by Simon Schama
Hanukkah, officially instituted by the Hasmoneans, was, like Tabernacles, eight days, and it was also the eight-day period corresponding to the pagan winter solstice festivities celebrating the return of light, lustily celebrated in Greece and Rome. Triumphal days in the Greek style – like the Day of Nicanor commemorating the defeat of that general – were added to the calendar.
The taste for classical grandeur, awkwardly superimposed on the more austere core of Judaism, is sometimes associated with Herod the Great’s alleged adulteration of Judaism. What else would you expect, this argument goes, from an Idumean convert, the son of Antipater, a military adventurer from the Edomite south? But Herod was merely aggrandising the Judeo-classicism inaugurated by the Hasmoneans. Their annihilating enemy had been the lunatic Antiochus IV, not the Greeks. What could possibly be wrong with emulating their elegant style? Long before Herod, John Hyrcanus had built himself a sumptuous palace at Jericho complete with swimming baths and a colonnaded pleasure pavilion. On the site of the Akra – and thus not far from the purported site of a Davidian palace – the Hasmoneans constructed their own fortified residence, in keeping with their royal pretensions as priests-cum-generals-cum-‘ethnarchs’, as they were styled.
In their minds, then, and those who wrote their histories, there was no contradiction between invoking whenever possible the original Judaic monarchies they claimed to reincarnate, while serving as loyal allies to the later Seleucids. More than once, the Hasmoneans showed they were prepared to compromise the always tenuously defined autonomy of their Jewish state as the price of survival. A long and intense siege of Jerusalem by Antiochus VII from 134 to 132 BCE, which nearly brought Jerusalem to its knees, was lifted only when John Hyrcanus agreed to turn his realm into a tributary state, much as had been the case under the benevolent Antiochus III. It was only that regular gift of the Greeks – the king’s sudden death on campaign – which enabled the Jewish dynasty to recover, for the time being, a semblance of independence.
Even this was thanks to the oncoming power of the Romans. Ever since Judas Maccabeus had sent Eupolemus to Rome in the first of three embassies at the end of the second century BCE, the Hasmoneans fancied themselves equal (if perhaps junior) partners in treaties of alliance. Those treaties, 1 Maccabees and Josephus tell us, were engraved on bronze tablets for public display in Jerusalem. Perhaps, for a while, the Hasmoneans were not entirely deluded in this swollen self-importance, since the march of the expansionist campaigns of Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus may indeed have made the Jewish quasi-kingdom seem like the dominant power in a strategically crucial region between Egypt and Asia Minor.
But getting respect from the Gentile powers meant, inevitably, losing it with the priests who held themselves, not armed dynasts, to be the true guardians of Judaism. The shocking usurpation, as many saw it, of the high priesthood, rankled and broke open again the ancient arguments and jealousies between priests and princes. That argument – first raised by the writers of the Books of Kings, Judges and Chronicles, more than half a millennium before in their histories of Saul, David, Solomon and their posterity – was whether political power sustained piety or damaged it. This is a debate, of course, which after two millennia, has not exactly disappeared from Jewish life. Then, as now, it was all about the clash between politics and Torah. Judaism needed the state to protect it, but Israelite religion had been founded in an escape from Egyptian kingship and had been established in the Promised Land without it. Along with all the other pretensions the Hasmoneans liked to imagine they inherited from the Davidian line was this perennial dilemma.
Outside their court, those who believed themselves to be the guardians of Temple and Torah divided on this critical issue (as they still do). The aristocratic-government caste which Josephus tells us were known as Sadducees were, essentially, statists, untroubled by the concentration of sacerdotal and military power assumed by the Hasmoneans, and presumably elated by the imposition of Judaism at the point of the sword (and the circumciser’s knife) on neighbouring peoples like the Itureans and Idumeans. Their adversaries, the Pharisees, on the other hand, had come to believe that the more swaggering Hasmonean power became, the more likely it was to violate the purity of Jewish law, and that, ultimately, the only sovereign in Israel was the Torah. The precise meaning of the Aramaic word from which they took their name has been much argued over as signifying either ‘clarification’ or ‘separation’, but for their numerous followers, the one implied the other.
