Chapter XI: Judaea and the Jews (2)

For the native authorities in Judaea as everywhere the urban communities were, as far as possible, taken as a basis. Samaria, or as the town was now called, Sebaste, the newly laid out Caesarea, and the other urban communities contained in the former kingdom of Archelaus, were self-administering, under superintendence of the Roman authority. The government also of the capital with the large territory belonging to it was organised in a similar way. Already in the pre-Roman period under the Seleucids there was formed, as we saw (p. 160), in Jerusalem a council of the elders, the Synhedrion, or as Judaised, the Sanhedrin. The presidency in it was held by the high priest, whom each ruler of the land, if he was not possibly himself high priest, appointed for the time. To the college belonged the former high priests and esteemed experts in the law. This assembly, in which the aristocratic element preponderated, acted as the supreme spiritual representative of the whole body of Jews, and, so far as this was not to be separated from it, also as the secular representative in particular of the community of Jerusalem. It is only the later Rabbinism that has by a pious fiction transformed the Synhedrion of Jerusalem into a spiritual institute of Mosaic appointment. It corresponded essentially to the council of the Greek urban constitution, but certainly bore, as respected its composition as well as its sphere of working, a more spiritual character than belonged to the Greek representations of the community. To this Synhedrion and its high priest, who was now nominated by the procurator as representative of the imperial suzerain, the Roman government left or committed that jurisdiction which in the Hellenic subject communities belonged to the urban authorities and the common councils. With indifferent short-sightedness it allowed to the transcendental Messianism of the Pharisees free course, and to the by no means transcendental land-consistory--acting until the Messiah should arrive--tolerably free sway in affairs of faith, of manners, and of law, where Roman interests were not directly affected thereby. This applied in particular to the administration of justice. It is true that, as far as Roman burgesses were concerned, ordinary jurisdiction in civil as in criminal affairs must have been reserved for the Roman tribunals even already before the annexation of the land. But civil jurisdiction over Jews remained even after that annexation chiefly with the local authority. Criminal justice over them was exercised by the latter probably in general concurrently with the Roman procurator; only sentences of death could not be executed by it otherwise than after confirmation by the imperial magistrate.

[Sidenote: The Roman provincial government.]

In the main those arrangements were the inevitable consequences of the abolition of the principality, and when the Jews had obtained this request of theirs, they in fact obtained those arrangements along with it. Certainly it was the design of the government to avoid, as far as possible, harshness and abruptness in carrying them out. Publius Sulpicius Quirinius to whom, as governor of Syria the erection of the new province was entrusted, was a magistrate of repute, and quite familiar with the affairs of the East, and the several reports confirm by what they say or by their silence the fact that the difficulties of the state of things were known and taken into account. The local coining of petty moneys, as formerly practised by the kings, now took place in the name of the Roman ruler; but on account of the Jewish abhorrence of images the head of the emperor was not even placed on the coins. Setting foot within the interior of the temple continued to be forbidden in the case of every non-Jew under penalty of death.[171] However averse was the attitude of Augustus personally towards the Oriental worships (p. 172), he did not disdain here any more than in Egypt to connect them in their home with the imperial government; magnificent presents of Augustus, of Livia, and of other members of the imperial house adorned the sanctuary of the Jews, and according to an endowment by the emperor the smoke of the sacrifice of a bullock and two lambs rose daily there to the “Supreme God.” The Roman soldiers were directed, when they were on service at Jerusalem, to leave the standards with the effigies of the emperor at Caesarea, and, when a governor under Tiberius omitted to do so, the government ultimately yielded to the urgent entreaties of the pious and left matters on the old footing. Indeed, when the Roman troops were to march through Jerusalem on an expedition against the Arabians, they obtained another route for the march in consequence of the scruples entertained by the priests against the effigies on the standards. When that same governor dedicated to the emperor at the royal castle in Jerusalem shields without imagery, and the pious took offence at it, Tiberius commanded the same to be taken away, and to be hung up in the temple of Augustus at Caesarea. The festival dress of the high priest, which was kept in Roman custody at the castle and hence had to be purified from such profanation for seven days before it was put on, was delivered up to the faithful upon their complaint; and the commandant of the castle was directed to give himself no further concern about it. Certainly it could not be asked of the multitude that it should feel the consequences of the incorporation less heavily, because it had itself brought them about. Nor is it to be maintained that the annexation of the land passed off without oppression for the inhabitants, and that they had no ground to complain; such arrangements have never been carried into effect without difficulties and disturbances of the peace. The number, moreover, of unrighteous and violent deeds perpetrated by individual governors must not have been smaller in Judaea than elsewhere. In the very beginning of the reign of Tiberius the Jews, like the Syrians, complained of the pressure of the taxes; especially the prolonged administration of Pontius Pilatus is charged with all the usual official crimes by a not unfair observer. But Tiberius, as the same Jew says, had during the twenty-three years of his reign maintained the time-hallowed holy customs, and in no part set them aside or violated them. This is the more to be recognised, seeing that the same emperor in the West interfered against the Jews more emphatically than any other (p. 172), and thus the long-suffering and caution shown by him in Judaea cannot be traced back to personal favour for Judaism.

[Sidenote: The Jewish opposition.]

