For The Temple (Cont'd)

THE JEW OF ROME--Lion Feuchtwanger --Viking ($2.50).

Whether progress is provable or not, even praisers of times past would have to admit that the historical novel of today stacks up favorably alongside its peers of yesterday. Though past-partisans might not allow Robert Graves's Claudius books, Alfred Neumann's The Devil, Lion Feuchtwanger's Power and Josephus, Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers the palm over such classics as Defoe's The Journal of the Plague Year, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Flaubert's Salammbo, critical consensus would be that the modern exponents are obviously better grade than run-of-the-mine romanticists like Walter Scott, Charles Reade et al. Lion Feuchtwanger's second volume on the Jewish Historian Josephus does not let his colleagues' standard down.

Flavius Josephus, or Joseph ben Matthias, as his fellow-Jews called him, was a queer sort of hero. Feuchtwanger's first volume told how Josephus, after fighting the Romans like an unexceptionable patriot, turned his cloak into a toga to save what he might from the wreck of Judea. Thereafter he never completely got back his countrymen's confidence, never altogether won the Romans' respect. Josephus himself was never quite sure how he stood with himself. When his hated master, the Emperor Vespasian, died and his friend Titus came to the throne, Josephus' wave curled to its crest. Reading over the new edition of his famed book, the Jewish War, gazing at his bust in Rome's Temple of Peace, where only the greatest writers were immortalized, he could say to himself: "There are seventy-seven who have the ear of the world, and of these I am one." But when he let his adored Egyptian wife wean away their son to Hellenic heathenishness, when he compromised with his religion for the sake of Roman rewards, he would think: "Your Doctor Joseph is a scoundrel."

While Titus' infatuation with Berenice, the Jewish princess, lasted, Josephus and his fellows made hay. But the affair came to an end, and to win back his waning popularity, Titus gave freer rein to the antiSemites. Josephus' wife and son left him; his other son (by an earlier marriage) died, partly through his neglect. He went back to Judea, visited the desolate site of what had once been Jerusalem, saw how vexed the land was by its Roman conquerors, by a dangerous new sect called Minaeans or Christians, by the iron orthodoxy of the Jewish doctors of the Law. Sadly he returned to Rome again, determined to be neither hidebound Roman nor hidebound Jew but a citizen of the world. He got back in time to see his emperor Titus die, to be evicted from his house by the new Emperor Domitian, to be made a public mock by the rabble of Rome.

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