The First Pogrom
In the summer or autumn of 38 CE an unprecedented outbreak of anti-Jewish violence erupted in Alexandria, perpetrated by members of the city’s Greek population. This violence was tolerated – indeed endorsed – by the Roman governor, the equestrian prefect Aulus Avillius Flaccus, and this government involvement in the violence is particularly remarkable given Flaccus’ previously unimpeachable conduct as governor and his fair treatment of Alexandria’s well-established and large Jewish community. As historians, we must ask what it was that provoked this change in the attitude of Rome’s most senior representative in the land, and we are fortunate enough to have two eyewitness accounts which purport to provide an answer to this question. The Jewish theologian and intellectual Philo wrote two accounts of this first of all pogroms in his historical treatises In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium, and in his works we find a dark tale of conspiracy and political skulduggery, of a devil’s pact struck between Flaccus and sinister anti-Jewish elements in the Greek population, all in the shadow of the rise of a demented new emperor.
According to Philo, the seeds of the pogrom lay in some poor political choices made by Flaccus before he even came to Egypt. Flaccus enjoyed high favour under Tiberius, as evidenced by the very fact of his holding the Egyptian prefecture, which at the time was the highest honour available to a non-senator in the Roman Empire (though the post would later come to be eclipsed by the Praetorian prefecture). But during the reign of Tiberius, he made some poor decisions. He offended the young future emperor Gaius (Caligula) by being somehow involved in the successful prosecution of his mother Agrippina. He was a close friend and political ally of Sutorius Macro, the commander of Tiberius’ praetorian guard and one of the earliest casualties of Caligula’s reign, and he belonged to a court faction that favoured the doomed Tiberius Gemellus, Caligula’s rival to succeed Tiberius (and who, needless to say, was soon “liquidated” by Caligula). After Caligula’s accession, five years into his governorship of Egypt, an increasingly despondent Flaccus watched his friends, partners and allies being executed one by one by the new master of the world. This competent and energetic governor began to fear that his neck would be next on the block, and he fell into a profound paranoid depression, becoming unable to complete even the most basic tasks entrusted to him. It was at this low ebb that the Greek enemies of Judaism in Alexandria swooped, and succeeded in bending a Roman governor to their nefarious will.
Greek-Jewish tensions in Alexandria were high under the early Roman emperors. Jews had lived in Alexandria almost since its foundation – one of the early Ptolemies (either I or II) gave them a district, called the Delta Quarter, specifically for Jewish settlement. Under the Ptolemies, Jews enjoyed the judicial status of “Hellenes”, an intermediate status between Greeks and native Egyptians, ensuring that they enjoyed many privileges and exemptions. This arrangement kept the peace successfully between Greeks and Jews for three centuries, but Augustus’ conquest of Egypt changed things decisively for the worse. He abolished Hellene status, meaning that Alexandria’s Jewish community suffered a major decline in prestige, becoming effectively equal to the despised Egyptian population in law. Moreover, he angered the Alexandrian Greeks by forbidding them to have their own council, although he allowed the Alexandrian Jews their own gerousia, a decision-making body in charge of the affairs of the Alexandrian Jewish community. Thus a situation was created where two different ethnic groups both believed that the other group was unfairly privileged by the occupying power – a sure-fire recipe for bitter community strife. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that some well-connected Jews (such as Philo’s own brother Alexander) were illegally usurping Greek citizenship and claiming privileges to which they were not legally entitled, creating Greek concerns about the “purity” of the citizen body. The ferociously anti-Jewish tone of much Alexandrian Greek scholarship of this period (most famously in the works of the poet and grammarian Apion) bears testimony to the profoundly Judeophobic attitude of many Alexandrian Greeks. Alexandria was a powder-keg of festering ethnic loathing – and the despondency and vulnerability of the Roman governor Flaccus after Caligula’s accession would prove to be the spark that set it off.
