A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  Jerusalem was the capital of a province that never made convincing patriotic claims on its inhabitants. When the Jews of Scythopolis sided, disastrously, with their Gentile neighbors, they were defending no bigger a territory than their own city and their own property and no grander a principle than their right to hold on to their local independence. They disdained wider allegiance.b Judaism might make absolute demands, but religion had no territorial boundaries. Jewish nationalism was an exaggerated defense of religious exclusivity. Judaea was not a Jewish state; it was a state with many Jews in it.

  Throughout his exiled life, Josephus remained a polemic pamphleteer in defense of Judaism. At the same time, he made no secret of abiding hostility to those belligerent Jews whom he rated as no better than usurping gangsters.c Josephus’s denunciation of what others call “freedom fighters” was consistent with his view that they had provoked the Romans to commit the atrocities he had observed. The Zealots’ endurance may have been heroic; it was certainly folly. As Joseph saw it, fanaticism triumphed in Jerusalem, not only over common sense but also over decency. The extremists exulted in the ruin of all the Jews who failed to be in their camp; they killed any who tried to escape it. Like Saturn, revolutions regularly consume their own children; but the Zealots were as savage in consuming their elders as they were in disputing leadership among themselves. Josephus refused to see the war as inevitable, or holy. In his view, if individual men, Jews and Romans, had behaved differently, Jerusalem need never have been destroyed.

  For a full two years after the fall of Jotapata, there was a standoff inside the walls of Jerusalem between the High Priest Ananus and his supporters and the Zealots who had installed themselves in different fortified sections of the city. The factions barred access even to kindred militants. All of them hated the elders; they also distrusted, and often murdered, each other. Despite his eminence, Ananus was never quite strong enough to arrest John of Gischala and the other radicals; nor could they unite to dispose of him. The internal stasis (the Thucydidean term for civil conflict or class war, frequently used by Josephus) continued until John resorted to accusing Ananus of being about to sell the city to the Romans. Two of the Zealots, Eleazar and Zachariah, both from priestly families, then wrote to the Idumaean tribes in the south of Palestine, urging them to save the day by bringing their forces to Jerusalem.

  Ananus still had enough support to be able to close the gates of the city against the “twenty thousand” tribesmen who rode up in answer to the Zealots’ call. It would be pretty to suppose that they came only because the Temple and the city were in danger of being surrendered to the Gentiles, but would they have traveled north in such numbers without the promise of a share in the spoils of revolution against the old hierarchy? Standing on a high tower, alongside Ananus, a revered elder priest called Jeshua made an appeal to the Idumaeans massed under the walls. His reported words are surely more elegantly phrased than what was actually said, but the gist of his speech rings true. Ananus may have been too old or too shaken to speak out.

  Jeshua must have had the aura and the volume to procure a respectful hearing. “Here you are,” he told the Idumaeans, “ready to take sides against us with men whose vices have no limit. You’ve answered their call more promptly than if you had been begged to repel a foreign invasion. If I thought that you were just like the Zealots, I might not find your enthusiasm absurd. But you’re not. Look at them up close and each of them deserves a thousand deaths.…. They’re nothing but brigands who have desecrated holy ground.…. There they are now, shamelessly drunk, pigging themselves on the plunder of people they’ve murdered. And then look at you, your vast army, the sparkling spectacle of your strength. Anyone would think you’d come to help us as allies against a foreign foe. It’s a scandal to see a great people like yourselves up in arms to help a band of outright criminals.…. I can hear some of you calling, ‘What about the Romans?’ and ‘Treason’ and claiming that you’re here to liberate our capital city before we sell it. That charge is a lie.” Jeshua denied, at length, that the hierarchy had any intention of negotiating with the Romans. He wished, loudly, that the Idumaeans had come to purge Jerusalem of the murderers and wreckers inside the city. He would then have been glad to welcome them. However plausible, his words were also patronizing: the hierarchy clearly wanted the Idumaeans to go back where they came from. The unmistakable, and unforgivable, implication was that the tribesmen might be Jews of a kind, but they had no place in the city except at the service of the Sanhedrin.

