JUDAEA AND THE JEWS.
The history of the Jewish land is as little the history of the Jewish
people as the history of the States of the Church is that of the
Catholics; it is just as requisite to separate the two as to consider
them together.
[Sidenote: Judaea and the priestly rule under the Seleucids.]
The Jews in the land of the Jordan, with whom the Romans had to do,
were not the people who under their judges and kings fought with Moab
and Edom, and listened to the discourses of Amos and Hosea. The small
community of pious exiles, driven out by foreign rule, and brought
back again by a change in the hands wielding that rule, who began
their new establishment by abruptly repelling the remnants of their
kinsmen left behind in the old abodes and laying the foundation for the
irreconcilable feud between Jews and Samaritans--the ideal of national
exclusiveness and priestly control holding the mind in chains--had
long before the Roman period developed under the government of the
Seleucids the so-called Mosaic theocracy, a clerical corporation with
the high-priest at its head, which, acquiescing in foreign rule and
renouncing the formation of a state, guarded the distinctiveness of its
adherents, and dominated them under the aegis of the protecting power.
This retention of the national character in religious forms, while
ignoring the state, was the distinctive mark of the later Judaism.
Probably every idea of God is in its formation national; but no other
God has been so from the outset the God only of his people as Jahve,
and no one has so remained such without distinction of time and place.
Those men returning to the Holy Land, who professed to live according
to the statutes of Moses and in fact lived according to the statutes
of Ezra and Nehemiah,[157] had remained just as dependent on the
great-kings of the East, and subsequently on the Seleucids, as they had
been by the waters of Babylon. A political element no more attached
to this organisation than to the Armenian or the Greek Church under
its patriarchs in the Turkish empire; no free current of political
development pervades this clerical restoration; none of the grave
and serious obligations of a commonwealth standing on its own basis
hampered the priests of the temple of Jerusalem in the setting up of
the kingdom of Jahve upon earth.
[Sidenote: Kingdom of the Hasmonaeans.]
The reaction did not fail to come. That church-without-a-state could
only last so long as a secular great power served it as lord-protector
or as bailiff. When the kingdom of the Seleucids fell into decay, a
Jewish commonwealth was created afresh by the revolt against foreign
rule, which drew its best energies precisely from the enthusiastic
national faith. The high priest of Salem was called from the temple
to the battlefield. The family of the Hasmonaeans restored the empire
of Saul and David nearly in its old limits, and not only so, but
these warlike high priests renewed also in some measure the former
truly political monarchy controlling the priests. But that monarchy,
at once the product of, and the contrast to, that priestly rule,
was not according to the heart of the pious. The Pharisees and the
Sadducees separated and began to make war on one another. It was not
so much doctrines and ritual differences that here confronted each
other, as, on the one hand, the persistence in a priestly government
which simply clung to religious ordinances and interests, and
otherwise was indifferent to the independence and the self-control of
the community; on the other hand, the monarchy aiming at political
development and endeavouring to procure for the Jewish people, by
fighting and by treaty, its place once more in the political conflict,
of which the Syrian kingdom was at that time the arena. The former
tendency dominated the multitude, the latter had the preponderance in
intelligence and in the upper classes; its most considerable champion
was king Iannaeus Alexander, who during his whole reign was at enmity
not less with the Syrian rulers than with his own Pharisees (iv. 139)
{iv. 133}. Although it was properly but the other, and in fact the more
natural and more potent, expression of the national revival, it yet by
its greater freedom of thinking and acting came into contact with the
Hellenic character, and was regarded especially by its pious opponents
as foreign and unbelieving.
[Sidenote: The Jewish Diaspora.]
But the inhabitants of Palestine were only a portion, and not the most
important portion, of the Jews; the Jewish communities of Babylonia,
Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, were far superior to those of Palestine even
after their regeneration by the Maccabees. The Jewish Diaspora in the
imperial period was of more significance than the latter; and it was an
altogether peculiar phenomenon.
The settlements of the Jews beyond Palestine grew only in a subordinate
degree out of the same impulse as those of the Phoenicians and the
Hellenes. From the outset an agricultural people and dwelling far from
the coast, their settlements abroad were a non-free and comparatively
late formation, a creation of Alexander or of his marshals.[158] In
those immense efforts at founding Greek towns continued throughout
generations, such as never before and never afterwards occurred to a
like extent, the Jews had a conspicuous share, however singular it
was to invoke their aid in particular towards the Hellenising of the
East. This was the case above all with Egypt. The most considerable of
all the towns created by Alexander, Alexandria on the Nile, was since
the times of the first Ptolemy, who after the occupation of Palestine
transferred thither a mass of its inhabitants, almost as much a city
of the Jews as of the Greeks, and the Jews there were to be esteemed
at least equal to those of Jerusalem in number, wealth, intelligence,
and organisation. In the first times of the empire there was reckoned a
million of Jews to eight millions of Egyptians, and their influence, it
may be presumed, transcended this numerical proportion. We have already
observed that, on no smaller a scale, the Jews in the Syrian capital
of the empire had been similarly organised and developed (p. 127). The
diffusion and the importance of the Jews of Asia Minor are attested
among other things by the attempt which was made under Augustus by the
Ionian Greek cities, apparently after joint concert, to compel their
Jewish fellow townsmen either to withdrawal from their faith or to full
assumption of civic burdens. Beyond doubt there were independently
organised bodies of Jews in all the new Hellenic foundations,[159] and
withal in numerous old Hellenic towns, even in Hellas proper, _e.g._ in
Corinth. The organisation was placed throughout on the footing that the
nationality of the Jews with the far-reaching consequences drawn from
it by themselves was preserved, and only the use of the Greek language
was required of them. Thus amidst this Graecising, into which the East
was at that time coaxed or forced by those in authority, the Jews of
the Greek towns became Greek-speaking Orientals.
[Sidenote: Greek language.]
That in the Jew-communities of the Macedonian towns the Greek language
not merely attained to dominion in the natural way of intercourse, but
was a compulsory ordinance imposed upon them, seems of necessity to
result from the state of the case. In a similar way Trajan subsequently
Romanised Dacia with colonists from Asia Minor. Without this
compulsion, the external uniformity in the foundation of towns could
not have been carried out, and this material for Hellenising generally
could not have been employed. The governments went in this respect
very far and achieved much. Already under the second Ptolemy, and at
his instigation, the sacred writings of the Jews were translated into
Greek in Egypt, and at least at the beginning of the imperial period
the knowledge of Hebrew among the Jews of Alexandria was nearly as rare
as that of the original languages of Scripture is at present in the
Christian world; there was nearly as much discussion as to the faults
of translation of the so-called Seventy Alexandrians as on the part
of pious men among us regarding the errors of Luther’s translation.
