History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Man was seen both as an individual, with rights, and as member of a community, with obligations. No system of justice in history has made more persistent and on the whole successful efforts to reconcile individual and social roles—another reason why the Jews were able to keep their cohesion in the face of otherwise intolerable pressures. Society required that there should be equality before the law—the greatest of all possible safeguards for the individual—but society, especially one under constant persecution, had its own priorities within that general equality. A remarkable series of rulings by the sages runs:

  The saving of a man’s life takes priority over a woman’s…. The covering of a woman’s nakedness takes priority over a man’s. A woman’s ransom has priority over a man’s. A man in danger of being forcibly sodomized has priority over a woman in danger of rape. The priest takes priority over the Levite, the Levite over the Israelite, the Israelite over the bastard, the bastard over the natin,* the natin over the proselyte, the proselyte over the slave…. But if the bastard is learned in the Law and the high-priest is ignorant of the Law, the bastard has priority over the high-priest.153

  A scholar was more valuable to society than, say, one of the am ha-arez, an ignorant fellow. The scholar therefore was entitled to sit when before the court. But if the other party to the suit was of the am ha-arez, the principle of individual equality demanded that he sit too. The sages were the first jurisprudents to accord all men the right to their dignity. They ruled: ‘If a man wounds his fellow man he becomes thereby culpable on five counts: injury, pain, healing, loss of time and indignity inflicted.’ But loss of dignity was assessed hierarchically in terms of social standing in the community.154

  Man was not only equal before the Law, he was physically free. The sages and rabbis were extraordinarily reluctant to use imprisonment as a punishment (as opposed to a restraint before trial), and the notion of man’s basic right to roam freely was very deep in Judaism, another reason why it was the first society of antiquity to reject slavery. But if a man was free physically, he was certainly not free morally. On the contrary, he had all kinds of duties to the community, not least the duty of obedience to its duly constituted authorities. Jewish law has no mercy on the rebel, whose punishment might be death. In late antiquity, each Jewish community was ruled in effect congregationally, with a governing board of seven, which fixed wages, prices, weights and measures, and bye-laws, and had powers to punish offenders. The obligation to pay communal taxes was religious as well as social. Moreover, philanthropy was an obligation too, since the word zedakah meant both charity and righteousness. The Jewish welfare state in antiquity, the prototype of all others, was not voluntary; a man had to contribute to the common fund in proportion to his means, and this duty could be enforced by the courts. Maimonides even ruled that a Jew who evaded contributing according to wealth should be regarded as a rebel and punished accordingly. Other communal obligations included respect for privacy, the need to be neighbourly (i.e. to give neighbours first refusal of adjoining land put up for sale), and strict injunctions against noise, smells, vandalism and pollution.155

  Communal obligations need to be understood within the assumptions of Jewish theology. The sages taught that a Jew should not regard these social duties as burdens but as yet more ways in which men showed their love for God and righteousness. The Jews are sometimes accused of not understanding freedom as well as the Greeks, but the truth is that they understood it better, grasping the point that the only true freedom is a good conscience—a concept St Paul carried from Judaism into Christianity. The Jews thought sinfulness and virtue were collective as well as individual. The Bible showed repeatedly that a city, a community, a nation, earned both merit and retribution by its acts. The Torah bound the Jews together as one body and one soul.156 Just as the individual man benefited from the worth of his community, so he was obliged to contribute to it. Hillel the Elder laid down: ‘Separate not thyself from the community and trust not in thyself until the day of thy death.’ Even a liberal like Maimonides warned that a Jew who held aloof from the community, albeit God-fearing in other ways, would have no share in the next world.

  Implicit in the Bible is the holistic notion that one man’s sin, however small, affects the entire world, however imperceptibly, and vice versa. Judaism never allowed the principle of individual guilt and judgment, however important, to override completely the more primitive principle of collective judgment, and by running the two in tandem it produced a sophisticated and enduring doctrine of social responsibility which is one of its greatest contributions to humanity. The wicked are the shame of all, the saints are our pride and joy. In one of his most moving passages, Philo writes:

  Every wise man is ransom for the fool, who would not last an hour did not the wise preserve him by compassion and forethought. The wise are like physicians, fighting the infirmities of the sick…. So when I hear that a wise man has died, my heart is sorrowful. Not for him, of course, for he lived in joy and died in honour. No—it is for the survivors that I mourn. Without the strong protecting arm which brought them safety, they are abandoned to the miseries which are their desert, and which they will soon feel, unless Providence should raise up some new protector to replace the old one.157

  A wise man must give of his wisdom to the community, just as a rich man must give of his wealth. So it is a sin not to serve when required. Prayer for others is a duty. ‘Whoever is able to plead God’s mercy for his fellows and does not do so is a sinner.’ Every Jew is a surety for every other Jew. If he sees a fellow sinning, he must remonstrate and if possible prevent it—otherwise he sins too. The community is responsible for the man who does wrong publicly. A Jew must always bear witness and protest against evil, especially great public sins of the powerful crying to God for vengeance. But precisely because the duty to protest against another’s sin is so important, false and malicious accusations are particularly abhorrent. To destroy a man’s reputation wilfully and unjustly is one of the worst of sins. The ‘witch hunt’ is a great collective evil.

