The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  So the conquerors kept their side of the bargain. The Senate officially proclaimed Herod King of the Jews, and Caesar generously enlarged his territories. The high priesthood was separated from the throne, and was no longer a dynastic prerogative but the appointee of the king. Tribute was paid to Rome and in turn sacrifices were received and made in the Temple in the name of Senatus Populusque Romanus.

  That pragmatic mutual accommodation and the relative peace it brought (under the reign of the charismatic sociopath) enabled an extraordinary flowering of Jewish culture. Its magnitude and dynamism is most often measured architecturally, in the creation of spectacular cities like Caesarea, and the astounding expansion of the Temple. But it should not be forgotten that the Herodian period was also one of intense religious creativity within the Pharisaic community from which (according to later Talmudic traditions) the duelling schools of the scholars Hillel and Shammai sprang. Their disputes over rigid or more relaxed readings of the Torah’s social prescriptions, and Hillel’s famous epigrammatic reductions of the commandments, were a kind of template on which the perennial disputations of the Mishnah and then the larger Talmud would eventually be constructed. No one, though, would ever compete with the moral elegance of Hillel’s famous response to the demand that he deliver the essence of the Torah while standing on one leg. ‘Do not do unto others what is hateful to you. All the rest is commentary. Now go study.’31

  The notion that all this happened under the reign of a non-Judaean Jew, from a dynasty of converts – not to mention a king with a psychopathic streak to him – sits awkwardly in the narrative of Jewish history. Religious reform and revival is made to appear a reaction to the Herodian government rather than sheltered by it; and Herod himself a pseudo-Jew. Allusions in the contemporary Psalms of Solomon to ‘a man foreign to our race’ illegitimately occupying dominion have been thought to refer to the Herodian line, but could just as easily have meant Pompey himself.

  For Herod was not, in fact, a pseudo-Jew or, as he is sometimes incorrectly characterised, ‘a half Jew’ (some Orthodox histories even describe him as an Arab): he was fully and uncontroversially a Jew whose converted family happened to come from Idumea. The response of priests and rabbis, Sadducees and Pharisees, to this rapid, cosmopolitan expansion of Jewish-controlled territory, begun under the Hasmoneans, was not to make sharper, purer, distinctions between Jews and non-Jews, but exactly the opposite: to establish procedures for conversion that would accept them fully into the community. Herod was entirely representative of this broadening of Jewish identity. And a keystone of his success was that his kingdom represented the integration of communities – Itureans as well as Idumeans and beyond – who had been converted, according to perfectly acceptable religious norms, into a wider commonwealth of Jews.32 That this commonwealth was less ethnically and territorially narrow than those that had gone before it did not, in fact, make it any less Jewish. Quite the reverse was the case. It was Jewish in the way that many diaspora communities were already Jewish (and had been for centuries): living in towns and streets with non-Jews, living in cities that were classically designed and which boasted theatres, expansive marketplaces, forums and agoras, even gymnasia, alongside proseuchai or synagogues. In fact, it was exactly in these more mixed and open urban environments and at this time that synagogues first began to spring up – as places of lodging, Torah reading, ritual purification and pilgrimage centres. Synagogues owed their beginnings not to rigid separations but to something like the opposite: a new sense of mobility, a sudden spurt of Jewish travel and resettlement – the capacity to go places and still be Jewish. So they appear in Jericho on the road to the Dead Sea, very much alive as a commercial waterway as we now know from anchors of this period discovered on its salty bed. Synagogues could be found in the ethnically mixed cities of Scythopolis (Beit She’an), on the edge of the Samaritan heartland, and in the elegant new Galilean town of Sepphoris, south-west of Tiberias.

