A Jew Among Romans Read online

  Essene communities were organized along communal lines not unlike those set out in Plato’s Republic.o Initiates had to be meticulous in speech and deed. According to a document found in Damascus Cave 4, Essene justice demanded capital punishment for “apostasy in a state of demonic possession, adultery of a betrothed girl, slandering the people of Israel and treason.” Since it is unlikely that any community had the right to carry out such sentences, their rigid penal code seems to belong to a project for the ideal society of the future.

  Among the Essenes, transgression of a single item of the Law of Moses entailed expulsion. If anyone so much as uttered the Most Venerable Name, “he shall be dismissed and return no more.”7 The same applied to initiates who murmured against the authority of the commune; the Essene insistence on homogeneity was a form of reactionary radicalism. It aimed to re-establish the hermetic absolutism which had supposedly existed in Jerusalem before the Babylonian exile. The Marxist claim that men once lived in a state of primitive communism, without social distinction, is a similar nostalgia: redemptive hope looks back and forward to symmetrical Edens.p

  No mention is made of Essenes either in the New Testament or in later rabbinic literature. They set an example no one cared to follow or even to commemorate.q All Essene property was held in common; only men could be full members. The community was quasi-monastic, wary of division or dissent: a priest had to supervise any meeting of ten or more inmates. A few Essenes had wives, but females were in no way equal to males. Men could be expelled for “fornicating” with their own wives during menstruation or pregnancy or at any time after menopause. Sex was licit only if it could result in conception. One of the Qumran caves yielded a document that decreed expulsion for any male who murmured against “the Fathers.” It required only ten days’ penance for females who did so. Their prattle was clearly of petty account.

  Josephus reports that sworn members were expected to be “truthful, humble, just, upright, charitable, modest and proficient in distinguishing ‘the two spirits,’ truth and falsehood.” The Essenes took a Manichaean view of life as a close-run contest between good and evil. Initiates had to be able to recognize a “son of Darkness.” Their great demon was the Wicked Priest, almost certainly Jonathan, the youngest of the Maccabee brothers. He succeeded the heroic Judas, who was killed in battle in 161 B.C.E. As valiant as his brothers in fighting for independence from the Seleucids, Jonathan became “Wicked” only when he accepted the High Priesthood under license from Alexander Balas, who had usurped the Seleucid throne. His exemplary opposite was the Teacher of Righteousness, about whose identity Josephus says nothing, probably because he relied for his information more on the apocryphal books of the Maccabees than on the Essenes themselves.r

  The “pragmatism” which the Essenes deplored had something in common with the Lutheran Protestantism which, in Roman Catholic eyes, was a menace to faith. Any departure from esoteric orthodoxy was likely to lead Jews into temptation.s Although the Teacher of Righteousness seems to have died toward the end of the second century B.C.E., wishful Christians have identified him with Jesus or with John the Baptist.t The desire to discover a founding father with rare qualities is common among monotheistic cults and their scholiasts. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism may have been inspired by the words of Strabo, a first-century historian originally from Amaseia, in Pontus, but long resident in Rome. Strabo says that the Jews left Egypt not because they fled or were expelled but because of their dissatisfaction with Egyptian religion. “Moses.… one of the Egyptian priests.… was accompanied by many people who worshipped the Divine Being. He said, and taught, that the Egyptians were mistaken in representing the Divine Being by the images of beasts and cattle.… and the Greeks were wrong in modelling the gods in human form.… for God is one thing alone that encompasses us all.” Moses impressed “not a few thoughtful men” and led them to “the place where Jerusalem now is.”u

  Jesus of Nazareth, like the Essenes, was drawn to “the wilderness.” His precocious reputation too was bolstered by therapeutic skill. Although Essene society was sternly hierarchical, one Dead Sea Scroll declares that if a “bastard” was a man of learning and the High Priest a boor, then the bastard should take precedence. Genius is the trump that wins the trick. Judaism always reserved a fast track for the clever boy. Jacob was Esau’s junior, and his son Joseph was not his firstborn; Josephus makes it clear that his own brother, Mattathias,v was senior to him only in years.