The national language of the Jews had at this epoch disappeared
everywhere from the intercourse of life, and maintained itself only in
ecclesiastical use somewhat like the Latin language in the religious
domain of Catholicism. In Judaea itself its place had been taken by
the Aramaic popular language of Syria, akin no doubt to the Hebrew;
the Jews outside of Judaea, with whom we are concerned, had entirely
laid aside the Semitic idiom, and it was not till long after this
epoch that the reaction set in, which scholastically brought back the
knowledge and the use of it more generally among the Jews. The literary
works, which they produced at this epoch in great number, were in the
better times of the empire all Greek. If language alone conditioned
nationality, there would be little to tell for this period as to the
Jews.
[Sidenote: Retention of nationality.]
But with this linguistic compulsion, at first perhaps severely felt,
was combined the recognition of the distinctive nationality with
all its consequences. Everywhere in the cities of the monarchy of
Alexander the burgess-body was formed of the Macedonians, that is,
those really Macedonian, or the Hellenes esteemed equal to them. By
the side of these stood, in addition to foreigners, the natives, in
Alexandria the Egyptians, in Cyrene the Libyans and generally the
settlers from the East, who had indeed no other home than the new city,
but were not recognised as Hellenes. To this second category the Jews
belonged; but they, and they only, were allowed to form, so to speak,
a community within the community, and--while the other non-burgesses
were ruled by the authorities of the burgess-body--up to a certain
degree to govern themselves.[160] The “Jews,” says Strabo, “have in
Alexandria a national head (ἐθνάρχης) of their own, who presides over
the people (ἔθνος), and decides processes and disposes of contracts and
arrangements as if he ruled an independent community.” This was done,
because the Jews indicated a specific jurisdiction of this sort as
required by their nationality or--what amounts to the same thing--their
religion. Further, the general political arrangements had respect in
an extensive measure to the national-religious scruples of the Jews,
and accommodated them as far as possible by exemptions. The privilege
of dwelling together was at least frequently added; in Alexandria,
_e.g._ two of the five divisions of the city were inhabited chiefly
by Jews. This seems not to have been the Ghetto system, but rather a
usage resting on the basis of settlement to begin with, and thereafter
retained on both sides, whereby conflicts with neighbours were in some
measure obviated.
[Sidenote: Extent of the Diaspora.]
Thus the Jews came to play a prominent part in the Macedonian
Hellenising of the East; their pliancy and serviceableness on the
one hand, their unyielding tenacity on the other, must have induced
the very realistic statesmen who assigned this course of action,
to resolve on such arrangements. Nevertheless the extraordinary
extent and significance of the Jewish Diaspora, as compared with the
narrowness and poorness of their home, remains at once a fact and
a problem. In dealing with it we may not overlook the circumstance
that the Palestinian Jews furnished no more than the nucleus for the
Jews of other countries. The Judaism of the older time was anything
but exclusive; was, on the contrary, no less pervaded by missionary
zeal than were afterwards Christianity and Islam. The Gospel makes
reference to Rabbis who traversed sea and land to make a proselyte; the
admission of half-proselytes, of whom circumcision was not expected but
to whom religious fellowship was yet accorded, is an evidence of this
converting zeal and at the same time one of its most effective means.
Motives of very various kinds came to the help of this proselytising.
The civil privileges, which the Lagids and Seleucids conferred on
the Jews, must have induced a great number of non-Jewish Orientals
and half-Hellenes to attach themselves in the new towns to the
privileged category of the non-burgesses. In later times the decay of
the traditional faith of the country helped the Jewish _propaganda_.
Numerous persons, especially of the cultivated classes, whose sense
of faith and morality turned away with horror or derision from what
the Greeks, and still more from what the Egyptians termed religion,
sought refuge in the simpler and purer Jewish doctrine renouncing
polytheism and idolatry--a doctrine which largely met the religious
views resulting from the development of philosophy among the cultured
and half-cultured circles. There is a remarkable Greek moral poem,
probably from the later epoch of the Roman republic, which is drawn
from the Mosaic books on such a footing that it adopts the doctrine of
monotheism and the universal moral law, but avoids everything offensive
to the non-Jew and all direct opposition to the ruling religion,
evidently intended to gain wider acceptance for this denationalised
Judaism. Women in particular addicted themselves by preference to the
Jewish faith. When the authorities of Damascus in the year 66 resolved
to put to death the captive Jews, it was agreed to keep this resolution
secret, in order that the female population devoted to the Jews might
not prevent its execution. Even in the West, where the cultivated
circles were otherwise averse to Jewish habits, dames of rank early
formed an exception; Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s wife, sprung from a noble
family, was notorious for her pious Jewish faith and her zealous
protectorate of the Jews, as for other things less reputable. Cases of
formal transition to Judaism were not rare; the royal house of Adiabene
for example--king Izates and his mother Helena, as well as his brother
and successor--became at the time of Tiberius and of Claudius in every
respect Jews. It certainly was the case with all those Jewish bodies,
as it is expressly remarked of those of Antioch, that they consisted in
great part of proselytes.
[Sidenote: Hellenising tendencies in the Diaspora.]
This transplanting of Judaism to the Hellenic soil with the
appropriation of a foreign language, however much it took place with
a retention of national individuality, was not accomplished without
developing in Judaism itself a tendency running counter to its
nature, and up to a certain degree denationalising it. How powerfully
the bodies of Jews living amidst the Greeks were influenced by the
currents of Greek intellectual life, may be traced in the literature
of the last century before, and of the first after, the birth of
Christ. It is imbued with Jewish elements; and they are withal the
clearest heads and the most gifted thinkers, who seek admission either
as Hellenes into the Jewish, or as Jews into the Hellenic, system.
Nicolaus of Damascus, himself a Pagan and a noted representative of the
Aristotelian philosophy pleaded, as a scholar and diplomatist of king
Herod, the cause of his Jewish patron and of the Jews before Agrippa as
before Augustus; and not only so, but his historical authorship shows
a very earnest, and for that epoch significant, attempt to bring the
East into the circle of Occidental research, while the description
still preserved of the youthful years of the emperor Augustus, who
came personally into close contact with him, is a remarkable evidence
of the love and honour which the Roman ruler met with in the Greek
world. The dissertation on the Sublime, written in the first period
of the empire by an unknown author, one of the finest aesthetic works
preserved to us from antiquity, certainly proceeds, if not from a Jew,
at any rate from a man who revered alike Homer and Moses.[161] Another
treatise, also anonymous, upon the Universe--likewise an attempt,
respectable of its kind, to blend the doctrine of Aristotle with that
of the Stoa--was perhaps written also by a Jew, and dedicated certainly
to the Jew of highest repute and highest station in the Neronian age,
Tiberius Alexander (p. 204), chief of the staff to Corbulo and Titus.
