"Until recently, no ancient historian was more widely read than the first-century soldier-statesman Flavius Josephus, the greatest source of our knowledge of the Holy Land 'between the Testaments.' In many a Victorian home and American Sunday-school library, a copy of William Whiston's translation of Josephus' works, first published in 1737 and reprinted more than 200 times since, held pride of place next to the Scriptures.
"Yet to his own people Josephus remained a pariah - a man who betrayed them in the hour of their greatest crisis. Voicing the view of many, Israeli archaelogist and general Yigael Yadin called Josephus 'a great historian and a bad Jew.'
It's AMK in the Bermuda Triangle.
"In the second and bolder part of 'A Jew Among Romans,' Mr. Raphael casts Josephus as a prototype of the alienated 'un-Jewish Jew' in the Diaspora. Josephus, he contends, was 'the first of many exiles who, whatever their internal dissidence, impersonated conformity with a dominant culture.' There follows a litany of solitaries that Mr. Raphael regards as prefigured by Josephus, from the poet Yehuda Halevi in 11th-century Andalusia to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in 17th-century Holland, to Sigmund Freud in turn-of-the-century Vienna, to the French film-maker Claude Lanzmann, director of 'Shoah,' who is likened to 'some kind of modern Flavius Josephus, unflaggingly persistant in the retrieval and recording of painful memories.' Torn between contradictory affinities, each bore something of the pathos so evident in Josephus, 'a writer whose Sisyphean exercise was to retrieve what had been lost to his people and to himself." - Benjamin BALINT, writer in Jerusalem, for the Wall Street Journal, 19-20 January 2013
