History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Ezekiel.

the only salvation was through religious purity. States and empires and thrones did not matter in the long run.

Ezekiel insisted, like Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the calamities which befell the Jews were the direct and inescapable result of sinful breach of the Law. But whereas earlier histories and prophecies had dwelt on the sense of collective guilt, and attributed to kings and leaders the wickedness which had brought down divine wrath on all, the exiled Jews now had no one to blame but their individual selves.

thereafter individual accountability became of the very essence of the Jewish religion.

If the individual was responsible for obeying the Law, he must know what the Law is. So it must not merely be set down and copied, but taught. Hence it was during the Exile that ordinary Jews were first disciplined into the regular practice of their religion.

Circumcision,

Sabbath,

regular feasts:

It was in exile that the rules of faith began to seem all-important: rules of purity, of cleanliness, of diet.

In exile the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy–voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occurred before in history.

In religious terms, there have been four great formative periods in Jewish history: under Abraham, under Moses, during and shortly after the Exile, and after the destruction of the Second Temple. The first two produced the religion of Yahweh, the second two developed and refined it into Judaism itself. But in none of these periods did the Jews possess an independent state, though it is true that, during the Mosaic period, they were not actually ruled by anyone else.

Conversely, it is also notable that when the Israelites, and later the Jews, achieved settled and prosperous self-government, they found it extraordinarily difficult to keep their religion pure and incorrupt.

Only in adversity did they cling resolutely to their principles and develop their extraordinary powers of religious imagination, their originality, their clarity and their zeal.

All the internal evidence shows that those who set down and conflated these writings, and the scribes who copied them when the canon was assembled after the return from Exile, believed absolutely in the divine inspiration of the ancient texts and transcribed them with veneration and the highest possible standards of accuracy, including many passages which they manifestly did not understand.

No other people has ever shown, particularly at that remote time, so strong a compulsion to explore their origins.

The transformation of Judaism into the first ‘religion of the Book’ took two centuries. Before 400 BC there is no hint of a canon. By 200 BC, it was there.

additions were discouraged. Prophecy, and prophets, fell into disrepute.

Canonization also discouraged the writing of history.

when the canon was finally sanctified early in the Christian era, Jewish history, one of the glories of antiquity, would cease for a millennium and a half.

But if one effect of canonization was to curb the creativity of Jewish sacred literature, another was enormously to increase the knowledge and impact of the approved texts on the Jewish population.

A new and quite revolutionary institution in the history of religion appeared: the synagogue–prototype of the church, the chapel and the mosque–where the Bible was systematically read and taught.

With the sacred literature digested into a canon, and the canon systematically taught from a central focus, Judaism became far more homogeneous. And it was homogeneity with a pronounced puritanical and fundamentalist flavour. In the history of the Jews, the rigorists tend to win.

It was Moses, the stern legal purist, who imposed his religion of Yahweh on the other tribal groups. It was the rigorists who again won at the time of Josiah’s reform. It was rigorous Judah, not compromising Israel, which survived the assault of the empires; and it was the rigorist community of Babylon, returning from Exile, which imposed its will on all Jews, excluding many, forcing many others to conform. The canon and the synagogue became instruments of this rigour, and it was to win many more victories.

Though the rigorizing tendency triumphed before, during and after the Exile, and sustained itself through the teaching of the canon, there was a countervailing force in the growing stress on the individual conscience

The impact of Hellenization on educated Jews was in many ways similar to the impact of the enlightenment on the eighteenth-century ghetto.

It was a destabilizing force spiritually and, above all, it was a secularizing, materialistic force.

However, any possibility of Greeks and Jews living together in reasonable comfort was destroyed by the rise of a Jewish reform party who wanted to force the pace of Hellenization. This reform movement, about which we know little since its history was written by its triumphant fundamentalist enemies, was strongest among the ruling class of Judah,

The reformers did not want to abolish the Law completely but to purge it of those elements which forbade participation in Greek culture

and reduce it to its ethical core, so universalizing it.

To promote their ultimate aim of a world religion, they wanted an immediate marriage between the Greek polis and the Jewish moral God.

there was never any possibility of a conflation between Judaism and Greek religion as such; what the reformers wanted was for Judaism to universalize itself by pervading Greek culture; and that meant embracing the polis.

In 167 the conflict came to a head with the publication of a decree which in effect abolished the Mosaic law as it stood, replacing it with secular law, and downgrading the Temple into an ecumenical place of worship.

The evidence suggests that the initiative came from the extreme Jewish reformers, led by Menelaus,

The zeal and intensity of the assault on the Law aroused a corresponding zeal for the Law, narrowing the vision of the Jewish leadership and pushing them ever more deeply into a Torah-centred religion.

The mob now became an important part of the Jerusalem scene, making the city, and so Judea as a whole, extremely difficult to govern by anyone

In their battle against Greek education, pious Jews began, from the end of the second century BC, to develop a national system of education.

spread and consolidation of the synagogue, in the birth of Pharisaism as a movement rooted in popular education, and eventually in the rise of the rabbinate. The education provided in these schools was entirely religious, rejecting any form of knowledge outside the Law. But at least these schools taught the Law in a relatively humane spirit.

God had given Moses, in addition to the written Law, an Oral Law, by which learned elders could interpret and supplement the sacred commands. The practice of the Oral Law made it possible for the Mosaic code to be adapted to changing conditions and administered in a realistic manner.

the Temple priests, dominated by the Sadducees, or descendants of Zadok, the great high-priest from Davidic times, insisted that all law must be written and unchanged.

The Sadducees soon became identified with Hasmonean rule in a rigid system of Temple administration, in which the hereditary high-priest performed the functions of a secular ruler, and a committee of elders, the Sanhedrin, discharged his religious-legal duties.

The recreation of the state and kingdom, originally and ostensibly on a basis of pure religious fundamentalism–the defence of the faith–rapidly revived all the inherent problems of the earlier monarchy, and in particular the irresolvable conflict between the aims and methods of the state and the nature of the Jewish religion.

The Jewish nation thus expanded vastly and rapidly in terms of territory and population, but in doing so it absorbed large numbers of people who, though nominally Jewish, were also half-Hellenized and in many cases were fundamentally pagans or even savages.

Alexander Jannaeus, according to the evidence we have, turned into a despot and a monster,

and came to despise some of the most exotic, and to Greeks barbarous, aspects of the Yahweh cult.

the civil war lasted six years and cost 50,000 Jewish lives.

It is from this time we first hear of the Perushim or Pharisees, ‘those who separated themselves’, a religious party which repudiated the royal religious establishment, with its high-priest, Sadducee aristocrats and the Sanhedrin, and placed religious observance before Jewish nationalism.

at the end of the civil war, Alexander returned in triumph to Jerusalem,

sadistic episode

Hence, when Alexander died in 76 BC,

the Jewish world was bitterly divided and, though much enlarged, included many half-Jews whose devotion to the Torah was selective and suspect.