The wedding of the two worlds of intellect meets us most clearly in
the Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy, the most acute and most palpable
expression of a religious movement, not merely affecting but also
attacking the essence of Judaism. The Hellenic intellectual development
conflicted with national religions of all sorts, inasmuch as it
either denied their views or else filled them with other contents,
drove out the previous gods from the minds of men and put into the
empty places either nothing, or the stars and abstract ideas. These
attacks affected also the religion of the Jews. There was formed a
Neo-Judaism of Hellenic culture, which dealt with Jehovah not quite
so badly, but yet not much otherwise, than the cultivated Greeks and
Romans with Zeus and Jupiter. The universal expedient of the so-called
allegorical interpretation, whereby in particular the philosophers
of the Stoa everywhere in courteous fashion eliminated the heathen
national religions, suited equally well and equally ill for Genesis as
for the gods of the Iliad; if Moses had meant by Abraham in a strict
sense understanding, by Sarah virtue, by Noah righteousness, if the
four streams of Paradise were the four cardinal virtues, then the most
enlightened Hellene might believe in the Law. But this pseudo-Judaism
was also a power, and the intellectual primacy of the Jews in Egypt was
apparent above all in the fact, that this tendency found pre-eminently
its supporters in Alexandria.
[Sidenote: Fellowship of the Jews generally.]
Notwithstanding the internal separation which had taken place among
the Jews of Palestine and had but too often culminated directly in
civil war, notwithstanding the dispersion of a great part of the
Jewish body into foreign lands, notwithstanding the intrusion of
foreign ingredients into it and even of the destructive Hellenistic
element into its very core, the collective body of the Jews remained
united in a way, to which in the present day only the Vatican perhaps
and the Kaaba offer a certain analogy. The holy Salem remained the
banner, Zion’s temple the Palladium of the whole Jewish body, whether
they obeyed the Romans or the Parthians, whether they spoke Aramaic
or Greek, whether even they believed in the old Jahve or in the new,
who was none. The fact that the protecting ruler conceded to the
spiritual chief of the Jews a certain secular power signified for the
Jewish body just as much, and the small extent of this power just as
little, as the so-called States of the Church in their time signified
for Roman Catholics. Every member of a Jewish community had to pay
annually to Jerusalem a _didrachmon_ as temple-tribute, which came in
more regularly than the taxes of the state; every one was obliged at
least once in his life to sacrifice personally to Jehovah on the spot
which alone in the world was well-pleasing to Him. Theological science
remained common property; the Babylonian and Alexandrian Rabbis took
part in it not less than those of Jerusalem. The feeling, cherished
with unparalleled tenacity, of belonging collectively to one nation--a
feeling which had established itself in the community of the returning
exiles and had thereafter contributed to create that distinctive
position of the Jews in the Greek world--maintained its ground in spite
of dispersion and division.
[Sidenote: Philo.]
Most worthy of remark is the continued life of Judaism itself in
circles whose inward religion was detached from it. The most noted and,
for us, the single clearly palpable representative of this tendency in
literature, Philo, one of the foremost and richest Jews of the time
of Tiberius, stands in fact towards the religion of his country in a
position not greatly differing from that of Cicero towards the Roman;
but he himself believed that he was not destroying but fulfilling it.
For him as for every other Jew, Moses is the source of all truth, his
written direction binding law, the feeling towards him reverence and
devout belief. This sublimated Judaism is, however, not quite identical
with the so-called faith in the gods of the Stoa. The corporeality of
God vanishes for Philo, but not His personality, and he entirely fails
in--what is the essence of Hellenic philosophy--the transferring of the
deity into the breast of man; it remains his view that sinful man is
dependent on a perfect being standing outside of, and above, him. In
like manner the new Judaism submits itself to the national ritual law
far more unconditionally than the new heathenism. The struggle between
the old and the new faith was therefore of a different nature in the
Jewish circle than in the heathen, because the stake was a greater one;
reformed heathenism contended only against the old faith, reformed
Judaism would in its ultimate consequence destroy the nationality,
which amidst the inundation of Hellenism necessarily disappeared with
the refining away of the native faith, and therefore shrank back from
drawing this consequence. Hence on Greek soil and in Greek language the
form, if not the substance, of the old faith was retained and defended
with unexampled obstinacy, defended even by those who in substance
surrendered before Hellenism. Philo himself, as we shall have to tell
further on, contended and suffered for the cause of the Jews. But on
that account the Hellenistic tendency in Judaism never exercised an
overpowering influence over the latter, never was able to take its
stand against the national Judaism, and barely availed to mitigate its
fanaticism and to check its perversities and crimes. In all essential
matters, especially when confronted with oppression and persecution,
the differences of Judaism disappeared; and, unimportant as was the
Rabbinical state, the religious communion over which it presided was a
considerable and in certain circumstances formidable power.
[Sidenote: The Roman government and Judaism]
Such was the state of things which the Romans found confronting them
when they entered on rule in the East. Conquest forces the hand of
the conqueror not less than of the conquered. The work of centuries,
the Macedonian urban institutions, could not be undone either by
the Arsacids or by the Caesars; neither Seleucia on the Euphrates
nor Antioch and Alexandria could be entered upon by the following
governments under the benefit of the inventory. Probably in presence
of the Jewish Diaspora there the founder of the imperial government
took, as in so many other things, the policy of the first Lagids as his
guiding rule, and furthered rather than hampered the Judaism of the
East in its distinctive position; and this procedure thereupon became
throughout the model for his successors. We have already mentioned
that the communities of Asia Minor under Augustus made the attempt to
draw upon their Jewish fellow-citizens uniformly in the levy, and no
longer to allow them the observance of the Sabbath; but Agrippa decided
against them and maintained the _status quo_ in favour of the Jews,
or rather, perhaps, now for the first time legalised the exemption of
the Jews from military service and their Sabbath privilege, that had
been previously conceded according to circumstances only by individual
governors or communities of the Greek provinces. Augustus further
directed the governors of Asia not to apply the rigorous imperial
laws respecting unions and assemblies against the Jews. But the Roman
government did not fail to see that the exempt position conceded to
the Jews in the East was not compatible with the absolute obligation
of those belonging to the empire to fulfil the services required by
the state; that the guaranteed distinctive position of the Jewish body
carried the hatred of race and under certain circumstances civil war
into the several towns; that the pious rule of the authorities at
Jerusalem over all the Jews of the empire had a perilous range; and
that in all this there lay a practical injury and a danger in principle
for the state.
