Frederic Raphael was trained at Cambridge as classicist and philosopher, and has lived for years in France: he sees Joseph(us)'s dilemmas reflected in those of Albert Camus, the radical pro-Algerian who was nevertheless a pied-noir, a French colonialist malgré lui. Now, at last, he has found his ideal biographer. To Romans, he was a pliable convert who nevertheless refused to go all the way to proper Romanitas. To the rebels he led, and deserted, he became the ultimate traitor. Understandably, he does not too often figure in the normal classical curriculum. It is exhilarating to read history that properly illuminates the present." -David Pryce-Jones, author of Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews "Joseph Ben Mattathias or-in his latter-day transformation as a Romanized historian of his own earlier role as failed leader of the Jewish nationalist revolt against Rome, 66-70 C.E.-Titus Flavius Josephus, is an extraordinarily modern character, who could easily, in all his political and moral ambiguity, have stepped straight out of a novel by John Le Carré. His purpose is to explore the moral ambiguity of identity and loyalty that Jews from Josephus to Hannah Arendt have tried to deal with ever since the Roman conquest of Judaea. Meanwhile, Raphael tells us something insightful on every page, about Edward Gibbon, the Wandering Jew, Stalin's Jewish executioner, Arthur Koestler, the battle of Masada, Pharisees, Hellenists, Tsarist pogroms, Judas Iscariot, Zionism and the ancient laws on farting." -Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War "Only someone with the gifts of Frederic Raphael could have written a book as original and wide-ranging as this one. The first modern Jewish historian and the first ever writer to use first-person prose, Josephus emerges as magnificently superior to those critics who have depicted him as a mere turncoat and traitor. With his Cambridge Classics scholars' eye and his customary sophisticated wit-he simply cannot write a dull sentence-Frederic Raphael uses the life of the general-turned-historian to explore the issues of Jewish alienation and assimilation, of collaboration versus realism, of virility and vanity, of identity, love and the meaning of historical truth. page-turning chronicle." -Publishers Weekly "It is astonishing how many modern themes are thrown up by the vicissitudes of Josephus' life of two millennia ago. "With the verve of good storyteller, novelist and biographer Raphael recreates Josephus' life and chaotic times. Raphael's insightful portraits of Yehuda Halevi, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Kraus, Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Hannah Arendt extend and illuminate the Josephean worldview Raphael so eloquently lays out. He goes beyond the fascinating details of Josephus's life and his singular literary achievements to examine how Josephus has been viewed by posterity, finding in him the prototype for the un-Jewish Jew, the assimilated intellectual, and the abiding apostate: the recurrent figures in the long centuries of the Diaspora. Raphael brings a scholar's rigor, a historian's perspective, and a novelist's imagination to this project. His life, in the hands of Frederic Raphael, becomes a point of departure for an appraisal of Diasporan Jews seeking a place in the dominant cultures they inhabit. Joseph ben Mattathias's transformation into Titus Flavius Josephus, historian to the Roman emperor Vespasian, is a gripping and dramatic story. From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist Frederic Raphael, here is an audacious history of Josephus (37-c.100), the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the Jew alone in the Gentile world.
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