by Howard Fast
The evening he came, Ragesh broke open a precious bottle of yellow semath wine, and with his daughter he sat in the tent of Ragesh and spoke to my brothers, myself, and a handful of the old men. All of us watched him—all but Eleazar, who had eyes only for his daughter; and she hid her face from the red-cheeked, red-bearded giant of a man.
A worldly person was Moses ben Daniel, such a Jew as I had never known before. Not alone the fact that he came with twelve black men who were his slaves and who adored him, big, smiling men out of Africa, soft-spoken and gentle, yet, as I learned, terrible in battle and deep in affection; not alone the fact that he wore silks such as I had never seen; not alone the fact that his curved sword was hilted with hundreds of tiny pearls: but the man himself was different from any Jews I had known. Unlike the Hellenists, the apostles of the Greek, he never for a moment could forget that he was a Jew—indeed more so than any of us; yet his culture was wider and deeper than the glib culture of any Hellenist I had met. Well read was he, and learned too, so that when Ragesh said, “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong.” he was able to answer in fine, old Hebrew, “The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt…
“As so many of us are strangers,” Moses ben Daniel said, “and we forget the old land and the old ways and the old soil—but a word like freedom travels on the high wind. Jews meet at the crossroads of the world.”
“And what do they say?”
“A little is whispered,” Moses ben Daniel smiled, crossing his legs and patting his fine linen trousers into even folds.
“It is hard to live in exile,” he nodded, “but it has certain compensations. A man’s heart is heavy and his home is an island—and then it comes from somewhere that a Maccabee is risen in Israel.”
“But what does Antiochus think?” Judas demanded.
“He knows the name of Judas ben Mattathias,” the merchant nodded. “I came with gifts that I should not come empty-handed, for though a stranger is welcome, he can make himself more welcome—is that not so?”
“Is a Jew a stranger in Judea?” Ragesh laughed, and Moses ben Daniel savored the odor of his wine, said the blessing softly, and sipped.
“It honors me.” he sighed. “What shall one who lives among the nokri weep for, the Judean sky, the Judean hills—or the wine? Now let me tell you—your warden, Apollonius, came to Antiochus, because, as he puts it, a few miserable Jews had risen in Judea. I had it from the best of sources, you may believe me. Do you know the King of Kings?” He looked from face to face.
“We are not honored,” Ragesh said. “We are simple peasants who till the land. The great ones, the wealthy ones, the noble ones among the Jews have shut themselves up in the Acra of Jerusalem, where the high priest Menelaus holds court.”
“Then let me tell you a little about this King of Kings who rules half the world—as he puts it. He is fat, loosely fat, and his lower lip hangs down and pouts constantly; but he is convinced of his own beauty. He serves many women and he does things to them I won’t speak of—he also loves animals. And he takes hemp. When he takes the hemp, he does terrible things to most of those about him, and even men like Apollonius are afraid of him. Yet Apollonius came to the palace, pleading for troops. ‘Against whom?’ the King said, and Apollonius answered, ‘The Jews, my Lord, to whom I abase myself.’ ‘Jews?’ asked Antiochus, ‘Jews? What are Jews?’ ‘A people who live in Palestine,’ Apollonius answered. ‘Their country is called Judea,’ he went on, knowing full well that Antiochus had a record of every shekel squeezed out of our land. ‘Jews—Judea?’ Antiochus said, looking at Apollonius in a way that made the warden sweat sufficiently. ‘Have you no men?’ ‘Seven thousand,’ Apollonius answered, and the King roared, ‘And with seven thousand men you annoy me with Jews! Mercenaries are dearer than wardens.’ Thus he said—and it is felt that even here in Ephraim, he’ll seek you out, he’ll seek you out.”
“Apollonius?”
