A Jew Among Romans Page 5
II
IN THE WAKE OF THE SQUABBLES AND FEUDS that followed Herod’s death, Judaea lost its nominal independence. For want of an indigenous strongman, Augustus subjected the territory to supervision by a sequence of less than distinguished Roman officials subordinate, in theory, to the governor of Syria. Judaea was not a popular posting. Although fertile, and with a number of prosperous cities, many with a majority of Greek-speaking inhabitants, it lacked natural riches. Unlike the empire’s wheat-producing provinces—Egypt, Sicily and North Africa—the region’s exports were not crucial to Rome’s well-being. Its main crop was a stock of gold, which was located, and annually replenished, in the Jerusalem Temple, the repository of tithes and offerings from Jews all around the Mediterranean.
By the time Joseph ben Mattathias was growing up, Palestine was no more than one of the buffers between the Roman imperium and the unconquered Parthians. The latter were formidable horsemen, said by the credulous second-century C.E. historian Justinus to live in the saddle, whether trading or arguing. Their archers were adept at firing parting shots from their bows as they wheeled to gallop in retreat. Legend insisted that their flight was more formidable than their attack. The ancient taste for congruity presumed that their morals, like their tactics, were perverse:a the Parthians were said to be addicted to undiluted alcohol (civilized men took water with their wine) and to father children even on their sisters and mothers.b
In 53 B.C.E., the Parthians had destroyed the army of Marcus Licinius Crassus. On the way to his death at the calamitous battle of Carrhae, he had stopped off at Jerusalem in order to cull all the gold in the Temple sanctuary. In subsequent years, the Romans made it a matter of honor to recover the “eagles”—the regimental standards—of Crassus’s slaughtered legions. They did so, finally, by a negotiation from which both sides emerged with unbruised pride. With rare willingness to settle for a draw, Rome conceded Parthia’s independence, in return for a show of diplomatic deference.
The eastern margin of the empire continued to be patrolled with possessive vigilance. Whoever ruled Judaea could never be allowed to face both ways. Soon after Joseph ben Mattathias was born, in 37 C.E., Herod’s grandson Agrippa I—who owed his throne to his loudly trumpeted loyalty to Rome—began to reconstruct the north wall of Jerusalem. If completed, it is said, the battlements would have made the city impregnable.1 Agrippa might then have had decisive leverage on the balance of power in the eastern marches. As it was, after the Roman procurator, Vibius Marsus, reported his uneasiness to the emperor, Claudius ordered that the project be aborted. Forty years later, the unimproved section of the walls was the back door through which the Romans, under Titus Flavius, mounted their final assault.
Agrippa’s plan to strengthen the defenses of Jerusalem (where he never lived for any great length of time) had no connection with the national or separatist aspirations of the Jews. He presumed that, as a securely based local potentate, he would be more impressive, and serviceable, to the Romans, and therefore more likely to be maintained by them in his Levantine hegemony. On the same principle, he later invited five regional princes to a summit meeting at the provincial capital, Tiberias. The king probably meant only to impress his peers into a common front under his presidency. He would look less dispensable if he could preside over the incorporation of Rome’s local clients in an anti-Parthian pact. From the point of view of the imperial power, however, his proposed confederacy once again appeared more impudent than helpful. The stronger a provincial alliance, the more tempted its leader might be to play the opportunist. Claudius’s response was to subject Judaea to direct rule from Rome. The Jews had little active part in events that, in one way and another, served to pitch them into a disastrous war.
During the years between Claudius’s administrative decision to garrison Judaea and the outbreak of Josephus’s “Jewish War,” the Roman presence was an irritant, as it had been in other parts of the empire, but seldom led to major incidents. As prefect from 26 to 36 C.E., Pontius Pilate caused more outrage among the Jews when he tried to divert some seventeen talents of Yahweh’s treasure to fund the building of an aqueduct than he did by crucifying Jesus of Nazareth. If he assumed that public amenities would enhance his popularity, as they might in any other city, he reckoned without the impractical orthodoxy of the Jerusalem community (their principal use for water was for ritual ablutions—for instance after touching corpses—never for hedonistic indulgence). While the Zealots were infuriated by the well-intentioned idea of the proposed aqueduct, none protested against the Sanhedrin’s use of its revenues for an ingenious and expensive drainage system to evacuate sacrificial blood from the Temple area.