[Sidenote: in the West]
The internal dualism of the empire expresses itself in nothing more
sharply than in the different treatment of the Jews in the respective
domains of the Latin and Greek languages. In the West autonomous bodies
of Jews were never allowed. There was toleration doubtless there for
the Jewish religious usages as for the Syrian and the Egyptian, or
rather somewhat less than for these; Augustus showed himself favourable
to the Jewish colony in the suburb of Rome beyond the Tiber, and made
supplementary allowance in his largesses for those who missed them on
account of the Sabbath. But he personally avoided all contact with the
Jewish worship as with the Egyptian; and, as he himself when in Egypt
had gone out of the way of the sacred ox, so he thoroughly approved
the conduct of his son Gaius, when he went to the East, in passing
by Jerusalem. Under Tiberius in the year 19 the Jewish worship was
even prohibited along with the Egyptian in Rome and in all Italy, and
those who did not consent openly to renounce it and to throw the holy
vessels into the fire were expelled from Italy--so far as they could
not be employed as useful for military service in convict-companies,
whereupon not a few became liable to court-martial on account of their
religious scruples. If, as we shall see afterwards, this same emperor
in the East almost anxiously evaded every conflict with the Rabbi, it
is here plainly apparent that he, the ablest ruler whom the empire had,
just as clearly perceived the dangers of the Jewish immigration as the
unfairness and the impossibility of setting aside Judaism, where it
existed.[162] Under the later rulers, as we shall see in the sequel,
the attitude of disinclination towards the Jews of the West did not in
the main undergo change, although they in other respects follow more
the example of Augustus than that of Tiberius. They did not prevent
the Jews from collecting the temple-tribute in the form of voluntary
contributions and sending it to Jerusalem. They were not checked, if
they preferred to bring a legal dispute before a Jewish arbiter rather
than before a Roman tribunal. Of compulsory levy for service, such as
Tiberius enjoined, there is no further mention afterwards in the West.
But the Jews never obtained in heathen Rome or generally in the Latin
West a publicly recognised distinctive position and publicly recognised
separate courts. Above all in the West--apart from the capital, which
in the nature of the case represented the East also, and already in
Cicero’s time included in it a numerous body of Jews--the Jewish
communities nowhere had special extent or importance in the earlier
imperial period.[163]
[Sidenote: and in the East.]
It was only in the East that the government yielded from the first, or
rather made no attempt to change the existing state of things and to
obviate the dangers thence resulting; and accordingly, as the sacred
books of the Jews were first made known to the Latin world in the
Latin language by means of the Christians, the great Jewish movements
of the imperial period were restricted throughout to the Greek East.
Here no attempt was made gradually to stop the spring of hatred
towards the Jews by assigning to them a separate position in law, but
just as little--apart from the caprice and perversities of individual
rulers--was the hatred and persecution of the Jews fomented on the part
of the government. In reality the catastrophe of Judaism did not arise
from the treatment of the Jewish Diaspora in the East. It was simply
the relations, as they became fatefully developed, of the imperial
government to the Jewish Rabbinical state that not merely brought about
the destruction of the commonwealth of Jerusalem, but further shook and
changed the position of the Jews in the empire generally. We turn to
describe the events in Palestine under the Roman rule.
[Sidenote: Judaea under the republic.]
The state of things in northern Syria was organised by the generals
of the republic, Pompeius and his immediate successors, on such a
footing, that the larger powers that were beginning to be formed
there were again reduced, and the whole land was broken up into
single city-domains and petty lordships. The Jews were most severely
affected by this course; not merely were they obliged to give up all
the possessions which they had hitherto gained, particularly the whole
coast (iv. 142) {iv. 136.}, but Gabinius had even broken up the empire
formerly subsisting into five independent self-administering districts,
and withdrawn from the high priest Hyrcanus his secular privileges (iv.
158) {iv. 151.}. Thus, as the protecting power was restored on the one
hand, so was the pure theocracy on the other.
[Sidenote: Antipater the Idumaean.]
This, however, was soon changed. Hyrcanus, or rather the minister
governing for him, the Idumaean Antipater,[164] attained once more the
leading position in southern Syria doubtless through Gabinius himself,
to whom he knew how to make himself indispensable in his Parthian and
Egyptian undertakings (iv. 345) {iv. 329.}. After the pillage of the
temple of Jerusalem by Crassus the insurrection of the Jews thereby
occasioned was chiefly subdued by him (iv. 355) {iv. 339.}. It was
for him a fortunate dispensation that the Jewish government was not
compelled to interfere actively in the crisis between Caesar and
Pompeius, for whom it, like the whole East, had declared. Nevertheless,
after the brother and rival of Hyrcanus, Aristobulus as well as his son
Alexander, had on account of their taking part for Caesar lost their
lives at the hands of the Pompeians, the second son, Antigonus, would
doubtless after Caesar’s victory have been installed by the latter as
ruler in Judaea. But when Caesar, coming to Egypt after the decisive
victory, found himself in a dangerous position at Alexandria, it was
chiefly Antipater who delivered him from it (iv. 452) {iv. 430.}, and
this carried the day; Antigonus had to give way before the more recent,
but more effective, fidelity.
[Sidenote: Caesar’s arrangements.]
Caesar’s personal gratitude was not the least element in promoting the
formal restoration of the Jewish state. The Jewish kingdom obtained
the best position which could be granted to a client-state, complete
freedom from dues to the Romans[165] and from military occupation
and levy,[166] whereas certainly the duties and the expenses of
frontier-defence were to be undertaken by the native government. The
town of Joppa, and thereby the connection with the sea, were given
back, the independence of internal administration as well as the free
exercise of religion was guaranteed; the re-establishment, hitherto
refused, of the fortifications of Jerusalem razed by Pompeius was
allowed (707) {47 B.C.}. Thus under the name of the Hasmonaean prince,
a half foreigner--for the Idumaeans stood towards the Jews proper
that returned from Babylon nearly as did the Samaritans--governed the
Jewish state under the protection and according to the will of Rome.
The Jews with national sentiments were anything but inclined towards
the new government. The old families, who led in the council of
Jerusalem, held in their hearts to Aristobulus, and, after his death,
to his son Antigonus. In the mountains of Galilee the fanatics fought
quite as much against the Romans as against their own government; when
Antipater’s son Herod took captive Ezekias, the leader of this wild
band, and had caused him to be put to death, the priestly council of
Jerusalem compelled the weak Hyrcanus to banish Herod under the pretext
of a violation of religious precepts. The latter thereupon entered the
Roman army, and rendered good service to the Caesarian governor of
Syria against the insurrection of the last Pompeians. But when, after
the murder of Caesar, the republicans gained the upper hand in the
East, Antipater was again the first who not merely submitted to the
stronger but placed the new holders of power under obligation to him by
a rapid levying of the contribution imposed by them.
[Sidenote: Herod.]
Thus it happened that the leader of the republicans, when he withdrew
from Syria, left Antipater in his position, and entrusted his son Herod
even with a command in Syria. Then, when Antipater died, poisoned as it
was said by one of his officers, Antigonus, who had found a refuge with
his father-in-law, the prince Ptolemaeus of Chalcis, believed that the
moment had come to set aside his weak uncle. But the sons of Antipater,
Phasael and Herod, thoroughly defeated his band, and Hyrcanus agreed
to grant to them the position of their father, nay, even to receive
Herod in a certain measure into the reigning house by betrothing to him
his niece Mariamne. Meanwhile the leaders of the republican party were
beaten at Philippi. The opposition in Jerusalem hoped now to procure
the overthrow of the hated Antipatrids at the hands of the victors;
but Antonius, to whom fell the office of arbiter, decidedly repelled
their deputations first in Ephesus, then in Antioch, and last in Tyre;
caused, indeed, the last envoys to be put to death; and confirmed
Phasael and Herod formally as “tetrarchs”[167] of the Jews (713) {41
B.C.}.
