Josippon

The Book of Josippon, also called Sefer Yosippon (Hebrew: ספר יוסיפון), is one of the most influential medieval chronicles of Jewish history, translated into many languages and republished in many editions, and a landmark of Jewish national historiography. It is a history of the Roman Empire and its Jewish inhabitants from the biblical history of Adam to the age of Titus. The author writes that he is copying the works of Roman-Jewish historian Josephus to whom its name refers. It was composed in the 10th century in Byzantine Italy. The Ethiopic version of Josippon is recognized as canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. It is also part of the Coptic Bible.

History The anonymous author of the work writes that he is copying from the writings of the old Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, whom the author calls Joseph ben Gorion (יוסף בן גוריון). The name Joseph is given the Greek ending on, resulting in the book's title Josephon, Joseppon, or Josippon. His Arabic name Yusibus is, according to Wellhausen, identical with "Hegesippus". A gloss gives the form from Italian Giuseppe. Trieber held the singular view that the author lived in the fourth century and derived much of his material from Hegesippus. In the Arabic and Yemenite translations, the author is called "Yusuf ibn Qaryun." The earliest textual versions surviving today are from the Cairo Geniza, fragments dated to the 11th century. Shulamit Sela has proposed that the earliest version might have been only the material from the Book of Maccabees. The Sefer Josippon was compiled in Hebrew early in the 10th century by a Jewish native of the Greek-speaking community of the Catepanate of Italy in Southern Italy, which was at that time part of the Byzantine Empire. The version edited and expanded by Yehudah ibn Moskoni (1328-1377), a Romaniote Jew from Ohrid, in the Balkan region, was printed in Constantinople in 1510 and translated to English in 1558. Moskoni was part of a Byzantine Greek-Jewish milieu that produced a number of philosophical works in Hebrew and a common intellectual community of Jews in the Mediterranean. Moskoni's version of Josippon became the most popular book published by Jews and about Jews for non-Jews, who ascribed its authenticity to the Roman Josephus, until the 20th century. The first edition was printed in Mantua in 1476. The book subsequently appeared in many forms, one of the most popular being in Yiddish, with quaint illustrations. As the Muslim writer ibn Hazm (d. 1063) was acquainted with the Arabic translation by a Yemenite Jew, Daniel Chwolson proposes that the author lived at the beginning of the ninth century. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) 's Muqaddimah (1377) also contains a post-biblical Jewish history of the "Israelites in Syria" and he relied on Jewish sources, such as the Arabic translation of Josippon by Zachariah ibn Said, a Yemenite Jew, according to Khalifa (d. 1655). Saskia Dönitz has analyzed an earlier Egyptian version older than the version reconstructed by David Flusser, drawing on the work of a parallel Judaeo-Arabic Josippon by Shulamit Sela and fragments in the Cairo Geniza and the Genizat Germania, which indicate that Josippon is a composite text redacted several times. Josippon was also a popular work or a volksbuch, and had further influence such as its Latin translation by Christian Hebraist Sebastian Münster which was translated into English by Peter Morvyn, a fellow of Magdalen College in Oxford and a Canon of Lichfield, printed by Richard Jugge, printer to the Queen in England, and according to Lucien Wolf its popularity may have played a role in the eventual resettlement of the Jews in England. Munster also translated the historical work of ibn Daud which was included with Morwyng's edition. Steven Bowman notes that Josippon is an early work that inspired Jewish nationalism and had a significant influence on midrashic literature and talmudic chroniclers as well as secular historians, though considered aggadah by mainstream Jewish thought, and acted as an ur-text for 19th century efforts in Jewish national history.

Content Commencing with Adam and the geographical conditions of the first millennium BCE, the author passes to the legendary history of Rome and Babylon, to the accounts of Daniel, Zerubbabel (according to the Apocrypha), the Second Temple, and Cyrus the Great, and to the histories of Alexander the Great and his successors. He then gives the history of the Jews down to the destruction of the Temple. The last part contains, among other things, a brief history of Hannibal and an account of the coronation of an emperor, which, according to Basnage refers to that of Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (crowned 962); this would be the only and a most valuable source of information concerning this event. If Basnage's conjecture is correct, the date of the composition of the "Yosippon" may be placed at the end of the 10th century. "Yosippon" is written in comparatively pure Biblical Hebrew, shows a predilection for certain Biblical phrases and archaisms, and is rich in poetical passages and in maxims and philosophical speculations.

Value as a historical source

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