The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  Anyone could be fair game. Something about Josephus’ description of the sicarii (named for the curved daggers they concealed in their shirts and stuck in the guts of victims in the tight-packed crowds thronging Jerusalem on festival days, lifting purses and then joining the hue and cry) rings horribly true. This doesn’t mean that the impoverished were divided into beggars and robbers. In his lordly way Josephus is inclined to classify any rebels or dissidents as ‘brigands’, but he could not have been wholly wrong either. Increasingly, the roads and hills and docks of Jaffa, Ptolemais and Caesarea were turning perilous. With mounting frequency the Herodian government turned to the Roman military for police and pacification operations. Predictably, those campaigns were blunt instruments that terrorised the innocent along with the guilty and began to make the Romans seem more like enemies than protectors.

  It is not surprising, then, that this was all held together only as long as Herod himself was alive, and in spite of the murderous palace politics in which he dispatched, inter alia, his own wife and sons. This was routine procedure in the Roman world of course, and for that matter the later Hasmoneans had not invariably been a model family either. Famously, after killing off anyone in his own family who might pose a threat, Herod developed an impressive array of infections of the gut including colonic tumours, an ‘intolerable itching of the intestines’ and a gruesome suppuration of the genitals where conventions of worms assembled in places surprising even to his understandably nervous physicians. When he finally died in 4 ce, in satisfying agony to those who suspected they might be next on the hit list, and was buried according to instructions in the specially prepared tomb at Herodion, the palace complex he had built east of Jerusalem, the funeral procession, miles long, featured contingents of troops from all the nations he had managed to gather to the golden eagle – Greeks and Syrians and Galatians – more unexpectedly, Germans.

  Twenty years later, the apparently imposing edifice the King of the Jews had built came under strain. The turbulent uncertainties of succession in Rome translated into aggressively self-serving and ambitious procurators. With a sense that Roman authority was either weakened or becoming partial, populations in the new cities who had coexisted without more than the usual exchange of suspicions and prejudices, now traded insults, looking for excuses to bait and even attack each other. In Caesarea, the Greeks and the growing population of Jews who had shared the city now disputed whose town it really was. Greeks and Syrians insisted that since Caesarea boasted temples, theatre and a gymnasium it could hardly qualify as a Jewish city. The Jews responded (tellingly) that since a Jew, Herod, had built it, the opposite was true. Periodically the petty argument turned confrontational and even violent.

  Little by little, piece by piece, the Pax Herodiana fell apart. Its twin pillars – that Rome was committed to protecting Jewish laws and traditions, and the assurance that Herod’s dynasty was close enough to the centre of imperial power to pre-empt any threat to the integrity of Judaism – collapsed during the brief but sensationally lethal reign of Gaius Caligula. Of course, everybody had hindsight about the peculiar Caligula, though no one much saw the full, rich, operatic madness of his delusions beforehand – certainly not the Herodian children and grandchildren who had spent their youth in his company as well as Drusus, the son of Tiberius, and the limping Claudius who would reign after the dispatch of the lunatic. The aristocratic priestly Alexandrian Jewish philsopher Philo certainly thought it worthwhile going in person before the emperor to defend his fellow Jews from the abuse and physical attacks that were assailing them.36

  And Caligula’s insistence on placing statues of himself in every temple in the empire was not directed especially at the Jews. No one should take it personally, why so thin-skinned? Some of his best friends, etc. One of them, in fact, was Herod’s grandson Agrippa, who, together with the procurator Petronius, had been saddled with the thankless task of seeing the statue project executed in Jerusalem. To Petronius’ question ‘Will you make war against Caesar?’ the elders in Jerusalem had replied that although they offered sacrifices twice a day for Caesar and for the Roman people, ‘if he would place images amongst them he would sacrifice the whole Jewish nation, and that they were ready to expose themselves with their children and wives to be slain’. After reports of this kind of thing, and in response to Agrippa’s personal appeals, Caligula uncharacteristically relented, but it was probably his assassination in 41 CE that ensured there would be no imperial change of mind. Nonetheless the vital trust in the Roman pledge to keep the Temple inviolate had been irreversibly damaged. For the first time, the external symbol of the bargain struck by Caesar and Augustus, the sacrifices received and made in the Temple for Rome, began to be questioned, interrupted and eventually – in a deliberately inflammatory act – discontinued.

