Christian authors of Late Antiquity, particularly in the fourth century, had many things to say about the Jews. They also had many ways of saying them. The most pressing dilemma for many was to explain how the Jews, the cultural and genealogical descendants of the ancient Hebrews or Israelites, had once been the covenant people of God but were so no longer. The former claim was undeniable, codified in the Christians’ own Scriptures (their ‘Old Testament’). The latter claim Christians took as axiomatic: the Christians alone were (now) God's chosen collective. Explaining how the Jews had lost their privileged place as God's people was thus of fundamental importance for Christians seeking to establish their own place within a theological understanding of history. One way of delegitimizing the Jews involved capitalizing on a complex of ideas familiar to the Roman world: namely, those of sickness, plague and disease.
Christians have always tended to see what we call the first century CE as definitive for Jewish and Christian identity: this period witnessed the birth of Christianity and its Scriptures, as well as the demise of the Jews in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE. Ancient Christians generally understood the latter as a direct result of the Jews’ rejection and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Jerusalem's destruction, and the larger Roman-Jewish War (66–70 CE), came to be seen as the provoked and purposeful rejection (and cursing) by God of his former people. Perhaps the most forceful articulation of this perspective came in a work fittingly titled On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De excidio Hierosolymitano).Footnote 1 This work employs the themes of sickness, disease and plague to help ‘write the Jews out of history’, as it were. That is, it uses a discourse of disease to signal a process of Jewish ‘dying’ in the course of the catastrophic events of the later first century.
The present article argues that De excidio uses a rhetoric of sickness, disease and plague to do two specific things: first, to stereotype the (first-century) Jews of the author's narrative as a people who are ‘sick’ or ‘diseased’ in certain critical ways; second, to present that sickness as a key causal and explanatory factor in the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. In cataloguing this rhetoric of contagion, we see that ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus’, the name given to the anonymous author of this work,Footnote 2 drew upon, and was inspired by, various categories of sources – biblical, classical and Josephan – but also that these influences were marshalled into a thoroughly Christian conception of supersessionist theology and anti-Jewish historiography (‘supersessionism’ being the biblically-based Christian self-understanding and claim to have displaced the Jews as God's covenant people within history). As today, in the ancient world disease and contagion were widely used as metaphors for moral, social and conceptual realities (the ‘spread’ of ideas, the notion of a social ‘disease’). Drawing upon such metaphor as it appears in the literature of traditions both ‘Graeco-Roman’ and ‘Judaeo-Christian’, Pseudo-Hegesippus articulated an early and significant iteration of a multifaceted, widespread and long-enduring Christian rhetoric: that of the contagion of the Jews.
Pseudo-Hegesippus as an Object of Study
De excidio, and its anonymous author dubbed ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus’, have received little attention during the past century.Footnote 3 This marginalization has several interrelated causes,Footnote 4 but suffice it to say that recent scholarship has begun to appreciate anew De excidio's significance as a literary artefact of Christian Late Antiquity.Footnote 5 Despite its authorial anonymity, unknown date (probably c.370–380 CE), and unknown provenance (probably Antioch, possibly Rome or Italy),Footnote 6 De excidio is an interesting text and in some ways may act as a cultural barometer of later fourth-century Christian thought.Footnote 7 Unlike any other extant ancient Christian text, it provides a type of historiography more reminiscent of Sallust or Livy than any other Christian modification of that genre.Footnote 8 Following Josephus in terms of literary genre, it is actually much like Thucydides in that it is a ‘war monograph’, expressing interests which are largely martial, geographical and political. As a distinctive and little-studied text, De excidio has a significant contribution to make to the growing body of work on the development and diversity of historiographical literature in Late Antiquity.Footnote 9
Pseudo-Hegesippus cited, and was familiar with, the classical tradition, including its historiography; thus the text often quotes Sallust, for instance. Whilst overtly Christian in outlook and rhetoric, Pseudo-Hegesippus produced a history that in many ways feels more classical than its Christian counterparts,Footnote 10 although this distinction itself is not unproblematic. In writing Jewish history in a classical tone (albeit from a Christian perspective), Pseudo-Hegesippus was following the lead of his primary source, Flavius Josephus, of whose Jewish War, a seven-book history written in Greek in the first century CE, De excidio was essentially a Latin rewriting.Footnote 11 De excidio's classical genealogy, including its more immediate predecessor, the Jewish War, proves a helpful framework for understanding Pseudo-Hegesippus's traditional yet novel configuration of contagion rhetoric within his larger project of anti-Jewish historiography.