[Sidenote: The Parthians in Judaea.]
[Sidenote: Herod, king of Judaea.]
Soon the vicissitudes of world politics dragged the Jewish state
once more into their vortex. The invasion of the Parthians in the
following year (714) {40 B.C.} put an end in the first instance to
the rule of the Antipatrids. The pretender Antigonus joined them,
and possessed himself of Jerusalem and almost the whole territory.
Hyrcanus went as a prisoner to the Parthians: Phasael, the eldest
son of Antipater, likewise a captive, put himself to death in prison.
With great difficulty Herod concealed his family in a rock-stronghold
on the border of Judaea, and went himself a fugitive and in search of
aid first to Egypt, and, when he no longer found Antonius there, to
the two holders of power just at that time ruling in new harmony (714)
{40 B.C.} at Rome. Readily they allowed him--as indeed it was only
in the interest of Rome--to gain back for himself the Jewish kingdom;
he returned to Syria, so far as the matter depended on the Romans,
as recognised ruler, and even equipped with the royal title. But,
just like a pretender, he had to wrest the land not so much from the
Parthians as from the patriots. He fought his battles pre-eminently
with the help of Samaritans and Idumaeans and hired soldiers, and
attained at length, through the support of the Roman legions, to
the possession of the long-defended capital. The Roman executioners
delivered him likewise from his rival of many years, Antigonus; his own
made havoc among the noble families of the council of Jerusalem.
[Sidenote: Herod under Antonius and Cleopatra.]
[Sidenote: Herod under Augustus.]
But the days of trouble were by no means over with his installation.
The unfortunate expedition of Antonius against the Parthians remained
without consequences for Herod, since the victors did not venture
to advance into Syria; but he suffered severely under the ever
increasing claims of the Egyptian queen, who at that time more than
Antonius ruled the East; her womanly policy, primarily directed to
the extension of her domestic power and above all of her revenues,
was far indeed from obtaining at the hands of Antonius all that she
desired, but she wrested at any rate from the king of the Jews a
portion of his most valuable possessions on the Syrian coast and in
the territory lying between Egypt and Syria, nay, even the rich balsam
plantations and palm-groves of Jericho, and laid upon him severe
financial burdens. In order to maintain the remnant of his rule, he
was obliged either himself to lease the new Syrian possessions of the
queen or to be guarantee for other lessees less able to pay. After all
these troubles, and in expectation of still worse demands as little
capable of being declined, the outbreak of the war between Antonius
and Caesar was hopeful for him, and the fact that Cleopatra in her
selfish perversity released him from active participation in the war,
because he needed his troops to collect her Syrian revenues, was a
further piece of good fortune, since this facilitated his submission
to the victor. Fortune favoured him yet further on his changing sides;
he was able to intercept a band of faithful gladiators of Antonius,
who were marching from Asia Minor through Syria towards Egypt to lend
assistance to their master. When he, before resorting to Caesar at
Rhodes to obtain his pardon, caused the last male offshoot of the
Maccabaean house, the eighty-years old Hyrcanus, to whom the house of
Antipater was indebted for its position, to be at all events put to
death, he in reality exaggerated the necessary caution. Caesar did
what policy bade him do, especially as the support of Herod was of
importance for the intended Egyptian expedition. He confirmed Herod,
glad to be vanquished, in his dominion, and extended it, partly by
giving back the possessions wrested from him by Cleopatra, partly by
further gifts; the whole coast from Gaza to Strato’s Tower, the later
Caesarea, the Samaritan region inserted between Judaea and Galilee, and
a number of towns to the east of the Jordan thenceforth obeyed Herod.
On the consolidation of the Roman monarchy the Jewish principality was
withdrawn from the reach of further external crises.
[Sidenote: Government of Herod.]
From the Roman standpoint the conduct of the new dynasty appears
correct, in a way to draw tears from the eyes of the observer. It
took part at first for Pompeius, then for Caesar the father, then
for Cassius and Brutus, then for the triumvirs, then for Antonius,
lastly for Caesar the son; fidelity varies, as does the watchword.
Nevertheless this conduct is not to be denied the merit of consistency
and firmness. The factions which rent the ruling burgess-body, whether
republic or monarchy, whether Caesar or Antonius, in reality nowise
concerned the dependent provinces, especially those of the Greek East.
The demoralisation which is combined with all revolutionary change
of government--the degrading confusion between internal fidelity and
external obedience--was brought in this case most glaringly to light;
but the fulfilment of duty, such as the Roman commonwealth claimed
from its subjects, had been satisfied by king Herod to an extent
of which nobler and greater natures would certainly not have been
capable. In presence of the Parthians he constantly, even in critical
circumstances, held firmly to the protectors whom he had once chosen.
[Sidenote: In its relation to the Jews.]
From the standpoint of internal Jewish politics the government of Herod
was the setting aside of the theocracy, and in so far a continuance
of, and in fact an advance upon, the government of the Maccabees, as
the separation of the political and the ecclesiastical government
was carried out with the utmost precision in the contrast between
the all-powerful king of foreign birth and the powerless high-priest
often and arbitrarily changed. No doubt the royal position was sooner
pardoned in the Jewish high-priest than in a man who was a foreigner
and incapable of priestly consecration; and, if the Hasmonaeans
represented outwardly the independence of Judaism, the Idumaean held
his royal power over the Jews in fee from the lord-paramount. The
reaction of this insoluble conflict on a deeply-impassioned nature
confronts us in the whole life-career of the man, who causes much
suffering, but has felt perhaps not less. At all events the energy, the
constancy, the yielding to the inevitable, the military and political
dexterity, where there was room for it, secure for the king of the Jews
a certain place in the panorama of a remarkable epoch.
[Sidenote: Herod’s character and aims.]
