The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  Colourful though this is, it is some way from being an adequate account of a mass social upheaval in the towns and villages of Palestine. Something other than gangsterish intimidation was at work when, after Vespasian’s conquest of Galilee, tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of people follow the leaders of the rising into Jerusalem, there to make their fortified stand against the Roman legions. ‘Brigands’ or ‘bandits’ have long been the terms which the propertied classes (among whom Josephus was certainly numbered) have used when facing a revolt by the overtaxed and dispossessed.46 It is likely that a rapidly expanding market economy pushing inland from the trading coast had prompted the Jewish elite to invest in land, pushing smallholders down into the status of tenants who could be taken or evicted at will, and that it was from this class as well as a shifting population of labourers, hired for the construction works that were everywhere in Roman Palestine, that John and Simon recruited their Zealot armies.47 A more surprising, but critically militant, addition to the rebel ranks came from Idumean veteran soldiers and their families who (if Josephus is to be believed), while fiercely loyal to Judaism, had been impoverished rather than enriched during the Idumean monarchy, and embittered against both its aristocrats and the Romans who protected them.48

  The gates of the city are closed against them but when the Zealots and Idumeans break in nonetheless, their first act, Josephus says, is to massacre the guards, Jewish and Roman, who had tried to exclude them, some 8,500 in a single night.49 They then institute a reign of terror to weed out anyone suspected of moderation – imprisoning, slaughtering and leaving the dead (in contravention of Jewish commandments) unburied, like ‘a herd of unclean animals’. Among the victims are the symbols of institutional temporising, above all the ex-high priest Ananus bar Ananus, who had persevered in trying to dissuade the Zealots and Idumeans from all-out war, and whose public murder, Josephus believed, was the moment when a terrible fate for Jerusalem was determined. The Idumeans, though, insisted they were the ones who honoured ‘the house of God’. The city, Josephus writes, was like ‘a great body torn in pieces’. The paranoia intensified; anyone so much as suggesting compromise, much less surrender, was summarily killed – 12,000 of the young of the city, the historian claims.50

  At this point, Josephus, recovered from his head wound, and with tears in his eyes, persists in trying to get the defenders to see reason and spare further misery. His posture of disinterested compassion might be stretching credibility were it not for the fact that there were intensely devout Jews, especially among the Pharisees, who were also arguing for peace. They believed that God had selected the Romans as the latest instrument of punishment for transgressions, that Rome had its place amid the list of appointed empires in the vision of Daniel, and that to continue fighting was therefore an act of futility against divine will. Hillel is described by the Talmud (centuries later) as debating the bellicose Shammai with exactly these arguments.

  In Talmudic tradition, Hillel’s youngest disciple, Yohanan ben Zakkai – who was in any case deeply suspicious of the Sadducee establishment – was the most anguished at the prospect of a last-ditch Zealot stand dooming the Temple. Three slightly different traditions have Yohanan and his two sons, Joshua and Eliezer, taking matters into their own hands by improvising an escape, probably no later than the spring of 68 CE, during a pause called by Vespasian, before his son Titus made the final onslaught. One version has Vespasian’s spies within the city walls discovering that Yohanan might be an advocate of surrender if Rome promised to respect the traditions, texts and observances of Judaism. Apparently arrows had been fired over the walls with messages attached informing the Romans of the opportunity for a deal. The rabbi is then brought before a duly appreciative Vespasian who grants Yohanan’s request to proceed to the southern town of Yavne with a group of his followers, establish an academy of Torah study and observe its commandments.

