motivations, Lehmann's angry review of Graetz must be understood as his entrance ticket into the new camp. That is not to say it was consciously meant as such, only that it functioned that way—and that had Jaffé still been alive Lehmann certainly would have abstained from writing so angrily about Jews. Were it not for Jaffé's suicide, moreover, Lehmann's personal circumstances would not have encouraged him to write that way, and, even if he had, he would not have had such a need to cultivate a new patron. Now he did, and that new patron turned out to be, in short order, Heinrich von Treitschke. That patronage, as we saw above, was to be expressed, inter alia, by Lehmann functioning as Treitschke's research assistant. In that context, it was totally natural that he would eventually lend his mentor, when the latter was working on his history of modern Germany, a book about the modern history of the Jews, along with his own review of it.

#### V Conclusion

Alles ist Frucht, alles Samen. 114

It is a truism that the rise of German antisemitism is to be understood on the background of the rise of German nationalism. The more the Germans saw themselves as a united nation, the more difficult it was for them to tolerate minorities in their midst, especially if they were suspected of having other allegiances,<sup>115</sup> and especially if they were successful and, therefore, competitive. Thus, the rise of German antisemitism in the 1870s, culminating in the Antisemitismusstreit that ended the decade, is quite understandable.

The present study, however, points to an explanation that goes back further and points to a particular aspect of the rise of German nationalism. Namely, the latter was accompanied by, and to some significant extent fueled by, the rise of German medievalism, the study of the history of medieval Germany. This was a pursuit that excited many, and to which many looked explicitly as a means to foster German patriotism—just as the MGH, which was a major institutional product of this, took sanctus amor patriae dat animum ("holy love for the homeland gives

"All is fruit, all (is) seed;" epitaph on Max Lehmann's tombstone in Göttingen. My thanks to the late Berndt Schaller, who located and photographed the tombstone for me.

The same goes for Catholics too; see Ch. 5, Part VI.

élan") as its motto. Philipp Jaffé, born the same year as the MGH (1819), was one of those who was swept up in this wave of exhilarating medievalism, and after making his first debuts with books about German monarchs of the twelfth century,<sup>116</sup> and then proving his talents as a medieval philologist by his work on papal documents (n. 52), he was eventually hired by the MGH and came, in time, to be its mainstay. His career can only be understood in the context of the rise of German nationalism that would lead, directly, to the unification of Germany.

In this chapter, we have traced the story that led from his work at the MGH to his war with it, and hence to the "orphaning" of his disciple just at the moment that the eleventh volume of Graetz's Geschichte was coming up for review—a review that, as we have seen, would have decisive impact upon Heinrich von Treitschke's attack on Graetz and the Jews. That attack, in turn, brought antisemitism out of the gutter and into the "Salon" and started off the inexorable path to Der Stürmer's "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck."

That is, our venture into medievalists' feuds and alliances in the two decades that preceded the Antisemitismusstreit points to a context that seems to have contributed crucially, if only due to happenstance (Graetz's volume happened to come up for review when Lehmann was writing reviews wholesale, and after Jaffé's death), to that fateful episode. Namely, at least two firm lines connect the Antisemitismusstreit of 1879/81 back to the Pertz-Jaffé feud that began in 1862. Neither line seems yet to have been the object of scholarly interest: Treitschke's dependence upon Lehmann's 1871 review and use of Lehmann's copy of Graetz have hardly been noticed,117 and Mommsen's friendship with Jaffé and support for him have attracted next to no attention and have not, it seems, been brought into connection with Mommsen's stance in the Antisemitismusstreit. <sup>118</sup> Nor have biographers of Lehmann viewed his move from medieval philology and history into modern history, however striking it is,119 as requiring any explanation. Although much attention has been devoted to Lehmann's changing views of Prussian history, which eventually transformed themselves into a stance quite opposed to the nationalist

One is cited in n. 51, the other is: Geschichte des deutschen Reiches unter Lothar dem Sachsen (Berlin: Veit, 1843).

Lehmann's name is not mentioned in the literature on the Antisemitismusstreit (apart from Meyer's article cited in n. 21), nor in studies of Treitschke, such as Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke and Ulrich Langer, Heinrich von Treitscke: Politische Biographie eines deutschen Nationalisten (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998). He is mentioned twice, but only in passing, in Walter Bußmann, Heinrich von Treitschke: Sein Welt- und Geschichtsbild (Götttingen: Musterschmidt, 1952), 212, 271.

Suffice it to say that none of the studies listed in n. 15 mentions Jaffé, Pertz, or Lehmann. See the lists cited in n. 111.

position he espoused in his 1871 review of Graetz,120 his aborted first career as a medievalist has been ignored.121

Of course, historians must be careful not to ascribe too much importance to their own debates and feuds. No one would suggest that something like the Antisemitismusstreit—or the Holocaust—would not have occurred had Pertz lent Mommsen the manuscript of Granius Licinianus in 1856, or had Pertz not torpedoed Jaffé's job offer in Florence in the early 1860s, or had Pertz had no son to groom to succeed him, or if that son had been a more talented philologist, or if Lehmann had not grown up to the tunes of Prussian military bands, or if Jaffé had not suggested to him a dissertation topic that was so eminently anti-Pertzian, or if Jaffé had not lost a manuscript in 1868 or committed suicide in 1870, or if the Francophilic eleventh volume of Graetz's Geschichte had not come up for review during the Franco-Prussian War, or if someone other than Lehmann had been asked to review it, or if Jaffé had put off his suicide until after Lehmann wrote the review, or if Lehmann had lent Treitschke some nice novel to read during his Swiss vacation in the summer of 1879 instead of the eleventh volume of Graetz's Geschichte with his own angry marginalia along with a copy of his review of it. The rise and success of modern German antisemitism in general, and the genesis of Treitschke's "Unsere Aussichten" in particular, were the result of larger and more basic processes of history, as noted at the outset of this study, and had they not come to fruition one way they could have done so in another.

Nevertheless, apart from their fundamental reasons historical processes need their specific circumstances that allow them to have their way, and a full understanding of such processes requires as full an understanding as possible of both. Indeed, the distinction between circumstances and reasons is often less than clear. As the epitaph on Lehmann's tombstone (n. 114) proclaims, nothing happens without cause, and nothing that happens remains without effect. In the present case, what I have suggested is that the fact that Lehmann, although quite a talented student of medieval Latin texts, was frustrated because he could not find

Apart from the two major studies of Lehmann's oeuvre mentioned in our next note, see also Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (New York: Scribner's, 1960), 324. Meinecke summarized Lehmann's development in a nutshell: "Der einstige konservative Heißsporn endete . . . als Bekenner zur Weimarer Verfassung" (HZ 141 [1930]: 450).

See Reichel, Studien zur Wandlung, 16, who opens her discussion of Lehmann's development with his first article on modern history, relegating his earlier works to a footnote (93, n. 3) that offers only the bibliographical details. Similarly, Vogler ("Max Lehmann," 61) characterizes Lehmann's first works on Prussian history, published in 1869 and 1874, as "seine erste Forschungsarbeiten," carefully adding between dashes the rider "von seiner Dissertation und einem Aufsatz zur mitteralterlichen Geschichte abgesehen" but giving those earlier studies no attention at all. Neither scholar mentions the detailed review cited above in n. 104.

a position after his patron had died, derived from rivalries among medievalists in the 1850s and 1860s; that his frustration, and need to dissociate himself from Jaffé (and Jews in general), go a long way toward explaining both his angry review of Graetz and his change of profession, which was accompanied by the cultivation of a new patron, Treitschke; and that that friendship, which flourished in the 1870s, was directly responsible both for the specific focus of Treitschke's anti-Jewish disgust and fury in the summer of 1879 and for some of the contents and even wording of Treitschke's expression of that fury a few months later in "Unsere Aussichten"—a publication that was to have epoch-making implications. Similarly, I suggested that Mommsen's troubles with the Pertzes contributed to his friendship with Jaffé and that his ensuing role as Jaffé's patron and defender against Pertz were part of a pattern in the context of which we should understand his role, a few years later, as standard-bearer of the rejection of Treitschke's attack on the Jews. Perhaps others, experts and not interlopers in this field, will be able to fill out this picture even more—fleshing out the relationships I have sketched and perhaps investigating others as well.122

✶✶✶

#### Appendix I: Berndt Schaller's List of Marginalia in Lehmann's Copy of Graetz, Geschichte XI

The following table, a model of Gründlichkeit and Akribie, as well as of friendship, was prepared by the late Berndt Schaller of Göttingen (1930–2020).<sup>123</sup> In 2008, when the hypotheses presented in this paper were beginning to take shape, I asked Schaller to check if there was, in some Göttingen library, a copy of Graetz's

It might be especially important to investigate the role played by Friedrich Zarncke, the editor of the LCD, in which so many anti-Pertz pieces were published. Perhaps Ranke's role as well. He was Jaffé's teacher, also Waitz's, Wattenbach's, and Dümmler's, and he looked forward to Pertz being replaced by Waitz; see, inter alia, L. von Ranke, Zur eigenen Lebensgeschichte (ed. A. Dove; Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1890), 492. But he was also Pertz's contemporary and friend. In his Tagebücher (above, n. 55: pp. 426–429), writing in the wake of Pertz's death, Ranke claims that he deliberately refrained from involvement in the feud, but asserts that Jaffé was more to blame than Pertz for the feud between them.

On Schaller, see Susannah Heschel's "Geleitwort" to his posthumously published Christlichakademische Judentumsforschung im Dienst der NS-Rassenideologie und -Politik: Der Fall des Karl Georg Kuhn (ed. U. Kusche; Jüdische Religion, Geschichte und Kultur 31; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2021), 26–27, also the list of his publications (prepared by Lutz Döring and Annette Steudel), ibid. 197–206. My thanks to Lutz Döring for his help with this note. May the memory of the righteous be a model and a blessing.

GdJ XI1 that had marginalia or the like that indicated that it once belonged to Max Lehmann. Shortly thereafter the following document showed up in my inbox. Schaller had not only located the volume just where one would expect to find the books of a Göttingen professor: in the SUB (Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Göttingen [Signatur: 8 H E UN 122/33:11]);<sup>124</sup> he also put in the time and effort required to locate and meticulously decipher the marginalia, as also to do some archival work in order to confirm that many are in Max Lehmann's handwriting. Conclusions from this document are offered in Appendix II.

✶✶✶

#### Heinrich Graetz:

Geschichte der Juden vom Beginn der Mendelsohn'schen Zeit (1750) bis in die neueste Zeit (1848) = Bd XI, Leipzig 1870 Exemplar SUB Göttingen H.E.U. 122/33

Notierung von Notizen (überwiegend höchstwahrscheinlich von Max Lehmann)

aufgenommen 22.7.2008 BS [Berndt Schaller, drs]


S. v Z. 14: U "überraschende Leistung weltgeschichtlicher Natur" Z. 2vu: U "trösten"

S. vi Z.15: U: "Subjectivität"


For another volume in the Göttingen SUB in which the penciled markings in the margins correspond very strikingly to Lehmann's review, compare Hermann Hüffer, Die Politik der deutschen Mächten im Revolutionskriege . . . (1869) – SUB Signatur 8 H GERM X, 150 – to LCD 1869: 1417–1418.

S. 56 Mitte: zu 'Sie brandmarkten . . .' R "typisch"

S. 70 Ende 1. Abschnitt: zu 'Gefühl des Bürgers.' R "Die Juden sind ein Staat im Staate"

S. 71 Z. 10ff.: zu 'Es ist möglich . . . " R: "und heute?"

S. 145 Z.12-4vu: zu '.. für Thätigkeit überhaupt . . . Hauptbeschäftigung' A, R "typisch jüdisch"

S. 150 Z.3-7: R "?"

S. 151 Z.9f.: U, E "?" – Z.7-4vu: R "typisch"

S.152 Z.8-10: A, R "haha"–"siehe . . ." – letzte Abschnitt: 'Deutsche Juden . . .' R "?" S. 154 Z. 13.ff: A, R "den sie einen geistlosen Lumpen nennen" – Z.3vu Ende: E "haha"

S.156 Z.3Ende: E "typisch"

S. 158 Z. 13: ✶ nach 'vereinten' Hinweis auf Anmerkung am unteren Rand: "So beginnt die systematische Arbeit der Juden, durch Verheiratung ihrer Töchter mit Deutschen, das Blut der Deutschen zu verseuchen u. entarten!" [Text ML?] – Z. 3- 1vu: A, R "richtig, die lassen sich nur zu einem jüdischen Volk modeln, ein Volk im Volke." [Texte ML??]

S.159 Z.1f: A, R "und heute?" - Z. 14f.: zu 'Friedrich d.G. . . . " R "sehr richtig" S.167 Z.2ff.: A, R "echt jüdisch"

S. 170 2. Abs. Anfang: R "Da haben wir den blödsinnigen Hochmut und die Intoleranz des Semiten" – Z.9-7: R "War das nicht Absicht?" – Z. 3-1vu: A

173 Z.12vu: zu 'nur diesem Stamm': R "nur? Sie sind doch Prof. d. Geschichte! Welcher?"

S. 183 Z. 16: zu Schleichermacher dictum: R "sehr richtig"

S.235 Z.12: zu 'unbezwingliche Franzosen' E "? Korsen"

256 Z.14-13vu: zu 'Der Staat würde . . .' R "sehr richtig"

S. 260 2. Absatz Z.3: zu 'Deutschthümelei' R "und die Judenthümelei? [Text ML?] –

Z.4ff: R "Verrückt und die alten Israeliten" [Text ML?]

S. 268 Z.3-6: R ? + "von den Juden gut gelernt" (selbe Hand?)

S.269 letzter Satz 1. Abschnitt: zu 'Einige" U E "Alle. Immer dasselbe Vernichtung des Wirtsvolkes" [Höchstwahrscheinlich nicht ML]

313 Z. 18: zu 'der als Deutscher Halbheit liebte' R "Graetz hat keine Ahnung vom Deutschen"

S.319 Überschrift: zu 'Deutschthümelei' R "dieses Wort macht den Verfasser lächerlich"

S. 331 Z.10-8: zu 'Es können daher nur Deutsche . . .' U, R "sehr richtig"

S. 405 zu vorhergehender R 'Börne u. Heine Diese Schweine' R "gottbegnadete Dichter!!"

S.408 Text Z.4: zu 'Kühnheit': durchgestrichen und durch "Unverschämtheit" ersetzt. [Eindeutig nicht ML]

S.563 Z.10-9vu: zu S. Holdheim A (150 Seiten vorher nichts!) S.565 Z. 6-1vu: zu S. Holdheim A In den Anmerkungen keinerlei Einträge

#### Appendix II: Treitschke Used Lehmann's Copy of Graetz, Geschichte, vol. 11

As Schaller showed (Appendix I), the copy of Graetz, GdJ XI that he checked has numerous penciled marginalia, "most of them most probably" (überwiegend höchstwahrscheinlich) by Max Lehmann. That confirms the conclusion that Lehmann authored the review of this volume in LCD 1871: 29–31. As for the marginalia in another hand, and in ink—given Lehmann's association with von Treitschke, I asked Karsten Krieger, who edited the compendium cited in n. 4, to check them, and also a few others that Schaller missed. He painstakingly compared the handwriting to Treitschke's, as represented by two handwritten letters (one of 1874 in the collections of the Humboldt-Universität [C. Schwarz (ed.), Autographen der Universitätsbibliothek (Berlin: Universitätsbibliothek, 1980<sup>2</sup> ), no. 1150] and the other of 1884 [reproduced after p. 566 of Heinrich von Treitschkes Briefe, III/2 (ed. M. Cornicelius; Leipzig: Hirzel, 1920]), and determined that a marginal note on p. 391 of the Graetz volume ("Wer?" in the margin, nine lines after the inset poem) was definitely written by Treitschke, and that several others probably were: two each on pp. 175 and 369 and one each on p. 406 (gut gelogen! ["well lied!"], on the Jewish contribution to the civilizing of Germany) and p. 408 (Unverschämtheit ["shamelessness'] instead of Graetz's reference to the Kühnheit ["boldness"] of Börne and Heine). Krieger's conclusions from the handwriting are bolstered, secondarily, by the correspondence of the topics commented upon to those that interested Treitsche in "Unsere Aussichten" (quoted above, in the table in Part II, §2). Note, especially, that "Wer?" ("who?") on p. 391 is an angry reaction to Graetz's claim that people considered Heine to be on the same level as Goethe, or higher; that the markup on p. 369 responds to Graetz's praise for Heine and Börne by pejoratively changing Graetz's references to them as a Zwillingspaar ("pair of twins") and diesen beiden Juden ("these two Jews") into Zwillingslumpen ("rag-twins") and diesen beiden Judenlümmeln ("these two Jew-louts"), respectively; and that the comment "Gut gelogen!" on p. 406 (reproduced on the cover of the present volume) comes at the end of a paragraph in which Graetz claims that Börne and Heine, the Erzieher ("educators" word mocked in this copy by quotation marks and an exclamation mark) of Germany, educated the Germans to freedom and to elegant language. My most sincere thanks to Schaller and Krieger for their careful and thorough work; to Noam Mizrahi for some first-hand rechecking of the Graetz volume for me; and to Dr. Helmut Rohlfing of the Göttingen SUB and Dr. Marion Neiss of the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at the Technische Universität in Berlin, who arranged for the loan of the volume to the latter library, where Krieger was able to examine its marginalia.

✶✶✶

Below: an example of a page with marginalia, both Lehmann's in pencil ("Die Juden sind ein Staat im Staate!") and two by Treitschke in pen (quotation marks added around four words in the first paragraph, along with an exclamation point, and around two words in the second paragraph). Another example, from p. 406, is shown on the cover of the present volume: Treitschke comments "gut gelogen!" with regard to Graetz's claim about the Jews' positive influence on the Germans.

Fig. 3: Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, XI (Leipzig: Leiner, 1870), p. 70, with marginalia by Max Lehmann and Heinrich von Treitschke. Image courtesy of the SUB Göttingen, where the volume's shelfmark is 8 H E UN 122/33:11.

## Appendix III (to n. 106): Max Lehmann Authored the Review of the Third Volume of Pertz's Gneisenau in LCD, 19 March 1870, cols. 332–335

This review of the third (1869) volume of Pertz's Das Leben des Feldmarschalls Grafen Neithardt von Gneisenau is completely anonymous, even without the reviewer's initials, and my attempts (bothering and amusing librarians all over Germany and elsewhere) to locate Lehmann's personal copy of the volume, so as to compare its marginalia with the review, have so far remained fruitless. Nevertheless, it seems virtually certain that the review is by Lehmann, for: (1) the book is about one of Lehmann's heroes (about whom he wrote often, including articles in HZ 62 [1889] and in Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte 1896/97, vol. 2); (2) Lehmann was reviewing very often in the LCD in those years (including the next week [cols. 366–369]; see above, n. 29), and especially works on Prussian military history were referred to him; (3) the review ends, on col. 335, with a reference to p. 89 of Pertz's volume, which reports a certain violation of orders by Scharnhorst; not only is Scharnhorst another of Lehmann's heroes (see n. 28), but that very same incident and page were emphasized, two years later (LCD 1872: 382), in an M. L review of a book about Scharnhorst; (4) the review's basic complaint, that Pertz presents much important material but does not know how to present it and his editing and writing is terrible, is precisely what Lehmann wrote the next year in an initialed (M. L.) review (LCD 1871: 558) that complains that a certain author who praised another work by Pertz had failed to distinguish between the material and the way it is handled.

Furthermore, note that Treitschke reviewed the first volume of Pertz's Gneisenau in LCD 1865: 1033–1034 (in LCD the review is anonymous but it is reprinted in the fourth volume of Treitschke's collected essays [above, n. 33: 641–643]). The comparison between the two reviews is very instructive: Lehmann's opens with an allusion to Treitschke's review ("auch dieser Band," i.e., just as the earlier volume previously reviewed in LCD), and emphasizes the exact same theme as Treitschke: the book is hardly edited but contains much important material. The difference between the two reviews is that Treitschke is forgiving (the book is hardly edited but nevertheless very interesting) whereas Lehmann hostilely emphasizes and illustrates the first point at length before going on to admit the second one. It is easy to imagine that the LCD asked Treitschke to review Pertz's third volume but he passed it off to his acolyte.

The fact that a few years later, when the shoe was on the other foot, Lehmann complained that a critic of his own work had remained anonymous (not even using initials), and claimed that anonymity was unusual in polemics where instead the rule was to identify oneself fully (Stein, Scharnhorst und Schön: Eine Schutzschrift [Leipzig: Hirzel, 1877], 3), does not, of course, prove he did not write this anonymous review of Pertz.

# 5 From Bismarck to Antiochus: On the Chaotic and "Worthless" Prehistory of Elias Bickermann's Gott der Makkabäer

#### I Introduction

According to the preface of Elias Bickermann's Gott der Makkabäer ("God of the Maccabees," henceforth: GdM), the book's goal was a "purely historical one: to determine the sequence of the events we usually call the persecution of Antiochus and to make this series of events comprehensible." <sup>1</sup> Bickermann's basic thesis, which he summarized prominently in the volume's foreword and, after working his way through various parts of the puzzle, set out in detail in the final chapter of the work, is that it was Jewish Hellenizers who brought Antiochus Epiphanes to impose his decrees against Judaism.<sup>2</sup>

Although this thesis, or parts of it, had been adumbrated here and there in earlier literature,3 Bickermann presented it with such detail and verve that it is nighuniversally considered to be his own personal contribution.4 That, in turn, has led

Elias Bickermann, Der Gott der Makkabäer: Untersuchungen über Sinn und Ursprung der makkabäischen Erhebung (Berlin: Schocken, 1937), 7, cited here according to Horst R. Moehring's 1979 English translation of the work, which is easily accessible in E. Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History (ed. A. Tropper; 2 vols.; AJEC 68; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 2.1033. In this volume, which focuses on Bickermann's work in Germany, I use the spelling "Bickermann" throughout, apart from citations that use "Bickerman."

As summarized in the preface (GdM 8 = Studies, 2.1033): "The religious persecution . . . originated among the Jews themselves, or, to be more exact, from a party among the Jews who aimed at a reform of the ancestral faith."

As was noted and documented by Isaak Heinemann, "Wer veranlaßte den Glaubenszwang der Makkabäerzeit?" MGWJ 82 (1938): 145, and by Christhard Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk deutscher Althistoriker des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Studies in Judaism in Modern Times 9; Leiden: Brill, 1988), 242.

See, for example, Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1959), 184: "Bickermann's innovation is in seeing the Hellenizers, not only as the initiators of the reform, but also as the initiators of the persecution." So too Arnaldo Momigliano: "To Bickerman we owe more particularly a reinterpretation . . . which makes the Jewish Hellenizers responsible for what used to be called the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes" (JTS n.s. 21 [1970]: 150). Note also Fausto Parente, "Ricordo di Elias Joseph Bickerman," Athenaeum 60 (1982): 241: despite some specific interests that Bickermann owed to his teachers (Meyer and Norden), his thesis in GdM is "sostanzialmente nuova." That GdM is the "most personal" of Bickermann's works ("das persönlichste Buch, das er geschrieben hat") was remarked by Klaus Bringmann, "Elias Bickermann und der 'Gott der Makkabäer,'" Trumah 17 (2007): 5. For

scholars interested in the genesis of the thesis to address, quite naturally and reasonably, the modern and even contemporary contexts in which Bickermann lived, and to which he responded, that contributed to fostering it. In GdM, Bickermann himself compared the Hellenizers to German-Jewish reformers of the 1840s;5 years later he also pointed out, although briefly, the relevance of the work's contemporary context in Nazi Germany,6 and Bezalel Bar-Kochva and Martha Himmelfarb have underlined that context;7 and Albert Baumgarten pointed especially to the impact of Bickermann's Russian background and his father's political orientation.8 These explanations are not mutually exclusive, and much may be said for each of them.

