Lampooning the Jew: The Depiction of the Jews in Juvenal’s ‘Satires’
Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis - better known to the Anglophone world as Juvenal - is one of the greatest of the Roman satirists whose work have come down to us through the ravages of time. His work ‘Satires’ is oft-quoted today and produced in various selections, but what those selections rarely inform the reader is that Juvenal also used his satirical talents to attack the jews.
Like the great poet Martial: Juvenal perceived that the jews were not merely a religious oddity but a threat to the very fabric of Roman society in how grasping and avaricious they were as a people. (1)
However unlike Martial or Philostratus: (2) Juvenal did not implicitly recognise that the jewish problem was not so much one of religion and abstract culture, but rather one of biology. Juvenal saw the jews from what we can gather from his satires as being a problem caused by a barbaric religion and a lack of a civilisation on the part of the jews.
That said however Juvenal does share his basic theme with Martial. This basic theme is that the jews as a people are tricksters, liars, thieves and frauds. One wonders about those who argue that anti-Semitism has no correlation to reality what-so-ever and how they can possibly say they know classical Rome better than the very intellectuals who lived in that city or the empire that expanded from it. We have testimony about the jews from a wide variety of Roman society at the time of nearly every political bias and social status and nearly all of it is negative. Are we supposed to believe that modern philo-Semitism used to interpreted ancient anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is supposed to give us the ‘ultimate’ interpretation (i.e., the Romans and Greeks didn’t know what they were talking about) when it contradicts the very sources on which it is supposedly based? (3)
Of course not, but yet so many of our contemporaries seem to think just this!
However enough of the slight academic generality as we should let Juvenal’s attitude to the jews speak for itself.
To wit in his third satire Juvenal comments as follows:
‘Here Numa held his nightly assignations with his mistress; but now the holy fount and grove and shrine are let out to Jews, who possess a basket and a truss of hay for all their furnishings.’ (4)
We can see that here Juvenal is attacking the jews on two different issues.
These are that:
A) The jews deliberately despoil Roman religious sites.
B) The jews are beggars and scoundrels.
On the first issue - of despoiling Roman religious sites - we can see that Juvenal points out that at the temple complex he is talking about ‘the holy fount and grove and shrine’ - has been scandalously abandoned and has been defiled by renting it to jews who are now using it as a den of iniquity. This is the height of insolence to a Roman to use a holy sanctuary - former or otherwise - as a den of iniquity which turns it from the spiritual to the mundane. Thus what Juvenal means here is clear: the jews will wilfully despoil Roman temples should they be able to get their hands on them!
One is reminded of a similar instance - this time rumoured rather than actual - of the jews upon their readmission into England wanting to purchase St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to turn into their new synagogue but this time according to the legendary rumour negotiations foundered upon the price (the jews naturally wanted a special price for a special people).
On the second issue - that the jews are beggars and scoundrels - we can see that Juvenal describes the jews who rent the temple complex as being possessed of ‘a basket and a truss of hay for all their furnishings’ by which he means to convey to his reader that the jews have rented the temple complex but are beggars in essence, which plays into his theme that the jews wish to despoil the temple complex by not even living in a majesty appropriate to the site of their abode. This to Juvenal - as to his reader - would have been the height of scandal as they would have been able to understand the wealthy despoliation of a temple complex as at least it would indirectly honour the Gods, but to despoil a temple complex while being poor was a double insult to everything the Romans believed.
We can note as an aside that Juvenal’s implicit reference to the jews as being beggars and lowly scoundrels does play very well into part of the economic history of jewry that is often overlooked by both anti-Semites and philo-Semites (historically and currently). This is what we may call the jewish iterant pedlar whose shadow darkened Europe for centuries as the common face of jewry to the average European as the jewish financier and merchant was to the middle class and aristocracy. (5) These individuals often had few possessions of their own and made - often a very good - living selling whatever they could get their hands on for staggering mark-ups to non-jews and sometimes even fellow jews. (6)
That these iterant jewish pedlars were similar to Juvenal’s jews inhabiting the temple complex we can see from his reference to their few possessions (which is a classic sign of the iterant pedlar) and later reference to the status of the jews as beggars and conmen (7) willing to sell anything for a price (even their ‘religion’). (8)
It is interesting to note that the basis for Juvenal’s remarks about the jewish wish to despoil the sacred sites of the Romans - even in Rome itself - may be found in his largely correct understand of Judaism as a religion.