  The two other versions are more inventive. Both involve the sage being smuggled out from Zealot-controlled Jerusalem as a corpse, in one story concealed in a coffin, complete with some persuasively reeking object; in the other, one son holds his stiff body, and one supports Yohanan’s head. In both these versions Vespasian has no clue who the petitioner clambering back to life might be, but is impressed by his courage, piety and certainly by his prophetic greeting of vive imperator. Unconvincingly affecting modesty, Vespasian protests that the salutations are premature and presumptuous and, if reported, likely to cost him his life. Yohanan assures him to have no doubt, for had not Isaiah prophesied that only a king would take Jerusalem and its Temple? Much taken by all this (and possibly recalling that he’d heard it before at Jotapata), Vespasian issues the grand authorisation: ‘Go!’51

  Whatever the truth or fiction of the story, its essence – that Judaism would continue even if the worst came to the worst and its outward material trappings were obliterated, and that a teacher, Yohanan, not a high priest, would henceforth be the source of Judaic authority – would leave a deep mark on Jewish memory. It was the foundation moment of the litany of endurance. Essentially, at this point Jewish time stops; the actuality of the Temple cult, its sacrifices and pilgrimages, become virtualised, the feasts themselves embalmed in a Judaism of loss. At Yavne, Yohanan is even said to have instituted a day of memorial mourning, probably the fast of the 9th of Ab. The adaptation of Judaism to its material displacement is best embodied in Yohanan’s dispensation allowing the blessing to continue wherever Jews assembled for worship. The priestly motif of the raised hands transferred itself now to amulets and burial vessels, ossilegia, and eventually to tombstones so that even among the Jewish dead, in whichever far-off place, the priests were among them. Judaism itself had floated free from the grave of history. It was to be a perpetual present, endlessly reanimated in memory. And this tragic humbling, embodied by the Yohanan stories – that a beginning presupposed an epically consuming ending – cast a very long shadow on Jewish history. It was, in effect, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi says in his beautiful Zakhor, the moment when history is replaced by timeless memory.52

  Which is, I suppose, why the originator of the story, Josephus, is the first, and for many centuries the only, Jewish historian. Not only does he assent to the condition by which Judaism’s rebirth, the sustaining transfusion into the Bible, of the blood of commentary, is conditional on death and destruction, but he is also, in some acutely poignant sense, the author of its unfolding. Looking back in some melancholy, I believe, from his Roman exile, Josephus too insisted that he was no traitor to God, only to John of Gischala and the misguided Zealots. On the contrary, when he tried to persuade his fellow Jews to surrender he was only speaking the manifest will of God who had abandoned Jerusalem and was fighting on the side of its foes; and that ‘as long as I live I shall never be in such slavery as to forgo my own kindred or forget the laws of our forefathers. To be a true Jew, then required resistance, if not treason, to Zealotry.’53

  The coup de grâce actually comes with famine rather than fire or sword, and Josephus gives us a set piece of horror, in the manner (and perhaps following the literary example) of Thucydides’ account of the plague in Athens. Sealed tight by Titus’ encircling army, Jerusalem is reduced to the last extremity. Made mad by starvation humans turn into feral scavengers, devouring not just the leather of their sandals, girdles and shields but, Josephus says, filthy things that even dogs wouldn’t touch. Children stretch into the mouths and down the gullets of their elders to snatch boluses of half-masticated food for themselves; raiders shove spikes up the anuses of people they suspect have a few grains of meal hidden away somewhere. The nadir is reached with the story of a woman called Mary from across the Jordan, trapped in Jerusalem and reduced to such straits that she murders the baby boy sucking at her breast, roasts him, and slices him in two, eating one half and setting the other aside for later. The stench draws suspicion and rebel guards who threaten to slit her throat if she does not give them her hidden food. ‘She replied that she had saved a very fine
portion of it for them and withal uncovered what was left of her son. Hereupon they were seized with horror and amazement of mind and stood astonished when she said to them, “This is mine son and what hath been done was mine own doing! Come eat of this food for I have eaten of it myself. Do not pretend to be either more tender than a woman or more compassionate than a mother but if you be so scrupulous and abominate this my sacrifice as I have eaten the one half let the rest be reserved for me also.”’54 Appalled, the men depart; the story instantly gets round the city and people ‘tremble as if this unheard of action had been committed by themselves’. Those that are starving to death beg for the end, and those already dead are thought fortunate not to have survived to witness such things. Titus himself, even as the first smoke starts to drift across the walls, is brought to believe that whatever will now befall such people could not be worse than such inhuman atrocities.