Indeed, even the technical publication that will be partially analyzed in the present study, Bickermann's highly detailed 1928 article on the first two Books of Maccabees in the central compendium of German Altertumswissenschaft, <sup>9</sup> reveals that its author was very much part of the world in which he lived. I refer especially to his comment (col. 786) that the Judeans' claim to be related to the Spartans (1 Macc 12:5–23) was their Eintrittsbillet in die europäische Kultur ("entry ticket to European culture"). That is, of course, an allusion to Heine's famous line about a baptismal certificate being das Entréebillett zur europäischen Kultur, and points to an issue that must have been alive and well for Bickermann, who, after completing his Berlin doctorate in 1926, was trying to make his way in German

GdM's great influence upon subsequent scholarship, note also Arnaldo Momigliano's comment, in 1968, that among scholarly works on the Books of Maccabees since 1931 Bickermann's studies "naturalmente" dominate the field (Arnaldo Momigliano, Prime linee di storia della tradizione Maccabaica [augmented reprint of 1931 edition; Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968], 8).

GdM 132 = Bickerman, Studies, 2.1121. This analogy was particularly emphasized by Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 243, and by Bringmann, "Elias Bickermann," esp. 9–10. For the view that it was this nineteenth-century analogy that explains Bickermann's view (away), see K. Bringmann, "Die Verfolgung der jüdischen Religion durch Antiochos IV.: Ein Konflikt zwischen Judentum und Hellenismus?" Antike und Abendland 26 (1980): 179, also idem, "Elias Bickermann," 9–10.

See his introduction to the English version of GdM in Bickerman, Studies, 2.1030.

Bezalel Bar-Kochva, "E. Bickermann's Research of the Second Temple Period," Cathedra 23 (1982): 7 (in Hebrew); Martha Himmelfarb, "Elias Bickerman on Judaism and Hellenism," in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (ed. D. N. Myers and D. B. Ruderman; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 207–208.

Albert Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman as a Historian of the Jews: A Twentieth Century Tale (TSAJ 131; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 253–267, and idem, "Russian-Jewish Ideas in German Dress: Elias Bickerman on the Hellenizing Reformers of Jewish Antiquity," in The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917–1937 (ed. J. Schulte, O. Tabachnikova, and P. Wagstaff; IJS Studies in Judaica 13; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 73–107.

"Makkabäerbücher 1: Buch I und II," PWRE 14/1 (1928): 779–797. Bickermann also wrote the next article, on 3 Maccabees (cols. 797–800), but it will not concern us here.

academia.<sup>10</sup> Suffice it to remember that of the two professors who, along with his advisor (Ulrich Wilcken), would examine him at his first attempt at Habilitation in 1929, and fail him, one was Ulrich von Wilamowitz–Moellendorf, who had little patience for Jews,<sup>11</sup> and the other was Eduard Meyer, of whom Bickermann wrote "He was certainly no friend of the Jews" <sup>12</sup>— an understatement that can be substantiated amply.13

However, not only contemporary context and events can bring scholars to think interesting thoughts about antiquity. Often their study of antiquity can generate interesting thoughts about antiquity; often, for example, the reading of a commentary on an ancient book can catalyze interesting and serious thoughts about that ancient book and about the history it recounts or reflects. The following brief study will offer an analysis of a particularly problematic article by Bickermann and use it to point to what seems to be a significant stop along the way to his thesis in GdM. The analysis will highlight that article's dependence on a somewhat earlier publication by Bickermann, and that, in turn, will lead us, paradoxically, to a book that Bickermann deemed "worthless" but nevertheless seems to have been the immediate inspiration of his thesis that Jewish Hellenists were responsible for Antiochus's decrees against Judaism. That earlier book will also lead us back, finally, from scholarship to history, and to a hitherto unexplored Bismarckian context for that thesis.

See Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 165–216 (with the Heine quotation on p. 199). For the same metaphor ("entry-ticket") in a similar context in the work of one of Bickerman's Jewish fellow students in his early years in Berlin, see Victor Tcherikover, "The Ideology of the Letter of Aristeas," HTR 51 (1958): 77.

See Christhard Hoffmann, "Antiker Völkerhass und moderner Rassenhass: Heinemann an Wilamowitz," Quaderni di storia 25 (1987): 145–157.

See his speech in Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman, 315 ("Er war gewiss kein Judenfreund").

See Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 133–189, also Arnaldo D. Momigliano, "Introduction to a Discussion of Eduard Meyer," in idem, Studies on Modern Scholarship (ed. G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 217: "For postexilic Judaism, particularly that of the Greco-Roman period, Meyer had no sympathy; he found it bigoted and anti-Greek, the predecessor of medieval and modern Judaism, for which his antipathy was evident, even if he usually (though not always) kept it within the bounds of civility."

## II Four Problems in the Last Chapters of Bickermann's "Makkabäerbücher"

This 1928 article (n. 9), which is a detailed introduction to 1 and 2 Maccabees, was Bickermann's main preparatory study for GdM. Although he would change his mind about various details in the decade that went by before GdM was completed,<sup>14</sup> the article nevertheless set out many of the main issues on which that 1937 volume would focus. Naturally, since it is a detailed and technical article, it especially underlies GdM's technical appendices (Beilagen) on chronology and documents. Of the book's chapters and basic theses, however, the article was, just as naturally, most important for the first chapter, which is devoted to Die Überlieferung ("the tradition")—the ancient sources concerning the Maccabean revolt, among which 1–2 Maccabees take pride of place.

In that first chapter of GdM, Bickermann sets out an elegant categorization of the ancient sources under four headings, which he summarizes as follows:15

Let us summarize the result of this survey. We wanted to know how the sources explain the persecution under Epiphanes. As we can see, they offer no less than four completely different answers to our question. [1] For the older Jewish conception (Daniel and the letter of the Jerusalem community of 143 [2 Macc 1:7–8]), which is also characteristic of II Maccabees, the persecution (Heimsuchung16) was a chastisement brought about by the sin of the people. [2] I Maccabees, i.e., the chronicle of the Hasmonean dynasty, sees in the religious oppression another piece of evidence for the arrogance of the gentiles. Over against these two supernaturalistic interpretations, we also find two pragmatic explanations, which were taken over from the Greeks. [3] The official Seleucid version justifies the measures taken by the king through the rebellion of the Jews. [4] A later generation glorified his policy as a determined struggle against Jewish barbarism.

Two examples: he changed his mind about the dating of 1 Maccabees, as he notes in a review in MGWJ 78 (1934): 311, and he revoked, in GdM and elsewhere, his conclusion, in "Makkabäerbücher," 784, that the Jewish dates according to the Seleucid era in 1 Maccabees are counted from the spring of 312 BCE, rather than that of 311. See GdM 155, where he laconically opens his detailed study of chronology with a footnote that invites readers to "compare" ("Vgl.") his discussion of the same topic in "Makkabäerbücher."

GdM 34–35, cited here according to Moehring's translation (Bickerman, Studies, 2.1057). I added the bracketed numbers and the reference to 2 Macc 1:7–8.

Since "persecution" can be imposed upon innocent victims, "visitation" (à la Exodus 20:5, rendered by Luther as "der die Missetat der Väter heimsucht . . . an den Kindern") or "punishment" would be better, for usually Heimsuchung is used, as here (and as already in the first paragraph of the preface of GdM 7, and in the passage cited below, from the very end of §17 of "Makkabäerbücher"), in the context of justified punishment imposed by God upon sinners. See Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, IV/2 (ed. M. Heyne; Leipzig: Hirzel, 1877), 883.

Such a set of four views, two each for Jews and gentiles, was already offered in 1928, in the summary at the very conclusion of "Makkabäerbücher" (cols. 795–796). That set is even more elegant, insofar as it consists of two matched pairs with, as Bickermann put it, the plus-minus sign reversed:17


Tab. 2: Set of four views.

True, there are numerous distinctions between the two divisions into four. Thus, for two examples, in 1928 Bickermann made no reference in this summary to sin (the first of the four explanations he would enumerate in 1937), nor to Daniel.18 Nor, indeed, does he refer to 2 Maccabees; he refers only to Jason of Cyrene, who was, according to 2 Macc 2: 23, the author of the longer but lost work of which 2 Maccabees is an abridgment, created by the so-called Epitomator; in Part III of this chapter we shall focus on Bickermann's failure, here, to distinguish between Jason's work and the Epitomator's. Here, what is important is that his basic orientation and quest was the same in 1928 and 1937. That encourages us to probe into what nevertheless changed, and why.

Bickermann's 1928 "Makkabäerbücher" is quite an impressive piece of scholarship—eighteen dense columns that Momigliano immediately welcomed as "ben informato," especially concerning chronology and documents, and which Bringmann and Smith would eventually characterize, respectively, as the "Höhepunkt" and "cli-

This table summarizes the view presented in col. 796; the text is quoted below, after n. 21. By "mit umgekehrtem Vorzeichen" ("with reversed sign," alluding to + and -), Bickermann meant that although the Jewish and Greek adherents of each view agreed as to what was at stake, their evaluations, as to who was the hero and who the villain, were of course opposite.

Other examples: in 1928 ("Makkabäerbücher," 796), he viewed several Greek historians, beginning with Polybius, cited by Josephus at Against Apion 2.84 and probably followed by him at War 1.31ff., as outsiders who espoused an interpretation different from that of the Seleucids, but in 1937 he put them together as the third interpretation (GdM 20 = Studies, 2.1045); and in 1928 he associated the antisemitic view with the Seleucid view, but in 1937 he upgraded the former to a separate category—the fourth interpretation.

max" of Bickermann's early work.19 And it remains a standard piece in scholarship on 1–2 Maccabees. Nevertheless, anyone who, even if only half awake, reads its last several columns, in which Bickermann sets out the abovementioned analysis of the sources and their interpretation of Antiochus's persecution, cannot help but notice several bewildering problems, which all pertain to its structure.

The article opens with the following table of contents (col. 779), which lists twenty chapters:

Fig. 4: E. Bickermann, "Makkabäerbücher," Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft I/27 (1928): col. 779.

The article follows this t.o.c. down to §16. At that point, however, it becomes rather chaotic. There are four main problems:

a. The t.o.c. lists twenty numbered chapters, but although the article indeed has twenty chapters, the last five are numbered §§16, 17, 18, 20, and 21. There is no §19.

Were the absence of §19 the only problem, it would not be worthy of much notice. Things like this happen, and no disruption is caused by the skipping of "§19": §20 is devoted to interpretations of the revolt's Vorgeschichte (prehistory), which what the t.o.c. promised as §19, and §21 is a bibliography, which is what the t.o.c. promised as §20. That is, the contents and the order remain as promised.

But although that mistake engenders no confusion, we might well wonder whether it resulted from something interesting, and not from mere random carelessness. That will become more likely if there are other, and weightier, problems in the structure of the article. Indeed, there are three, of which the first is simple, the others more complex.

See Momigliano, Prime linee, 176; Bringmann, "Elias Bickermann," 4–5; and Morton Smith, "Elias J. Bickerman," in Bickerman's Religions and Politics in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (ed. E. Gabba and M. Smith, Biblioteca di Athenaeum 5; Como: New Press, 1985), x.

b. According to the t.o.c., §16, on the character of 1 Maccabees, was to have been followed by §17, on Jason of Cyrene (the author of the work on which 2 Maccabees is based), and then by §18, on 2 Maccabees. That is, the t.o.c. promises a very rational order: a chapter on 1 Maccabees, and then two on 2 Maccabees, divided between one on Jason's lost original work and one on its extant abridgment. Indeed, in the article as published the discussion of 1 Maccabees in §16 is followed by one of Jason—but the latter is not marked as the beginning of a new chapter. Rather, as we have it, §16 opens with a full column (mid-791–mid-792) on 1 Maccabees, concluding it with a brief discussion of the work's date, and then, at line 38, turns abruptly, with no transition and no new chapter number, as if the discussion still concerned 1 Maccabees, to a column-long discussion of Jason:

Fig. 5: E. Bickermann, "Makkabäerbücher," Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft I/27 (1928): col. 792.

That discussion of Jason continues until the middle of col. 793. Only then does §17 begin, and it is on 2 Maccabees as we have it, not on Jason—which is what the t.o.c. promised for §18. Why is there no separate chapter on Jason, as promised?

c. According to the t.o.c., §19 (on the prehistory of the rebellion) was to have been preceded by §18 on the "character" of 2 Maccabees. In fact, however, the extant chapter on the prehistory of the rebellion (now §20) is preceded by a chapter (§18) on the way 1 Maccabees understands the rebellion's prehistory.

This third problem has two aspects, which show how difficult it is:

i. Bickermann's discussion of 1 Maccabees is, as promised by the t.o.c., in §16, and it is followed by discussions of Jason (the end of §16) and 2 Maccabees (§17), which together fill half of col. 792 and virtually all of cols. 793–794. Why should a discussion of 1 Maccabees' view on a given topic (the revolt's prehistory) come, as §18 does, after such a long interruption by discussions of Jason and 2 Maccabees?

ii. After arguing in §17 that 2 Maccabees as we have it, after the so-called Epitomator edited Jason's original work, focuses on divine retribution for sins and the atonement wrought by suffering and martyrdom, Bickermann concludes §17 with a very heavy-handed declaration: "Mit dieser Tendenz stimmt aber nicht die Art wie die Sündiger und die Sünde charakterisiert sind" (But the way the sinners and the sins are characterized does not match this approach). A statement like that demands, and so promises, an immediate explanation. But that explanation comes not in the next chapter (§18), but only in the one after the next (§20), which opens with the statement that the prehistory according to 2 Maccabees is not a story of retribution, sin, and atonement, but, rather, one in which personal rivalries—"die Πλεονεξία . . . einem persönlichen Streit . . . Habund Machtgier . . ." (greediness . . . personal conflict . . . lust for money and power)—play the dominant role. "Kurz gesagt: in II M. ist die Katastrophe Folge eines Partei- und nicht des Prinzipenkampfes" (in brief, according to 2 Maccabees the catastrophe resulted from a struggle between parties, not from one about principles). That interpretation of the revolt's prehistory is very different from 2 Maccabees' interpretation as set out in §17, which focuses on sinfulness—so the opening of §20 constitutes the fulfillment of the promise made at the end of §17, namely, to explain how the way the characters are described in 2 Maccabees does not correspond to the way the Epitomator interprets the story.20 That is, §18 is not only out of place (distant from the article's discussion of 1 Maccabees); it positively disrupts the flow of the argument. If it is removed, there is a smooth passage from the end of §17 to the beginning of the next section, §20.

d. As we already noticed, the summary of ancient interpretations of Antiochus's persecution of Judaism, which is offered in the very last lines of "Makkabäerbücher" (col. 796), ignores the interpretation of the events as a result of the Jews' sinful behavior—the explanation that, a decade later, is the first of the four Bickermann enumerates in GdM. But the fact is that already in "Makkabäerbücher" he devoted more than a column (793–794) to that explanation: it is the main theme of §17, which is about the interpretation of the persecution posited by the Epitomator who put together 2 Maccabees by abridging Jason's original work. Why is it ignored in the same article's concluding summary of those interpretations, in §20?

True, one could imagine harmonizing the two by claiming that 2 Maccabees tells a two-level story, in the tradition of biblical "dual causality": the real story is about sin, but the way it played out was via rivalry. But Bickermann does not suggest that; for him, as we see clearly not only in "Makkabäerbücher" but also in the programmatic passage cited from GdM at n. 15, the explanations are "completely different answers."

Here, then, are four problems with the article as published: there is no §19; the discussion of Jason, which according to the t.o.c. and common sense should have begun a new chapter, does not, and instead continues the chapter on 1 Maccabees, with which it has nothing to do; §18 seems to be misplaced (it is separated from the rest of the discussion of 1 Maccabees and disrupts the obvious continuity between §17 and §20); and the summary of interpretations of Antiochus's persecution, presented so prominently in the final lines of the entire article, ignores the interpretation offered by the Epitomator of 2 Maccabees, to which Bickermann devoted his detailed discussion in §17.

It is at least interesting to attempt to divine what engendered these problems. And while each could have its own explanation, it is of course preferable (more "parsimonious") to find one that explains all four.

#### III Two Stages in the Development of "Makkabäerbücher"

In looking for such an explanation of what happened here, it seems that we should begin with the fourth of the problems enumerated in Part II: "Makkabäerbücher"'s summary of explanations for Antiochus's persecution of Judaism (§20, col. 796) ignores the Epitomator's explanation about Jewish sins, although the article presented it in detail in §17 (col. 794). Now we may add, more generally, that careful reading of "Makkabäerbücher" reveals that not only that summary in §20, but also the discussion of Jason at the end of §16 (cols. 792–793), recognizes no essential difference between Jason and the Epitomator. While Bickermann of course knew that the latter abridged the former, as is stated explicitly at 2 Macc 2:23,<sup>21</sup> from the point of view of interpretation he treats the two, in the article's summary and its discussion of Jason, as interchangeable. This is clear in the summary (§20, col. 796), in which the second and fourth sentences refer to "Iason" but not to "IIM." and the third refers to "IIM." but not to "Iason," as if the two were synonymous:

IM. und Tacitusquelle sind im Kampfe entstanden. Iason folgt irgendeinem kühldenkenden, rein politisch eingestellten, griechischen Historiker. In Details lassen sich und müssen IM. und IIM. einander ergänzen, in der Grundauffassung sind sie unvereinbar. Zwischen IM. und Tacitus einerseits, Iason und Polybios anderseits muß man wählen.

So already at the opening of "Makkabäerbücher" (col. 780), where he notes that 2 Maccabees is not an independent work, but rather based on Jason's work (as is stated in 2 Macc 2:23, which he quotes in Greek), the word he uses to describe it is merely "Auszug" (excerpt).

(1 Maccabees and Tacitus's source originated in the conflict. Jason follows a sober, purely politically-oriented, Greek historian. Concerning details, it is possible and necessary for 1 and 2 Maccabees to supplement one another, but in their basic approaches they are irreconcilable. One must choose between 1 Maccabees and Tacitus on the one hand, and Jason and Polybius on the other.)

The same equation of Jason and 2 Maccabees is also apparent in Bickermann's discussion of Jason in §16 (col. 792). That discussion opens as follows, referring to a seminal monograph on the Books of Maccabees by Benedictus Niese:

Iasons Werk hat Niese 299ff. mit Recht der hellenistischen pathetischen Historiographie eingereiht. "Mitleid und Furcht" hervorzurufen sucht auch II M.

(Jason's work was categorized by Niese (pp. 299ff.) as Hellenistic pathetic historiography, correctly, [for] 2 Maccabees too [as Hellenistic pathetic historiography] strives to awaken "sympathy and fear.") 22

Similarly, a few lines later Bickermann quotes indiscriminately from 2 Maccabees in characterizing Jason, such as:

Iason lässt die Juden auch im Kriege die Sabbatruhe streng bewahren (8, 26. 12, 31. 12, 38. 15.1 . . .)

(Jason portrays the Jews as strictly observing the Sabbath rest even while at war (8:26; 12:31, 38; 15:1 . . .)

It appears to be clear that when Bickemann wrote those lines he thought it reasonable to assume that 2 Maccabees is merely an abridgment of Jason's work. But it is also obvious, from §17, that by the time he published the article, Bickermann knew very well that the Epitomator, who shaped the book as we have it, had a view very different from Jason's. Namely, although early in §17 he declared that "Der Inhalt gehört also Iason, seine Gestaltung dem Epitomator" ("the contents belong to Jason, the arrangement—to the Epitomator"), which follows the Epitomator's own claim (at 2:23–32 and 15:38–39) that all he did was make Jason's material more readable, at the very end of §17 Bickermann nonetheless declares, as we have seen, after summarizing the Epitomator's interpretation of the persecution:

I added the bracketed clarifications, which seem to be required by the formulation and are confirmed by what is quoted in the next lines. Niese's monograph, Kritik der beiden Makkabäerbücher (Berlin: Weidmann, 1900), is cited here according to its original pagination in Hermes 35 (1900).

So verstanden erscheint die Heimsuchung als ein neuer Beweis der Gottesmacht und der Erwählung seines Volkes. Mit dieser Tendenz stimmt aber nicht die Art wie die Sündiger und die Sünde charakterisiert sind.

(So understood, the punishment appears as a new proof for the power of God and the election of His people. But the way the sinners and the sins are characterized is not in accord with this approach.)

That is, the Epitomator's interpretation does not correspond to the story as supplied by Jason. And that is indeed what Bickermann fleshes out at the outset of §20.

This suggests that Bickermann wrote the body of "Makkabäerbücher" before he became aware of the distinction between the views of Jason and the Epitomator, and that, therefore, it was only secondarily that he added in an account of the Epitomator's views in §17, along with its pendant at the opening of §20. If that suggestion can be elevated to probability, it will suggest that such secondary editing engendered the structural problems we pointed out in "Makkabäerbücher." After looking, in Part IV, for further evidence of such revision of the original draft of "Makkabäerbücher," we will consider, in Part V, what led Bickermann to become aware of the distinction.

#### IV A First Draft of "Makkabäerbücher"

Ideally, a suggestion such as the one raised in the preceding paragraph could be checked by examination of earlier drafts of "Makkabäerbücher," in order to see if §17 was or was not there from the outset. Unfortunately, however, my attempts to locate drafts of "Makkabäerbücher," or correspondence concerning it, have come to naught. Bickermann himself ordered the destruction of his own papers upon his death,23 and I have been unable to discover any relevant archives of the Realencyclopädie, or of the editor or publisher of this particular volume.<sup>24</sup>

However, it did turn out to be possible to find what seems clearly to have functioned as something of a first draft for the last chapters of "Makkabäerbücher." Namely, several months before the publication of "Makkabäerbücher," Bickermann published a little-noticed review, henceforth cited as "GutRev," of Constantin Gut-

See Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman, 29, citing Smith, "Elias J. Bickerman," xi.

As I was kindly informed by Dr. Oliver Schütze of the Metzler Verlag, the firm's pre-war records went up in flames in 1944 and he knows of no other relevant records. The dearth of records pertaining to Kroll's years at the helm of the Realencyclopädie is noted by Wolfhart Unte, "Wilhelm Kroll (1869–1939): Professor der klassischen Philologie an der Universität Breslau, 1913–1935," Jahrbuch der Schlesischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau 45–46 (2005): 272.

berlet's 1927 commentary on 2 Maccabees.25 In "GutRev," Bickermann panned the nonagenarian's volume mercilessly, just as later, in the bibliography to "Makkabäerbücher," he offers only word to describe the volume: wertlos ("worthless" col. 796).26 Here, however, what is important is that the issue on which the review focused (interpretations of the revolt's prehistory) is precisely the one on which Bickermann focused in the last chapters of "Makkabäerbücher," and many of the formulations are identical, so it is obvious that he used the former when preparing the latter. It is enough to compare the passages juxtaposed in the table on the next page, in which my bold type points up the identical wordings.

