A Jew Among Romans Read online

  Promised that Herod was dying, a posse of young men lowered themselves on ropes from the Temple roof, in the midday sun. The precinct was thronged with people who gaped or cheered as they hacked down the eagle with axes. Troops were sent in. Forty demonstrators were arrested and taken before the sick king. The culprits confessed, gladly, to chopping down the blasphemous monstrosity. Herod asked who had told them to do so. They replied that it was the law of their fathers. And how could they be so cheerful when they were about to die? Because of the blessings they would enjoy after death.t

  Herod convened a public meeting, in which he accused the young men of being temple robbers who had made the law an excuse for sacrilege. Josephus reports that “the people,” afraid of some communal punishment, now begged the king to deal as he wished with those who had instigated the crime and with those caught in the act, but to take no action against the mass of the population. Herod confined himself to ordering that the two rabbis and the young men who had lowered themselves from the roof should be burned alive. It was a form of execution alien to Jews, although convicted criminals in ancient Athens, half a millennium before, had sometimes been done to death by being rolled in red-hot ash. The remainder of Herod’s troublemakers were put to death more discreetly.

  The eagerness with which the citizens called for the execution of those with whom many had sympathized is as craven as it is understandable. The Jerusalem crowd is said some thirty years later to have switched from welcoming the Galilean preacher Jesus of Nazareth to calling for his execution. Pitched among a demanding God, quasi-Jewish kings, a predatory priesthood and an alien imperial power, the Judaean Jews swung from messianic hope to practical apprehension. By playing politics with the High Priesthood, Herod had inclined the masses to vest their credulity in unofficial preachers and outlandish gurus. When such men disappointed expectation, they were abandoned to their fate.

  In Jerusalem, the lower classes had no vote and no social status. Unlike the citizens of Greek city-states or the Roman aristocracy and equites, they were never required or trained to take up arms in defense of the state. Herod was a typical Hellenistic potentate: his tenure of power depended less on the loyalty than on the defenselessness of his subjects. The lower orders had either to reconcile themselves to meekness or to resort to terrorism. The Jewish War goes to great lengths to show that the rising against Rome in 66 C.E. was, in good part, the consequence of divisions among the Judaean Jews. Their internecine friction had sources in events that had taken place long before its author was born.

  Herod’s anger over the incident of his golden eagle was visited on the latest of his High Priests, who was deposed. Despite devaluation by their frequent, cynical replacement, these dignitaries remained the only traditional interpreters of the law. Yet since their lease was subject to the pleasure of the occupying power, no appointee could hope for unalloyed public esteem. Their contamination was regularly denounced by the Zealots.

  Soon after the incident of the golden eagle, Herod’s fever worsened. According to Josephus, diviners told him that his debility was punishment for the burning of the rabbis.4 His derangement accelerated; he hurried to the therapeutic hot baths at Kallirhoe; he distributed bonuses to his entourage; then he repaired to Jericho, where he challenged death itself by devising a “criminal operation.” He called all the Judaean notables together, village by village, and shut them all into the hippodrome. He then told his sister, Salome, and her husband, Alexas, that he knew that the Jews would celebrate his death as a holiday. In that case, as soon as he breathed his last, the notables were to be massacred. The whole of Judaea would then have cause to weep on his account.

  While the king was still on his deathbed, a party of officials returned from Rome with word that the emperor Augustus had endorsed the execution of Herod’s allegedly treasonous son Antipateru (who was being held in prison in Judaea) but that Herod was free to banish him instead. As soon as Antipater heard the news, he offered a fat bribe to his jailers to spring him at once. When this was reported to Herod, it served as a terminal stimulant; Josephus says that he “uttered a cry louder than seemed possible in so sick a man” and sent orders for his son to be executed immediately. Five days later, in 4 B.C.E., he himself died, after reigning for thirty-three years.

