History of the Jews (29 page)

The Torah and its superstructure of commentaries formed a moral theology as well as a practical system of civil and criminal law. Hence though it was very specific and legalistic on particular points, it always sought to reinforce the temporal authority of the courts by appeals to spiritual factors and sanctions. The notion of strict justice was never enough. The Jews were the first to introduce the concept of repentance and atonement, which became a primary Christian theme also. The Bible repeatedly refers to the ‘change of heart’—‘Turn ye even to me with all your heart,’ as the Book of Joel puts it, and ‘Rend your hearts and not your garments.’ In the Book of Ezekiel the injunction is ‘Make ye a new heart.’ The Law and the courts sought to go beyond restitution to bring about reconciliation between the contending
parties. The aim was always to keep the Jewish community cohesive. So the Law and the rulings of the sages were designed to be positive in promoting harmony, and preventative in removing possible sources of friction. It was more important to promote peace than to do nominal justice. In doubtful cases it was the custom of the sages to quote the saying in Proverbs about wisdom: ‘Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.’
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The idea of peace as a positive state, a noble ideal which is also a workable human condition, is another Jewish invention. It is one of the great motifs of the Bible, especially of its finest book, Isaiah. The Mishnah laid down: ‘Three things sustain the existence of the world—justice, truth and peace,’ and the closing words of the whole work are: ‘God did not bestow any greater blessing on Israel than peace, for it is written: “The Lord will give strength to his people, the Lord will bless his people with peace.” ’
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The sages argued that one of the great functions of scholarship was to use the Law to promote peace, between husband and wife, parents and children, and then in the wider world of the community and the nation. A prayer for peace was one of the chief benedictions and was said by pious Jews three times a day. The sages quoted Isaiah, ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace,’
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and they claimed that the first action of the Messiah would be to declare peace.

One of the most important developments in the history of the Jews, one of the ways in which Judaism differed most strongly from primitive Israelite religion, was this growing stress on peace. After 135
AD
, in effect, Judaism renounced even righteous violence—as it implicitly renounced the state—and put its trust in peace. Jewish valour and heroism was pushed into the background as a sustaining national theme; Jewish irenicism came to the foreground. To countless generations of Jews, what happened at Jabneh, where the scholar finally took over from the warrior, was far more significant than what happened at Masada. The lost fortress, indeed, was virtually forgotten until, in the lurid flames of the twentieth-century Holocaust, it became a national myth, displacing the myth of Jabneh.

The concentration on external peace and internal harmony, and the study of the means whereby both could be promoted, were essential for a vulnerable people without the protection of the state, and were clearly one of the main objects of Torah commentary. In this it was brilliantly—one might almost say miraculously—successful. The Torah became a great cohesive source. No people have ever been better served by their public law and doctrine. From the second
century
AD
onwards, the sectarianism which had been such a feature of the Second Commonwealth virtually disappeared, at any rate to our view, and all the old parties were subsumed in rabbinical Judaism. Torah study remained an arena of fierce argument, but it took place within a consensus sustained by the majority principle. The absence of the state was a huge blessing.

Equally important, however, was another characteristic of Judaism: the relative absence of dogmatic theology. Almost from the beginning, Christianity found itself in grave difficulties over dogma, because of its origins. It believed in one God, but its monotheism was qualified by the divinity of Christ. To solve this problem it evolved the dogma of the two natures of Christ, and the dogma of the Trinity—three persons in one God. These devices in turn created more problems, and from the second century onwards produced innumerable heresies, which convulsed and divided Christianity throughout the Dark Ages. The New Testament, with its enigmatic pronouncements by Jesus, and its Pauline obscurities—especially in the Epistle to the Romans—became a minefield. Thus the institution of the Petrine church, with its axiom of central authority, led to endless controversy and a final breach between Rome and Byzantium in the eleventh century. The precise meaning of the eucharist split the Roman trunk still further in the sixteenth. The production of dogmatic theology—that is, what the church should teach about God, the sacraments and itself—became the main preoccupation of the professional Christian intelligentsia, and remains so to this day, so that at the end of the twentieth century Anglican bishops are still arguing among themselves about the Virgin Birth.