  The Torah and its superstructure of commentaries formed a moral theology as well as a practical system of civil and criminal law. Hence though it was very specific and legalistic on particular points, it always sought to reinforce the temporal authority of the courts by appeals to spiritual factors and sanctions. The notion of strict justice was never enough. The Jews were the first to introduce the concept of repentance and atonement, which became a primary Christian theme also. The Bible repeatedly refers to the ‘change of heart’—‘Turn ye even to me with all your heart,’ as the Book of Joel puts it, and ‘Rend your hearts and not your garments.’ In the Book of Ezekiel the injunction is ‘Make ye a new heart.’ The Law and the courts sought to go beyond restitution to bring about reconciliation between the contending parties. The aim was always to keep the Jewish community cohesive. So the Law and the rulings of the sages were designed to be positive in promoting harmony, and preventative in removing possible sources of friction. It was more important to promote peace than to do nominal justice. In doubtful cases it was the custom of the sages to quote the saying in Proverbs about wisdom: ‘Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.’158

  The idea of peace as a positive state, a noble ideal which is also a workable human condition, is another Jewish invention. It is one of the great motifs of the Bible, especially of its finest book, Isaiah. The Mishnah laid down: ‘Three things sustain the existence of the world—justice, truth and peace,’ and the closing words of the whole work are: ‘God did not bestow any greater blessing on Israel than peace, for it is written: “The Lord will give strength to his people, the Lord will bless his people with peace.” ’159 The sages argued that one of the great functions of scholarship was to use the Law to promote peace, between husband and wife, parents and children, and then in the wider world of the community and the nation. A prayer for peace was one of the chief benedictions and was said by pious Jews three times a day. The sages quoted Isaiah,
‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace,’160 and they claimed that the first action of the Messiah would be to declare peace.

  One of the most important developments in the history of the Jews, one of the ways in which Judaism differed most strongly from primitive Israelite religion, was this growing stress on peace. After 135 AD, in effect, Judaism renounced even righteous violence—as it implicitly renounced the state—and put its trust in peace. Jewish valour and heroism was pushed into the background as a sustaining national theme; Jewish irenicism came to the foreground. To countless generations of Jews, what happened at Jabneh, where the scholar finally took over from the warrior, was far more significant than what happened at Masada. The lost fortress, indeed, was virtually forgotten until, in the lurid flames of the twentieth-century Holocaust, it became a national myth, displacing the myth of Jabneh.

  The concentration on external peace and internal harmony, and the study of the means whereby both could be promoted, were essential for a vulnerable people without the protection of the state, and were clearly one of the main objects of Torah commentary. In this it was brilliantly—one might almost say miraculously—successful. The Torah became a great cohesive source. No people have ever been better served by their public law and doctrine. From the second century AD onwards, the sectarianism which had been such a feature of the Second Commonwealth virtually disappeared, at any rate to our view, and all the old parties were subsumed in rabbinical Judaism. Torah study remained an arena of fierce argument, but it took place within a consensus sustained by the majority principle. The absence of the state was a huge blessing.

  Equally important, however, was another characteristic of Judaism: the relative absence of dogmatic theology. Almost from the beginning, Christianity found itself in grave difficulties over dogma, because of its origins. It believed in one God, but its monotheism was qualified by the divinity of Christ. To solve this problem it evolved the dogma of the two natures of Christ, and the dogma of the Trinity—three persons in one God. These devices in turn created more problems, and from the second century onwards produced innumerable heresies, which convulsed and divided Christianity throughout the Dark Ages. The New Testament, with its enigmatic pronouncements by Jesus, and its Pauline obscurities—especially in the Epistle to the Romans—became a minefield. Thus the institution of the Petrine church, with its axiom of central authority, led to endless controversy and a final breach between Rome and Byzantium in the eleventh century. The precise meaning of the eucharist split the Roman trunk still further in the sixteenth. The production of dogmatic theology—that is, what the church should teach about God, the sacraments and itself—became the main preoccupation of the professional Christian intelligentsia, and remains so to this day, so that at the end of the twentieth century Anglican bishops are still arguing among themselves about the Virgin Birth.

  The Jews escaped this calvary. Their view of God is very simple and clear. Some Jewish scholars argue that there is, in fact, a lot of dogma in Judaism. That is true in the sense that there are many negative prohibitions—chiefly against idolatry. But the Jews usually avoided the positive dogmas which the vanity of theologians tends to create and which are the source of so much trouble. They never adopted, for instance, the idea of Original Sin. Of all the ancient peoples, the Jews were perhaps the least interested in death, and this saved them a host of problems. It is true that belief in resurrection and the afterlife was the main distinguishing mark of Pharisaism, and thus a fundament of rabbinic Judaism. Indeed the first definite statement of dogma in the whole of Judaism, in the Mishnah, deals with this: ‘All Israel share in the world to come except the one who says resurrection has no origin in the Law.’161 But the Jews had a way of concentrating on life and pushing death—and its dogmas—into the background. Predestination, single and double, purgatory, indulgences, prayers for the dead and the intercession of the saints—these vexatious sources of Christian discord caused Jews little or no trouble.