Flaccus met in secret with several leaders of the Greek community, named by Philo as Isidoros, Lampon and Dionysios. These men are presented by Philo as hate-spewing demagogues who built their careers on incendiary anti-Jewish diatribes. They offered to “protect” Flaccus from Caligula’s anger, on one condition – that Flaccus surrendered the city’s Jewish community to them, and assisted them in destroying the civil liberties of the Alexandrian Jews. Precisely how these people were able to “protect” Flaccus is not clear, but we ought to note Philo’s comments in the Legatio that many of the influential slaves and freedmen at Caligula’s court were Alexandrians, most famously the infamous cubicularius (chamberlain) Helicon. It is perhaps through such channels that these demagogues believed they would be able to advocate on Flaccus’ behalf. Whatever they promised him was enough and Flaccus, motivated by a desire to save his own skin, agreed. The deal was done, and the misery of Alexandria’s Jews was set to begin.
The first manifestation of the governor’s new position was a perceptible bias against Jews in his legal hearings, and a refusal to hear cases or petitions instigated by Jews. As this situation became ever more patently unfair, the situation was destabilised by a surprise visit from Agrippa I, the grandson of King Herod and a close friend of the new emperor, who visited Alexandria on his way to take over the administration of new territories which Caligula had just awarded to him in Judaea. The beleaguered Jews of the city gave him a letter of complaint to send to Caligula about Flaccus’ behaviour, thus bypassing the usual bureaucratic channels (officially, any letter sent from Egypt to the outside world had to be approved by the governor). But the pageantry of the visit infuriated the Greeks, who had been denied the privilege of their own ruler ever since the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. After King Agrippa’s departure, they staged their own mock royal visit, dressing up a mentally handicapped tramp called Carabas in royal robes and addressing him as “Maron” (Aramaic for “My Lord”). Astonishingly, considering the closeness of Agrippa to Caligula, Flaccus took no action to avenge this insult.
But this was still very mild. Soon after this, things got much worse. It began with an edict of the governor which created a de facto “ghetto”, one sole district of the city in which all Jews had to live. Those Jews who had homes or businesses outside this new ghetto found their property forfeit to the state. The Alexandrian Greeks eagerly took it upon themselves to police Flaccus’ new law, and they formed an organised cordon around the Jewish district, viciously punishing any Jews found outside the area. Soon, chronic overcrowding, overstretched sanitation and a lack of resources led to acute misery in the ghetto, the complete collapse of economic activity among the city’s Jews and the outbreak of a plague. Starving Jews who snuck out of the ghetto in search of food were tortured and lynched, with no Roman intervention. Women who were apprehended outside the ghetto and suspected of being Jewish were offered pork – any who refused to eat it were raped, tortured and murdered. Jewish merchants who put in at the city’s harbour, presumably not knowing what was afoot in the city, were burned alive on the docks and had their cargoes ransacked. Synagogues were desecrated with images of Caligula, and desperate, starving Jews spilled outside of the city walls, living on the beaches, in the necropolis, and among the city’s rubbish heaps.
The apogee of these cruelties, and the clearest sign that such atrocities had Flaccus’ endorsement, came on August 31st, Caligula’s birthday, when festive games were celebrated in Alexandria as everywhere else in the empire. More than 30 members of the Jewish ruling council, the gerousia, were publicly flogged, many of them dying. Other Jews who had been caught outside the ghetto or refused to leave their homes were offered as victims in gladiatorial games, and subjected to spectacular deaths described in nauseating detail by Philo. Soon after this, Flaccus sent Roman troops into the Jewish ghetto in search of weapons, a further sign of official endorsement of the Greek pogrom. The situation was bleak indeed and come September and the Jewish festival of Sukkot, Philo tells us that spirits were so low that the Jews were too dispirited to even celebrate it. But a miraculous reversal awaited them – a reversal so dramatic and unexpected that Philo inevitably interpreted it as a divine intervention.
At some point during Sukkot, a boat carrying Roman troops arrived in the harbour and arrested the governor. The precise charges are not recoverable, but it seems unlikely that Caligula, an emperor who would soon try to introduce his own statue in the Jerusalem Temple, would care much about the plight of Alexandria’s Jews. Perhaps Flaccus’ earlier political miscalculations had finally caught up with him; perhaps he was punished for manifestly failing to maintain the peace in a city which was of crucial importance to Rome’s grain supply. Sandra Gambetti suggests another intriguing possibility: it is clear that Flaccus’ search of the ghetto had taken place during the period of mourning for Caligula’s sister Drusilla, a period during which the emperor had forbidden any extraordinary government business to be conducted. Such disrespect to the imperial family was unwise, particularly if Flaccus had already upset Caligula as Philo indicates. Either way, Flaccus’ replacement, Vitrasius Pollio, seems to have rapidly over-ruled Flaccus’ pronouncements and restored many of the Jews’ lost freedoms. However, full restitution would not come until after the assassination of Caligula and his replacement by an entirely more reasonable emperor, Claudius.