  One of the Idumaean generals, Simon son of Cathla, replied by accusing Jeshua of hypocrisy. He and his men would stay where they were in order to defend “the house of God” against the enemy outside and the traitors within. The Idumaeans were incensed that the Zealots had failed to find a way of getting them into the city. Once in arms, they expected some action and, no doubt, some reward. They stayed where they were, out in the open. The gates remained barred.

  That night a tremendous storm broke over Jerusalem, with raging wind, torrential rain, sheet lightning and thunder. Josephus says that the Idumaeans at first took the tempest as a sign of God’s displeasure at their coming in arms against the city. Ananus and his friends were equally sure that He had come out on their side. The tribesmen huddled together under their long shields, in a makeshift testudo. As a result, they suffered less from the weather than Ananus supposed. Josephus says that the High Priest had kept the walls fully manned. In the middle of the night, however, some of the key sentries, at the approaches to the Temple, fell asleep. The Zealots were able to get hold of saws from the Temple workshops and sever the beams that secured the gates. No one heard anything because of the noise of the storm. The Idumaeans poured into the city.

  Angry with Ananus and Jeshua, they immediately allied themselves with the extremists. Within a short time, they were proving their “barbarous and bloodthirsty” credentials by attacking the good citizens, whose young men tried in vain to defend them. Josephus says that eighty-five hundred civilians died in the ensuing massacre. The outer courtyard of the Temple was deluged with blood. Ananus and his colleagues were murdered by men who then stood on their bodies before throwing them to be “devoured by dogs and wild beasts.” Josephus concludes that the city was, from that moment, beyond salvation.

  The successful revolutionaries conducted a prolonged and brutal purge in which twelve thousand “young nobles” are said to have been killed. They also mounted show trials of alleged traitors. One of their choice victims was a distinguished man also called Zachariah, who not only had what Josephus calls “a burning hatred of wrong and a love of freedom” but was rich and important enough to question their hegemony. Having accused him, without evidence, of being in touch with Vespasian, they convoked seventy men in high public positions to form a jury to judge—or, rather, to condemn—him.

  Zachariah defended himself with such spirit, and denounced the Zealots with such accuracy, that his accusers became the accused.d Seeing that they were about to lose the case, the Zealots curtailed his trial and called for the seventy notables to bring in their verdict, “keen to discover whether they were ready to risk their own lives for the sake of justice.” When, despite intimidation, the seventy brought in a unanimous verdict of “not guilty,” two of the Zealots murdered Zachariah, in the middle of the Temple (yet another pollution of the sacred site) and jeered over his dead body “Now you’ve got our verdict too, and your trials are over!”

  Josephus says that the Zealots drove off the seventy recusant jurors with the flat of their swords, failing to kill them only because they thought it better to humiliate them in front of everyone. The Idumaeans could not hide their revulsion. A renegade Zealot then spelled out to them how they had been duped into conniving at the ruin of Ananus and his people, none of whom had had any treasonous contact with the Romans. The best thing would be for them now to go home. The Idumaeans first broke open the jails and sprang some two thousand prisoners, who immediately fled the city to join Simon ben Gioras�
��s bandit rebels in the Judaean hills, where they commanded the approaches to Jerusalem. In the spring of 69, Simon was strong enough to move back into the city and challenge the hegemony of John of Gischala.

  After most of the Idumaeans went home, the mass of the population hoped that the worst of the terror was over, but Josephus says that the Zealots, less ashamed than relieved by the departure of their belatedly squeamish allies, became even more murderous. The Idumaeans who did remain in the city later grew disillusioned with the extremists and, in the spring of 70, were able to surrender, on fairly lenient terms, before the final debacle. Immediately, however, there was another purge, in which the only victims named were a certain Gurion, said to be “democratic” and devoted to liberty “if ever a Jew was,” and Niger, from Peraea, who had been outstanding in an early battle at Ascalon, soon after the expulsion of Cestius Gallus.