  The unfolding catastrophe is dispatched by Josephus with instructional grimness: thousands consumed in the flames; vast piles of treasure piled up in the Temple storehouse seized; men and women throwing themselves from the walls; and, to be sure, a distraught prophet called Jesus. This particular Jesus (there were a multitude of them) was the son of Ananus the priest, and four years before the war had begun he had made himself obnoxious at celebrations of the pilgrimage festivals by shouting, in the Jeremiad manner, ‘Woe, woe to Jerusalem.’ Flogged for his temerity until ‘his bones were laid bare’, he continued this cry for seven years and five months until at last the great calamity vindicated him, at which point a stone from one of the siege engines killed him in mid-lamentation.55

  All that is now left for Josephus is counting. And so the historian, liquidating his own methodology, collapses back into biblical numerology. He has become a mere arithmetician of Jewish time. ‘Now the number of years that passed from its first foundation which was laid by King Solomon, till this its destruction, which happened in the second year of Vespasian, are collected to be one thousand one hundred and thirty, besides seven months and fifteen days and from the second building of it which was done by Haggai in the second year of Cyrus the king till its destruction under Vespasian there were six hundred and thirty-nine years and forty-five days.’56

  On the other side of the Western ‘Wailing’ Wall, with its throng of the rocking devout, lies an immense tumble of massive Herodian masonry dislodged by some pounding projectile or torn by the Romans from the heights of the south wall of the Temple. One of the stones retains a niche big enough for a man to stand, and the inscription by it identifies it as the place ‘[reserved] to the trumpeter’, the shofar blower who sounded the horn at the beginning and close of the Sabbath and holy days. Silenced for good. And there is the so-called ‘Burnt House’, a tourist attraction in the Jewish Quarter where, amid the artfully arranged broken pots and a spearhead, there lies a telling roof beam, glossily carbonised, faintly blue like the plumage on a seabird’s broken wing. The tourists are directed to a photograph sitting in its dusty frame on a back wall. Faded though the print is, it displays the skeletal arm of a young girl found in the ruined basement, its outstretched finger-bones seeming to reach for something or someone and, without overdoing the Jewish tragic romance, one must suppose, to no avail.

  VI. The Return of Yosef ben Matityahu

  How did the new-minted ‘Flavius Josephus’, pensionary of the emperor Vespasian, feel as seven hundred chained Jewish captives processed before him in the triumph of his friend Titus?57 Was he one of the victors or the vanquished? His new name extolled his benefactors, but the Flavians actually based their imperial authority above all else on the conquest of the Jews and the utter obliteration of Jerusalem. Obliged to relate the parade, he does so in extraordinary detail (this is the most elaborate description of a Roman triumph in any literature) but without much relish, despite the descriptions of the empurpled Vespasian and his son, the soldiery in their finery, the hails and salutations, the procession of pageants representing the battles and fires. One of those re-enactments, after all, was of the burning of the Temple.