Jewish Disease from Josephus to Pseudo-Hegesippus
In the Jewish War, Josephus speaks of the ills of Jewish factionalism in terms of the metaphor of sickness, referring to the capacity of the Sicarii (dagger-carrying Jewish rebels) to foment rebellion as a ‘madness akin to disease’.Footnote 12 More than once, Josephus refers to the Jewish uprisings that fuelled civil dissension during the Roman-Jewish War by using the language of disease, particularly the noun νόσος (‘sickness, disease, plague’) and corresponding verb νοσέω (‘to be sick / diseased, to suffer [from plague]’).Footnote 13 In so doing, Josephus plays on the established historian's habit of describing undesirable social movements, which often carried strong ethnic associations, in terms of disease.Footnote 14 Livy had done the same thing in Book 39 of his Ab vrbe condita when he described the foreign (Greek) cult of the Bacchanalia as a dangerous movement which was spreading through Italy ‘like a contagious disease’.Footnote 15 Further, this figurative portrayal of disease played on the already important place of plague in ancient historiography – Thucydides’ description of the plague at Athens (430–426 BCE) in Book 2 of his History of the Peloponnesian War is one of the more popular pericopes of ancient history-writingFootnote 16 – by imputing to human social action what had already been observed (by some) of epidemiological reality: the capacity to ‘catch,’ spread and harm.Footnote 17 Such metaphors became particularly prominent in the work of Roman authors such as Sallust and Lucan, who discussed civil war in terms of a ‘disease’ of state;Footnote 18 Josephus will have been influenced by such a milieu as a historian in Rome writing explicitly about (Jewish) civil war. Pseudo-Hegesippus, who also knew both Sallust and Lucan, goes even further, building upon Josephus's characterization of Jewish factionalism as a sickness to portray not just the Jewish rebels, but the Jews in general as a diseased, and thus dying, people.
This article will show how Pseudo-Hegesippus develops an original ‘rhetoric of contagion’, moving far beyond his major source, by referencing a series of passages which have no direct parallel in Josephus's Jewish War. This is significant, because much of De excidio's narrative consists in loose translations or paraphrases of Josephus's earlier Greek work. Just as significant is the literary nature of the passages to be discussed: we find Pseudo-Hegesippus's rhetoric of the ‘contagion of the Jews’ expressed most frequently and most fully in character speeches.
Speeches attributed to various characters in the narrative were a constituent and important feature of ancient historiography.Footnote 19 They allowed historians to frame, explain and interpret their narratives in terms of variegated perspectives and possibilities. Numerous scholars have contributed to our understanding of ancient historiographical speeches in recent decades.Footnote 20 The most important points to note here are that speeches in ancient histories were not what such speeches would be expected to be in modern histories: they were not presented as verbatim transcripts of things said, but were understood as the kinds of things that particular people would, should or could have said in particular scenarios. Such speeches were evaluated in terms of plausibility, as well as aesthetic quality and rhetorical style, not what we would dub ‘accuracy’.Footnote 21 Thus, although the passages treated below are imputed to various characters within De excidio's narrative, they evince ways in which Pseudo-Hegesippus constructed meaning via the interplay between imagined authorial and character perspectives.
The Discourse of Jewish Disease in De excidio
Early in his work, in Book 1, Pseudo-Hegesippus alters a fundamental aspect of Josephus's own disease discourse, thereby signalling the anti-Jewish rhetoric of contagion to be developed throughout De excidio. In describing the reign of the little-loved Judean king Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE), Pseudo-Hegesippus speaks of a domestica seditio and contentio which led to war, and he calls these uprisings pestis (‘a plague’),Footnote 22 following Josephus's metaphorical model. But Pseudo-Hegesippus goes beyond Josephus when he identifies this ‘sickness’ as a kind ‘familiar to the Jews’.Footnote 23 Now, instead of just describing Jewish factions, the metaphor of sedition as disease becomes a pockmark of the Jews in general: in De excidio, the Jews are stereotyped as a people who carry the contagion of civil unrest.
