Customer Reviews

Josephus

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The epoch chronicled by Joseph ben Matthias, former priest of the High Temple in Jerusalem, military commander (of sorts) in Galilee against the opening Roman onslaught and historian of that war, is an extremely significant crossroads of civilization and religion.

Josephus was a champion of his maligned people in the waning years of his life. His life and works were shunned by his beloved Jews as he was considered an arch-traitor who became a Roman lackey. That his works were preserved was only due to
the dligence of certain Christian prelates in the early Church, who (after tampering with some revered passages) found in Josephus a witness to the life and resurrection of Christ outside the Gospels. What a marvelous subject for a novel. Lion Feuchtwanger rose to the occasion. His characters are not the antiseptic saints or the demons of Lew Wallace's Ben Hur, but
conflicted, vacillating and at times just plain goofy people who almost accidentally were placed center stage in one of history's most crucial turning points.

Is F's history a little fudged? Well certainly, but his own essay on the historical novel makes it clear that he is
a "political message" writer who takes liberties here and there to make his tale relevant. When he wrote, Jews throughtout the diaspora wrestled with the notion of Zionism... reestablishment of a Jewish polity on ancient ground. The countervailing movement was that Jews had to become "world citizens", contributing to civilization in the countries of their birth, even as rising fascism and antiSemitism closed in upon them.

So Josephus' famed Antiquities is given a bit of a spin to conform with Feuchtwanger's Germany and the Palestine under the British Mandate. To the purist, distortions such as having
the aristocratic priest Josephus be an early advocate of a Zealot faction called the Makkabees might be a bit jarring.
Was Queen Berenice a Jewish patriot in her own way? Well it's possible, and the real Josephus may have wanted to mute this
characterization, as the Jews in Rome were under suspicion and censure under Domitian. Did Nero's consort, Poppaea Sabina
flirt coquettishly with Josephus while testing his knowledge of Jewish aspirations in Judaea and the world? Why not? We know she showered Josephus with gifts and that she was sympathetic
to the Jews's situation....though not a very saintly person in her personal affairs to put it mildly.

Reading these works, one can only wonder why they were never brought to the screen, let alone allowed to go out of print.