  Niger’s earlier heroism did nothing to save him from the remorseless Zealots. As they paraded him through Jerusalem, he protested furiously and drew attention to his battle scars (in this he resembled his namesake, the outspoken “black” Cleitus, who saved Alexander the Great’s life at the battle of the Granicus and was later killed by Alexander in a drunken rage). As soon as the Zealots dragged Niger through the gates of Jerusalem, he realized that they meant to kill him and leave his corpse for the dogs to eat. He pleaded with them to allow his body to be buried. When they denied him even that, he cursed them and called the vengeance of Rome down on their heads, as well as famine, pestilence and slaughter. He even had time, Josephus says, to add civil war to the misfortunes he wished on his murderers.

  After Niger’s death, the terror continued in the city. As in the emblematic case of stasis, on the island of Corcyra, in 427 B.C.E., during the prelude to the Peloponnesian War, even those who did not take sides were accused of arrogance, especially if they had enviable property. Jesus of Nazareth was not alone in saying that people were either with him or against him. Death was the sole penalty for giving offense to the Zealots. Only men without pedigree or possessions were immune.e

  Josephus’s narrative now cuts back to the Roman camp. Informed of the stasis in Jerusalem, his generals urged Vespasian to march directly on the city while the population was distracted by civil war. The commander-in-chief argued against undue vigor; it would unite the enemy. It was better to leave them to tear themselves apart and wait for the garrison to be weakened by the growing number of desertions. As long as Nero remained on the throne, Jerusalem could be left to fester. The Zealots and their henchmen killed so many people that bodies accumulated in the streets or were thrown over the walls to rot in the open. Kinsmen who tried to bury their dead were themselves threatened with death. Josephus repeats that there was a time-honored prophecy that the city would be captured and the Holy Temple burned, if the citizens fought each other and if Jews themselves polluted the house of God.

  Whether or not he had taken Joseph ben Mattathias’s dream prediction to heart, Vespasian’s tactics were sound, and in character. It would be a signal achievement to capture Jerusalem, but it had to be at the right moment. There were political as well as tactical reasons to be in no hurry. Although few of his officers could be allowed to guess it, Vespasian was fighting a campaign on two fronts. He had to keep his men in good humor for an infinitely bigger prize than Judaea Capta. His greatest ambition was to capture Rome.

  Nero’s popularity had survived the great fire of Rome in 64, thanks to the prompt measures he took for urban relief, and it had not been dented, except among the upper class, by the bloodthirsty repression of the aristocratic Pisonian conspiracy of 65 C.E. If the people never ceased to be amused by his panache, Nero’s unmanly indifference to threats on the empire’s borders lost him the respect of the military commanders on whom his tenure depended. His treacherous treatment of Corbulo clinched the conviction of provincial governors and generals that they had no more to fear from challenging him than from succeeding in his cause. Despite the contempt of the senatorial establishment, Nero might not have been driven to (assisted) suicide if he had shown more spirit. In the event, rumors that Vindex, in Gaul, and Galba, in Spain, were preparing to unseat him were enough to unnerve the last of the Julio-Claudian line of emperors.

  In the course of the second year of the Judaean campaign, young Titus was literally blooded. By the beginning of 69 C.E., he could be entrusted with command of the siege of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, his father had gone to rally support in Alexandria for his imperial ambitions. Thanks to Tiberius Julius Alexander, the prefect of Egypt, Vespasian received solid enough military backing to be able to sail for Italy after two of his rivals had been eliminated in, as it were, the semifinals. The noblest, and least remembered, was Otho, the second of the four emperors (and the onetime husband of Nero’s beautiful wife and Joseph ben Mattathias’s benefactor Poppaea Sabina). When the pretender Vitellius marched against him, Otho chose to kill himself, although his chances of remaining emperor were not negligible. Unlike more successful candidates down the ages, Otho did not care to have it on his conscience that he had led Romans to kill Romans. Vespasian was not so squeamish. By defeating Vitellius in the final, he made Joseph ben Mattathias’s predictive dream come true. His lease on the throne would last ten years, and he would die of natural causes.

