A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  When Vespasian marched on Tiberias, he must have expected that the city would put up a strong resistance. From his own sour experience of their duplicity, Joseph was able to assure the Roman commander that few of the inhabitants of Tiberias had ever been wholeheartedly in favor of the rebellion. He was proved right when, thanks to Agrippa II’s mediation, the leading men of the city agreed to open the gates. As a result, Tiberias suffered no more than a wide breach being made in its walls. The Romans wanted to be sure that they would have easy access if the wrong people—such as Joseph ben Mattathias’s prewar supporters—regained control of the city.

  Tiberias’s neighbor and rival, Tarichaeae, was filled with Zealots who had fled to the safety of walls that Josephus had had strengthened before the arrival of the legions. Its defenses were less substantial than those of Tiberias, where greater funds had been available; but since their city backed directly onto the southernmost shore of the Sea of Galilee, Tarichaean Jews had a line of retreat that the Romans could not easily sever. The militants had lined up a large number of boats to enable them to evacuate the city and then harass the enemy from the sea. Not everyone was eager to resist, but residents who preferred a quiet life were given no choice.

  In accordance with the standard practice of blooding ambitious young officers in combat, Vespasian sent his son Titus ahead with six hundred cavalry. Before the battle, Josephus reports Titus to have stiffened the sinews of his ethnically mixed force by addressing them as “Romans.”g He told them that they belonged to a “people” whose reach no one in the whole world had been able to escape. His words were more a reminder of shared Romanitas than of any specific racial identity. Fighting for Rome defined its soldiers as Romans, whatever they might be by birth.h

  “All the same,” Titus went on, “the Jews, to do them justice, have not until this moment flinched from the fight. And since they are managing to keep their end up, despite their disasters, it would be ridiculous for us to back away when we’re winning. I’m still afraid some of you may be secretly alarmed by the number of our enemies.” Since Josephus has informed his readers that Titus had already sent for reinforcements, there is a squeeze of irony here: the general attributes his own anxiety to some of his men. “The Jews are tough,” Titus tells them, “and have no dread of death, but they’re also undisciplined, without any experience of organized warfare, more a mob than an army.…. Remember that you are fighting in armor against men whose bodies are totally unprotected. You’re on horseback; they’re on foot. You have a commander and they do not.” Titus is reported to have emphasized how important daily drills and training were to the Romans. He hardly needed to tell them what they knew already; but the redundancy gave Josephus a chance to remind his readers with what gallantry unprepared Jewish irregulars had gone into battle against an experienced military machine.

  “What wins wars isn’t the number of fighting men,” Titus continues, “even if they don’t lack fighting spirit. What counts most is courage, even with reduced numbers. The Jews are driven by daring, recklessness, desperation—emotions that flare up when things go well, but collapse at the slightest reverse, whereas we.… we’re controlled by courage, discipline and steady morale. They work wonders when things go well and make sure we hold out to the end, if they don’t. Remember: our cause is superior to theirs. They run all the risks of going to war for the sake of their liberty and their homeland. But for us nothing is more important than success. We must never allow anyone to get the impression that we, who’ve taken control of the whole world, are being frustrated by the Jews.”

  Titus is made to grace the enemy with patriotic amateurism and his own army with no nobler motive than professional vanity. Insisting that the Romans had every advantage, in equipment and training, Josephus lends heroic luster to the Jews who sallied out from Tarichaeae, even as he deplores their recklessness. They had to confront not only Titus and his cavalry but also two thousand archers, supplied by King Agrippa. While the archers gave covering fire, the mounted men charged in and set about slaughtering the Jewish militants. The whole plain was soon littered with corpses. As the Zealots retreated toward the city, Titus and his horsemen outflanked several groups and cut them down. The remainder bullocked their way back to the city gates. They found them barred. Tarichaeae’s original inhabitants had watched their worst fears realized. They screamed at the militants that they were bringing ruin on the city and prayed that, by keeping them out, they might still save their lives and property.