  Herod’s grandiose funeral procession was also a show of force on the part of his son and nominated heir, Archelaus. The latter’s succession depended on the approval of the future emperor, Tiberius, to whom he hurried to present himself.v Meanwhile, Herod was buried in the Herodium, which had been readied for him, twenty-four miles outside Jerusalem, where his death was a cause for rejoicing. The citizens, who were still mourning the priests executed by the dead king, demanded that his nominee as High Priest be ejected from office. A Roman detachment, under a tribune, was roughed up by the Passover crowd. A larger force, backed by cavalry, was then sent in. Josephus says that three thousand Jews were cut down and the feast abandoned.5

  A few weeks later, Sabinus, the procurator of Syria, who backed the candidature of Herod’s son Antipas for his father’s throne, sent in a full legion, with a posse of slaves, to look for the dead king’s treasure. Sabinus’s courage did not match his greed. Cornered in the royal palace by a massive Jerusalem crowd, he promised to withdraw, hoping that his colleague Varus would arrive in time for him to break his word. There were riots all over Judaea as rival claimants bid for power. When Varus (whose name means, literally, “the crooked one”) reached Jerusalem, with a large force, the insurgent Jews dispersed. According to Josephus, the best people welcomed the return of law and order which was enforced by the crucifixion of some two thousand “ringleaders.”6

  The riots and feuds which followed Herod’s death confirmed that he had fabricated a grandiose façade for a kingdom with no affection or trust between the ruler and his culturally diverse subjects. His style of tyranny embargoed even the remote possibility of differing strands of opinion and ambition being reconciled by common civility or municipal power-sharing. As a young man, Herod had derived his military prowess from a combination of aggressive flair and personal heroism; but his soldiers had always been mercenaries. Some had happened to be Jews; none belonged to a national army with allegiance to anyone but their paymaster.

  Because of its connection with Christian mythology, the history of Herod’s rule is better known than that of most minor kings, but his methods and conduct hardly differed from those common to a host of Hellenistic and Macedonian kingdoms. Herod’s machinations provided Josephus with some of his liveliest pages, but his résumé of them was there to prove that the Jews were neither worse nor very different from the Romans or anyone else in the Mediterranean world when it came to treachery, egotism and ostentation.

  Alternating appeasement with repression, Herod had inflated Judaea into a heterogeneous, quasi-autonomous province, never a cohesive state. Jerusalem had been turned into a gilded reproduction of Solomon’s capital in which the king, although a native of the region, was never at home. Herod had secured independence of a kind from Rome, but his Jewish subjects distrusted him too much to identify themselves with the Greater Judaea which his personal demons drove him to expand and embellish. The vast new Second Temple (and the adjacent palace that insisted on its tenant’s temporal authority) both dominated and closed off the horizons of the citizens.

  The Temple’s magnificence was intended to establish its creator as the equal of “Solomon in all his glory.” Among all the cities under imperial jurisdiction, Herod’s Jerusalem was unique. It bore some resemblance to a mediaeval monastery. Dedicated to a devout calendar, it was at the center of a community that both serviced and profited from its religious status. Tourists filled the caravanserais, changed money, bought suitable sacrificial livestock and marveled at the Temple and at Herod’s palace. Eighteen thousand people found employment in maintaining the precinct and its services to pilgrims. The stone carvers and glassmakers were said to be almost as good as those in Sidon. Upkeep of the Temple demanded r
egular supplies of wood for repairs, animals for sacrifice, oil and incense for lighting and atmosphere. In general, however, since the city’s revenues went mainly into the Temple treasury, they did little to fund practical enterprise or to enrich the surrounding countryside. The rigidity of their society froze the Jerusalem Jews in traditional roles and attitudes. Never organized in any military formation, they had no impulse to secular political activity. Herod’s golden Temple and its cyclopean fortifications combined to persuade them that, with God’s favor, they would be invincible.

  a In 2 Kings 5:12, the Syrian general Naaman says, “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?”

  b Idumaea, in the south of Judaea, had been conquered by the Maccabees less than a century earlier. The heroic brothers began as strict Jewish nationalists, but they needed manpower for their war of liberation from the Seleucids. The forced conversion of the Idumaeans legitimized their recruitment in what began as a purely Jewish religious uprising. The hierarchy in Jerusalem never embraced the Idumaeans, even when circumcised, as their equals and brothers. In this the Idumaeans resembled Sephardic immigrants today, mostly from North Africa, who claim to have been discriminated against in modern Israel by the mostly Ashkenazi Israeli establishment.