Pilate could be forgiven for wondering what he had done to deserve such a posting.c By comparison with some of his successors, he was, at the worst, inept. One of his first moves, on arriving as governor, had been to establish his authority by smuggling gilded imperial shields into Jerusalem during the night.d When the Jews woke to the sacrilegious sight of graven images in the Temple precinct, a mob gathered. It then marched on Pilate’s headquarters in the seaport of Caesarea, a full fifty miles away. The protesters surrounded his house and lay prostrate for five days. Pilate ordered them to disperse. The crowd remained immobile. When the procurator called in the troops, the recumbent Jews bared their throats for the legionaries’ swords. Pilate thought again. The sacrilegious standards were removed from the Temple. Some thirty years later, while waiting in Galilee for the Roman onslaught to gather force, Joseph ben Mattathias had reason to be sorry that the Jews of his own day had not adopted the unglamorous tactics of the passive resisters who persuaded Pilate to back down.e
The rank-and-file Roman and mercenary soldiers on garrison duty in Judaea were probably more often bored than malevolent. In the early 50s C.E., when Ventidius Cumanus was governor, a Roman sentry posted in the Temple colonnade was so exasperated by festive Jews jeering at his presence that he turned his back and mooned the lot of them. (How many stolid sentries on public parade have longed to do as much, or more?) The flash of a bare and alien backside, in a holy place, fomented a riot in the tight Jerusalem streets. Josephus claims that thirty thousand people were crushed to death.2 That figure must be inflated, but evidently there were many casualties. Cumanus calmed things, temporarily, by agreeing to execute the wretched squaddy who had cheeked the pilgrims.
The governor may have harbored some resentment against the Jews for making such a fuss. Soon afterward, a party of Galilean Jews on their way to a festival in Jerusalem, were attacked by Samaritan villagers. Cumanus and his tribune, Celer, were probably bribed to take no action. The Galilean Jews then sought partisan aid from Eleazar,f a Zealot chieftain with a mountain stronghold in the region. Samaritan villagers were attacked and killed. When Cumanus intervened in force, Eleazar retreated, but Judaea was already, Josephus tells us, “full of brigands.”
The Samaritans appealed to Quadratus, the legate of Syria. He crucified the Jews Cumanus had taken prisoner and had several “troublemakers” decapitated. He then sent the High Priests Jonathan, Ananias and Ananus, the commander of the Temple, to Rome in fetters. A number of other Jews, as well as some of the Samaritan leaders, were ordered to appear before the emperor Claudius, who relished the part of chief justice. Once in court in Rome, the Jews must have both defended themselves and attacked Cumanus with vigor and with some justice. They enjoyed the invaluable support of Claudius’s close friend, King Agrippa II, who happened to be in Rome. The Jews obtained a favorable verdict. Cumanus was exiled, but Celer—who had presumably conducted the “police operation”—took the fall: the tribune was returned to Jerusalem for public torture, after which he was dragged round the city and then beheaded. Presumably, Quadratus claimed to have been misinformed and put all the blame on his subordinates. Tacitus indicates that it was now that Pallas,g the emperor’s powerful freedman, took the opportunity to vest his brother Felix with full powers in Judaea. He was to be no marked improvement over his predecessors.
> The provincials were subject both to Roman taxes and, in the case of the Jews, to the tithes, which kept the higher echelons of the priesthood in the elaborate style to which tradition entitled them. Since the lower ranks of priests benefited least from what it was their duty to collect, they often sympathized with the rural population whose penury they shared. The Talmud records that the Romans built bridges for the sake of charging tolls on those who crossed them; when they borrowed a poor man’s donkey, he could expect them not to return it. The Talmud does not, however, note that the sharecropping peasantry had less to fear, financially, from the Romans than from the exactions of the priesthood.