  Josephus dwells on the Essenes’ reputation for accurate prophecy. More than a century earlier, a certain Judas is reported to have given instructions on the signs to watch for and never to have made a mistake in his own predictions. Prophets were to the ancient Jews what economists are to the modern world: they dealt in futures. Géza Vermès claims that the most rewarding augury was by another Essene, Menahem, who foretold Herod the Great’s rule over the Jews. When it came true, Herod had the rare grace to dispense the Essenes, who refused to take all oaths apart from the covenant, from swearing loyalty to him. Another Essene interpreted a dream that came to Archelaus, ethnarch of Judaea at the beginning of the first century, to mean that he would rule for ten years, which also proved correct.8 Josephus makes no mention of these neat accuracies, and their happy dividends, perhaps because he did not wish to detract from what seems to be the uniqueness of his own impending performance in front of Vespasian. The historian knew, of course, that when the time came, Vespasian’s reaction to Joseph’s own predictions was to prove as gracious as any precedent could have disposed his prisoner to hope.

  The exact meaning of “Essenes” is uncertain. Philo of Alexandria refers to an Egyptian sect who followed a similar way of life as “Therapeutai,” healers, but elsewhere he mentions the Essenes as if they were distinct from them. Some modern sources, spearheaded by Martin Bernal, have incorporated Egypt in the black Africa from which, so they claim, on more or (often) less sound grounds, other societies, especially the Greeks, “stole” their culture. Freud in his mythologizing Moses and Monotheism postulated an Egyptian Moses.w

  The Essenes’ withdrawal from city life and their determination to absent themselves from secular history make them the antecedents of the Hasids of Mea Shearim, in modern Jerusalem. They too abstain from mundane politics, avert their eyes from secular culture and refuse even to acknowledge the existence of the State of Israel.x Since, for them, the coming of the Messiah must precede the creation of a Jewish state, nothing in current secular history has relevance to Hasidic pieties. The Essene writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls left no record of daily life. Natural events were of interest solely as omens of what was to come. Everything was interpreted in accordance with its moral deposit; good or bad harvests were worthy of note only as evidence of the virtue or sinfulness of the nation.

  The sense of living in “Last Days” fevered the dreams of many Judaean Jews of the first century. It conformed with the Zealots’ tradition of reading the world only in the light of biblical predictions. After Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return from Babylon, a sequence of pretenders and preachers, of whom John the Baptist was only the most charismatic, told audiences that the ultimate vindication of the covenant was all but upon them. In fact, back in the sixth century B.C.E., many Jews chose not to leave Babylon,y where their families had been for two or three generations, in order to go to a “homeland” they had never seen. Jeremiah himself had advised the original deportees not to waste their time in lamentation for what they had lost; they could and should live as Jews wherever they happened to be. As the Romans put it, ubi bene, ibi patria: where the living is good, that’s home.

  The Essenes’ “Pauline” attitude to chastity presumed that mundane family life (if not happiness itself) was inimical to holy living. Josephus gives no indication that the sect as a whole took any militant part in the rebellion against the Romans,z but their communities were nevertheless put to the sword when Vespasian swept through Galilee. Nor does The Jewish War hint why they were treated with such ruthlessness. I
t was entirely in character that they should refuse all compromise with the Gentile forces, but their social organization, however “Spartan,” was not military. Yet the Romans are said to have “racked and twisted, burnt and broken them.… in order to make them blaspheme the Lawgiver or eat forbidden food. Smiling in their agony and gently mocking their torturers, they resigned their souls, confident that they would be returned to them.”9 Were Vespasian’s soldiers infuriated by the Essenes’ serene self-righteousness or because their settlements yielded so little booty?

