The Earliest International Best Seller?
The Tremendous Impact of the Book of Yosippon
Imagine you had a time machine and could travel back to the 7th or 8th century. That you landed in one of the Jewish communities around Baghdad or in Southern Italy, for example, and asked someone there to tell you a little of their communal history.
The chances are that they would tell you stories from the Bible or Talmud, stories rooted in their religious background. They would know very little secular history, hardly anything of the empires that had risen and fallen, of the wars that had been fought or political alliances that had been made since biblical times, or elsewhere in the world. Centuries after the Greeks were able to read the histories of Herodotus or the Romans to study Tacitus, the Jewish world had still not had an historian of its own. Except, of course, for Josephus, the 1st century Jewish historian. But they had never heard of him. He became a Roman citizen and wrote in Greek, a language the great majority of Jews were unable to read.
The situation changed at the end of the 9th century, or early in the 10th when a secular history book suddenly appeared. Written in Hebrew, it looked at first sight to be a translation of Josephus’s history of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, The Jewish War. The author of this new book was said to be a certain Joseph ben Gorion, an otherwise unknown character whose name may have been a pseudonym, a clumsy attempt to identify him with Josephus (who was Joseph ben Matityahu). Joseph ben Gurion’s publication became known as the Book of Yosippon, a Greek form of the name Joseph.
As the only Hebrew book dealing with post-biblical Jewish history from the 6th century BCE to the 1st CE, Yosippon plugged a yawning gap in the market. It became an instant success. Initially it was thought to be a translation of Josephus’s Jewish War, but it was nothing of the sort. Unknown to its 10th century readers, who were ignorant of such things, Yosippon contained passages based on Virgil’s Aeneid, Livy’s History of Rome, Orosius’s History Against the Pagans, the Vulgate and various other Latin texts. It did contain a translation of parts of Josephus’s book Jewish Antiquities too. But the sections that could possibly have come from his Jewish War were actually taken from On the Destruction of the City of Jerusalem, a Latin paraphrase, based on Jewish War but given an anti-Jewish, pro-Roman slant instead.
Of course, in the 10th century, and for quite some time after, nobody realised just how well-read and erudite the author of Yosippon was. They just assumed that his book was the true and unvarnished history of the Jews, a particularly credible assumption since the book was written in a very clear and elegant Hebrew, making it easy to read, digest and understand.
Despite its various Latin and Greek sources, Yosippon (sometimes pronounced Josippon) is undoubtedly a Jewish book. It contains some very imaginative polemics, all designed to exaggerate Jewish heroics, to dispel any suggestion that, in comparison to other nations, Jews were weak and pusillanimous. It makes a hero out of the rather obscure biblical character Zepho, a grandson of Esau. There is no mention of this in the Bible but according to Yosippon, Zepho was taken prisoner by his cousin Joseph, Jacob’s son who was ruler of Egypt. However Zepho escaped from prison and fled to Carthage where he met Aeneas, hero of Virgil’s Aeneid. He became head of Aeneas’s army and travelled with him to Italy where, in true Herculean style, he killed a monster, half-human and half-goat, that was devouring all the Italian cattle. He had his name changed to Janus-Saturnus, and his status from a person to a god. He founded a city and ruled as King of Italy for 55 years, finally being buried in Genoa. After his death the city he founded was governed by his grandson, Latinus, whose great achievement was to invent the Latin language. Romulus built a wall around the city that Zepho founded and Latinus governed, to protect it from invasion by the Hebrew King David. The city became known as Rome.
Zepho therefore, in Yosippon’s reworking of the Aeneid, replaced Aeneas as the founder of Rome, making the Romans descendants of Zepho’s great-grandfather, the biblical Isaac. In itself that is no surprise, The legend that the Romans are descended from Isaac through Esau crops up many times in Jewish folklore. But Yosippon is the first source to attribute the founding of Rome to Isaac’s great-grandson Zepho, and to transfer the mythical beginnings of Rome from Virgil’s Latin Aeneid to the Hebrew Bible.