These identical or nearly identical formulations show that when Bickermann was writing this part of "Makkabäerbücher," "GutRev" was on his desk or fresh in his memory; note that Bickermann even makes the same mistake in both, referring to Tacitus, Histories 5.5 instead of 5.8. And that is all the clearer from the fact that the main body of the review is devoted to doing precisely what §§17–20 of "Makkabäerbücher" do, namely, to distinguishing between interpretations of what caused the revolt. Moreover, as the passage cited above shows, "GutRev" offers the same understanding as "Makkabäerbücher" of 1 Maccabees and of Seleucid historiography (although they of course have opposite points of view): they both consider the struggle to have been one of principle, between Judaism and

Deutsche Literaturzeitung, n. F. 5, Heft 6, 11 February 1928: 284–286 (review of Constantin Gutberlet, Das zweite Buch der Machabäer [Alttestamentliche Abhandlungen 10/3–4; Münster i. W.: Aschendorff, 1927]). That Bickermann's "Makkabäerbücher" was composed only after this review is shown not only by the fact that it appeared later (see the continuation of this note) and by the analysis presented below. It is also shown fairly conclusively by the fact that Bickermann allowed himself to add "(wertlos)" next to his listing of Gutberlet's volume in the bibliography of "Makkabäerbücher" (col. 796); presumably he could not have done that without having his review to point to. Indeed, probably several months went by between the review, which appeared in February 1928, and the completion of "Makkabäerbücher." For although I have not been able to find relevant correspondence (see nn. 23–24), it turned out to be fairly easy to discover that vol. 14/1 of the Realencyclopädie was received by two major German libraries, which had standing orders, on November n. 2–3, 1928. (My thanks to Ms. Sigrun Schall-Thiery of the Heidelberg University Library, who located its 1928 Anschaffungsbuch for me, and to my friend Hermann Lichtenberger, who checked the Zugangsbuch of the University of Tübingen's theological library). The near-identity of those two dates constitutes strong evidence that the volume appeared only in the autumn. Moreover, it seems that the volume went to press very soon after the article was submitted; see below, nn. 31–32.

For this type of disdain toward the work of other scholars, compare Bickerman's willingness to discard another prominent scholar's thesis as "undiskutabel" ("Makkabäerbücher," 787) and his flippant remark, in the first text mentioned in n. 14, that one can understand the Books of Maccabees only if one first forgets, "einigermaßen," everything he has read about them. In general, cf. Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman, 98–99.


Tab. 3: "Makkabäerbücher," cols. 794–796 vs. "GutRev," 285–286.

Hellenism. Now I will add that the review also points to another interpretation current among Greek historians, and shared by Jason of Cyrene: that the revolt was a result of politics, greed, and personal rivalry, what Bickermann summarizes in Greek as πλεονεξία—all as later found in "Makkabäerbücher," as we have seen.

What is striking, however, is that the review presents only those two positions: principle (1 Maccabees and Seleucid historiography) vs. politics (other Greek historians and Jason). It says not a word about a religious interpretation, with reference to sin, such as the one Bickermann attributes to the Epitomator in §17 of "Makkabäerbücher." Indeed—and this is a cardinal point here—in "GutRev," written in the latter half of 1927 or very early in 1928,<sup>27</sup> Bickermann, just as the pious Catholic author whose work he reviewed, treated 2 Maccabees essentially as a unitary work and made no effort at all to distinguish between it and

Gutberlet's preface is dated 8 May 1927; Bickerman's review appeared in early February 1928.

Jason's work28—a sign of how much of a tyro Bickermann then was.<sup>29</sup> In sum, Bickermann's approach to Jason and 2 Maccabees in this review, which appeared earlier in the same year as "Makkabäerbücher," is, not surprisingly, the same as the one he followed in what we have posited as the first draft of "Makkabäerbücher," before the addition of §17 and its continuation at the opening of §20.

This finding offers significant support for the suggestion that originally there was such a first draft, and that it was only belatedly that Bickermann realized there was yet another interpretation of the persecution: 2 Maccabees' view that it resulted from Jewish sinfulness. That conclusion seems, to me, to be established beyond doubt.

It is natural (and "parsimonious") to imagine that it was the introduction of new material in §17 and §20 that engendered the other problems in "Makkabäerbücher," and various scenarios can be imagined.30 Suffice it to say that it is clear

For Gutberlet on the author of 2 Maccabees as having only shortened Jason's work, see Das zweite Buch,5("Es gilt also für das Buch . . . daß es einen Auszug darstellt" [original emphasis]), 7 ("sehr gekürzt"); he says not a word about any additions. As for Bickermann in "GutRev": note his formulation in col. 285, where he refers to 2 Maccabees, "or, better put: the history by one Jason of Cyrene that is excerpted in it" (das II. Makkb., oder besser gesagt: die in ihm ausgezogene Historie eines gewissen Iason von Kyrene ..."; he uses the same formulation, Auszug ("excerpt"), in the opening of "Makkabäerbücher," cited above, n. 21). Similarly, in the only other allusion in "GutRev" to the fact that Jason did not author 2 Maccabees as we have it, Bickermann refers to "the Hellenistic Jew, Jason of Cyrene, who[se work] was written out by 2 Maccabees" ("der hellenistische Jude Iason von Kyrene, den das II. Makkb. ausschreibt" [col. 286]). The precise sense of "ausschreibt" here is unclear, but in any event it does not ascribe any innovation to the Epitomator.

In his introduction to the English version of GdM (Studies, 2.1029), Bickermann writes that he does not know why Kroll entrusted the PWRE article to him. I have been unable to discover the date of that invitation (see nn. 23–24), but can note that Bickermann already mentioned "Makkabäerbücher" as forthcoming in a review in Deutsche Literaturzeitung n. F. 4, Heft 36, 3 September 1927: 1767. Whenever the invitation came, it is, for us, something of a mystery, for, although Kroll regularly invited Jewish scholars to write in PWRE (see Unte, "Wilhelm Kroll," 275–277), nevertheless, according to Fausto Parente's list of Bickerman's publications (in Bickerman, Religions and Politics, xiii–xxxvii), prior to "Makkabäerbücher" he had published nothing on the Books of Maccabees apart from "GutRev." Parente suggests ("Ricordo," 241), faute de mieux, that Bickermann must have discussed the Books of Maccabees with his teachers, and that somehow was passed on and brought about the invitation to write "Makkabäerbücher." That might also account for the invitation to review Gutberlet's commentary.

In the original version of this article I offer one at pp. 138–140.

that the article was published in a hurry,<sup>31</sup> without much proofreading,32 and no one with any experience in writing should be too surprised that things can go very wrong when a substantial block of material is inserted belatedly into an extant draft.

#### V Where Did Bickermann Learn More about 2 Maccabees?

All that remains, now, is to attempt to identify what brought Bickermann to recognize, in the course of 1927 or 1928 (see nn. 25, 27), what was special about and characteristic of the Epitomator's (i.e., 2 Maccabees') interpretation of the persecution, in contrast to Jason's. Admittedly, that need not be much of a question, for it is clear that the assignment to write "Makkabäerbücher" would have brought Bickermann to study the book seriously. Even a cursory reading of the Epitomator's excurses (2 Macc 4:14–17; 5:17–20; 6:12–17)—which are the main pillars of §17, the latter two being quoted at length in Greek—makes its interpretation, its focus on sinfulness, very clear.

Nevertheless, it occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to check Gutberlet's commentary, since we know that Bickermann owned it and was reading it in the months preceding his composition of "Makkabäerbücher." <sup>33</sup> When I did so, I was quite surprised to discover that, in fact, in his introductory discussion of 2 Maccabees' theology and leading ideas Gutberlet does not even mention its repeated notion that suffering is engendered by sin and atoned for by suffering and martyrdom. There is, in his discussion, not a word about those themes—nothing,

See, in the corrigenda at the very end (col. 1288) of this volume of the PWRE (above, n. 9), the complaint of another author that very little time was allowed for proofreading.

Additional evidence that Bickermann did not reread "Makkabäerbücher" very carefully is provided by any number of errors in the piece, especially with regard to numerals. Note, for example, the references in col. 785 to a letter by Antiochus VI in 1 Macc 15:2–29 (i.e., Antiochus VII in 1 Macc 15:2–9); in col. 787 to 1 Macc 17:26–49 (i.e., 7:26–49); and in col. 792 to 1 Macc 6:61 (i.e., 5:61–62); also, that of the thirty references to verses in the table in columns 781–782, four are wrong (3:47; 4:51; 10:53; 13:40 should be 3:37; 4:52; 10:57; and 13:41), and "Den Einfall" appears instead of "Der Einfall" in the middle of col. 787. Col. 787 presents a more interesting problem as well: Bickermann offers two tables that compare the chronology of 1 Maccabees to that of 2 Maccabees, and although in both of them it is 1 Maccabees that provides the basis for comparison, he introduces the second table by noting that "diesmal" (this time) he chose 1 Maccabees as the basis for comparison. It is difficult to imagine that this, like our problems in §§16–21, does not reflect hasty revision of an earlier draft, in which the first table was not based on 1 Maccabees. On Bickermann as a careless proofreader, see Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman, 88–89, n. 40.

My attempts to locate Bickerman's copy of Gutberlet's commentary, in order to check his marginalia, have so far been fruitless.

in other words, of the themes on which Bickermann focused in §17 of "Makkabäerbücher." So Bickermann, who accordingly showed no knowledge of those themes when he wrote "GutRev," must have picked that all up by himself, or elsewhere.<sup>34</sup> Rather, what is quite obvious is that, for Gutberlet, the story of 2 Maccabees is one of pious Jews who were saved by God from their persecutors.35 And who were the latter? Here Gutberlet's stance, set forth on the very first page of his volume, is very clear: after commenting that 2 Maccabees' story opens somewhat earlier than does that of 1 Maccabees, Gutberlet pointedly observes that

Dieser Eingang ergänzt die Darstellung des ersten Buches wesentlich, indem er zeigt, wie jüdische Apostaten die Verfolgung gegen die Juden heraufbeschworen.

(This opening significantly supplements 1 Maccabees' account, by showing how Jewish apostates brought on the persecution of the Jews.)

There, in a nutshell, is Bickermann's entire thesis in GdM. That thesis, which is nigh-universally viewed as Bickermann's (see n. 4), turns out to be written as plainly as can be on the first page of a commentary on 2 Maccabees that we know Bickermann read and reviewed a few months before writing "Makkabäerbücher." That commentary was written by a ninety-year old German Catholic priest who, as we see, argued that the story was one of pious believers who suffered not because they were sinful, but because they were persecuted unjustly. That position, however, is one that is not at all appropriate for 2 Maccabees, which instead preaches, repeatedly and demonstratively, in the author's explicit addresses to his readers and elsewhere, that the Jews' suffering was due to their sins. What, then, brought Gutberlet to impose such an interpretation on the book?

#### VI From Bismarck to Antiochus

Once the question is formulated that way, a glance at Gutberlet's biography points to an explanation. Namely, it is very interesting, in the present context, to learn that, in the 1870s, Gutberlet (b. 1837), sharing the fate of hundreds of other German priests, had lost his first home and academic position due to the Kulturkampf

E.g. in Joseph Knabenbauer, Commentarius in duos libros Machabaeorum (Cursus Scripturae Sacrae 1/11; Paris: Lethielleux, 1907), a work that Bickermann cites a few times in "Makkabäerbücher," including from its account (pp. 264–265) of the nature of 2 Maccabees ("Makkabäerbücher" 792). A few pages later (270), Knabenbauer writes clearly that 2 Maccabees "teaches that the tribulations by which foreigners oppress them are inflicted as penalties for violation of the law: 4,17; 5,17; 7,32. 38."

See esp. Gutberlet, Das zweite Buch, 3–4 (his main exposition of the work's theology).

laws of the early 1870s. These were the laws by which Bismarck, employing the full power of the newly-founded Empire in order to suppress the Catholic Church, especially in the wake of the pope's newly-ratified claim to infallibility (1870), closed down the Catholic seminary at which Gutberlet taught, as many others, and confiscated its property.<sup>36</sup> Moreover, anyone who focuses on that episode will discover that the typical stance of German Catholics, in undergoing and later in recalling the terrible days of the Kulturkampf, was, quite naturally, that they had been the innocent and pious victims of governmental persecution inspired by "renegades" in their own midst—the so-called "Old Catholics" who denied the pope's infallibility and thus found themselves allied with Bismarck.<sup>37</sup> Moreover, along with comparing themselves to Christian martyrs in other historical contexts,<sup>38</sup> Germany's Catholics liked to compare themselves, during the Kulturkampf, to the suffering Jews of Antiochus's days.

Thus, for an example from Fulda, where Gutberlet personally suffered under the Kulturkampf (see n. 36), note the highly rhetorical and broadly circulated encyclical (Sendschreiben) issued by twelve German bishops in February 1874.39 It reads in its focus on condemning renegade Catholics ("Old Catholics"), in its emphasis on loyalty to the government but firm refusal to violate divine law, and in its consequent call for willingness to sacrifice oneself in the face of persecution—like a latter-day 2 Maccabees, apart from the fact that, as Gutberlet on 2 Maccabees, it gives no indication that the Catholics were suffering because of their own sins. Note, espe-

Gutberlet (1837–1928) first taught in the Catholic boys' school in Fulda. When it was closed down in the summer of 1873 because the local bishop refused to accept governmental supervision, Gutberlet was appointed to the faculty of the local seminary for priests; but that was closed down for the same reason in January 1875, forcing him and others into exile. See Gutberlet's autobioigraphical essay in Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, IV (ed. R. Schmidt; Leipzig: Meiner, 1923), 10, and Stephanus Hilpisch, Geschichte des Fuldaer Priesterseminars (Fulda: Parzeller, 1962), 19, 28–30. On the closing of the Fulda seminary, which sent Gutberlet into exile, see also Winfried Jestaedt, Der Kulturkampf im Fuldaer Land (Veröffentlichungen des Fuldaer Geschichtsvereins 36; Fulda: Parzeller, 1960), 71, 81–84.

See, for example, Jestaedt, Kulturkampf, 63, on popular Catholic resentment at the government's appointment of a "renegade" ("abtrünnig") priest as director of a Catholic teachers' seminary in Fulda. Of such priests, "Old Catholics" who accepted governmental appointments, Franz X. Schulte wrote, "Aehnlich urtheilte das einfache Volk: es betrachtete solche Geistliche als 'Abtrünnige'" (Geschichte des Kulturkampfes in Preußen [Essen: Fredebeul & Koenen, 1882], 457).

See Rebbeca A. Bennette, Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification (Harvard Historical Studies 178; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 47–50. My thanks to Prof. Bennette for her help with this issue.

For this fascinating text, see Akten der Fuldaer Bischofskonferenz, I (1872–1887) (ed. E. Gatz; Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte A/22; Mainz: Matthias Grünewald, 1977), 316–323 (no. 199).

cially, that this encyclical actually terms the government's persecution of the church in general, and, in particular, the appointment of an Old Catholic (J. H. Reinkens) as bishop, a Greuel der Verwüstung ("abomination of desolation").40 No bishop could choose such terminology, and probably few Catholic priests and even laymen could read that terminology, without realizing that it was comparing Bismarck and his persecution of the Church to Antiochus Epiphanes and his persecution of Judaism recounted in the Books of Maccabees; see Daniel 9:27, 11:31, and 12:11, along with 1 Macc 1:54 and 4:43. Indeed, even today, a century and a half later, the official Bible translation for German-speaking Catholics offers the heading Kulturkampf gegen das Judentum ("Kulturkampf against Judaism") for 1 Macc 1:1–64.41

It was, therefore, quite natural for Gutberlet to assume that this—God's protection of the unjustly persecuted pious—was the message of 2 Maccabees, and to showcase that interpretation so prominently, on the first page of his work, just as he explicitly compared Antiochus's persecution to the Kulturkampf in his 1920 commentary on 1 Maccabees.42

I have no reason to suspect that Bickermann was aware of his debt to Gutberlet. His review trashed the volume, in the bibliography to "Makkabäerbücher" (col. 796) he termed it wertlos ("worthless"), and he seems never to mention Gutberlet anywhere in his oeuvre. But it is often the case that scholars, following human nature, pick up what seem to be good ideas from others and find them so convincing that eventually they adopt them, naturally and without being aware of their origin, and use them as if they were their own.

#### VII Conclusion

The impetus to write this study came when I stumbled over the unannounced shift from 1 Maccabees to Jason in §16 of "Makkabäerbücher" and then noticed the absence of §19. An attempt to understand what engendered these glitches led to the

Ibid., 320.

So the 2016 Einheitsübersetzung, accessible online on the ERF Bibelserver website.

See Constantin Gutberlet, Das erste Buch der Machabäer (Alttestamentliche Abhandlungen 8/3–4; Münster i.W.: Aschendorff, 1920), 42, where he focuses on "der abtrünnige Alkimos" ("the renegade Alcimus") as the villain. After complaining that Alcimus termed all supporters of Judas "Ḥasidim" (2 Macc 14:6) although in fact that fit only some of them, Gutberlet remarked: "Alkimos scheint aber schon denselben Trick gekannt zu haben wie die heutigen Feinde der Kirche, welche die Katholiken Ultramontane schimpfen" (But Alcimus seems to have been familiar with the same "trick" as today's enemies of the church, who denounce the Catholics as Ultramontanists). "Ultramontanists" was the term used to characterize and denounce German Catholics who held that the pope, although he lived in Italy, exercised authority "beyond the mountains," including in Germany.

identification of a more pristine stage of Bickermann's thought and article, characterized by a failure to distinguish between Jason's interpretation of Antiochus's persecution of Judaism, on the one hand, and the interpretation offered by 2 Maccabees, as it was produced by the Epitomator, on the other. That failure is especially salient in the article's discussion of Jason in §16 and the concluding summary in §20; they contrast plainly with §17 and its pendant at the opening of §20, which do make the distinction between their interpretations clear, just as it would eventually be made clear in GdM. Recognition of these issues led me to search for other evidence concerning the development of Bickermann's understanding of 2 Maccabees, and that led to the discovery of his review of Gutberlet's commentary ("GutRev"), which appeared several months before "Makkabäerbücher." The discovery that "GutRev" too (as Gutberlet) failed to distinguish between Jason and 2 Maccabees, along with the similarity of formulations in "GutRev" and "Makkabäerbücher," made it easy to see that Bickermann used that review as something of a first draft for this part of "Makkabäerbücher."

That left only the question, how it happened that Bickermann came to discover the distinction—a question for which no answer was found, and perhaps none is needed; Bickermann knew how to read, and 2 Maccabees' thesis that sin engenders suffering is written in very large letters in the author's addresses to his readers (see n. 34). However, in the course of checking Gutberlet's commentary to see if it distinguishes between Jason's approach and that of 2 Maccabees as we have it (and discovering that it did not), I discovered that Gutberlet already stated and took for granted, on the very first page of his book, the thesis to which Bickermann would eventually devote GdM—that it was Jewish "renegades" who encouraged Antiochus to impose his decrees against Judaism. Finally, an examination of Gutberlet's background led, in turn, to the realization that, since it cannot have been 2 Maccabees (where the emphasis is on the Jews' sins) that suggested this thesis, it is probable that it arose in Gutberlet's mind, or perhaps that of someone whose lead he followed, on the background of the Catholics' suffering during Bismarck's Kulturkampf, especially in light of Bismarck's alliance with "Old Catholics," whom the Church viewed as renegades

This does not mean, of course, that the fact that Bickermann adopted Gutberlet's thesis, and ran with it, had nothing to do with liberal Judaism in nineteenthcentury Germany, with Nazi antisemitism, or with his family's Russian background (see above, nn. 5–8). Nor did Gutberlet develop the thesis; his atomistic (verse-byverse) commentary does not attempt to work it out in any way, and so it remains justifiable to view the thesis as, basically, Bickermann's. Nevertheless, Gutberlet played an important part in this story—and had Bickermann taken (or been allowed43) more time with editing and proofreading his "Makkabäerbücher," Gutberlet's role, and hence the role that Bismarck's Kulturkampf seems to have played in developing modern interpretations of Antiochus's decrees,<sup>44</sup> might never have been noticed.

See above, n. 31.

Note that Bickermann did refer to Bismarck's Kulturkampf, but with a different slant. Namely, at GdM 45–48 = Studies 2.1063–1065, in the course of his survey of earlier scholarship, he wrote that, beginning in the 1870s, it became common, especially in Germany, to interpret Antiochus's persecution of Judaism as an ancient Kulturkampf—a conflict between the government and organized religion, in which the king functions as a champion of nationalism. Bickermann does not relate there to Gutberlet, for whom, as for Bickermann in GdM, the villains are not the government but, rather, the religious "renegades."

## 6 Hitler and Antiochus, Hellenists and Rabbinerdoktoren: On Isaak Heinemann's Response to Elias Bickermann, 1938

According to Shaye J. D. Cohen's From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, "the most striking feature of the Hellenistic period is its spectacular finish": the chain of events that began with Antiochus IV Epiphanes's profanation of the Temple and persecution of Judaism, quickly turned into the Maccabean revolt, and brought about, some two decades later, the end of Seleucid rule.<sup>1</sup> The present study, composed in gratitude and friendship by one who has been reading Cohen's works and learning from them for nearly four decades, is offered in the hope that he too will find it interesting to think about what and how our predecessors of not too long ago thought about the origins of that chain of events in the second century BCE.

The basic facts of Antiochus Epiphanes's decrees against Judaism are fairly well-documented. According to several ancient sources (especially 1 Macc 1 and 2 Macc 6, but also other interesting passages including Daniel 7 and 11, Assumption of Moses 8–9, and Diodorus Siculus 34/35.1.3–42 ), Antiochus established a pagan cult in the Temple of Jerusalem, coerced the Jews to participate in it, forbade circumcision, forced Jews to eat forbidden foods, burned Torah scrolls, and, in general, forbade the practice of Judaism; as 2 Macc 6:6 put it, it was even forbidden to admit to being a Jew. These decrees played a serious role in early stage of the Maccabean revolt that led, eventually, to the establishment of the Hasmonean state.

In contrast, the question why Antiochus Epiphanes imposed these decrees, which seem to have been unprecedented in antiquity and also to contradict all we would expect from a polytheistic monarch (why should he care whom his subjects worshipped, as long as they rendered unto him what was his?), is hardly addressed in the ancient sources. But it has occupied scholars for centuries. Numerous suggestions have been made, based upon this or that interpretation of this or that source or combination of sources, but also influenced by this or that contemporary trend or issue. Indeed, there is no dearth of historiographical studies that survey the various suggestions and contextualize them, explaining how each functioned in its respective time and place. This is often done, of course, as part of a scholar's opening move, clearing the deck before proposing a new explanation.

Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Library of Early Christianity; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1989), 14–15.

Stern, GLAJJ 1.182–185.

Open Access. © 2024 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110765342-006

Thus, for the two main examples of the mid-twentieth century, both Elias Bickermann in 1937<sup>3</sup> and Victor Tcherikover in the 1950s<sup>4</sup> opened their studies by surveying various answers and showing their weaknesses, after which each proposed his own explanation. Bickermann, after surveying several earlier theories and contextualizing them, argued that Antiochus issued his decrees because Jewish Hellenists, such as Jason and Menelaus (known especially from 2 Macc 4–5), convinced him to do so in in support of their effort to modernize the Jews and make them part of the broader Hellenistic world. Tcherikover, in contrast, for whom Bickermann's suggestion was the most recent of the five he surveyed and found wanting, argued instead, mostly on the basis of a close reading of 2 Maccabees 5, that nationalist Jews of Judea had rebelled against Antiochus's rule in a bid for independence. For Tcherikover, accordingly, the king's decrees against Judaism—as later Hadrian's at the time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt—are to be understood as retaliatory measures meant to hit Jewish rebels where it hurt.