This basis is found in the following passage from the Satires:
‘Some who have had a father who reveres the Sabbath, worship nothing but the clouds, and the divinity of the heavens, and see no difference between eating swine's flesh, from which their father abstained, and that of man; and in time they take to circumcision. Having been wont to flout the laws of Rome, they learn and practise and revere the Jewish law, and all that Moses committed to his secret tome, forbidding to point out the way to any not worshipping the same rites, and conducting none but the circumcised to the desired fountain. For all which the father was to blame, who gave up every seventh day to idleness, keeping it apart from all the concerns of life.’ (9)
Here we can see that Juvenal is satirising the jewish religion by noting that they don’t worship their divinities/divinity through idols (as was then the basis of all other major religions) and instead assert that their divinity is omnipotent, omniscient and also wondrously invisible. Of course Juvenal is making fun of the Torah indirectly here by pointing out - as any educated Roman would have known - that the jews were forbidden to worship idols by their God because in his absence they started worshipping the golden calf (possibly the origin of the idea common in European witch literature of kissing the devil’s arse).
Of course Juvenal - much as Martial did - sees the irony in the hypocrisy of the jews who had - then as now - a huge level of disparity between their religious theory and how they actually behaved. This he later makes fun of by pointing out that a jewess will change her learned interpretation of jewish lore to suit each customer depending on much silver they are willing to fill her palm with. (10)
Juvenal makes a surprising mention of the mark of the covenant (circumcision) when he correctly notes that the jews abstain from pork (‘swine’s flesh’) and see ‘no difference’ between eating that and cannibalism. Here Juvenal is once again poking fun at the jews by comparing their own bodies with those of the meat of animals forbidden by kashrut. He is also pointing out once again the disparity between jewish religious theory and practice by noting that the jews willingly mutilate their genitalia (which is sacred flesh) but yet regard the mutilation of animals (which is non-sacred flesh) as being below them, while proclaiming contradictory commandants in the Decalogue (the ten commandments). This would have the basis for many a Roman or Greek intellectual chortle at the intellectual absurdity of Judaism and jewish rites.
Juvenal also notes that the jews ‘flout the laws of Rome’ which is a direct reference to the supremacy of jewish religious law - what we now call halakhah - over Roman jurisprudence in jewish eyes and the fact that when in Rome they did not act like Romans but continued to act as if they were in Judea. One can easily imagine the corpulent jewish priest swaggering about Imperial Rome thinking he owned the place only to be kicked in the gutter and knifed by some crazed jewish adherent of the zealot cult - eager for his proverbial dark-eyed houris - for his ‘worldliness’ and worship of Mammon. All this of course would have been a source of much intellectual amusement to both the average Roman (who we can presume probably despised the jews as much as the Roman elite did) and the Roman intellectual. After all who would have thought that these proverbial guttersnipes from the backside of beyond were anything more than an odd ink blot on the pages of history at the time?
This perceived supremacy of jewish religious law over the jurisprudence of non-jews is interesting to note as this has long been one of the most credible and hardest to attack of anti-Semitic arguments precisely because it is based in obvious fact to anybody who cares to study Judaism with a critical eye. Jews - and those who uncritically support them - attacking this position frequently assert that the Talmuds enjoin obedience to the laws of land in which the jew then happens to reside, but what that argument conveniently leaves out - lets call it what it is: lying by omission - is what is enjoined should the laws of the land and jewish religious law come into conflict (i.e., what happens when to be a good jew one has to go against the laws of the land)?
