Contagion of the Jews: Metaphorical and Rhetorical Uses of Sickness, Plague, and Disease in Pseudo-Hegesippus

Abstract

Drawing upon discourses developed in earlier Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian antiquity, the little-known text De excidio Hierosolymitano, also dubbed ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus’, develops a discourse of Jewish disease within a history of Jerusalem's destruction by the Romans in 70 CE. Based upon Flavius Josephus's Greek Jewish War, this Latin Christian text of Late Antiquity thus deploys a rhetoric of Jewish contagion within its historiographical solution to the Christian theological exigency of explaining the Jews out of history. Far from being an incidental or merely aesthetic component of this work, this article shows that a discourse of Jewish sickness constitutes a central component of Pseudo-Hegesippus's conceptualization and presentation of the end of Jerusalem and the historical demise of the Jews.