It is not too difficult to contextualize those two suggestions. As noted in Part I of the preceding study, Bickermann explicitly compared the Hellenizers of the second century BCE to German Reform Jews of the nineteenth century, the founders of a type of Judaism quite current in the Germany in which Bickermann lived in the 1920s and 1930s, and Albert Baumgarten has shown that Bickermann was also thinking of Russian Jewish Communists and perhaps Russian Jewish reformers as well, of the types he will have known in his earlier days in Russia; the last sections of the preceding study add that ultimately Bickemann's model was, whether he knew it or not, the "Old Catholic" "apostates" who allied themselves with Bismarck against the Catholics in the 1870s. As for Tcherikover, his model and inspiration become obvious when we note that Tcherikover's reconstruction of a Jewish national revolt in the 160s BCE jelled in Jerusalem a few years after the Israeli War of Independence (1948). Indeed, note that the very next chapter in Tcherikover's work (but only in the second edition, of 1959/1963 [see n. 4], not in the first, of 1930) was entitled "The War of Liberation" (in the Hebrew original: milh̩ emet hashih̩ rur—the common name for the 1948 war), and that in it he complained about theologians who dismissed the political side of the rebellion's etiology.5 That Jews were interested in pol-

For the details of his Gott der Makkabäer, see Ch. 5, n. 1.

Tcherikover's article on Antiochus's decrees was first published in Hebrew, in Eshkolot 1 (1953/54): 86–109. It was reprinted in several collections, but is most easily available, in English, as Ch. 5 of his Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1959), 175–203. That volume is a translation of the 1962/63 second edition of the 1930 Hebrew original; the first edition did not include this chapter.

Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization, 206. This was a common theme; see Ch. 1, n. 7.

itics and in having their own national state was a notion very well at home in Tcherikover's historical context, but hardly elsewhere and earlier.

Perhaps it is superfluous, but I will nevertheless underline with regard to this study too, as others in the present volume, that the fact that a scholar's theory is inspired by the context in which he or she lives does not mean the theory is not true. Whether Bickermann's theory is true, that is, whether or not it corresponds to what really happened in the 170s and 160s BCE, or whether Tcherikover's theory is, or perhaps some other theory should be preferred, is not an issue I am addressing here.6 Nor do I wish to focus on contextualizing Bickermann's reconstruction of events or Tcherikover's, although that would be interesting, and there is more to say about them; for both, I note, it would be interesting to pursue the relation of their ideas to those of their teachers at the University of Berlin in the Weimar years, especially Eduard Meyer.7

Rather, the present study focuses on a single influential study that appeared between Bickermann's and Tcherikover's: Isaak Heinemann's 1938 response to Bickermann, entitled "Wer veranlaßte den Glaubenszwang der Makkabäerzeit?" (Who Brought about the Religious Persecution in the Maccabean Period?).8 By focusing precisely on who "brought about" <sup>9</sup> Antiochus's decrees, it took aim at Bickermann's central thesis, and Bickermann's biographer correctly characterized it as the "most trenchant" of the critical reviews of Gott der Makkabäer (GdM).<sup>10</sup> In-

Cf. Daniel R. Schwartz, 1 Maccabees (Anchor Yale Bible 41B; New Haven: Yale, 2022), 55–58.

On Meyer on ancient Judaism, see C. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk deutscher Althistoriker des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Studies in Judaism in Modern Times 9; Leiden: Brill, 1988), 133–189, also Ch. 5, n. 13.

MGWJ 82 (1938): 145–172.

It appears that Heinemann formulated the title of his article with care, for "veranlaßen" is more nebulous than "cause" or "be responsible for" and so can mean something less direct. The entry in a contemporary dictionary, for example, offered a whole list of verbs beginning with "cause" but continuing with "occasion" and "bring about" (K. Breul, Heath's New German and English Dictionary [ed. J. H. Lepper and R. Kottenhahn; Boston: Heath, 1939], 649), and that in Duden Bedeutungswörterbuch [2nd ed; Der Duden in 12 Bänden 10; Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1985], 695) makes the breadth of possibilities very clear: auf irgendeine Weise dahin wirken, daß etwas Bestimmtes geschieht oder dass jmd. etwas Bestimmtes tut ("to bring about, one way or another, that something in particular happens or that someone does something particular"). The title of Heinemann's study thus encompassed not only the argument he offered at length, namely, that the Jewish Hellenizers did not in fact cause the persecution, but also the "bottom line" of his article, discussed in the third part of the present paper, about the tragic role they nevertheless played in "bringing it about."

See Albert I. Baumgarten's "bibliographical note" at the end of Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 310.

deed, it has often been recognized as a central refutation of Bickermann's thesis;11 writing in 1978, Bickermann himself, who did not give up his thesis, recognized Heinemann's article as "the most incisive (and still worth reading) review" of his book and responded to it at some length.12 Somewhat surprisingly, however, Heinemann's article seems not to have been the object of attention directed at contextualizing it historically. In what follows, I would address that desideratum, focusing upon three main points raised, one way or another, by Heinemann's article.

#### I Gleichschaltung

The first point builds on an obvious datum: Both Bickermann's monograph (1937) and Heinemann's response (1938) were published in Nazi Germany, when Hitler was at the height of his power. That context must be taken seriously. True, Bickermann had written about the issue well before the Nazis' rise to power: as early as 1928, in a detailed study of the Books of Maccabees, he specifically addressed the question as to what engendered Antiochus's decrees, and already then he raised the possibility that the Jewish Hellenists had been the main movers.<sup>13</sup> Nevertheless, his Gott der Makkabäer, a decade later, developed the thesis in much more detail and also presented it with a pathos that undoubtedly reflects the times of persecution in which it appeared.<sup>14</sup> What about Heinemann's response?

Heinemann, we should first note, was very active in Jewish community life. He was the rector and, by 1938, the main remaining scholar at the Jewish theological seminary of Breslau, editor of the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Monthly for History and Science of Judaism," in which his response to Bickermann was the lead article in the May–June 1938 issue), and

Note that Heinemann's article is the only item cited by Tcherikover (Hellenistic Civilization, 183–185 and 473, n. 18) in rejecting Bickerman's thesis; see also Bringmann, "Verfolgung," 181; idem, "Elias Bickermann," 10; and Stern, GLAJJ 1.185. Similarly, note that Tcherikover's discussion was, in turn, the only item cited by Jonathan A. Goldstein, nearly twenty years later, in his footnote rejecting Bickermann's thesis: 1 Maccabees (Anchor Bible 41; Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976), 159, n. 336.

See Bickerman, "Preface to English Translation," in his God of the Maccabees, xii–xiii (reprinted in his Studies, 2.1030–1031), also Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman, 243–244. See also below, n. 31.

E. Bickermann, "Makkabäerbücher (I. und II.)," PWRE 1/27 (1928): 794–796. This article is the central focus of the preceding study in the present volume.

See Ch. 5, n. 7.

also served in numerous other Jewish communal functions.<sup>15</sup> I assume no such person writing in Germany of 1938 about the persecution of Jews in antiquity could do so without thinking of what was going on around him. Indeed, Heinemann is quite explicit about the way his contemporary world contributed to the construction of his (as everyone's) understanding of the past: at numerous points of his response to Bickermann he explicitly refers to modern events in order to make his points about antiquity. Thus, for example, when Heinemann points out that pious Jews of the second century BCE may have taken umbrage at departures from tradition although they were innocuous from the point of view of Jewish law, he adduces, as an example, the opposition of ultra-Orthodox Jews of Palestine, in his day, to the widespread use of Hebrew as a vernacular language.<sup>16</sup> Similarly, a few pages later Heinemann illustrates the importance of Antiochus III's charter that guaranteed the Judeans' rights at the outset of Seleucid rule of Judea (Josephus, Ant. 12.138ff.) by comparing it to the Balfour Declaration.17

On that background, and also given the fact that as late as 1931 the question, who was responsible for Antiochus's decrees, did not exist for Heinemann,<sup>18</sup> I think we should be especially interested by a particular word that appears in Heinemann's formulation of his main thesis. That thesis is that not the Jewish Hellenizers (as Bickermann argued) but, rather, Antiochus himself, initiated the decrees.

On Heinemann and his oeuvre see: Alexander Altmann, "In Memoriam – Isaak Heinemann," JJS 8 (1957): 1–3; Ephraim E. Urbach, "Prof. Isaak Heinemann," Ḥokhmat Yisrael beMaarav Eropa [I] (ed. S. Federbush; Jerusalem/Tel–Aviv: Neumann, 1958), 219–222 (in Hebrew); Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 219–232; Lexikon deutsch-jüdischer Autoren, vol. 11 (ed. R. Heuer; München: Saur, 2002), 30–37. For his writings see the latter, also Hanna Emmrich, "Isaak Heinemanns Schriften," MGWJ 80 (1936): 294–297 and the continuation in Das Breslauer Seminar (Ch. 1, n. 11), 396–397. Below, at n. 60, I will relate to an instance of his communal involvement in 1936/37.

Heinemann, "Wer veranlaßte," 147, n. 7.

Ibid., 154. Note also: 147, n. 6 (on modern Jewish sports associations), 158 (modern complaints about the superficial westernization of primitive cultures), and 168 (even today it is difficult, in Palestine, for the government to put its hands on tax-evaders). For another case of this (Heinemann's reference, in a 1919 article on ancient antisemitism, to World War I and contemporary discussions concerning war guilt), see Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum, 228.

See his "Antisemitismus," PWRE Supplementband 5 (1931): 5–6—a discussion of Antiochus' motives without any reference to the possibility of Jewish influence upon him. Similarly, note that although already in 1919 ("Poseidonios über die Entwicklung der jüdischen Religion," MGWJ 63 [1919]: 113–121) Heinemann had argued that a certain Strabonic text depends upon Posidonius, he saw no reason to inquire whether or not Posidonius had derived the relevant notion from previous thinkers, and that in his 1931 "Antisemitismus" (loc. cit., cols. 34–35) he even took it for granted that Posidonius did build upon such predecessors and popular ideas. In his 1938 response to Bickermann, however, Heinemann took the opposite position, which better served his case about the limited early dissemination of Hellenism; see below, at n. 30. For a similar case, see below, n. 46.

This thesis has two main parts: a positive argument, namely, that Antiochus had his own reasons to impose the decrees, and a negative argument, namely, that the Jewish Hellenizers would not have encouraged Antiochus to impose decrees against Judaism. The first, positive, part of Heinemann's thesis is, basically, that 1 Macc 1:41 is the key to the whole issue: it states that Antiochus imposed the decrees because he wanted to unify his kingdom. However, if 1 Maccabees put that in quasi-biblical terms, saying that Antiochus's goal was that all should "become one people," <sup>19</sup> Heinemann phrases the matter in other terms:

Daß er seine Verfügung durch den Gedanken an die Reichseinheit begründet hat, ist außerordentlich wahrscheinlich, da die Seleukiden, im Gegensatz zu den Ptolemäern, zwar nicht gerade auf eine "Gleichschaltung," aber doch auf eine Anpassung der verschiedenen Reichskulturen hingearbeitet haben . . . (pp. 163–164)

(That he based his edict upon the notion of imperial unity is extraordinarily likely, for the Seleucids, as opposed to the Ptolemies, strove, if not precisely for a "Gleichschaltung," nevertheless for the assimilation of the different cultures of the empire . . .)

In a footnote (his n. 41) here, on the word Gleichschaltung, Heinemann refers his readers to Aage Bentzen's 1937 commentary to Daniel, where Bentzen uses the term in his discussion of Antiochus's policy, making specific reference to 1 Macc 1:41–42.<sup>20</sup> However, contemporary readers of Heinemann's article will have readily understood Heinemann's use of that term as an allusion (conscious or not) to their own times. Indeed, it seems that, even without the heavy cues supplied by references to Reichseinheit and Reichskulturen, but certainly with them, Gleichschaltung must have pointed such readers directly to their own context, for the term—in the sense of "bringing into line," "unifying," "making all march to the beat of the same drummer"—was one of the Nazis' favorites; in his study of Nazi vocabulary, Victor Klemperer observed that the word was "ungeheuerlich repräsentativ für die Grundgesinnung des Nazismus" (monstrously representative of the basic attitude of Nazism).<sup>21</sup> As has been noted by lexicographers, apart from

It seems likely that the lost original Hebrew text of 1 Maccabees will have been taken, by those who knew their Bible, as an implicit comparison of Antiochus to the Shechemites of Genesis 34:16, 22—and Jews of course took the latter to be the villains of that story.

Aage Bentzen, Daniel (Handbuch zum Alten Testament I/19; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1937), 50–51 (2nd ed. [1952], 81–82). Bentzen, in his brief discussion, writes that Antiochus wanted to effect a Hellenistic Gleichschaltung of his kingdom that would "at the same time" (zugleich) help it resist Parthian expansion, but does not suggest what Antiochus's main reason for desiring the Gleichschaltung was.

Victor Klemperer, LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologens (22nd ed.; Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007), 207–208 (in English: V. Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich [London: Athlone, 2006], 144). (LTI was Klemperer's term for the language of the Third Reich – Lingua Tertii Imperii.) Klemperer

electrical engineering (where it refers to the ability to close or break numerous circuits simultaneously) the term was not at all in use before the Nazi period; there was no entry for it in the 1929 tenth edition of Duden's Rechtschreibung but there was by the eleventh, which appeared in 1934.22 That is, the term came in, in a big way, with Hitler and the Nazis. Whether we look at their 1933 laws "zur Gleichschaltung der Länder mit dem Reich" (to bring the German states into line with the Reich) or at the widespread use of the term that same year in the context of abolishing professional unions and taking control of the press, the word and the theme were omnipresent in the parlance of Nazi policy.<sup>23</sup> And, as has been observed, they were again very popular in 1938, in connection with the annexation (Anschluß) of Austria to the Reich in March 193824—when Heinemann must have been busy preparing his response to Bickermann, which appeared later that spring. All in all, it seems clear that, in Germany of 1938, one simply could not use Gleichschaltung without alluding to Nazi laws and policies.<sup>25</sup> In the present case, moreover, Heinemann's adjacent references to the Reich (Reichseinheit and Reichskulturen) underscored the allusion all the more.

True, Heinemann qualifies his ascription of this policy to Antiochus: he writes that the Seleucids strove not precisely for a Gleichschaltung, but only for something similar. But in context that is merely a scholarly pose meant to avoid the appearance of coming to the ancient topic with an attitude that is too obviously dictated by contemporary circumstances. Despite this, Heinemann goes on to say, at p. 164, that the Seleucids, and especially Antiochus Epiphanes, did strive for cultural unity within the kingdom, and that it is likely that the reference at 1 Macc 1:41–42 to the king's demand, that all become one people and give up their own laws, accurately reflects the king's decree. That all fits Gleichschaltung fine.

Thus, the first point to emphasize about Heinemann's article is that if Bickermann found it difficult to imagine that a Hellenistic king would attempt to impose

was cited by Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 278, n. 167.

See Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, Wörterbuch der 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung': Die NS-Vergangenheit im öffentlichen Sprachgebrauch (Hildesheim: Olms, 2007), 271, n. 601.

As Klemperer (above, n. 21) notes, its popularity resulted in its being the subject of satire as early as late 1933.

Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular, 278. For a wealth of material, see Alexander Leitgeb, "Die Gleichschaltung der steirischen Zeitungen zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus" (Diplomarbeit, University of Gräz, 2019; accessible online).

See Eugen Seidel and Ingeborg Seidel-Slotty, Sprachwandel im dritten Reich (Halle: VEB, 1961), 70–71; Kurt Pätzold, "Gleichschaltung," Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus (ed. W. Benz, H. Graml, and H. Weiß; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 490–491; Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular, 277–280; Eitz and Stötzel, Wörterbuch der "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," 270–276.

cultural or religious unity upon his subjects, and therefore found himself forced to look for others who could have influenced the king to do so, Heinemann, in his context, had no such difficulties. Heinemann's context, and his active involvement in it and in the German Jewish community's struggle to maintain itself, made it quite natural and easy for him to imagine a government trying to impose such unity upon its subjects. In that respect, Heinemann's Sitz im Leben was very different from that of Bickermann, whose stay in Germany lasted little more than a decade before he left for France in 1933, and even when he was in Germany he did not consider himself a German Jew.26

#### II Hellenism instead of Volkssitte = Apostasy?

My second point concerning the context of Heinemann's article has to do with the negative part of his response to Bickermann: Heinemann's vigorous denial of the likelihood that Jewish Hellenists would have attempted to move Antiochus to impose the decrees. Heinemann bases this upon several claims. One is the general agreement of the sources that Antiochus was responsible—a point that is basically true but overstated by Heinemann.27 Another, more important argument, is Heinemann's rejection of Bickermann's suggestion that the Jewish Hellenizers in Jerusalem held, like various nineteenth-century scholars and reformers to whom Bickermann alludes,28 historicizing beliefs that we associate, today, with biblical criticism and the history of religions, especially the belief that undermines the authority of Jewish law by arguing that it was of human and even post-Mosaic origin. Such a belief concerning Jewish law may be found in Diodorus Siculus, apparently going back to Posidonius of Apamea29—but even Posidonius was born

See Baumgarten, Elias Bickerman, 108–111.

He overstates it in two ways. First, in his discussion of the ancient sources that ascribe the decrees to Antiochus (pp. 150–153) he does not recognize the fact that even if others influenced the king, ancient authors may not have known that or may have preferred to ignore such details. Second, after belatedly (p. 153) admitting that 2 Maccabees 13:4 and its parallel at Antiquities 12.384 do have Lysias claiming, retrospectively, that a Jewish Hellenizer, Menelaus, was to blame for all the troubles—texts that were Bickermann's very point of departure (GdM 153)—Heinemann belittles the importance of those texts. He insists that "kein Historiker weiß etwas von der Schuld des Menelaus" ("no historian has anything to say about Menelaus's guilt"), so Lysias's claim must be only ex post facto scapegoating. This sounds like special pleading, for why should we deny the author of 2 Maccabees the title "historian," and why should we accord this passage of 2 Maccabees less weight than the silence of the same work in its earlier chapters?.

See Ch. 5, n. 5.

See Stern, GLAJJ 1.184.

only some three decades after the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. Heinemann, who was a specialist in Posidonius's thought (see n. 41), argued, in his response to Bickermann, tacitly retracting a view he had once posited before the need arose to deal with Bickermann's thesis, both that such beliefs were not yet current among Greek thinkers prior to Posidonius and that, even if they were, Hellenism in Jerusalem of the second century BCE was probably too superficial to pick up such scientific theories.<sup>30</sup>

For some reason, this particular argument of Heinemann's aroused the most subsequent discussion.<sup>31</sup> It is, undoubtedly, an important argument. Much more basic for Heinemann, however, seems to have been his insistence that just as the ancient sources distinguish between the Hellenizers' innovations and Antiochus's persecutions, so too must the modern historian recognize that there is a chasm between Hellenizing and apostasizing. For Heinemann, it was of fundamental importance to insist upon that point, and to argue that, all the more so, there is a chasm between Hellenizing, on the one hand, and attempting to force other Jews to give up Judaism, on the other.

As Heinemann makes very clear at pp. 146–150 of his "Wer veranlaßte," his insistence on these points is based upon the axiom that the Jewish religion requires the observance of Jewish religious law, but not adherence to a more general and folksy Jewish way of life—what he terms Volkssitte. As long as Hellenization applied only to the latter, Hellenizers did not abandon Judaism, for only the abandonment or violation of religious law constitutes apostasy.32

See Heinemann, "Wer veranlaßte," 156–159, and above, n. 18.

Note, for example, that it is at only at this point of his argument with Bickermann that Tcherikover cites Heinemann with approval (Hellenistic Civilization, 473, n. 18); so too Bringmann, "Verfolgung," 181; and it is also the focus of Hoffmann's discussion in Juden und Judentum, 242–243. As Baumgarten notes, at pp. 310–311 of his "bibliographical note" in Bickermann's The Jews in the Greek Age (as also in Elias Bickerman, 245), that volume, which argues for significant Hellenism in pre-Hasmonean Judea, is, basically, Bickermann's "fully nuanced response" to this part of Heinemann's criticism. But the debate continued. As has been noted, Martin Hengel's Judentum und Hellenismus (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1969, 19732 ; in English: Judaism and Hellenism [2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974]), was to a large extent a new version of Bickermann's thesis, and the numerous Jewish critiques of it were, functionally, new versions of Heinemann's "Wer veranlaßte." See, for two examples, Arnaldo Momigliano's review of Hengel in JTS 21 (1970): 149–153 (including the complaint that Hengel, in following Bickermann, did not sufficiently consider Heinemann's objections) and Louis H. Feldman, "How Much Hellenism in Jewish Palestine?" Hebrew Union College Annual 57 (1986): 83–111.

Note here that L. Levin's characterization of Heinemann's position as if "the line that he drew was between those who did and did not accept the binding character of the body of traditional halakha as a whole" (preface to his English translation of Heinemann, The Reasons for the Commandments in Jewish Thought: From the Bible to the Renaissance [Boston: Academic Studies

Thus, although Heinemann admits (p. 148) that "it is not at all to be doubted that the Jewish Hellenists responded to the world culture with hearty enthusiasm, while for their own religion, in contrast, they retained only very lukewarm33 feelings (nur sehr laue Gefühle hegten)," he nonetheless insists that although Jason, the first of the prominent Hellenizers (2 Macc 4), strongly opposed the usual Jewish lifestyle, he hardly violated Jewish religious law (scharf gegen die jüdische Volkssitte, aber nur in begrenztem Umfang gegen das jüdische Religionsgesetz verstoßen [p. 146]). Jason was, therefore, a very far cry from Antiochus, whose edicts deliberately strove to abolish the Jewish religion (bewußt die Beseitigung der jüdischen Religion anstreben [ibid.]). In this passage, we clearly see that, for Heinemann, Religion amounts to the observance of religious law, while everything else about being Jewish is merely Volkssitte and non-essential.

Specifically, in the same vein, Heinemann goes on to insist that the adoption of the Greek hat (2 Macc 4:12) was totally innocuous from a religious point of view (eine religiös so unverfängliche Neuerung [p. 146]) and that "Auch die Einführung des Gymnasion ist nicht, wie Bi[ckermann, S.] 63 meint, 'nach dem jüdischen Gesetz verpönt'" (ibid.; even the introduction of a gymnasium is not, as Bickermann [p. 63] thought, frowned upon by Jewish law), for however unhappy Jews might be about what went on in gymnasia, "ein Verbot des Gymnasion ist im jüdischen Schrifttum nirgends zu lesen" (pp. 146–147: a prohibition of the gymnasium is nowhere to be found in Jewish writings). Especially this last-cited passage shows very clearly that Heinemann insists on "law," which is written, exempting himself from the question whether Jewish tradition, or even habitus, would "frown upon" studies in a gymnasium.

True, Heinemann does go on (pp. 147–148) to point to three of the Hellenizers' innovations that were "religiös anfechtbar" (could be criticized from a religious point of view), but he minimizes the import of all three, for:

a. sexual contact with non-Jewish women,<sup>34</sup> although admittedly a violation of "religious ethic," does not constitute "planmässige religiöse Reform" (programmatic religious reform);

Press, 2008], xv) is somewhat less than precise, insofar as by referring generally to "traditional halakha" it does not distinguish between law and tradition.

On "lukewarm," see below, nn. 50–51.

For this Heinemann cites ἐζευγίσθησαν in 1 Maccabees 1:15, which (as is especially suggested by 2:24–26) seems to be echoing ṣmd in Numbers 25:3, 5. Other relevant sources include a talmuldic reference to a "Hasmonean court" that prohibited sexual relations with a non-Jewish woman (b. Sanhedrin 82a) and the polemics of Jubilees 30. For a review of the evidence, and doubts about the extent of the phenomenon, see Martha Himmelfarb, "Levi, Phinehas, and the Problem of Intermarriage at the Time of the Maccabean Revolt," Jewish Studies Quarterly 6 (1999): 1–24.