Hence the gradual but unmistakable estrangement of the ruling dynasty from the guardians of holiness as they saw themselves. 1 Maccabees and Josephus tell the powerful story of Hyrcanus, originally a ‘disciple’ of the Pharisees, and believing himself to be gifted with prophetic powers, indulging himself by asking them, at a feast, to ensure that when they thought he was straying from the straight and narrow, they would be bold enough to correct him. All dictators like to flatter themselves they can take it on the chin from the pious until they discover they don’t like the upbraiding after all. One septuagenarian Pharisee, Eleazar, was naive enough to take the invitation at face value and spoke up to the effect that Hyrcanus ought to lay aside the priestly role and be contented with the lay power. When pressed for the reason, he explained that this was because Hyrcanus’ mother (Simon’s second wife) had been a captive in the time of the Antiochus IV persecution. This was a euphemism for saying she had been raped, casting doubt on Hyrcanus’ own legitimacy. Infuriated, Hyrcanus then asked the Pharisees what punishment ought to be meted out for a speech of such temerity and was mortified when they suggested that a bit of a flogging might be enough.
The accusation of illegitimacy was repeated against his son Alexander Jannaeus, who was also subjected to an undignified rain of etrogim – the knobbly, enlarged and inedible lemon-like citrons carried by Jews at the Feast of Tabernacles (along with the furled lulav palm wand and sprigs of myrtle and willow). The citric pelting was triggered by Alexander’s high-handed indifference to the prescribed procedure for the water-libation while he was officiating as high priest during Tabernacles, pouring it on his own feet rather than on the altar. Comic though the incident seems, it told the outraged Pharisees that the Hasmonean pose as guardians of the Torah was just that. What, after all, was the difference between those self-crowned king-priests and the scandalous ultra-Hellenisers they had deposed in the time of Judas? The indignation turned lethal, opening a murderous six-year Jewish civil war (not always sufficiently registered in popular histories of the Maccabean period), in which thousands of disaffected Jews joined the army of the Seleucid Demetrius (so recently the enemy), in the hopes of overthrowing the iniquitous Hasmoneans. Fifty thousand were slaughtered in the bloody conflict, the climax of which was the rout of Jannaeus by Demetrius and his Jewish auxiliaries. But his throne and state were saved by the usual sudden need of the Greek ruler to retreat abruptly back north and east, allowing Jannaeus to return to Judaea and inflict a horrifying retribution on the disloyal. His revenge culminated in a mass crucifixion of eight hundred of the Jews he judged most guilty in front of the king-priest while he was feasting ‘with his concubines’, looking on as the wives and children had their throats slit before their crucified husbands and fathers.
The brutality of the Jannaean repression bought the Hasmoneans some time, but the wound that had opened between the dynasty and Pharisees would never close. At some point after the death of John Hyrcanus in 104 BCE, the assumption of an identity between Judaism and the Hasmoneans began to fray, and under his son Alexander Jannaeus it ripped violently and permanently apart. Intrinsic to that division was the profound question Judaism has always asked and continues to ask: what is the proper relationship between power and piety? Is a modicum of state force the condition of leading the good Jewish life, or is it most likely to corrupt and destroy it? The kingdoms of David and Solomon get the benefit of the doubt that they might have managed the problem only through documentary near-silence. We can infer a royal bureaucracy from all th
ose lmlk jar impressions and seals, but we have little sense of how statehood and priesthood might have abrasively rubbed against each other, except where the Bible stages scenes of confrontation. Of course, those scenes – whether David confronted with his personal sins and overreaching war power, or Solomon with his Egyptian queen and the countless other consorts – come regularly enough in the Bible for us to sense that holiness and worldliness (both needed if anything like a Jewish state was to survive, let alone flourish) were in constant friction. That prophets like Jeremiah should characterise the defeat of the kingdom and even the destruction of the Temple itself – the whole Babylonian annihilation – as perfectly in keeping with God’s plan, did not make the squaring of force and faith any simpler.
The bulk of the Bible, from generation to generation, was written when the weaknesses of state power were most apparent. The portable scroll-book became the countervailing force to the sword. Once that happened, the idea that Jewish life was Jewish words, and they could and would endure beyond the vicissitudes of power, the loss of land, the subjection of people, took off into history. Since other monotheistic book-faiths allied word and sword rather than divorced them, this would turn out to be a uniquely Jewish vision.