  The young Joseph stayed long enough with the Essenes to be daunted by their dignity. As he put it in his Vita: “These are men’s men, legionaries of the soul, engaged in the serious pursuit of the virtuous life; disciplined, courageous, perfectly just, and contemptuous of the pleasures as much as of the fears that drive ordinary people.”aa Joseph was also impressed by the charitable funds to which all able-bodied men contributed two days’ wages a month. The money was then distributed by “the Guardians” to the sick and to Jews in foreign hands. The model for Christian charity originates with the Jews. While appreciative of the Essenes’ qualities, their visitor appears to have had something in common with Ovid when he said “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor” (I see the better way and approve it, I follow the worse). Before leaving the Essenes, Joseph may have learned to mimic the vatic tones of their elders.bb His apprentice years taught him to adapt his manner to whatever audience he hoped to win. Speed in the imitation of attitudes and arguments gave him secret room to be himself through a show of conformity. It was a facility that would serve him well when he came to live in Rome.

  Joseph entertained many ideas, and they entertained him, but the breadth of his intelligence worked against single-mindedness. After sampling the three outstanding strains of Judaism, he ventured further into the wilderness to spend time with the man he calls Bannus. No other source mentions him. Was his unlikely name the cover for a Zealot who, as Tessa Rajak suggests, ran some kind of boot camp for young men who wanted to toughen up for the imminent struggle with the Romans?10 Joseph’s voluntary experience of camp life resembles the way in which modern narcissists improve their musculature, and their self-esteem, by going to the gym or running marathons. His decision to take a survival course is more consistent with his dilettantism than with any militant purpose. It gave him a taste of the Hellenic way of life.cc There is no evidence that Bannus inculcated Joseph with rebellious resolve or military know-how. Roughing it may have given him physical confidence; but his time encamped on the margin of society scarcely amounted to effective (or premeditated) preparation for revolutionary generalship.

  a It is typical of ancient typologies that those outside the civilized pale were depicted as physically and morally incongruous. Herodotus recorded, even if he did not believe, that there existed a race of men called “Hyperboreans” (extreme northerners), who wore their heads below their shoulders. Tacitus said that “Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred and permit all that we abhor”; but he also said of the Finns—none of whom he can ever have observed—that “among them the woman rules: thus they have fallen lower not merely than freemen, but even than slaves.” As for the Germans, they were his idea of noble savages. It is hardly plausible that Tacitus did any fieldwork or “meticulous research” before having fun at the expense of the kind of people with whom he was unlikely ever to have dinner.

  b The same was regularly said of the Thracians, whose territory (including modern Bulgaria) bordered northern Greece.

  c Anatole France’s story “The Procurator of Judaea” depicts Pilate, in old age, with only a vague memory of a certain Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospels’ image of Pilate as a man with a tender conscience ignores the abrupt way in which he had dealt with a Samaritan “Messiah” who led his followers to occupy Mount Gerizim. The Samaritans’ temple was a symbol of secession, but they continued to regard the Torah as their fundamental law. They claimed to observe the sacred ordinances with greater punctiliousness than the Jerusalem priesthood (in the thirteenth century, the Provençal Cathars rebelled against papal authority in a similarly fervent, eventually suicidal, spirit). Pilate’s troops were ordered to massacre most of the Samaritan dissidents. The ascription of patience and fairness to the Romans in the face of Jewish extremism was a tactic devised, after Josephus’s war, to put the followers of Jesus of Nazareth on the side of the imperial power. The notion, recently revived by Richard Bauckham, in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, that the Gospels are authentic, because derived from eyewitness accounts, ignores how often the terms in which evidence is given can color what witnesses claim to have seen. Without any ideological recipe, Josephus himself offers copious examples in describing his own and other people’s acts and motives. Confidence that the Gospels were beyond question encouraged clerics and theologians to wrap themselves in the mantle of Elijah and speak and write with increasing assertiveness about the Almighty’s wishes and purposes.

  d Roman coins, stamped with the emperor’s image, were in themselves an affront to Judaism. Jesus’s eviction of the money changers from the Temple may have had more to do with disgust at the invasion of impious coinage than with disapproval of currency dealers as such. Jesus, like the Sicarii, but less violent, could more safely vent his disapproval of the Roman presence by the indirect method of attacking Jews who traded in the alien currency. Such assaults won popular applause and did not attract punitive action from the imperial power.

