Lessons for the community: Jewish and Christian readers and their perception of Josephus/Josippon as an early political thinker

• In Event: HABENT SUA FATA LIBELLI: Josephus and Other Ancient and Medieval Sources

Abstract

This paper examines Josephus as an example for the fluidity of Jewish texts in early modern Europe, an issue of growing research interest. I focus on Abraham Ibn Daud’s twelfth-century world Chronicle Dorot Olam (Generations of the Ages), a text that used Josippon, a tenth-century Hebrew work based on Josephus, to stress the importance of political quietism under proper rabbinic leadership. Here, the reading interests of wildly diverse readers could converge: Five hundred years after Ibn Daud, and with the help of early modern translations into German and English via an early Latin-Hebrew print edition, this particular version of Josippon would help Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic to formulate their own ideas regarding the relationship between religion and state in their fledgling political entities. Some readers of these English-language versions were aware of the author’s identity, but many were not, and they read and discuss the text as the brief and immensely readable Hebrew original of Josephus Flavius, together with other versions of Josippon and Josephus circulating at their time.

author

• Katja Vehlow, University of South Carolina