Chapter XI: Judaea and the Jews (1)

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.]