Word: josephus
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When Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was hard pressed for clerical workers just before the U.S. entered World War I, he gave his legal advisers a knowing look: forthwith they decided that a yeoman need not be male. This led to 11,275 yeomanettes in the U.S., France...
...never-ending tug-of-war in the Semitic mind between nationalism (atavistic) and internationalism (idealistic)-a nub made spiny with the misunderstandings that this cryptic conflict causes in whatever alien community it takes place. Author Feuchtwanger has embodied this struggle in the character of First-Century Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus (The Jewish War), historical hero of the fictional trilogy of which Josephus and the Emperor is volume three...
...earlier volumes, Josephus and The Jew of Rome, the nationalist in Josephus succumbed to the internationalist. A young Jewish rebel, he came to recognize the invincibility of Rome, ended the Jewish revolt by proclaiming the Emperor Vespasian as the Messiah. Josephus went to Rome, became a Roman knight and official historian of the Flavian dynasty, spent the rest of his life trying to move Mount Zion and the Capitoline Hill closer together. Result: he was distrusted by the Jews, never accepted by the Romans. But Rome, tolerantly skeptical in religious matters, showed him no official hostility...
...Josephus and the Emperor takes the inevitable tragedy a step further, tells what happens when an antiSemitic, Romanizing Emperor, the Lord and God Domitian (Dominus ac Deus Domitianus, "D.D.D." to his friends), destroys the very basis of Josephus' verbal internationalism, destroys his prestige, his son, his life. At last the broken and aging Jew, thrown back on simple nationalism, is killed in Judea by ignorant Roman horse troopers while he is trying to reach a band of Jewish rebels like those he repudiated in his youth. He is buried in his native earth, but his grave is unknown. Paradoxically...
...Josephus and the Emperor is sultry with wars, murders, double & triple- intrigues, early Christians, rape, weird religious rites, living burials and the intangible mood of desperation that pervaded late Roman society. There are memorable pictures of candidly dissolute Empress Lucia, who goes in for young intellectuals; of Norbanus, head of the secret police, who murders Domitian just before Domitian gets around to murdering him. There is Domitian himself, worrying about his place in history; tossing doles to the masses when he feels his popularity waning; plotting how to destroy the last liberties of the Senate. Against these monstrous Romans...