History of the Jews (25 page)

Josephus was probably correct to see this long, savage and disastrous war as the work of small, malignant minorities on both sides. Later, he came to see the force of the Jewish demand for religious
and political rights, to have some respect for the Maccabees, and to take pride and pleasure in Jewish particularism. Yet his original contention, that the resistance of Jerusalem was unconscionable, remains valid. Titus had 60,000 men and the latest siege equipment. He could rely on starvation and Jewish divisions to do their work. The defenders had about 25,000 fighters, split into groups: the Zealots, under Eleazar ben Simon, held the Antonia and the Temple; the extremist Simeon ben Giora and his Sicarii ran the upper city; and there were Idumeans and other partisans under John of Giscala. The mass of the citizens and refugees were the helpless prisoners of these militants. Josephus described the final stages of the siege in horrifying detail. The Romans had to fight all the way. They stormed the Antonia, then took the Temple, which was burned, then Herod’s citadel a month later. The people were sold as slaves, or massacred, or saved to die in the arenas of Caesarea, Antioch and Rome. Simeon ben Giora was captured alive, taken to Rome for Titus’ triumphal process, then executed in the Forum. Titus’ arch still stands there, the Temple
menorah
he captured carved on its stone. He also preserved, in his palace, the curtain which screened the Holy of Holies and a copy of the scriptures—would that it had survived!

After the fall of Jerusalem, only three Jewish centres of resistance remained: Herodium, which was taken soon after; Machaerus, taken in 72
AD
; and Masada, the spectacular, 1,300-foot high rock on the edge of the Judaean desert, which Herod had turned into a great fortress, 37-31
BC
. It could only be approached by what Josephus called ‘a snaky path’. It fell to the Jews in 66 by ‘a stratagem’, the hero of this episode being Menahem, son of the Zealot founder and executed revolutionary, Judah the Galilean.
¹¹⁷
But Menahem was murdered during one of the many struggles for power in Jerusalem and the Masada command devolved on his nephew Eleazar. When the Roman general Flavius Silva finally invested it at the end of 72
AD
, there were 960 insurgents and refugees in the fortress, men, woman and children. In 1963-5, the site was exhaustively excavated by Yigael Yadin with a huge force of archaeologists and thousands of volunteer helpers from all over the world. The details of the siege have been vividly recreated. Silva had the entire
X
th legion, plus auxiliaries, and countless Jewish prisoners of war as labourers. Taking the place was essentially a problem in military engineering of precisely the type in which Rome excelled. Its fall was inevitable and, when this became apparent, Eleazar forced or persuaded the remaining defenders to engage in an act of mass suicide. Josephus gives what purports to be his final speech. Two women, and their five children, survived by hiding in
a cave. Scraps of clothing, sandals, bones, entire skeletons, baskets, fragments of personal belongings—storerooms left intact to prove to the Romans that the mass suicide had not been dictated by hunger—nationalist coins, armour-scales and arrows are mute witnesses of the siege. They testify to the hopeless valour of the defenders far more eloquently than Josephus’ powerful description. Among the ostraca found are what appear to be the lots cast by the last ten survivors to determine who was to kill the other nine and then himself. Abundant evidence of services in the fort’s synagogue and parts of fourteen scrolls of Biblical, sectarian and apocryphal books indicate that this was a God-fearing garrison of militants, profoundly influenced by the terrible power of Jewish literature.
¹¹⁸

Jerusalem was left a ruined city by the siege, its Temple destroyed, the walls nothing but rubble. But the woeful experience of these seven bloody years did not end the Graeco-Jewish clash nor the capacity of religious sentiment to drive pious Jews, young and old, to violent defence of their faith, however hopeless. Anti-Semitic sentiment continued to spread. The fall of Jerusalem was cited as evidence that Jews were hated by God. Philostratus asserted in his
Vita Apollonii
that when Helen of Judaea offered Titus a victory wreath after he took the city he refused it on the grounds that there was no merit in vanquishing a people deserted by their own God. This sounds highly unlikely coming from a professional commander who had fought a hard war against a very determined enemy. But it is typical of the anti-Semitic propaganda which now appeared everywhere. Horace and Martial were muted in their criticisms but Tacitus summarized all the Greek smears. From about 100
AD
onwards, the Jews were attacked even more fiercely for subverting the lower orders and introducing novel and destructive ideas—a charge which was to echo through the ages.
¹¹⁹
So there were constant troubles in the diaspora cities, especially in 115-17.