Moses ben Daniel nodded somberly. “How does one serve a king? Poorly, my young friend,” he said to Judas. “Kings are not wise—they are very stupid indeed, and this one is not clever enough to know that Apollonius is as good a warden as he might find. He is only clever enough to do awful things to Apollonius if the Greek—he is all Greek, you know, or mostly, which is all these days—if the Greek does not do awful things to the rebels. He does not know that Apollonius was forced to spread himself thinly to hold down a thousand villages, and he does not particularly care. But Apollonius does care to remain as warden of Judea, and for that reason I think he will seek you out—and soon.”
There was a long silence then. I watched Judas, and I knew what no one else present knew how afraid he was. But his voice had all of its light and endearing charm as he said to the merchants,
“And to me, who has never been more than a dozen miles past the border of Judea, Damascus is a wonderland indeed. Tell me about it. Tell me about the King and how a king lives and rules…”
Yet that day, the germ was born, the new army, the new war, the new might that would give the word Jew new meaning, a different kind of meaning—that would embody the very word with connotations of love or hatred, admiration or disgust, considering upon whose tongue the word lay.
So it is to this day, when I sit here and write, calling to mind this and that of those days so long past, so that I may make truth and understanding for this time—this time when the Senate of mighty Rome sends a legate to seek out the Maccabee. But the Maccabee is dead, and I am an old Jew, like my father the Adon and those before him, an old Jew who troubles his memories. And how, I wonder, is one to sift memory, for what was, instead of the glow of what should have been? I walked not long ago through the streets that border the market place, and there was a singer, one of the real ones out of the tribe of Dan, and he sang the song of the five sons of Mattathias. I covered my face with my cloak and listened and I heard him say, “Now heed ye Eleazar, the splendor of battle; his name was Eleazar and the Lord was his weapon…”
But now, sitting here, groping back to then, I see Eleazar as he walked that night with the girl from Damascus, my brother without anger, without malice, going so softly, going so patiently, more the Jew than any of us. I see Judas facing Ragesh that same night, and Ragesh said, “If we go south to the Negeb—”
“The Negeb is broad enough,” Judas answered. “I would stay here where Apollonius can find us, and we will greet him.”
“Without an army?”
“We’ll make an army,” Judas said, and Ragesh looked at me. “The people will be the army, and my brothers and I will train them.” It was a dream, but there was no denying him. We saw Eleazar then with the girl, walking through the moonlight, and Ragesh said, with almost humble amazement, “And ye are the sons of Mattathias…”
***
We fought our first great battle—great by the tiny skirmishes of the past, yet little enough to what followed—six weeks after the merchant of Damascus appeared in Ephraim, and a week after Eleazar took his daughter as a bride and the twelve black men as dowry. Faithful enough they were to him, to the end; they became Jews, lived as Jews and died as Jews. In those six weeks, we gathered together twelve hundred men under the banner of the Maccabee.
Never had there been a thing like this in Israel before—or in any land, for these men were not mercenaries nor were they wild barbarians, in whom war and life are so intermixed that the one cannot be entangled from the other. No, these were simple farmers, gentle scholars whose devotion had been to the Law, the covenant, and the scrolls of our past. Some, indeed, knew well enough the use of our small, laminated bows and had shot partridges and rabbits with them, but even those had no experience with spears or swords; and many there were like the pupils of the saintly Rabbi Lazarus ben Simon who had a school at Mi
zpah, and who taught a creed of love that extended itself to the smallest insect, so that his disciples walked barefoot with their eyes upon the ground, that they might not crush the lowliest of God’s creatures. These same men now stood in ranks of the twenties, while Ragesh, who had been among the Parthians—who are the best archers in the world—taught them to case the slim Jewish barbs, flight after flight, until a veritable rain of them sought out every crevice in the enemy’s ranks.