To describe in detail the government of Herod for almost forty
years--he died in the year 750 {4 B.C.}--as the accounts of it
preserved at great length allow us to do, is not the task of the
historian of Rome. There is probably no royal house of any age in which
bloody feuds raged in an equal degree between parents and children,
between husbands and wives, and between brothers and sisters; the
emperor Augustus and his governors in Syria turned away with horror
from the share in the work of murder which was suggested to them; not
the least revolting trait in this picture of horrors is the utter
want of object in most of the executions, ordained as a rule upon
groundless suspicion, and the despairing remorse of the perpetrator,
which constantly followed. Vigorously and intelligently as the king
took care of the interest of his country, so far as he could and might,
and energetically as, not merely in Palestine but throughout the
empire, he befriended the Jews with his treasures and with his no small
influence--for the decision of Agrippa favourable to the Jews in the
great imperial affair of Asia Minor (p. 171) they were substantially
indebted to him--he found love and fidelity in Idumaea perhaps and
Samaria, but not among the people of Israel; here he was, and continued
to be, not so much the man laden with the guilt of blood in many
forms, as above all the foreigner. As it was one of the mainsprings of
that domestic war, that his wife of the Hasmonaean family, the fair
Mariamne, and their children were regarded and dreaded by him more as
Jews than as his own, he himself gave expression to the feeling that
he was as much drawn towards the Greeks as repelled by the Jews. It
is significant that he had the sons, for whom in the first instance
he destined the succession, brought up in Rome. While out of his
inexhaustible riches he loaded the Greek cities of other lands with
gifts and embellished them with temples, he built for the Jews no doubt
also, but not in the Jewish sense. The buildings of the circus and
theatre in Jerusalem itself, as well as the temples for the imperial
worship in the Jewish towns, were regarded by the pious Israelite as
a summons to blaspheme God. His conversion of the temple in Jerusalem
into a magnificent building was done half against the will of the
devout; much as they admired the building, his introduction into it of
a golden eagle was taken more amiss than all the sentences of death
ordained by him, and led to a popular insurrection, to which the eagle
fell a sacrifice, and thereupon doubtless the devotees as well, who
tore it down.
[Sidenote: Energy of his rule.]
Herod knew the land sufficiently not to let matters come to
extremities; if it had been possible to Hellenise it, the will to that
effect would not have been wanting on his part. In energy the Idumaean
was not inferior to the best Hasmonaeans. The construction of the great
harbour at Strato’s Tower, or as the town entirely rebuilt by Herod was
thenceforth called, Caesarea, first gave to a coast poor in harbours
what it needed, and throughout the whole period of the empire the town
remained a chief emporium of southern Syria. What the government was
able to furnish in other respects--development of natural resources,
intervention in case of famine and other calamities, above all things
internal and external security--was furnished by Herod. The evil of
brigandage was done away, and the defence--so uncommonly difficult
in these regions--of the frontier against the roving tribes of the
desert was carried out with sternness and consistency. Thereby the
Roman government was induced to place under him still further regions,
Ituraea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, Batanaea. Thenceforth his dominion
extended, as we have already mentioned (p. 146), compactly over the
region beyond the Jordan as far as towards Damascus and to the Hermon
mountains; so far as we can discern, after those further assignments
there was in the whole domain which we have indicated no longer
any free city or any rule independent of Herod. The defence of the
frontier itself fell more on the Arabian king than on the king of the
Jews; but, so far as it devolved on him, the series of well-provided
frontier-forts brought about here a general peace, such as had not
hitherto been known in those regions. We can understand how Agrippa,
after inspecting the maritime and military structures of Herod, should
have discerned in him an associate striving in a like spirit towards
the great work of organising the empire, and should have treated him in
this sense.
[Sidenote: The end of Herod and the partition of his kingdom.]
His kingdom had no lasting existence. Herod himself apportioned it
in his testament among his three sons, and Augustus confirmed the
arrangement in the main, only placing the important port of Gaza and
the Greek towns beyond the Jordan immediately under the governor
of Syria. The northern portions of the kingdom were separated from
the mainland; the territory last acquired by Herod to the south of
Damascus, Batanaea with the districts belonging to it, was obtained by
Philip; Galilee and Peraea, that is, the Transjordanic domain, so far
as it was not Greek, by Herod Antipas--both as tetrarchs; these two
petty principalities continued, at first as separate, then as united
under Herod “the Great’s” great-grandson Agrippa II., with slight
interruptions to subsist down to the time of Trajan. We have already
mentioned their government when describing eastern Syria and Arabia (p.
146 f.). Here it may only be added that these Herodians continued to
rule, if not with the energy, at least in the sense and spirit of the
founder of the dynasty. The towns established by them--Caesarea, the
ancient Paneas, in the northern territory, and Tiberias in Galilee--had
a Hellenic organisation quite after the manner of Herod; characteristic
is the proscription, which the Jewish Rabbis on account of a tomb found
at the laying out of Tiberias decreed over the unclean city.
[Sidenote: Judaea under Archelaus.]
[Sidenote: Judaea a Roman province.]
The main country, Judaea, along with Samaria on the north and Idumaea
on the south, was destined for Archelaus by his father’s will. But
this succession was not accordant with the wishes of the nation. The
orthodox, that is, the Pharisees, ruled with virtual exclusiveness
the mass of the people; and, if hitherto the fear of the Lord had
been in some measure kept down by the fear of the unscrupulously
energetic king, the mind of the great majority of the Jews was set
upon re-establishing under the protectorate of Rome the pure and godly
sacerdotal government, as it had once been set up by the Persian
authorities. Immediately after the death of the old king the masses
in Jerusalem had congregated to demand the setting aside of the
high-priest nominated by Herod and the ejection of the unbelievers from
the holy city, where the Passover was just to be celebrated; Archelaus
had been under the necessity of beginning his government by charging
into these masses; a number of dead were counted, and the observance
of the festival was suspended. The Roman governor of Syria--the
same Varus, whose folly soon afterwards cost the Romans Germany--on
whom it primarily devolved to maintain order in the land during the
interregnum, had allowed these mutinous bands in Jerusalem to send
to Rome, where the occupation of the Jewish throne was just being
discussed, a deputation of fifty persons to request the abolition
of the monarchy; and, when Augustus gave audience to it, eight
thousand Jews of the capital escorted it to the temple of Apollo.
The fanatical Jews at home meanwhile continued to help themselves;
the Roman garrison, which was stationed in the temple, was assailed
with violence, and pious bands of brigands filled the land; Varus had
to call out the legions and to restore quiet with the sword. It was
a warning for the suzerain, a supplementary justification of king
Herod’s violent but effective government. But Augustus, with all the
weakness which he so often showed, particularly in later years, while
dismissing, no doubt, the representatives of those fanatical masses
and their request, yet executed in the main the testament of Herod,
and gave over the rule in Jerusalem to Archelaus shorn of the kingly
title, which Augustus preferred for a time not to concede to the
untried young man; shorn, moreover, of the northern territories, and
reduced also in military status by the taking away of the defence of
the frontier. The circumstance that at the instigation of Augustus
the taxes raised to a high pitch under Herod were lowered, could but
little better the position of the tetrarch. The personal incapacity
and worthlessness of Archelaus were hardly needed, in addition, to
make him impossible; a few years later (A.D. 6) Augustus saw himself
compelled to depose him. Now he did at length the will of those
mutineers; the monarchy was abolished, and while on the one hand the
land was taken into direct Roman administration, on the other hand,
so far as an internal government was allowed by the side of this,
it was given over to the senate of Jerusalem. This procedure may
certainly have been determined in part by assurances given earlier by
Augustus to Herod as regards the succession, in part by the more and
more apparent, and in general doubtless justifiable, disinclination
of the imperial government to larger client-states possessing some
measure of independent self-movement. What took place shortly before
or soon after in Galatia, in Cappadocia, in Mauretania, explains why
in Palestine also the kingdom of Herod hardly survived himself. But,
as the immediate government was organised in Palestine, it was even
administratively a bad retrograde step as compared with the Herodian;
and above all the circumstances here were so peculiar and so difficult,
that the immediate contact between the governing Romans and the
governed Jews--which certainly had been obstinately striven for by the
priestly party itself and ultimately obtained--redounded to the benefit
neither of the one nor of the other.
