Source: richardedmondson.net

Two thousand years ago a mob of Jews stood on a paved walkway outside of Pilate’s residence in Jerusalem and screamed for Jesus’ crucifixion.

This past week, a group of Israeli soldiers and medics stood about a dying Palestinian man lying prone upon a street, offering him no medical assistance–just as one of the soldiers stepped forward and pumped a bullet into the man’s head.

The question we might ask ourselves is what do these two incidents, spaced 2,000 years apart, tell us about Jewish behavior? Do they suggest a pattern? Maybe even an historical one?

Recently I published my second novel, The Memoirs of Saint John: When the Sandstone Crumbles. The book has a lengthy section in it set in Alexandria in 38 AD. One of the first pogroms against Jews in recorded history took place in the Egyptian city at that time, and the events which unfolded, including a massive explosion of violence against Jews, serve as the story’s backdrop.

Here’s a true fact–a man named Philo lived in Alexandria in those days. He was one of the wealthiest, most prominent Jews of the city, and he also happened to be a prolific writer. You can do a search and turn up a number of his treatises on the Internet today. One of these is entitled “Embassy to Gaius,” in which he referred to the native Egyptians as “a seed bed of evil in whose souls both the venom and the temper of the native crocodiles and asps were reproduced.” Philo, though highly respected by Jewish scholars today, was, as you can see, a bit of a racist.

The population of Alexandria at the time was comprised mainly of three different groups. There were the Native Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Jews. Considerable tensions existed between the Jews, on the one hand, and the Greeks and Native Egyptians on the other. The Native Egyptians by and large tended to work as laborers for Jewish traders and shopkeepers, though some excelled in a variety of other endeavors including philosophy and sciences.

In addition to his supremacist attitude toward the Egyptians, Philo also managed to enrage Greek scholars at the Museion–the sector that housed the city’s famed library–by insisting that Plato had gotten all his ideas from Moses. The Greeks, of course, revered Plato, much in the way that the Jews venerated Moses. A brouhaha ensued, particularly after Philo asserted that Moses had been in essence “the very summit of philosophy.”

An Egyptian scholar jumped into the fray by arguing that the ancient Israelites had not actually escaped from Egypt, as their books maintain, but had in reality been expelled–while a Greek scholar interjected, by way of elaboration, that the expulsion had been due to the Israelites being “scabby and leprous.”

Thus, as we see, tensions in the city were seething under the surface–at virtually every level of society. It was in essence a “perfect storm” waiting to engulf the Jews of Alexandria. And it did indeed engulf them.

One of the things I noticed when I started studying the events of 38 AD is the striking parallel between Jewish behavior at that time and what we see occurring in Occupied Palestine today. In fact, it was one of the reasons I wrote the novel.

For 275 years–from 305 BC up to 30 BC–Alexandria was under the rule of a family dynasty known as the Ptolemies. During this time the city was subdivided into five districts, each named after the first five letters of the Greek alphabet. The Jews were assigned the Delta district with the stipulation that they remain in that district and not move into other areas of the city. This took place under one of the early Ptolemy leaders, who also accorded the Jews a large measure of self-government. The privileges extended to them included the right to practice their own religion according to their own laws, with a Jewish ethnarch to preside over their civil affairs whose power was officially recognized by the Ptolemy kings. The Ptolemies had in effect rendered Jews independent of the council and civic government of the city as a whole, though as I say, there was one stipulation–that they remain in the Delta district.

But in the following years, the Jewish population grew, and eventually leave was given them to expand into a second district. Into a third district they also moved, followed by a fourth, until, by 38 AD, Jews could be found living in all five districts of the city. This in itself probably would have brought them into conflict with the other two ethnic groups, but Jews were granted additional licenses as well.

The lone Jewish ethnarch had been replaced by a Gerousia, which had 71 members–just like the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem. Theoretically, the Gerousia was subject to the authority of Flaccus, the Roman-appointed governor of Egypt, but Jews also had considerable political influence in Rome. Herod Agrippa, part Jewish, was best friends with the emperor Gaius. The two were old school chums, and Gaius appointed Agrippa as king over a vast swath of territory, including most of Palestine as well as parts of what is today Syria.

In Alexandria itself, Jews equally held political influence. Despite being presided over by their own Gerousia, through which they conducted their own civil affairs, they also held administrative posts in the city government. In fact, Philo’s brother, a man named Alexander, held the position of alabarch, making him the chief customs official for both of the city’s harbors. He was widely suspected of corruption.

The riots against the Jews started in early August that year, and ended up with Jewish shops being plundered and with Jews being bound and dragged through the streets. The anger had been building for nearly three centuries, and suddenly it found release in an explosion of pent-up fury. A “court” was set up in the city’s theater. Here Jews were taken, accused of crimes, and subsequently found guilty. Some were killed, others were stripped of their clothing and flogged in front of an audience of cheering spectators. The flogged and chastened included a group of 38 members of the Gerousia who had been captured and paraded through the streets.

All of these events are described in my novel. What I see in Palestine today is notexactly the same, but it does have certain similarities. Glaring examples of Jewish supremacism can of course be seen on display in modern day Israel. For instance, compare Philo’s quote about the Native Egyptians–that they are “a seed bed of evil in whose souls both the venom and the temper of the native crocodiles and asps were reproduced”–with remarks about the Palestinians by Israeli “Justice” Minister Ayelet Shaked:

They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

Crocodiles and asps…little snakes. You get my drift. Striking, striking similarities! And of course, compare the expansion out of the Delta district by Alexandria’s Jews with the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Note also what Shaked said regarding blood, namely that the Palestinian’s “blood shall be on all their heads,” and then look at Matthew 27:25. “Then answered all the people, and said, ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’” It has often been the contention of Jews that passages like this from the gospels are nothing more than fabrications by anti-Semites–but the extent to which we see Israel now validating the portrayals of Jews in the New Testament is little short of amazing!

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