What if Emperor Domitian had loved his cousin?

Cousinly love stays Domitian’s hand → A Jewish emperor, if not a Jewish empire → 2000 years of pogroms against someone else → The Manhattan Project is the Berlin Project → Uh-oh

Someone came before Raba and said:
The mayor of my town has told me:
Go and kill so and so; if you do not, I will have you killed.
Raba said to him: Let him kill you, but you must not kill.
What do you think, your blood is redder than another man’s?
Perhaps his blood is redder than yours.
•Pesahim, 25b.

The Roman emperor Domitian (Suetonius tells us) started out as a gentle soul; while still a boy, he had tried to forbid sacrificing bulls to the gods, so great was his aversion to bloodshed.

Roman emperors don’t tend to stay gentle souls. Suetonius’ one paragraph about gentle Domitian stands out as an anomaly among page after page of Domitian’s atrocities, in which the Emperor orders unsuspecting citizens to be torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or have their genitals seared, all on the flimsiest of pretexts (one named his dog Hannibal; one had studied under an actor who had been Domitian’s rival in love; one copied out Mss. that the Emperor suspected were offensive). His infamous persecutions of Christians (including, according to Eusebius, the apostle John) and general lawlessness mark Domitian as one of the worst Emperors, down there with Nero and Caligula.

Or was he? History is around 80% spin. If I were to say that labor unions were originally designed to keep immigrants unemployed; later sold out to a genocidal dictatorship (Stalin); and then got taken over by organized crime—in 1969 (to take one example) the president of the United Mine Workers had Jock Yablonski and his entire family murdered in order to prevent reform in the union (listen to it here)—well, all of that would be true. If I were to say that unions are the only things preventing us from laboring nonstop in dangerous conditions for not money but simply coupons; and that companies, in league with the US government, mercilessly gunned down workers and their wives and children—at Ludlow, Colorado (to take one example), in 1914—this too is correct. Whatever your opinion on unions, it has to take into account both these sentences, neither of which is phrased fairly.

Domitian may not have been so bad; he sought to consolidate more power in his own hands, which put him at odds with the Roman Senate; but this meant that the Senatorial class, which wrote all the histories, made a monster out of an autocrat. He may not have even persecuted Christians (Eusebius being a partisan source, and late). If you were not a senator, jealous of your traditional role in Roman government, Domitian probably looked to you like a competent, strong emperor.

As it turns out, the Senate eventually murdered Domitian (see IH p. 295—Domitian is Vespatian’s younger son). Along the way, Domitian murdered a bunch of senators. Another guy he murdered: his cousin Titus Flavius Clemens, which is important because Clemens’ two sons were, before their father’s fall, Domitian’s designated heirs. The charge against Flavius Clemens was “atheism.”

Atheist was a term applied at the time to Christians (they refused to worship the divine emperor!); but it was also applied to Jews. No one knows for certain exactly what Flavius Clemens was or was not not believing in, but one theory (offered by Paul Kerestztes, for example, and based on a close reading of contemporary sources) was that he had converted to Judaism.

This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. At certain points in antiquity, Judaism was, if not “fashionable” then at least respected in the Empire. The Jews had a reputation in the ancient world of being especially pious and virtuous. There is an old Jewish commonplace that the greatest tragedy in Jewish history was not the Babylonian captivity or the destruction of Herod’s temple, but rather that day in the third century BC when the Torah was translated into Greek (the “Septuagint”) and placed in the Library of Alexandria. Suddenly gentiles could read the hitherto secret histories of the Jews, and the fear was that the sordid tricks of the patriarch Jacob, or the faithlessness of the Israelites in the Sinai Desert, might ruin the Jews’ good name. A shanda fur die goyim, one might say.

Their good name must not have stayed ruined, though, as three hundred years after the Septuagint there were people known as “god fearers,” gentiles who worshiped alongside Jews without being Jews themselves. They did not get circumcised nor did they follow all the Mosaic laws of the Torah, but they were expected to follow the ethical commandments of Moses, and worship the Jewish God as best they could.