[Sidenote: Provincial organisation.]
Judaea thus became in the year A.D. 6 a Roman province of the second
rank,[168] and, apart from the ephemeral restoration of the kingdom
of Jerusalem under Claudius in the years 41-44, thenceforth remained
a Roman province. Instead of the previous native princes holding
office for life and, under reservation of their being confirmed by
the Roman government, hereditary, came an official of the equestrian
order, nominated and liable to recall by the emperor. The port of
Caesarea rebuilt by Herod after a Hellenic model became, probably at
once, the seat of Roman administration. The exemption of the land from
Roman garrison as a matter of course ceased, but, as throughout in
provinces of the second rank, the Roman military force consisted only
of a moderate number of cavalry and infantry divisions of the inferior
class; subsequently one ala and five cohorts--about 3000 men--were
stationed there. These troops were perhaps taken over from the earlier
government, at least in great part formed in the country itself,
mostly, however, from Samaritans and Syrian Greeks.[169] The province
did not obtain a legionary garrison, and even in the territories
adjoining Judaea there was stationed at the most one of the four Syrian
legions. To Jerusalem there came a standing Roman commandant, who took
up his abode in the royal castle, with a weak standing garrison; only
during the time of the Passover, when the whole land and countless
strangers flocked to the temple, a stronger division of soldiers was
stationed in a colonnade belonging to the temple. That on the erection
of the province the obligation of tribute towards Rome set in, follows
from the very circumstance that the costs of defending the land were
thereby transferred to the imperial government. After the latter had
suggested a reduction of the payments at the installation of Archelaus,
it is far from probable that on the annexation of the country it
contemplated an immediate raising of them; but doubtless, as in every
newly-acquired territory, steps were taken for a revision of the
previous land-register.[170]
[Sidenote: The native authorities.]
[Sidenote: The Synhedrion of Jerusalem.]
For the native authorities in Judaea as everywhere the urban
communities were, as far as possible, taken as a basis. Samaria, or as
the town was now called, Sebaste, the newly laid out Caesarea, and the
other urban communities contained in the former kingdom of Archelaus,
were self-administering, under superintendence of the Roman authority.
The government also of the capital with the large territory belonging
to it was organised in a similar way. Already in the pre-Roman period
under the Seleucids there was formed, as we saw (p. 160), in Jerusalem
a council of the elders, the Synhedrion, or as Judaised, the Sanhedrin.
The presidency in it was held by the high priest, whom each ruler of
the land, if he was not possibly himself high priest, appointed for
the time. To the college belonged the former high priests and esteemed
experts in the law. This assembly, in which the aristocratic element
preponderated, acted as the supreme spiritual representative of the
whole body of Jews, and, so far as this was not to be separated from
it, also as the secular representative in particular of the community
of Jerusalem. It is only the later Rabbinism that has by a pious
fiction transformed the Synhedrion of Jerusalem into a spiritual
institute of Mosaic appointment. It corresponded essentially to the
council of the Greek urban constitution, but certainly bore, as
respected its composition as well as its sphere of working, a more
spiritual character than belonged to the Greek representations of
the community. To this Synhedrion and its high priest, who was now
nominated by the procurator as representative of the imperial suzerain,
the Roman government left or committed that jurisdiction which in the
Hellenic subject communities belonged to the urban authorities and the
common councils. With indifferent short-sightedness it allowed to the
transcendental Messianism of the Pharisees free course, and to the
by no means transcendental land-consistory--acting until the Messiah
should arrive--tolerably free sway in affairs of faith, of manners,
and of law, where Roman interests were not directly affected thereby.
This applied in particular to the administration of justice. It is true
that, as far as Roman burgesses were concerned, ordinary jurisdiction
in civil as in criminal affairs must have been reserved for the Roman
tribunals even already before the annexation of the land. But civil
jurisdiction over Jews remained even after that annexation chiefly with
the local authority. Criminal justice over them was exercised by the
latter probably in general concurrently with the Roman procurator; only
sentences of death could not be executed by it otherwise than after
confirmation by the imperial magistrate.
[Sidenote: The Roman provincial government.]
In the main those arrangements were the inevitable consequences of the
abolition of the principality, and when the Jews had obtained this
request of theirs, they in fact obtained those arrangements along with
it. Certainly it was the design of the government to avoid, as far
as possible, harshness and abruptness in carrying them out. Publius
Sulpicius Quirinius to whom, as governor of Syria the erection of the
new province was entrusted, was a magistrate of repute, and quite
familiar with the affairs of the East, and the several reports confirm
by what they say or by their silence the fact that the difficulties
of the state of things were known and taken into account. The local
coining of petty moneys, as formerly practised by the kings, now took
place in the name of the Roman ruler; but on account of the Jewish
abhorrence of images the head of the emperor was not even placed on the
coins. Setting foot within the interior of the temple continued to be
forbidden in the case of every non-Jew under penalty of death.[171]
However averse was the attitude of Augustus personally towards the
Oriental worships (p. 172), he did not disdain here any more than in
Egypt to connect them in their home with the imperial government;
magnificent presents of Augustus, of Livia, and of other members of the
imperial house adorned the sanctuary of the Jews, and according to an
endowment by the emperor the smoke of the sacrifice of a bullock and
two lambs rose daily there to the “Supreme God.” The Roman soldiers
were directed, when they were on service at Jerusalem, to leave the
standards with the effigies of the emperor at Caesarea, and, when a
governor under Tiberius omitted to do so, the government ultimately
yielded to the urgent entreaties of the pious and left matters on
the old footing. Indeed, when the Roman troops were to march through
Jerusalem on an expedition against the Arabians, they obtained another
route for the march in consequence of the scruples entertained by the
priests against the effigies on the standards. When that same governor
dedicated to the emperor at the royal castle in Jerusalem shields
without imagery, and the pious took offence at it, Tiberius commanded
the same to be taken away, and to be hung up in the temple of Augustus
at Caesarea. The festival dress of the high priest, which was kept in
Roman custody at the castle and hence had to be purified from such
profanation for seven days before it was put on, was delivered up to
the faithful upon their complaint; and the commandant of the castle
was directed to give himself no further concern about it. Certainly
it could not be asked of the multitude that it should feel the
consequences of the incorporation less heavily, because it had itself
brought them about. Nor is it to be maintained that the annexation of
the land passed off without oppression for the inhabitants, and that
they had no ground to complain; such arrangements have never been
carried into effect without difficulties and disturbances of the peace.
