The Power of Personality

Abraham and Moses were perhaps the only two figures that non-Jewish authors of the ancient Mediterranean world would have known about and would have associated with the Jews (or Judeans). The Roman world in particular cared a great deal about famous ancestral paradigms – what they called exempla – and the ancient world writ large had a habit of correlating the defining characteristics of particular exempla and particular peoples. Thus Carthaginians, like Hannibal, were seen as perfidious and Romans, like Scipio, were understood to be brave and impassive. This essay explores a similar dynamic wherein exemplarity and racial (and/or ethnic/national) stereotypes coalesced in Greco-Roman presentations of Abraham and/or Moses as embodiments of Jewish traits. It argues that Greek and Roman authors tended to impute to Abraham and Moses a particular theurgic, magical essence, and that this came to be a stereotype used to categorize the Jewish people. By putting this discourse in the frame of symbolic or cultural power, this article seeks to contribute to our understanding of how exemplarity, the rhetoric of race, and discursive constructions of identity and alterity could function in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian antiquity.