  Joseph ben Mattathias had discovered when he was in command that few comfortable citizens wanted a war which they were likely to lose. Despite his role as general, he shared their views. Why, then, had he been so keen not to be ousted from his invidious office when the delegation came from Jerusalem to depose him? He could have resigned; but he stayed, at the risk of his life. His likeliest motives were at once honorable and duplicitous; honorable because duplicitous: if he were dislodged, little hope of a compromise peace would remain. When Josephus tells how, at the gates of Tarichaeae, the residents came to blows with the extremists, he supplies one more proof of how the misfortunes of moderate and modest Judaean Jews, himself and his family not least, had been brought upon them by extremists.

  The imminent fate of Tarichaeae had very nearly been visited on Tiberias. Vespasian had been enraged by a certain Jeshua, who made off with some unguarded Roman horses. The general had shown clemency in the particular case of Joseph ben Mattathias, but it was rarely his first quality. Josephus now has Titus say what he himself feared, although no Roman is likely to have thought: “God has delivered the Jews into our hands! What are you waiting for? Take the victory that’s offered to you. Listen to the Jews yelling at each other even when they’ve just got away from us. The town’s ours if we move fast. Let’s hit them before they join ranks again and take the place all by ourselves before reinforcements arrive. That way, we—the happy few!—can say we’ve beaten the lot of them!” Josephus implies what it would be tactless, even years later, to spell out: the main incentive for Titus and his men to capture Tarichaeae before Vespasian arrived was less the glory than the spoils. If they won promptly, the booty would not have to be shared with the latecomers.

  In another vivid close-up, Josephus next portrays Titus leading from the front, in the style of Alexander on his stallion Bucephalas. Titus leaps onto his horse and heads his squadrons toward the lake. Plunging into the water, he rides at the town from the lake side. This daring maneuver is said to have paralyzed the defenders. Most abandoned the ramparts and fled toward the beach. They scrambled into the boats or swam out into the warm water. Jeshua the horse thief escaped into the countryside. Those who had nothing to lose in the city ran for their lives. Civilians who had never had anything to do with the decision to resist were cut down together with militiamen who had left it too late to get away. Josephus first describes an indiscriminate massacre and then, in the same paragraph, observes, “Finally, after having killed all the genuinely guilty men, Titus took pity on the inhabitants and stopped the slaughter.” In other words, the legionaries were sated with blood and broke off to help themselves to as many valuables as they could carry before the reinforcements arrived and grabbed a share. Meanwhile, Titus was quick to courier the good news back to his father. When Vespasian rode up, he ordered Tarichaeae to be sealed off. Anyone who came out was to be killed.

  The next morning, the veteran campaigner went down to the lake and ordered rafts to be prepared so that soldiers could go after the waterborne fugitives. In those days, there was no shortage of wood in the region. Josephus prolongs the suspense by—in cinematic terms—cutting away to the beauty of the surrounding countryside. Galilee was so fertile that its vines and fruit trees produced crops almost without interruption.i Like Homer with his parenthetical similes, Josephus sharpens the contrast between peace and war by harping on the quality of the region’s air and the abundance of its irrigation. One of the springs was held to be a branch of the Nile because it produced a species of
catfish (coracinus) similar to that found in the lake near Alexandria. Jewish fishermen regarded it as forbidden food, because it had no scales, but it could always be sold to the Arabs.

  Once enough rafts had been constructed, Vespasian set about encircling and killing the Jews out on the pretty waters. Their narrow boats had been designed, as Josephus puts it, for “piracy,” although fishing must have been their more regular use. The craft held only a few men and were too unstable to fight from. The Jews were helpless against legionaries able to throw their javelins and fire their arrows from the steady base of their rafts. By evening, the whole lake was stained with the blood of more than six thousand defenders. By a possibly deliberate symmetry, the casualties are said to be of exactly the same number as those of Cestius’s Twelfth Legion at Beth-Horon.