  The fate of the third emperor of the year 69, Vitellius, at the hands of Vespasian’s soldiers (some of whom might have been at Jotapata), illustrates what might well have happened to Joseph ben Mattathias: Vitellius was dragged from where he was hiding, paraded naked through the streets of Rome, pelted with abuse and missiles, his head pulled back, a drawn sword under his chin, and was then thrown down the Gemonian steps toward the Tiber, beaten to death and then decapitated.f

  Josephus recounts the horrors of the war in Judaea in a cool manner until he comes to the siege of Jerusalem itself. Having described how the whole of Vespasian and Titus’s large force was massed around the city, he apostrophizes the “unhappy city” in a style that, even in its Greek recension, echoes Jeremiah. To those like Yigael Yadin, the prophet himself must have seemed another “bad Jew” when he advocated accepting that Jews should make a life elsewhere if the odds were irresistibly stacked against them. Contrary to that view, the modern Israeli Sabra Yehoshafat Harkabi held that the Jewish rebels of 67 should have honored Jeremiah’s advice. Thomas Idinopulos counters with the view that the Jews of Jeremiah’s day were “not confronted by the actual danger of national extinction through cultural dissolution.”1 Can it really be claimed that first-century Israel had no due way of reacting to a cultural threat except by risking and—as it turned out—procuring the destruction of Jerusalem? If there had been an effective Jeremiah in the city at the time when Vespasian was advancing on it, the consequences would have been infinitely less ruinous. Idinopulos insists that the Great Revolt of 66–73 “preserved a sense of Jewish national uniqueness.… a creative and lasting contribution to Jewish history.”g

  Whatever tears Joseph ben Mattathias shed as he looked back, he could not, during the siege itself, afford to manifest too much sympathy for his fellow countrymen, even though he had many friends and relatives, including his brother and his old mother, inside the walls. It is some testimony to his credibility that he mentions in The Jewish War that his mother never forgave him for his defection to the Romans. Does the third-person narrative account for his dispassionate candor? The narrator was not quite identical with the person he describes, even when it was himself.

  Joseph’s survival has to have depended on the intelligence he provided. Speaking Aramaic, the language of the natives, he was well-placed to convince the Romans that, until the end, he was the likeliest negotiator with those inside the city. He begged the Jewish leaders repeatedly to curtail the sufferings of the innocent.h He seems also to have been authorized to promise leniency to members of his own class who came over to the Romans. Several did in the last days of the siege, among them Ananus ben Bagadatus, who had earlier supervised the execution of would-be
deserters. He was regarded with distaste by Titus, but was allowed to retire “honorably” to Gophna (the modern Jifna), at the base of the Samaritan hills.

  Martin Goodman argues that the landlord class, which Josephus regularly distinguishes from the Zealots and “brigands,” was more deeply implicated in the rebellion than it suited him to concede after the event.2 In his view, it was “mendacious” to claim that those who fought on were all low-life scoundrels whose wickedness prevented them from admitting the futility of the struggle. Josephus’s portrayal of the Zealots, in the winter of 68–69 “running riot in the city, dressed as women while they murdered and looted” is said, by Goodman, to be “ancient invective at its most blatant.” Must he be right? It is hard to believe that the class war that undoubtedly took place in Jerusalem, from the earliest months of the war, did not lead to the confusion of theft and murder with the hazards and malice of revolutionary “justice.” As for dressing as women, might this not have secured them immunity from search or suspicion as it has terrorists wearing burkas in modern circumstances?

  Josephus denies that the Romans were superior in anything but military efficiency and resources. He had seen their machine in action; he witnessed pillage, rape, killing, the auction of captives. His memories were the reward and the cost of being a witness. It would have been suicidal openly to question the right of Vespasian to crush the rebellion, but his portraits of unsavory or cynical Roman officials, especially when “Greek,” were as scathing as those of the Zealots who had usurped power inside the city. What witness of the events at Tarichaeae (where the Romans had tortured captives, at length, in front of those on the city walls) can be blamed for begging the Jewish commanders to allow noncombatants to quit Jerusalem? Joseph’s tears at the heartlessness of the Zealot leaders were those of a sincere crocodile: he wept for a fate he now stood every chance of escaping. Yet he returned again and again to the walls of Jerusalem and called on the defenders to come to terms while they had the chance. He was literally in no-man’s-land; there had, until then, never been a Jew quite like him.