  c Here and elsewhere, I use the term “Zealots,” rather loosely, to cover those Jews, distinct from (and opposed to) the Temple hierarchy, who militantly promoted the strict and hermetic practice of Judaism. They had something in common with modern Middle Eastern fundamentalists in regarding the presence of all outsiders, especially the Romans, as an abomination. It should not be supposed that they had any central organization or program. The term “Zealot” is a convenience, but not one which any ancient Jews would have applied to themselves. The sect of eastern European Hasidim, founded in the eighteenth century by Israel Baal Shem Tov, was a wishful throwback to the Judaean Zealots (who are referred to as Hasidim in sources that scholars now regard as obsolete). The modern Hasids suppose themselves to share many of their spiritual notions and social customs with those of ancient Judaea, but they are reproduction antiques, styled, as Zuleika Rodgers has expressed it, by “German medieval pietism and Polish mysticism.” Those who live in the Stamford Hill section of London and in Brooklyn, New York, imitate (in costume, posture and social organization) the inhabitants of the Ukrainian shtetls, which were finally swept away by the Nazis.

  d Despite ad hoc concessions to the Maccabees, the Seleucids had never formally renounced their lease on Palestine. Pompey had reason, of a kind, to consider that Jerusalem formed part of the spoils of his war.

  e One of those in Jerusalem at the time was the miracle worker known to folklore as Choni the Circle Drawer. Choni’s name and fame derived from an occasion when he was said to have drawn a circle in the dust and stood in it, calling on Yahweh to make it rain. It began to drizzle, but he said that was not enough; it then began to pelt with rain, which was too much; when he asked for a “calm rain,” steady rain then began to fall, and Choni’s reputation was made. Captured by followers of Hyrcanus, he was solicited to pray for their leader’s success. He responded by saying, “Lord of the Universe, since the besieged and the besiegers both belong to your people, I beg you not to listen to the evil prayers of either side.” He was then stoned to death by the High Priest’s followers.

  f In 56 B.C.E., Aristobulus and one of his sons escaped from Rome to Syria and raised a rebellion. Again defeated and again a prisoner, he must have had considerable resources of charm, ability and gold. He survived in renewed captivity until 49 B.C.E., when, at the height of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, he was sprung from his dungeon by Caesar’s supporters and sent to command the legions fighting against Pompey in what they took to be Aristobulus’s home patch, Syria. There his lucky run reached term: he was poisoned by a bounty hunter. Preserved in honey, his body was returned for burial to Judaea, where his old enemy, Hyrcanus II was in office as High Priest.

  g In The Ruling Class of Judaea, Martin Goodman says that the Jewish inhabitants of Rome were demonstrably in favor of direct imperial rule, so great was their hatred of the Herodians. A good number of them, it is said, were descended from those captured and sold into slavery by Herod and Mark Antony’s consular friend Sosius. The Roman Jews and their descendants were concentrated in the Trastevere quarter of Rome, not far from where the popes would restrict their descendants to the gated ghetto which enclosed many of them until after the Second World War.

  h Pedestrian fact makes nonsense of his rhetoric, but Cicero still won his case, the advocate’s sole concern. “Vae victis” (Woe to the defeated) was a jeering slogan to which, in one form or another, the Jews were to be subjected many times.

  i John Rogister, a present-day British historian of Vichy France, has suggested that the Pétain regime’s outlawing of Jews in the summer of 1940, soon after France’s defeat, was a reaction to their aggressive “lobbying,” which amounted, in fact, to seeking exemption from being deported and murdered.

  j The term “Egyptians” probably embraces a spectrum of disaffected Levantines. The Romans, like the British in their imperial vanity, made small distinction when it came to labeling indigenous peoples. The aggressive advent of the Romans during the previous century had generated violent resentment in local populations in the Fertile Crescent. In 88 B.C.E., Mithridates VI of Pontus, the ruler of a kingdom on the south shore of the Black Sea, plotted and primed the simultaneous massacre of some eighty thousand Roman and Italian colonists and officials in the region. His rebellion was put down, with difficulty and condign pitilessness, by Sulla and by later Roman commanders, Pompey the last. A revolt that was intended to drive the Romans out of “Asia” made sure that they would stay there. Mithridates maintained fugitive resistance to the Italian presence until 63 B.C.E. When cornered, he required a slave to stab him (he was impervious to poison, of which he had taken regular small doses as a prophylactic). The attack on Caesar is likely to have been mounted by the rump of those who remembered, and resented, the Mithridatic wars in which so many “natives” had died.