Avillius Flaccus was tried by Caligula at Rome (his Greek "allies” Isidoros and Lampon appeared as witnesses for the prosecution) and exiled to the barren Greek island of Andros. Several months later, soldiers with an imperial commission arrived on the island and hacked him to pieces. To this day, scholars debate the extent of his culpability for what happened, and argue over the reliability of Philo’s “conspiracy theory” about the secret deal he struck with the Alexandrian Judeophobes. However, at best he sat back and tolerated the mass mob lynchings of some of his Jewish subjects. In the end, Philo’s In Flaccum falls into the trap of gloating over a fallen enemy. This may be unseemly, but when we read of the atrocities over which Avillius Flaccus presided it is easy to forgive Philo for this venial lapse in taste.
Select Bibliography:
Bilde, P, Engberg-Pederson, T, Hannestad, L, and Zahle, J. eds. (1992) Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt (Aarhus).
Blouin, K. (2005) Le Conflit Judéo-Alexandrin de 38 – 41 (Paris).
Borgen, P, "Philo and the Jews of Alexandria", in Bilde et al (1992) 122 – 138.
Box, H. (1979) Philonis Alexandrini In Flaccum (New York).
Gambetti, S. (2009) The Alexandrian Riots of 38 CE and the Persecution of the Jews (Leiden).
Horbury, W, Davies, W. D, and Sturdy, J. eds (1999) The Cambridge History of Judaism vol. 3, Cambridge.
Schäfer, P. (1997) Judeophobia (Cambridge, MA).
Smallwood, E. M. (1991) Philonis Alexandrini Legatio ad Gaium (Leiden).
Tcherikover, V. A, and Fuks, A. (1960) Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum vol. 2 (Cambridge MA). (contains the text of an edict of Claudius on Jewish rights in Alexandria, and some papyrus fragments which claim to recount a meeting between Flaccus and the Alexandrian Greek Judeophobes).
Van der Horst, P. W. (2003), Philo's Flaccus: The First Pogrom (Leiden).
According to Philo, the seeds of the pogrom lay in some poor political choices made by Flaccus before he even came to Egypt. Flaccus enjoyed high favour under Tiberius, as evidenced by the very fact of his holding the Egyptian prefecture, which at the time was the highest honour available to a non-senator in the Roman Empire (though the post would later come to be eclipsed by the Praetorian prefecture). But during the reign of Tiberius, he made some poor decisions. He offended the young future emperor Gaius (Caligula) by being somehow involved in the successful prosecution of his mother Agrippina. He was a close friend and political ally of Sutorius Macro, the commander of Tiberius’ praetorian guard and one of the earliest casualties of Caligula’s reign, and he belonged to a court faction that favoured the doomed Tiberius Gemellus, Caligula’s rival to succeed Tiberius (and who, needless to say, was soon “liquidated” by Caligula). After Caligula’s accession, five years into his governorship of Egypt, an increasingly despondent Flaccus watched his friends, partners and allies being executed one by one by the new master of the world. This competent and energetic governor began to fear that his neck would be next on the block, and he fell into a profound paranoid depression, becoming unable to complete even the most basic tasks entrusted to him. It was at this low ebb that the Greek enemies of Judaism in Alexandria swooped, and succeeded in bending a Roman governor to their nefarious will.
