Peter Schafer

PETER SCHÄFER

Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World

"The Exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses is one of the decisive events of Jewish history. According to the biblical story, the people of Israel left Egypt voluntarily and against the will of the Pharaoh and his fellow Egyptians . . . Quite different is the Egyptian and Greco-Roman tradition of the Exodus: the Jews were driven out of Egypt by force in a kind of 'ethnic cleansing' because they were polluted lepers and/or unwelcome foreigners . . . "^1a TACITUS

" . . . Tacitus connects with the motif of impiety that of misanthrōpia: the Jews are loyal only to their fellow countrymen but express hostile odium toward all other people (adversus omnes). This is reminiscent of Hecataeus, Manetho, . . . , and above all Lysimachus, according to whom the Jews should not show good will to any man and should always offer the worst possible advice."^1b* TACITUS

"Juvenal accuses only the Jews . . . of proselytism. And it is precisely the combination of proselytism and exclusiveness that alarms him. One can hardly think of a more serious attack on the customs of Rome’s ancestors than the Jewish insistence that one has to abandon the ‘laws of Rome’ (Romanas contemnere leges) in order to follow the ‘Jewish law’ (Judaicum ius)."^1c*

"As the course of history shows, this fear was well-founded. The vanquished did succeed in giving laws to their victors: at first as Jews and later, and most effectively, in the guise of Christianity."^1d TACITUS


	Peter Schäfer. Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World. SEARCH BUY IT

The History of the Jews in Antiquity: The Jews of Palestine from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest

Peter Schäfer. The History of the Jews in Antiquity: The Jews of Palestine from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest. Translated by David Chowcat. Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH. (Originally published as Geschichte der Juden in der Antike. Stuttgart, Germany: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk GmbH, 1983.)
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Jesus in the Talmud

Peter Schäfer. Jesus in the Talmud. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
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* Italics in the original.

¹ Peter Schäfer (b. 1943). Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World. The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1997. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
^a Part 1. Who Are the Jews. Ch. 1. Expulsion from Egypt, at 15.
^b Ibid., at 32-33.
^c Part III. Centers of Conflict. Ch. 11. Rome, at 185.
^d Part III. Centers of Conflict. Anti-Semitism, at 211.

MK-BOOKS-SCHÄFER-20011223. UPDATED 20090120.