the street-youth of Alexandria. In the year 39 the governor of Syria,
Publius Petronius, received orders from the emperor to march with
his legions into Jerusalem, and to set up in the temple the statue
of the emperor. The governor, an honourable official of the school
of Tiberius, was alarmed; Jews from all the land, men and women,
gray-haired and children, flocked to him, first to Ptolemais in Syria,
then to Tiberias in Galilee, to entreat his mediation that the outrage
might not take place; the fields throughout the country were not
tilled, and the desperate multitudes declared that they would rather
suffer death by the sword or famine than be willing to look on at this
abomination. In reality the governor ventured to delay the execution
of the orders and to make counter-representations, although he knew
that his head was at stake. At the same time the king Agrippa, lately
mentioned, went in person to Rome to procure from his friend the
recall of the orders. The emperor in fact desisted from his desire, in
consequence, it is said, of his good humour when under the influence
of wine being adroitly turned to account by the Jewish prince. But at
the same time he restricted the concession to the single temple of
Jerusalem, and sent nevertheless to the governor on account of his
disobedience a sentence of death, which indeed, accidentally delayed,
was not carried into execution. Gaius now resolved to break the
resistance of the Jews; the enjoined march of the legions shows that he
had this time weighed beforehand the consequences of his order. Since
those occurrences the Egyptians, ready to believe in his divinity,
had his full affection just as the obstinate and simple-minded Jews
had his corresponding hatred; secretive as he was and accustomed to
grant favours in order afterwards to revoke them, the worst could not
but appear merely postponed. He was on the point of departing for
Alexandria in order there to receive in person the incense of his
altars; and the statue, which he thought of erecting to himself in
Jerusalem, was--it is said--quietly in preparation, when, in January
41, the dagger of Chaerea delivered, among other things, the temple of
Jehovah from the monster.
[Sidenote: Jewish dispositions.]
[Sidenote: The Apocalypse of John.]
The short season of suffering left behind it no outward consequences;
with the god his altars fell. But yet the traces of it remained on
both sides. The history, which is here being told, is that of an
increasing hatred between Jews and non-Jews, and in it the three years’
persecution of the Jews under Gaius marks a section and an advance.
The hatred of Jews and the Jew-hunts were as old as the Diaspora
itself; these privileged and autonomous Oriental communities within
the Hellenic could not but develop them as necessarily as the marsh
generates the malaria. But such a Jew-hunt as the Alexandrian of
the year 38, instigated by defective Hellenism and directed at once
by the supreme authority and by the low rabble, the older Greek and
Roman history has not to show. The far way from the evil desire of the
individual to the evil deed of the collective body was thus traversed,
and it was shown what those so disposed had to will and to do, and were
under circumstances also able to do. That this revelation was felt
also on the Jewish side, is not to be doubted, although we are not in
a position to adduce documentary evidence in support of it.[175] But
a far deeper impression than that of the Jew-hunt at Alexandria was
graven on the minds of the Jews by the statue of the god Gaius in the
Holy of Holies. The thing had been done once already; a like proceeding
of the king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, had been followed by the
rising of the Maccabees and the victorious restoration of the free
national state (iii. 64) {iii. 61.}. That Epiphanes--the Anti-Messiah
who ushers in the Messiah, as the prophet Daniel had, certainly after
the event, delineated him--was thenceforth to every Jew the prototype
of abomination; it was no matter of indifference, that the same
conception came to be with equal warrant attached to a Roman emperor,
or rather to the image of the Roman ruler in general. Since that
fateful edict the Jews never ceased to dread that another emperor might
issue a like command; and so far certainly with reason, as according to
the organisation of the Roman polity such an enactment depended solely
on the momentary pleasure of the ruler for the time. This Jewish hatred
of the worship of the emperor and of imperialism itself, is depicted
with glowing colours in the Apocalypse of John, for which, chiefly
on that account, Rome is the harlot of Babylon and the common enemy
of mankind.[176] Still less matter of indifference was the parallel,
which naturally suggested itself, of the consequences. Mattathias of
Modein had not been more than Judas the Galilean; the insurrection of
the patriots against the Syrian king was almost as hopeless as the
insurrection against the monster beyond the sea. Historical parallels
in practical application are dangerous elements of opposition; only too
rapidly does the structure of long years of wise government come to be
shaken.
[Sidenote: Claudius and the Jews.]
[Sidenote: Agrippa.]
The government of Claudius turned back on both sides into the paths
of Tiberius. In Italy there was repeated, not indeed precisely the
ejection of the Jews, since there could not but arise a conviction that
this course was impracticable, but at any rate a prohibition of the
exercise of their worship[177] in common, which, it is true, amounted
nearly to the same thing and probably came as little into execution.
Alongside of this edict of intolerance and in an opposite sense, by an
ordinance embracing the whole empire the Jews were freed from those
public obligations which were not compatible with their religious
convictions; whereby, as respected service in war particularly, there
was doubtless conceded only what hitherto it had not been possible
to compel. The exhortation, expressed at the close of this edict, to
the Jews to exercise now on their part also greater moderation, and
to refrain from the insulting of persons of another faith, shows that
there had not been wanting transgressions also on the Jewish side.
In Egypt as in Palestine the religious arrangements were, at least
on the whole, re-established as they had subsisted before Gaius,
although in Alexandria the Jews hardly obtained back all that they had
possessed;[178] the insurrectionary movements, which had broken out,
or were on the point of breaking out, in the one case as in the other,
thereupon disappeared of themselves. In Palestine Claudius even went
beyond the system of Tiberius and committed the whole former territory
of Herod to a native prince, that same Agrippa who accidentally had
come to be friendly with Claudius and useful to him in the crises of
his accession. It was certainly the design of Claudius to resume the
system followed at the time of Herod and to obviate the dangers of the
immediate contact between the Romans and Jews. But Agrippa, leading an
easy life and even as a prince in constant financial embarrassment,
good-humoured, moreover, and more disposed to be on good terms with
his subjects than with the distant protector, gave offence in various
ways to the government, for example, by the strengthening the walls
of Jerusalem, which he was forbidden to carry further; and the towns
that adhered to the Romans, Caesarea and Sebaste, as well as the
troops organised in the Roman fashion, were disinclined to him. When
he died early and suddenly in the year 44, it appeared hazardous to
entrust the position, important in a political as in a military
point of view, to his only son of seventeen years of age, and those
who wielded power in the cabinet were reluctant to let out of their
hands the lucrative procuratorships. The Claudian government had here,
as elsewhere, lighted on the right course, but had not the energy to
carry it out irrespective of accessory considerations. A Jewish prince
with Jewish soldiers might exercise the government in Judaea for the
Romans; the Roman magistrate and the Roman soldiers offended probably
still more frequently through ignorance of Jewish views than through
intentional action in opposition to them, and whatever they might
undertake was on their part in the eyes of believers an offence, and
the most indifferent occurrence a religious outrage. The demand for
mutual understanding and agreement was on both sides just as warranted
of itself as it was impossible of execution. But above all a conflict
between the Jewish lord of the land and his subjects was a matter
of tolerable indifference for the empire; every conflict between
the Romans and the Jews in Jerusalem widened the gulf which yawned
between the peoples of the West and the Hebrews living along with
them; and the danger lay, not in the quarrels of Palestine, but in the
incompatibility of the members of the empire of different nationalities
who were now withal coupled together by fate.