  Conversely, places that had been essentially off limits to Jews like Ptolemais on the Galilean coast, Askelon and Gaza, all now had growing populations of Jewish migrants settling into these societies of trade and shipping, looking outward into the Mediterranean towards Rhodes and Cyprus, the Aegean islands, south-west to Alexandria and Cyrenaica. And it was because of this social and economic gravitational pull that Herod decided to build at its geographical centre the spectacular coastal city named for his latest patron, Augustus – Caesarea Maritima. Boasting an enormous amphitheatre, a harbour made from sinking stonework foundation walls twenty fathoms deep, a showy marine palace with bathing pools, towers and colossi facing the ocean, Caesarea turned coastal Palestine into the new Phoenicia almost overnight. Jews poured into its elegant quarters, with others choosing Jaffa in the south or Ptolemais in the north. The expansion was so fast and so momentous that it was bound, in the end, to bring with it inter-ethnic trouble between Jewish and non-Jewish populations, as was also the case in both Rome and Alexandria. But as long as Herod was governing, that trouble was contained, and the demands of Roman procurators were kept within bounds so as not to provoke dangerous alienation.

  At the other pole of Jewish life was Jerusalem. And just as the sense of a Jewish world pushed beyond Judaea towards the coast, south into the desert and north into Galilee and the Golan, was essentially a Herodian achievement, so the physical transformation of the Temple was likewise the accomplishment of the Idumean-Jewish king and master builder. Until Herod got to work on it, and for all its lavish ornamentation, the size of the Temple was still confined to the modest scale of Zerubbabel and the returnees’ design, four centuries before. Under the Hasmoneans, Jerusalem had grown more populous and the crowds pouring into the Temple districts in festival and high holy day seasons had created an impossible bottleneck of devotion (and less sacred clamour). Herod significantly enlarged the precinct area, quarrying and transporting massive slabs of dressed limestone to the Mount to create the great exterior wall of the precinct perimeter. Recently opened tunnels beneath modern Jerusalem have revealed the colossal scale of many of these slabs, especially immediately above the foundation level, and the Herculean labour that would have been mobilised to set them in place, without benefit of mortar or cement. Even by Roman standards, the masonry walls were so imposing that they gave rise to suspicions in Rome that the Jews were building an edifice that under pretence of religion was actually strategic; a defensive line that could defy any future besieging army. It now seems unlikely that many of those praying at the remnant Western Wall, or who extrapolate from it the Temple they yearn to see rebuilt, give much thought to the sociopathic Idumean Jew who constructed it.

  For centuries Jerusalem had been the Temple: a cult and sacrifice centre of deep devotional importance to Jews. Without compromising that status, Herod wanted to turn it into a city that would rival the other great achievements of the ancient world: Athens, Alexandria and Rome. He thought big and built bigger. The immensity of the Temple, sitting on its urban mountain, visible from miles around, proclaimed to travellers the imperial scale of that vision. Beyond the Temple, too, the modest residential palace the Hasmoneans had built for themselves became a much grander building, both towered fortress and pleasure resort. There were now gardens, pools, elegantly paved streets, markets and arched bridges connecting the Temple Mount with Mount Zion. The Hezekian aqueducts and cisterns were renewed and expanded, another great one built from scratch to supply the needs of Caesarea. That city and Jerusalem became the magnetic poles of Jewish life in the Roman period: two entirely different ways of leading it (much as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem embody the same difference today), but both stamped with that distinctive culture. All of a sudden the Jews were seen as a force to be reckoned with in the eastern Mediterranean world.