  It is significant, indeed, that whereas the Christians started to produce credal formulations very early in the history of the church, the earliest Jewish creed, listing ten articles of faith, was formulated by Saadiah Gaon (882-942), by which time the Jewish religion was more than 2,500 years old. Not until much later did Maimonides’ thirteen articles become a definitive statement of faith, and there is no evidence it was ever actually discussed and endorsed by any authoritative body. The original thirteen-point formulation, given in Maimonides’ commentary on the Tenth Chapter of the Mishnah, on the Tractate Sanhedrin, lists the following articles of faith: the existence of a perfect Being, the author of all creation; God’s unity; his incorporeality; his pre-existence; worship without intermediary; belief in the truth of prophecy; the uniqueness of Moses; the Torah in its entirety is divinely given; the Torah is unchangeable; God is omniscient; He punishes and rewards in the afterlife; the coming of the Messiah; the resurrection. This credo, reformulated as the Ani Ma’amin (‘I believe’), is printed in the Jewish prayer-book. It has given rise to little controversy. Indeed, credal formulation has not been an important preoccupation of Jewish scholars. Judaism is not so much about doctrine—that is taken for granted—as behaviour; the code matters more than the creed.

  The lasting achievement, then, of the sages was to transform the Torah into a universal, timeless, comprehensive and coherent guide to every aspect of human conduct. Next to monotheism itself, the Torah became the essence of the Jewish faith. Even in the first century, Josephus had been able to write, with only a pardonable degree of exaggeration, that whereas most races did not know much about their laws until they found themselves in conflict with them, ‘should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls. Hence to break them is rare, and no one can evade punishment by the excuse of ignorance.’162 This position was reinforced in the age of the academies and sages, so that knowing God through the Law became the summation of Judaism. It made Judaism inward-looking, but it gave it the strength to survive in a hostile world.

  The hostility varied, in place and time, but it tended to increase. The most fortunate Jews, in the Dark Ages, lived in Babylonia, under exilarchs. These princes, more powerful and secular than the Palestinian nasi, claimed direct Davidic descent from the kings of Judah, and lived with some ceremony in their palaces. Indeed in Parthian times, the exilarch was in effect a senior official of the state. The rabbis stood in his presence and, if favoured, dined at his table and taught in his courtyard. With the coming of the Sassanid dynasty, early in the third century, and their revival of the national religion of Zoroaster, religious pressure on the Jewish communities increased. The power of the exilarch declined and, as it did so, the influence of the scholars rose. At the academy of Sura in the third century AD there were as many as 1,200 scholars, and these numbers increased during the slack months of the farming year. Having escaped the appalling consequences of the Jewish revolts against Rome, the Babylonian communities produced higher standards of scholarship. In any case, Babylonian Jewry had always regarded itself as the repository of the strictest Jewish tradition, and the purest blood. The Babylonian Talmud asserted: ‘All countries are dough compared to the [yeast of the] land of Israel, and Israel is dough compared to Babylonia.’163 It is true that Babylonia depended on the West for calendrical decisions, and a chain of signal-beacons connected the academies to Jerusalem to receive them. But the Babylonian Talmud is more detailed than its Jerusalem counterpart—neither survives complete—and was for long regarded as more authoritative. It was the main source of instruction for Jews everywhere (Palestine alone excepted) throughout the Middle Ages.

  Yet Babylonia was not safe for Jews. There are many accounts of persecutions and martyrs under the Sassanids, but the documentary evidence is scarce and unreliable. In 455, Tazdigar III a
bolished the Sabbath by decree, and (according to a letter of Rabbi Sherira Gaon) ‘the rabbis proclaimed a fast, and the Holy One, blessed be He, sent a crocodile unto him in the night, which swallowed him as he lay on his couch, and the decree was invalidated’. But Sherira, head of the Pumbedita academy, flourished c. 906-1006, and was writing 450 years after the event. Jewish tradition terms Tazdigar’s son and heir Firuz the Evil, and accuses him of martyring the exilarch. After he died, there was a period of anarchy, in which the Jewish exilarch Mar Zutra II (c. 496-520) with 400 warriors succeeded in setting up an independent state, with a capital at Mahoza; but after seven years, its immorality led to a Persian victory, and the exilarch was beheaded and crucified. There was another outbreak of persecution in 579-80. But some Persian monarchs favoured the Jews and it is significant that when the Persians invaded Palestine and occupied Jerusalem in 624, the local Jews received them warmly.164