The Jews escaped this calvary. Their view of God is very simple and clear. Some Jewish scholars argue that there is, in fact, a lot of dogma in Judaism. That is true in the sense that there are many negative prohibitions—chiefly against idolatry. But the Jews usually avoided the positive dogmas which the vanity of theologians tends to create and which are the source of so much trouble. They never adopted, for instance, the idea of Original Sin. Of all the ancient peoples, the Jews were perhaps the least interested in death, and this saved them a host of problems. It is true that belief in resurrection and the afterlife was the main distinguishing mark of Pharisaism, and thus a fundament of rabbinic Judaism. Indeed the first definite statement of dogma in the whole of Judaism, in the Mishnah, deals with this: ‘All Israel share in the world to come except the one who says resurrection has no origin in the Law.’
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But the Jews had a way of concentrating on life and pushing death—and its dogmas—into the background. Predestination,
single and double, purgatory, indulgences, prayers for the dead and the intercession of the saints—these vexatious sources of Christian discord caused Jews little or no trouble.

It is significant, indeed, that whereas the Christians started to produce credal formulations very early in the history of the church, the earliest Jewish creed, listing ten articles of faith, was formulated by Saadiah Gaon (882-942), by which time the Jewish religion was more than 2,500 years old. Not until much later did Maimonides’ thirteen articles become a definitive statement of faith, and there is no evidence it was ever actually discussed and endorsed by any authoritative body. The original thirteen-point formulation, given in Maimonides’ commentary on the Tenth Chapter of the Mishnah, on the Tractate Sanhedrin, lists the following articles of faith: the existence of a perfect Being, the author of all creation; God’s unity; his incorporeality; his pre-existence; worship without intermediary; belief in the truth of prophecy; the uniqueness of Moses; the Torah in its entirety is divinely given; the Torah is unchangeable; God is omniscient; He punishes and rewards in the afterlife; the coming of the Messiah; the resurrection. This credo, reformulated as the
Ani Ma’amin
(‘I believe’), is printed in the Jewish prayer-book. It has given rise to little controversy. Indeed, credal formulation has not been an important preoccupation of Jewish scholars. Judaism is not so much about doctrine—that is taken for granted—as behaviour; the code matters more than the creed.

The lasting achievement, then, of the sages was to transform the Torah into a universal, timeless, comprehensive and coherent guide to every aspect of human conduct. Next to monotheism itself, the Torah became the essence of the Jewish faith. Even in the first century, Josephus had been able to write, with only a pardonable degree of exaggeration, that whereas most races did not know much about their laws until they found themselves in conflict with them, ‘should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls. Hence to break them is rare, and no one can evade punishment by the excuse of ignorance.’
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This position was reinforced in the age of the academies and sages, so that knowing God through the Law became the summation of Judaism. It made Judaism inward-looking, but it gave it the strength to survive in a hostile world.

The hostility varied, in place and time, but it tended to increase. The most fortunate Jews, in the Dark Ages, lived in Babylonia, under exilarchs. These princes, more powerful and secular than the Palestinian
nasi
, claimed direct Davidic descent from the kings of
Judah, and lived with some ceremony in their palaces. Indeed in Parthian times, the exilarch was in effect a senior official of the state. The rabbis stood in his presence and, if favoured, dined at his table and taught in his courtyard. With the coming of the Sassanid dynasty, early in the third century, and their revival of the national religion of Zoroaster, religious pressure on the Jewish communities increased. The power of the exilarch declined and, as it did so, the influence of the scholars rose. At the academy of Sura in the third century
AD
there were as many as 1,200 scholars, and these numbers increased during the slack months of the farming year. Having escaped the appalling consequences of the Jewish revolts against Rome, the Babylonian communities produced higher standards of scholarship. In any case, Babylonian Jewry had always regarded itself as the repository of the strictest Jewish tradition, and the purest blood. The Babylonian Talmud asserted: ‘All countries are dough compared to the [yeast of the] land of Israel, and Israel is dough compared to Babylonia.’
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It is true that Babylonia depended on the West for calendrical decisions, and a chain of signal-beacons connected the academies to Jerusalem to receive them. But the Babylonian Talmud is more detailed than its Jerusalem counterpart—neither survives complete—and was for long regarded as more authoritative. It was the main source of instruction for Jews everywhere (Palestine alone excepted) throughout the Middle Ages.