  e Mahatma Gandhi counseled the German Jews to adopt similar tactics with the Nazis, as he had, with some success, against the British. It is inconceivable that Hitler would have been shamed into a reversal of policy like that of the pragmatic British. Fanatics have no shame.

  f His name means, in Hebrew, “God has helped.”

  g Described by Tacitus as “a man practicing every kind of cruelty and lust [who] wielded royal power with the instincts of a slave.”

  h Judas led the resistance to the census of 6 C.E., initiated (no doubt to assist Roman and priestly tax collection) by the High Priest Joazar ben Boethus, who was later deposed, only to be replaced by another Roman puppet, Ananus ben Sethi, said by Martin Goodman, in The Ruling Class of Judaea, to be a nouveau riche of obscure provenance. He and his five sons dominated the High Priesthood for more than sixty years. None was acclaimed, as tradition required, by a mass meeting of the people (this by no means implies that the High Priest was ever endorsed by any kind of “democratic” process). Compare the ritual preceding the crowd’s cry of “habbiamo un papa” when the white smoke proves that the Vatican conclave has made its choice of a new pope.

  i Usually Jewish “moderates” (who could be accused of collaborating with the Romans), though M. Sartre claims (D’Alexandre à Zénobie, p. 573) that some Romans too were killed. The intended effect of terror was, then as now, to “radicalize the struggle,” in this case by eliminating “Hellenizers.” Greek ideas were as threatening to the Zealots as Roman government.

  j Malachi (the Messenger), the last of the biblical prophets, records the standoff, in the fifth century B.C.E., between “those who fear God and served Him” and “those who do not fear God nor serve Him.” See Shemaryahu Talmon’s “The Internal Diversification of Judaism in the Early Second Temple Period.”

  k In Jesus the Jew and elsewhere, Géza Vermès has shown how closely, in truth, His teachings resembled theirs. Jesus is said, in the Gospels, to have reproached the Pharisees for inflexible literal-mindedness; they were even accused of forbidding acts of charity on the Sabbath. This smacks of retroactive denigration. Jesus’s near contemporary Hillel, a famous Pharisaic rabbi, told his disciples, “That which is hateful, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole of the Torah. The rest is explanation; go and learn.” Such a view hardly amounted to inflexibility. The Christian evangelists sought to disembarrass their Savior of any debt to the Jewish sect with which His teachings had most in common.

  l The Sadducees are sometimes said to derive their name from Zadok the Priest
, an affectation of antique lineage that may have appealed to the ruling circle in Jerusalem.

  m The idea of the immortality of the “soul,” rather than physical rebirth, is closer to Platonism. Pythagoreans, on the other hand, believed in a form of transubstantiation, which accounts for their vegetarianism. In their view “a duck might be somebody’s mother.” They refrained even from kidney beans, on account of their supposed similarity to human embryos. The Pharisees believed that the souls of the good “passed into another body” (Jewish War, II: 162–63).

  n During the forty years following the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1947, it was assumed by scholars that the inhabitants of the Qumran caves, where they were found, were either Essenes or proto-Christians. The messianic tone of the scrolls and their references to the “Son of God” seemed to typify their communities. More recently, as Edward Rothstein summarized in a review of the Discovery Times Square exhibition of October 2011, it has been suggested that the Qumran population was less exclusively sectarian; that the scrolls derive from a variety of sources; and that they, and other discovered treasures and artifacts, were accumulated by a mixture of “locals, nomads and invaders.” The scrolls composed what amounted to a somewhat eclectic local library. Their authors take different points of view on a number of matters and cannot all have been Essenes of the kind Joseph encountered.

  o Plato’s ejection of “poets” from his ideal city, because they tended to create deviant or derisive versions of the gods, matched the ordinance of the Torah that proscribed any representation or direct mention of the deity.

  p According to Philip Davies and his colleagues, “It is unlikely that [after the return from Babylon] there was a single pure, agreed ‘Judaism.’ ” The beliefs, often found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in a basic dualism between “two equal and contending spirits” and also in a “fiery end to the cycle of world history” are essentially Zoroastrian ideas. Modern belief in “the Revolution” can be seen as a “philosophical” mutation of the same antique notion.