The answer from the jewish literature is pretty unanimous: one should be a good jew first and obey the laws of the land second. (11) Even today jews are still enjoined by their rabbinical authorities to obey halakhah first and the laws of the land in which they reside second. (12)
It is clear that Juvenal’s reference to the jews believing in their divinity ‘in the clouds’ and the religious law he supposedly gave them is the origin of the implicit belief that Juvenal alludes to that the jews can do what they please, because they are unique and special (hence can occupy and desecrate Roman temple complexes with abandon while Yahweh apparently plays the part of a celestial cheerleader) and need obey no rules that the non-jew might try to impose on them. (13)
It is also of note that Juvenal refers to the Torah as ‘Moses’ secret tome’, which suggests that the jews were trying to keep the text of Torah to themselves lest the non-jews ‘misunderstand’ some of the passages therein and draw the logical conclusion that Judaism is explicitly anti-gentile and admonishes its followers to be a ‘Chosen people’ and that that status is biological not merely based on religious confession and belief. Obviously parts of the Torah leaked out and by the time of Celsus the Epicurean it had become common knowledge among Roman intellectuals what the Torah contained but by then the Roman and Greek intellectuals were having to contend with early Christianity as a more overt and aggressive threat than Judaism had ever been (and as such their writings were focused on Christianity and often attacked Christianity through using the apparent lesser of the two intellectual evils: Judaism). (14)
Juvenal also picks up a common point of amusement for the Roman and Greek intellectual when he touches upon the Sabbath and the jews downing of proverbial tools for a day to ‘honour their father’. Juvenal predictably - and correctly I think - points this out as a sign of the inherent laziness of jews, but does not mention that they will tend to engage non-jews to do the tasks they would normally do for them while using legal loop holes in jewish religious law to allow them to get their work done as long as they don’t specify that this work is being done on the Sabbath.
From this discussion it is therefore obvious that Juvenal’s thought on the jewish question is based on the presumption that it is a question of religion and abstract culture and not one of biology. We can further see this in Juvenal’s delightful satirizing of jewish religious hypocrisy and lapsed ethics.
The relevant passage is as follows:
‘No sooner has that fellow departed than a palsied Jewess, leaving her basket and her truss of hay, comes begging to her secret ear; she is an interpreter of the laws of Jerusalem, a high priestess of the tree, a trusty go-between of highest heaven. She, too, fills her palm, but more sparingly, for a Jew will tell you dreams of any kind you please for the smallest of coins.’ (15)
Once again here we find reference by Juvenal to the fact the jew is by nature something of an iterant pedlar (16) when he refers to the ‘basket’ and ‘truss of hay’, but we also find here explicit reference to the false beggary of the jews not similar from Martial’s comments regarding this phenomenon. (17)
Part of her begging Juvenal tells us - with obvious satirical intent - is to ‘interpret the laws of Jerusalem’ for passers-by, by which he means to make his reader snort with laughter at the hypocrisy of the jews as a religious community and as a people. Juvenal is referring to the ability of every jew to somehow tell everyone else what jewish religious law really says, but what he or she says it is somehow differs from what every other jew thinks it is! (18)
Hence Juvenal wryly remarks that while jews occupy and desecrate Roman temple complexes and holy places: they set themselves up as what the high priests or priestesses of the local tree, which is a nod to the nature worship and animism inherent in Roman and Greek mythology (that was the worship of idols according to Judaism and thus abhorrent).
Juvenal also remarks that one can change the ‘laws of Jerusalem’ by simply giving the begging jewess more money and all of a sudden the prognostication becomes more favourable and oh wait the prediction was mistaken and that ‘looking deeper’ it is now favourable if you cross her palm with more silver. Hence Juvenal’s sarcastic reference to the jewess as a ‘trusty go-between of highest heaven’ and that a jew - in general - will ‘tell you dreams of any kind you please’ for a fee of course.
Oh, but wait that isn’t from some anti-Semitic newspaper or text: it is from Juvenal one of the greatest satirists the world has ever known! Now watch the philo-Semites squirm and gabble about ‘prejudice’, but they must answer the simple question of why on earth Juvenal would choose the jews alone to attribute his ‘prejudices’ too and not everyone else as well?
