Patton’s Poem and the Jews

Patton is one of the great American films, featuring George C. Scott as the brilliant, flawed, and exceedingly idiosyncratic general who believed in reincarnation and insisted he had himself been present at all of the great battles in human history. Toward the beginning of the film, Patton is driving with another general, Omar Bradley, in the Morocco desert, when he spies a battle site from the Punic Wars. He insists that they pull over, and the very modern general is suddenly transported to a scene two millennia earlier. He says to Bradley: “It was here. The battlefield was here. The Carthaginians defending the city were attacked by three Roman Legions. The Carthaginians were proud and brave, but they couldn’t hold. Two thousand years ago. I was here.”

The point is to stress the strangeness of a man who personally identifies with a battle that took place nearly two dozen centuries earlier. Patton had himself written some terrible things about the Jewish people; but for Jews, this scene in particular should not be that odd. We remember, commemorate, and mourn moments that took place in the ancient past, some of them intimately involving defeats at the hands of the very same Romans themselves.

This was brought home to me over the past few months, as I have been teaching a seminar on Josephus’s The Jewish War at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. Josephus’s history chronicles the Jewish rebellion against Rome that broke out in 66 C.E., which concluded with the Romans burning Jerusalem and its Temple, in the year 70. The seminar is conducted in an old-fashioned way. Laptops are prohibited, and the text is studied in print, with members of the class taking turns reading from it aloud. The English translation, composed in the 19th century, contains phrases that students have rarely seen, such as descriptions of troops that “sally” forth from the city; this lends a greater feeling of antiquity to the subject.