This distinction between Volkssitte and what is entailed by the real Jewish Religion, namely religious law, with the consequent insistence that one can abandon the Volkssite without violating the Religion, is a cardinal argument for Heinemann.

It seems that in order to understand this distinction, and to understand why Bickermann was not impressed by it, we must realize that Heinemann was brought up in, and remained devoted to, the modern version of German Orthodoxy associated with the name of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), who insisted that Jews could and should live in both worlds.37 This type of Orthodoxy, of which Hirsch's Frankfurt community, in which Heinemann grew up, was the capital, is usually termed neo-Orthodoxy, and at its heart was an insistence on the binding authority of Jewish law along with a willingness to limit the sphere addressed and claimed by Jewish folkways, thereby creating space for partaking in contemporary German culture. As Mordechai Breuer has shown, such a reduction of "being Jewish" to observance of Jewish religious law was often criticized by self-critical Orthodox (who complained that "apart from their religious life, Jews had ceased to be Jews"), but in practice, one could summarize the stance of most German Orthodox Jews as "We want to do nothing in contradiction to the

Here Heinemann might be somewhat disingenuous, insofar as he ignores the common Jewish usage of brit (covenant) as a reference specifically to circumcision, a usage that endows circumcision, or abstinence from it, with a much broader significance; see Schwartz (n. 6), 158, and cf. below, n. 46.

Here Heinemann specifically contradicts Bickermann (GdM 64), who had assumed, following the plain meaning of 2 Macc 4:19–20, that Jason and his associates had wanted the money to go for sacrifices.

For Heinemann's Hirschian upbringing, see Urbach, "Prof. Isaak Heinemann," 219. Several of Heinemann's publications are devoted to Hirsch. See, for example, "Samson Raphael Hirsch: The Formative Years of the Founder of Modern Orthodoxy," Historia Judaica 13 (1951): 29–54. For lists of his publications, see above, n. 15. On Hirsch's approach, see Noah H. Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform: The Religious Philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976), and Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838–1877 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985).

provisions of the Shulḥan Aruch [i.e., the authoritative code of Jewish law, drs], but we do not want everything we do to derive from it." 38

Indeed, Heinemann was a salient example of that type of attitude. Heinemann, whose major works were devoted to a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, including translations of Philo's works and a substantial monograph about Philo's relationship to both Jewish and Greek culture,<sup>39</sup> expressed intense admiration for Philo's success at living in both worlds. That is natural, for Heinemann too lived in both worlds: his Berlin doctoral dissertation, written in Latin, concerned a prominent Athenian of the seventh-sixth century BCE,<sup>40</sup> and his major work of the 1920s was a two-volume monograph on the metaphysics of a Hellenistic philosopher.<sup>41</sup> He wrote these works while teaching both at the University of Breslau and the Breslau rabbinical seminary. There was no way an Orthodox Jewish scholar could function in German universities without limiting as much as possible, to Jewish law rather than mere Volksitte, the restrictions imposed upon him by Judaism.<sup>42</sup> Accordingly, there was no way that such a scholar could easily accept the notion that his forerunners of the second century BCE were, merely on account of their penchant for Hellenism, to be viewed as apostates. And all the more impossible was it for such a scholar to assume that, because they were Hellenists, they encouraged Antiochus to stamp out Judaism.

Mordechai Breuer, Modernity within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 24, 26 (quoting publications of 1870 and 1876 [sic]). True, it seems that Breuer took the latter passage (Die Angriffe des Herrn Rabbiner Süskind zu Wiesbaden gegen die Statuten der israel. Religionsgesellschaft zu Frankfurt a. M. [Frankfurt a. M.: Kauffmann, 1876], 10) out of context: the assertion was made by an Orthodox spokesman defending the fact that his community's rules were even more stringent, in defense of the religious community, than those of the Shulḥan Aruch. A candid assertion by an Orthodox Jew, that he does not want everything he does to be governed by Jewish law, would be—as Breuer himself notes (p. 23)—out of character. Nevertheless, Breuer's point that this was, by and large, their true stance, seems to be well-founded. For an idea of the world of the Frankfurt Jewish Gesetzestreuen ("those faithful to the law") among whom Heinemann grew up, see his account of his father's role in the schism in the Frankfurt Jewish community: "Zur Umbildung der Frankfurter Gemeinde in den Jahren 1876/77," Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt, September 1932: 6–7. This newspaper is accessible online via the "Compact Memory" website, under the title Gemeindeblatt der Israelitischen Gemeinde Frankfurt am Main.

Philons griechische und jüdische Bildung (Breslau: Marcus, 1932). For surveys of Heinemann's oeuvre, see above, n. 15.

Studia Solonea (Diss. Berlin; Berlin: Vogt, 1897).

Poseidonios' metaphysische Schriften (2 vols.; Breslau: Marcus, 1921–1928).

Even the Jewish legal restrictions were restrictive enough. See esp. Heinemann's letters to Wilamowitz, published by Hoffmann, "Antiker Völkerhass" (Ch. 5, n. 11).

Resistance to such a view of Jewish Hellenists had its institutional background as well. Note that Heinemann had not only been brought up in a Hirschian context (and remained for many years in Frankfurt, the bastion of Hirschian Judaism) but had studied at a Jewish theological seminary—the Orthodox Hildesheimer Rabbinerseminar in Berlin—whose graduates were required to earn a doctorate from a university if they wanted to be ordained by the seminary. The latter demand exposed them to the scorn of traditionalist circles, for whom a Rabbinerdoktor was something of an oxymoron, a caricature that paired but could not merge polar opposites or even allow them to coexist.43 In response, someone like Heinemann simply had to insist that admiration for Hellenistic culture was, in and of itself, a chasm away from anti-Judaism.

Indeed, in support of his claim that education in a gymnasium was not contrary to Judaism, Heinemann—who taught for many years, and directed in 1918/19, his family's private Jewish high school for girls in Frankfurt, a school that emphasized "scientific" education44—specifically points to Jewish participation in games in the gymnasia of ancient Alexandria as evidence that such participation was not a violation of Jewish law.45 Similarly, he points to Philo for support of the assertion that circumcision is just one law among many and, therefore, concealing it does not constitute abrogation of the covenant.46 As Maren Niehoff has shown, German

For such criticism see, for example, Daniel R. Schwartz and Christhard Hoffmann, "Early but Opposed – Supported but Late: Two Berlin Seminaries Which Attempted to Move Abroad," LBIYB 36 (1991): 270 and 283.

On the Heinemann'sches Institut (Israelitische höhere Mädchenschule und Pensionat), which was directed by Heinemann's father and step-mother, and his own teaching there for around two decades, see Paul Arnsberg, Die Geschichte der Franfurter Juden seit der Französischen Revolution (3 vols.; Darmstadt: Roether, 1983), 2.79–80 and 3.182–184. An advertisement for the school, in Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt, 2 Sept. 1904: 7, first says it offers "gründliche wissenschaftliche" education, only thereafter adding also "häusliche und gesellschaftliche"; so too ibid. 31 August 1917: 7. That Heinemann directed it beginning in 1918, until he moved to Breslau in 1919/20, emerges from the advertisement in Neue jüdische Presse 15, no. 46 (1917): 6 and "Jubelfeier des Dr. Heinemannschen Lyzeums," ibid. 17, no. 15 (1919): 5. My thanks to Maike Strobel, of the University of Frankfurt's library, for her help with this note.

Heinemann, "Wer veranlaßte," 147, n. 8. He refers to Harold I. Bell, Juden und Griechen im römischen Alexandreia (Behefte zum Alten Orient 9; Leipzig: Hinrich, 1926), 26, who cites in this context the fifth column of Claudius's letter to the Alexandrians (P. London 1912).

Heinemann, "Wer veranlaßte," 148. He gives no specific reference to Philo for this point. Indeed his position is surprising, and seems to have been influenced by the needs of his critique of Bickermann; for a similar case, cf. above, n. 18. A few years earlier, without such a context, Heinemann had, instead, emphasized that circumcision is not just another commandment: the fact that Philo treats circumcision separately at the outset of De specialibus legibus 1, before turning to the specific laws, was sicherlich nicht zufälligerweise ("certainly not a matter of chance"; Philons Bildung, 176–177). See also Heinemann's own outline of the structure of De spec. leg. that pre-

scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums frequently pointed to the Alexandrian model as "a paradigm for acculturation, modernization and pluralism within Judaism." <sup>47</sup> Here we are discussing an Orthodox version of that, one that entails a definition of Judaism limited to the more or less narrow bounds of religious law alone, to the exclusion of the more inclusive Volkssitte (customary way of life)—a way of life in which being Jewish fills up so much space and time that little is left for going to gymnasia or for symbiosis with any other culture. German Jewish Orthodoxy had to leave that Volkssitte behind in order to participate in the world of German culture and scholarship at large, and Heinemann speaks here for the many who did just that.

Bickermann came from another world. In the eastern European world in which Bickermann was raised, and which he left, religious Judaism was still very traditional; that is, it was usually assumed to be, for those who adhered to it, an entire way of life and not just the relatively narrow domains addressed by religious law sensu stricto.<sup>48</sup> One could either persevere in that way of life or (as many) abandon it, but in the virtual absence of a practical distinction between law and mere Volkssite, that was a stance that tended to make any deviation from Jewish tradition, even from those practices that Heinemann's Orthodox world would as-

cedes his translation of the work (Die Werke Philos von Alexandria, II [ed. L. Cohn; Breslau: Marcus, 1910], 8): Philo's opening discussion of circumcision precedes his discussion of the first and second commandment.

Maren R. Niehoff, "Alexandrian Judaism in 19th Century Wissenschaft des Judentums: Between Christianity and Modernization," in Jüdische Geschichte in hellenistisch-römischer Zeit. Wege der Forschung: Vom alten zum neuen Schürer (ed. A. Oppenheimer; Schriften des historischen Kollegs: Kolloquien 44; München: Oldenbourg, 1999), 9–28 (quotation – p. 27). See esp. 22–25 on work at the Breslau Seminary, and then p. 25 on the rise of Philonic studies, which were at the heart of much of Heinemann's work. For a similar turn to the Alexandrian example by younger contemporaries of Heinemann, see Moses Hadas, "Judaism and the Hellenistic Experience: A Classical Model for Living in Two Cultures," Commentary 222 (August 1956): 119–124, along with readers' responses ibid., 375–376. Contrast above, Ch. 3, n. 18.

For this contrast, see for example Eli Lederhendler, "Modernity without Emancipation or Assimilation? The Case of Russian Jewry," in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (ed. J. Frankel and S. J. Zipperstein; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 324–343. For a somewhat paradoxical corollary, see Adam S. Ferziger, Orthodoxy, Nonobservance, and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 166–168 and 186–187: in Eastern Europe, the fact that great masses of Jews continued to adhere to tradition allowed Orthodox authorities to feel less threatened by, and therefore more inclusive toward, non-observant Jews. That is, however, a legal implication. Sociologically, the gap between Eastern European traditionalists and non-observant Jews could be much greater than the one between German Orthodox (such as Heinemann) and non-observant Jews, whose lifestyles might be quite similar, apart from some circumscribed aspects of life defined by religious law.

sign to mere Volkssitte, a departure from Judaism. That was a Jewish world in which, as the Yiddish phrase would have it, a Greek had no place at all in a Sukkah. Reverting now, on that basis, to attitudes toward Hellenists of the second century BCE, it seems that Heinemann's reflected German-Jewish circumstances and perspectives, while Bickermann's reflected those of eastern Europe.49

In sum, the second point to make about Heinemann's argument is that his context made him used to the idea that Jews could be Orthodox by observing Jewish law (but not necessarily all the folkways and traditions that had accreted to it) and nonetheless be Hellenists. Bickermann, in contrast, was led by his eastern European upbringing to see the abandonment of a Jewish way of life, even if that applied only to what Heinemann would marginalize as mere Volksitte and not religious law, as tantamount to leaving the fold, apostasy.

#### III Jewish Representatives with Only Loose and Lukewarm Attachment to Judaism

My third and final point about the context of Heinemann's article pertains especially to its concluding remarks. They too, I believe, deserve more attention than they have received. After an entire article dedicated to exonerating the Jerusalem Hellenists of Antiochus's day from responsibility for the king's persecution for Judaism, in the final paragraph of "Wer veranlaßte" Heinemann turns nearly aboutface and takes a position on the verge of Bickermann's: he asserts that Antiochus would not have begun his persecution of Judaism had he thought it would encounter serious resistance. This leads Heinamann to conclude that the Jewish Hellenizers of Jerusalem did indeed share some of the guilt ("eine gewisse Mitschuld"):

Sie haben die völlige Ausmerzung des Judentums, die Antiochos nach Möglichkeit durchführen versuchte, nicht veranlaßt und in ihrer großen Mehrheit schwerlich gewollt; aber ernstlichen Widerstand brauchte der König von ihrer Seite allerdings nicht zu befürchten. Und es war das Unglück des Judentums, daß Antiochos seine [i.e., Judaism's, drs] innere Kraft nach Männern bemaß, die ihm vertraut waren, mit den Überlieferungen ihrer jüdischen Gemeinschaft aber nur noch in sehr loser Verbindung standen.

(They did not initiate the complete eradication of Judaism, which Antiochus attempted to carry out if at all possible, and the great majority of them hardly desired it; but the king did not need to fear any serious resistance on their part. And it was the misfortune of Judaism, that Antio-

For a survey of research on this distinction, which is, of course, not totally hermetic, see Yosef Salmon, "Jacob Katz's Approach to Orthodoxy: The Eastern European Case," MJ 32 (2012): 129–154.

chus measured its inner strength according to those Jews with whom he was familiar—Jews whose attachment to the traditions of their Jewish community was, by then, only very loose. 50)

That is the very end of the article, Heinemann's parting shot. My impression is that any sentence written by a German Jew in 1938, placed so prominently at the conclusion of an article and beginning with such a somber reference to das Unglück des Judentums ("the misfortune of Judaism"), must be read in light of the contemporary situation—especially since the sentence includes nothing (such as damaligen ["in those days"]) that would have limited its relevance to the ancient case under discussion. Heinemann, that is, seems to be expressing his view that had the Jews who represented Judaism to the Nazis had more of an attachment to it, the Nazis would not have undertaken their program aimed at suppressing Judaism. This amounts to a complaint that those who were representing the Jews to the Nazis were not sufficiently devoted to Judaism and its traditions, and to blaming them for thus making the Nazis think that an attempt to eradicate Judaism could easily succeed.

Whom did Heinemann have in mind? Did he, in fact, have anyone specific in mind? His wording, about Jews whose attachment to Judaism was only very loose (or "lukewarm" [see at n. 33]), is a general and stereotypical way of referring to non-traditional Jews, and so need not point to anyone in particular.51 Indeed, so far, I have not found anything explicit enough to allow for more than a guess. Nevertheless, I will not abstain from that guess, however painful it might be.

German Jews were represented collectively, to the Nazi government, by the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden ("National Representative Body of German Jews"). So it was named when founded in 1933, and even when it was demonstratively downgraded in 1935 to Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (. . . of the Jews in Germany), so as to clarify that the Jews in Germany were not Germans, it retained its designation as the body representing (vertreten) the Jews, namely, to

Heinemann, "Wer veranlaßte," 172. So too ibid., 148: the Hellenists had "nur sehr laue Gefühle" about their religion.

Compare, for example, Toni Cassirer's general reference to German Jewish refugees in the 1930s "die nur noch eine ganz lose Verbindung zum Judentum hatten" (Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer [Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1981], 234), also Todd M. Engelman's account of liberal German Jews in England of the mid-nineteenth century ("German Jews in Victorian England: A Study in Drift and Defection," in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (ed. J. Frankel and S. J. Zipperstein; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 74: "their attachment to Judaism was lukewarm . . . maintained a loose attachment to Judaism." Compare Graetz, GdJ.III1 , 275, 318 = III/1<sup>4</sup> , 335, 388, on the way philosophy and allegory made many Alexandrian Jews lau ("lukewarm") with regard to the observance of practical Judaism.

the German government.52 Its director from the outset was Otto Hirsch (1885–1941); and its first and only president was Leo Baeck (1873–1956). Hirsch was an important lay leader of liberal Judaism,53 Baeck—the foremost liberal rabbi in Germany of his day.54

Now it just so happens that there was considerable competition between Heinemann and Baeck, who were both in their sixties in 1938. This had, first of all, an institutional basis. As we saw in Ch. 1, there were three institutions of higher Jewish learning in Germany, and while Heinemann had studied at the Orthodox Hildesheimer rabbinical seminary in Berlin and spent most of his career at the traditionally-oriented seminar in Breslau, Baeck, although he began his higher Jewish studies in Breslau (1891–1894), deliberately left it for a more liberal institution, the Berlin Hochschule.<sup>55</sup> There he completed his studies, there he was ordained (1897), and there, eventually, he would teach for decades, beginning in 1913.<sup>56</sup> Anyone familiar with competition among scholars, and among academic institutions, can imagine what it was like to have two Jewish institutions of higher learning, representing two diametrically opposed versions of Judaism, in the same city—indeed, on the very same street.<sup>57</sup> If, for example, in 1897, while Heinemann was studying at the Hildesheimer Seminary, a prominent professor at the Hochschule allowed himself to complain publicly that the Judaism of Hildesheimer's was hidebound and death-like,<sup>58</sup> we can easily imagine what clichés were common at Hildesheimer's about the lack of serious devotion to Judaism at the competing institution down the street. Certainly Esriel Hildesheimer himself was full of burning anger and unbounded scorn for the Hochschule, which he

See Esriel Hildesheimer, Jüdische Selbstverwaltung unter dem NS-Regime: Der Existenzkampf der Reichsvertretung und Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (SWALBI 50; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1994); Otto D. Kulka (ed.), Dokumente zur Geschichte der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden 1933–1939 (SWALBI 54; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997).

See Paul Sauer, "Otto Hirsch: Director of the Reichsvertretung," LBIYB 32 (1987): 341–368.

On Baeck, see Ch. 1, n. 36.

For the reasons for his early departure from Breslau, see (in the works cited ibid.) the anecdotes in Baker, Days of Sorrow, 21, also Meyer, Rabbi Leo Baeck, 4–5. On the Hochschule, see Ch. 1, n. 20.

See BHWJ 1914: 8 and 58–75 (Baeck's inaugural lecture, "Griechische und jüdische Predigt"). See Ch. 1, n. 13.

See H. Steinthal, Über Juden und Judentum: Vorträge und Aufsätze (ed. G. Karpeles; Berlin: Poppelauer, 1906), 246–247. In this lecture (originally published in AZJ 1897, no. 23: 270) celebrating the first quarter-century of the Hochschule, Steinthal contrasts its living Judaism to the historical Judaism of the Breslau seminary and the dead Judaism of Hildesheimer's orthodox seminary up the street.

characterized as devoted to the destruction of Judaism.59 Those were the kind of clichés Heinemann will have imbibed, as a youthful scholar, with regard to the institution with which Baeck was to stay affiliated throughout his life, and Heinemann's move to Breslau (in 1919 or 1920) will not have engendered any need to back far away from such clichés.

Moreover, note that only about a year before Heinemann responded to Bickermann, in late 1936/early 1937, he represented the Breslau seminary on a commission, chaired by Baeck, through which the Reichsvertretung had tried to amalgamate the Berlin Hochschule and the Breslau Seminary into one institution. The attempt was very heavy-handed, with the deck stacked against Heinemann, so his protests came to naught. Nothing came of the plan, but it must have made its own contribution of hot air and resentment.60

Baeck's work competed with Heinemann's in other ways as well. Note, first of all, that early in his career Baeck turned to apologetics: his Das Wesen des Judentums (1905), which responded to Adolf von Harnack's Das Wesen des Christentums (1900) and the way it portrayed Judaism, put him on the map quite prominently.<sup>61</sup> But what he did in that volume, in searching for the Wesen (essence) of Judaism as opposed to all its secondary and tertiary accretions, was just what Heinemann was doing: looking for the Jewish religion in its most circumscribed form, without its Volkssitte, so as to allow for major involvement in western culture beside it. The fact that Baeck sought to serve that same end by seeking Judaism in its most universalist form, identifying its essence as faith and morality and ascribing law only a secondary function (preservation of the community that observes true religion), whereas Heinemann basically equated Judaism with Jewish law, made the

For Hildesheimer's intense hostility both to the Hochschule and to the Breslau seminary, see David Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Judaic Studies Series; Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 75–84.

On this episode, see Kulka, Dokumente, 302–307. True, the Reichvertretung's committee on rabbinical training, which included fifteen members (for the breakdown, see the table, ibid., 304), had one representative from each of the three institutions, including Heinemann, who represented Breslau. But it was chaired by Baeck himself, four of its members represented the Reichsvertretung and two represented the Allgemeiner Rabbinerverband Deutschlands, both of which were chaired by Baeck (see Kulka, ibid., 455 [and see Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, 85, on avoidance of it by the Orthodox]), and the Hochschule was allowed a separate representative for its general studies program, apart from one (Baeck) for its rabbinical program. Thus, Heinemann and the representative of the Orthodox Hildesheimer rabbinical seminary were quite outnumbered. For Heinemann's plea to preserve the Breslau Seminary, see Kulka, Dokumente, 306. According to Kulka, p. 303, n. 5, no more is known of this plan.

For an English version, see L. Baeck, The Essence of Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1961).

difference between them quite polar.62 Moreover, Baeck devoted much of his research and writing to ancient rabbinic literature, and to its Hellenistic context,<sup>63</sup> thus plowing a field that very frequently was the same as the one worked by Heinemann—and it is not surprising that Baeck is one of the few scholars with whom Heinemann troubles to argue in his volume on Philo, once even underscoring his case with an exclamation point.<sup>64</sup>

That is: Baeck and Heinemann represented academic institutions that competed with each other, and varieties of Judaism that frequently evinced contempt for each other, and as individuals they competed with each other academically as well, working with similar materials and on similar themes. But while Heinemann, in Breslau, played virtually no role in national Jewish leadership and representation to the Nazis, Baeck, in Berlin, was at their helm—and anyone could see, in 1938, that things were not going well. So although I would prefer to find something that explicitly backs up this hunch, it appears quite likely that academic competition plus inner-Jewish tensions could, in the pressure cooker in which German Jewry found itself in 1938, with everyone looking for someone to blame, lead people like Heinemann to imagine that if only the Nazis had to deal

For Heinemann, see above, after n. 33. As for Baeck, see esp. Das Wesen des Judentums (Schriften der Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums; Berlin: Rathausen und Lamm, 1905), 151 (in English: Essence of Judaism, 263). Here, daringly appropriating the mishnaic distinction (Avot 1:1) between basic laws ("Torah") and other, secondary, laws that were merely "fences" to ensure the Torah would not be violated, Baeck (who goes on to protest definitions of "Torah" that limit it to law) defines all of Jewish ritual law, including such basics as the Sabbath and dietary laws, as "ceremonial laws" that were only "fences" around true "Religion." Compare Heinemann's review of the second (1922) edition of Baeck's volume in MGWJ 66 (1922): 67–68. In this review that, for the most part, politely praises the work as a good introduction to Judaism, Heinemann emphasizes that Baeck's approach is modern and liberal, points to Baeck's statement that nevertheless Judaism is and must be "unmodern," and then complains that Baeck does not at all flesh out the latter by discussing the Jewish Lebensstimmung—i.e., what Jews actually do qua Jews. For a much less genteel version of basically the same critique, note an eastern European Jewish response to Baeck's work that mimics his work's title, brands him "ein moderner Rabbiner," and totally scorns his volume, see [Elias] Jakob Fromer, Das Wesen des Judentums (Kulturprobleme der Gegenwart II/1; Berlin-Leipzig-Paris: Hüpeden & Merzyn, 1905), 181–182, n. 60. See pp. 2–3 for the author's self-identification as having been born in a "Russian-Polish" ghetto and raised on Talmud alone.