Let us cut through the pestilent sophistic miasma of philo-Semitic ‘clarifications’ and ‘qualifications’: Juvenal was hardly likely to make things up when his contemporary Roman sources agree with him as well. Surely the Law of Parsimony tells us that the least number of assumptions; in the absence of evidence to the contrary (which is where oh worshippers of the self-chosen?), is the way to go and not simply trying to rationalise away comments by those we idolise that we don’t like (as the philo-Semite does habitually)?
For Juvenal and the numerous other Roman authors critical of the jewish tradition (by far the majority who deign to mention Yahweh’s little darlings) are talking about what they saw and the intellectual trends of the day: they are not trying to justify a pre-existing agenda based on the assumption of non-jewish guilt and jewish innocence (which forms the basis of post-holocaust philo-Semitism).
Juvenal goes on in his lampooning of jewish beggary and dishonesty when he refers to them indirectly as ‘Syro-Phoenician’ and talks of the community from the Indumean gate, which was ancient Rome’s jewish quarter and one of its poorer districts. (19)
To wit:
‘And when it pleases him to go back to the all-night tavern, a Syro-Phoenician runs forth to meet him----- a denizen of the Idumean gate perpetually drenched in perfumes --- and salutes him as lord and prince with all the airs of a host; and with him comes Cyane, her dress tucked up, carrying a flagon of wine for sale.’ (20)
Here Juvenal is relying on his Roman reader’s knowledge of the contemporary geography of ancient Rome as he is noting the Semitic tendency to hondle (21), but then telling us that this ‘Syro-Phoenician’ is actually a reference to jews by noting that he is from Indumean gate where the majority of Rome’s jewish population at that time resided. In effect the passage should be understood as ‘a Jew runs forth to meet him’ rather than that which a literal interpretation would suggest.
Juvenal’s remarks about the jews in this context are different version of his jewish beggary and dishonesty theme that we have covered throughout this article. He ascribes to the jew a place in an ‘all-night tavern’ (22) where the jew appears to be waiting for the unsuspecting non-jewish customer - having dolled himself up with effeminate perfume which is clearly distasteful to Juvenal - (23) so that he can sell him as much wine as he can possibly drink (hence his acting like a host and the offering of a flagon of [probably cheap] wine for sale) with the additional incentive of a prostitute (‘her dress tucked up’) and then take advantage of the Roman’s drunken stupor to proverbially rob him blind. The fact that the jew is ostensibly poor is also provided contextually by Juvenal reference to the Indumean gate, which was one of the poorest quarters of Rome.
So much as the jew of Martial is taught by his mother to beg properly (and falsely): the jew according to Juvenal has refined this process into an art of the conman, which entails playing the host, pawning off cheap wine at an exorbitant price with the help of a willing prostitute (possibly a jewess playing the part of Esther) and then clean out his customer’s pockets and possessions.
So what of the satirist Juvenal: well he certainly was no friend of the jews and nor was he an anti-Semite in the actual sense of the term, but he strongly opposed the jews of his day in his beautiful verse. It is a shame that Juvenal contribution to the anti-jewish cause has so long been forgotten by anti-Semites and it deserves to be remembered and honoured once again.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/savage-poetry-martial-on-the-jews
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-first-anti-semite-philostratus
(3) I am using slightly Hegelian language here, but it serves to demonstrate that the philo-Semites tend to conceive their ideas as the end of all interpretations as opposed to merely just another interpretation.
(4) Juv. 3
(5) For an excellent summary work of the economic life of the time which gave rise to the iterant pedlar in popular myth and folklore see Christopher Dyer, 2005, ‘Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850 – 1520’, 2nd Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven; Georges Duby, Juliet Vale (Trans.), 1991, ‘France in the Middle Ages 987 – 1460’, 1st Edition, Blackwell: Cambridge.