Other things too, we learned, I and my brothers as well as the men of the little army that was making in Marah. From the Ethiopians, the black men who had come with the merchant of Damascus, we learned to turn spears into lances, to cast them, to guide them with bits of thin leather, so that they rode the wind. From Judas, we learned to use the long sword of the Syrian, for the sword came to him like a part of his fist, another arm. Moses ben Daniel left his daughter with us and traveled on to Alexandria, returning a month later with one hundred Jewish youths, volunteers from the Alexandrian community, and a gift of ten talents of gold from the great synagogue. Among the volunteers were six engineers, two of whom had lived among the Romans and taught us to make their catapults. Well do I remember how they marched into Ephraim, these strangers from far-off Egypt, laden with gifts and dressed in beautiful garments that made our peasant homespun seem simple indeed. They brought a gift for the Maccabee: a banner of blue silk, and upon it the star of David, and sewn beneath the star: Judas Maccabeus. Who resists tyrants obeys God. And I remember too how they crowded forward to look at Judas—who had already become a legend, and the wonder and surprise of the volunteers when they discovered that Judas was as young as most of them and younger than some.
Yet it was not all easy and not all smooth. We never had food enough in Ephraim, and always the population grew as Apollonius vented his wrath on Judea. Wherever there were Greeks or Greek rule, Jews suffered, and people came to Ephraim from as far off as Galilee and Geshur, footsore, starving often enough, a pitiful trickle of refugees who all repeated the same tale of terror, rape, and murder. It was my task and John’s to care for them. I sat in judgment, from early in the morning until late at night—and it was not judgment such as an Ethnarch deals out today—and the bickering and the squabbling never ceased. The elders resented my youth; the young ones challenged it—and from that came what they called the iron hand of Simon ben Mattathias.
How often I envied my brothers, Eleazar and Jonathan and Judas, whose work was the comparative simplicity of war! Yet I had my share of war too, as you will see. Once, I shook it off and went to watch Ruben and Eleazar work at an open forge they had set up against the hillside—iron and hammer and fire and these two, the strongest men in Judea, beating the insensate metal and muttering all the while that ancient blessing, as old as Cain, who first worked metal. In the shower of sparks, they greeted me, and I saw that they were happy, Ruben, the wild survivor of those sons of Esau, and Eleazar who had no doubts, no fears, no hatred even, but only a love of all things and a reverence for Judas and myself that was almost worship. It was not his to doubt, it was his to battle and train others to battle; and he said to me, over the heads of the curious crowd that can always be found at any forge—children and adults too, and women, there as much for these two men as for the fire, and graybeards to criticize and the black Ethiopians to admire and applaud—“Now, Simon, these black men are making us spears to throw”—holding up a red-hot blade—“but not for me!”
“What for you, Eleazar?” someone demanded.
He plunged the blade into a pot of water that boiled and sent off clouds of steam, and then he took from behind him a huge hammer. “This is for me—a hammer.”
They felt it, a mighty lump of iron, with a handle of twelve iron rods, beaten together and bound. The women tried to raise it, and laughed as it bent them over. The children touched it, and Eleazar watched and glowed with pride. He picked it up and swung it around his head, letting it go and spinning it on its leather strap—until the crowd broke away, laughing with apprehension mixed with delight. Ruben was twice his age and more, but they were alike in the simple wonder with which they approached weapons’ iron, their delight at the submissiveness of metal to them and what came forth from their hands. Thus it was with my brother, my brother Eleazar…
There came to me a man and wife out of the town of Carmel in the far South, and the man, Adam ben Lazar, tall and dark and hawklike and unbending, as so many of those who live close to the Bedouins are, said to me, “And thou art the Maccabee?”
“Not the Maccabee, who is my brother Judas. Are you new in Marah that you don’t know Simon ben Mattathias?”
“I am new, and I come to be judged by a child.” But his wife, who was round and lovely, yet worn and terrible with grief, said nothing.
“And yet I judge,” I said. “If you want other judgment, go to the Greeks and find it.”
“You are bitter the way the Adon your father was bitter, Simon ben Mattathias.”
“What I am I am.”
