by Howard Fast
I sat silent and waited. By now, I knew enough of Jews to doubt my ability to make any appropriate comment. What pleases others offends them, and what offends others pleases them. So long as I am in Judea, I am Rome; and Rome is always interested, always curious, always inquiring. This woman needed to talk and wanted to talk, and since there was some curious satisfaction in talking to a Roman, I lay back on the couch, watching her and listening.
“He is my husband, Lentulus Silanus, and there is no man like him in all of Israel today—is that strange? Or is this so tiny a land, so unimportant and uncivilized that what I say amuses you? I know—many things amuse you, or perhaps they don’t, and part of the legate’s uniform is that cynical, supercilious smile of yours. I’ve been watching it. Or it may be that I do you an injustice and you are genuinely amused at these queer and uncouth Jews. Why are you here? Why did they send you? Don’t bother to answer a garrulous old woman, and in any case I was talking about Simon Maccabeus. He had four brothers, you know, so there were five we call the Maccabeans, but they are dead now, and something is dead inside of him. All he could love, all he ever knew how to love were those brothers of his—and one whose name was Judas. It was after Judas died that he married me. Not because he loved me. Oh, I grew up in Modin with him, and he had seen me every day since I was a child—but he couldn’t love me, not any woman, not even one whose name was Ruth and who was the most beautiful that ever walked in Modin. But I bore you with this gossip, for it is of him you would hear and not of me.”
“Surely of you,” I ventured, “for you are a part of him.”
“Now those are pretty words indeed,” she said, smiling for the first time, “but hardly true, Lentulus Silanus. No one is a part of the Maccabee—no woman that ever lived. He is a lonely and sorrowful man, and thus it has ever been, and the sorrow is for the life he lost, the life that all other men have but was never for the Maccabeans. Think, Roman, of what it is to live without a soul, without yourself, but only for something outside of you. Consider these five brothers—and go through Jerusalem and Judea and ask of them, and you will find no word against them, no sin to stain them—only that they were without peer and without reproach—”
She stopped suddenly, looking out over the lovely, moonlit valley, and then said:
“But at what cost! What a price they paid!”
“Yet they were victorious.”
She turned those deep, brooding dark eyes on me, and there was in them a trace of anger, but mixed with and submerged to such a pool of regret, sorrow, and hopelessness as I have never seen in the eyes of another. Then it passed and only the sorrow remained.
“They were victorious,” she nodded. “By all means, Roman, they were victorious. For thirty years my husband knew only warfare and death. What do you fight for, Roman? For land? For loot? For women? Yet you want me to explain to you a man who fought for the holy covenant between God and mankind, which says only that each human being should walk erect and clean in freedom—”
I watched her, knowing there was nothing to say, trying to understand the amazing way of these folk, who, rejecting all that is worthy and substantial, make an altar of nothingness.
“—without glory. Where was the glory for Simon ben Mattathias? For his brothers—yes. For the least of his brothers. Speak a word against Judas, Lentulus Silanus, and for all the sacred laws of hospitality, he will strike you down with his own hand. Or Jonathan, or John, or Eleazar. For in his love for Judas, there was something else that tore out his heart—I don’t understand it—but it tore at him always, always, and only them could he love, he who is like no other man in all the world…”
Rigid, I lay, watching the tears stream down her cheeks, and I was almost grateful when she rose, excused herself hurriedly, and left me.
After that, for three weeks, I saw nothing of the Ethnarch and almost nothing of his wife. During that time, I employed myself with the taking of notes and a study of the land and its people. Three trips I made under the acid guidance of Aaron ben Levi, one to the Dead Sea, a deep and caustic pit of motionless water that might have been created by demons for demons, one to the beautiful mountains of Ephraim, and one to the South. On two of these trips I was accompanied by the boy Judas, an amiable and handsome son of the Maccabee.
Also, I attended a session of the Great Assembly of Elders, but I do not think it would be profitable to include the tedious and meticulous legal-religious discussions I heard. During these journeys, I stayed at numerous villages and saw much of the life of the Jews as they live from day to day; the more difficult then for me to explain to you, the noble Senate, how without being able to detail a specific act of antagonism I came to hate them so—and came to accept, if not to fully understand, how and why they are hated by other people.
At the end of this period, Simon suddenly appeared at dinner, offering no explanation of the weeks during which he had avoided me. In that time, he gave the impression of having aged, of having gone through some trying ordeal, but he said nothing of it until after the meal, until he had recited the prayer with which all meals end, and dipped his hands ceremoniously into a bowl of water. Then he invited me to sit on the balcony and chat with him—which I was most pleased and eager to do, since I now considered the time ripe to enter into political discussions concerning the future of both our countries. I must also admit that the personality of the man exercised a certain spell over me. The necessity I had built in myself to despise him always melted in his presence—yet always returned afterwards.
When we were on the balcony, lounging on the deep couch with the clear, star-sprinkled Judean sky overhead, he made a curious observation, saying:
“The guilt I must bear to live in this palace is compensated only by this ledge. Here, somehow, I find a degree of peace. Is that strange, Lentulus Silanus?”