The last Jewish risings were precipitated by a wave of government hostility to the Jews under the Emperor Hadrian, who was in the East 128-32. Initially sympathetic to Judaism, he later swung into hostility, possibly under the influence of the Tacitus circle. He came to dislike oriental religions in general, and developed a particular loathing for circumcision, which he classified with castration, a form of self-mutilation forbidden on pain of death. Hadrian introduced pan-Hellenistic policies throughout the East and one of his projects was to create a new, pagan
polis
on the ruins of Jerusalem, with a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter on Temple Mount.

Dio Cassius, the Roman historian who is our chief source for these
years, says the Jews did not dare rise while Hadrian was in the East, though they armed secretly and built hidden fortifications. There were two legions stationed in the area. But as soon as Hadrian departed, the Jews of Judaea struck and, says Dio, ‘the Jews in the entire world also rose and joined them and created a great deal of trouble for the Romans, secretly or openly, and even many gentile people came to their aid’.
¹²⁰
The revolt lasted four years. Roman losses, says Dio, were heavy. Legions had to be concentrated in Palestine from all over the empire, including Britain and the Danube, so that eventually the Jews were facing no fewer than twelve. Once again the Roman methods were slow but systematic and sure, splitting up and isolating the rebel forces, starving outlying pockets into surrender, then gradually closing in on the remaining centres of resistance. The Jews occupied Jerusalem for a time but it had no walls and was not defensible. They held various fortresses and their tunnelling, as for instance at Herodium, has been excavated. They seem to have made their headquarters in what was then the town of Betar, in the Judaean hills south-west of the capital, and this final stronghold fell to the Romans in 135
AD
.

The extent and the initial success of the revolt were made possible by the fact that on this occasion the Jews, or at least their militant elements, were united and under the leadership of a single strong personality. Simon bar Kokhba or Kosiva is one of the most enigmatic personalities in Jewish history, and his name or names alone have excited intense but inconclusive scholarly argument. The more enterprising Jewish rebels, like Judah of Galilee, called themselves the Messiah to attract wider support-the main reason the Romans were willing to crucify Jesus Christ. According to Bishop Eusebius, a hostile Christian source, Simon did make messianic claims and his name Kokhba or ‘star’ referred to the prophecy in Numbers ‘there shall come a star out of Jacob and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab and destroy all the children of Sheth’.
¹²¹
A rabbinic source says he was recognized as Messiah by the greatest scholar of the age, the rabbi Akiva ben Joseph (
c
. 50-135
AD
).
¹²²
Akiva is an interesting social case, for he came of very humble stock, the
am ha-arez
, with no tradition of literacy, and for a long time (as he says) hated scholarship and worked as a shepherd. In time he became prodigiously learned but he retained a passionate concern for the poor, and this may be why he joined the rebellion (if he did: the tradition has been disputed). But other rabbis did not follow him. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, when Akiva said of Simon, ‘This is the King Messiah’, Rabbi Johanan ben Torta replied: ‘O Akiva,
grass will sprout between your jaws and the Son of David will still not have come.’
¹²³