Among his many historical accounts, Yosippon rewrote the story of the siege at Masada. According to Josephus, a band of Jewish rebels had fled from the Roman invaders, taking refuge in the mountain top fortress at Masada. The Romans besieged the fortress and, when it looked as if all was lost, the rebels committed suicide rather than fall into en emy hands.Yosippon’s author didn’t like this. It didn’t paint Jews in a very favourable light. In his version of the story, the rebels, far from dying by their own hand like sheep to the slaughter (the phrase comes from Yosippon) staged a fierce and valiant counter attack. They were defeated, overwhelmed by superior numbers and weaponry. But they died in glory. They were the nation who founded the city of Rome. They could hardly be seen to be terrified of its army.
Yosippon was written somewhere in Southern Italy, home to a number of Jewish communities in those days. One of the questions about its authorship is how the author managed to get hold of the Latin sources he relied upon. The only places that collections of Latin manuscripts were likely to be found were monastery libraries, places where Jews were rarely admitted. Steven Bowman, one of the leading authorities on Yosippon, suggests the author may have been granted access to a library as an itinerant scholar, or that a Jewish doctor might have taken the opportunity to spend time there, while visiting a patient in the monastery. Alternatively he suggests that the yeshivot, the rabbinic colleges, in Apulia could have ordered copies of the manuscripts for their own libraries. The late David Flusser, who published a critical edition of Yosippon in 1978, suggested that the author may have used the library belonging to the Duke of Naples, though again, in those days it would not have been easy for a Jew to gain access. So far, nobody has come up with a satisfactory answer to the question of how he was able to consult his sources.
Yosippon was the first of several Jewish books to appear in Southern Italy in the 10th and 11th centuries. Full of mythical and legendary material, they all purported to be historical in their own way, though none of them really were. And none enjoyed anything like the same degree of success as Yosippon. It was translated into Arabic, Slavonic and Russian in the 10th or 11th century and into Ethiopic during the 13th. It was translated into Yiddish in 1546 and an English version was published in 1558 by Peter Morvyn, under the title A Compendious and Moste Marveylous History of the Latter Times of the Jewes’ Commune Weale. The Coptic church treats Yosippon as a canonical text.
Nobody doubted Yosippon’s veracity. Even when educated Jews began reading Josephus in its original Greek or in Latin translations, if they came across something that was contradicted by Yosippon, they deferred to the Hebrew work. Christian authors copied extracts and passages from it over the following centuries. It was one of the earliest, perhaps the first Jewish book to be printed, in Mantua in the late 1470s, some years before the Talmud.
The first serious challenge to Yosippon’s accuracy came during the 16th century, from the Italian, Jewish scholar Azariah di Rossi, in his book The Light of the Eyes. Di Rossi was a deeply learned and highly controversial character, the first person to subject the entire corpus of Jewish writings to sustained analysis and historical criticism. These days he would not be out of place in any university, but in 16th century Italy he was condemned relentlessly by less insightful thinkers. He questioned the historicity of Yossipon and challenged the claim that it was a translation of Josephus. But he didn’t condemn the book, he recognised its value, despite some of its claims.
Yosippon’s status as the pre-eminent work of Jewish history ended long ago. But it has remained influential. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who modernised the Hebrew language, drew on Yosippon’s superb linguistic style to help hm compose his thesaurus. It is said that Israel’s first prime minister, David ben Gurion, born David Grün, took his new name in homage to the purported author of Yosippon. And when trying to encourage the desperate inmates of the Vilna ghetto to fight back against the Nazis, the resistance leader Abba Kovner quoted from Yosippon, “We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter!”
Yosippon is still read today. There are some, on the fringes of the Jewish Orthodox world who continue to maintain that it is the authentic voice of history, the correct Hebrew recension of Josephus’s Jewish War. The Greek version and translations made from it are, they assert, corruptions of the original. They reason in this way for religious reasons, and they will argue, as strongly as we will, that their view of the world is correct. 1,000 years of avid Yosippon readers may agree with them.
greetings from La La Land
" There are some, on the fringes of the Jewish Orthodox world who continue to maintain that it is the authentic voice of history, "
I'm curious, who would that be plz
KVCT