Note already Baeck's inaugural lecture at the Hochschule (above, n. 56), and see his collection: Aus drei Jahrtausenden: Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte des jüdischen Glaubens (Berlin: Schocken, 1938). For English versions of some of his studies of ancient Judaism, see Ch. 1, nn. 39–40.

See Heinemann, Philons Bildung, 47, n. 4 (Baeck interprets a text very one-sidedly ["in sehr einseitiger Beleuchtung"]) and 61–62, n. 5 (Heinemann scolds Baeck, with an exclamation point, for holding that those who thought less of priesthood than of the Torah are therefore to be understood as opposing the priesthood.).

with Jews more observant of Jewish law than Otto Hirsch and Leo Baeck, whose attachment to Judaism must have been, in Heinemann's Orthodox eyes, lukewarm and loose,<sup>65</sup> namely, if only those who represented German Jewry to the Nazis were Jews like himself, the Nazis would not think they could get away with things so easily. That is the direction in which Heinemann's closing complaint about the Hellenizers seems to point. It is interesting to imagine how the end of Heinemann's article would have been received, and the look on his face, had he given it, in 1938, as a lecture at the Hochschule.

#### IV Conclusion

In sum, I suggest that Heinemann's


are all to be understood as reflecting his own particular location in the world of German Jewry in the intense years in which he wrote, half a decade into the Third Reich. The first reflects what the Reich was doing all around him, and so made it simple for him to think that Antiochus tried the same; the second reflects his family's and, more generally, German Orthodoxy's way of living in both worlds; and the third reflects, it seems, Heinemann's attitude toward the liberal Jews, perhaps especially Leo Baeck, who represented the Jews of Germany to the Nazi government. As in the other cases studied in this volume, that Heinemann's work as an historian reflected his and other Jews' contemporary circumstances in Germany is only as should be expected.

See the quotations at nn. 33 and 50–51, also n. 59. For the same Orthodox attitude toward Baeck as an unauthentic Jew, around the same time that Heinemann's article appeared, see the angry review of Baeck's Das Evangelium als Urkunde der jüdischen Glaubensgeschichte (1938) that appeared in Der Israelit, 14 July 1938, p. 10: after admitting that some teachers might find the book useful, although there is nothing new in it apart from what the reviewer snidely calls "Baeck'sche Formulierungen," he continues quite polemically: "But for anyone who seeks Judaism from the inside and understands it free of external mirrors and influences, whether they grew in totally foreign fields or in fields related to Jews—to him, this book has nothing, really nothing ("nichts, aber rein nichts"), to say. There is hardly any interest or need for us to show Judaism to our children in the light of a spiritual world that, for millennia, has deliberately distanced itself from us."

## 7 Abraham Schalit on Herod and Josephus, before and after the Holocaust

Die Problematik des jüdischen Daseins im Römischen Reich war viel komplizierter, als man seinerzeit anzunehmen geneigt war. 1

#### I Herod the Great

It seems that two factors make King Herod of Judea (ca. 73–4 BCE) an especially challenging and attractive topic for historians. The first is the fact that few historical figures lived at so many crossroads as Herod did and played such an important role in each of them. Whether one deals with Roman history, with Jewish history, or with the religious history of the West, that is, whether one is telling the story of the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Principate, the story of the transformation of the Hasmonean state ruled by Jewish high-priests into a vassal kingdom and then into a Roman province, or the story of the appearance and rise of Christianity, Herod plays a central and significant role. Who else managed to hobnob with Octavian and Antonius and spar with Cleopatra, to kill off the Hasmonean priestly-royal dynasty of Judea but also build the magnificent Temple that dynasty never even attempted, and to be spotlighted at the very opening of a Gospel: "There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judea . . ." (Luke 1:5)?

The second factor is that the extant ancient sources that deal with Herod so frequently express hostility or contempt for him. For some examples from each of the three contexts mentioned above, we may note that Augustus Caesar is said to have quipped that he would rather be Herod's pig than his son;2 that the central talmudic text on Herod focuses on the way he exterminated the Hasmoneans and upon the death of a Hasmonean maiden who committed suicide so as not to be defiled by him (b. Baba Batra 3b); and that the New Testament, implicitly comparing Herod to the wicked Pharaoh of Exodus 1:15–22, has him perpetrating mass infanticide (Matthew 2:16). Indeed, note that, in Acts 12, Luke calls Herod's

For this quotation and an English translation, see below at n. 48. The present chapter began as a foreword to De Gruyter's 2001 reprint of Schalit's König Herodes: Der Mann und sein Werk (Studia Judaica 4; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), which was a translation of the original Hebrew work: King Herod: Portrait of a Ruler (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1960 [in Hebrew]).

Macrobius, Saturnalia II 4:11 (GLAJJ 2.665–666). The quip apparently reflects a Greek pun between hys and hyios, indicating Augustus' assumption, at least for purposes of the pun, that Herod, who killed several of his own sons, would not eat pork.

grandson Agrippa I "Herod" when it reports the way he persecuted the Church, although Agrippa himself seems not to have used that name, because "for the Christian reader the very title 'King Herod' supplied the prince's motive for persecution: 'King Herod' had to be an enemy of the Christians!" 3

#### II Schalit's König Herodes

Accordingly, Herod affords the modern historian an opportunity to organize much of the history of a critical period around a single focus, and also the challenge to adopt his or her own independent attitude toward it, and toward the issues it raises. Abraham Schalit (1898–1979) was quite evidently well-equipped to do justice to this opportunity: few scholars ever knew the main source, namely the writings of Josephus, better than Schalit,4 and, it seems, he was also temperamentally suited to take up the challenge. The combination of the two resulted in an outstanding example of what nineteenth-century scholarship proudly termed "philological-historical science."

Namely, just as Theodor Mommsen—one of Schalit's heroes5 —combined detailed philological work in preparing editions of Latin texts, in compiling the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and in such technical fields as Roman prosopography, administrative and penal law, and numismatics, with the synthesizing and high-flying prose of his history of Rome (Römische Geschichte, 1854–1885), which earned him a 1902 Nobel Prize in literature, so too Schalit, from the first, combined the two nearly diametrically opposed approaches and styles. His 1925 Vienna dissertation, on Flavius Josephus and Justus of Tiberias, is composed of two parts: one, which combines source-criticism and numismatics, is devoted to technical issues of chronology, but the other attempts to evaluate the politics and personalities of Josephus and Justus

Ernst Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 381, n. 2. Note, in contrast, that when Luke wants to portray Agrippa II as fair and just, he calls him "Agrippa" (Acts 25–26), not "Herod."

Suffice it to mention his doctoral dissertation on Josephus's Life, his three-volume Hebrew translation of Josephus's Antiquities, his Namenwörterbuch zu Flavius Josephus (details for all of which appear in notes below), as well as his lost Hebrew commentary on Ant. 11–20 and the extant unpublished torso of his German commentary on those same books, of which 233 pages on Ant. 11.1– 108 seem to be all that survived. On the latter, as well as his other publications, manuscripts, and plans (including a book about Josephus as a Hellenistic Jew that, so he reported in 1962, was nearly complete), see my "Hellenism, Judaism, and Apologetics: Josephus's Antiquities according to an Unpublished Commentary by Abraham Schalit," Jewish Studies Internet Journal 19 (2020). See below, n. 57.

as two figures who played ambiguous roles in the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66–67 C.E.6 Again, the next years saw Schalit, following his 1929 immigration to Palestine, producing both a Hebrew volume on Roman Administration in Palestine (1937), which combines—like his 1960/1969 monograph on Herod (see n. 1)—detailed studies of this or that terminological or administrative point with broader assessments and soaring prose; were the volume in German, Mommsen, or, for that matter, Julius Wellhausen and Eduard Meyer, would have felt right at home, at least with regard to its style and interests. And the same may be said of his Hebrew translation of the first half of Josephus' Antiquities (1944), which opens with a long and detailed introduction. It begins by focusing on such detailed philological issues as Josephus's Greco-Roman models and the sources and biblical texts he used for his paraphrase of biblical history, but concludes with some world-historical perspectives on Josephus and his place in the history of Jewish grappling with the world, and especially the West, and their challenges.7

Accordingly, and especially given the fact that Schalit's continued work on translating the last ten books of Josephus' Antiquities, in the 1940s and 1950s, took him letter by letter through Josephus's long account of Herod (which fills about a third of those ten books),8 it is no surprise that he dedicated his magnum opus to that monarch. That work appeared in Hebrew in 1960 (see n. 1). The present German version, König Herodes: Der Mann und sein Werk, which had the good fortune to be based on a translation from the Hebrew prepared by a man who is himself an accomplished scholar of ancient Judaism, Jehoschua Amir,<sup>9</sup> was considerably expanded and revised, as Schalit points out at p. xi.

Even a cursory look through this massive tome will convince the reader that Schalit took the opportunity Herod presents and rose to the challenge created by

On this unpublished and long-lost dissertation ("Die Vita des Flavius Josephus: Eine historischkritische Untersuchung"), which is now again available in libraries in Vienna and Jerusalem, and on some subtle differences between its two parts and the way they appeared as published articles in the 1930s, see my "More on Schalit's Changing Josephus: The Lost First Stage," Jewish History 9/2 (Fall 1995): 9–20, along with Henri Zukier, "Historical Reality and Psychological Truth," ibid. 21–25.

Abraham Schalit, Josephus: Antiquities, Books 1–10 (2 vols.; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1944), 1.lxxix-lxxxii (in Hebrew). In these pages, Schalit attributes to Josephus the political program of building the Jews' future in the West, an idea adumbrated already at the end of his 1934 paper cited in n. 35.

Much of Antiquities 14 is devoted to Herod's immediate antecedents and rise to power, all of Books 15–17 are devoted to his reign and its immediate aftermath, and much of Books 18–20 relates to his descendents.

See inter alia his Studien zum antiken Judentum (Beiträge zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des antiken Judentums 2; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985).

the antagonistic sources, and that, correspondingly, we have here, in full measure, the two halves of the "philological-historical" approach. Philology there is aplenty. Numerous footnotes and excurses are devoted to the interpretation, emendation, and establishment of texts, pages and pages are devoted to the elucidation of ancient terms and institutions; see, inter alia, his detailed discussions of various taxes (pp. 262–298, 725–729, 777–781, 788–790), of Hellenistic and Roman notions of the contrast between "tyrannical" and "monarchical" (pp. 461–471), of the norms and genres of Hellenistic historiography (pp. 577–586), etc. Indeed, students of the period interested in any term or institution would be well-advised to ascertain<sup>10</sup> if it is mentioned in Schalit's main source, namely the writings of Josephus, and, if so, to check—with the aid of the copious index of Josephan passages cited (pp. 841–853)—whether Schalit discussed it in detail. Frequently he did, even far beyond what an account of Herod requires.

#### III Realpolitik

In that respect, however, there was nothing essentially new about Schalit's König Herodes. One could find much of the same in the work of Schalit's favorite predecessor, Walter F. Otto, whose Herodes appeared in 1913.11 What was new, and is still quite unique, in Schalit's König Herodes, is the line he took in the latter half of the "philological-historical" endeavor, i.e., his historical synthesis and evaluation, which amount to his response to the condemnatory sources and the subsequent historical tradition.

I refer to the fact that Schalit, in the present volume, quite explicitly rejects both of the obvious and common historiographic options. Namely, given the damning sources, historians by and large took one of two positions. Most simply adopted the attitude of the sources (and of their own religions, be they Christian or Jewish) and condemned Herod, portraying him as an opportunistic and selfserving murderer, a monster. Others, however, leaned over backwards to show the guilt of his victims,<sup>12</sup> thus portraying Herod as the wronged good guy of the

Using Karl H. Rengstorf, A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus (4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1973–1983). Schalit's Namenwörterbuch zu Flavius Josephus (1968) is "Supplement 1" to this concordance and is included in the second volume of Brill's 2002 reprint of the concordance.

Walter F. Otto, Herodes: Beiträge zur Geschichte des letzten jüdischen Königshauses (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1913) – originally published the same year in the second Supplementband of PWRE. As Schalit, I cite according to the separate volume.

In his preface to König Herodes Schalit singles out Hugo Willrich's Das Haus des Herodes zwischen Jerusalem und Rom (Bibliothek der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften 6; Heidelberg:

story, who was both rejected by his Jewish subjects who refused to understand that Rome, not the Hasmoneans, ruled the world, and wrongly condemned by Christians who, understandably, given their apologetic situation in the early Empire, needed to find Jewish villains rather than Roman ones. Thus, historians persevered in applying moral categories in evaluating Herod, and assumed that Herod was either a good king and a good person or a bad king and a bad person.

Schalit, in contrast, gloried in denying the relevance of usual moral categories to politics and, accordingly, to such people as Herod. As he put it, "in practicalpolitical affairs, experience everywhere and always shows that it is the end result that decides who is 'right'" (p. 48113). Schalit's scare quotes around "right" (recht) say it all: there is no "right" other than success. Or: "Herod believed in the principle that moral values such as pangs of conscience, loyalty, honesty and the like have no place in political life in his day or earlier periods, and that he should live according to this recognition" (p. 65114).

This real-political approach governs Schalit's entire account of Herod, right down to the smallest details. Let us take three examples, all from early in Herod's reign.

The first: when Herod conquered Jerusalem in 37 BCE, with Roman support, the last Hasmonean defender of the city, Mattathias Antigonus, was captured. Sometime later he was executed—and there are different reports about the details. Here, suffice to say that Hugo Willrich, Schalit's star example of an antisemitic writer who loved Herod (see above, n. 12), expressed doubt about Josephus's statement, at Ant. 14.490, that Herod bribed Marcus Antonius to kill Antigonus;

Winter, 1929) as having used Josephus's narratives "to allow all the light to fall on Herod and all the shadows to fall on the Jews," thus testifying to the author's passionate Jew-hatred (leidenschaftlicher Judenhaß). For examples, see below, nn. 15, 23. Another author who expressed quite a positive attitude toward Herod was Stewart Perowne, The Life and Times of Herod the Great (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1956). In his case, the background seems mostly to have been his exasperating experience as a British diplomat in Mandate Palestine: "the catalogue of Herod's crimes which the Jews presented to Caesar after his death as recorded by Josephus [War 2.84– 87//Ant. 17.304–310, drs] need not be taken seriously; it has an absolutely familiar ring to anyone who is acquainted with the manner in which any government in that part of the world is accused by those who for one reason or another wish to overthrow it" (ibid., 177), Cf. Daniel R. Schwartz, Reading the First Century: On Reading Josephus and Studying Jewish History of the First Century (WUNT 300; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 171, n. 6.

"Denn in praktisch-politischen Dingen ist es eine allenthalben und zu jeder Zeit bestätigte Erfahrung, daß der Enderfolg darüber entscheidet, wer 'recht' behält."

"Herodes bekannte sich zu dem Grundsatz, daß moralische Momente wie Gewissensbisse, Treue, Redlichkeit und dergleichen nichts im politischen Leben seiner Zeit oder früherer Zeiten zu suchen hätten, und daß er nach dieser Erkenntnis zu handeln habe."

Willrich argued that that was only a calumny by Herod's enemies.15 Heroes, Willrich assumed, should not give bribes to do their enemies in. Schalit, in contrast, in a special appendix on the subject (pp. 691–692), depends on Josephus's statement, for it shows that Herod was smart, which is no calumny in Schalit's book.

Denn es leuchtet durchaus ein, daß Herodes, der an einem möglichst rasches Verschwinden des Antigonos brennend interessiert war, alle Hebel—auch den der Bestechung . . . in Bewegung setzte, um den immer noch gefährlichen Rivalen . . . endgültig aus dem Wege zu räumen.

(For it stands to reason that Herod, who was ardently interested in Antigonus's disappearing as soon as possible, put all levers, even bribery, into motion in order to finally get that rival, who was still dangerous, out of his way.)

Correspondingly, Schalit rejected another version of the story (Ant. 15.8–10), based on Strabo, according to whom Antonius killed Antigonus on his own, without any Herodian influence. That was, according to Schalit, only pro-Herodian propaganda. In other words, Schalit's Herod was both smart and ruthless enough to do what had to be done, and also clever enough to attempt to deny it.

The second episode is Herod's marriage with Mariamme, a granddaughter of Hyrcanus II, the scion of the Hasmonean dynasty who ruled Judea when Rome took over in 63 BCE and who continued to rule, as a Roman vassal, until the end of the 40s. Most historians have viewed this marriage as a prime piece of evidence that Herod's first approach to the dynasty he had dispossessed was an attempt to bolster his own rule by marrying into it, since it continued to enjoy popular support. The only question in this connection is whether that was wise: while such scholars as Wellhausen identified this move as "the great foolish move (die große Torheit) of his life," others, especially Otto, detailed the political benefits that Herod could rightly expect to reap from the match, in improving his status and prospects vis-à-vis his own older brother, the Hasmoneans, and their supporters.16 Schalit, in contrast, argued in detail (pp. 61–66) that politically Herod had nothing to gain from the match, and much to lose from it, and that, since he was smart, he must have known all that. Accordingly, if Herod nevertheless married Mariamme, it must have been for love: "The conclusion that imposes itself is that Herod's desire to marry the Hasmonean princess did not derive in any way from political calculations, but only from the most simple and natural of motivations, namely, he was

Willrich, Das Haus des Herodes (above, n. 12), 47. For a very similar case, see below, n. 23.

Julius Wellhausen, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte (7th ed.; Berlin: Reimer, 1914), 325–326; Otto, Herodes, 43.

ardently in love with Mariamme" (p. 6617). Thus, Schalit's insistence that Herod be understood as a totally astute and scrupulous homo politicus led him to conclude, that when Herod did something which turned out to bring him political disadvantage, it must have been with open eyes, due to a decision to prefer some other consideration.

A third example, concerning Herod's early policy vis-à-vis the high priesthood, shows the other, more usual, side of the coin. From the outset of his reign, the question, who would be high priest, posed a dilemma for Herod. Herod's nonpriestly pedigree prevented him from serving as high priest, but for generations prior to him the Hasmoneans had been both kings and high priests. Were Herod to allow a Hasmonean to serve as high priest, he might become a focus of popular support, which could be threatening for Herod. Accordingly, Herod first appointed a certain Hananel, an otherwise unknown and harmless priest, to the post (Ant. 15.22)—a move easily understood politically. Within a year or two, however, Herod gave in to Hasmonean pressure, exerted by his wife and mother-inlaw, and appointed Mariamme's brother, Aristobulus III, to the position. What happened was only to be expected: when Aristobulus appeared in public in his priestly vestments the Jewish crowd went wild with enthusiasm, which made it very clear that Herod indeed had a serious competitor. Shortly thereafter, the young Aristobulus drowned in what was made to look like a swimming accident at Herod's palace in Jericho, and Herod, after shedding appropriate tears at the poor boy's funeral, thereafter reverted to appointing nobodies to the top religious post. So much for the story, as told by Josephus (Antiquities 15.23–56).

Prior to Schalit, there were two main approaches to interpreting this series of events. The first, which is closest to Josephus's account, was that Herod originally embarked upon a policy of sidelining the Hasmoneans completely, but that under the pressure of some influential women (his mother-in-law, her [and Mark Anthony's] friend Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt, and his wife Mariamme) he was forced into conceding the high priesthood to Aristobulus; in other words, their pressure forced Herod to exchange his original strategy for a new one, which proved to be a failure—and when he recognized that he did what had to be done. Thus, for a prime example, Schürer, whose handbook, as usual, hews close to Josephus' account.<sup>18</sup> The other approach was that of Otto, who, in contrast, had much more invested in Herod and did not want to believe that the appointment

"Es drängt sich der Schluß auf, daß bei dem Wunsche des Herodes, die hasmonäische Prinzessin zu heiraten, keinerlei politische Berechnung im Spiele gewesen ist, sondern nur das höchst einfache und natürliche Motiv, daß er in Liebe zu Mariamme entbrannt war."

See Emil Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, I (3rd–4th edition; 3 vols.; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1901–1909), 1.378–379.

of Aristobulus was a mere surrender to pressure; Otto's Herod was not that kind of ruler.19 Rather, Otto claimed, counter to Schürer, that Herod's general strategy from the outset was to bolster his own reign by linking it to the Hasmoneans, and that this same policy was reflected both in his marriage with Mariamme and in the appointment of Aristobulus.<sup>20</sup> Acordingly, Otto also attempted to neutralize the obvious point of Herod's appointing Hananel rather than Aristobulus by arguing that it derived only from a technical problem: when Herod came to power, Aristobulus was too young for the position, according to the usual rules, and therefore Herod appointed Hananel as an innocuous stand-in for him until he came of age.<sup>21</sup> That is, all the Hasmonean pressure did was bring Herod to appoint the young Aristobulus sooner than he had planned.<sup>22</sup> Thus, if between the two options, displacement and cooperation, Schürer thought Herod tried first the former approach but was later forced into the latter one, Otto thought that Herod all along followed the latter one, until the demonstrations of support for Aristobulus showed Herod his error, at which point he changed course diametrically.<sup>23</sup> Common to both interpretations, however, is the conclusion that Herod recognized he had made a strategic error in appointing Aristobulus, and corrected it by murdering him.

But if Otto would not allow Herod to be the kind of guy a few women could push into changing his strategy, Schalit did him one better: Schalit envisioned a Herod who followed the same correct strategy from beginning to end. The most Schalit would allow Herod was a tactical error. And that, indeed, was how Schalit dealt with this episode. Namely, Schalit's Herod, the exact opposite of Otto's, always intended to prevent the Hasmoneans from holding any position of authority: "we cannot at all agree with Otto's opinion, who refuses to recognize, already in this act [the appointment of Hananel, drs], Herod's opposition in principle to the Hasmonean family" (p. 102).<sup>24</sup> For Schalit, rather, Herod's only mistake, and

Otto, Herodes, 41–42.

Ibid., 39.

Ibid., 38. The Bible does not fix a minimal age for service as a priest or high priest, but one may assume there was some rule. For the exclusion of "an infant," see Josephus, Ant. 12.44.

The obvious weakness of Otto's case is in the unlikelihood that Herod was more bothered by traditional Jewish age requirements than the Hasmoneans themselves were.

Otto's approach was taken one step further by Willrich (Das Haus des Herodes [above, n. 12], 52), who, just as concerning Antigonus, urged the possibility that Herod was not, in fact, responsible for Aristobulus' death. Cf. above, n. 15.

"Keineswegs können wir uns hier der Meinung Ottos [col. 39] anschließen, der in diesem Akt [the appointment of Hananel rather than Aristobulus] 'noch keine prinzipielle Gegnerschaft des Herodes gegen die hasmonäische Familie' erkennen will."

change of course, were in the realm of tactics: by appointing Hananel he had moved too fast and revealed his goal before his strength was sufficiently consolidated to achieve it, and, by leaving Aristobulus without a position that more or less tethered him to Jerusalem, he left the Hasmonean free to move about the country and, one may surmise, organize support for himself, thereby laying the foundations for a putsch against Herod (see Ant. 15.31). Accordingly, Schalit's Herod realized it had not been "politically smart" (politisch klug [pp. 103, 108]) to keep Aristobulus out of the high priesthood, and he revised the situation; "the political tack and the wicked intentions (bösen Vorsätze) remained, only the tactics had changed" (p. 109).<sup>25</sup> When the opportunity came, at his swimming pool in Jericho, Herod achieved his goal.

