Plutarch on the Jews
Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus - usually known as Plutarch - is one of the best known and widely-read of all classical authors in part, because many of his 'Parallel Lives' - which form the majority of his works - are the - or one of the - principle sources for many classical figures and civilizations. For example, Plutarch is our principal informant about the early Spartan kings and also a key writer about controversial early Roman figures such as the Grachii.
Plutarch himself also lead an interesting life in the first and second centuries A.D. being a Platonist philosopher, priest of the god Pluto, a senior Roman governmental official as well as being a historian. In his capacity as a historian, he makes two remarks which are noteworthy for our purposes concerning the jews.
The first occurs in his life of Mark Anthony when he tells us:
'After some stay in Greece, he was invited by Gabinius, who had been consul, to make a campaign with him in Syria, which at first he refused, not being willing to serve in a private character, but receiving a commission to command the horse, he went along with him. His first-service was against Aristobulus, who had prevailed with the Jews to rebel. Here he was himself the first man to scale the largest of the works, and beat Aristobulus out of all of them; after which he routed in a pitched battle, an army many times over the number of his, killed almost all of them and took Aristobulus and his son prisoners.' (1)
Now the above is talking about the life of Mark Anthony - as you might - expect, but we should note precisely what Plutarch says here. He is somewhat blandly referring to the rebellion of the jews against the Romans at the best of their king Aristobulus and that Anthony was one of the first men over the walls when fighting them (thus showing the personal bravery that made him stand out as a military commander).
However, note what Plutarch says next when he describes how Aristobulus gathered together a very large army of jews to make war on Rome. Aristobulus' army - Plutarch tells us - was several times the size of the Roman army, but yet the Romans with their relatively small force routed the jews with - what Plutarch seems to suggest as - relative ease.
The message Plutarch is giving us here is very simple: the jews are treacherous in that they will rebel at a moment's notice given the opportunity to do so, but if they rebel then one need not be too worried given that jews perform appalling on the battlefield and lose appalling even when they have a massive advantage in terms of numbers.
Essentially Plutarch is all but referring to the jews here as treacherous natural cowards who are ready to stab any non-jew in the back, but when they are in an honest man-to-man fight they are unable to even give a good account of themselves. This finds confirmation both in the reality (as opposed to the jewish fantasy) of the siege of Masada in 73 A.D. (2) and the jewish behaviour at the fall of Byzantine Jerusalem to the Persians in 614 A.D. (3)
Plutarch's other mention of jews comes in an episode in his life of Cicero. Where he tells us that:
'When a man named Caecilius, one of the freed slaves, who was said to be given to Jewish practices, would have put by the Sicilians, and undertaken the prosecution of Verres himself, Cicero asked, "What has a Jew to do with swine?" Verres being the Roman word for a boar.' (4)
Now Plutarch here is using the medium of Cicero's intervention in a court case to mix in a bit of anti-jewish humour to his biographic portrait of him. He had a freed slave named Caecilius try to undertake a prosecution of a man named Verres, but yet Verres roughly equates 'pig' so accordingly Plutarch is poking fun at a man addicted to 'jewish practises' for trying to prosecute a pig when pigs are considered to be unclean animals by him as a devotee to such practices.
In essence Plutarch is using the medium of a freed slave - who were usually held to be highly superstitious in Roman literature - to express the fact that he regarded Judaism as the ultimate in superstitious belief (i.e., only a slave and thus a highly superstitious and credulous person would put any intellectual stock in it) precisely because it was so different from his own religious and intellectual experiences as a priest of Pluto and a Platonic philosopher. Not unreasonably to him: Judaism would have been - as it was for many Greeks and Romans - a superstitious excuse for atheism and even if the jews did worship a god then theirs was a patently irrational system of worship as it had no form or material substance to it.
So, we can see - by way of summary - that Plutarch in both of his mentions of jews in his 'Parallel Lives' is having an intellectual jab at the jews for being highly superstitious treacherous natural cowards who compare unfavourably to the learned, honourable and heroic Greeks and Romans.
References
(1) Plut. Ant. 36
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-masada
(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-massacre-of-christians-at-mamilla
(4) Plut. Cic. 11