The Blood Libel and the Leper Libel: Ancient Antisemitism?

Was there a “Jewish problem” in antiquity?1 Did Jews make themselves sufficiently offensive to generate resentment, fear, or hostility? Or, regardless of Jewish actions or intentions, were they perceived as distasteful, objectionable, or dangerous? Discussions of antisemitism in the Greco-Roman world are legion, and the bibliography seems to grow monthly. I make no effort to summarize it all, let alone to engage with any of it in detail in the short space available. Nor will I endeavor to construct a definition of “antisemitism” which would inevitably be arbitrary, disputable, and probably unhelpful. One can, of course, always resort to the comfortable evasion of saying what was said of pornography, “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it.” On any reckoning, Jews, at least those in the diaspora, were outside the mainstream, usually marginal, and often separatist. That could get them into trouble on occasion, for they were conspicuous, conspicuously different, and, in the event of turbulent circumstances, vulnerable. Scholarship on the subject, which began as early as the eighteenth century, featured by luminaries like Johann Gustav Droysen, Theodor Mommsen, Eduard Meyer, and Elias Bickerman, has labored mightily to identify reasons why gentiles might have found Jews to be odious or menacing.2 The most common reasons postulated by researchers are the social non-conformism of the Jews, their supposed shunning of the majority culture, their isolationism which slid into xenophobia and misanthropy, their monotheism that scorned civic cults, not to mention emperor worship, their peculiar customs like circumcision, dietary laws, and observance of the Sabbath that pagans found especially bizarre and subject to mockery, their religious beliefs that set them apart from the rest of society, their claim to be a chosen people, their proselytism that threatened the coherence and stability of traditional Greco-Roman values, indeed their fundamental ethnocentricity which, as the influential Israeli scholar Victor Tcherikover put it a generation ago, made their very existence a foreign body among other peo-