Thus, Schalit's Herod was a scrupulous homo realpoliticus, <sup>26</sup> and Schalit is full of praise for him. True, Herod made mistakes, whether out of love, hatred, or miscalculation; but he knew that power makes the world go around and that Rome had the power. Consequently, Schalit's Herod knew very well that all his own power came from Rome, not from the Jews upon whom he had been foisted by Roman lances. As such, this rex socius et amicus populi Romani linked his reign and his very being to Rome, and thus brought to Judea—so Schalit emphasizes—a period of peace and prosperity, the local version of the pax Romana of which Augustus and his public relations agents were so proud.<sup>27</sup>

Schalit took this aspect of Herod very seriously. If Herod's harsh measures were intended to keep him in power, they were also intended to keep Judea quiet and save it from war (as opposed to the decades of stubborn but hopeless Hasmonean anti-Roman violence that had preceded his reign) in order to allow him to bring peace and prosperity to his subjects. Hence Schalit's detailed discussion of the Hellenistic Herrscherideal (ideals of rulers; pp. 465–471), hence too, particularly, the juxtaposition of the long section on "Herodes und der Glaube an die Sendung Roms und des Augustus" ("Herod and the Belief in Rome's and Augustus's Mission"; pp. 412–450) and the one on "Das Reich des Herodes und das Reich des Messias"

Note that the original Hebrew of this passage (King Herod, 65) refers only to "intentions," without "wicked." The latter was, apparently, contributed by the translator. It does not fit Schalit's general position, which, with regard to great men and politics, has little use for "good" and "bad."

Just as his father, Antipater, before him. At p. 35, n. 104, Schalit emphasizes that while both the Pharisees and Antipater agreed that Roman rule must be accepted, the former saw it as divine punishment for Jewish sins while the latter "die Dinge rein realpolitisch beurteilte" (assessed things realpolitically).

On Herod's projected public image and its comparison to Augustus's, see especially Kimberly Czajkowski and Benedikt Eckhardt, Herod in History: Nicolaus of Damascus and His Augustan Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

("Herod's Reich and the Messiah's Reich"; pp. 450–460). True, the evidence that Schalit assembles in the latter section for his suggestion that Herod allowed his reign to be portrayed as a fulfillment of the Jews' messianic hopes is not always convincing. Schalit's hypothesis that Herod claimed Davidic descent (pp. 473–480) is based on Josephus's report (Ant. 14.9) that Herod claimed Babylonian descent, on the basis of some audacious extrapolation: (a) a weak case for the assumption that Herod supported Hillel (who is known to have moved to Palestine from Babylonia), together with (b) late and tendentious rabbinic sources that claimed Davidic descent for Hillel28 and (c) Schalit's suggestion that the "Herodians" mentioned in the Gospels, in the context of Jesus's career (Matthew 22:16; Mark 3:6, 12:13), were supporters of Herod who believed he was the Messiah, a suggestion based on next to nothing.29

The very fact that Schalit went out on such limbs in search of corroborative evidence for his basic thesis, that Herod viewed the success of his reign as evidence that it was in some sense messianic, shows how important this thesis was for him. Indeed, it also furnishes the very last line of the book: after summarizing the fact that Jewish tradition recalls Herod only as "the wicked Herod" and "the Idumaean slave," <sup>30</sup> Schalit concludes as follows: "But today an unbiased historian should bestow upon him the only title that befits him: 'Herod, King of Israel'" (p. 67531). In the Hebrew, the last four words are an explicit play on a central slogan of Jewish messianism (beginning with b. Rosh Hashana 25a) that proclaims the hope for the messianic restoration of the kingdom of "David, King of Israel."

This point drew criticism from several reviewers, beginning with Menahem Stern's review of the Hebrew original: "A. Schalit's Herod," JJS 11 (1960): 55–56. For Schalit's attempt to defend his position, on the basis of some patristic evidence, see his "Die 'herodianischen' Patriarchen und der 'davidische' Herodes," Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute 6 (1968): 114–123. For more recent and detailed discussions, see David Goodblatt, The Monarchic Principle (TSAJ 38; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1994), 143–175; Martin Jacobs, Die Institution des jüdischen Patriarchen: Eine quellen- und traditiionskritische Studie zur Geschichte der Juden in der Spätantike (TSAJ 52; Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1995), 212–224.

For other views, see H. H. Rowley, "The Herodians in the Gospels," JTS 41 (1940): 14–27; Harold W. Hoehner, Herod Antipas (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 17; Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1972), 331–342. Note, moreover, that, in the Gospels, where the name "Herod" appears more than thirty times, apart from the narratives of Jesus's infancy it refers not to Herod the Great, but, rather, to his son Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee.

This Hebrew Schimpfname manages in a mere two words not only to allude to Herod's Idumean descent but also to characterize him as a slave of Rome, which Hebrew sources term Edom, i.e., Idumea.

"Der unvoreingenommene Geschichtsschreiber unserer Zeit aber hat ihm den Titel beizulegen, der allein ihm gebührt: Herodes, König von Israel."

#### IV Background and Reception

Any attempt to understand the background and genesis of Schalit's approach, on the one hand, and of its reception, on the other, should, I believe, take its point of departure from the discovery that the views he held and advocated beginning in the mid-1940s and articulated so fully in König Herodes, as summarized above, are quite the opposite of those he held as late as the mid-1930s.32 This leads easily to the hypothesis that what was central for his view of Herod, as it came to be in König Herodes, a work that he produced in the course of the 1950s, and in other works of the post-war years, was an understanding of the Jews' relations with Rome in light of their fate under the Third Reich.

As so often happens, I discovered the change in Schalit's view only in the course of grappling with a bibliographical riddle. At War 5.367, Josephus recalls how in a speech before the walls of besieged Jerusalem he called upon its defenders to surrender, arguing, inter alia, that God, who endowed different nations with dominion at different times, was now "over" Italy. That is quite a meaningful statement, and therefore my curiosity was piqued by a footnote in Schalit's 1943/ 44 introduction to his Hebrew translation of Josephus's Antiquities, in which he refers readers, in connection with War 5.367, to a forthcoming article entitled "Zur nationalpolitischen Theorie des Josephus" ("On Josephus's National-Political Theory").33 My intensive search for the article, however, was fruitless: the usual and unsusual methods of searching (in those pre-Google days) came up with nothing, and so it appeared that the article never appeared. That conclusion, which the advent of Google and other online resources has not changed, is not so surprising. Historians, as others, frequently promise publications that never materialize, for one reason or another, and Schalit was no exception.34

What was perplexing, however, was the fact that, as I discovered when looking for the planned German article, Schalit had already published, in Hebrew, a decade earlier (1934), a detailed article with virtually the same title: "Josephus's National-Political Views (in His War)," and it included a detailed discussion of the same passage, War 5.367.35 Why should a Hebrew writer refer his Hebrew readers to a non-existent German article rather than an extant Hebrew one? And if, as

For fuller documentation of this thesis, see my "On Abraham Schalit, Herod, Josephus, the Holocaust, Horst R. Moehring, and the Study of Ancient Jewish History," Jewish History 2/2 (Fall 1987): esp. 10–13. On an earlier development of Schalit's views, before and after his move to Palestine in 1929, see the sequel to that article, cited above, n. 6.

See Schalit, Josephus: Antiquities (above, n. 7), 1.xxiii, n. 35.

For two examples, see above, n. 4.

Mosnaim 2 (1933/34): 296–305 (in Hebrew). On War 5.367, see ibid., 300.

often happens, he planned to revise his views in the German version, why did he not at least refer his readers to the Hebrew version "in the meantime," as is so usual in such cases?

This question immediately gave rise to the suspicion that Schalit's view had changed significantly, so that, by 1943/44, he no longer subscribed to the views he had published in 1934. And that hypothesis was further strengthened by the discovery that Schalit, elsewhere as well, tried to consign that 1934 article to oblivion. Even when seeking a job at the Hebrew University, around 1950, a situation in which scholars typically list every publication they can, Schalit left it out of his list of publications.<sup>36</sup>

Once armed with that hypothesis, it was not hard to substantiate it. It turns out that, on the one hand, in the 1930s, Schalit was expressing standard Zionist positions concerning the need for a heroic fight for Jewish statehood, the comparison of Rome to the British Mandate in Palestine, and the consequent condemnation of Herod (as well as Josephus) for accepting Roman rule. Herod was a "reptile" whom only an antisemite like Hugo Willrich might declare kosher,37 Josephus was a spineless "rag" (Lumpen) and a worthless individual;38 the British should learn the lesson that history taught the Romans, insofar as they disappeared and the Jews are again back in Palestine;39 and the only "historical meaning" of Roman rule in Judea was —according to the final pages of Schalit's 1937 volume on the subject—rapacious taxation and arbitrary rule by avaricious governors bent on self-enrichment.<sup>40</sup>

See my "On Abraham Schalit, Herod, Josephus," 22, n. 4.

So in a Hebrew letter of July 1933 to Klausner, in the file cited below, n. 39. For Schalit on Willrich, see above, n. 12. Given the fact that already the Bible (Leviticus 30) declares reptiles unclean, "to purify a reptile" is a standard rabbinic metaphor for offering specious proof for a false proposition (b. Sanhedrin 17a).

A. Schalit, "Josephus und Justus: Studien zur Vita des Josephus," Klio 26 (1933): 68 ("einem Lumpen und nichtswürdigen Individuum"). So too, in the last lines of his Hebrew article cited in n. 35, Schalit refers, seeing no need to explain, to Josephus's "degenerate character." For another statement of the same view around the same time, cf. Menahem (Edmund) Stein's Hebrew translation of Josephus's Life (Tel Aviv: Stybel, 1932/33; p. 89, n. 5): with regard to Josephus's report at §415 that his wife left him, Stein explains, as if no evidence were needed, that "One may conjecture that the woman was disgusted by the traitor and took the opportunity to free herself from him." On this widespread assessment among Jews, see the end of Ch. 2.

So according to a Hebrew letter of December 28, 1933, to Klausner, preserved in the National Library in Jerusalem's Klausner collection (ARC 1086, no. 498).

Roman Administration in Palestine (Library of Palestinology 5–6; Jerusalem: Bialik Foundation, 1937), 101–104 (in Hebrew).

These were all positions well at home in Jewish nationalist historiography, most notably represented by Schalit's friend, Joseph Klausner.41

Let us take, for example, Schalit's treatment of the days of the Roman governor of Judea ca. 50 CE, Ventidius Cumanus. On the one hand, his governorship raises, inter alia, an involved chronological issue, complicated by a passage in Tacitus and related material, and Schalit-the-philologist gives it detailed attention in a long footnote.<sup>42</sup> But our focus here is on Schalit-the-historian, and here his position, concerning both Josephus and Roman rule, is very clear.

Namely, Josephus's account of Cumanus's term in Judea is divided into three violent episodes: one in the Temple, one near Jerusalem, and one further north. The first began with a Roman soldier's vulgar provocation in the Temple, followed by the Jews' protests to the governor, who urges them to remain calm; when they do not, he calls in troops to make a show of force, and the Jews, frightened, flee in panic, trampling numerous among their numbers in the narrow passageways. So Josephus, at War 2.224–227 and Antiquities 20.105–112. Here, in contrast, is Schalit's version of the story:

The wickedness of this governor fanned the flame of rebellion [and] hatred in wide segments of the population, such that one spark was enough to set off rebellions and riots. They came in the wake of an indecent act of a Roman soldier, who outraged the religious sensitivity of the multitude that had gathered in the courtyard of the Temple at the time of the offering of the paschal sacrifice. The disorder ended with terrible bloodshed in the courtyard of the Temple, which was carried out by Cumanus's soldiers.<sup>43</sup>

This paraphrase of Josephus's story is egregiously skewed, in three main ways. First, Schalit tells the story in order to illustrate his opening generalization about Cumanus's wickedness, but the story itself is about a single Roman soldier who acted on his own; Josephus even emphasizes this point, at the end of his narrative ("so great were the sufferings engendered by the wanton behavior of a single soldier" [Ant. 20.112]). This is a standard apologetic move on Josephus's part: when Jews or Romans break the rules, he prefers to underline that they were exceptional. Compare, for example, Ant. 18.84, where Josephus emphasizes how few some Jewish scoundrels were. Schalit would have none of that; for him, wicked Romans were typical Romans. Second, most of Josephus's story, in both accounts, is about how the outraged Jews misbehaved, and the account in Antiquities also

On Klausner, see David Berger, "Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus: The Impact of Zionism on Joseph Klausner's History of the Second Temple," in idem, Cultures in Collision and Conversation: Essays in the Intellectual History of the Jews (Boston: Academic Press, 2011), 312–325.

Schalit, Roman Administration, 147, n. 82.

Schalit, Roman Administration, 86.

reports Cumanus's efforts to calm the Jews. None of that remains here. Third, and worst, the last line of Schalit's summary of this episode reports terrible bloodshed was carried out by Cumanus's men, but Josephus, in both of his accounts, reports only that Cumanus ordered his soldiers to assemble in a show of force, whereupon the Jews, in panic, started to flee and, since the exits were narrow, many were trampled by fellow Jews in their flight. There is not a single word in Josephus (the only source for the story), in either version, about Romans killing Jews, nor, of course, about Cumanus, the Roman governor, ordering his soldiers to kill Jews.

Here, then, in one small paragraph, we have Schalit, in 1937, painting Roman rule in Palestine very hostilely and doing it by manhandling Josephus's report, which is his only source. Presumably, had he been asked how he could do such a thing, Schalit would have responded that Josephus was a despicable pro-Roman and so the open-eyed historian, who was not born yesterday, must fill in the blanks himself: if a confrontation between Roman troops and a multitude of Jews resulted in the death of many Jews, the Romans must be responsible, no matter how Josephus chose to tell the story. Schalit's version of this story is just like Klausner's.<sup>44</sup>

Josephus's second story (War 2.228–231; Ant. 20.113–117) is about Jewish highwaymen who attacked and robbed a Roman official on a road near Jerualem. Cumanus dispatched troops to carry out reprisals on nearby Jewish villages on the assumption they had abetted the criminals, and one of the soldiers went so far as to tear up and burn a Torah scroll. That elicited Jewish protests and Cumanus had the soldier beheaded. That is, there was a clash initiated by criminal Jews, which elicited punishment, but when a Roman soldier involved in punishing the Jews went too far and violated Jewish sancta, the Roman governor of Judea, recognizing the severity of the situation, demonstratively and severely punished him—a story that hardly served an anti-Roman/anti-British narrative.

Rather than reporting such Roman sensitivity, Schalit omitted the entire story. Instead, he moved directly to Josephus's third story (War 2.232–246; Ant. 20.118–136), which features Galilean Jews being killed by nasty others—Samaritans and Cumanus's troops—and thus fits easily into the picture Schalit wanted to paint.

The same goes, but even more egregiously, for Schalit's treatment of one of Cumanus's successors, Albinus. Schalit's account of him is hostile throughout, but

Note especially Klausner's closing ironic comment, that the Roman soldier was not punished; "had he been punished, Josephus, as was his wont, would have hurried to report this act of integrity by the Roman governor" (History of the Second Temple, V [2nd edition; Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1952], 14 [in Hebrew]).

the nadir, of Albinus's image and also of Schalit's work as a responsible historian, comes in the final sentence: "His last prank (ta'alul), before leaving his job, was to release all the Sicarii and the rich prisoners, who paid him money in return for their freedom." <sup>45</sup> That is his rendition of Josephus's report at Antiquities 20.215, which reads as follows:

When Albinus heard that Gessius Florus was arriving as his successor, he—desiring to be thought of as someone who had provided something [beneficial] for the Jerusalemites brought out all the prisoners and ordered the execution of all of those who were clearly worthy of death, but freed, in return for money, those who had been imprisoned only on some minor and incidental charge. The result was that the prison was purged of prisoners, but the land was filled with brigands.

As Shaye Cohen observed, the tone of this passage is "particularly ambiguous and/or self-contradictory." <sup>46</sup> In particular, note that it is not clear whether "in return for money" refers to bribes or to commutation of imprisonment into fines, nor is it clear how the release of criminals who were guilty only of "some minor and accidental wrongdoing" could fill the land with brigands, who are serious felons. So perhaps Schalit was allowed to interpret that the way he chose. But what could possibly justify his decision simply to ignore Josephus's statement that Albinus executed those who were clearly deserving of death? Nothing, as far as I can see, apart from his desire to denigrate Albinus, and, through him, Roman rule in general.

#### V The New Schalit

By the time Schalit's monograph on Herod appeared in Hebrew, in 1960, Schalit's views had changed radically, to the realpolitical view we saw in Part III, and he knew it. Although he dedicated that original version of his volume to the memory of Klausner, who had died in 1958, he notes in the preface that had Klausner lived to read the book, he would have "condemned me severely (lit: 'sentenced me [to death] in boiling water') for violation of the nation's sancta, in his opinion." <sup>47</sup> As he explains in the preface to the present volume (xxv–xxvi), as already in the Hebrew volume (p. 9), Klausner wrote from a "Hasmonean" perspective and his "Jewish national feeling" made it impossible for him to judge Herod fairly: "Ev-

Schalit, Roman Administration, 88.

S. J. D. Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 8; Leiden: Brill, 1979), 62.

King Herod (above, n. 1), 10.

erything the Hasmoneans did can be explained and forgiven, while all of Herod's acts, no matter how much they benefited the public and how excellent they were, derived only from the self-interest of that corrupt man."

If there Schalit limits himself to rejecting Klausner's position, a few years later, in his preface to a collection of articles about Josephus, he recognizes that his own view had changed:

Wir blicken heute auf die Vorgänge in Judäa in der letzten Zeit des Zweiten Tempels anders, als das noch vor etwa zwei Generationen üblich war. Die Problematik des jüdischen Daseins im Römischen Reich war viel komplizierter, als man seinerzeit anzunehmen geneigt war<sup>48</sup>

(We look today on what happened in Judea in the last years of the Second Temple period differently than was still common some two generations ago. The problematics of Jewish existence in the Roman Reich were much more complicated than one then tended to think.)

If we ask, what it is that brought about this change, what led Schalit to believe that in the world of politics might makes right (so "right" can come only within scare quotes, as we saw at n. 13), it seems that numerous indications show that it was the Holocaust.

A priori there is little chance than any major revision of thought in Israel in the 1950s, certainly if it concerns states and power, could have transpired without connection to the greatest and most fateful clash history has ever seen between the Jews and a powerful state, a clash that transpired only a few years earlier. Correspondingly, I would estimate at about 0% the chance that an Israeli could have written, in the 1950s, that had the last Hasmoneans accepted Roman rule willingly they could have thereby prevented "the great national catastrophe of 66–70 CE" (p. 24), without having the Holocaust in mind. Indeed, the term translated here as "catastrophe" appears in the 1960 Hebrew original (p. 23) as shoa, which, although a common noun, was used, already by then, as today, as a proper noun denoting the Holocaust.49 For Schalit, the Holocaust showed that in the real

Zur Josephus-Forschung (WdF 84; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), xviii. In a footnote, Schalit refers here specifically to a long article by Y. Baer (cited below, n. 54).

For a prominent Israeli poet's complaint, as early as 1955, about the widespread use of the term shoa, see Uri Zvi Grinberg, Collected Works, XVIII (ed. D. Miron; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2013), 84–86 [in Hebrew]). Indeed, a search of the JPress: Jewish Historical Press website for 1958–1960 easily demonstrates that, as today, already then, when Schalit was completing his monograph, ha-shoa, with the definite article, referred specifically to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. So do many, although not all, of the occurrences of shoa without the definite article. In the present case, in which Schalit qualifies the shoa as a "national" one, it seems to be impossible to imagine the comparison with the Holocaust was not present in his mind and those of his Hebrew readers. For a survey of the ascent and dominance of the term, see Dan Michman, "Why Is the

world might is all that matters, so there is no right apart from might and those who have might may and should "rightly" use it, while those who do not have it are wrong to act as if they did. Accordingly, Herod (as later Josephus) was right to bow to Roman might and Herod was also justified in using his own might to keep himself in power, especially since, as Schalit repeatedly argues, that allowed him to achieve, for the Jews, the maximum possible given the circumstances, which were Roman circumstances. Those Jews who strove for more, before Herod or after him, lost more and brought about the death of multitudes along the way. Given the fact that the Romans, as opposed to the Nazis, were not bent on exterminating the Jews, only on ruling them, Schalit's conclusion from the Holocaust, that those with power will have their way, led him to conclude that Jews in antiquity should have bowed to Roman might, just as Herod was right to use his might to do what needed to be done to maintain his position.

Just as it is apparent that Schalit's approach in König Herodes (as in several other works) was a response to the Holocaust, so too is it clear that the Holocaust figured in the responses that the book elicited. For although the book was quite properly hailed as a model of historical-philological scholarship,50 its ideological line drew criticism, even extreme criticism, from Jews and Israelis who accused Schalit of justifying Hitler. Thus, Menahem Stern concluded his review by responding, in his typically restrained formulation, to the abovementioned conclusion of this volume:

The reviewer hesitates as to whether "King of Israel" is indeed the appropriate title for one whose starting point was the postulate that the sole source of justice and of law is the ruler and his whim, the roots of whose cruelty were, as Schalit himself states (p. 329 [= p. 657 in the German edition, drs]), fast intertwined in his murderous nature, and whose whole policy was governed by the intention of obscuring the likeness of Judaism beyond recognition.51

A less urbane reviewer, Getzel Kressel, chose to focus on the book's final chapter, where Schalit summarizes his view of Herod as characterizd by political wisdom.<sup>52</sup> Already in the first lines of his review, Kressel complains that Schalit's book propounds, "I believe for the first time in Hebrew, a theory that justifies the

Shoah Called 'the Shoah' or 'the Holocaust'? On the History of the Terminology for the Nazi Anti-Jewish Campaign," Journal of Holocaust Research 35 (2021): 233–256. My thanks to Aynat Rubinstein and Giddon Ticotsky for their help with this point.

Among the substantial reviews, see K. Matthiae, Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 69 (1974): 34–41; K. Müller, Theologische Revue 57 (1971): 352–359; and K. Schubert, Biblische Zeitschrift 5 (1961): 125–133. Some others are cited in the coming notes.

Stern, "A. Schalit's Herod" (above, n. 28), 57–58.

G. Kressel, "Herod: A Case of Abominable Machiavellianism," Mosnaim 14 (37) (1961/62): 124–129 (in Hebrew).

most abominable and murderous jungle in human relations." In his conclusion, referring to Schalit's deployment of "Herod, King of Israel" as the bottom line of his work, Kressel turns to the twentieth century:

the present writer cannot conclude his discussion without appending a large question mark to that concluding sentence . . . to express the deep shock felt in reading things like this in Hebrew, today, after we saw how millions have been murdered and imprisoned as a result of a system that constitutes "political wisdom," and some years later, as a result of another political wisdom, that arch-murderer "is thrown out, like an abominable branch" [Isaiah 14:19, drs], from his resting-place in his mausoleum.

Although Kressel alludes here to Stalin,<sup>53</sup> it was and is impossible to write in Israeli Hebrew about the murder of millions without also alluding to the Holocaust.

