My Glorious Brothers (28 page)

He paused, his eyes fixed on something across the ravine, across the blue Judean hills. His great hands clenched and unclenched, and the lines on his face became deeper etched. He was not telling me these things; he was expelling them from himself.

“Yes,” he went on, “there were two free men, but we did not awaken Israel from the dark pit of despair and defeat. The spirit of Judas did that—of the Maccabee, like whom there was no other, ever, or will be again. And bit by bit, the land roused itself. Men who loved freedom crossed the Jordan and came to us, and embraced us and kissed us for the sons of Mattathias who had died for their people and for the dignity of all men. So our strength grew and our numbers grew—and one day we crossed the river and came back to our country. Then it was as before—wherever we went, the people rose up and joined us. Once again, we taught the Greeks that a Jew can fight. It didn't happen at once. You don't buy your freedom as you buy a cow or a bit of land. Year after year, we paid the price—but in the end we won, and there is no overlord in Judea now, only a free people who live in peace…”

“And thus is twenty years accounted,” I said.

“If you read what I wrote, you read the accounting,” the Jew reminded me. “We reaped what Judas sowed, for he taught us what we never fully knew before, that no man ever dies uselessly or futilely in the struggle for the freedom of man. That he taught us—and what more would you have me say? War is evil and killing is evil, and he who takes up the sword must perish by it. Thus is it written in our holy scrolls. We fought for our freedom and—God willing—we will never fight for any other cause. We were not chosen to teach the ways of war, but the ways of peace and of love. Let the dead rest, and if you would know what we fought for and how we fought, go through the land, Lentulus Silanus, and watch how the people live. I have troubled my memories enough.”

“Yet you trouble it strangely, Simon Maccabeus, for you never see the whole, but only a part. Do you truthfully think that your tiny state could smash the Syrian Empire single-handed?”

“Yet we did—”

He was less certain now. “But did you?” I demanded. “Was it not Rome that smashed the power of Greece and barred the further advance of Syria? Was it not a Roman legate who stood on the Egyptian border and said to a Syrian army, Go this far and no farther? You knew nothing of Rome, but Rome knew of Judea. Can you survive against the whole world, Simon? That is a dream; a dream, Simon. You say you fought for your freedom and you will never fight for any other cause. That is a bold statement, Simon—for I will not believe that a Jew is so different from all others. Your country stands here at the crossroads of the world, and those crossroads must be kept open, Simon. Whether you knew it or not, Rome fought on your side, Simon. And where will Rome fight tomorrow? Consider that, Simon Maccabeus.”

The Jew stared at me, his pale eyes puzzled and sad. He was disturbed, not with fear, but with a deep uncertainty. Then, he made as to dismiss me.

“One more question,” I insisted, “if the Maccabee will allow me?”

“Ask it, Lentulus Silanus.”

“What of Jonathan?”

“Why? Does it matter? They are all dead, my glorious brothers, can they not rest in peace?” Then he reached out a hand and touched my shoulder. “Forgive me, Lentulus Silanus, for you are a guest in my house, and may my tongue rot if I say a word that offends you. Only some things are more easily said than others.”

“Let it pass.” I assured him.

“No, for as you said, you are a courier, and what you hear will pass your lips. There is not much to tell of Jonathan, for as he grew without our mother, he was our child, our beloved, and in the first years, it was as a child he fought. He never had what we had, the sweet and generous years when we were children at Modin, for as a child he took the bow in his hand, and all he knew was war and the only memories he had were memories of war and exile and struggle. Yet he lived through it, through the awful slaughter when Judas died, through the time of exile in the desert. Just as I mourned my brothers, so did he mourn them, and year after year, we fought together for Judea and for Israel, and then, almost at the end, almost at the moment when we had won, the Greeks took him…” His voice died away, and he sat bent over and staring across the valley.

“They took him?” I prodded softly.

