For at least 300 years, Greeks, Jews and Egyptians lived alongside each other, fairly harmoniously, in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria. The harmony was shattered in the year 38 CE when the city became the scene of the world’s first pogrom, or at least the first pogrom known to history.
Originally, Alexandria was a Greek city, founded by Alexander the Great. The Romans took it into their Empire in 30 BCE but its Hellenist social structure remained much as it had always been in the past. The Greeks were the upper class, urbane and suave, dwelling in the best neighbourhoods and sharing a vestige of political power. The lower class was Egyptian, those whose families were native to the land, who had not been able to buy themselves into the upper echelons. They lived semi-rural lives.
And then there were the Jews. They didn’t fit neatly into the Hellenist structure and had long been treated as a semi-autonomous group, quartered in their own areas of the city, keeping their own customs and laws.
Philo was a Jewish philosopher in 1st century Alexandria. He wrote many books, mainly allegorical interpretations of the Bible and treatises on how to live a good life. He also wrote a few works about contemporary Alexandrian life including two (slightly different) accounts of the city’s pogrom.
Philo’s most detailed description of the pogrom comes in his book In Flaccum. The book tells the story of Flaccus, the Roman prefect in Alexandria, who, in 32 CE, was appointed to his post by his good friend the Emperor Tiberias. According to Philo, for the first five years of Flaccus’s rule he was the ideal governor who “preserved peace and governed the country with such vigour and energy that he was superior to all the governors who had gone before him.” But after the death of his friend Tiberias, when Gaius Caligula succeeded him as Emperor of Rome, Flaccus fell into a deep depression. When he later heard that Caligula had murdered Tiberias’s grandson and had sentenced the former Emperor’s friend and adviser, Macro, to death, Flaccus “utterly abandoned all hope for the future and was no longer able to apply himself to public affairs as he had done before.”
It was around this time, for reasons which Philo doesn’t adequately explain, that a bunch of troublemakers persuaded Flaccus to turn against the Jews. At first he did little more than act in a hostile manner towards individual Jews who came to petition him. Soon however he heard that a boat was on its way from Rome carrying a man named Agrippa, the grandson of Herod, who Emperor Caligula had just appointed as King of Judea. Agrippa was due to disembark in Alexandria where he would wait until favourable winds arose to blow his sails towards Judea.
Flaccus had clearly been traumatised by Caligula’s rise to power and it did him no good at all to hear that the Emperor’s ally Agrippa was due to make landfall in his city. Worse still, the man was on his way to Judea, to take up an appointment as King of the Jews, the very people who Flaccus had only recently been persuaded to decry. Disturbed, Flaccus encouraged the Alexandrians to protest against Agrippa’s arrival and his subsequent presence in the city. He advised them to mock Agrippa, to disparage him in puppet shows and to employ poets to write calumnies against him. When the ribaldry had run its course, Flaccus gave orders for the mob to go into the synagogues and erect statues of idols, a provocation that had never before been carried out in Alexandria.
That was when things really began to disintegrate. The Jews must have started to fight back because within a few sentences Philo was writing about the total destruction of the synagogues, destroyed so completely that not even their names remained.
While the synagogues were being torn apart, Flaccus issued a decree. Up to this point everything that had happened had been unofficial, mobs going on the rampage because they were encouraged to do so. Now the pogrom became institutionalised. Flaccus declared the Jews of Alexandria to be foreigners and aliens, no longer protected by the law. He gave permission to those who were so inclined to treat them as prisoners of war.
Fried up, the mob burst into the Jewish quarter, drove them all out of their homes and confined them into a tiny area on the edge of the desert and along the sea shore, where predatory gangs waited to attack them. Meanwhile, the mob looted their homes and ransacked their workshops.
Then the slaughter started. It isn’t necessary to repeat the details that Philo records. Although his account is far more bland than some of the disturbing reports we have heard over the past couple of weeks, and the images we have seen, it doesn’t bear repeating here. Suffice to say that the Alexandrian mob used the tools and technology available to them in those days to maximum effect.
Not all of Alexandria’s Jews were killed at the height of the pogrom. However, when passions had cooled somewhat, Flaccus reignited them again. He ordered the arrest of 38 members of the Jews’ Council of Elders. They were manacled, bound in chains and then marched in a procession through the streets to the theatre, where they were stripped of their clothes and scourged. Bizarrely, Philo complains that the instruments used to whip the Jewish elders were those usually reserved for peasants and servants, instead of the scourges typically used for the higher classes. As if that could make any difference to anyone being subjected to the lash.
Philo wrote a second account of the pogrom in his short book entitled Embassy to Gaius. In this telling he blamed Caligula himself for inciting the riot. The reason he gave is that, unlike every other nation, the Jews refused to proclaim the Emperor Gaius Caligula as a god; they neither acknowledged his divinity nor prostrated themselves before him. Philo says that Caligula’s response was to proclaim a war against the Jews, a proclamation that was enthusiastically taken up by the Alexandrians.
Of course the origins of the pogrom and the truth about who actually started it meant nothing to those who suffered. But it is a shame that we don’t have a clearer idea of the reasons behind it. The Alexandrian pogrom was the first in history, there have been untold numbers since. But unlike every other pogrom, as far as I am aware, the one in Alexandria was the only one that was not about religion or hatred. It is quite possible that it wasn’t even about Jews; if the Greeks and Egyptians in Alexandria had been incited against, say, Anglo Saxons or Gauls, the consequences would have been the same. There was no ancient hatred at the root of this pogrom. The Alexandria pogrom was simply about outsiders, about people who were different.
The philosopher, Richard Kearney, in his book Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, suggests there are three types of outsiders, three types of people who society shuns. The monsters are those terrifying alien creatures of myth and fantasy who will prevail over us if we do not subdue them first. In medieval pogroms Jews were seen as monsters, they were thought to infect people with their touch or pollute souls with their gaze. The second group, the gods, are those people who we fear because we believe that their powers and abilities exceed our own; we feel impotent against them. Contemporary antisemites see Jews as gods (though they would never express it in those terms), attributing to them the power to control the banks, the media, and who know what else. In the Shoah the stereotypes of both monsters and gods prevailed.
In contrast, the stranger can be anybody who dwells beyond our experience; people to whom we are strangers, just as they are strangers to us. They can be the family next door who come from a different culture, who seem odd to us. We can turn upon them at any time, it has often happened, as those caught up race riots throughout history can testify.
If Richard Kearney is right then the Alexandrian pogrom was the only anti-Jewish insurrection that was really a race riot; a pogrom conducted against strangers, rather than against monsters or gods. Not, of course, that it made any difference to those caught up in it.