Proselytizing increased after the disastrous Jewish uprising of AD 70. It may have continued increasing, for the late-second-century emperor Septimus Severus eventually banned all conversions to Judaism, which must have meant it was happening often enough that he thought it was a problem. But the late first century, when Flavius Clemens lived, had enough Jewish converts to make his own conversion plausible.

Domitian had no son surviving to adulthood (of course he didn’t! he was a Roman!); not did he have any nephews; so making their cousin’s children heirs to the Empire made good sense. But whatever atheism Clemens had fallen into, his wife, and presumably his children, were equally culpable. A Jewish emperor would never allow his predecessor to be deified; Domitian was never going to stand for an afterlife as a mortal! Jews may have been seen as virtuous in ancient Rome, but they were also seen as a radical break with Roman tradition, and Domitian was not going to stand for that either. He ordered his cousin killed. Clemens’ wife was exiled. We don’t know what happened to the two children, but they certainly didn’t inherit any empires.

Cousin Flavius was popular, and Domitian’s fall (assassination) has been tied directly to his murder of a beloved relative. The aged senator Nerva ended up succeeding to the purple.

Rome would continue to be a loose confederation of polytheisms, gradually shouldered into obsolescence by the encroaching tide of Christianity.

But what if (his hand perhaps halted by familial love) Domitian had failed to kill his cousin? What if one of Clemens’ sons, Vespatian II or Domitian II, had been a Jewish emperor on the Roman throne?

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Cousinly love stays Domitian’s hand → A Jewish emperor, if not a Jewish empire → 2000 years of pogroms against someone else → The Manhattan Project is the Berlin Project → Uh-oh

Back in Brownsville, I often heard it said,
“Life is so hard that
sometimes I think it’s better not
to be born at all.
But who’s so lucky?
Maybe one in ten thousand.”
•Dave Berg, My Friend God (1972).

In the fourteenth century BC, the pharaoh Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and demanded that the people of Egypt leave off the worship of the old gods and embrace his new cult of Atenism. It didn’t take: A generation after he died, Atenism was extinct; the grand temple of Aten was “cemented over”; Akhenaten’s inscriptions were chiseled away. Egyptian scribes erased Akenaten and his heirs from history like Stalinists airbrushing Nikolai Yezhov out of official Soviet photos: The roll of kings passed directly from Amenhotep III to Horemheb, leaving a quarter century unaccounted for.

Rome’s history was this: It got a Christian emperor and then it became a Christian empire. You might imagine a Jewish emperor would equal a Jewish empire. But things don’t have to work out that way; Akhenaten and Julian (see IH chapter 9) are counterexamples. Rome won’t be made Jewish in a day.

Young Vespatian II had a few things going for him as a Judaizing force, though. His father was well-liked. His predecessor was very much disliked, at least by the powerful senatorial class. Judaism, as we’ve seen, was itself well-liked, and its most scandalous feature—the fact that Jews were more or less traitors to the Empire—Vespatian II could erase on his first day in office. It’s easy to imagine that a Jewish emperor would at the very least lead to Jews, especially converted “god fearer” Jews, being more common in the Roman world.

In our world—in one of the stranger corners of our world—stands David Icke, the British author and former soccer star who believes that earth is secretly run by “certain bloodlines” of extraterrestrial shape-shifting reptiles. When Icke sought to enter Canada on a lecture tour in 1999, he found himself detained at the airport by immigration: Canadian authorities were afraid that his reptiles were a codeword for Jews. Icke denies this charge, of course. While some of these reptiles are doubtless Jewish, he’d say, others are Methodist or Zoroastrian or what have you. They’re actually just reptiles. His opponents can only reply by quoting Robert Loren Fleming: “Nobody’s that stupid”—lizardry must be a metaphor. But Canadian authorities decided that his lizards were lizards, and let him enter the country. The protestors who followed Icke around Canada remained unconvinced.

Between the fall of Flavius Clemens and the bizarre set of circumstances that lets people confuse lizards and Jews lie fifteen hundred years of European history—and also fifteen hundred years of Jewish persecution. The question for us is what difference more Jews would make.

ii. To figure out the answer, we’ll need a whirlwind tour of European antisemitism. The first thing to note is that fifteen hundred years of Jewish persecution is, while not inaccurate, a vast oversimplification. Things were different all over: city by city and year by year.

