The Reception of Josephus in Jewish Culture from the 18th Century to the Present

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Josephus was a Jewish priest from Jerusalem who took part in the war against Rome in 66 CE until he was captured and, inspired (so he said) by divine guidance, changed to the Roman side and devoted his retirement in Rome to writing about the history and customs of the Jews. His best known work, the Jewish War, was completed by 81 CE, just ten years after the end of the war itself, but he also wrote three further works: the Jewish Antiquities, a twenty-book account of Jewish history from the creation of the world to 66 CE; the Life, an apologetic autobiography designed to uphold a claim never to have been genuinely anti-Roman despite his career in 66-67 as a rebel general; and Against Apion, a defence of Jews and Judaism in two books against calumnies found in the writings of a variety of gentile authors. The project will investigate the attitudes to these writings and to Josephus as an individual to be found among Jews from the 18th century to the present. Josephus' writings were not acknowledged in the Jewish tradition preserved by the rabbis in Hebrew and Aramaic in late antiquity, and the survival of his works is due entirely to the value ascribed to them by early Christians. The re-entry of the Jewish War into the Jewish cultural milieu came about only through a paraphrase of the Latin text of Hegesippus into Hebrew, with additions from Roman and Jewish history, produced by a South Italian Jew ('Josippon') in the tenth century CE, and it was only in the sixteenth century, when, again in Italy, Azariah de'Rossi reintroduced Jews to the writings of Greek Judaism in antiquity, that they became reacquainted with Josephus' original text.The focus of this multidisciplinary research will be on the way Jews in the last 250 years have built on earlier Jewish and Christian uses of the writings of Josephus for a variety of very different purposes. It will look at the use of Josephus by the Maskilim, intellectuals from the late 18th and 19th centuries who sought to open the eyes of their fellow Jews to the world outside, forging a new Jewish consciousness and ultimately a redefined identity. It will examine the attitudes to Josephus of the founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement in Germany, who were inclined to see Josephus's version of Jewish history as more reliable than stories in rabbinic texts, even though their attitude to his political stance was ambivalent. It will investigate the uses of Josephus by Rabbinic circles in the nineteenth century, as they came to be influenced by the Haskalah, and by European Jews more generally as part of the wider rhetoric of Jewish identity, especially within the arguments about assimilation throughout Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And it will trace the uses of Josephus both by Zionists from the late nineteenth century through the foundation of the State of Israel to the present day - as expressed in Zionist political speeches, dramas, novels, and by the interpretation of the archaeology and geography of the land during the formation of the Israeli state - and, finally, by 'post-Zionist' historians, sociologists and publicists as part of their re-assessment of the foundation and ideologies of the State of Israel.Among issues for investigation in all these contexts will be the attachment of Jewish interest to some of Josephus' writings more than others, and how Jewish attitudes to those writings were affected by attitudes to the historian as a person, by non-Jewish opinion and by concerns about the relationship of Josephus' Antiquities to the text of scripture. In view of the huge amount of relevant data, the project does not aim to produce an exhaustive analysis of all uses of Josephus by Jews during this period, but rather a representative series of fully documented and analysed case studies to illuminate these complex and diverse issues. The resulting monographs, edited volume, workshop papers and website will address a varied audience.