  The astute and not inhuman Claudius went out of his way to revert to the Augustan tradition, issuing edicts which expressly renewed and reiterated those promises, as well as trying to make peace between the now warring Egyptian and Jewish communities in Alexandria. But then came Nero – not that the new emperor repudiated the Claudian pledges, and nor was he particularly hostile to the Jews inside Rome or out. His second wife Poppaea was said to be a ‘God-Fearer’, one of those who enthusiastically followed Judaism without undergoing formal conversion which, given her famous sexual appetite, was just as well. For that matter Nero’s favourite actor (an important issue for him) was the Jewish thespian Alytorus, the butt of the usual circumcision jokes when wearing loose costume onstage.37 The principal damage done by Nero was to appoint the procuratorships in Palestine to men who treated the job as an opportunity for spoils (or at least he did not prevent such men from holding office). The worst of all, for Josephus, was Gessius Florus, who not only rubber-stamped the crimes of local extortionists but operated a protection racket in which he took the lion’s share of the loot. Increasingly Jewish grievances were met with indifference or contempt; and while, in Caesarea, both Jews and Gentiles were evidently to blame for riotous behaviour, the sharp edge of ferociously punitive action was felt more by the former. More and more, the nation that under Augustus had been prepared to live as loyal Jews of a subject state of the Imperium Romanum was beginning to see the Romans as the descendants of Antiochus IV.

  Even before Nero, there were signs that Roman soldiers – sometimes encouraged (or certainly not dissuaded) by their officers and governors – planned provocations guaranteed to end in riot, which would then be the pretext for Roman campaigns of plunder and massacre. During Passover, with crowds pouring into the Temple precincts, one of the guards stationed to prevent trouble decided instead to cause it: ‘Pulling back his garment, squatting down after an indecent manner, he turned his breech to the Jews and spoke such words as you might expect from such a posture.’38 Outrage ensued, followed by stone-throwing. The procurator Cumanus called in the troops who came into the Temple ‘cloisters’, beating the rioters with such force that they fled in panic. But the gates were narrow; the people were many. Ten thousand, says Josephus, were killed in the trampling crush. Instead of Passover rejoicing, ‘this feast became the cause of mourning to the whole nation’.

  V. A Foot in Both Camps

  The moment you know that Josephus is the first – and for many centuries, the only – truly Jewish historian is when, with a twinge of guilt, he introduces his mother into the action. He is with the Roman army to which, as former military governor of Jewish Galilee, he had defected. As usual he is imploring the Jerusalemites to ‘come to their senses before it is too late’ and accept the inevitability of the world-imperial omnipotence that is Rome, arguing that God must have assigned it the role of latest chastiser of the Jews for their repeated transgressions. There was still time, Josephus said over and over to the Jews inside the walls, whom he represents as captive to the ruthless egotistical machinations of the Zealot leaders, to avert the worst: destruction of Temple, city and people.

  While he is going on in this fashion, a stone thrown
from the walls knocks him unconscious.39 Delighted with hitting the target of the Jew they most loved to hate, there is a ‘sally’ by the defenders, and Josephus, still knocked out, is rescued by a flying squad of Roman soldiers sent by Titus. News spreads that he is dead. The Zealots and their followers are happy; the civilian Jews who Josephus likes to think are their hostages are unhappy, since now they have no chance of defecting to safety. And Josephus’ mother, held in prison, shrugs. ‘To those about her she said . . . she had always been of the opinion that since the siege of Jotapata [the place defended by the Jewish garrison which Josephus commanded, and the scene of his infamous desertion to the future emperor Vespasian] she should never enjoy him alive any more . . . she also made great lamentation privately to the maid-servants that were about her and said that this was all the advantage she had of bringing so extraordinary a person into the world; that she would not be able even to bury that son of hers by whom she expected to have been buried herself.’40