  k The going annual subscription was half a shekel per adult male.

  l In an extension of the sabbatical principle, as decreed in Leviticus, Judaean farmers left their land fallow for one year in seven. The Roman authorities waived land taxes accordingly, but the peasants’ (as it happened) fruitful practice kindled jeers from Roman legionnaires that Jews were lazy. It proved a long-running canard: Julio Grondona, an Argentinian football tycoon, said recently that no Jew should be allowed to referee a football game, because it involved physical effort “and no Jew likes hard work.”

  m Josephus was proud to number the High Priest Simon Psellus (“the stutterer”) among his forebears.

  n Jewish moralists, including Jesus of Nazareth, were alone in the ancient world in regarding wealth as an impediment to virtue. Their attitude was alien to Romans and Greeks (except for a few Cynics, such as the ostentatiously minimalist Diogenes).

  o Constantine Cavafy’s 1918 poem “Aristovoulos” mentions only the young man’s beauty. The poet has it (perhaps ironically) that Herod was distressed by the death, which is attributed to the machinations of Salome and Kypros.

  p It is a measure of Herod’s parlous situation after the battle of Actium in 31 B.C.E. that, according to Josephus (Jewish War I: 519 etc.), the Romanized Spartan adventurer Gaius Julius Eurycles extracted the huge sum of fifty talents from him by promising to intercede on Herod’s behalf with Octavian, whom the Spartan had been shrewd enough to back with a contingent of latter-day Spartiates. Eurycles was the last Spartan to strut the public stage. His avarice was notorious, but the Spartans were renowned, even in their most glorious (and supposedly ascetic) days, for their appetite for money.

  q According to Dio Cassius (51.19.3), Antony’s birthday, January 14, was “decreed accursed” by the Senate, under Octavian’s encouragement. This did nothing to prevent Antony’s legitimate offspring and their de
scendants from occupying high places in the imperial order of things.

  r In The Israelites, Antony Kamm notes that social conflicts over cult became seriously vexed, especially in the case of the Judaean Jews, only after the Romans made gods of their emperors, a view diplomatically confirmed by Philo in his De legatione ad Gaium.

  s The coinage struck in Jerusalem during the 67–73 war was in honor of “Zion,” not of Judaea. Today’s Haredim, similarly inward-looking, refuse to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

  t The notion of paradisal resurrection for the faithful long preceded Christianity and Islam, although the Sadducees had no belief in it. The Pharisees had a Hellenized notion of the immortality of the soul. Josephus (Antiquities 18: 13–14) says that they taught that there were punishments and rewards “under the earth for the those who led lives of virtue or vice.”

  u Antipater was the son of Doris, the first of the nine wives by whom Herod had seven children. In 7 B.C.E., with Augustus’s reluctant approval, the increasingly paranoid king had had Alexander and Aristobulus—his sons by his beloved Mariamne—strangled for supposedly plotting against him. Backed by his scheming mother, Antipater was restored to favor, but he was soon accused of plotting to make sure of surviving his father by disposing of him. Observing imperial protocol, Herod sought Augustus’s warrant to execute yet another of his own sons. Stanley Kubrick’s definition of paranoia, “understanding what’s going on,” is relevant both to Herod and to his Roman masters. Augustus, whom Dryden called a man who “kills and keeps his temper,” sent his only daughter, Julia, into ignominious and unreprieved exile for being implicated in a conspiracy, of which the details were successfully suppressed.

  v So did a pretender who—sponsored by a devious Levantine operator—claimed to be Herod’s dead son Alexander. Like a false Messiah, he gained the support of the Jews in Rome (and of the inhabitants of the Cycladic island of Melos). He was quickly exposed by Tiberius, who, with a rare show of geniality, sent the silly fellow to the galleys. His sponsor was executed.