Aelinus Galenus - or Galen of Pergamon - is one of the best known of all the figures of classical antiquity. He is chiefly known to have been the successor to Hippocrates and the chief intellectual inspiration for students of medicine for over a millennium before the theory of bodily humors was discarded. (1) What is less well-known about Galen is that he was a philosopher as well as a doctor and in the course of his work he had course to mention the jews on several occasions.
When he does Galen isn't exactly complimentary about them as he states in his 'On Anatomy according to the View of Hippocrates' that:
'Therefore, physicians of the kind mentioned are comparable to Moses, who gave laws to the Jewish people, for he wrote his books without adducing proofs, he merely said: God has ordered, or, God has said.' (2)
He clarifies his views further in 'On the Pulse' as follows:
'In order that one should not at the very beginning, as if one had come into the school of Moses and Christ, hear talk of undemonstrated laws, and that where it is least appropriate.' (3)
And yet further in 'On the Prime Mover' as follows:
'If I had in mind people who taught their pupils in the same way as the followers of Moses and Christ teach theirs — for they order them to accept everything on faith — I should not have given you a definition.' (4)
We can see from the above that Galen is not being exactly complementary about jews - although he is pointedly attacking both Christianity and Judaism not one or the other - and is arguing that jews (as well as Christians) are told that they should take everything that is claimed to be the 'word of god' on belief alone rather than look for external validation of this claim as the empiricists argued should be the case.
In essence we should read Galen here as saying that those propounding jewish ideas - and remember that Galen almost certainly directly associated both Judaism and Christianity as religious siblings - among the Romans do so by directly appealing to the emotion and the love of the irrational - although to be fair the Syrian variant of pagan neo-Platonism pioneered by Iamblichus Chalcidensis was just as bad with its love of and devotion to the irrational as well as theurgy - and that as such it was undercutting Roman intellectual life as it was taking people away from empirical learning and rather into the realms of intellectual sensuality so-to-speak.
Galen is asserting in effect that jews will speak of many different things and ideas, but will never define what in fact they are talking about. Leaving their audience to try to discern just what they mean, which then creates what we today term plausible deniability. In so far as they allow each listener to create their own - often mutually contradictory - interpretation of what they have said without directly committing to one interpretation or the other, while retaining the audience's loyalty to the intellectual centre-point: in this case Moses.
This then creates the fiction of an intellectually unified sect or group, which then allows the jews to further proclaim their ideas by utilizing their existing following to suggest that - as such - they already have many followers and those who are interested can come and find support in that group.
In essence Galen is implying that jews (5) appeal to the irrational in the gentiles in order to further their own interests by demanding absolute belief without first providing proof and then use the following this creates to expand that following further as well as increasingly subvert the existing social, economic, political and intellectual order to their own advantage.
That Galen is arguing that the Machiavellian use of the irrational in religion by jews as well as Christians was dangerous can be seen in a further mention of the subject in his 'On the Pulse':
'One might more easily teach novelties to the followers of Moses and Christ than to the physicians and philosophers who cling fast to their schools.' (6)
We can see from the above that Galen is implying a two-fold critique of the followers of the jews: in that they are completely irrational and also that they are hidebound in their ways (in the context of his comments about Moses' requirement of absolute belief without the necessary empirical evidence).
This may be more simply stated as Galen asserting that those who follow the jews do so because they believe without reason to do so (i.e., they want to believe it is true so they do) and then refuse to learn about the objections to what they believe, because their beliefs tell them not to or that it is 'sin against god' to do so.
We may take Galen's assertion somewhat further by pointing out that by necessary implication: this must mean that in Galen's view the jews are a people of religious fanatics and/or cunning schemers who have sought to subvert all that was Roman by trying to assault the faculty of reason by trying to make irrationality (unreason) synonymous with rationality (reason).
This is confirmed in Galen's last mention of the jews in his 'On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body':
'He would have suffered a worse failure not only than Moses but also than a bad general who plants a wall or a camp in marshy ground.' (7)
In this passage - which is a rhetorical point after a short commentary on the irrationality of the ideas of Moses compared to the ideas of the Greek philosopher Epicurus - we can see that Galen clearly associates the jews - and Moses in particular - with intellectual failure as well as subversive success. In so far as even while Moses was himself an intellectual but not a political failure: his ideas lived on and as such have come to challenge the rational philosophy of the classical world. This would make the ideas of Moses - and those propounded to the followers of the jews as unimpeachable writ straight from the creator of the universe - a direct subversive threat to the Roman intellectual world of which Galen was a part as well as to the Roman empire itself writ large.
As such then we can see that Galen - while not a particularly strident opponent of the jews - was nevertheless aware of the danger that the ideas espoused by Judaism and jews more generally posed to both the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake - which was so lionized by the Greeks and Romans - as well as to the material world that he knew. This enables us to place Galen not as an ancient opponent of the jews, but rather as an occasional critic of both jews and Judaism.
References
(1) See Roy Porter, 1999, 'The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present', 2nd Edition, Harper Collins: London
(2) http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/galen_on_jews_and_christians.htm
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) That this does not apply to Christians is implied in Galen's positive comments about Christian ascetic practices and ideas in his 'Summary of Platonic Dialogues'.
(6) http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/galen_on_jews_and_christians.htm
(7) Ibid.