History of the Jews (24 page)

Both the great Jewish revolts against Roman rule should be seen not just as risings by a colonized people, inspired by religious nationalism, but as a racial and cultural conflict between Jews and Greeks. The xenophobia and anti-Hellenism which was such a characteristic of Jewish literature from the second century
BC
onwards was fully reciprocated. It is anomalous to speak of anti-Semitism in antiquity since the term itself was not coined until 1879. Yet anti-Semitism in fact if not in name undoubtedly existed and became of increasing significance. From deep antiquity the ‘children of Abraham’ had been, and had seen themselves, as ‘strangers and sojourners’. There were many such groups—the Habiri, which included the Israelites, were only one—and all were unpopular. But the specific hostility towards the Jews, which began to emerge in the second half of the first millennium
BC
, was a function of Jewish monotheism and its social consequences. The Jews could not, and did not, recognize the existence of other deities, or show respect for them. Even in 500
BC
, the Jewish faith was very old and retained antique practices and taboos which had been abandoned elsewhere but which the Jews, under the impulse of their increasingly rigorous leadership, observed faithfully. Circumcision set them apart and was regarded by the Graeco-Roman world as barbarous and distasteful. But at least circumcision did not
prevent social intercourse. The ancient Jewish laws of diet and cleanliness did. This, perhaps more than any other factor, focused hostility on Jewish communities. ‘Strangeness’, in a word, lay at the origin of anti-Semitism in antiquity: the Jews were not merely immigrants, but they kept themselves apart.
¹⁰¹

Thus Hecataeus of Abdera, writing before the end of the fourth century
BC
—150 years before the clash with the Seleucids—in many ways approved of the Jews and Judaism but he attacked their abnormal way of life, which he called ‘an inhospitable and anti-human form of living’.
¹⁰²
As Greek ideas about the one-ness of humanity spread, the Jewish tendency to treat non-Jews as ritually unclean, and to forbid marriage to them, was resented as being anti-humanitarian; the word ‘misanthropic’ was frequently used. It is notable that in Babylonia, where Greek ideas had not penetrated, the apartness of the large Jewish community was not resented—Josephus said that anti-Jewish feeling did not exist there.
¹⁰³
The Greeks saw their
œcumene
, that is the civilized universe (as opposed to the
chaos
beyond it) where their ideas prevailed, as a multi-racial, multi-national society, and those who refused to accept it were enemies of man. In his great offensive against Mosaic Judaism, Antiochus Epiphanes swore to abrogate Jewish laws ‘inimical to humanity’, and he sacrificed swine over Jewish sacred books.
¹⁰⁴
In 133
BC
the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Sidetes was told by his advisers that Jerusalem should be destroyed and the Jewish people annihilated because they were the only people on earth who refused to associate with the rest of humanity.

Much of the anti-Semitic feeling which found its way into literature was a response to what was felt to be the aggressive Jewish presentation of their own religious history. In the third century
BC
, the Greek-speaking Egyptian priest Manetho wrote a history of his country, a few passages of which survive in Josephus’
Antiquities of the Jews
, attacking the Jewish account of the Exodus. Obviously he and other Egyptian intellectuals found it deeply offensive and responded in kind. He presented the Exodus not as a miraculous escape but as the expulsion of a leper colony and other polluted groups. Manetho reflected Greek notions of the Jews as misanthropic in his charge that Moses (whom he presents as Osarsiph, a renegade Egyptian priest) ordained that the Jews ‘should have no connection with any save members of their own confederacy’, but it is evident that Egyptian anti-Semitism antedated the Greek conquest of Egypt. From Manetho’s time we can see emerging the first anti-Semitic slanders and inventions. Various Greek writers echoed and embroidered them in saying the Jews were specifically commanded by the Mosaic laws to
show goodwill to no men, but especially to Greeks. The volume of criticism of the Jews was greatly increased by the establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom and its religious oppression of Greek-pagan cities. The Egyptian libels were circulated and the argument went that the Jews had no real claim on Palestine—they had always been homeless wanderers and their sojourn in Judaea was merely an episode. In reply, the Jews retorted that the land of Israel was God’s gift to the Jews: Chapter 12 of the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, written in the first century
BC
, castigates its original inhabitants as infanticists, cannibals and murderers, guilty of unspeakable practices, a ‘race accursed from the very beginning’.
¹⁰⁵

As in the modern age, fables about the Jews were somehow fabricated, then endlessly repeated. The statement that the Jews worshipped asses, and had an ass’s head in their Temple, goes back at least as far as the second century
BC
. Apollonius Molon, the first to write an essay directed exclusively against Jews, used it, and it later figured in Posidonius, Democritus, Apion, Plutarch and Tacitus—the last repeating it, though he knew perfectly well that the Jews never worshipped images of any kind.
¹⁰⁶
Another fable was that the Jews conducted secret human sacrifices in their Temple: that was why no one was allowed to enter it. They avoided pork because they were more liable to contract leprosy—an echo of Manetho’s smear.