  In the days that followed, the stench of swollen and ruptured corpses filled the previously delicious air. Josephus says that even many of the victors were appalled by the effects of the carnage. Vespasian was not one of them. He set up a court-martial at Tarichaeae and proclaimed his intention to separate residents from troublemakers who had infiltrated the city. Some of his officers insisted that it was dangerous to leave any suspects alive. Vespasian agreed that all the Jews had to die, but fearing that wholesale slaughter might reignite a general insurrection, he appeared to proclaim a distinction between guerrillas and innocent citizens.j

  Josephus attributes what followed at Tarichaeae to the advice of some of Vespasian’s anonymous lieutenants, but would the general have listened to them if they had not proposed what he wanted to hear? There was deliberate ambiguity in Vespasian’s proclamation of an amnesty for those who had not already been condemned. Unsuspecting citizens were encouraged to leave their wrecked and reeking city, taking whatever they could carry, and proceed, by a single prescribed route, to Tiberias. Promised that they would be safe, they took the Roman at his word. In their innocence and despair, the survivors of Tarichaeae did not find it amiss that the road along which they trudged was lined with legionaries who made sure that no one dodged the column. Once they had reached Tiberias, the Tarichaeans were herded into the stadium. Vespasian is said to have ordered twelve hundred old and unfit refugees to be executed at once. The phrase “at once” disposes of the matter quickly, but such slaughter required hard, hot work; the victims had to be corralled and cut down, among the screams and prayers of those who were spared only that they might later be sold as slaves. Vespasian auctioned thousands of Jews, of whom only a small proportion can have been involved in active hostilities, to the slave-merchants. Out of politeness, he presented Agrippa II with a contingent of captives, who were in truth his own subjects. The king sold them on. The possessions the Tarichaeans had toted with them were distributed among the soldiers who had escorted them to their deaths. Booty and sex were the dividends of ancient war.k

  Six thousand strong young Jews were sent by Vespasian to Nero for forced labor on his proposed canal across the Isthmus of Corinth. Whatever ambition Joseph may have kindled or confirmed in Vespasian, the general maintained a posture of deference to his songster sovereign until Nero was safely dead. There were logistical reasons why the siege of Jerusalem was not Vespasian’s first objective, but the lack of haste suggests that he had not forgotten Corbulo’s fate. The siege of Jerusalem did not begin in earnest until shortly before Passover in 70 C.E.3 Meanwhile, Vespasian’s policy was to campaign unobtrusively and fruitfully enough, in terms of booty, to deserve the gratitude, and enhance the expectations, of his troops. The massacre in Tiberias was less “racist” than prudential: it gave the men some additional pocket money. Their general had to be able to rely on their support when it came to a fight for the purple. By this stage in Roman history, loyalty was a commodity to be bought and sold, not a feature of citizenship.

  The assault on Tarichaeae was followed by the siege of Gamala, another hilltop bastion, somewhat like Jotapata. Josephus reports that he had himself had the walls strengthened. As a result, they were “virtually impregnable.” Vespasian suffered heavy casualties while trying to reduce the place, but men of the Fifteenth Legion at last undermined the walls and broke in and slaughtered the civilian population. The citadel resisted longer, but a “heaven-sent storm” (thyella daimonios) blew in the defenders’ faces and helped the Roman javelins find their marks, thanks to Rome’s “alliance with God.” (Another such favorable wind would be said to help the Romans take Masada.) When all hope was gone, the defenders are said to have flung their wives and children, five thousand of them, down the sheer flanks of the hillside, into the abyss below. The remaining four thousand Gamalans, including infants, are reported to have been cut to pieces or thrown down the walls by the enraged Romans. Only two women survived, but Josephus does say that, during the early stages, “the more venturesome slipped away.” He had proposed the same course to the Jotapatans, who had scorned it.

  a Joseph straddled two worlds, as did countless Jews of talent or genius who administered the affairs of non-Jewish overlords. Such Jews included Samuel ibn Nagrela, the eleventh-century vizier of the Muslim king Badis in the triune city of Granada; “court Jews” such as Joseph Süss Oppenheimer in eighteenth-century Württemberg; Bismarck’s banker, Gerson Bleichröder; and Walther Rathenau, who, during the Great War of 1914–18, served the kaiser with technocratic and managerial flair (emulated by Albert Speer when he presided over the Nazi war effort from 1942 to 1945). As German foreign minister in 1922, Rathenau was murdered by those who claimed that “the Jews” had stabbed Germany in the back in 1918. In 1897, he had published an anonymous but “notorious” pamphlet, which, according to Susan Tegel (Jew Süss), called on German Jews to “cast off all vestiges of oriental customs and appearance.”