Again, even ten years after the Hebrew original of the work appeared, Yitzhak Baer, Schalit's colleague in the very same department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found, in an essay that focuses mostly on denigrating Josephus, an opportunity to complain about Herod too, and so, very harshly, about Schalit as well:

Schalit treats the Roman nobles and rulers kindly and graciously while denying the Jewish people its self-respect and its right to save itself from a regime that was interested only in cruel murder and in acts of prostitution54

Note that Baer's characterization of Roman rule in Judea, in 1971, corresponds closely to Schalit's characterization of it in 1937.55

Accordingly, although Schalit received, with whatever politicking,56 an Israel Prize for the Hebrew volume after it appeared in 1960, the book isolated him to a very significant extent from the world of Israeli scholarship, and soon he began to find a German context more and more comfortable. True, he responded to his critics in Hebrew, in an elegant way, in a 1962 Hebrew essay on Theodor Mommsen, in which he praised the great German historian for recognizing that the usual rules of interpersonal morals do not apply to the great men of political history:

Whose remains were removed, late in 1961, from the mausoleum he shared with Lenin. Kressel's citation from Isaiah amounts to comparing Stalin, and so Herod, to a biblical archvillain: the king of Babylonia.

Y. Baer, "Jerusalem in the Times of the Great Revolt," Zion 36 (1970/71): 131, n. 14 (in Hebrew). On the context of this article in Baer's oeuvre, which focused on constructing an ideal Israel in antiquity that did not correspond to what Josephus and Schalit reported, see Israel J. Yuval, "Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism," in The Jewish Past Revisited (Ch. 5, n. 7), 81–82. See above, at n. 40.

See Jacob Katz, With My Own Eyes (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1995), 146.

He who concentrates all the government in his own hands and turns it into a dictatorship is not a usurper; rather, he executes the verdict of history. Julius Caesar was not the murderer of the Roman Republic. Rather, he did what he had to do. Pompey was a little man, because he was not able to do what could be done and what he should have done. Mommsen shows, therefore, no sympathy for all sorts of people in the late Republic, such as Cicero and Cato, who wanted to preserve the Republic when its fate was already sealed.<sup>57</sup>

Apart from that, in 1968 Schalit devoted an article to answering his critics about Herod's messianic claims,58 and in 1973 he responded in a general way to Baer, as we have seen (at n. 48). Basically, however, Schalit's response is evident in the list of publications in the 1980 volume published in his memory, which shows that the last two decades of his life, until his death in 1979, saw more and more publication in German and less and less in Hebrew, in blatant contrast to the preceding decades. Correspondingly, he spent more and more time in Germany after he retired from the Hebrew University in 1966.<sup>59</sup>

However, it should be noted, in conclusion, that Schalit's rejection of the standard Zionist view as to who was laudable and who to be denounced with regard to ancient Jewish rebels did not make him into a harbinger of the third, diasporic, approach depicted in the first study in this volume. That approach too arose as an antithesis to Zionist historiography, but it posits Jewish life in the Diaspora. Schalit did not. An optimistic view of Jewish life in the Diaspora, that might be appropriate for American Jews more than a half a century after the end of the Holocaust, had little appeal for a Central European Jew writing when it was still underway, or in recent memory. So if the Holocaust, as we have seen, taught Schalit that only power matters in this world, so too did it teach him that the hope for peaceful Jewish life

A. Schalit, "Theodor Mommsen," in Historians and Historical Schools: Lectures Delivered at the Seventh Convention of the Historical Society of Israel (Jerusalem: The Historical Society of Israel, 1962/63), 77 (in Hebrew; more or less identical with Schalit's introduction to D. Kalai's first volume of the Hebrew translation of Mommsen's Römische Geschichte [Tel-Aviv: Masadah, 1961], viii). See above, n. 28.

See Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period: Abraham Schalit Memorial Volume (ed. A. Oppenheimer, U. Rappaport and M. Stern; Jerusalem: Yad Izhaq ben Zvi and Ministry of Defence, 1980), 483–488 (in Hebrew): a chronologically organized list of fifty-eight publications. Of the first thirtyfour, down to 1964, apart from his Vienna dissertation and an article based on it all but five are in Hebrew. Of the remaining twenty-four, only one (no. 52) is in Hebrew, and it is a translation from a German original (no. 53; for proof, from details of editing, that the German version was his original, see my "On Abraham Schalit" [above, n. 32], 25–26, n. 55). His main post-King Herod publications are its 1969 German version (see n. 1), his 1968 Namenwörterbuch zu Flavius Josephus (see n. 10), and his posthumous Untersuchungen zur Assumptio Mosis (Arbeiten zur Literatur und Geschichte des hellenistischen Judentums 17; Leiden: Brill, 1989). In his last years he was working on a German commentary on Antiquities; see above, n. 4.

in the Diaspora was chimeric. Thus, already in his first major expression of his new view, at the end of the introduction to Antiquities in 1943/44, he wrote as follows:

The Jewish Antiquities is the first work written after the Destruction that sees the future of the Jewish people in the West as a positive political program . . . Today, about nineteen hundred years later, we know that Josephus's political program was based on an illusion.60

And thus, some thirty-five years later, just before his death, he wrote quite emphatically in explaining the origin of antisemitism in antiquity: "What really engendered the hatred [of Jews] was Jewish existence in the Diaspora per se" (Was wirklich den Haß hervorgerufen hat, war die jüdische Diasporaexistenz als solche).61

Today, while Schalit's three-volume Hebrew translation of Josephus' Antiquities remains a or perhaps even the foundation of Israeli study of the Second Temple period, his magnum opus on Herod is hardly used, whether in Hebrew or in German. In contrast to Klausner's and Baer's works on the Second Temple period, which are generally ignored by scholars working on ancient history but are studied with interest by those interested in the ideological struggles of the decades in which they were written, Schalit's König Herodes is hardly considered from either point of view. That is a shame, for, it seems, no one else combined such a complete familiarity with the nuts and bolts of Josephus and ancient Roman and Jewish history with such a clear understanding of the axiological issues which any historian must confront in dealing with Herod.62

Schalit, Josephus: Antiquities (above, n. 7), 1.lxxxi–lxxxii (the end of Schalit's introduction to Ant. 1–10).

Gnomon 50 (1978): 285—a review of J. N. Sevenster, The Roots of Pagan Anti-Semitism in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 1975).

In the original publication of this essay, the conclusion was preceded by a final section on "Herod since Schalit," and followed by appendices that provided lists of reviews of König Herodes (see n. 50) and of post-Schalit works about Herod.

# 8 Summary and Final Reflections

If we now revert to the questions asked in the foreword, we can summarize that:

a. The search for an explanation for a superfluous comma in Heinrich Graetz's Geschichte led to the discovery of a serious change in his attitude toward Josephus that reflected, we suggested, heightened sensitivity in the 1870s about charges, in Germany, that Jews were treasonous and/or cowardly.

b. The search for an explanation why Graetz omitted a certain first-century episode in the first two editions of his Geschichte but included it in the next ones, in which he also changed what was earlier called a Racenkampf into a Religionskampf, led to the realization that, in the 1870s, after the full legal emancipation of the Jews of Germany, Graetz was tending to ascribe to the Jews' neighbors, rather than to the government, responsibility for the Jews' troubles, just as he was tending to a more militant Jewish response.

c. The search for the identity of the M. L. who wrote a scathing review of Graetz in 1871, and for an explanation as to how it happened that Heinrich von Treitschke, eight years later, cited the obscure publications cited by M. L. in the same partial and erroneous way, led to the discovery of the path that led from a dispute in the 1850s and 1860s, among medievalists, about the editing of Latin texts, to the emergence of antisemitism from the gutter into respectable academia and journalism and, eventually, to Der Stürmer.

d. Analysis of the background of Isaak Heinemann's use of Gleichschaltung with regard to Antiochus Epiphanes' persecution of Judaism led not only to the interpretation of Heinemann's response to Bickermann on the background of Nazi policy and legislation in the 1930s, but also to understanding Heinemann's response to Bickermann on the background of the former's identity as a devotee of "Hellenized" German Jewish Orthodoxy. The latter explains Heinemann's opposition both to Bickermann's theory, which assumed Hellenists are traitors to Judaism, and to liberal Jews who represent Jews to the government, whom Heinemann considered to be too "lukewarm" about Judaism.

e. An attempt to understand what generated the misnumbering of paragraphs and other editorial bungles in Elias Bickermann's "Makkabäerbücher" (1928) led not only to an understanding of the development of his understanding of 2 Maccabees but also to the discovery that his revolutionary interpretation of Antiochus's persecution of Judaism, in Der Gott der Makkabäer (1937), was born out of German Catholics' understanding of the persecution they endured during Bismarck's Kulturkampf of the 1870s.

f. An attempt to understand why Abraham Schalit, writing in Hebrew in 1943/44, preferred to refer his Hebrew readers to a forthcoming German article of his (that never appeared) rather than to a Hebrew article of his on the same topic which had appeared a decade earlier, led to the realization that Schalit concluded from the Holocaust that "might makes right" and hence revised, diametrically, his attitude toward those ancient Jews, such as Herod and Josephus, who collaborated with Rome.

✶✶✶

Hopefully these studies will interest several types of readers.

Scholars of modern German-Jewish Jewry will hopefully agree that the study of what German-Jewish historians thought about ancient Jews and their relations with ancient empires, studies based inter alia on close comparison of editions and parallel publications, may broaden and deepen their understanding about how those historians saw and experienced the modern Reichs in which they lived.

My colleagues, scholars of Jewish history in the Greco-Roman era, will hopefully find it interesting to follow and understand the changing views of some of our prominent predecessors, and also take these studies as a recommendation, or admonition, to think critically about their own work and its contexts.

Students, especially graduate students preparing themselves for careers as historians, will hopefully recognize, additionally, that (as Fuhrmann put it) the paragons of the past were, after all, human, and also how fruitful it can be to avoid the impulse simply to shrug their shoulders and go on reading whenever they encounter typos, strange diction or punctuation, inconcinnities, mis-references, or other infelicities in whatever it is they are reading. While it may be that, after investigation, they cannot find more than carelessness, often enough pursuit of such oddities can lead to discoveries that are interesting and themselves of historical import.

Other readers, especially but not only those interested in Jewish history, will hopefully find it interesting to see some examples of the nitty-gritty of historiography and to understand something of the interplay between sources from the past, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the historian's contemporary world, within which historiography is created and develops.

# Original Publications


## Illustrations

#### Front cover illustration:

Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, XI (Leipzig: Leiner, 1870), 406, with marginal note, "gut gelogen!" (well lied!), by Heinrich von Treitschke. Image courtesy of the SUB Göttingen, where the volume's shelfmark is 8 H E UN 122/33:11

#### Figure 1: Chapter 4, p. 78:

Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, II (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1882), 418, note ✶

#### Figure 2: Chapter 4, p. 78:

[Max Lehmann], Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland 1871: col. 30

#### Figure 3: Chapter 4, p. 106:

Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, XI (1870), p. 70, with marginalia by Max Lehmann and Heinrich von Treitschke. Image courtesy of the SUB Göttingen, where the volume's shelfmark is 8 H E UN 122/33:11

#### Figure 4: Ch. 5, p. 114:

E. Bickermann, "Makkabäerbücher," Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft I/27 (1928): col. 779

#### Figure 5: Ch. 5, p. 115:

E. Bickermann, "Makkabäerbücher," Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft I/27 (1928): col. 792

## Index of Authors Cited

Abrahams, I. 3 Aderet, A. 27 Alon, G. 21, 27, 29 Altmann, A. 143 Amir, J. 151 Arnsberg, P. 141 Asch, A. 51 Attridge, H. W. 34 Avineri, S 16, 58 Awerbuch, M. 9 Baeck, L. 3, 11–13, 145–148 Baer, Y. 164, 166 Baerwald, A. 45–47, 51 Baker, L. 11, 145 Bamberger, F. 11 1 Barkai, A. 13 Bar-Kochva, B. 110 Baumel, M. 26, 27 Baumgarten, A. I. 4, 18, 24, 110, 111, 119, 120, 123, 130–132, 136, 137 Baumgarten, J. M. 24 Bell, H. I. 141 Bennette, R. A. 125 Bentzen, A. 134 Ben-Yehuda, N. 52 Berg, N. 71 Berger, D. 161 Berger, E. 30 Berger, M. 50 Bergmann, W. 73 Bickerman(n), E. 109–128, 130, 132, 137, 139 Bietenhard, H. 20 Bilde, P. 31, 32, 54, 55 Blumenthal 10 Böcher, O. 25 Boehlich, W. 71, 74 Bousset, W. 3 Boyarin, D. 27 Brakkelmann, G. 73 Brann, M. 6, 7, 13, 43, 45 Brenner, M. VII, 14, 32, 58 Bresslau, H. 85 Breuel, K. 131

Breuer, M. 139, 140 Bringmann, K. 109, 110, 113–114, 128, 132, 137 Brown, J. S. 93 Bußmann, W. 100 Caplow, T. 71 Carmilly-Weinberger, M. 6 Cassirer, T. 144 Cobet, C. 67 Cohen, H. 11 Cohen, S. J. D. 41, 47, 129, 163 Cohn, A. 96 Conforti, Y. 16 Conze, W. 67 Criniti, N. 26 Croce, B. X Czajkowski, K. 157 Dahn, F. 49 Deines, R. 2 Dorpalen, A. 72 Dove, A. 83, 86, 87, 93, 102 Dube, W. 90–91 Dubrau, A. 9 Dümmler, E. 88–90, 102 Eckhardt, B. 157 Efron, John 67 Efron, Joshua 4, 21–22 Eitz, T. 135 Elbogen, I. 2, 10, 11, 13, 14, 24, 30 Eliav, M. 8 Ellenson, D. 8, 146 Emmrich, H. 133 Engelman, T. M. 144 Feldman, L. 32, 52, 137 Ferziger, A. 142 Forger, D. 2 Freimann, A. 12 Freytag, G. 48 Fromer, [E.] J. 147 Fuhrmann, H. 85, 89, 92, 94, 170

Gärtner, E. 30 Gaston, L. 18 Geiger, A. 7, 9, 10 Götz, A. 72 Goldschmidt, A. 51 Goodblatt, D. 29, 30, 158 Goodman, M. 52 Graetz, H. 6, 13, 14, 16, 28, 31–69, 75, 76, 80, 81, 103–105 Grimm, J. & W. 112 Grinberg, U. Z. 164 Gruen, E. 26, 29 Gutberlet, C. 120–128 Guttmann, J. 11 Hadas, M. 142 Haenchen, E. 150 Harnack, A. von 3, 4, 140 Hausrath, A. 59 Heinemann, I. 13, 109, 111, 131–148 Hellwald, F. von 48 Hengel, M. 19, 20, 137 Henning, E. 88 Hertz, D. 111 Heschel, S. 2, 102 Heuer, R. 79, 84, 133 Hildesheimer, E. (I) 8 Hildesheimer, E. (II) 145 Hilpisch, S. 125 Himmelfarb, M. 110, 138 Hirsch, S. 87 Hoehner, H. W. 158 Hoffmann, C. 59, 91, 109–111, 131, 132, 137, 140, 141 Hoffmann, D. Z. 8, 9 Hoheisel, K. 2 Hollander, W. den 44 Holtzmann, R. 90 Horowitz, E. 49 Hübinger, G. 74 Hüffer, H. 88 Hughes, A. W. 24 Jacobs, M. 158 Jaffé, P. 85–100 Jarausch, K. H. 73 Jestaedt, W. 125

Joiner, T. E., Jr. 93 Jospe, A. 14 Kampe, N. 72, 73 Kasher, A. 27, 28, 55, 56 Katz, J. 53, 73, 166 Kellermann, B. 30 Kisch, G. 6, 133 Kittel, G. 20 Klausner, J. 17, 19, 52, 160–162, 168 Klemperer, V. 134–135 Klinzing, G. 2 Knabenbauer, J. 124 Knowles, M. D. 85 Kohn, H. 101 Kressel, G. 165–166 Krieger, K. 48, 49, 71–73, 76, 77, 92, 105 Krüger, C. G. 150 Kulka, O. D. 145–146 Kunze, H. 90–91 Landesmann, P. 6 Lederhendler, E. 142 Lehmann, M. 81–84, 92, 95–99, 102–108 Leitgeb, A. 135 Levin, L. 137 Levine, L. I. 55 Liberles, R. 139 Lichtenstein, M. 30 Lick, T. 76 Lorenz, O. 86, 88, 93 Luther, H. 47 Magen, O. 51 Malitz, J. 74, 91, 92 Marcus, I. G. 15 Marr, W. 66, 69, 73 Mason, S. 26, 54, 55, 62, 64 Matthiae, K. 165 McGee, R. J. 71 Meinecke, F. 75, 79, 81, 101 Meisl, J. 49, 79 Meyer, M. A. 6, 10, 11, 76, 100, 145 Michael, R. 49, 53, 58 Michman, D. 164 Momigliano, A. 4, 109–111, 113, 114, 137 Mommsen, A. 91

Mommsen, T. 72, 75, 90, 91, 97, 150, 167 Moore, G. F. 2 Modrzejewski, J. M. 55 Mosse, G. I. 48 Mukai, N. 11 Müller, K. 165 Myers, D. N. 15 Neusner, J. 24. 25. 27, 30 Niehoff, M. R. 142 Niese, B. 118 Niewyk, D. L. 48 Nippel, W. 72 Otto, W. F. 152, 154–156 Pätzold, K. 135 Pallmann, R. 87 Parente, F. 109, 122 Penslar, D. 50 Perles, F. 3 Perowne, S. 153 Pertz, G. H. 86, 89, 90, 97, 107, 108 Pertz, K. 86, 87, 95, 96 Petersdorff, H. von 73, 74 Philippson, J. 51 Philippson, L. 50 Pinn, C. 83 Poliakov, L. 72 Poznański, S. 30 Prager, I. 43–46, 51 Preston, D. L. 14 Pulzer, P. 48 Pyka, M. 16, 32, 34, 35, 41, 50, 52, 58, 66 Ranke, L. von 86, 88, 102 Rappaport, U. 40 Rebenich, S. 75 Redlich, O. 91 Reichel, W. 79, 81, 82, 95, 98, 101 Reinhartz, A. 26 Rengstorf, K. H. 152 Roberts, S. B. 69 Röder, K. 48 Roemer, N. VII Rogers, G. M. 54 Rosenbloom, N. H. 139

Rosenfeld, A. H. 25 Rowley, H. H. 158 Rürup, R. 68 Ruether, R. R. 18 Safrai, S 17, 27 Salmon, Y. 143 Salvador, J. 39, 41 Sanders, E. P. 2 Sauer, P. 145 Schäfer, P. 19 Schalit, A. 22, 149–168 Schieder, T. 79 Schmelke, G. 48 Schmid, K. 20 Schmitz-Berning, C. 135 Schochow, W. 6, 8, 14 Schorch, I. VII, 14, 48, 50, 58 Schubert, K. 165 Schürer, E. 3, 14, 45, 47, 54, 55, 59, 155, 156 Schulte, F. X. 125 Schwartz, S. 26 Seidel, E. 135 Seidel-Slotty, I. 135 Shapiro, M. B. 8 Sickel, T. von 89, 90, 94 Simchoni, J. N. 51 Smallwood, E. M 57–58 Smith, M. 113–114, 119 Steinthal, H. 11, 145 Stern, M. 17, 129, 132, 136, 158, 165 Stöcker, A. 73 Stötzel, G. 135 Stoezler, M. 71 Stow, K. 29 Strauss, H. A. 1, 9, 13 Stumpf, K. F. 93J Suchier, W. 84 Tcherikover, V. 4, 17, 28, 109, 111, 130–132, 137 Treitel, L 32 Treitschke, H. von 71, 76, 77–82, 92, 105–106 Unte, W. 119, 122 Urbach, E. E. 133, 139 Usinger, R. 87

Varrentrapp, C. 80, 96 Vogler, G. 79, 101 Volkov, S. 19 Waitz, G. 87, 90, 102 Wasserman, H. 48 Wattenbach, W. 85–90, 102 Weinberg, J. J. 8 Wellhausen, J. 154 Wenschkewitz, H. 1–3 Wickert, L. 72, 74, 90, 91 Wiedebach, H. 13 Wiener, M. 30 Wiese, C. VII Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von 92 Willrich, H. 152–154, 156 Wingate, L. R. 93 Wistrich, R. 66, 72 Wolf, I. 5 Wyrwa, U. 68, 71, 73, 74, 76

Yadin, Y. 22 Yerushalmi, Y. H. 69 Yuval, I. J. 166

Zimmermann, M. 63, 73 Zucker, S. 91 Zuckerman, C. 28 Zukier, H. 151

## Index of Names and Subjects

Agrippa I 45, 150 Agrippa II 7, 45, 46, 47, 52, 150 Albinus, Lucceius 162–163 Alexandria 24, 54–57, 64–66, 69, 140–142, 144 Antiochus IV Epiphanes 109, 111, 114, 116, 117, 121, 123, 125–140, 143, 148 Augustus Caesar 149, 157 Baeck, Leo 3, 11–13, 145–148 Berliner Antisemitismusstreit 48, 71–77, 82, 92, 99, 100, 101 Bernays, Jacob 13, 74, 90, 91 Bickerman(n), E. 4, 109–148 Bismarck, O. von 48, 58, 73, 74, 79, 124–128, 130 Breslau Seminary 6, 7, 12, 23, 30, 43, 45, 132, 140, 142, 145, 146 Caesarea Maritima 27, 55, 56, 61–69 Capito, Herennius 57, 60, 61, 68 Cassel, D. 102 Catholics 58, 67, 69, 99, 125–127, 130, 170 Claudius Caesar 141 comma 36, 169 cowardice 39, 47–52, 69 crucifixion 22–24 Cumanus, Ventidius 161–162 emancipation 19, 49, 50, 72, 82, 142, 169 Feigheit, feig – see cowardice Florus, Gessius 61–64, 68, 163 Fulda 125

Gaius Caligula 54–57, 60, 61, 68 Geiger, A. 7, 9, 10 Gleichschaltung 132–135 Graetz, H. VII, VIII, X, 6, 7, 13, 14, 16, 28

Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1, 3, 4, 11, 15, 18, 19, 23, 29, 160, 166, 167 Heine, H. 77, 104, 105, 110–111 Heinemann, I. 13, 111, 129–148

Herod 7, 45, 53, 149–168 Hildesheimer Seminary 7–9, 18, 141, 145, 146 Hirsch, S. R. 139, 141 Hochschule für die Wiss. des Judentums 7–14, 18, 23, 30, 145–148 Holocaust 15–25 Jaffé, Philipp 82–102 Jamnia 54–69 Jason of Cyrene 113–127 Josephus 7, 22, 25, 27, 31–52, 54, 55, 57, 61–65, 113, 133, 149–168 Jost, I. M. 6, 14, 32, 43 Judeans (Judäer) 16, 26, 27, 35, 58 Kulturkampf 58, 124–128 Lehmann, Max 79–85, 94–108 Maccabees, Books of 21, 109–128, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 169 Meyer, E. 4, 21, 109, 111, 131, 151 Mommsen, T. 72, 74, 75, 88–92, 94, 97, 101, 150, 166, 167 Monumenta Germaniae Historica 85–100 "Old Catholics" 125, 127 Pertz, G. H. 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 101, 107 Pertz, K. 86, 87, 88, 90, 95, 96, 101 Pharisees, Pharisaism 2, 3, 10, 12, 13, 21, 34, 157 Philo 54, 57, 60, 140, 141, 147 race 65–69 Rabbinerdoktor 141 Realpolitik, realpolitical 152–158 Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden 11, 144–146

Schalit, A. 22, 149–168 Stürmer 71, 100, 169

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theologians 3, 4, 13, 14, 17, 23, 130 treason, traitors 24, 32, 36–38, 40–52, 160, 169 Treitschke, H. von 71–82, 92, 97–102, 105–107

Viadrina 51

Yavneh 27, 54

Zarncke, F. 49, 76, 93, 98, 102 Zionism 15–22, 58, 59, 161