A Jew Among Romans by Frederic Raphael

Author:Frederic Raphael [Raphael, Frederic]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-90783-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

a Damascus, the capital of modern Syria, was the locus of the blood libel that, in 1840, was seconded by the French consul in the city.

b Unlike Nero’s Golden House, which was intended to occupy the same ground and which was going to be paid for only by exacting taxes.

c Osip Mandelstam’s 1933 poem deriding Stalin’s “cockroach whiskers” was enough to lead to his long persecution. When Stalin telephoned Boris Pasternak and asked his opinion of Mandelstam, Pasternak was famously frightened. After he had finished equivocating, Stalin is said to have remarked, “Is that the best you can do for your friend?” Pasternak survived. Mandelstam did not. Stalin did not execute Mandelstam, but he made it clear that his minions should do nothing officious to keep him alive. It is impossible to present a clear picture of Stalin’s vexed relations with writers without acknowledging how many of those he murdered were Jews. One was the short-story writer Isaac Babel, who said, early in Stalin’s reign, that he had discovered a new art form: silence. It proved too loud for the tyrant. In 1940, he was accused of being a Trotskyite, tortured and then shot.

d As a species, historians play with inquisitive skill on the reminiscential vanity of those with privileged access to great places (and great beds).

e “Queen Berenice, whom it is said he had promised to marry, was immediately sent away from the city by a Titus as reluctant to expel her as she was to go.”

f Racine’s tragic heroine had an afterlife in the French brothels of the belle époque, which often featured a raven-haired beauty known as la juive whose exotic favors were particularly desirable. A conspicuous literary example is “Rachel when from the Lord” in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, another work in the Josephan tradition of redemptive recollection. In the Faubourg St.-Honoré, Jewish women of rich provenance had a greater exchange value than males. Two Rothschild sisters, both friends of Proust’s, became the Duchesse de Gramont and the Princesse de Wagram. Proust’s fictional Swann—based on a blend of Charles Haas and Charles Ephrussi—epitomizes the exquisite flâneur who, by his idiosyncratic assimilation and wealth, detaches himself from the mass of Jews, but never quite denies his Jewishness. It is suggested only obliquely that Proust’s narrator has any “Israelite” connection. The desire to conceal Jewish origins is ridiculed in the character of Bloch, a Jew so reluctant to speak his name that he changes it to Jacques du Rozier. The young Bloch’s pseudo-Homeric vocabulary is an early fuite en avant, a run for clever camouflage. His later assumption of a particule, the signal of aristocracy, conveys the sarcasm the snobbish Proust displayed for snobs less stylish than himself.

g Hadrian was a more vindictive enemy of the Jews than Vespasian or Titus, whose repression lacked the “racial” animus of the later emperor. It prompted Tacitus to say, “In their treatment of Judaea, the Romans made a desert and called it peace.” If only for the sake of an epigram, he afforded himself a thin measure of pity for the victims of the war.

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