  This, at least, has the ring of truth; simultaneously vainglorious, sentimental and with a touch of the tortured wistfulness that settled on Josephus in Rome, after the war, as he wrote his Jewish histories, probably no later than five years following the destruction of the Temple.41 He would never get over the odium of Jotapata, but what did he expect? The command had been conferred on him at the tender age of twenty-six, presumably because he claimed to be from the Hasmonean establishment on his mother’s side, the scion of priests on his father’s. He was of course still known by his Hebrew name, Yosef ben Matityahu. None of this was taken lightly. As a youth, his autobiography tells us, he had gone into the desert to live with, and in the manner of, an ascetic teacher, one Banus, ‘wearing no clothing other than what grew on trees’ and taking cold baths night and day to keep himself chaste.42 A little later in 62 or 63 ce, surviving shipwreck en route, he was sent to Rome to try and liberate some priests from captivity where, through the intermediary of Alytorus, he was introduced to the emperor’s wife Poppaea Sabina, the ‘God-Fearer’.

  His first experience of Rome may have given the young Hasmonean priest a sense of the compatibility of Roman and Jewish culture – enough at any rate to worry about the rising tide of alienation and potential rebellion back home. In keeping with the relentless self-exoneration that runs through his account of the terrible war that follows, Josephus represents himself always in damage-containment mode – trying to restrain hotheads, warning that to take on the might of Rome was to court certain disaster, and only accepting command in Galilee with this sober truth constantly on his mind. Always, he listens to the distress calls coming from people trapped between Roman legions and Zealot terror, and sympathises with towns like Sepphoris, which in the end opt for peaceful subordination rather than patriotic resistance. Writing about himself in the third person (as if that gives the account more credibility), he has ‘Josephus’ rushing back and forth disposing troops, doing what he can to organise the chaotic Jewish forces in Galilee. Not all of this is self-serving fiction. On the vertiginous slopes of Mount Arbel above the Sea of Galilee, defensive caves had been cut, apparently by fugitives from the Herodian government, either brigand gangs or anti-Herodian Jewish armed bands, and in fact probably both. The caves were fortified during Josephus’ command – and thus almost certainly on his orders – as guerrilla holdouts against the Romans, should that be the last resort of Jewish resistance.

  Josephus’ account of the forty-seven-day siege of Jotapata by Vespasian is anything but defeatist. He tries everything he has against the overwhelming numbers and 160 siege engines of the Romans. To protect those who were raising the height of the defensive walls against Roman stones and arrows, he creates a cover from the skins of freshly slaughtered oxen tough enough to take hits and damp enough to resist fire. Then he tries mind games. Since the Romans assumed (not incorrectly) the town was short of water, Josephus ordered the defenders to saturate their clothing and hang them from the ramparts so that water would run down the walls to deceive the assailants. At other moments he sallies forth at the head of raiding bands to burn Roman tents and sow confusion. And the historian is not beyond tall tales emphasising the power of the adversary. One ballista missile strikes a defender with such force it sends his head hundreds of metres; another hits a pregnant women whose baby sails out of her womb landing some distance from its mother.

  The occasional resort to hyperbolic fantasy does not automatically discredit Josephus. Herodotus was notoriously free with fancies as well as facts, and even the critically severe Thucydides was not above ‘imagining’ just what it was that Pericles had probably said to the Athenians according to someone else who claimed to have heard him. Josephus told whoppers for the sake of entertainment, for which, given the relentless detail and many repetitions of his story, we must be duly thankful. But the climax of the story is so unflattering to the author that it seems inconceivable that Josephus would make it up.

