Volume 44, Number 20 · December 18, 1997
Their Jewish Problem
By Jasper Griffin
Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World
by Peter Schäfer
Harvard University Press,, 306 pp., $35.00
It would have come as a surprise to the imperial peoples of antiquity—the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Medes and Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans—if they could have been induced to believe that they would all pass away into extinction, leaving in unbroken existence only an inconsiderable people, never even mentioned by the Greeks before the fourth century BCE, which each of them in turn had defeated, conquered, and ruled. Yet so it is. One ancient people has clung on to its existence: repeatedly subjected, repeatedly dispersed, but somehow never extinguished. In the modern world there are no Babylonians, no Medes, no Romans even, but the Jews are still here.
Review, 3784 words
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