“Strange? I think your guilt is stranger.”
“How so? Is it a good thing for a man to exalt himself over others and build him a palace?”
“If he is the Maccabee.”
Simon shook his head. “Least so, if he is the Maccabee. Yet let that rest. You stay in Judea—do you like our land?”
“It is not a question of liking or disliking the land. I shall have to make a comprehensive report to the Senate concerning Judea, and how shall I do so if I come one day and go the next? Also, they will ask me, what of the Maccabee?”
“And what will you answer?” Simon smiled.
“I don’t know. I see so little of you. I felt you deliberately avoided me these past weeks.”
“No more you than anyone else,” Simon said. “I was troubled by the past, so I went to my memories to write them down and find understanding there.”
“And did you?”
The old man regarded me thoughtfully, his pale eyes probing like knives, but with curiosity and not with anger and resentment, and once again I had that strange and disturbing sensation of unexpressed and pitying superiority woven through with humility, as if I were a dog and he not my master but of the same race as my master. Then it was gone, and he shook his head.
“You have many memories,” I said.
“Too many. But that’s the price of living, isn’t it?”
“Yes and no,” I shrugged. “In Rome we would not consider it in that fashion. Pleasure is a good thing to remember, and love, too, I suppose, and a job of work well done or a mission accomplished—and, above all those, strength, power.”
“From all I have heard,” he mused, “Rome is very strong.”
“The queen of all nations—and master of half the world.”
“Soon to be master of the rest?” the Ethnarch asked softly.
“That is not for me to decide. I am a legate, a courier between nations, one of the many men who quietly and—I trust—uncomplainingly do the work of the Republic and contribute in some small measure to the extension of civili
zation and peace.”
“Even as the Greeks did before you,” the Ethnarch reflected.
“I trust better. But tell me, Simon, what you wrote.”
“The story of my brothers.”
“One of my lasting regrets,” I said, “is that I was never able to know them. They were great men.”
“How do you know?” Simon asked.
“Can one spend a month in Judea and not know?”
He smiled, “And already, Roman, you are learning a Jewish turn of phrase. Yet I don’t think one should waste time regretting the dead. Life belongs to the living.”
“Which is strange coming from you. I know of no people so obsessed by their past as you Jews.”
“Because our covenant is of the past. We were slaves once in Egypt. Can we forget that?”
“I don’t imagine you want to forget. But about what you wrote, Simon, could I read it?”
“If you read the Aramaic,” he answered carelessly.
“You set no store by it?”
“None,” he shrugged. “What I wanted to do, I could not do, and when I was finished it seemed to me that what I put down was the rheumy searching of an old man for his dead and lost youth. If you wish to read it, however, you are welcome to. I wrote it for others more than for myself.”
We talked on of one thing and another, and then, before he left me for the night, he brought me the long scroll of parchment upon which he had set down the story of his glorious brothers. That night, I didn’t sleep, but lay awake, the smoking lamp drawn close, reading what this lonely and masterful Jew had written.
This manuscript I enclose with my report, for I consider that better than any personal observations of mine, it probes the Jewish mind and what they so confidently term their Jewish soul, or n’shamah, as they have it—the spirit that abides within them and joins them with the rest of life. This is the original manuscript which Simon, the Maccabee, gave to me, saying, “If you wish, Lentulus Silanus, you may have it—if it will mean anything to your Senate. It is of no value, and I set no worth upon it.”
There, however, I consider him wrong, and I judge it well worth the trouble of the noble senators to have this rendered into Latin by competent translators, that it may be perused by everyone who has anything to do with Judea or Jews. Not only does it deal with military tactics in detail, but it specifies those subjective elements which make these people so dangerous, so deceitful, and so consistent a menace to Western ideals and civilization.
Even the flamboyant and emotional style of presentation is worth remarking, for it is an indication of many qualities in this seemingly cold and hard man whom they call Simon of the iron hand. Also contained in it are many clues to the religious ritual of the Jews.
I did not see the Ethnarch on the following day, although I spent some time with his wife, but the day after that, he and I were alone at the morning meal, a simple repast of fruit, bread and wine, which he usually took on the terrace. He did not refer to the manuscript, but instead directed a series of questions at me, concerning Rome, its size, its wealth, the nature and condition of its armies, its navies—and particularly, the military tactics which brought about the downfall of Hannibal and his Carthaginians. His questions were extremely clever, pointed, and always focused on the fact that Hannibal had maintained his Carthaginian army in Italy for sixteen years against all Roman pressure.
“What I cannot comprehend,” he said thoughtfully, “is the position and condition of the people of your land—the Italians.”
“Why?” I asked him. “The people are a rabble of earth-bound, ignorant slaves. Should it matter to them who rules, Carthage or Rome?”
“I can’t say what would matter to them,” Simon reflected, “for I am an old man, and in my whole life I have never been more than a few score miles beyond the Judean border. Yet in the end, Carthage fell.”
“Because of the strength and consistency of Rome,” I answered proudly. “Because it became a maxim in our city that Carthage must be destroyed—as it was.”
“Yet it was a maxim with the Greeks that Judea must be destroyed, and we were not.”