“They took him,” the Maccabee repeated, a hard note of bitterness in his voice. “They captured him and held him for ransom, and I emptied my coffers to pay them what they asked and the people gave up what little gold and jewels they had. Every bit of gold and silver in the land the people gathered together, willingly, so that they could buy back the life of a son of Mattathias, and this we handed over to the Greek, and then he slew my brother…”

***

This foregoing, as well as I can recall, is the conversation I held with Simon Maccabeus. Certain details should be added, as for example the fact that in the course of their twenty-year war for freedom subsequent to the death of Judas Maccabeus, they fought, as near as I can learn, twelve major battles and three hundred and forty minor engagements. This I consider of extreme importance, for therein lies the clue to their victory. This tiny and seemingly defenseless land—which has only one walled city of any consequence, no standing army, and only the loosest type of administration—literally bled the Syrian Empire of the Greeks to death. If one merely goes through their archives and computes the price of the thousands of mercenaries they have slain in their valleys and defiles, one emerges with a figure calculated to stagger the imagination. Then one begins to comprehend why, for the past three decades, the Syrian kings have engaged themselves in a seemingly insane and lustful search for wealth, sacking their own cities within their own empire, selling their own free citizens into slavery, so that they might find money to prosecute their wars against the Jews. Therefore, one is forced to deal with a natural and obvious question—why they did not give up this enterprise and allow the Jews to live in peace? To that, there is a complex of answers, some of which I presume will interest the Senate sufficiently for me to go into them.

For one thing, the antipathy toward these people must be reckoned with. Their notions of freedom, their whole concept of what one may best call the rights of individuals, are a threat to free men everywhere and to our entire slave structure. As with us, the peoples hereabout recognize slavery as the basis of freedom, since it is only in those societies which rest upon the firm foundation of slavery that free citizens are able to advance civilization. The Jewish notion of freedom as applying to all men, even slaves, is, when once understood, a menacing factor. Taken in conjunction with the fact that they exalt disobedience and rebellion, making a prime virtue out of a stubborn and senseless unwillingness to bend a knee to man or Yahvah, their God, they become even more dangerous. Without question, they were once a slave people who were led from their slavery by one Moses, and this has instilled in them so deep and unwavering a hatred of natural obedience and subjugation that it is quite impossible to regard them as civilized human beings—even though one must confess that they possess certain salutory virtues. Yet even these virtues, as I remarked before, are distilled by the peculiar Jewish method of application. One must also note, in connection with the antipathy of others toward them, their exaltation of peace. They are almost servile in their desire for peace and love. They wholly refuse to recognize that war is a part of the pattern of civilization, and they instantly condemn any act of manliness or strength as brutality. Unlike all other people, they do not hire mercenaries but demean their own free citizenry in war that contradicts everything they profess to believe; but to my observation, this regular method of contradiction is a basic part of Jewishness. In all the world, there exists no record of a war so bloody and terrible in its toll of life as these thirty years of Jewish resistance; and the very unreasonableness of that resistance could not but contribute to increasing the hatred and determination of the Greeks. I once brought this up with the Ethnarch, saying to him:

“Would it not have been better, at any one of several points, for you and your brothers to have made peace, for the sake of law, order, and well-being in general?”

“At the price of our freedom?” he wanted to know.

“Yet you set up freedom as an abstract,” I pointed out to him. “If it is, as you seem to indicate, a virtue in itself, then what can we say to slaves?”

He was clearly troubled by this. “I don't know,” he answered.

“You will admit,” I persisted, “that slavery is the basis of freedom?”

“How can I admit such a thing?”

“Still, you have slaves.”

“That is true, yet in the course of the war, the slaves disappeared.”

“How was that?”

“We gave them their freedom, so that they could fight beside us.”

“And did they?”

“They did—and they died beside us too.”