While Pseudo-Hegesippus attributes the disease of sedition to the Jews in general, we will explore further below how the manifestation of this ‘illness’ is also shown to be specifically symptomatic of the Jewish factions and their rebel leaders per se,Footnote 24 again as in Josephus's oeuvre. Thus, in Book 4, where Pseudo-Hegesippus reports how John of Gischala fled Galilee and entered Jerusalem, there to stir up trouble, he describes him as doing so ‘like some kind of disease’ (quasi quaedam pestis) which ‘infected’ (infecit) the minds of many.Footnote 25 Elsewhere John is called a ‘pestilential virus’ (pestilens uirus).Footnote 26 Nor is John's ‘sickness’ incidental to Pseudo-Hegesippus's narrative. The very next sentence begins: ‘this, therefore, was the cause of the destruction of that great city’.Footnote 27 In other words, the seditious contagion of which John was a representative was the primary cause of Jerusalem's destruction. In this Pseudo-Hegesippus agrees with Josephus, who also identified Jewish sedition as the effective cause of the destruction of both Jerusalem and the Temple.Footnote 28 Josephus even allowed what we will soon see Pseudo-Hegesippus aver: that this internal self-destruction had a level of prophetic inevitability to it.Footnote 29 However, as an examination of Pseudo-Hegesippus's rhetoric of contagion will reveal, the Christian author drew rather different conclusions from these events than had his Jewish predecessor.
It is at this point that we begin entering territory within De excidio which does not have parallels in Josephus's earlier Greek work. The passages discussed below occur in speeches which De excidio creatively reworked and expanded what the author had found in Josephus (when he found anything at all), so that the passages themselves are original to Pseudo-Hegesippus. Thus they not only illustrate how De excidio's anti-Jewish rhetoric of contagion functions within the narrative's broader logic, but they also demonstrate that Pseudo-Hegesippus wielded this discourse as an original and independent historian in his own right.
We begin with De excidio 5.2.1, arguably the most striking and important speech in the entire work.Footnote 30 In that speech, a second-person address by the author or narrator to the city of Jerusalem (and by proxy to the Jews), Pseudo-Hegesippus dramatizes, describes, explains and frames the destruction of Jerusalem, which the remainder of the work will narrate. The address begins, notably, by summoning five biblical figures as a kind of cloud of witnesses to behold the Jerusalem and Jews to, about and over whom Pseudo-Hegesippus speaks. These are Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David and Elisha.Footnote 31 Each hero is introduced with reference to one or more of his most famous legacies within biblical tradition. In introducing Aaron, Moses's brother and Israel's celebrated inaugural high priest, Pseudo-Hegesippus says: ‘Arise, Aaron, you who once, when death was devouring the majority of the people because they had offended the omnipotent God, stood between the living and the dead, and death was stayed and the plague clung to your body, which was thrown forward, nor was it able to become a contagion among the living’.Footnote 32 Pseudo-Hegesippus introduces Aaron as an ancestral exemplum in terms of his heroic actions in Numbers 16: 41–50: there, following yet another rebellion on Israel's part against God's ordained leaders (Moses and Aaron), God strikes the people with a plague, which Aaron must check, censer and incense in hand. Pseudo-Hegesippus recalls this major moment of Aaron's priestly mediation by way of introduction: Aaron was one who prevented death (mors) from plague (lues), which could have become a contagion (contagio) among God's people.
