From Masada to Jotapata: On Josephus in Twentieth-Century Hebrew Scholarship

This chapter traces the changing attitudes towards Flavius Josephus in Hebrew scholarship from the 1920s to the end of the century. It shows that the process of transformation of Josephus from low-life traitor in the 1930s to the skilled historian and writer (of works such as Jewish Antiquities, Against Apion, and Life of Josephus) of the 1990s was influenced by trends in scholarship: translations, archaeological discoveries at Qumran and Masada, and the appreciation of the literary nature of historiography. The chapter also links this reassessment to the changing world in which scholars found themselves, from pre-State Mandatory Palestine, the experience of the Holocaust, to Israel's inconclusive wars of the 1970s and 1980s. All this eventually allowed Jotapata to rise as Masada declined, and Simchoni's position, which acquitted Josephus from the charge of Betrayal, came to be accepted.