At the time, when eastern and western civilisations were governed by the truism that without imperial force the sacred realm was of little consequence, this Judaic reversal of assumptions represented a radical rearrangement of the priorities of human existence. When it was restated with numinous insistence and clarity by an otherwise obscure Nazareth preacher, the doctrine of the power of the powerless began to draw the allegiance of millions. It could not have been more significant that the most effective creator of the Christian universe, Paul, began as an enthusiastic instrument of the state – enforcer, tax collector, bureaucrat – and then un-stated himself by falling from the high horse of his authority in a bolt of prostrating illumination – blinded by the light, overthrown by the gospel truth. But the minute Christianity itself turned imperial, the dilemma first played out by the biblical states – and then more fatefully and dramatically by the Hasmoneans – was laid upon the new church. Could empires ever be holy, much less Roman?
The Pharisees became important not just because they claimed to uphold the Torah more purely and uncompromisingly than the government of the Hasmoneans and their court-priest caste, the Sadducees. In circumstances where the Jewish state was unstable, the source of law-giving, and the encouragement of law-abiding, needed to come from somewhere else. Nor could the written Torah alone cope with the vicissitudes of year-round life that would come from an unsettled polity and society. So the Pharisees began the process of engaged addition, supplying an ‘oral law’ meant as not only an extension of the written, but also an organic, vital connection between the writ of the Commandments and the challenges of daily existence. Shockingly, they insisted that their own learned interpretations would have authority comparable with biblically revealed law. Thus was launched a system that was simultaneously open and closed, and which made the judgements of the Oral Law the object of interminable, multi-millennia argument. But from this momentous act of self-authorisation the beginnings of the Mishnah (two hundred years later) and eventually the authority of the entire Talmud would flow.
Negatively, too, the insuperable conditions of just being a state, or rather a state at perpetual war, played to the strengths of the Pharisaic emphasis on a realm of common succour beyond the institutions of power. Those who suffered most painfully from punishing taxes, conscription levies, the regular visitations of military brutality (along with its outriders, agrarian destruction, famine and epidemic), were naturally drawn to critics who claimed that, while God ordained sufferings, they had been aggravated by haughty and presumptuous men. The fact that the Temple establishment was in the hands of Sadducees close to the ruling caste, that somehow it had become a domain of personal Hasmonean display, only added fuel to popular fire and adherents to this Pharisaic disaffection.
All of which was a prelude to one of the more astonishing scenes in Jewish history (and one which doesn’t get much play in lessons of Hanukkah and Tisha b’Ab, said to be the appointed day on which both the Babylonians and the Romans destroyed the Temple): the repudiation of the Hasmonean king-priests, in the name of Judaic righteousness. After the apparently unstoppable Roman general Pompey had conquered Damascus (and was moving his legions into Judaea), three Jewish delegations visited him there to persuade him to their cause. Two were embassies from each of the brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus, rivals for the Hasmonean succession. But a third, writes Josephus, claimed to speak with a truly Jewish voice and ‘was of the nation that was against them both [and] which did not desire to be under kingly government because the form of government they received from their forefathers was that of subjection to the priests of the God they worshipped’.30 The Hasmoneans had changed this form of government ‘seeking to enslave them’, so their request to Rome was to liquidate the pretension to be king and high priest at the same time, and restore the ancient separation of the worldly and holy realms. As far as the Pharisees were concerned it was unimportant which of the contenders was allotted that wordly power – Hyrcanus II, who together with his Idumean enforcer Antipater had summoned the Romans, or his brother Aristobulus. Let whoever wanted that power, or could take it, have it. The true power lay elsewhere.
IV. Roost of the Golden Eagle
So this is where the story had got to: a bitter contest between the Hasmonean dynasty which claimed to be the true embodiment of the Jewish commonwealth it had founded, and those who said it had become the obstacle to its survival. But when, towards the middle of the first century BCE, Hyrcanus and his enforcer Antipater brought a Roman army to the very gates of Jerusalem, had he made a nonsense of the claim to be a Jewish ruler? Would the Roman wolf suckle you and then eat you? Ironically, once the worst had come to pass and what had been a Jewish state was turned into a tributary of Rome, the aura of the deposed, impotent Hasmoneans, as the holders of the flame, actually grew. For Herod, and his successors, the refusal of the Hasmonean ghosts to die off altogether, their legend sustained by the Hanukkah story, was an aggravation. Herod’s way of dealing with them was nothing if not versatile: marrying one of them, co-opting another and murdering the rest.