Why does Pseudo-Hegesippus introduce Aaron this way? One answer seems to be that this scene was in Pseudo-Hegesippus's mind a key episode from the Bible, relevant to later Jews in several respects. Out of seven passages in De excidio in which Aaron is mentioned, three specifically reference this story from Numbers 16.Footnote 33 Another answer, however, appears inductively from an examination of the speech of De excidio 5.2.1 which follows Aaron's introduction. There it becomes clear that what Aaron represents in the speech is a kind of national priestly leadership that is willing and able to stave off death and disease from God's people. The ancient Israelites had this in Aaron; the first-century Jews manifestly lacked it, at least after killing their own legitimate priests Ananus and Jesus (not the Jesus of the gospels) and then rejecting and crucifying the true high priest (from a Christian perspective), Jesus Christ. Indeed, Pseudo-Hegesippus alludes to Aaron again in delineating this with reference to Aaron's staff, whose miraculous budding (Numbers 17) is explicitly said to have characterized ancient Israel's divine blessing, and whose present (figurative) absence embodies the divinely abandoned state of the first-century Jews:
Ananus and Jesus – chief priests – lay unburied within you, and these men who not long ago were clothed in priestly robes, who were held in honour even by foreigners, lay with deformed corpses, fodder for birds and food for dogs, with their limbs removed and scattered throughout the whole city, so that a spectacle of ancient sanctity might be seen to mourn such an affront of the sacred name and such deformity of the once brilliant office [of priest]. … And previously the priestly staff blossomed even though cut off from its wooden root, but now faith withers and piety has been buried and all emulation of virtue is departed. It is no wonder if a people which has turned away from God and follows after the vile spirit of opposition has been divided against itself. For how would he have been able to hold onto his peace who had repudiated the peace of God? Christ is the peace of God who made the two one. For this reason, from one people many have rightly been turned against themselves, because, divided, they did not want to follow Jesus, who was bringing harmony, but rather, united, they followed the divisive spirit of fury. Therefore you were receiving a just reward for your faithlessness, Jerusalem, when you destroyed your ramparts with your own hands, when you tore out your entrails with your own swords, so that the enemy had pity on you, and he spared you so that you might rage.Footnote 34
In other words, Aaron – or his staff – provided what might be understood as a sacerdotal vaccine to ancient Israel whereby that people was able to avoid the disease of civil dissent (what Pseudo-Hegesippus here calls the ‘vile spirit of contradiction’, improbus contradictionis spiritus). De excidio 5.2.1, therefore, evinces a creative interpolation of biblical imagery, Christian theology and rhetorical exemplarity: the cultural practice, perfected by the Romans, of using ancient figures to embody ideals and thus interpret and evaluate current events.Footnote 35 This complex serves to illustrate how Aaron, who historically shielded Israel from a literal plague caused by sedition, provides a sharp contrast to the unprotected Jews of 70 CE, who in Pseudo-Hegesippus's narrative are dying of a disease comprised of sedition.
De excidio 5.2.1 perpetuates Pseudo-Hegesippus's rhetoric of Jewish contagion by playing on various kinds of sickness, both historically and in his narrative present.Footnote 36 Aaron had defended Israel from a plague in Hebrew antiquity, which provides a contrast to the situation of the narrative's present-day Jews, who were ‘consumed by a very severe disease’ (grauiore morbo consumerentur) while they were besieged inside Jerusalem's walls.Footnote 37 But even this sickness during siege experienced by the Jews emerges within a larger description of a polluted Jerusalem and Temple precincts, whose smell (and even taste) Pseudo-Hegesippus describes in detail. The dead bodies around the Temple had created a twofold ill, one which was both medical and ritual, such that ‘human and divine things were equally spoiled and polluted together, with all things being mixed’ (humana pariter atque diuina maculari ac pollui, permixta omnia). Both epidemiological-physical and theological-religious disease characterize the plight of the first-century Jews, which, according to Pseudo-Hegesippus, related to, and was accompanied by, the contagion of civil dissent.Footnote 38 Nor does Pseudo-Hegesippus refrain from mentioning the would-be cure (remedium) which existed for the Jews: namely, Jesus Christ. In so doing, De excidio fuses Christian theology with the Roman historiographical habit, exemplified in Tacitus, of speaking of societal boons as remedia.Footnote 39
De excidio 5.2.1 clarifies that different kinds of disease were, in the author's mind, causal factors in Jerusalem's demise. Ritual pollution, physiological ailments and civic sickness were interrelated parts of the diseased Jewish body politic which is the object and addressee of the speech in that chapter. But there was also another, contiguous party to these events: the Romans. At one point in the address, Pseudo-Hegesippus discusses how the Romans at times refrained from their active siege of Jerusalem because the Jews were doing their work for them by warring amongst themselves. However, Pseudo-Hegesippus explains this by saying of Jewish unrest, which might be viewed as a standard military tactic, that ‘it was for this reason that the Romans preferred to be spectators rather than fighters, lest within your internally raging innards there be perceived a force at work more of contagion than of strength’.Footnote 40 Pseudo-Hegesippus's sideways attribution of a manus contagionis to the Jews here is a way of saying that the Romans’ occasional abstention from battle was due, at least sometimes, not to the military threat the Jews posed, but to their ‘viral’ threat. Just before this Pseudo-Hegesippus describes Jerusalem as a body tearing itself apart, a rhetorical trend in Roman historical analysis epitomized in Lucan's Pharsalia (i.e. De bello civili).Footnote 41 Is Jerusalem's metaphorical sickness therefore physiological or psycho-social?Footnote 42 In any case, Pseudo-Hegesippus adds to this, in the line directly preceding the one cited above, a theological element, saying to Jerusalem that God had fought against it as well. The suggestion in all of this is that the Jews of Jerusalem were understood by the Romans to be in some way ‘contagious’, sick with a disease whose symptoms were civil unrest and infighting and whose causes, it seems, were at least in part divinely sent.