[Sidenote: Preparation for the insurrection.]
Thus the ship was driving incessantly towards the whirlpool. In this
ill-fated voyage all taking part lent their help--the Roman government
and its administrators, the Jewish authorities and the Jewish people.
The former indeed continued to show a willingness to meet as far as
possible all claims, fair and unfair, of the Jews. When in the year
44 the procurator again entered Jerusalem, the nomination of the
high-priest and the administration of the temple-treasure, which
were combined with the kingly office and in so far also with the
procuratorship, were taken from him and transferred to a brother of
the deceased king Agrippa, king Herod of Chalcis, as well as, after
his death in the year 48, to his successor the younger Agrippa already
mentioned. The Roman chief magistrate, on the complaint of the Jews
caused a Roman soldier, who, on occasion of orders to plunder a
Jewish village, had torn in pieces a roll of the law, to be put to
death. The whole weight of Roman imperial justice fell, according to
circumstances, even upon the higher officials; when two procurators
acting alongside of one another had taken part for and against in the
quarrel of the Samaritans and the Galileans, and their soldiers had
fought against one another, the imperial governor of Syria, Ummidius
Quadratus, was sent with extraordinary full powers to Syria to punish
and to execute; as a result one of the guilty persons was sent into
banishment, and a Roman military tribune named Celer was publicly
beheaded in Jerusalem itself. But alongside of these examples of
severity stood others of a weakness partaking of guilt; in that same
process the second at least as guilty procurator Antonius Felix escaped
punishment, because he was the brother of the powerful menial Pallas
and the husband of the sister of king Agrippa. Still more than with the
official abuses of individual administrators must the government be
chargeable with the fact that it did not strengthen the power of the
officials and the number of the troops in a province so situated, and
continued to recruit the garrison almost exclusively from the province.
Insignificant as the province was, it was a wretched stupidity and an
ill-applied parsimony to treat it after the traditional pattern; the
seasonable display of a crushing superiority of force and unrelenting
sternness, a governor of higher rank, and a legionary camp, would have
saved to the province and the empire great sacrifices of money, blood,
and honour.
[Sidenote: High-priestly rule.]
[Sidenote: Ananias.]
But not less at least was the fault of the Jews. The high-priestly
rule, so far as it went--and the government was but too much inclined
to allow it free scope in all internal affairs--was, even according to
the Jewish accounts, at no time conducted with so much violence and
worthlessness as in that from the death of Agrippa to the outbreak of
the war. The best-known and most influential of these priest-rulers
was Ananias son of Nebedaeus, the “whitewashed wall,” as Paul called
him, when this spiritual judge bade his attendants smite him on the
mouth, because he ventured to defend himself before the judgment-seat.
It was laid to his charge that he bribed the governor, and that by a
corresponding interpretation of Scripture he alienated from the lower
clergy the tithe-sheaves.[179] As one of the chief instigators of the
war between the Samaritans and the Galileans, he had stood before
the Roman judge. Not because the reckless fanatics preponderated in
the ruling circles, but because these instigators of popular tumults
and organisers of trials for heresy lacked the moral and religious
authority whereby the moderate men in better times had guided the
multitude, and because they misunderstood and misused the indulgence of
the Roman authorities in internal affairs, they were unable to mediate
in a peaceful sense between the foreign rule and the nation. It was
under their very rule that the Roman authorities were assailed with
the wildest and most irrational demands, and popular movements arose
of grim absurdity. Of such a nature was that violent petition, which
demanded and obtained the blood of a Roman soldier on account of the
tearing up of a roll of the law. Another time there arose a popular
tumult, which cost the lives of many men, because a Roman soldier had
exhibited in the temple a part of his body in unseemly nudity. Even the
best of kings could not have absolutely averted such lunacy; but even
the most insignificant prince would not have confronted the fanatical
multitude with so little control of the helm as these priests.
[Sidenote: The Zealots.]
The actual result was the constant increase of the new Maccabees. It
has been customary to put the outbreak of the war in the year 66; with
equal and perhaps better warrant we might name for it the year 44.
Since the death of Agrippa warfare in Judaea had never ceased, and
alongside of the local feuds, which Jews fought out with Jews, there
went on constantly the war of the Roman troops against the seceders
in the mountains, the Zealots, as the Jews named them, or according
to Roman designation, the Robbers. Both names were appropriate; here
too alongside of the fanatics the decayed or decaying elements of
society played their part--at any rate after the victory one of the
first steps of the Zealots was to burn the bonds for debt that were
kept in the temple. Every one of the abler procurators, onward from
the first Cuspius Fadus, swept the land of them, and still the hydra
appeared afresh in greater strength. The successor of Fadus, Tiberius
Julius Alexander, himself sprung from a Jewish family, a nephew of the
above-mentioned Alexandrian scholar Philo, caused two sons of Judas the
Galilean, Jacob and Simon, to be crucified; this was the seed of the
new Mattathias. In the streets of the towns the patriots preached aloud
the war, and not a few followed to the desert; these bands set on fire
the houses of the peaceful and rational people who refused to take part
with them. If the soldiers seized bandits of this sort, they carried
off in turn respectable people as hostages to the mountains; and very
often the authorities agreed to release the former in order to liberate
the latter. At the same time the “men of the knife” began in the
capital their dismal trade; they murdered, doubtless also for money--as
their first victim the priest Jonathan is named, as commissioning
them in that case, the Roman procurator Felix--but, if possible, at
the same time as patriots, Roman soldiers or countrymen of their own
friendly to the Romans. How, with such dispositions, should wonders and
signs have failed to appear, and persons who, deceived or deceiving,
roused thereby the fanaticism of the masses? Under Cuspius Fadus the
miracle-monger Theudas led his faithful adherents to the Jordan,
assuring them that the waters would divide before them and swallow up
the pursuing Roman horsemen, as in the times of king Pharaoh. Under
Felix another worker of wonders, named from his native country the
Egyptian, promised that the walls of Jerusalem would collapse like
those of Jericho at the trumpet blast of Joshua; and thereupon four
thousand knife-men followed him to the Mount of Olives. In the very
absurdity lay the danger. The great mass of the Jewish population were
small farmers, who ploughed their fields and pressed their oil in the
sweat of their brow--more villagers than townsmen, of little culture
and powerful faith, closely linked to the free bands in the mountains,
and full of reverence for Jehovah and his priests in Jerusalem as
well as full of aversion towards the unclean strangers. The war there
was not a war between one power and another for the ascendency, not
even properly a war of the oppressed against the oppressors for the
recovery of freedom; it was not daring statesmen,[180] but fanatical
peasants that began and waged it, and paid for it with their blood. It
was a further stage in the history of national hatred; on both sides
continued living together seemed impossible, and they encountered each
other with the thought of mutual extirpation.