Simon did not call himself ‘star’ but ‘Koseva’ and the coins he issued make no mention of the Messiah and refer to him as ‘Simon Nasi [prince] of Israel’. His chief spiritual adviser was not Akiva but his uncle, Eleazar of Modin, whose name also figures on some of his coins; but in the final stages of the revolt the two men quarrelled and Eleazar was murdered by his nephew.
¹²⁴
From the fragments of evidence we have, it looks as if Simon got little support from learned Jews and in the end lost what he had. In the years 1952-61, archaeologists working in the Judaean desert found objects connected with the revolt in various locations, especially in what is termed ‘the Cave of the Letters’. Many of these documents, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, were written and signed on his behalf. These discoveries show that the men of the rebellion were orthodox Jews who took great trouble, despite desperate circumstances, to observe the Mosaic law—the Sabbath, the festivals, priestly and levitical dues for instance. But there is no evidence that Simon regarded himself as a Messiah, the anointed one or in any way a spiritual leader. The letters show him ruling an extensive territory, concerned with farm leases, agricultural supplies, the mobilization of the countryside to supply men and food for his war. He was in every respect a secular ruler, a
nasi
as he calls himself in his letters, harsh, practical, unbending, ruthless: ‘I call Heaven to witness…I shall put you in chains’; ‘if you will not do this you will be punished’; ‘You are living well, eating and drinking off the property of the house of Israel, and care nothing about your brethren.’
¹²⁵
The later rabbinic legends woven around the ‘Son of a Star’ seem to have no basis in fact. Simon was more of a prototype for a modern Zionist fighter: unromantic and professional, a man who lived and died a guerrilla and nationalist.

Simon was killed in Betar. Akiva was captured, imprisoned, finally tortured to death, the flesh torn from his body ‘by iron combs’. Dio says that of the rebels ‘very few were saved’. The Roman vengeance was awe-inspiring. Fifty forts where the rebels had put up resistance were destroyed and 985 towns, villages and agricultural settlements. Dio says 580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judaea was laid waste.’.
¹²⁶
In the late fourth century, St Jerome reported from Bethlehem a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale that the price dropped to less than a horse.

Hadrian relentlessly carried through to completion his plan to transform ruined Jerusalem into a Greek
polis
. He buried the hollows
of the old city in rubble to level the site. Outside the limits he removed the debris to get at and excavate the rock below to provide the huge ashlars for the public buildings he set up on the levelled site. The new city was the first to be broadly on the plan of the present Old City of Jerusalem. The main road from the north entered through the present Damascus Gate; the main east gate was the one later known as St Stephen’s Gate, spanned by a triumphal arch, whose ruins remain. The city he built was called Aelia Capitolina. Greek-speakers were moved in to populate it and the Jews were forbidden to enter on pain of death. This regulation may not have been strictly enforced, and in the mid-fourth century it was lifted under the pagan recidivist Emperor Julian. At any rate Jews contrived to visit a section of the old ruins, now known as the Wailing Wall, on the anniversary of the city’s destruction. Jerome, in his Commentary on Zephaniah, gives a picture which is both moving and harsh:

 

On the day of the Destruction of Jerusalem, you see a sad people coming to visit, decrepit little women and old men encumbered with rags and years, showing both in their bodies and their dress the wrath of the Lord. A crowd of pitiable creatures assembles and under the gleaming gibbet of the Lord and his sparkling resurrection, and before a brilliant banner with a cross, waving from the Mount of Olives, they weep over the ruins of the Temple. And yet they are not worthy of pity.
¹²⁷

 

These two catastrophes, of 70 and 135
AD
, effectively ended Jewish state history in antiquity. There were two immediate consequences of great historical significance. The first was the final separation of Judaism and Christianity. Paul, writing in the decade around 50
AD
, had effectively repudiated the Mosaic law as the mechanism of justification and salvation, and in this (as we have seen) he was consistent with Jesus’ teaching. At a meeting with the Jewish-Christian leaders in Jerusalem he had won the right to exempt his gentile converts from Jewish religious requirements. But none of this meant necessarily that Jews and Christians would come to regard their beliefs as mutually exclusive and their respective supporters as enemies of each other. The Gospel of Luke, written perhaps in the 60s, resembles in some ways the writings of Hellenistic Jews in the diaspora, directed at potential converts to Judaism. Luke’s aim seems to have been to summarize and simplify the Law, which he saw as an enlightened body of Jewish customs—the ethics of a specific people. Piety was the same among Jews and gentiles: both were the means by which the soul was prepared to receive the gospel. The gentiles had their good customs too, and God did not discriminate against those
who did not possess the Law, i.e. Jewish customs. Nor did God discriminate against Jews. Both categories were saved by means of faith and grace.
¹²⁸