Disease, the Destruction of Jerusalem and the Demise of the Jews
In this final section we follow the Roman and divine components of Jewish sickness as diagnosed by Pseudo-Hegesippus, introduced above, into what is arguably the most serious aspect of Jewish contagion in De excidio. We have already seen that Pseudo-Hegesippus's understanding of the Jews’ diseased state was multifaceted and involved a theological component. We have also seen that De excidio presents the Romans as having recognized, and having tried to avoid, this Jewish epidemic. These features of the discourse become even more explicit and grave in a speech made by the Roman general (and future emperor) Titus towards the end of the work.
De excidio 5.40 is in many ways the most disturbing chapter in a generally disturbing history. There, we read Pseudo-Hegesippus's rewriting of a story recorded previously in Josephus's Jewish War (6.199–213), sometimes called the ‘Maria Story’; it is the story of a mother caught up in the Roman siege of Jerusalem who, driven mad by starvation and harassment, proceeds to kill, cook and eat her infant son.Footnote 43 When Titus hears news of this, he is horrified. In De excidio he responds with an extended prayer-speech hybrid which, among other aspects, brings Pseudo-Hegesippus's rhetoric of contagion to new heights. The way that Pseudo-Hegesippus introduces Titus's reaction to the report is one of the more telling instances of anti-Jewish contagion rhetoric to be found in the whole of De excidio. We read:
Upon hearing this [i.e. news of Maria's deed], Caesar cursed the contagion of the unhappy country and, lifting his hands to heaven, declared as follows: ‘… I, blameless, absolve myself to you from this contagion, whatever power you are who exists in heaven. … May their own ruins cover it and hide it, lest the sun look upon the disease of the earth itself, lest the sphere of stars behold it; lest the breeze of the wind be defiled, and that cleansing fire arise.’Footnote 44
The Latin term contagium, like contagio (with which it is often semantically and grammatically interchangeable), refers to ‘contact’ and carries the idea of ‘infection, contagion, taint’.Footnote 45 Therefore Titus is here deploring not only Roman contact with the Jews, but the taint of that contact: the Jews are sick, and they threaten to infect the Romans. Maria's unthinkable deed becomes an embodiment of Jewish sickness that now threatens Roman civil health. Titus tries to deal with the disease by means of prayer, a kind of ad hoc apotropaic cure, absolving himself to ‘whatever power exists’ in heaven from the Jewish contagion he beholds before him in Jerusalem (ab hoc contagio tibi me absoluo). In Titus's speech we find again the correlation between epidemiology and theology (or, better, theodicy): the Jews are sick with an illness that manifests itself in self-harm, but this ailment also has divine implications. Titus does not want to ‘catch’ it, nor to appear before the divinity as if he had. But Titus's reaction to Maria's deed does not end with prayer.
The final statement in Titus's quotation above comes near the end of his speech. To my mind it is among the most important manifestations of what is here referred to as Pseudo-Hegesippus's rhetoric of contagion. In the interim between the earlier statements quoted above and this final statement, Titus delivers a lengthy speech in which he explicitly stereotypes the Jews as a people – they are twisted, self-harming and destructiveFootnote 46 – and considers and justifies at length what he sees as a necessary course of action: the destruction of Jerusalem, and thus the effective decimation of the Jews. This event is, of course, what De excidio is all about, as its title overtly suggests. What is important for present purposes is that Titus casts Jerusalem's destruction as necessary partly in the terms of Pseudo-Hegesippus's overarching Jewish-disease discourse: ‘let the sun not look upon the contagion of the earth itself’. The land of Judaea, the Jewish people, constitute a plague that must be quarantined, quashed, lest it infest the elements and the universe itself. This fits well with the statement of Pseudo-Hegesippus mentioned earlier that the pestis embodied in John of Gischala is said to have been the causa of Jerusalem's destruction.Footnote 47 In the passage at hand, Pseudo-Hegesippus uses the Roman general Titus as a mouthpiece to reinforce his own perspective as a historian that the destruction of Jerusalem, the effective end of the Jews, represented the needful hygienic eradication of a diseased people. World history is not unacquainted with those who have viewed such group or ethnic eliminations as ‘cleansings’. Titus's final statement about a ‘cleaning fire’ (purgatorius ignis), an ancient Stoic idea, somehow resonates uncomfortably with such a notion. But the point here is that Titus's speech marks the Jewish ‘disease’ not only as the ultimate cause of Jerusalem's destruction, but also as a visible reality whose symptoms sparked the Roman response to the epidemic.