Greek-Jewish tensions in Alexandria were high under the early Roman emperors. Jews had lived in Alexandria almost since its foundation – one of the early Ptolemies (either I or II) gave them a district, called the Delta Quarter, specifically for Jewish settlement. Under the Ptolemies, Jews enjoyed the judicial status of “Hellenes”, an intermediate status between Greeks and native Egyptians, ensuring that they enjoyed many privileges and exemptions. This arrangement kept the peace successfully between Greeks and Jews for three centuries, but Augustus’ conquest of Egypt changed things decisively for the worse. He abolished Hellene status, meaning that Alexandria’s Jewish community suffered a major decline in prestige, becoming effectively equal to the despised Egyptian population in law. Moreover, he angered the Alexandrian Greeks by forbidding them to have their own council, although he allowed the Alexandrian Jews their own gerousia, a decision-making body in charge of the affairs of the Alexandrian Jewish community. Thus a situation was created where two different ethnic groups both believed that the other group was unfairly privileged by the occupying power – a sure-fire recipe for bitter community strife. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that some well-connected Jews (such as Philo’s own brother Alexander) were illegally usurping Greek citizenship and claiming privileges to which they were not legally entitled, creating Greek concerns about the “purity” of the citizen body. The ferociously anti-Jewish tone of much Alexandrian Greek scholarship of this period (most famously in the works of the poet and grammarian Apion) bears testimony to the profoundly Judeophobic attitude of many Alexandrian Greeks. Alexandria was a powder-keg of festering ethnic loathing – and the despondency and vulnerability of the Roman governor Flaccus after Caligula’s accession would prove to be the spark that set it off.
Flaccus met in secret with several leaders of the Greek community, named by Philo as Isidoros, Lampon and Dionysios. These men are presented by Philo as hate-spewing demagogues who built their careers on incendiary anti-Jewish diatribes. They offered to “protect” Flaccus from Caligula’s anger, on one condition – that Flaccus surrendered the city’s Jewish community to them, and assisted them in destroying the civil liberties of the Alexandrian Jews. Precisely how these people were able to “protect” Flaccus is not clear, but we ought to note Philo’s comments in the Legatio that many of the influential slaves and freedmen at Caligula’s court were Alexandrians, most famously the infamous cubicularius (chamberlain) Helicon. It is perhaps through such channels that these demagogues believed they would be able to advocate on Flaccus’ behalf. Whatever they promised him was enough and Flaccus, motivated by a desire to save his own skin, agreed. The deal was done, and the misery of Alexandria’s Jews was set to begin.
The first manifestation of the governor’s new position was a perceptible bias against Jews in his legal hearings, and a refusal to hear cases or petitions instigated by Jews. As this situation became ever more patently unfair, the situation was destabilised by a surprise visit from Agrippa I, the grandson of King Herod and a close friend of the new emperor, who visited Alexandria on his way to take over the administration of new territories which Caligula had just awarded to him in Judaea. The beleaguered Jews of the city gave him a letter of complaint to send to Caligula about Flaccus’ behaviour, thus bypassing the usual bureaucratic channels (officially, any letter sent from Egypt to the outside world had to be approved by the governor). But the pageantry of the visit infuriated the Greeks, who had been denied the privilege of their own ruler ever since the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. After King Agrippa’s departure, they staged their own mock royal visit, dressing up a mentally handicapped tramp called Carabas in royal robes and addressing him as “Maron” (Aramaic for “My Lord”). Astonishingly, considering the closeness of Agrippa to Caligula, Flaccus took no action to avenge this insult.
But this was still very mild. Soon after this, things got much worse. It began with an edict of the governor which created a de facto “ghetto”, one sole district of the city in which all Jews had to live. Those Jews who had homes or businesses outside this new ghetto found their property forfeit to the state. The Alexandrian Greeks eagerly took it upon themselves to police Flaccus’ new law, and they formed an organised cordon around the Jewish district, viciously punishing any Jews found outside the area. Soon, chronic overcrowding, overstretched sanitation and a lack of resources led to acute misery in the ghetto, the complete collapse of economic activity among the city’s Jews and the outbreak of a plague. Starving Jews who snuck out of the ghetto in search of food were tortured and lynched, with no Roman intervention. Women who were apprehended outside the ghetto and suspected of being Jewish were offered pork – any who refused to eat it were raped, tortured and murdered. Jewish merchants who put in at the city’s harbour, presumably not knowing what was afoot in the city, were burned alive on the docks and had their cargoes ransacked. Synagogues were desecrated with images of Caligula, and desperate, starving Jews spilled outside of the city walls, living on the beaches, in the necropolis, and among the city’s rubbish heaps.