None of this particularly bothered the Pharisees, nor did the replacement of sovereignty by the dwarfish status of a Roman tributary state. To their way of thinking the end of independence would be the condition of a truly Jewish restoration, or at least a renewed separation of the sacred and lay realms. Our only source for what then happened is Flavius Josephus, born Joseph bar Mattathias, who was in a unique position to understand both sides of the matter since he came from a priestly family on his father’s side and the Hasmoneans on his mother’s. But Josephus wrote for a Roman audience, following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE in which he had been not a neutral bystander but an active collaborator and guide with the exterminating army of Vespasian and Titus. So his account of Pompey the conqueror marvelling at the Temple is of a piece with the conviction that there was nothing intrinsic to Roman power that would make it the destroyer of Judaism.
There is Pompey, on the threshold of the Temple, after an aggravatingly protracted siege, involving the construction of colossal siege ramps, battering rams built at the Mount. Twelve thousand are killed in and around its precincts, yet Pompey notices that even as this infernal carnage is proceeding, the Temple priests continue their ceremonies. Brushing aside all the taboos against foreigners, the general marches through the Temple, tearing aside the curtain veil and entering the Holy of Holies where only the high priest was admitted. But then Pompey is so awed by the golden altar and shewbread table and the menorah candlestick (one tradition has him actually prostrated) that he uncharacteristically refrains from plunder. On the following day Pompey orders a cleansing of the Temple courtyards and the resumption of sacrifices.
Replaying the Alexander scene – the conqueror chast
ened by the spectacle of holiness – Josephus harmonises (at least in his imagination) the Judaism of his priestly family and the Romanism of his citizenship. And in some ways he was right. Although the Romans would reveal themselves to be more interventionist than the Seleucids or the Ptolemies, and more exacting in their tax demands, and although they replaced an independent state with a puppet kingdom, the first seventy years or so of their domination was not a time in which disaster looked like it was being merely postponed.
This was not due, however, to some benign fit between the two cultures. Much of the credit goes to the brutally shrewd dynasty of Hyrcanus II’s military hard man, Antipater, who understood the essence of the deal already anticipated by Pompey. Show us you can take Syria and Palestine and keep it in order for us, went the Roman side of the contract, and we won’t interfere with your funny ways: that thing you have about pork and prepuce; your annoying work stoppage at the end of the week; all those burning animal carcasses; the crowd-control problems you get yourselves into come pilgrimage holidays. All your business. Just don’t let it get out of hand. Go ahead, make yourself a powerful little state; we’ll call it a kingdom if it helps; keep the peace, land hard on the least sign of revolt; deal with brigands; send us the money on time. Don’t give our procurators grief and we can have an understanding. Why not?
Antipater and his sons, especially Herod, shook on the deal. Paradoxically, they could make it stick (for now) not because Rome was so strong but because it was, exactly at this time, so violently divided. Pompey dies; Caesar is assassinated, his murderers are vanquished; Mark Antony perishes; Augustus eventually triumphs. At each stage, in moments of crisis, one or other of the parties (even Cassius, who makes a visit to Judaea) needed the help that Herod in particular could provide. The Near East – from Egypt to the troubled Parthian border – was as important as Rome itself in deciding who would prevail. And all of them knew Herod. He had had to flee to Rome after a reverse in the fortunes of Hyrcanus II’s army; his children were educated in the city; their clan became close to some of the most powerful families. Herod became their kind of Jew, which is to say a non-Judaean Jew, an Idumean from the territory south-west of the Dead Sea that had been conquered and forcibly converted by John Hyrcanus. Though Herod was mostly punctilious in his adopted Judaism, the Romans certainly felt that his ethnically different background made him less liable to be in thrall to the ‘superstitio’ that could spell trouble. Herod was the sort of Jew they thought they could depend on. His capacity for homicidal brutality (towards his own family if necessary – par for the course in Rome) was another sign of this dependability. Nor did it hurt that Herod was loaded with a kind of feral charisma: the smile of the predator. When he appeared before Octavian, shortly to be Augustus, as an ally of the defeated Antony and had the brass to tell the notoriously unsentimental victor ‘judge me on my loyalty not by the person to whom I am loyal’, Augustus was somehow disarmed.