Jewish Tragedy

JOSEPHUS AND THE EMPEROR-Lion Feuchtwanger-Viking ($2.75).

In the guise of a series of historical novels, Novelist Lion Feuchtwanger has for years been discussing one of the touchiest of age-old issues-the Jewish problem. The nub of this problem is the never-ending tug-of-war in the Semitic mind between nationalism (atavistic) and internationalism (idealistic)-a nub made spiny with the misunderstandings that this cryptic conflict causes in whatever alien community it takes place. Author Feuchtwanger has embodied this struggle in the character of First-Century Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus (The Jewish War), historical hero of the fictional trilogy of which Josephus and the Emperor is volume three.

In the earlier volumes, Josephus and The Jew of Rome, the nationalist in Josephus succumbed to the internationalist. A young Jewish rebel, he came to recognize the invincibility of Rome, ended the Jewish revolt by proclaiming the Emperor Vespasian as the Messiah. Josephus went to Rome, became a Roman knight and official historian of the Flavian dynasty, spent the rest of his life trying to move Mount Zion and the Capitoline Hill closer together. Result: he was distrusted by the Jews, never accepted by the Romans. But Rome, tolerantly skeptical in religious matters, showed him no official hostility.

Josephus and the Emperor takes the inevitable tragedy a step further, tells what happens when an antiSemitic, Romanizing Emperor, the Lord and God Domitian (Dominus ac Deus Domitianus, "D.D.D." to his friends), destroys the very basis of Josephus' verbal internationalism, destroys his prestige, his son, his life. At last the broken and aging Jew, thrown back on simple nationalism, is killed in Judea by ignorant Roman horse troopers while he is trying to reach a band of Jewish rebels like those he repudiated in his youth. He is buried in his native earth, but his grave is unknown. Paradoxically, all that remains of Josephus is his internationalism-the histories in which he labored to reconcile his race and the Romans.

Feuchtwanger historical novels are constructed with the bellying bigness of the Coliseum, are as crammed with characters as the benches of the arena at lion-feeding time. A smart literary tradesman, Feuchtwanger dresses up his vast windows on the past with a brilliant, meticulous reconstruction of Roman society in the iridescent stages of dissolution. His characters he treats with a superior irony which his devotees deeply admire, but in which others sometimes resent a rather rabbinical roguishness.

Josephus and the Emperor is sultry with wars, murders, double & triple- intrigues, early Christians, rape, weird religious rites, living burials and the intangible mood of desperation that pervaded late Roman society. There are memorable pictures of candidly dissolute Empress Lucia, who goes in for young intellectuals; of Norbanus, head of the secret police, who murders Domitian just before Domitian gets around to murdering him. There is Domitian himself, worrying about his place in history; tossing doles to the masses when he feels his popularity waning; plotting how to destroy the last liberties of the Senate. Against these monstrous Romans, the crafty Jews of Rome's gilded ghetto seem simple, hardworking, humane people. But despite Author Feuchtwanger's reporting of the Roman arena as if he had been there yesterday, the real appeal of Josephus and the Emperor is limited to those who are already interested in its central dramatic theme.

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