[Sidenote: Outbreak of the insurrection in Caesarea.]
The movement, through which the tumults were changed into war,
proceeded from Caesarea. In this urban community--originally Greek,
and then remodelled by Herod after the pattern of the colonies of
Alexander--which had developed into the first seaport of Palestine,
Greeks and Jews dwelt, equally entitled to civic privileges, without
distinction of nation and confession, the latter superior in number
and property. But the Hellenes, after the model of the Alexandrians,
and doubtless under the immediate impression of the occurrences of the
year 38, impugned the right of citizenship of the Jewish members of the
community by way of complaint to the supreme authority. The minister of
Nero,[181] Burrus († 62), decided in their favour. It was bad to make
citizenship in a town formed on Jewish soil and by a Jewish government
a privilege of the Hellenes; but it may not be forgotten how the
Jews behaved just at that time towards the Romans, and how naturally
they suggested to the Romans the conversion of the Roman capital and
the Roman headquarters of the province into a purely Hellenic urban
community. The decision led, as might be conceived, to vehement street
tumults, in which Hellenic scoffing and Jewish arrogance seem to have
almost balanced each other, particularly in the struggle for access
to the synagogue; the Roman authorities interfered, as a matter of
course, to the disadvantage of the Jews. These left the town, but were
compelled by the governor to return, and then all of them were slain in
a street riot (6th August 66). This the government had at any rate not
commanded, and certainly had not wished; powers were unchained which
they themselves were no longer able to control.
[Sidenote: Outbreak of the insurrection in Jerusalem.]
[Sidenote: Eleazar.]
If here the enemies of the Jews were the assailants, the Jews were
so in Jerusalem. Certainly their defenders in the narrative of these
occurrences assure us that the procurator of Palestine at the time,
Gessius Florus, in order to avoid impeachment on account of his
maladministration, wished to provoke an insurrection by the excessive
measure of his torture; and there is no doubt that the governors of
that time considerably exceeded the usual measure of worthlessness and
oppression. But, if Florus in fact pursued such a plan, it miscarried.
For according to these very reports the prudent and the possessors
of property among the Jews, and with them king Agrippa II., familiar
with the government of the temple, and just at that time present in
Jerusalem--he had meanwhile exchanged the rule of Chalcis for that
of Batanaea--lulled the masses so far, that the riotous assemblages
and the interference against them kept within the measure that had
been usual in the country for years. But the advances made by Jewish
theology were more dangerous than the disorder of the streets and
the robber patriots of the mountains. The earlier Judaism had in a
liberal fashion opened the gates of its faith to foreigners; it is true
that only those who belonged, in the strict sense, to their religion
were admitted to the interior of the Temple, but as proselytes of
the gate all were admitted without ceremony into the outer courts,
and even the non-Jew was here allowed to pray on his part and offer
sacrifices to the Lord Jehovah. Thus, as we have already mentioned (p.
189), sacrifice was offered daily there for the Roman emperor on the
basis of an endowment of Augustus. These sacrifices of non-Jews were
forbidden by the master of the temple at this time, Eleazar, son of the
above-mentioned high priest Ananias, a passionate young man of rank,
personally blameless and brave and, so far, an entire contrast to his
father, but more dangerous through his virtues than the latter was
through his vices. Vainly it was pointed out to him that this was as
offensive for the Romans as dangerous for the country, and absolutely
at variance with usage; he resolved to abide by the improvement of
piety and the exclusion of the sovereign of the land from worship.
Believers in Judaism had for long been divided into those who placed
their trust in the Lord of Zebaoth alone and endured the Roman rule
till it should please Him to realise the kingdom of heaven on earth,
and the more practical men, who had resolved to establish the kingdom
of heaven with their own hand and held themselves assured of the help
of the Lord of Hosts in the pious work, or, by their watchwords, into
the Pharisees and the Zealots. The number and the repute of the latter
were constantly on the increase. An old saying was discovered that
about this time a man would proceed from Judaea and gain the dominion
of the world; people believed this the more readily because it was so
very absurd, and the oracle contributed not a little to render the
masses more fanatical.
[Sidenote: Struggle of parties.]
[Sidenote: Victory of the Zealots.]
The moderate party perceived the danger, and resolved to put down the
fanatics by force; it asked for troops from the Romans in Caesarea and
from king Agrippa. From the former no support came; Agrippa sent a
number of horsemen. On the other hand the patriots and the knife-men
flocked into the city, among them the wildest Manahim, also one of
the sons of the oft-named Judas of Galilee. They were the stronger,
and soon were masters in all the city. The handful of Roman soldiers,
which kept garrison in the castle adjoining the temple, was quickly
overpowered and put to death. The neighbouring king’s palace, with the
strong towers belonging to it, where the adherents of the moderate
party, a number of Romans under the tribune Metilius, and the soldiers
of Agrippa were stationed, offered as little resistance. To the latter,
on their desire to capitulate, free departure was allowed, but was
refused to the Romans; when they at length surrendered in return for
assurance of life, they were first disarmed, and then put to death
with the single exception of the officer, who promised to undergo
circumcision and so was pardoned as a Jew. Even the leaders of the
moderates, including the father and the brother of Eleazar, became the
victims of the popular rage, which was still more savagely indignant
at the associates of the Romans than at the Romans themselves. Eleazar
was himself alarmed at his victory; between the two leaders of the
fanatics, himself and Manahim, a bloody hand-to-hand conflict took
place after the victory, perhaps on account of the broken capitulation:
Manahim was captured and executed. But the holy city was free, and
the Roman detachment stationed in Jerusalem was annihilated; the new
Maccabees had conquered, like the old.
[Sidenote: Extension of the Jewish war.]
Thus, it is alleged on the same day, the 6th August 66, the non-Jews
in Caesarea had massacred the Jews, and the Jews in Jerusalem had
massacred the non-Jews; and thereby was given on both sides the
signal to proceed with this patriotic work acceptable to God. In the
neighbouring Greek towns the Hellenes rid themselves of the resident
Jews after the model of Caesarea. For example, in Damascus all the Jews
were in the first instance shut up in the gymnasium, and, on the news
of a misfortune to the Roman arms, were by way of precaution all of
them put to death. The same or something similar took place in Ascalon,
in Scytopolis, Hippos, Gadara, wherever the Hellenes were the stronger.
In the territory of king Agrippa, inhabited mainly by Syrians, his
energetic intervention saved the lives of the Jews of Caesarea Paneas
and elsewhere. In Syria Ptolemais, Tyre, and more or less the other
Greek communities followed; only the two greatest and most civilised
cities, Antioch and Apamea, as well as Sidon, were exceptions. To this
is probably due the fact that this movement did not spread in the
direction of Asia Minor. In Egypt not merely did the matter come to
a popular riot, which claimed numerous victims, but the Alexandrian
legions themselves had to charge the Jews.--In necessary reaction
to these Jewish “vespers” the insurrection victorious in Jerusalem
immediately seized all Judaea and organised itself everywhere, with
similar maltreatment of minorities, but in other respects with rapidity
and energy.