  Its aristocrats, lay and priestly, revelled in this new splendour. That Sadducees saw no contradiction between their calling and the elegance of ornamental design we know from the recently discovered ossuary of Joseph, son of Caiaphas, the priest (and cert
ainly a Sadducee) who, at the behest of Pilate, sat in judgement on Jesus of Nazareth. If Jesus’ followers wanted to dramatise the difference between their messianic champion of the poor and the vanity of the Jewish priesthood, they could hardly have done better than the Caiaphas tomb with its exquisitely carved, inter-patterned rosettes. Provided that decoration did not violate the Second Commandment’s prohibition on ‘graven images’ (generally assumed to be the representation of human figures), there was in fact nothing about ornament that was in plain contradiction to the Torah. Hiddur mitzvah – the ‘glorification’ of the commandment, in the phrase used in Exodus 15:2 – became understood as material beautification. No one can read the middle books of the Pentateuch without registering the relish its writers took in describing in minute detail the ornamentation of the Tabernacle, which was both rudimentary in its portable, travel-ready simplicity, and lavish in its decoration. Bezalel, the master artisan, designing everything from the tentpoles to priestly costume, became the first legendary hero of Jewish craft, nearly as important in his legacy to Judaism as Aaron. Almost certainly the multitudes of artisans – goldsmiths, jewellers, weavers, metal beaters, masons and the like – who transformed Jerusalem and added immensely to its prosperity in the Maccabean and Herodian years, thought of themselves as the descendants of Bezalel. And it was the patronage of the Herodian court, and the priestly and lay oligarchs – with their taste for public show and sumptuous houses – that transformed the reputation of the city in the classical world.

  For the most part the Herodian monarchy was careful not to cross a line into idolatrous offensiveness. But the pull of Roman self-glorification was tempting nonetheless. At some point Herod had his emblem of a golden eagle mounted atop one of the outer Temple gates. It was not as bad as a likeness of himself, and it was not within the interior precincts, but still it was enough to provoke a gang of young sophistai – sophists: sticklers for the law, followers of Judas of Sepphoris in Galilee – into clambering down on ropes slung from the roof and hacking off the eagle with axes. Sticklers they may have been, but they still would not have dared do it unless they believed the rumour circulating that Herod was entirely, rather than partially, consumed by worms. Unfortunately for the hackers he was not. Brought before the outraged king, and asked why they seemed merry when they were about to die for their crime, the sophists replied that they would ‘enjoy greater happiness after they were dead’.33 It seemed to cheer Herod up one last time to grant them their wish.

  Hiddur mitzvah, or what was overdone in its name, still gave offence to the two other religious sects described by Josephus. The Pharisees – probably the most numerous, although no one was counting – made a great show of puritanical plainness, in keeping with their self-designation as keepers (and interpreters) of the Word. Although the canon of the Bible was not formally closed (there would be no grandiose proclamation), it was agreed that the age of prophecy had indeed passed. It was now possible then to inaugurate the first intensive exercises in midrash, a word which carries the same sense as the Greek historia of enquiry or questioning examination. In particular it was thought that at the time of their utterances the prophets, from Isaiah onwards, could not be prophetic enough to foresee how their words would be vindicated by changing circumstances, so the Pharisees especially set about doing, in effect, applied prophetics. And from that questioning came a still more radical development: the self-apportionment of an authority to make the interpretation of the Torah coeval with its text. No one was yet coining an ‘oral law’, but the assumptions that, ultimately, it would govern the way the Torah shaped daily lives was already at work in Pharisaic teaching. It was serious and lively enough to provoke an opposite reaction from Samaritans who insisted on the exclusive authority of the written law.