They could change quickly. In the fourteenth century, Spain was the most hospitable country to Jews in all of Christian Europe; by the fifteenth century, it was probably the least. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella (in addition to 1. sending Columbus off on his way and 2. ending over seven centuries of Muslim occupation in the Iberian peninsula—annus mirabilis!) exiled all the Jews from Spain; the ones who converted, and therefore got to remain, were subject to constant scrutiny, lest they prove to be “crypto-Jews” only pretending to be Christians. (This is more or less the plot of the third part of the 1820 gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer.) In Portugal (which expelled its own Jews in 1497), the recently converted were, in 1506 in Lisbon, massacred anyway.

Spain and Portugal were near the end of what might be called the Golden Age of Jewish Expulsions: Between 1398 and 1519, over ninety cities in Germany alone ousted their Jewish populations. These expulsions may have been due (as one anonymous fifteenth century source asserts) to the fact that the local Christians were in debt to the Jewish money lenders—as King Philip IV, who killed all the Templars rather than pay them back, will tell you, expulsion is an easy way to default on a loan (see IH p. 220). But they may also have been due to a fear that Jews would ritually murder the local children.

The rumor started in 1144 in Norwich, England, that Jews needed to sacrifice gentile children to celebrate Passover or (I am not making this up) to cure their hemorrhoids. All Jews had hemorrhoids because they had told Pontius Pilate, “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25b); they’d heard from Christian priests the blood of Christ could cure them, but they misunderstood, and sacrificed a young Christlike scapegoat in the hope of relief. From Norwich, the story of ritual child murder spread to the continent, and lasted for centuries. The American folk song “Fatal Flower Garden” (hear it here) about a young boy killed by a “gypsy lady,” is based on a much older British ballad, “Sir Hugh,” in which the child killer is a “Jew’s daughter.”

She’s led him in through ae dark door,         /one
And sae has she thro nine;                             /so
She’s laid him on a dressing-table,
And stickit him like a swine.
And first came out the thick, thick blood,
And syne came out the thin,                         /next
And syne came out the bonny heart’s blood; 
There was nae mair within.                          /no more

Martin Luther is often cited as a watershed moment in the history of antisemitism. Luther’s own opinion of the Jews devolved (i.e. became worse) over the course of his career—the tracts Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) and On the Jews and Their Lies (1542) mark the two poles, twenty years apart, of his thinking—but what is important is that Luther, even at his “burn the synagogues” worst, does not insist on fantasies of murdered children or blood libel. Luther hates Jews not because of things they haven’t done (ritual sacrifice) but because of things they have done—they have, after all, rejected Christianity. This is not a good reason to persecute a people, of course, but we might call it, after the rules of logic, a valid one. Luther’s charges were unfair, but they were true; the Jews really were Jews! If convicting people for their religion is just, then the Jews are all guilty; whereas they’re innocent of ritual murder.

Luther’s slightly older contemporary Johannes Pfefferkorn was a Jew who had converted to Christianity and was as fanatical as converts are proverbially said to be. But although he advocated burning Hebrew books and confiscating Jews’ property, he sensibly insisted that ritual child murder had not been a Jewish tradition at least since the days of Jephthah (Judges 11:30–40); Pfefferkorn should know; he had spent the early years of his life not sacrificing any children.

The Nazis made generous use of old German antisemitic traditions—of the medieval “Judensau” image carved into some German churches, for example, which depicts (as the word implies) a sow nursing Jews; but especially they made use of Luther’s antisemitic tracts. This is odd, though, because an even wider gulf separates Nazi antisemitism from Luther’s antisemitism than separates Luther’s antisemitism from the antisemitism of Norwich and Sir Hugh. In fact, not only Nazi-style antisemitism, but all modern antisemitism, had not even been dreamed of in the sixteenth century, or centuries following. You cannot actually mix the two. Look, for example, at Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: No less a critic than Harold Bloom asserts that “one would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb” not to perceive that the play is antisemitic; and yet it is not a play that a Nazi could have written. The Merchant of Venice is the story of two Jews, one bad and one good; the good Jew (Jessica) is so good that she converts to Christianity!