[Sidenote: Vain expedition of Cestius Gallus.]
It was necessary to interfere as speedily as possible, and to prevent
the further extension of the conflagration; on the first news the
Roman governor of Syria, Gaius Cestius Gallus, marched with his troops
against the insurgents. He brought up about 20,000 Roman soldiers and
13,000 belonging to client-states, without including the numerous
Syrian militia; took Joppa, where the whole body of citizens was put to
death; and already in September stood before, and in fact in, Jerusalem
itself. But he could not breach the strong walls of the king’s palace
and of the temple, and as little made use of the opportunity several
times offered to him of getting possession of the town through the
moderate party. Whether the task was insoluble or whether he was not
equal to it, he soon gave up the siege, and purchased even a hasty
retreat by the sacrifice of his baggage and of his rear-guard. Thus
Judaea in the first instance, including Idumaea and Galilee, remained
in, or came into, the hands of the exasperated Jews; the Samaritan
district also was compelled to join. The mainly Hellenic coast towns,
Anthedon and Gaza, were destroyed, Caesarea and the other Greek towns
were retained with difficulty. If the rising did not go beyond the
boundaries of Palestine, that was not the fault of the government, but
was rather due to the national dislike of the Syro-Hellenes towards the
Jews.
[Sidenote: The Jewish war of Vespasian.]
The government in Rome took things in earnest, as earnest they were.
Instead of the procurator an imperial legate was sent to Palestine,
Titus Flavius Vespasianus, a prudent man and an experienced soldier.
He obtained for the conduct of the war two legions of the West,
which in consequence of the Parthian war were accidentally still
in Asia, and that Syrian legion which had suffered least in the
unfortunate expedition of Cestius, while the Syrian army under the
new governor, Gaius Licinius Mucianus--Gallus had seasonably died--by
the addition of another legion was restored to the status which it
had before.[182] To these burgess-troops and their auxiliaries were
added the previous garrison of Palestine, and lastly the forces of
the four client-kings of the Commagenians, the Hemesenes, the Jews,
and the Nabataeans, together about 50,000 men, including among them
15,000 king’s soldiers.[183] In the spring of the year 67 this army
was brought together at Ptolemais and advanced into Palestine. After
the insurgents had been emphatically repulsed by the weak garrison of
the town of Ascalon, they had not further attacked the cities which
took part with the Romans; the hopelessness, which pervaded the whole
movement, expressed itself in the renouncing at once of all offensive.
When the Romans thereupon passed over to the aggressive, the insurgents
nowhere confronted them in the open field, and in fact did not even
make attempts to bring relief to the several places assailed. Certainly
the cautious general of the Romans did not divide his troops, but kept
at least the three legions together throughout. Nevertheless, as in
most of the individual townships a number--often probably but small--of
the fanatics exercised terror over the citizens, the resistance was
obstinate, and the Roman conduct of the war neither brilliant nor rapid.
[Sidenote: First and second campaigns.]
Vespasian employed the whole first campaign (67) in bringing into his
power the fortresses of the small district of Galilee and the coast
as far as Ascalon; before the one little town of Jotapata the three
legions lay encamped for forty-five days. During the winter of 67-8
a legion lay in Scytopolis, on the south border of Galilee, the two
others in Caesarea. Meanwhile the different factions in Jerusalem fell
upon one another and were in most vehement conflict; the good patriots,
who were at the same time for civil order, and the still better
patriots, who, partly in fanatical excitement, partly from delight in
mob-riot, wished to bring about and turn to account a reign of terror,
fought with each other in the streets of the city, and were only at one
in accounting every attempt at reconciliation with the Romans a crime
worthy of death. The Roman general, on many occasions summoned to take
advantage of this disorder, adhered to the course of advancing only
step by step. In the second year of the war he caused the Transjordanic
territory in the first instance, particularly the important towns of
Gadara and Gerasa, to be occupied, and then took up his position at
Emmaus and Jericho, whence he took military possession of Idumaea in
the south and Samaria in the north, so that Jerusalem in the summer of
the year 68 was surrounded on all sides.
[Sidenote: Stoppage of the war.]
The siege was just beginning when the news of the death of Nero
arrived. Thereby _de iure_ the mandate conferred on the legate became
extinct, and Vespasian, not less cautious in a political than in a
military point of view, in fact suspended his operations until new
orders as to his attitude. Before these arrived from Galba, the good
season of the year was at an end. When the spring of 69 came, Galba was
overthrown, and the decision was in suspense between the emperor of the
praetorian guard and the emperor of the army on the Rhine. It was only
after Vitellius’s victory in June 69 that Vespasian resumed operations
and occupied Hebron; but very soon all the armies of the East renounced
their allegiance to the former and proclaimed the previous legate of
Judaea as emperor. The positions at Emmaus and Jericho were indeed
maintained in front of the Jews; but, as the German legions had denuded
the Rhine to make their general emperor, so the flower of the army went
from Palestine, partly with the legate of Syria, Mucianus, to Italy,
partly with the new emperor and his son Titus to Syria and onward to
Egypt, and it was only after the war of the succession was ended, at
the close of the year 69, and the rule of Vespasian was acknowledged
throughout the empire, that the latter entrusted his son with the
termination of the Jewish war.
[Sidenote: Titus against Jerusalem.]
Thus the insurgents had entirely free sway in Jerusalem from the summer
of 66 till the spring of 70. What the combination of religious and
national fanaticism, the noble desire not to survive the downfall of
their fatherland, the consciousness of past crimes and of inevitable
punishment, the wild promiscuous tumult of all noblest and all basest
passions in these four years of terror brought upon the nation, had its
horrors intensified by the fact that the foreigners were only onlookers
in the matter, and all the evil was inflicted directly by Jews upon
Jews. The moderate patriots were soon overpowered by the zealots
with the help of the levy of the rude and fanatical inhabitants of
the Idumaean villages (end of 68), and their leaders were slain. The
zealots thenceforth ruled, and all the bonds of civil, religious, and
moral order were dissolved. Freedom was granted to the slaves, the high
priests were appointed by lot, the ritual laws were trodden under foot
and scoffed at by those very fanatics whose stronghold was the temple,
the captives in the prisons were put to death, and it was forbidden
on pain of death to bury the slain. The different leaders fought with
their separate bands against one another: John of Gischala with his
band brought up from Galilee; Simon, son of Gioras from Gerasa, the
leader of a band of patriots formed in the south, and at the same time
of the Idumaeans in revolt against John; Eleazar, son of Simon, one
of the champions against Cestius Gallus. The first maintained himself
in the porch of the temple, the second in the city, the third in the
Holy of Holies; and there were daily combats in the streets of the city
between Jews and Jews. Concord came only through the common enemy;
when the attack began, Eleazar’s little band placed itself under the
orders of John, and although John in the temple and Simon in the city
continued to play the part of masters, they, while quarrelling among
themselves, fought shoulder to shoulder against the Romans.