Yet Babylonia was not safe for Jews. There are many accounts of persecutions and martyrs under the Sassanids, but the documentary evidence is scarce and unreliable. In 455, Tazdigar
III
abolished the Sabbath by decree, and (according to a letter of Rabbi Sherira Gaon) ‘the rabbis proclaimed a fast, and the Holy One, blessed be He, sent a crocodile unto him in the night, which swallowed him as he lay on his couch, and the decree was invalidated’. But Sherira, head of the Pumbedita academy, flourished
c
. 906-1006, and was writing 450 years after the event. Jewish tradition terms Tazdigar’s son and heir Firuz the Evil, and accuses him of martyring the exilarch. After he died, there was a period of anarchy, in which the Jewish exilarch Mar Zutra
II
(
c
. 496-520) with 400 warriors succeeded in setting up an independent state, with a capital at Mahoza; but after seven years, its immorality led to a Persian victory, and the exilarch was beheaded and crucified. There was another outbreak of persecution in 579-80. But some Persian monarchs favoured the Jews and it is significant that when the Persians invaded Palestine and occupied Jerusalem in 624, the local Jews received them warmly.
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Nor is this surprising, for in Palestine and the western diaspora the
position of the Jews was much harder. In 313 the Emperor Constantine had become a Christian catechumen and ended state persecution. There followed a brief period of general toleration. From the 340s, however, Christianity began to assume some of the characteristics of a state church. The first edicts against pagan worship date from this time. There was a brief pagan reaction under the Emperor Julian in the 360s, followed by a harsh and systematic campaign to eradicate paganism altogether. Christianity was now a mass religion. In the eastern Mediterranean it was often a mob religion too. Popular religious leaders held vast torchlight meetings, at which angry slogans were shouted: ‘To the gallows with the Iscariot!’, ‘Ibas has corrupted the true doctrine of Cyril!’, ‘Down with the Judophile!’ These mobs were initially raised to threaten participants in church councils. But they were easily set to work smashing idols and burning pagan temples. It was only a matter of time before they turned on the Jews too. Christianity became the norm throughout the Roman empire in the late fourth century and paganism began to disappear. As it did so, the Jews became conspicuous—a large, well-organized, comparatively wealthy minority, well educated and highly religious, rejecting Christianity not out of ignorance but from obstinacy. They became, for Christianity, a ‘problem’, to be ‘solved’. They were unpopular with the mob, which believed that Jews had helped the authorities when the emperors persecuted Christians. They had greeted with relief the pagan revival under Julian, who is known in Jewish tradition not as the Apostate but as ‘Julian the Hellene’. During the 380s, under the Emperor Theodosius
I
, religious uniformity became the official policy of the empire, and a mass of statutes and regulations began to rain down on heretics, pagans and nonconformists of all kinds. At the same time, Christian mob attacks on synagogues became common. This was contrary to the public policy of the empire, since the Jews were a valuable and respectable element in society, who gave consistent support to duly constituted authority. In 388, a Christian mob, instigated by the local bishop, burned down the synagogue at Callinicum on the Euphrates. Theodosius
I
decided to make this a test-case and ordered it rebuilt at Christian expense. He was hotly denounced by the most influential of all the Christian prelates, Bishop Ambrose of Milan. He warned Theodosius in a letter that the royal order was highly damaging to the church’s prestige: ‘What is more important,’ he asked, ‘the parade of discipline or the cause of religion? The maintenance of civil law is secondary to religious interest.’ He preached a sermon in front of the emperor putting this argument, and the royal command was shamefacedly withdrawn.
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