(6) This is a serious gap in the literature and the only work I know of that deals with this economic phenomenon in detail and in any language is: Betty Naggar, 1992, ‘Jewish Pedlars and Hawkers 1740-1940’, 1st Edition, Porphyrogenitus: Camberley. Statistical backup for this argument is incidentally offered by the German statistical handbook on the jewish question: Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage, 1939, ‘Die Juden in Deutschland: Herausgegeben vom Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage’, 8th Edition, Franz Eher Verlag: Munich, pp. 29-45
(7) Juv. 8
(8) Ibid. 6
(9) Ibid. 14
(10) Ibid. 6
(11) An explicit example is provided by Myer Lew, 1944, ‘The Jews of Poland: Their Political, Economic, Social and Communal Life in the Sixteenth Century as reflected by the Works of Rabbi Moses Isserls’, 1st Edition, Edward Goldston: London, n. 65 p. 129; Paul Kriwaczek, 2006, ‘Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation’, 2nd Edition, Phoenix: London, p. 140. Also worth reading in this case is the testimony of Jacob Brafmann, Siegfried Passarge (Trans.), 1928, ‘Das Buch vom Kahal’, 2 Vols., 1st Edition, Hammer Verlag: Leipzig, which spends considerable time on this issue from the perspective of a jewish rabbinical convert to Christianity (on the reasons for Brafmann’s conversion and the origins of the book please see Brafmann, Op. Cit., Vol. I, pp. 3-7).
(12) As one can ascertain by reading about the recent concern among jewish religious authorities that halakhah could be removed from its status of a separate legal authority under American law: http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national/anti_sharia_laws_stir_concerns_halachah_could_be_next
(13) Surely giving credence to Philostratus’ remark that the jews are in perpetual rebellion not only against Rome but humanity writ large as well. (Philostra. V A 5.33)
(14) On early Christianity and its conflict with Rome please see: Charles Freeman, 2009, ‘A New History of Early Christianity’, 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven.
(15) Juv. 6
(16) Ibid. 3
(17) Mart. Epi. 12.57
(18) One could see this as an implicit nod to the egoistic theory of the jewish question as Juvenal is essentially telling us that every jew is an egomaniac who thinks he is the next Moses or David.
(19) Jerome Carcopino, E. O. Lorimer (Trans.), 1991, ‘Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire’, 4th Edition, Penguin: New York, pp. 138-142
(20) Juv. 8
(21) To ‘hondle’ means to informally bargain/negotiate in a commercial context in Yiddish.
(22) This can be compared to the frequent jewish occupation of running taverns and inns in Eastern Europe during the early modern period to the advent of the Soviet Union in late 1917.
(23) The conservative idea that a real man did not need to wear perfume as it was a mark of an effeminate nature was actually quite common in ancient Rome as it was frequently ascribed to the luxuries and degeneracy of the East with their fleshpots and loose sexual mores. That said the Spartans were known to perfume their heavily muscled bodies and long hair, but this was rejected by the Romans. In a modern context one might remark as did Henry Ford in ‘The International Jew’ that the jew always tries too hard to fit in and as such simply gets it wrong often with hilarious results. Juvenal also implies just this in his first satire when he says: ‘The day itself is marked out by a fine round of business. First comes the dole; then the courts, and Apollo learned in the law, and those triumphal statues among which some Egyptian Arabarc or other has dared to set up his titles; against whose statue more than one kind of nuisance may be committed! Wearied and hopeless, the old clients leave the door, though the last hope that a man relinquishes is that of a dinner; the poor wretches must buy their cabbage and their fuel. Meanwhile their lordly patron will be devouring the choicest products of wood and sea, lying alone upon an empty couch; for off those huge and splendid antique dinner-tables he will consume a whole patrimony at a single meal. Ere long no parasites will be left! Who can bear to see luxury so mean? What a huge gullet to have a whole boar----an animal created for conviviality----served up to it! But you will soon pay for it, my friend, when you take off your clothes, and with distended stomach carry your peacock into the bath undigested! Hence a sudden death, and an intestate old age; the new and merry tale runs the round of every dinner-table, and the corpse is carried forth to burial amid the cheers of enraged friends!’ (Juv. 1) [Arabarc is an allusion to the jewish Prefect of Egypt between 67 – 70 A.D.]