[Sidenote: Task of the assailants.]
The task of the assailants was not an easy one. It is true that the
army, which had received in place of the detachments sent to Italy
a considerable contingent from the Egyptian and the Syrian troops,
was quite sufficient for the investment; and, in spite of the long
interval which had been granted to the Jews to prepare for the siege,
their provisions were inadequate, the more especially as a part of
them had been destroyed in the street conflicts, and, as the siege
began about the time of the Passover, numerous strangers who had come
on that account to Jerusalem were also shut in. But though the mass of
the population soon suffered distress, the combatant force took what
they needed where they found it, and, well provided as they were, they
carried on the struggle without reference to the multitudes that were
famishing and soon dying of hunger. The young general could not make
up his mind to a mere blockade; a siege with four legions, brought to
an end in this way, would yield to him personally no glory, and the
new government needed a brilliant feat of arms. The town, everywhere
else defended by inaccessible rocky slopes, was assailable only on the
north side; here, too, it was no easy labour to reduce the threefold
rampart-wall erected without regard to cost from the rich treasures
of the temple, and further within the city to wrest the citadel, the
temple, and the three vast towers of Herod from a strong, fanatically
inspired, and desperate garrison. John and Simon not merely resolutely
repelled the assaults, but often attacked with good success the troops
working at the trenches, and destroyed or burnt the besieging machines.
[Sidenote: Destruction of Jerusalem.]
But the superiority of numbers and the art of war decided for the
Romans. The walls were stormed, and thereafter the citadel Antonia;
then, after long resistance, first the porticoes of the temple went
on fire, and further on the 10th Ab (August) the temple itself, with
all the treasures accumulated in it for six centuries. Lastly, after
fighting in the streets which lasted for a month, on the 8th Elul
(September) the last resistance in the town itself was broken, and
the holy Salem was razed. The bloody work had lasted for five months.
The sword and the arrow, and still more famine, had claimed countless
victims; the Jews killed every one so much as suspected of deserting,
and forced women and children in the city to die of hunger; the Romans
just as pitilessly put to the sword the captives or crucified them.
The combatants that remained, and particularly the two leaders, were
drawn forth singly from the sewers, in which they had taken refuge. At
the Dead Sea, just where once king David and the Maccabees in their
utmost distress had found a refuge, the remnants of the insurgents
still held out for years in the rock-castles Machaerus and Massada,
till at length, as the last of the free Jews, Eleazar grandson of Judas
the Galilean, and his adherents put to death first their wives and
children, and then themselves. The work was done. That the emperor
Vespasian, an able soldier, did not disdain on account of such an
inevitable success over a small long-subject people to march as victor
to the Capitol, and that the seven-armed candelabrum brought home from
the Holy of Holies of the temple is still to be seen at the present
day on the honorary arch which the imperial senate erected to Titus
in the market of the capital,[184] gives no high conception of the
warlike spirit of this time. It is true that the deep aversion, which
the Occidentals cherished towards the Jewish people, made up in some
measure for what was wanting in martial glory, and if the Jewish name
was too vile for the emperors to assign it to themselves, like those of
the Germans and the Parthians, they deemed it not beneath their dignity
to prepare for the populace of the capital this triumph commemorative
of the victor’s pleasure in the misfortunes of others.
[Sidenote: Breaking up of the Jewish central power.]
The work of the sword was followed by a change of policy. The
policy pursued by the earlier Hellenistic states, and taken over
from them by the Romans--which reached in reality far beyond mere
tolerance towards foreign ways and foreign faith, and recognised
the Jews in their collective character as a national and religious
community--had become impossible. In the Jewish insurrection the
dangers had been too clearly brought to light, which this formation of
a national-religious union--on the one hand rigidly concentrated, on
the other spreading over the whole East and having ramifications even
in the West--involved. The central worship was accordingly once for all
set aside. This resolution of the government stood undoubtedly fixed,
and had nothing in common with the question, which cannot be answered
with certainty, whether the destruction of the temple took place by
design or by accident; if, on the one hand, the suppression of the
worship required only the closing of the temple and the magnificent
structure might have been spared, on the other hand, had the temple
been accidentally destroyed, the worship might have been continued
in a temple rebuilt. No doubt it will always remain probable that
it was not the chance of war that here prevailed, but the flames of
the temple were rather the programme for the altered policy of the
Roman government with reference to Judaism.[185] More clearly even
than in the events at Jerusalem the same change is marked in the
closing--which ensued at the same time on the order of Vespasian--of
the central sanctuary of the Egyptian Jews, the temple of Onias, not
far from Memphis, in the Heliopolitan district, which for centuries
stood alongside of that of Jerusalem, somewhat as the translation by
the Alexandrian Seventy stood side by side with the Old Testament; it
too was divested of its votive gifts, and the worship of God in it was
forbidden.
In the further carrying out of the new order of things the high
priesthood and the Synhedrion of Jerusalem disappeared, and thereby
the Jews of the empire lost their outward supreme head and their
chief authority having jurisdiction hitherto generally in religious
questions. The annual tribute--previously at least tolerated--on the
part of every Jew, without distinction of dwelling-place, to the temple
did not certainly fall into abeyance, but was with bitter parody
transferred to the Capitoline Jupiter, and his representative on
earth, the Roman emperor. From the character of the Jewish institutions
the suppression of the central worship involved dissolution of the
community of Jerusalem. The city was not merely destroyed and burnt
down, but was left lying in ruins, like Carthage and Corinth once upon
a time; its territory, public as well as private land, became imperial
domain.[186] Such of the citizens of the populous town as had escaped
famine or the sword came under the hammer of the slave market. Amidst
the ruins of the destroyed town was pitched the camp of the legion,
which, with its Spanish and Thracian auxiliaries, was thenceforth to
do garrison duty in the Jewish land. The provincial troops hitherto
recruited in Palestine itself were transferred elsewhere. In Emmaus, in
the immediate neighbourhood of Jerusalem, a number of Roman veterans
were settled, but urban rights were not conferred on this place. On
the other hand, the old Sichem, the religious centre of the Samaritan
community, perhaps a Greek city even from the time of Alexander the
Great, was now reorganised in the forms of Hellenic polity under the
name Flavia Neapolis. The capital of the land, Caesarea, hitherto
a Greek urban community, obtained as “first Flavian colony” Roman
organisation and Latin as the language of business. These were essays
towards the Occidental municipalising of the Jewish land. Nevertheless
Judaea proper, though depopulated and impoverished, remained still
Jewish as before; the light in which the government looked upon
the land is shown by the thoroughly anomalous permanent military
occupation, which, as Judaea was not situated on the frontier of the
empire, can only have been destined to keep down the inhabitants.