  On day forty-seven the Romans break through and slaughter everyone except women and children: 40,000, the historian claims. Vespasian sends an officer whom Josephus had known in Rome to persuade him to surrender, and he is only prevented from this by the anger of his comrades: ‘O Josephus, are thou still fond of life; and canst thou bear to see the light in a state of slavery?’43 Turning philosopher, the commander argues casuistically that since the battle was over and the Romans were no longer threatening death, ‘he is equally a coward who will not die when he is obliged to die and he who will die when he is not obliged to do so’. To expel from the body the divine ‘depositum’ was a reprehensible thing. True courage, he says, is to go on living, which may be the face-saving of a moral worm, but may also, in a Jewish tradition, be true. The argument cuts no ice with his companions in arms. So Josephus proposes lots by which the second drawer slays the first and so on down to the last man standing, who then kills himself. Except that instead of falling on his own sword Josephus presents it in short order to Vespasian’s son, Titus, who was to become friend, protector and imperial patron. It is Titus who intervenes with his father to spare the life of the enemy commander and presents Josephus in person. At which point the Jewish priest assumes the attitude of prophetic grandeur, announcing to the Roman commander that he bears a message from God, the gist of which is that Nero is no more and Vespasian would be called to the purple. If you knew all this in advance, courtesy of the Almighty, you might have let the people of Jotapata in on the secret and spared everyone a lot of grief, says Vespasian. Oh indeed I did, replies Josephus, implying ‘But would they listen?’ Josephus is liberated, given fine clothes and, much more important, permission to marry one of the Jewish captives. Two years later, when the prophecy comes true, the young Jewish defecting soldier comes back to Vespasian’s mind and he is made a trusted collaborator of the new emperor and his son. He is not the only Jew in such a position. Titus’ second in command through the siege of Jerusalem, Tiberius Julius Alexander, is none other than the Alexandrian-Jewish philosopher Philo’s nephew. If there was an ultimate test of apostasy that would be it.

  From Josephus’ perspective, of course, who better than a turncoat to be an impartial historian capable of seeing matters from both sides? It is not that he is blind to the extortionate, brutal and corrupt conduct of a succession of Roman procurators – though Vespasian, in whose old apartment on the Quirinal Josephus is lodged when he goes with the army back to Rome, can do little wrong. Likewise, Titus, the imperial successor, according to Josephus, merely does what must be done and often with reluctance. Just before the final breakthrough of the walls of Jerusalem, Titus summons his officers to a council advising them against destroying the Temple, both from respect for its splendour (highly unlikely) and for reasons of religious respect (not much less so). Later Roman histories, in particular those of Tacitus and Cassius Dio, have Titus making a precautionary decision to obliterate, which sounds a lot more plausible. Tacitus even goes so far as to suggest that the Roman soldiers held back from firing the Temple until they knew they ha
d explicit orders from their general. Josephus’ version is a lot more flattering to his patron. Catastrophe happens when fire spreads from the outer gates (as ordered) into the main courtyard, and gets out of control, as do the Roman troops who had been warned against plunder.

  Titus’ fastidiousness – confirmed by not a single later source – is obviously wishful thinking on the part of the Jewish defector. And it is impossible to get from The Jewish War any nuanced account of the motivation of the Zealot rebels, much less their rank and file. Josephus has next to nothing to say, for example, about the Pharisaic ‘school’ of Shammai, whose young followers (in contrast to those of the more peaceable Hillel) were urged by their famously impassioned and intransigent teacher to commit themselves to resistance against the Kittim – the derogatory Hebrew word for the Romans. Instead, Josephus assumed the lofty stance of Jewish priest-aristocrat turned Roman patrician and imperial pensionary, and paints pasteboard caricatures of the rebel leaders, reducing them to sociopathic brigands (leistei): bloodthirsty, power-mad, loot-hungry thugs, leading the gullible people astray for their own villainous advantage. Josephus’ personal nemesis in Galilee, John of Gischala, was ‘a ready liar, yet very sharp in gaining credit for his fictions, he thought it a point of virtue to delude people . . . He was a hypocritical pretender to humanity but where he had hopes of gain he spared not the shedding of blood.’44 Simon bar Giora is just as bad – not as cunning as John, but more of a monster of raw strength, a petty tyrant who enjoyed torturing the rich. It is when the two of them and their ‘robber’ armies fall back on Jerusalem, and terrorise the captive population which if left to its own devices would have surrendered, that the city’s fate is sealed. The Zealots then appoint their own priests and pollute the Temple with drunken enormities from which, the distraught representative of the old priesthood Ananus says, the Romans themselves would have refrained. Things go rapidly downhill. Gangs help themselves to property and to women, having murdered their husbands. More astonishingly John’s toughs turn into cross-dressing, gay terrorists ‘indulging themselves in feminine wantonness . . . while they decked their hair, put on women’s garments and besmeared with ointments and imitated not only the ointments but the lusts of women and invented unlawful pleasures of that sort, rolling themselves up and down the city as in a brothel . . . while their faces looked like the faces of women they killed with their right hands’.45