The number, moreover, of unrighteous and violent deeds perpetrated
by individual governors must not have been smaller in Judaea than
elsewhere. In the very beginning of the reign of Tiberius the Jews,
like the Syrians, complained of the pressure of the taxes; especially
the prolonged administration of Pontius Pilatus is charged with all
the usual official crimes by a not unfair observer. But Tiberius, as
the same Jew says, had during the twenty-three years of his reign
maintained the time-hallowed holy customs, and in no part set them
aside or violated them. This is the more to be recognised, seeing
that the same emperor in the West interfered against the Jews more
emphatically than any other (p. 172), and thus the long-suffering and
caution shown by him in Judaea cannot be traced back to personal favour
for Judaism.
[Sidenote: The Jewish opposition.]
In spite of all this both the opposition on principle to the Roman
government and the violent efforts at self-help on the part of
the faithful developed themselves even in this time of peace. The
payment of tribute was assailed, not perchance merely because it was
oppressive, but as being godless. “Is it allowable,” asks the Rabbi in
the Gospel, “to pay the census to Caesar?” The ironical answer which
he received did not by any means suffice for all; there were saints,
though possibly not in great number, who thought themselves polluted
if they touched a coin with the emperor’s image. This was something
new--an advance in the theology of opposition; the kings Seleucus and
Antiochus had also not been circumcised, and had likewise received
tribute in silver pieces bearing their image. Such was the theory; the
practical application of it was made, not certainly by the high council
of Jerusalem, in which, under the influence of the imperial government,
the more pliant notables of the land directed the vote, but by Judas
the Galilean from Gamala on the lake of Gennesaret, who, as Gamaliel
subsequently reminded this high council, “stood up in the days of the
census, and behind him the people rose in revolt.” He spoke out what
all thought, that the so-called census was bondage, and that it was a
disgrace for the Jew to recognise another lord over him than the Lord
of Zebaoth; but that He helped only those who helped themselves. If
not many followed his call to arms, and he ended his life, after a few
months, on the scaffold, the holy dead was more dangerous to the unholy
victors than the living man. He and his followers were regarded by the
later Jews alongside of the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes, as the
fourth “School;” at that time they were called the Zealots, afterwards
they called themselves Sicarii, “men of the knife.” Their teaching was
simple: God alone is Lord, death indifferent, freedom all in all. This
teaching remained, and the children and grandchildren of Judas became
the leaders of the later insurrections.
[Sidenote: The emperor Gaius and the Jews.]
[Sidenote: Jew-hunt in Alexandria.]
If the Roman government had under the first two regents, taken on the
whole, skilfully and patiently sufficed for the task of repressing,
as far as possible, these explosive elements, the next change on the
throne brought matters close to the catastrophe. The change was saluted
with rejoicing, as in the whole empire, so specially by the Jews in
Jerusalem and Alexandria; and, after the unsociable and unloved old
man, the new youthful ruler Gaius was extravagantly extolled in both
quarters. But speedily out of trifling occasions there was developed a
formidable quarrel. A grandson of the first Herod and of the beautiful
Mariamne, named after the protector and friend of his grandfather
Herod Agrippa, about the most worthless and abandoned of the numerous
Oriental princes’ sons living in Rome, but nevertheless or on that very
account the favourite and youthful friend of the new emperor, hitherto
known solely by his dissoluteness and his debts, had obtained from his
protector, to whom he had been the first to convey the news of the
death of Tiberius, one of the vacant Jewish petty principalities as a
gift, and the title of king along with it. This prince in the year 38,
on the way to his new kingdom, came to the city of Alexandria, where
he a few months previously had attempted as a runaway bill-debtor
to borrow among the Jewish bankers. When he showed himself there in
public in his regal dress with his splendidly equipped halberdiers,
this naturally stirred up the non-Jewish inhabitants of the great
city--fond as it was of ridicule and of scandal--who bore anything but
good will to the Jews, to a corresponding parody; nor did the matter
stop there. It culminated in a furious hunting-out of the Jews. The
Jewish houses which lay detached were plundered and burnt; the Jewish
ships lying in the harbour were pillaged; the Jews that were met with
in the non-Jewish quarters were maltreated and slain. But against the
purely Jewish quarters they could effect nothing by violence. Then the
leaders lighted on the idea of consecrating the synagogues, which were
the object of their marked attentions, so far as these still stood,
collectively as temples of the new ruler, and of setting up statues of
him in all of them--in the chief synagogue a statue on a _quadriga_.
That the emperor Gaius deemed himself, as seriously as his confused
mind could do so, a real and corporeal god, everybody knew--the Jews
and the governor as well. The latter, Avillius Flaccus, an able man,
and, under Tiberius, an excellent administrator, but now hampered by
the disfavour in which he stood with the new emperor, and expecting
every moment recall and impeachment, did not disdain to use the
opportunity for his rehabilitation.[172] He not merely gave orders by
edict to put no hindrance in the way of setting up the statues in the
synagogues, but he entered directly into the Jew-hunting. He ordained
the abolition of the Sabbath. He declared further in his edicts that
these tolerated foreigners had possessed themselves unallowably of the
best part of the town; they were restricted to a single one of the five
wards, and all the other Jewish houses were abandoned to the rabble,
while masses of the ejected inhabitants lay without shelter on the
shore. No remonstrance was even listened to; eight and thirty members
of the council of the elders, which then presided over the Jews instead
of the Ethnarch,[173] were scourged in the open circus before all the
people. Four hundred houses lay in ruins; trade and commerce were
suspended; the factories stood still. There was no help left except
with the emperor. Before him appeared the two Alexandrian deputations,
that of the Jews led by the formerly (p. 170) mentioned Philo, a
scholar of Neojudaic leanings, and of a heart more gentle than brave,
but who withal faithfully took the part of his people in this distress;
that of the enemies of the Jews, led by Apion, also an Alexandrian
scholar and author, the “world’s clapper” [_cymbalum mundi_], as the
emperor Tiberius called him, full of big words and still bigger lies,
of the most assured omniscience[174] and unlimited faith in himself,
conversant, if not with men, at any rate with their worthlessness, a
celebrated master of discourse as of the art of misleading, ready for
action, witty, unabashed, and unconditionally loyal. The result of
the discussion was settled from the outset; the emperor received the
deputies while he was inspecting the works designed in his gardens, but
instead of giving a hearing to the suppliants, he put to them sarcastic
questions, which the enemies of the Jews in defiance of all etiquette
accompanied with loud laughter, and, as he was in good humour, he
confined himself to expressing his regret that these otherwise good
people should be so unhappily constituted as not to be able to
understand his innate divine nature--as to which he was beyond doubt
in earnest. Apion thus gained his case, and, wherever it pleased the
adversaries of the Jews, the synagogues were changed into temples of
Gaius.
[Sidenote: The statue of the emperor in the temple of Jerusalem.]