[Sidenote: The end of the Herodians.]
The Herodians, too, did not long survive the destruction of Jerusalem.
King Agrippa II., the ruler of Caesarea Paneas and of Tiberias,
had rendered faithful service to the Romans in the war against his
countrymen, and had even scars, honourable at least in a military
sense, to show from it; besides, his sister Berenice, a Cleopatra on
a small scale, held the heart of the conqueror of Jerusalem captive
with the remnant of her much sought charms. So he remained personally
in possession of the dominion; but after his death, some thirty years
later, this last reminiscence of the Jewish state was merged in the
Roman province of Syria.
[Sidenote: Further treatment of the Jews.]
No hindrances were put in the way of the Jews exercising their
religious customs either in Palestine or elsewhere. Their religious
instruction itself, and the assemblies in connection with it of their
law-teachers and law-experts, were at least permitted in Palestine;
and there was no hindrance to these Rabbinical unions attempting to
put themselves in some measure in the room of the former Synhedrion of
Jerusalem, and to fix their doctrine and their laws in the groundwork
of the Talmud. Although individual partakers in the Jewish insurrection
who fled to Egypt and Cyrene produced troubles there, the bodies
of Jews outside of Palestine, so far as we see, were left in their
previous position. Against the Jew-hunt, which just about the time
of the destruction of Jerusalem was called forth in Antioch by the
circumstance that the Jews there had been publicly charged by one of
their renegade comrades in the faith with the intention of setting the
town on fire, the representative of the governor of Syria interfered
with energy, and did not allow what was proposed--that they should
compel the Jews to sacrifice to the gods of the land and to refrain
from keeping the Sabbath. Titus himself, when he came to Antioch, most
distinctly dismissed the leaders of the movement there with their
request for the ejection of the Jews, or at least the cancelling of
their privileges. People shrank from declaring war on the Jewish faith
as such, and from driving the far-branching Diaspora to extremities; it
was enough that Judaism was in its political representation deleted
from the commonwealth.
[Sidenote: The consequences of the catastrophe.]
The alteration in the policy pursued since Alexander’s time towards
Judaism amounted in the main to the withdrawing from this religious
society unity of leadership and external compactness, and to the
wresting out of the hands of its leaders a power which extended not
merely over the native land of the Jews, but over the bodies of Jews
generally within and beyond the Roman empire, and certainly in the
East was prejudicial to the unity of imperial government. The Lagids
as well as the Seleucids, and not less the Roman emperors of the
Julio-Claudian dynasty, had put up with this; but the immediate rule
of the Occidentals over Judaea had sharpened the contrast between
the imperial power and this power of the priests to such a degree,
that the catastrophe set in with inevitable necessity and brought its
consequences. From a political standpoint we may censure, doubtless,
the remorselessness of the conduct of the war--which, moreover,
is pretty much common to this war with all similar ones in Roman
history--but hardly the religious-political dissolution of the nation
ordained in consequence of it. If the axe was laid at the root of
institutions which had led, and could not but with a certain necessity
lead, to the formation of a party like that of the zealots, there was
but done what was right and necessary, however severely and unjustly
in the special case the individual might be affected by it. Vespasian,
who gave the decision, was a judicious and moderate ruler. The question
concerned was one not of faith but of power; the Jewish church-state,
as head of the Diaspora, was not compatible with the absoluteness
of the secular great-state. From the general rule of toleration the
government did not even in this case depart; it waged war not against
Judaism but against the high priest and the Synhedrion.
[Sidenote: The Christians.]
Nor did the destruction of the temple wholly fail in this its aim.
There were not a few Jews and still more proselytes, particularly in
the Diaspora, who adhered more to the Jewish moral law and to Jewish
Monotheism than to the strictly national form of faith; the whole
important sect of the Christians had inwardly broken off from Judaism
and stood partly in open opposition to the Jewish ritual. For these
the fall of Jerusalem was by no means the end of things, and within
these extensive and influential circles the government obtained in some
measure what it aimed at by breaking up the central seat of the Jewish
worship. The separation of the Christian faith common to the Gentiles
from the national Jewish, the victory of the adherents of Paul over
those of Peter, was essentially promoted by the abolition of the Jewish
central cultus.
[Sidenote: Palestinian Jews.]
But among the Jews of Palestine, where the language spoken was not
Hebrew indeed, but Aramaic, and among the portion of the Diaspora
which clung firmly to Jerusalem, the breach between Judaism and the
rest of the world was deepened by the destruction of the temple. The
national-religious exclusiveness, which the government wished to
obviate, was in this narrow circle rather strengthened by the violent
attempt to break it down, and driven, in the first instance, to further
desperate struggles.
[Sidenote: The Jewish rising under Trajan.]
Not quite fifty years after the destruction of Jerusalem, in the
year 116,[187] the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean rose against
the imperial government. The rising, although undertaken by the
Diaspora, was of a purely national character in its chief seats,
Cyrene, Cyprus, Egypt, directed to the expulsion of the Romans as of
the Hellenes, and, apparently, to the establishment of a separate
Jewish state. It ramified even into Asiatic territory, and seized
Mesopotamia and Palestine itself. When the insurgents were victorious
they conducted the war with the same exasperation as the Sicarii in
Jerusalem; they killed those whom they seized--the historian Appian,
a native of Alexandria, narrates how he, running from them for
his life, with great difficulty made his escape to Pelusium--and
often they put the captives to death under excruciating torture, or
compelled them--just as Titus formerly compelled the Jews captured
in Jerusalem--to fall as gladiators in the arena in order to delight
the eyes of the victors. In Cyrene 220,000, in Cyprus even 240,000
men are said to have been thus put to death by them. On the other
hand, in Alexandria, which does not appear itself to have fallen
into the hands of the Jews,[188] the besieged Hellenes slew whatever
Jews were then in the city. The immediate cause of the rising is not
clear. The blood of the zealots, who had taken refuge at Alexandria
and Cyrene, and had there sealed their loyalty to the faith by dying
under the axe of the Roman executioner, may not have flowed in vain;
the Parthian war, during which the insurrection began, so far promoted
it, as the troops stationed in Egypt had probably been called to the
theatre of war. To all appearance it was an outbreak of the religious
exasperation of the Jews, which had been glowing in secret like a
volcano since the destruction of the temple and broke out after an
incalculable manner into flames, of such a kind as the East has at
all times produced and produces; if the insurgents really proclaimed
a Jew as king, this rising certainly had, like that in their native
country, its central seat in the great mass of the common people.