So it is clear to the noble Senate what manner of threat the very way of life and thought of these people contain. Without doubt, this was an important contributing factor in the attacks of the Greeks, but other factors must be noted. In the very first years of the Maccabean uprising, the losses sustained by the Syrian Empire were of such staggering size that the only manner in which they could ever be recouped would be by a final conquest and rape of Judea. Tied up in this was the question of the wealthy Jews, a rather small group of cultured people whose residences were, for the most part, in the city of Jerusalem. They were an anathema to the other Jews, who resented bitterly the fact that these cultured Jews had shed the miserable and barbarian mark of their Jewishness, adopting Greek ways and Greek dress, and speaking Greek instead of the Hebrew or the Aramaic. At the very outset of the rebellion, these Jews wisely made a pact with the Greeks, employed their own mercenaries, and shut themselves up in a great stone citadel within the city of Jerusalem—in which citadel they maintained themselves for two decades and more—until Simon laid siege to the place, took it, and leveled it to the ground.

Whenever the ardor of the Greeks cooled and they considered withdrawing completely from Judea, these Hellenized Jews employed every effort and every strategy to prevent such withdrawal and to fan anew the flames of war. Little wonder then that the hatred between these few Hellenized Jews and the village Jews cut deeper than any hatred between Greek and Jew; only through complete destruction of the Maccabeans could the Jews in the citadel regain their position and property—and one can readily sympathize with their predicament. It should be noted that when the citadel finally fell, Simon did not slay these Jews, but permitted them to remove from Judea to Antioch and Damascus. I earnestly recommend that the Senate make contact with them in those cities and cultivate them for a time when their services may prove valuable for the advancement and betterment of Rome.

A third factor responsible for the extent of the war is revenge, Judas Maccabeus having slain with his own hand two of the most popular and valued Greek commanders, Apollonius and Nicanor. There were others, but these three, antipathy, the need for money, and revenge, are the principal reasons for the prolongation of the struggle—in the course of which the Syrian Greek Empire was bled dry.

That so small a land as Judea with so inconsiderable a population as these Jews could sustain this long war is difficult to believe; and, indeed, if Jews lived as other people do, in cities, with a civilized way of life based upon slavery, then they surely must have come to defeat. But being the agrarian people they are, rooted as they are to a soil they cultivate with their own hands, it is possible for them to display remarkable tenacity of purpose. When this is combined with their barbarian methods of war, with their absolute reluctance to engage in a forthright struggle or test of strength, with their tactic of trap and countertrap, and lastly with the favorable terrain they occupy, it is difficult to conceive of any method of conquest except from within.

Thus my recommendations, with which I intend to finish this report. In the making of it, in the details of its preparation, I have attempted to be wholly objective, seeing in such objectivity the highest duty of a legate to the Senate. I have given myself a liberal allowance of time in which to study these people, and I have mixed with and spoken with all parts of their society, the farmers, the vintners, the craftsmen, the priesthood, and even the few merchants they have among them.

I have tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to deny myself the indulgence of hating Jews. I have tried to look at the world as they do, yet I must confess that for a Roman that is next to impossible.

I have tried to ignore their slurs and insults, conceiving of my mission as one above such mundane practices. I have tried, even, to sympathize with them.

For all of that, I have of necessity come to the foregoing conclusions, most of which have been duly recorded here. In a general sense, they may be stated so:

Jews cannot be trusted, for the Western mind can find no basis of mutual understanding. All our concepts of freedom, dignity, and responsibility are alien to them.

Jews are naturally inferior, since they reject the best of civilization and appear unable to cope with the higher aspects of life. Jews are the enemies of mankind, since they reject and despise and slander all that is precious to mankind, the gods of men, the beliefs of men and the customs of men.

Jews are a basic threat to Rome itself, since they stand in opposition to the basis of Western culture, free slavery.

Jews are the enemies of all order, since they enshrine disorder and disobedience and worship the very act of resistance.

For all of the foregoing reasons and for others which have appeared throughout this report, I would strongly recommend to the noble Senate that it consider ways and means for the subjugation and subsequent elimination of these people. Small though they be, contained as they are in their little country, they nevertheless must be understood and respected as a threat. Speaking as a humble legate, I would submit that it is highly questionable that Rome and Judea could exist in the same world. Never were two systems more contradictory, more unable to find common ground either for alliance or for submission.