The apogee of these cruelties, and the clearest sign that such atrocities had Flaccus’ endorsement, came on August 31st, Caligula’s birthday, when festive games were celebrated in Alexandria as everywhere else in the empire. More than 30 members of the Jewish ruling council, the gerousia, were publicly flogged, many of them dying. Other Jews who had been caught outside the ghetto or refused to leave their homes were offered as victims in gladiatorial games, and subjected to spectacular deaths described in nauseating detail by Philo. Soon after this, Flaccus sent Roman troops into the Jewish ghetto in search of weapons, a further sign of official endorsement of the Greek pogrom. The situation was bleak indeed and come September and the Jewish festival of Sukkot, Philo tells us that spirits were so low that the Jews were too dispirited to even celebrate it. But a miraculous reversal awaited them – a reversal so dramatic and unexpected that Philo inevitably interpreted it as a divine intervention.
At some point during Sukkot, a boat carrying Roman troops arrived in the harbour and arrested the governor. The precise charges are not recoverable, but it seems unlikely that Caligula, an emperor who would soon try to introduce his own statue in the Jerusalem Temple, would care much about the plight of Alexandria’s Jews. Perhaps Flaccus’ earlier political miscalculations had finally caught up with him; perhaps he was punished for manifestly failing to maintain the peace in a city which was of crucial importance to Rome’s grain supply. Sandra Gambetti suggests another intriguing possibility: it is clear that Flaccus’ search of the ghetto had taken place during the period of mourning for Caligula’s sister Drusilla, a period during which the emperor had forbidden any extraordinary government business to be conducted. Such disrespect to the imperial family was unwise, particularly if Flaccus had already upset Caligula as Philo indicates. Either way, Flaccus’ replacement, Vitrasius Pollio, seems to have rapidly over-ruled Flaccus’ pronouncements and restored many of the Jews’ lost freedoms. However, full restitution would not come until after the assassination of Caligula and his replacement by an entirely more reasonable emperor, Claudius.
Avillius Flaccus was tried by Caligula at Rome (his Greek "allies” Isidoros and Lampon appeared as witnesses for the prosecution) and exiled to the barren Greek island of Andros. Several months later, soldiers with an imperial commission arrived on the island and hacked him to pieces. To this day, scholars debate the extent of his culpability for what happened, and argue over the reliability of Philo’s “conspiracy theory” about the secret deal he struck with the Alexandrian Judeophobes. However, at best he sat back and tolerated the mass mob lynchings of some of his Jewish subjects. In the end, Philo’s In Flaccum falls into the trap of gloating over a fallen enemy. This may be unseemly, but when we read of the atrocities over which Avillius Flaccus presided it is easy to forgive Philo for this venial lapse in taste.
Select Bibliography:
Bilde, P, Engberg-Pederson, T, Hannestad, L, and Zahle, J. eds. (1992) Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt (Aarhus).
Blouin, K. (2005) Le Conflit Judéo-Alexandrin de 38 – 41 (Paris).
Borgen, P, "Philo and the Jews of Alexandria", in Bilde et al (1992) 122 – 138.
Box, H. (1979) Philonis Alexandrini In Flaccum (New York).
Gambetti, S. (2009) The Alexandrian Riots of 38 CE and the Persecution of the Jews (Leiden).
Horbury, W, Davies, W. D, and Sturdy, J. eds (1999) The Cambridge History of Judaism vol. 3, Cambridge.
Schäfer, P. (1997) Judeophobia (Cambridge, MA).
Smallwood, E. M. (1991) Philonis Alexandrini Legatio ad Gaium (Leiden).
Tcherikover, V. A, and Fuks, A. (1960) Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum vol. 2 (Cambridge MA). (contains the text of an edict of Claudius on Jewish rights in Alexandria, and some papyrus fragments which claim to recount a meeting between Flaccus and the Alexandrian Greek Judeophobes).
Van der Horst, P. W. (2003), Philo's Flaccus: The First Pogrom (Leiden).
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Comments
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A great blog and a good read. I enjoyed it very much.Posted August 10th, 2012 at 04:25 AM by Aulus Plautius
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Thanks Aulus!Posted August 20th, 2012 at 12:11 PM by Clodius