That this Jewish rising partly coincided with the formerly-mentioned
(p. 68) attempt at liberation of the peoples shortly before subdued
by the emperor Trajan, while the latter was in the far East at the
mouth of the Euphrates, gave to it even a political significance; if
the successes of this ruler melted away under his hands at the close
of his career, the Jewish insurrection, particularly in Palestine and
Mesopotamia, contributed its part to that result. In order to put down
the insurrection the troops had everywhere to take the field; against
the “king” of the Cyrenaean Jews, Andreas or Lukuas, and the insurgents
in Egypt, Trajan sent Quintus Marcius Turbo with an army and fleet;
against the insurgents in Mesopotamia, as was already stated, Lusius
Quietus--two of his most experienced generals. The insurgents were
nowhere able to offer resistance to the regular troops, although the
struggle was prolonged in Africa as in Palestine to the first times of
Hadrian, and similar punishments were inflicted on this Diaspora as
previously on the Jews of Palestine. That Trajan annihilated the Jews
in Alexandria, as Appian says, is hardly an incorrect, although perhaps
a too blunt expression for what took place; for Cyprus it is attested
that thenceforth no Jew might even set foot upon the island, and death
there awaited even the shipwrecked Israelites. If our traditional
information was as copious in regard to this catastrophe as in regard
to that of Jerusalem, it would probably appear as its continuation and
completion, and in some sense also as its explanation; this rising
shows the relation of the Diaspora to the home-country, and the state
within a state, into which Judaism had developed.
[Sidenote: The Jewish rising under Hadrian.]
[Sidenote: Aelia Capitolina.]
Even with this second overthrow the revolt of Judaism against the
imperial power was not at an end. We cannot say that the latter gave
further provocation to it; ordinary acts of administration, which were
accepted without opposition throughout the empire, affected the Hebrews
just where the full resisting power of the national faith had its seat,
and thereby called forth, probably to the surprise of the governors
themselves, an insurrection which was in fact a war. If the emperor
Hadrian, when his tour through the empire brought him to Palestine,
resolved in the year 130 to re-erect the destroyed holy city of the
Jews as a Roman colony, he certainly did not do them the honour of
fearing them, and had no thought of propagating religious-political
views; but he ordained that this legionary camp should--as shortly
before or soon afterwards was the case on the Rhine, on the Danube,
in Africa--be connected with an urban community recruiting itself
primarily from the veterans, which received its name partly from
its founder, partly from the god to whom at that time the Jews paid
tribute instead of Jehovah. Similar was the state of the case as to
the prohibition of circumcision; it was issued, as will be observed at
a later point, probably without any design of thereby making war on
Judaism as such. As may be conceived, the Jews did not inquire as to
the motives for that founding of the city and for this prohibition,
but felt both as an attack on their faith and their nationality, and
answered it by an insurrection which, neglected at first by the Romans,
thereupon had not its match for intensity and duration in the history
of the Roman imperial period. The whole body of the Jews at home and
abroad was agitated by the movement and supported more or less openly
the insurgents on the Jordan;[189] even Jerusalem fell into their
hands,[190] and the governor of Syria and indeed the emperor Hadrian
appeared on the scene of conflict. The war was led, significantly
enough, by the priest Eleazar[191] and the bandit-chief Simon, surnamed
Bar-Kokheba, _i.e._ son of the stars, as the bringer of heavenly help,
perhaps as Messiah. The financial power and the organisation of the
insurgents are testified by the silver and copper coins struck through
several years in the name of these two. After a sufficient number of
troops was brought together, the experienced general Sextus Julius
Severus gained the upper hand, but only by a gradual and slow advance;
quite as in the war under Vespasian no pitched battle took place, but
one place after another cost time and blood, till at length after a
three years’ warfare[192] the last castle of the insurgents, the strong
Bether, not far from Jerusalem, was stormed by the Romans. The numbers
handed down to us in good accounts of 50 fortresses taken, 985 villages
occupied, 580,000 that fell, are not incredible, since the war was
waged with inexorable cruelty, and the male population was probably
everywhere put to death.
[Sidenote: Judaea after Hadrian.]
In consequence of this rising the very name of the vanquished people
was set aside; the province was thenceforth termed, not as formerly
Judaea, but by the old name of Herodotus Syria of the Philistines, or
Syria Palaestina. The land remained desolate; the new city of Hadrian
continued to exist, but did not prosper. The Jews were prohibited under
penalty of death from even setting foot in Jerusalem; the garrison was
doubled; the limited territory between Egypt and Syria, to which only
a small strip of the Transjordanic domain on the Dead Sea belonged,
and which nowhere touched the frontier of the empire, was thenceforth
furnished with two legions. In spite of all these strong measures the
province remained disturbed, primarily doubtless in consequence of the
bandit-habits long interwoven with the national cause. Pius issued
orders to march against the Jews, and even under Severus there is
mention of a war against Jews and Samaritans. But no movements on a
great scale among the Jews recurred after the Hadrianic war.
[Sidenote: Position of the Jews in the second and third centuries.]
It must be acknowledged that these repeated outbreaks of the animosity
fermenting in the minds of the Jews against the whole of their
non-Jewish fellow-citizens did not change the general policy of the
government. Like Vespasian, the succeeding emperors maintained, as
respects the Jews in the main, the general standpoint of political and
religious toleration; and not only so, but the exceptional laws issued
for the Jews were, and continued to be, chiefly directed to release
them from such general civil duties as were not compatible with their
habits and their faith, and they are therefore designated directly as
privilegia.[193]
Since the time of Claudius, whose suppression of Jewish worship in
Italy (p. 199) is at least the last measure of the sort which we know
of, residence and the free exercise of religion in the whole empire
appear to have been in law conceded to the Jew. It would have been
no wonder if those insurrections in the African and Syrian provinces
had led to the expulsion generally of the Jews settled there; but
restrictions of this sort were enacted, as we saw, only locally, _e.g._
for Cyprus. The Greek provinces always remained the chief seat of the
Jews; even in the capital in some measure bilingual, whose numerous
body of Jews had a series of synagogues, these formed a portion of the
Greek population of Rome. Their epitaphs in Rome are exclusively Greek;
in the Christian church at Rome developed from this Jewish body the
baptismal confession was uttered in Greek down to a late period, and
throughout the first three centuries the literature was exclusively
Greek. But restrictive measures against the Jews appear not to have
been adopted even in the Latin provinces; through and with Hellenism
the Jewish system penetrated into the West, and there too communities
of Jews were found, although they were still in number and importance
even now, when the blows directed against the Diaspora had severely
injured the Jew-communities of the East, far inferior to the latter.
[Sidenote: Corporative unions.]
Political privileges did not follow of themselves from the toleration
of worship. The Jews were not hindered in the construction of
their synagogues and proseuchae any more than in the appointment
of a president for the same (ἀρχισυναγωγός), as well as of a
college of elders (ἄρχοντες), with a chief elder (γερουσιάρχης)
at its head. Magisterial functions were not meant to be connected
with these positions; but, considering the inseparableness of the
Jewish church-organisation and the Jewish administration of law,
the presidents probably everywhere exercised, like the bishops in
the Middle Ages, a jurisdiction, although merely _de facto_. The
bodies of Jews in the several towns were not recognised generally as
corporations, certainly not, for example, those of Rome; yet there
subsisted at many places on the ground of local privileges such
corporative unions with ethnarchs or, as they were now mostly called,
patriarchs at their head. Indeed, in Palestine we find at the beginning
of the third century once more a president of the whole Jewish body,
who, in virtue of hereditary sacerdotal right, bears sway over his
fellow-believers almost like a ruler, and has power even over life and
limb, and whom the government at least tolerates.[194] Beyond question
this patriarch was for the Jews the old high priest, and thus, under
the eyes and under the oppression of the foreign rule, the obstinate
people of God had once more reconstituted themselves, and in so far
overthrown Vespasian’s work.