No one would call The Merchant of Venice a pro-Jewish work, for note its basic assertion: That Jessica’s only flaw is that she subscribes to the tenets of a particular religion. When she converts, that flaw disappears! The Nazis, though, did not object to Jews because Jews were obdurate in denying Christ; they objected to Jews as a race. Antisemitism as a term dates from the late nineteenth century, because before that people weren’t worried about Jews being Semites. Note the distinction: The Merchant of Venice is anti-Jewish; the Nazi were antisemitic.

The Semitic-but-Jew-baiting Johannes Pfefferkorn would have made no sense in the twentieth century. But Nazis would have made no sense in the sixteenth century. Luther could never deny that Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew. It took nineteenth-century race fantasists to come up with a two-step theory that overturned Luther. The first step was to pretend, based largely on bad etymologies, that the lost tribes of Israel could be found in Northern Europe (Danes = the tribe of Dan; Jutes = Jews; Saxons = Isaac’s sons; etc.; etc.); the second step was to add to history’s various fantasies about Jews—not only that they murdered children, but also that they sported horns, they poisoned wells, their men menstruated—the fantasy that the current so-called Jews were actually imposters. The Bible’s Jews were a different people altogether; Jesus was an Aryan. There are plenty of websites still devoted to this theory if you wish to search for them, but a warning: They get very bad, very fast.

St. Augustine had wanted (in the fifth century) to keep Jews around because they had witnessed Christ’s Passion. If the Jews were not actually witnesses, but fakes—the stage was set for eliminating a superfluous people. Not all Nazis subscribed to this theory, but then not all Nazis cared about Jesus enough to fret about his race.

The Nazis’ Holocaust was the terrible capstone of fifteen hundred years of history. It was in some ways just another pogrom on a larger scale, with twentieth-century automation and Prussian efficiency—but in other ways a different animal. There would be no more conversions. Baptism would be no escape; the blood of the lamb wasn’t going to save anyone this time.

iii. In a Flavian world, where there were more Jews, would any of this history have been different? If Europe were all Jews, then there would be no antisemitic persecutions of course. But what if there were only some, but more, Jews? More Jews does not necessarily mean less persecution. Antisemitism in the early twentieth century was much stronger in countries with large Jewish populations, such as Hungary—where before WWII Jews made up something like 5% of the population, and nearly a quarter of the population of Budapest—than in the UK, where Jews made up less than .1%. There were only some 200 Jews in Norwich in 1144.

This pattern repeats with other groups, beyond Jews: France was seen as a haven of racial tolerance by black American celebrities in the early twentieth century, when France had no racial minorities (other than, say, Bretons); now that France has a sizable minority population, it can no longer pass for a land without hate.

On the other hand, antisemitism is stronger in the American South than in New York City; the antisemitic classic (or “classic”) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became a bestseller in South Korea at a time (the late twentieth century) when it was taboo in any country with a larger Jewish population. These things can go either way.

Since it’s unlikely that medieval Europe could have been more antisemitic (especially in the worst centuries for Jewish persecution, roughly the twelfth through the fifteenth), we’ll assume that the presence of more Jews has decreased persecution. Perhaps the Jewish population is large enough to make any attempted pogrom escalate into a costly war no one wants. Perhaps the very presence of so many “god fearers” has siphoned off Roman attraction to Christianity, and Europe is not split between Jews and Christians, but rather between Jews and pagans.

Without persecution, though, what would happen to Jews? The worst thing that can happen to a group is, oddly enough, success. It was the ghettoization of Jews that kept them from assimilating. As Sartre says (in a slightly different context) Jews don’t create anti-Semites; but anti-Semites certainly do create Jews. A less hostile Europe could end up, fifteen hundred years on, with no Jews at all. Assimilation and disappearance happened, after all, to ten of the tribes of Israel in the eighth century BC; it could easily happen again.

But a Jewish population that emphasized proselytization could eliminate this problem; instead of assimilating to the majority, Jews in Rome were assimilating the majority to them. This allows a Jewish population to mingle with others without losing its identity: its identity is, after all, a people who keeps bringing in converts.