“Like him,” his wife cried suddenly, pointing to her husband. “The men in Israel were emptied and hatred was poured in. I want him no more, so separate us and make us strangers to each other.”
“Why?” I asked the woman.
“Shall I tell you, when every word is wiped in blood?”
“Tell me or don’t tell me,” I said, “for I make no marriages and break none. Go to the Rabbis or the Kohanim for that, to the old ones, not to me.”
“Will the old ones understand?” the man demanded coldly. “Listen, Simon, and then send me where you will, to hell or to the arms of your brother, the Maccabee.”
“We are married twelve years,” the woman said, “and we had a daughter and three sons,” and she said it in almost those singsong tones of the teller of tales in the market place. “Bright they were, and round and beautiful and a blessing in my heart and my house and in the eyes of God. Then the warden, whose name was Lampos, set up his Greek altar in the market place and told the people to come and bend their knees and burn incense. But he”—whirling on her husband and pointing an accusing finger at him—“he would not bend his knee, and the Greek smiled with pleasure—”
“With pleasure,” Adam ben Lazar nodded, wooden-faced. “He was the right man for the South. For if there are hard men in Judea, you will find harder if you travel South.”
“So he slew my little girl,” she said, “and he hung her body on the rafters over our door, so that the blood dripped on our doorstep, and all day and all night, the mercenaries sat there, drinking and eating and watching, so that we should not cut down her body and give her burial—”
Without tears she told this. I judged in the open, sitting on a rock, and sometimes the people listened. Now they listened, and more and more came, and as she told her tale, the people were packed around, shoulder to shoulder.
“This for seven days, and when the Sabbath came, with his own hands this Lampos cut the throat of my little boy and hung the body up beside the girl, the girl who was already foul with corruption and smell. Yet we must live there. All around the house stood the mercenaries, day and night, with their spears linked, so that a mouse could not crawl through. Then, on the third Sabbath, Apollonius came to consult with his warden, and it was great sport—” Her voice dried up; she did not cry or appear to be moved, but her voice dried up.
“It was great sport and the Greeks love sport,” her husband said, nodding. “With his own hands, Apollonius cut the throat of the third child, for he pointed out to us that a people who could not bend a knee, to God or man, were an abomination on the face of the earth. It was merciful to kill the young, he said, so that mankind could look forward to a time when it would be rid of Jews forever, and then all the world would be sweet with laughter.”
“And the next week, they slew our first-born and hung the body beside the others,” the woman added in her terrible singsong tones. “And a
ll in a row, the four bodies hanged, and the birds came to feed upon them; but we could not cut them down, we could not cut them down, and the flesh that came out of my womb rotted away. So I hate him, my husband, even as I hate the nokri, for his pride was too much and it destroyed everything I loved.”
She did not weep, but an anguished sigh came from the people listening.
“His pride was too much,” she said, “his pride was too much.”
There was silence then for what seemed to be a long while, a silence broken only by the weeping of those among the people who did not hate too much to weep. Yet I could not judge and I said so, motioning to Ragesh who stood there, listening. “Come and judge,” I said to him. “You are a man of years and a Rabbi.” But Ragesh shook his head, and like two lost and eternally tormented souls, the man and his wife stood in the circle of the people—until Judas pushed through them and stood before her, such sorrow and love on his young and beautiful face as I have not seen before or since on the countenance of any human being. All she had said of death and the making of death seemed to wither away in the face of this man who was the very embodiment of life, and he took her two hands in his and pressed his lips to them.
“Weep,” he said softly, “weep, my mother, weep.”
She shook her head.
“Weep, for I love you.”
And still she shook her head hopelessly and damned. “Weep, because you lost four children and gained a hundred. Am I not your child and your lover—then weep for me, weep for me or the pain of your children will lie on my heart and destroy me. Weep for me and the blood on my hands. I am proud too, and I wear my pride like a rock around my neck.”