[Sidenote: Public services.]
As respects the bringing of the Jews under obligations of public
service, their exemption from serving in war as incompatible with
their religious principles had long since been and continued to be
recognised. The special poll-tax to which they were subject, the old
temple-payment, might be regarded as a compensation for this exemption,
though it had not been imposed in this sense. For other services,
as _e.g._ for the undertaking of wardships and municipal offices,
they were at least from the time of Severus regarded in general as
capable and under obligation, but those which ran counter to their
“superstition” were remitted to them;[195] in connection with which we
have to take into account that exclusion from municipal offices became
more and more converted from a slight into a privilege. Even in the
case of state offices in later times a similar course was probably
pursued.
[Sidenote: Forbidding of circumcision.]
The only serious interference of the state-power with Jewish customs
concerned the ceremony of circumcision; the measures directed against
this, however, were probably not taken from a religious-political
standpoint, but were connected with the forbidding of castration, and
arose doubtless in part from misunderstanding of the Jewish custom.
The evil habit of mutilation, becoming more and more prevalent, was
first brought by Domitian within the sphere of penal offences; when
Hadrian, making the precept more stringent, placed castration under the
law of murder, circumcision appears also to have been apprehended as
castration,[196] which certainly could not but be felt and was felt (p.
224) by the Jews as an attack upon their existence, although this was
perhaps not its intention. Soon afterwards, probably in consequence of
the insurrection thereby occasioned, Pius allowed the circumcision of
children of Jewish descent, while otherwise even that of the non-free
Jew and of the proselyte was to involve, afterwards as before, the
penalty of castration for all participating in it. This was also of
political importance, in so far as thereby the formal passing over
to Judaism became a penal offence; and probably the prohibition was,
not indeed issued but, retained with this in view.[197] It must have
contributed its part to the abrupt demarcation of the Jews from the
non-Jews.
[Sidenote: Altered position of the Jews in the imperial period.]
If we look back on the fortunes of Judaism in the epoch from Augustus
to Diocletian, we recognise a thorough transformation of its character
and of its position. It enters upon this epoch as a national and
religious power firmly concentrated round its narrow native land--a
power which even confronts the imperial government in and beyond
Judaea with arms in hand, and in the field of faith evolves a mighty
propagandist energy. We can understand that the Roman government
would not tolerate the adoration of Jehovah and the faith of Moses on
another footing than that on which the cultus of Mithra and the faith
of Zoroaster were tolerated. The reaction against this exclusive and
self-centred Judaism came in the crushing blows directed by Vespasian
and Hadrian against the Jewish land, and by Trajan against the Jews
of the Diaspora, the effect of which reached far beyond the immediate
destruction of the existing society and the reduction of the repute
and power of the Jews as a body. In fact, the later Christianity and
the later Judaism were the consequences of this reaction of the West
against the East. The great propagandist movement, which carried the
deeper view of religion from the East into the West, was liberated
in this way, as was already said (p. 220 f.), from the narrow limits
of Jewish nationality; if it by no means gave up the attachment to
Moses and the prophets, it necessarily became released at any rate
from the government of the Pharisees, which had gone to pieces. The
Christian ideals of the future became universal, since there was no
longer a Jerusalem upon earth. But as the enlarged and deepened faith,
which with its nature changed also its name, arose out of these
disasters, so not less the narrowed and hardened orthodoxy, which
found a rallying point, if no longer in Jerusalem, at any rate in
hatred towards those who had destroyed it, and still more in hatred
towards the more free and higher intellectual movement which evolved
Christianity out of Judaism. The external power of the Jews was broken,
and risings, such as took place in the middle of the imperial period,
are not subsequently met with; the Roman emperors were done with the
state within the state, and, as the properly dangerous element--the
propagandist diffusion--passed over to Christianity, the confessors of
the old faith, who shut themselves off from the New Covenant, were set
aside, so far as the further general development was concerned.
[Sidenote: Altered character of Judaism.]
But if the legions could destroy Jerusalem, they could not raze Judaism
itself; and what on the one side was a remedy, exercised on the other
the effect of a poison. Judaism not only remained, but it became an
altered thing. There is a deep gulf between the Judaism of the older
time, which seeks to spread its faith, which has its temple-court
filled with the Gentiles, and which has its priests offering daily
sacrifices for the emperor Augustus, and the rigid Rabbinism, which
knew nothing and wished to know nothing of the world beyond Abraham’s
bosom and the Mosaic law. Strangers the Jews always were, and had
wished to be so; but the feeling of estrangement now culminated within
them as well as against them after a fearful fashion, and rudely were
its hateful and pernicious consequences drawn on both sides. From the
contemptuous sarcasm of Horace against the intruding Jew from the
Roman Ghetto there is a wide step to the solemn enmity which Tacitus
cherishes against this scum of the human race, to which everything
pure is impure and everything impure pure; in the interval lie those
insurrections of the despised people, and the necessity of conquering
it and of expending continuously money and men for its repression. The
prohibitions of maltreating the Jew, which are constantly recurring in
the imperial ordinances, show that those words of the cultured were
translated, as might be expected, by their inferiors into deeds. The
Jews, on their part, did not mend the matter. They turned away from
Hellenic literature, which was now regarded as polluting, and even
rebelled against the use of the Greek translation of the Bible; the
ever-increasing purification of faith turned not merely against the
Greeks and the Romans, but quite as much against the “half-Jews” of
Samaria and against the Christian heretics; the reverence toward the
letter of the Holy Scriptures rose to a giddy height of absurdity, and
above all an--if possible--still holier tradition established itself,
in the fetters of which all life and thought were benumbed. The gulf
between that treatise on the Sublime which ventures to place Homer’s
Poseidon shaking land and sea and Jehovah, who creates the shining sun,
side by side, and the beginnings of the Talmud which belong to this
epoch, marks the contrast between the Judaism of the first and that
of the third century. The living together of Jews and non-Jews showed
itself more and more to be just as inevitable, as under the given
conditions it was intolerable; the contrast in faith, law, and manners
became sharpened, and mutual arrogance and mutual hatred operated on
both sides with morally disorganising effect. Not merely was their
conciliation not promoted in these centuries, but its realisation was
always thrown further into the distance, the more its necessity was
apparent. This exasperation, this arrogance, this contempt, as they
became established at that time, were indeed only the inevitable growth
of a perhaps not less inevitable sowing; but the heritage of these
times is still at the present day a burden on mankind.