“Antioch is not Rome,” I smiled. “And in any case, Simon, you have a debt to pay. You cost me a night’s sleep with your writing, but in the end I found only questions and not answers. With the death of Judas Maccabeus, you leave off—as if that were all that mattered—yet that was more than twenty years ago, and today Judea is free, and even in far-off Rome, honor is done to the Maccabee.”
“Still—it was all that mattered,” the old man sighed. “Perhaps all of my writing was pointless, yet when I finished telling of the death of my brother, I could write no more.”
“Still, there was more? Much more?”
“Yes.”
“Even I have heard of how, after Judas’s death, you and your two brothers gathered together what men of high heart there were and fought again—and then were driven into the desert beyond the River Jordan, and how for so long you maintained yourself there.”
“That is so,” the old man nodded. “We went into the desert because all hope and all future seemed lost, yet it was the covenant of the sons of Mattathias that we would fight, even if we alone of all Israel fought. To the banks of the Jordan, we never turned our backs, but then there were none left but the dead, and we three swam the Jordan and went into the desert, even as our forefathers did so long ago, going into the wilderness but not bending their knees to any man. And then, living in the desert, without rooftree or shelter, we stayed alive—somehow we stayed alive, and we sent our brother John back to Judea on a mission, and the wild Bedouins fell upon him and slew him. He was gentle, gentle and loving, and in all his life he hated no man and never did he do an unkind thing or raise his voice in anger. Yet because he was a son of Mattathias, he turned his face away from the holy scrolls he loved, from the sweet quiet of the synagogue and the home, from his wife and his children, and he took a long sword in his hand. We are not mercenaries, Roman, and with us the whole fabric of life is the face and the manifestation of God, and all of life is sacred. There is no sin like the shedding of blood, and to take a man’s life away is an act of awful evil. So you may not understand what it meant for John—who was so much a Jew—to become a creature of battle and bloodshed. Yet he did it. Willingly, he did it, and in all the years he was by my side, I never heard from his lips a word of complaint, never a word of regret, never a word of fear. Unlike the rest of us, he was thin and always frail, but such a spirit burned in him as I never knew. Even when he was so sorely wounded, and lay day and night, week in and week out in burning fever, he never complained, never regretted. And the wild Bedouins slew him, and he died alone in the desert—and then only Jonathan and I remained. Once I dispatched my brother Jonathan to Rabbi Ragesh—he was called the father of Israel then—and I told my brother to say to Ragesh that so long as two free men walked on Judean soil, our land would not be enslaved, and thus it was, Jonathan and I in the lonely desert.”
He paused, his eyes fixed on something across the ravine, across the blue Judean hills. His great hands clenched and unclenched, and the lines on his face became deeper etched. He was not telling me these things; he was expelling them from himself.
“Yes,” he went on, “there were two free men, but we did not awaken Israel from the dark pit of despair and defeat. The spirit of Judas did that—of the Maccabee, like whom there was no other, ever, or will be again. And bit by bit, the land roused itself. Men who loved freedom crossed the Jordan and came to us, and embraced us and kissed us for the sons of Mattathias who had died for their people and for the dignity of all men. So our strength grew and our numbers grew—and one day we crossed the river and came back to our country. Then it was as before—wherever we went, the people rose up and joined us. Once again, we taught the Greeks that a Jew can fight. It didn’t happen at once. You don’t buy your freedom a
s you buy a cow or a bit of land. Year after year, we paid the price—but in the end we won, and there is no overlord in Judea now, only a free people who live in peace…”
“And thus is twenty years accounted,” I said.
“If you read what I wrote, you read the accounting,” the Jew reminded me. “We reaped what Judas sowed, for he taught us what we never fully knew before, that no man ever dies uselessly or futilely in the struggle for the freedom of man. That he taught us—and what more would you have me say? War is evil and killing is evil, and he who takes up the sword must perish by it. Thus is it written in our holy scrolls. We fought for our freedom and—God willing—we will never fight for any other cause. We were not chosen to teach the ways of war, but the ways of peace and of love. Let the dead rest, and if you would know what we fought for and how we fought, go through the land, Lentulus Silanus, and watch how the people live. I have troubled my memories enough.”
“Yet you trouble it strangely, Simon Maccabeus, for you never see the whole, but only a part. Do you truthfully think that your tiny state could smash the Syrian Empire single-handed?”
“Yet we did—”
He was less certain now. “But did you?” I demanded. “Was it not Rome that smashed the power of Greece and barred the further advance of Syria? Was it not a Roman legate who stood on the Egyptian border and said to a Syrian army, Go this far and no farther? You knew nothing of Rome, but Rome knew of Judea. Can you survive against the whole world, Simon? That is a dream; a dream, Simon. You say you fought for your freedom and you will never fight for any other cause. That is a bold statement, Simon—for I will not believe that a Jew is so different from all others. Your country stands here at the crossroads of the world, and those crossroads must be kept open, Simon. Whether you knew it or not, Rome fought on your side, Simon. And where will Rome fight tomorrow? Consider that, Simon Maccabeus.”