As in modern times, moreover, anti-Semitism was fuelled not just by vulgar rumour but by the deliberate propaganda of intellectuals. Certainly, in the first century
AD
anti-Jewish feeling, which grew steadily, was to a large extent the work of writers, most of them Greeks. The Romans, once allies of the Jews, initially accorded privileges to the Jewish communities in the big cities—the right not to work on the Sabbath, for example.
¹⁰⁷
But with the foundation of the empire and the adoption of emperor-worship, relations deteriorated swiftly. The Jewish refusal to practise the formalities of state worship was seen not merely as characteristic of Jewish exclusiveness and incivility—the charges always brought against them by the Greeks—but as actively disloyal. Official Roman hostility was eagerly whipped up by Greek intellectuals. Alexandria, where the Jewish community was exceptionally large, and Graeco-Jewish feelings tense, was a centre of anti-Semitic propaganda. Lysimachus, head of the Alexandrian library, was a notable trouble-maker. It was following a disturbance there that the Emperor Claudius, while confirming Jewish rights, warned the Jews publicly that they must be more reasonable towards other people’s religions.
¹⁰⁸
An edict of his to Alexandria, written on papyrus, has survived. It tells the Jewish community there
that, if they prove intolerant, he will treat them as people who spread ‘a general plague throughout the world’—another echo of Manetho.
¹⁰⁹
Anti-Semitic Greek intellectuals not only circulated charges, like Apion, but systematically poisoned the minds of rulers. For example, the Emperor Nero showed no personal hostility to the Jews, and one talmudic tradition even presents him as a proselyte; but his Greek tutor Chaeremon was a notable anti-Semite.

From the death of Nero the Great onwards, relations between the Jews and Rome deteriorated steadily, the rule of his grandson in Judaea being a brief halt on the downward spiral. The revolt might indeed have come during the reign of Caligula (37-41
AD
), who sought to impose full-blooded emperor-worship, had it not been for his merciful assassination. The rise of Jewish apocalyptic nationalism was undoubtedly one factor, as Tacitus explicitly asserts: ‘Most Jews were convinced that it was written in the ancient priestly writings that in those times the East would gain in might and those who came forth from Judaea should possess the world.’
¹¹⁰
But equally important was the growing Graeco-Jewish hatred. The Hellenized gentiles were the elite of Palestine. They, rather than Jews, supplied the rich men and the merchants. They constituted the local civil service and tax-collectors. Most of the soldiers in the Roman garrisons were gentiles recruited from Hellenized cities such as Caesarea and Samaritan Sebaste. Like the Greeks of Alexandria, the Hellenes of Palestine were notorious for their anti-Semitism: it was Greek-speakers from Jabneh and Ashkelon who put Caligula up to his anti-Jewish measures.
¹¹¹
Foolishly, Rome insisted on drawing its Judaean procurators from Greek-speaking gentile areas—the last, and most insensitive of them, Gessius Florus, came from Greek Asia Minor. Roman rule in first-century
AD
Palestine was clumsy and unsuccessful. It was also chronically insolvent, and raids on the Temple treasury for allegedly unpaid taxes were a source of outrage. There were numerous unpunished bands of brigands, swollen by insolvents and political malcontents. Many of the farmers were hopelessly in debt. In the towns with mixed Greek-Jewish populations the atmosphere was often tense.

Indeed, the revolt itself began in 66
AD
not in Jerusalem but in Caesarea, following a Graeco-Jewish lawsuit, which the Greeks won. They celebrated with a pogrom in the Jewish quarter, while the Greek-speaking Roman garrison did nothing. The news caused uproar in Jerusalem, and feelings were raised still further when Florus chose that moment to take money from the Temple treasury. Fighting broke out, the Roman troops looted the Upper Town, the Temple priests suspended the sacrifices in honour of the people and emperor of Rome,
and furious argument broke out between moderate and militant Jews. Jerusalem was filling up with angry and vengeful Jewish refugees from other cities where the Greek majority had invaded the Jewish quarters and burnt their homes. This element turned the tide in favour of the extremists, and the Roman garrison was attacked and massacred. So the Great Revolt was a civil and racial war between Greeks and Jews. But it was also a civil war among Jews, because—as in the time of the Maccabees—the Jewish upper class, largely Hellenized, was identified with the sins of the Greeks. As the radical nationalists took over Jerusalem they turned on the rich. One of their first acts was to burn the Temple archives so that all records of debts would be destroyed.