An undercurrent of glamorous (and glamorized) rebellion runs throughout Judaean history. The descendants of Judas of Galilee, a Zapata-like hero of the rural resistance from the first days of the Roman hegemony,h were among those who practiced terrorism in the name of God and liberty. Memories of the heroic Maccabees (the Hammer Men) inspired Judaean Jews to double piety with sectarian violence. In the Jerusalem of Joseph ben Mattathias’s youth, the so-called Sicarii, knife men, waged guerrilla warfare in the streets and markets. Heirs of Judas the Galilean, they would mingle with the crowds in the streets and markets, then suddenly draw knives from under their cloaks. They could stab a targeti and vanish quickly, sometimes screaming “Murder” along with the panicking crowd.
Militants in colonial territories often flex their muscles, and blood the young, by a campaign of violence against “traitors” or “collaborators” in their own community. This advertises their cause (and leads people to exaggerate their number) without directly challenging the imperial power. Like today’s suicide bombers, the Sicarii linked brutality and surprise. Their knives brought them kudos on the street and, no doubt, allowed unscrupulous capi to exact “protection” from prosperous targets. Their revolutionary glamour attracted the young and the unemployed, as well as religious fanatics; it also lent cover to sneak thieves and racketeers. Their gangs were united only in the wish to dispossess the ruling junta and usurp its powers.
Turf wars between rival fundamentalist factions inside Jerusalem were a savage feature of Joseph ben Mattathias’s early life.j The High Priest Jonathan—a compromising diplomat appointed by King Agrippa II to please the Romans—was only the most distinguished cadaver done to death by the Sicarii. Attacking other Jews demanded less military cohesion than confronting the troops commanded by the provincial governor, Cestius Gallus. The citizens of Jerusalem were divided, irreconcilably, among themselves. Religion and politics were indistinguishable: reference to revealed Truth allowed any compromise to be labeled heresy. Personal ambitions could be dressed, seductively, as missionary piety.
Agrippa II had been appointed to his father’s throne in 49. He owed his small majesty to imperial favor, not to inheritance. His continued tenure depended on performance. The king’s principal duty was to control his Jewish subjects. Their affection for him was hardly greater than it had been for his great-grandfather; their fear, much smaller. His public image was enhanced by his sister and close companion, Berenice. In order to allay rumors of incest with her brother, she had been married to her uncle, another Herod, the ethnarch of Chalcis, in northern Syria, but on her husband’s death she returned to Agrippa II. While her brother had to keep a diplomatic balance between local loyalties—which divided “Greeks” (that is, Greek speakers) from Jews and the overriding requirements of the Romans—Berenice could afford to be undisguised, if only because she was a woman, in favoring the Jews.
Joseph ben Mattathias grew up under the shadow of Herod’s vast Second Temple complex. No other god but Yahweh could be worshipped within the city. Gentile tourists were excluded from the inner precinct. A theater and an amphitheater had been built, outside the walls, for alien amusement, but Jews who contributed to such pagan constructions, or enjoyed their entertainments, always risked denunciation as heretics. Jerusalem’s primacy was guaranteed by the presence of the High Priests. Their authority dated back to Moses and Aaron. Viewed from outside, the singularity of the Jewish religion, and its ostentatious enactment in the Temple, made it appear that the inhabitants of Jerusalem were united in its esoteric practice and in deference to the hierarchy.
When the Maccabees had gone to war against the Seleucids in 168 B.C.E., they had been fired with tribal zeal, which unified and inspired their Judaean fighters under the banner of Mosaic conformity. After they had secured the de facto independence of Judaea, however, the surviving Maccabeans usurped the kudos of the High Priesthood and, by filling any vacancy with their own placemen, diminished its sacred aura. Subsequently, the standing of the Temple hierarchy was further eroded by its enforced subservience, first to Herod the Great, and then to Roman officials, to whom the Temple treasury was obliged to supply regular golden eggs. The High Priests and their council, the Sanhedrin, were wedged between a rock and a hard place: while seeking to honor the law of the Jews, they had to placate, if not buy off, a series of Roman governors who had small sympathy for Jewish sensibilities. As a result of their fractious history, the solidarity of the Judaeans was more apparent than real.