  At the conclusion of the passage he mentions the ‘purple Babylonian veil’ – the curtain screening the Holy of Holies – the golden table, and of course the seven-branched candlestick that would be reproduced in the frieze decorating the Arch of Titus. Along with the showier loot, ‘last of all of the spoils’, writes Josephus, ‘was carried the Laws of the Jews’.58 But though the shewbread table is there on the frieze, you look in vain for the scrolls. Perhaps they defied adequate representation, loot-wise? Furled, or unfurled, how could mere scrolls, parchment writing, have made much impression on admirers of Roman conquest? Could someone have belatedly appreciated the impossibility of capturing the words of the Torah, either in sculpted image or by military power? Could there have been a sudden, silent moment of embarrassment when the impotence of trophy display became inescapable? Unlike Simon bar Giora – led through the streets, a rope about his neck, to the Forum where he was tortured and dispatched, signalling the conclusion of the celebrations – the Sifrei Torah, the essence of Jewish identity, could not, by definition, be done away with. The words beat the swords. The words floated free from their material embodiment like the nefesh from the body. So long as someone committed them to memory, so long as someone somewhere had copied them, the words would survive the annihilation of everything else. Yohanan ben Zakkai had been right. The solid trophies were taken to Vespasian’s entertainingly named ‘Temple of Peace’ where, it was said (by the gloating victors, naturally), Jews would come and stare and sigh and the rest of Rome would marvel – for this was, in effect, the first public museum in the city.59 Whether the display included the Torah is not known, but why would it have been there? It was just writing on parchment; nothing entertaining about that.

  Perhaps Josephus understood this, for the most powerful (and relatively succinct) piece of writing he ever set down, Against Apion, becomes in its powerful and moving climax both explanation and praise of the imperishability and – paradoxically – the universalism of the Torah. There was still a lot of Yosef ben Matityahu, the son of priests and Hasmoneans, left in the house historian and protégé of the Flavians. Even before he closes the tragic story of the war, his tune changes, perhaps because this last dreadful finale had played out in 73 CE, barely two years before he began to write.60

  The scene moves from Jerusalem to Masada, pre-emptively taken by the Zealots from the royal government, even before the hostilities proper had broken out. Dominating land-approaches from the west and looking out over the Dead Sea, Herod had built the palace fort with his usual megalomaniac resolution, strong enough to resist both disaffected Jews and the aggressive Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, who bore him a steady hatred. Supplies were laid in and a stupendous system of trapping and storing water built. It was to this mountain fastness that the remaining survivors of the revolt, just under a thousand of them, escaped as Jerusalem burned. Josephus says they were mostly sicarii, the hardcore daggermen who had turned from their Passover crimes to last-ditch rebels, but it seems more likely to have been a mix of Zealot bands and families. Commanded by Eleazar, the third leader of the revolt, they camped amid the mosaics and pools and ritual baths, the storehouses and the terraces carved from the rock.

  They hold out there for three years after Jerusalem has fallen. But there is no escape. The pursuing general Silva laboriously constructs the ramp up which his siege engines and soldiers will ascend to seal the fate of the last rebels. So Josephus has Eleazar gather the survivors and propose collective suicide, ‘Since we, long ago, my friends, resolved never to be servants to Rome nor to any other than to God himself who alone is the true and just lord of mankind the time is now come . . . that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice . . . we were the very first that revolted from them and we are the last that fight against them.’61 God has chosen to make the unconquerable fortress conquerable. Everything is in the hands of the Romans except the power to die free. ‘Let our wives die before they are a
bused and our children before they have tasted slavery and after we have slain them let us bestow that glorious benefit upon one another mutually and preserve ourselves in freedom as an excellent funeral monument for us.’

  If this sounds both familiar and suspicious it is because transparently Josephus has scripted Eleazar to sound like a more virtuous performance of himself at Jotapata. This is what he would like to have said; this is what a piece of him, at any rate, would like to have done. This is the one voice which will echo through Jewish history, through the suicides of medieval Europe, all the way to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943. Faced with understandable terror on the part of those he has urged to die, Eleazar then tries to reassure them by delivering a second speech affirming the immortality of the soul, liberated from the mere husk of the body. This gives Josephus another opportunity to allow his own restive conscience out for an airing. Those already dead, Eleazar says, should be deemed truly blessed ‘for they are dead defending, and not in betraying, their liberty’. Those taken alive by the Romans are tortured and flogged to death; old men lie on the ashes of Jerusalem. ‘Who is there so much his country’s enemy or so unmanly . . . as not to repent that he is alive?’