  The Pharisees presented themselves as teachers and guides uncorrupted by the usurped grandeur of Sadducee institutional power. But for others it was impossible to achieve a state of pure observance – much less the intense and close-up investigation of meanings – while trapped inside the distracted world of populous, vainglorious, swarming Jerusalem. The north-western shore of the Dead Sea was only thirty-five miles from Jerusalem, yet remote enough to offer the community of ascetics that settled at Qumran at least an illusion of desert purification. For a long time now they have been identified with the Essene sect described by Josephus, and the description given by Pliny the Elder a generation later of the topography of their settlement seems to coincide exactly with the desert-sea landscape at Qumran. Enough doubts about this identification have lately been registered to shake the assumption, but the word they sometimes used for ‘community’ – yachad, together – is poetically apposite enough to use without worrying too much about the exact degree of their Essenery. The first generation, led by a ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, may have come to Qumran during the Maccabean period or even earlier (the oldest of the 850 manuscripts discovered in the eleven caves are fourth century BCE). But their motivation – the escape from urban wordliness and the outward trappings of Judeo-royal power and governance – would have been the same. Their importance was to personify yet another model of Jewish devotion that remains very much alive today: self-contained, suspicious of outsiders, obsessed with purity (passages in the Serek hayachad – the Community Rule, present in Qumran in fifteen copies! – ponder in minute detail just which kind of skin blemishes disqualify a man from the community, and warn against a man not yet fully received into the covenant pressing ripe olives or figs at harvest time, lest he defile the juice with his imperfect touch and thus contaminate the community provisions). The Rule is compulsively obsessed with ablutions (before and after common meals), and ferocious in the punishment of backsliders.34 Woe betide anyone falling asleep at meetings of the council (but how could anyone not? one wonders). As for the Sabbath, not only must there be no suggestion of work, but ‘he shall not talk about any matter relating to work or wealth’ (which would have disqualified my father and uncles from membership for a start, although they would have been heartened that another subject dear to their hearts – eating and drinking – was deemed permissible).35

  We take this tripartite division of the sects on trust from Josephus (as we do everything else from this period) but there is no reason to suppose it fictitious. He was certainly exaggerating later – in his Against Apion, written to correct the delusions of the Gentiles – when he insisted on the unity of Jewish culture and practice (not a common view). But he was right to suggest that, the toxic politics of the high priesthood aside, the divisions of the sects would not necessarily have torn the Jewish community apart had not there been a fourth tendency, arising within the Pharisees but implacably hostile to both the Herodian government and their protectors and supporters: the Romans. This was the beginning of Zealotry that would ultimately provoke the war of destruction in Palestine. Some of the Zealot leaders (whom, frustratingly, we know only from Josephus’ intensely unsympathetic and caricatural characterisations, like John of Gischala) undoubtedly thought of themselves as called as much by religious fervour as a kind of Jewish tribal fury. Another was a mysterious Egyptian ‘prophet’ who was charismatic enough to lead a following of 30,000 to Mount Zion before fizzling out. But the Zealots and their increasingly embittered sensibility, their conviction (shared by the yachad at Qumran) that some sort of reckoning between the forces of light and darkness was at hand, meant that beneath the apparently adamantine surface of the Pax Herodiana all sorts of trouble was looming.

  Some of that trouble was ethnic. Just because Tyrians (from Phoenician Tyre), Greeks, Syrians, Jews and scatterings of Egyptians and Romans shared the living space of the new towns didn’t mean they especially liked each other or were oblivious to differences, especially below the level of the commonly Hellenised elites. Every so often in Ptolemais, Scythopolis, Caesarea or Jaffa, casual resentments boiled over into neighbourhood violence, each of the parties calling in government officials, and behind them Roman authorities and soldiers, to uphold their caus
e and punish their neighbourhood enemies. One particularly ugly outbreak of inter-communal violence and the perceived partiality of the Romans against the Jews would trigger the all-out revolt.

  Social division was also making the Pax Herodiana harder to sustain. As with the usual way of such developments, the acceleration of a trading and market economy along the coast, with its concomitant flow into the Lower Galilean countryside and handsome new towns, had also created a populous underclass. Many of them are likely to have been itinerant pastoralists from barren, semi-desert environments, beyond the farms of Galilee and Jezreel, growing prosperous as they supplied the awakening urban markets with grain, oil and wine. They made up the labour pool for the great Herodian building projects, and they suffered accordingly when those works were done. Eighteen thousand alone of this casual labour force were put out of work when the Temple construction was completed. When Jesusite preachers told them they, not the rich, were likelier to enter heaven, they must have listened attentively. The chances are that they were also a recruiting pool for more violent men who could see profit from working up a head of steam against Greeks or Samaritans or, if they were rash enough, even the Romans. Barabbas and Jesus of Nazareth were truly opposite sides of the same coin.