  b When Jacob died, his embalmed body was sent with an escort of Egyptian chariots and cavalry, and an honor party of dignitaries, to be buried in the cave of Machpelah in Canaan, “the land of his fathers.”

  c Saladin, the great Saracen leader who defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin, in 1187, and went on to capture Jerusalem, was—according to Anne-Marie Eddé’s 2011 biography—regularly compared to “Yusuf,” who features in the Quran as “the embodiment of wisdom and righteousness, and as a person who found success in Egypt.”

  d In the Second World War, after the Battle of El Alamein, the British general Bernard Montgomery invited his defeated adversary, the German Panzer general Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, to a desert dinner in his caravan. When this antique courtesy provoked indignation back in London, Winston Churchill defused it by remarking, “Poor von Thoma! I too have dined with Montgomery.” Churchill’s favorite form of sustenance, alcohol, was banned from the general’s table.

  e The Song of Solomon is the exception that highlights the rule.

  f Personal charm is a quality in survivors that can elude strict analysis. In Piotr Rawicz’s 1961 novel, Blood from the Sky (written originally in French and substantially based on his own experiences in the Holocaust), his blond alter ego, Boris, has the lineaments of a modern John of Gischala. He escapes death by conning a Gestapo officer into accepting that he really is the Ukrainian Gentile in whose vocabulary and culture he has dressed himself. Rawicz is almost alone in seeing that the Final Solution could carry elements of foul comedy. John Hersey’s 1950 novel, The Wall, about the Warsaw ghetto, features a clownish Jew who remains alive only by amusing his Gestapo captors with his sterotypical performance as a capering, cringing Yid, but Hersey could not match Rawicz’s hellish authenticity.

  g Conversely, on an occasion when Julius Caesar was faced with discontented soldiers, he addressed them as “quirites,” citizens, which in a single word demobilized them to the status of mere civilians. They promptly returned to military rectitude.

  h In a similar fashion, the regiment of Gurkhas, recruited in Nepal, are traditionally regarded, in the Gunga Din spirit, as British soldiers.

  i Géza Vermès suggests that Jesus of Nazareth gave evidence of his provincial origins when he cursed a
fig tree, in the environs of Jerusalem, because it failed to produce timely refreshment for him, as trees in his native Galilee did at the same season.

  j His tactics were of the kind that, two millennia later, Jean-Paul Sartre labeled “serialization.” By creating several categories of Jews, distinguished by whatever factitious criteria of age or origin, and seeming to grant some of them immunity, the authorities in Nazi-occupied Europe inhibited their victims from reacting in unison to what was, as it turned out, a common danger.

  k Any female, Judaean or otherwise, who had been a captive, for however short a time, was assumed to have been raped and had to be regarded as unsuitable for marriage, especially to a priest. One of the reasons why Eleazar urged the people in Masada to mass suicide in 73 was to safeguard the purity of the women. The same motive may have applied to the elders in Jotapata. True to his name, Josephus makes a point of denying that he ever used his authority to force himself on women. In this, he was at one with the few commanders, from Alexander the Great, to Scipio Africanus in the second century B.C.E., to Julian the Apostate, five hundred years later, who deplored the violation of women. Ammianus’s praise of the last for refraining from taking advantage of beautiful Persian females suggests that the emperor’s chastity was not infectious.

  X

  WAS IT EVIDENCE of Joseph’s treason to the Jews that, after the war, he confirmed his transfer from Judaea to Rome? Whom was he betraying? Upper-class men of foreign birth, such as the Seneca family, had no reluctance about reconditioning and relocating themselves as Roman citizens. When Saint Paul declared that he was both a Jew and a native of Tarsus (“no mean city”), he made a point, at the same time, of flaunting his status as a Roman citizen, which exempted him from flogging and, unless he was very unlucky, from summary execution.a For most people in Josephus’s time, nothing was more desirable than to be integrated into the imperial system. Spaniards, Gauls and Greeks converged on Rome. Even in later centuries, the tribes—Goths, Alans, Huns—who overran the empire were keener to have access to its benefits (and to the levers of power) than to destroy it: Theodoric the Goth was a more effective Caesar, in Ravenna, than the last official emperor, Romulus Augustulus, ever was in Rome.