The fact that Titus prays to some undefined deity in his speech at De excidio 5.41.2 introduces a final, though no less important, element into the equation. Like Josephus, Pseudo-Hegesippus recognizes in Jerusalem's destruction a divine hand linked to ancient prophecy.Footnote 48 But the couching of this viewpoint in contagion language sets De excidio's theological perspective apart. At De excidio 5.16.1, Pseudo-Hegesippus scripts the second of two consecutive speeches given by Josephus qua historical actor (former Jewish general turned Roman captive-client-ambassador) to his Jewish countrymen trapped behind the walls of Jerusalem (in what follows Josephus is discussed as the historical character of De excidio's narrative, not as author of the Jewish War). In an effort to convince his comrades to lay down arms and bow to the inevitable Roman imperium, Josephus in these speeches is made to present extensive, sweeping recollections of Hebrew history to make his case that resistance is futile and capitulation is the virtuous, right and only option. Josephus also states unequivocally the cause of the current Jewish plight: internal strife and sedition. Eventually his argument turns theological. Using biblical exempla who are, as we already saw above, rather familiar to De excidio and especially to its discourse of Jewish contagion, Pseudo-Hegesippus has Josephus wax eloquent:
No wonder if divine favour has departed from the Jews, whom so many shameful things had walled in. For surely, a good man will flee his home and desert his house, full of horror, if he learns that some crime has been committed in it – he refuses to be associated with a dishonourable household, and he abhors the iniquities of those who abide there; and shall we doubt concerning the highest and immaculate God, that he would abhor the taint of such shameful things, and that he would turn away from such deadly crimes, lest he be delayed within the marketplaces of murderers, he who commanded that Dathan and Abiram be separated from the innocent, because they had challenged Moses and Aaron for claiming the priestly office, lest either their stain contaminate the pious by their proximity to the innocent or their punishment engulf them?Footnote 49
Here Pseudo-Hegesippus takes ideas found in Josephus, Jewish War 5.412–15, and couches them in the language of contagion, adding key biblical exempla as illustrations of the argument. The picture painted by Josephus's sententia here is of a God who is immaculatus and as such fundamentally averse to the contagium of the Jews’ shameful deeds. As a historical illustration of what God is like, furthermore, Josephus cites the rebellion of Dathan and Abiram against Moses and Aaron, a rebellion which resulted in the divinely mandated quarantining, and then the exceptional destruction, of the offending party.Footnote 50 The upshot of this section of Josephus's speech is that God, the final historical cause of Jerusalem's destruction, is presented as having abandoned the Jews for reasons of sanitation and hygiene: like the disease of rebellion evinced by Dathan and Abiram, the Jews are diseased and thus have the potential to contaminate (contaminare). For this reason, Pseudo-Hegesippus has Josephus say that it is ‘no surprise’ that diuina gratia has departed from the Jews.
The above passage appears in one of the sections of De excidio where Pseudo-Hegesippus is at his most creative and most expansive as a historian in departing from his historical source. In other words, it is a passage of great import for understanding Pseudo-Hegesippus in general. The section quoted above, along with other passages discussed earlier, suggests that at a basic level Pseudo-Hegesippus understood the divine rejection of the Jews to be an attempt to reduce contagion. The Jews of the first century, whom De excidio effectively depicts as the ‘final Jewish generation’ in history, were diseased. Their sickness exhibited interrelated symptoms, including civil war, ritual pollution and at times even literal, physiological disease. Pseudo-Hegesippus implies that such sickness was communicable and that it was understood as such both by the Romans (embodied in Titus) and by God. Clearly this lies at the centre of De excidio's historiographical logic, inasmuch as it speaks directly to the ultimate and mediate causes of Jerusalem's destruction. Pseudo-Hegesippus's anti-Jewish rhetoric of contagion is not a peripheral part of De excidio; it is the very germ of the work's historical logic and narrative rhetoric.