Deprived of political freedom, the Jews of Joseph ben Mattathias’s youth had recourse to philosophical and religious intensity and division; there were always contending strands of thought and purpose within Judaism. Of the groups centered in Jerusalem, the Sadducees and the Pharisees were the most influential. The New Testament’s evangelists had doctrinal and political reasons for making them appear to have been yoked in common hostility to Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, their principal doctrinal disagreement was with each other. Jesus had often expressed himself in more or less Pharisaic terms.k
Since childhood was never a topic in ancient literature, Josephus’s Vita does not describe his early years. He merely lays claim, through a remote ancestor of his mother’s, to “royal” blood (that of the “Hasmonaeans,” as the Maccabees were formally known). He also maintains that his father Mattathias’s family belonged to the highest of the twenty-four echelons of the “priesthood.” Their status was an inherited social distinction that entitled its holders to benefit from the tithes the lower orders were required to pay. Although Josephus does not give any details of his father’s wealth or property, he took pride in belonging to a leading, certainly conservative, family.
Tessa Rajak maintains that, by the time Josephus sat down to write The Jewish War, “it would have suited [him] to present himself as a Pharisee.”3 It seems overly elaborate to accuse Josephus, isolated in Rome, of sudden Pharisaic affectations. As he indicates, when looking back in his Vita to the days when he had choices about his future, the disputatious refinement of the Pharisees was congenial to him from an early age. Their practice of exegesis when interpreting the law turned brilliant teachers such as Hillel into the maîtres-à-penser whom any intellectually ambitious young man would wish to impress. Even if F. W. Walbank is right when he claims that Joseph’s family favored the Sadducees,4 Joseph’s quick mind is likely to have veered into the fast lane leading to the Pharisaic seminars at which he might flaunt his ingenuity. The Sadducees advocated the dry study of the Torah without any ingenious interpetations. Honoring the law, but not lawyers, they were unlikely to provide the kind of company a clever boy would be keen to keep. If Joseph’s family did incline to the Sadducees, it was probably out of vestigial pride in the Hasmonaean connection.l
The Sadducees later had ideas in common with the followers of Epicurus. Neither believed in human resurrection or immortality; both would be condemned by Christianity, which drew much of its imagery from the Pharisaic belief that God “revives the dead with great mercy.… and keeps the faith with those who sleep in the dust.”m In the Vita, Josephus explains, for the benefit of Gentile readers, that the Pharisees were analogous to the Stoics. The latter philosophy affected Jewish thinking as early as the second century B.C.E.; Ben Sira, in Ecclesiasticus, recommended its unaggressive, rational virtues, “modest piety, self-knowledge and wisdom.” His good Jew was q
uiet, if not skeptical.
The Pharisees formed a distinct sect only in the first century B.C.E. Early in The Jewish War, Josephus recalls how, when Alexander Jannaeus, one of the later Hasmonaeans, assumed the role of High Priest as well as king, the Pharisees were sufficiently incensed to appeal to the hated Seleucids to help overthrow him.5 Alexander’s response was to have eight hundred of them crucified in the center of Jerusalem. He then “butchered their wives and children before their eyes” while reclining, cup in hand, among his concubines. Eight thousand citizens, led by the Pharisees, fled the city. They remained in exile till Alexander died. After his death, when his widow, Alexandra, became queen, she sanctioned the return of the exiles. It was soon said that “she ruled others, the Pharisees ruled her.”6 When she died, her sons became involved in the vicious civil war that led to that fatal invitation, by each of the parties, to Pompey the Great to come to Jerusalem.
The young Joseph was able to savor the teachings of the Pharisee and Sadducee instructors within the gates of Jerusalem itself. To visit the third group in which, as the Vita recalls, he took a cruising interest required him to leave the city. The Essenes had turned their backs on the metropolis and set out to return to an uncompromising, primitive form of Judaism. Seceding from allegiance to the Temple hierarchy, some four thousand men had established a number of pious communities, notably in the desert region of Qumran, where the dry climate preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls until their publication in the 1950s.n The Essene “fathers”—the elders of each community—imposed rigorous asceticism on their followers. Initiates had to commit to a three-year period of study before being received as members. Joseph can have visited them only as a dilettante. He considered their Spartan regime, which included cold baths, truly virtuous, but he was not disposed to take the plunge and join them.