Historically, Jews had been driven by repressive laws to trades that were forbidden to Christians, such as moneylending, which is not a job designed to make a people more popular; no one likes owing money. It’s possible that a good deal of antisemitism would disappear if Jews just escaped the opprobrium of having debtors.

One thing that is all but certain: Reducing antisemitism will make life better for European Jews, but it will hardly decrease the amount of misery in Europe overall. Massacres are like neuroses; you can bottle them up over here, but then they’ll leak out over there. We know enough of hate to know that if the Jews didn’t get massacred, someone else would have: the Cathars, or the Romani, or old ladies with black cats, or people with googly eyes. Gotta massacre someone. Not having many Jews around didn’t stop Chairman Mao from murdering more people than Hitler ever did.

(Granted, I feel obliged to note upon revision, Sun Yat-sen had had a Jewish-Canadian bodyguard named Two-gun Cohen, but neither he not the few hundred Kaifeng Jews are really statistically relevant.)

Events in the past are often a zero-sum game. The ancient world, for example, was rife with slavery, and saw many slave revolts, some of them successful; which sounds great, because we are all opposed, now, to slavery. But here’s the thing: Not one of those successful slave revolts eliminated slavery. All they did was change who was the master and who the man. For some people, the revolt made a big difference, but for society as a whole it made none. The number of slaves did not change. We could reduce or even eliminate antisemitism without improving the world in total (although, again, the world would improve for Jews).

I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about the twentieth century, but there is this: By the twentieth century, some people (not Hitler, obviously; not Mao) had learned to control themselves. While in most (not all, perhaps) older wars, who wins is only important to the immediate participants, recent centuries saw more and more a disparity in the tendency to massacre. Whether Prussia beat France or France beat Prussia (1871) mattered only to Napoleon III and Kaiser Wilhelm; the amount of suffering in the world would have been the same either way; it was an old-fashioned war. But with some wars who wins makes a big difference. The canonical example is of course World War II.

Europe with the antisemitism dialed down may still be a zero sum game; Hitler just finds another group (Slavs, maybe) to try to exterminate. Except for one thing.

The atomic bomb was based on the work of a group of primarily Jewish scientists—Albert Einstein, Leó Szilárd, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, etc. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi wasn’t Jewish, but his wife was, and so he, like Einstein, Szilárd, and Teller, fled the antisemitic Axis powers for the safer shores of the US. There they built a weapon that would hand victory to whoever had it first. The Allies had it first.

If Hitler had decided to persecute and exterminate someone else—not Jews, but someone else—that’s much less incentive for all these German and Hungarian Jews to flee the Axis. The Third Reich encourages them to build a bomb for their fuhrer. Against the weight of Einstein, Teller, Fermi, et al. the US would have only Oppenheimer (born in America to German Jewish parents).

When Stalingrad and Moscow fall to atomic fire; when a V2 rocket drops an A-bomb on London; when totalitarian forces stand unopposed in Europe, looking across the Atlantic at an America still desperately duking it out with a Japan that just will not surrender—history will no longer look like a zero sum game.

References: Domitian’s atrocities: Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (Penguin, 1979)—the examples I gave are all from pp. 306–7, but don’t stop there; Eusebius, The History of the Church (Penguin, 1981) p. 125; Paul Kerestztes;“cemented over”: Nicholas Reeves, Akhenaten: Egypt’s False Prophet (Thames & Hudson, 2001) p.191; “certain bloodlines”: David Icke, The Biggest Secret (Bridge of Love, 2001) p. 394 (& v. pp. 22ff); Robert Loren Fleming and Keith Giffen, Son of Ambush Bug #2 (8/86); Sir Hugh; Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead, 1998) p. 171—if you want to set imperious critics arguing about MoV’s alleged antisemitism, cf. Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak (Knopf, 2017) p. 173; Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (Schocken, 1973) p. 143; number of slaves did not change: Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (UCAP, 1990) p. 385—for a counterargument, see Theresa Urbainczyk, Slave Revolts in Antiquity (UCAP, 2008) esp. pp. 79ff. Picture by L. Alma-Tadema.