Conclusion
Even aside from a rather impressive argot related to disease,Footnote 51 De excidio demonstrates an apparent familiarity with the institutions related to health and sickness in the author's day.Footnote 52 Furthermore, the later Roman world in which this text was written was one familiar with the realities of plague, disease and epidemic, even if the fourth century was something of a ‘golden age’ which largely avoided such devastations.Footnote 53 Thus, Pseudo-Hegesippus's rhetoric of Jewish disease is in some ways unsurprising to find in De excidio as a work, and within the late Roman Empire as a culture. Further, as noted above, Pseudo-Hegesippus was writing within an ancient Mediterranean koinê which had already developed many of the metaphorical tools that he applies to his discourse of Jewish disease. In a way, then, Pseudo-Hegesippus's deployment of disease language to realize anti-Jewish depiction is an extension of discursive habits, informed by his own habitus, that extend far beyond these particular rhetorical aims. As a Christian text of the late fourth century, De excidio is in good company in presenting his anti-Jewish rhetoric of contagion: John Chrysostom is another Christian author who routinely refers to Jewish ritual and Jewishness as a disease in his Discourses against Judaizing Christians.Footnote 54 All these things – intertextual evidence, context of writing, sources and inspirations, broader literary-rhetorical milieu – help make sense of Pseudo-Hegesippus's discourse of Jewish contagion. In a text such as De excidio, such a discourse is unsurprising, even de rigeur.
At the same time, however, Pseudo-Hegesippus's rhetoric of Jewish contagion marks a singularity within ancient Christian literature. For De excidio applies its discourse of Jewish disease to the widespread Christian historiographical dilemma of explaining the Jews out of history, as it were. Many authors may have talked about Jews and Jewishness in terms of disease – ironically, for Pliny the Younger had said the same of Christians in his famous tenth Letter Footnote 55 – but far fewer constructed a historicized rhetoric of Jewish contagion as a way of diagnosing the effective end of the Jews. Pseudo-Hegesippus was far from unique in making figurative use of disease language; but his specific application of that language is distinctive: De excidio exudes an original and pointed play on this extant trope which serves poignantly and multifariously to imbue an anti-Jewish historiographical vision.
Noting the antiquity of the figurative use of disease in his essay ‘Culture and Contagion’, Marvin Pernick makes a critical note about interpreting such metaphorical usage:
Although contagion has served as a metaphor for centuries, distinguishing the figurative from the literal usages depends on the specific historical and literary contexts. It is anachronistic to assume that every use that does not fit modern bacteriologic meanings must have been intended metaphorically. Since Greek and Roman antiquity, religion, ideas, and emotions have often been seen as literally linked with physical health. Calling sin or grief ‘contagious’ could be a metaphor, but it could also be meant quite literally. Since imbalances of the mind and soul were widely believed to cause and reflect physical disease, mental states might be seen as transmitted by a physical contagion or might themselves actually be the poison of disease contagion.Footnote 56
In other words, we should beware of mapping our own modern assumptions and worldview onto a metaphor-employing discourse such as Pseudo-Hegesippus's rhetoric of Jewish contagion. Adjectives such as ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ used in this article may in reality be misleading, for it seems very likely that Pseudo-Hegesippus would not have recognized a reading of (say) civil dissension as disease as anything other than literal. And indeed, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have most famously shown, the way that we as humans apprehend the world is, quite literally, usually a matter of metaphor.Footnote 57 When Pseudo-Hegesippus talks about what he perceives as problems within the social history of the Jews in terms of disease and contagion, he is merely betraying the fact that he is human: human minds function in terms of metaphors; it is their fundamental modus operandi.Footnote 58
For Pseudo-Hegesippus, the corporate sins of the Jews – moral, ritual and religious – constitute a ‘disease’. But there is no good reason to assume that Pseudo-Hegesippus would have disassociated such an idea from, say, physical disease. Indeed, as this essay has shown, his disease rhetoric itself ignores any real boundary between physical and conceptual sickness: the contagion of the Jews, witnessed by Titus and God, was what we would call a ‘metaphor’ but is presented as having literal physiological correlates and real historical consequences. De excidio's anti-Jewish discourse of contagion is ‘real’ and had real implications as well, carried as it was by one of the more popular and influential texts of Late Antiquity.Footnote 59 Inasmuch as such an idea spread through subsequent streams of Christian thought and discourse, we might be justified in seeing Pseudo-Hegesippus's discourse of Jewish contagion as a kind of ideological disease all its own.