The Great Revolt of 66
AD
and the siege of Jerusalem constitute one of the most important and horrifying events in Jewish history. Unfortunately it is badly recorded. Tacitus left a long account of the war but only fragments survive. Rabbinic accounts are made up of anecdotes with no clear historical context, or of sheer fantasy. There is very little epigraphical or archaeological evidence.
¹¹²
Virtually our only authority for the war is Josephus, and he is tendentious, contradictory and thoroughly unreliable. The broad outline of events is as follows. After the massacre of the garrison in Jerusalem, the Roman legate in Syria, Cestius Gallus, assembled a large force in Acre and marched on the city. When he reached the outskirts he was dismayed by the strength of the Jewish resistance and ordered a retreat which turned into a rout. Rome then took charge and reacted with enormous force, no fewer than four legions, the
V, X, XII
and
XV
, being concentrated on Judaea, and one of the empire’s most experienced generals, Titus Flavius Vespasian, being given the command. He took his time, leaving Jerusalem severely alone until he had cleared the coast and secured his communications, reduced most of the fortresses held by Jews and settled the countryside. In 69
AD
Vespasian was proclaimed emperor, and at the end of the year he left for Rome, leaving his eldest son, the twenty-nine-year-old Titus, in charge of the final phase of the campaign, the siege and capture of Jerusalem, which lasted from April to September 70
AD
.

Josephus took a prominent part in these events and left two different accounts of them. His
Jewish War
, describing the years 66-70 in detail, and preceded by a history of the Jews in Palestine from the Maccabees onwards, was largely written while Titus, who succeeded Vespasian, was still alive. Then, about twenty years later, Josephus finished his
Antiquities of the Jews
, giving the entire history from the Creation onwards (based mainly on the Bible), ending in 66, but
including an autobiographical
Vita
as an appendix. There are many discrepancies between the
War
and the
Vita
.
¹¹³
Most historians of antiquity wrote from tendentious motives. The trouble with Josephus is that his motives changed between writing the two works. In his
Vita
he was responding, for instance, to an attack on his character by the Jewish writer Justus of Tiberias.
¹¹⁴
But the main reason for his change of viewpoint was that he was an example of a Jewish phenomenon which became very common over the centuries: a clever young man who, in his youth, accepted the modernity and sophistication of the day and then, late in middle age, returned to his Jewish roots. He began his writing career as a Roman apologist and ended it close to being a Jewish nationalist.

Hence, as a recent analyst of Josephus has observed, it is easy to destroy confidence in his account but almost impossible to replace it with a truthful one.
¹¹⁵
What light, then, does it throw on this tragic chapter in Jewish history? The overwhelming impression is that the Jews were throughout irreconcilably divided into many factions. The original massacre of the garrison was the work of a small minority. Only when Cestius Gallus was driven back and his force destroyed did the aristocratic element decide to raise troops, and even then it had mixed motives. Its object seems to have been to carry on government and await events. So bronze coins—shekels, half-shekels and small change—were minted. Josephus, a senior priest attached to the house of one of the aristocrats, Eleazar ben Ananias, was sent to Galilee with two other priests to prepare the population for the conflict. He found most of the population opposed to the war. The farmers hated the brigands (including the ultra-Jewish nationalists) and hated the cities too. They did not like the Romans either but were not anxious to fight them. Of the cities, Sephoris was pro-Roman; Tiberias was divided; Gabara favoured John of Giscala, one of the insurgent leaders. Josephus says he tried to unite the cities, the peasants and the brigands, but failed; the peasants would not join up and when conscripted soon deserted. So he retired on Herod’s old fortress of Jotapata and, after a token resistance, surrendered to Vespasian. Thereafter he served the Romans, first as an interpreter at the siege of Jerusalem, later as a propagandist. He took the same line as Jeremiah at the first fall of Jerusalem: it was all God’s will, and the Romans were His instruments; to fight the Romans was therefore not only foolish but wicked.
¹¹⁶