In spite of all this both the opposition on principle to the Roman government and the violent efforts at self-help on the part of the faithful developed themselves even in this time of peace. The payment of tribute was assailed, not perchance merely because it was oppressive, but as being godless. “Is it allowable,” asks the Rabbi in the Gospel, “to pay the census to Caesar?” The ironical answer which he received did not by any means suffice for all; there were saints, though possibly not in great number, who thought themselves polluted if they touched a coin with the emperor’s image. This was something new--an advance in the theology of opposition; the kings Seleucus and Antiochus had also not been circumcised, and had likewise received tribute in silver pieces bearing their image. Such was the theory; the practical application of it was made, not certainly by the high council of Jerusalem, in which, under the influence of the imperial government, the more pliant notables of the land directed the vote, but by Judas the Galilean from Gamala on the lake of Gennesaret, who, as Gamaliel subsequently reminded this high council, “stood up in the days of the census, and behind him the people rose in revolt.” He spoke out what all thought, that the so-called census was bondage, and that it was a disgrace for the Jew to recognise another lord over him than the Lord of Zebaoth; but that He helped only those who helped themselves. If not many followed his call to arms, and he ended his life, after a few months, on the scaffold, the holy dead was more dangerous to the unholy victors than the living man. He and his followers were regarded by the later Jews alongside of the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes, as the fourth “School;” at that time they were called the Zealots, afterwards they called themselves Sicarii, “men of the knife.” Their teaching was simple: God alone is Lord, death indifferent, freedom all in all. This teaching remained, and the children and grandchildren of Judas became the leaders of the later insurrections.

[Sidenote: The emperor Gaius and the Jews.]

[Sidenote: Jew-hunt in Alexandria.]

If the Roman government had under the first two regents, taken on the whole, skilfully and patiently sufficed for the task of repressing, as far as possible, these explosive elements, the next change on the throne brought matters close to the catastrophe. The change was saluted with rejoicing, as in the whole empire, so specially by the Jews in Jerusalem and Alexandria; and, after the unsociable and unloved old man, the new youthful ruler Gaius was extravagantly extolled in both quarters. But speedily out of trifling occasions there was developed a formidable quarrel. A grandson of the first Herod and of the beautiful Mariamne, named after the protector and friend of his grandfather Herod Agrippa, about the most worthless and abandoned of the numerous Oriental princes’ sons living in Rome, but nevertheless or on that very account the favourite and youthful friend of the new emperor, hitherto known solely by his dissoluteness and his debts, had obtained from his protector, to whom he had been the first to convey the news of the death of Tiberius, one of the vacant Jewish petty principalities as a gift, and the title of king along with it. This prince in the year 38, on the way to his new kingdom, came to the city of Alexandria, where he a few months previously had attempted as a runaway bill-debtor to borrow among the Jewish bankers. When he showed himself there in public in his regal dress with his splendidly equipped halberdiers, this naturally stirred up the non-Jewish inhabitants of the great city--fond as it was of ridicule and of scandal--who bore anything but good will to the Jews, to a corresponding parody; nor did the matter stop there. It culminated in a furious hunting-out of the Jews. The Jewish houses which lay detached were plundered and burnt; the Jewish ships lying in the harbour were pillaged; the Jews that were met with in the non-Jewish quarters were maltreated and slain. But against the purely Jewish quarters they could effect nothing by violence. Then the leaders lighted on the idea of consecrating the synagogues, which were the object of their marked attentions, so far as these still stood, collectively as temples of the new ruler, and of setting up statues of him in all of them--in the chief synagogue a statue on a _quadriga_. That the emperor Gaius deemed himself, as seriously as his confused mind could do so, a real and corporeal god, everybody knew--the Jews and the governor as well. The latter, Avillius Flaccus, an able man, and, under Tiberius, an excellent administrator, but now hampered by the disfavour in which he stood with the new emperor, and expecting every moment recall and impeachment, did not disdain to use the opportunity for his rehabilitation.[172] He not merely gave orders by edict to put no hindrance in the way of setting up the statues in the synagogues, but he entered directly into the Jew-hunting. He ordained the abolition of the Sabbath. He declared further in his edicts that these tolerated foreigners had possessed themselves unallowably of the best part of the town; they were restricted to a single one of the five wards, and all the other Jewish houses were abandoned to the rabble, while masses of the ejected inhabitants lay without shelter on the shore. No remonstrance was even listened to; eight and thirty members of the council of the elders, which then presided over the Jews instead of the Ethnarch,[173] were scourged in the open circus before all the people. Four hundred houses lay in ruins; trade and commerce were suspended; the factories stood still. There was no help left except with the emperor. Before him appeared the two Alexandrian deputations, that of the Jews led by the formerly (p. 170) mentioned Philo, a scholar of Neojudaic leanings, and of a heart more gentle than brave, but who withal faithfully took the part of his people in this distress; that of the enemies of the Jews, led by Apion, also an Alexandrian scholar and author, the “world’s clapper” [_cymbalum mundi_], as the emperor Tiberius called him, full of big words and still bigger lies, of the most assured omniscience[174] and unlimited faith in himself, conversant, if not with men, at any rate with their worthlessness, a celebrated master of discourse as of the art of misleading, ready for action, witty, unabashed, and unconditionally loyal. The result of the discussion was settled from the outset; the emperor received the deputies while he was inspecting the works designed in his gardens, but instead of giving a hearing to the suppliants, he put to them sarcastic questions, which the enemies of the Jews in defiance of all etiquette accompanied with loud laughter, and, as he was in good humour, he confined himself to expressing his regret that these otherwise good people should be so unhappily constituted as not to be able to understand his innate divine nature--as to which he was beyond doubt in earnest. Apion thus gained his case, and, wherever it pleased the adversaries of the Jews, the synagogues were changed into temples of Gaius.

[Sidenote: The statue of the emperor in the temple of Jerusalem.]

But the matter was not confined to these dedications introduced by 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.]