History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The Hasmonean state, like its prototype the Davidic kingdom, had flourished in...

Rome bided its time until the Jewish state was rendered vulnerable by internal divisions, as the Seleucid empire had been.

Herod,

combines in one person the tragedy of Saul and the successful materialism of Solomon,

he used his great political and diplomatic gifts to ensure that he always had the backing of whoever was in power in Rome.

Herod was both the most loyal and reliable of Rome’s oriental satellite kings,

also the most richly rewarded,

with Rome’s backing he extended the kingdom up to and even beyond its Hasmonean boundaries and ruled it with far greater security.

Secondly, he exterminated the Hasmoneans to the bes...

towards the Hasmoneans, or anyone who had ancestral claims to his possessions–such as members of the House of David–he behaved with paranoid suspicion and reckless brutality.

Herod’s third policy was to emasculate the destructive power of rigorist Judaism by separating state and religion and by bringing the diaspora Jews into play.

execute forty-six leading members of the Sanhedrin who, in his own case and others, had sought to uphold the Mosaic law in secular matters.

He did not even attempt to become high-priest himself and divorced it from the crown by turning it into an official post, appointing and dismissing high-priests as acts of his prerogative, and picking ...

But the general level of Palestinian prosperity rose during his reign,

The number of Jews, both born and converts, expanded everywhere,

the Jews thus constituting about 10 per cent of the Roman empire.

Rather like the Jewish Hellenizers before him, he saw himself as a heroic reformer, trying to drag an obstinate and conservative Near Eastern people into the enlightened circle of the modern world.

To enable the Jews to take their rightful place in a better world, he had to destroy the debilitating elements of its past and in particular to rid Jewish society and religion of the selfish oligarchy of families which exploited both.

The diaspora Jews saw Herod as their best friend. He was also the most generous of patrons.

For Herod, building the Antonia fortress in Jerusalem was part of a political, almost a geopolitical, purpose. When he had first taken the city, in 37 BC, with the power of the legions, he had only with great difficulty persuaded his Roman allies not to expel all its inhabitants and pull it down, for they already took the view that it was an ungovernable place. Herod proposed to internationalize the city, to bring in new Jewry to redress the failings of the old, and to make the city the capital not just of Judaea but of the whole Jewish race. He saw the diaspora Jews as more enlightened than the Palestinians, more receptive to Greek and Roman ideas, and more likely to encourage forms of worship in Jerusalem compatible with the modern world. He appointed diaspora Jews to public offices in the capital and he wanted to bolster their authority by encouraging other diaspora Jews to come there regularly. In theory the Law demanded that Jews make pilgrimage to the Temple three times a year, for Passover, the Feast of Weeks and Tabernacles.66 Herod decided to encourage this practice, especially from the diaspora, by providing Jerusalem with all the facilities of a modern Romano-Greek city and above all by rebuilding the Temple itself as a monument-spectacle worth coming to see. Herod was not merely a notable philanthropist; he was also an inspired propagandist and a great showman.

most of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples prospered under Roman rule and judged it to be far preferable to anything else they were likely to get. This was the view of the six million or more Jews in the diaspora,

It is likely that even in the Jewish homeland many, perhaps most, Jews did not see the Romans as oppressors or enemies of religion. But a substantial minority in Palestine became irreconcilable to the kittim (Romans)

there were the great uprisings of 66 AD and 135 AD, which were on an enormous scale and convulsed the eastern empire. There is no parallel to this sequence of events in any other territory Rome ruled.

the real trouble with the Jews was that they were too advanced, too intellectually conscious to find alien rule acceptable.

The Greeks had faced the same problem with Rome. They had solved it by submitting physically and taking the Romans over intellectually.

There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate. Yet the Greeks, who controlled the cultural policies of the Roman empire, afforded no recognition at all to the Hebrew language and culture.

Both Jews and Greeks claimed and thought they believed in freedom, but whereas with the Greeks it was an end in itself, realized in the free, self-governing community, choosing its own laws and gods, for the Jews it was no more than a means, preventing interference with religious duties divinely ordained and unalterable by man. The only circumstances in which the Jews could have become reconciled to Greek culture was if they had been able to take it over–as, in the form of Christianity, they eventually did.

Josephus distinguishes between the Zealots, who preached and practised violence, and what he terms the other three principal sects, Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, who seemed to have accepted foreign rule in general.

Essenes. There were, in fact, many different categories. The best known are the Qumran monks,

Essene-type communities. All were affected by apocalyptic, but not all were violent and a few were wholly pacific.

The messianic doctrine, being of complex and even contradictory origins, created great confusion in the minds of the Jews. But most of them seem to have assumed that the Messiah would be a political-military leader and that his coming would inaugurate a physical, earthly state.

Any Jew who listened to a man making messianic claims would take it for granted he had some kind of political and military programme.

Jesus of Nazareth conformed to none of these messianic patterns.

The evidence we possess shows that, though Jesus was influenced by Essene teaching and may have spent some time living with them, and though he was personally connected with the Baptist sect, he was in essentials one of the Hakamim, the pious Jews who moved in the world. He was closer to the Pharisees than to any other group.

The truth seems to be that Jesus was part of a rapidly developing argument within the pious Jewish community, which included Pharisees of various tendencies. The aim of the Hakamic movement was to promote holiness and make it general. How was this to be done? The argument centred around two issues: the centrality and indispensability of the Temple, and the observance of the Law.

On the first point, Jesus clearly sided with those who regarded the Temple as an obstacle to the general spread of holiness, since the concentration on the physical building, with its hierarchies, privileges (mostly hereditary) and wealth, was a form of separation from the people–a wall built against them.

The idea that the Jews could do without the Temple was not new. On the contrary, it was very old, and it could be argued that the true Jewish religion, long before the Temple was built, was universalistic and unlocated. Jesus, like many other pious Jews, saw holiness spreading to the whole people through the elementary schools and synagogues. But he went further than most of them by regarding the Temple as a source of evil and predicting its destruction, and by treating the Temple authorities and the whole central system of Judaic administration and law with silent contempt.

On the second issue, the degree to which the Law must be obeyed, the original argument between the Sadducees, who admitted only the written Pentateuch, and the Pharisees, who taught the Oral Law, had by Jesus’ time been supplemented by a further argument among the Hakamim and Pharisees.

One school, led by Shammai the Elder (c. 50 BC-c. 30AD), took a rigorist view especially on matters of cleanliness and uncleanliness, an explosive area since it militated strongly against the ability of ordinary, poor people to achieve holiness. The rigorism of the Shammai school, indeed, was eventually to take his descendants and followers out of the rabbinical-Judaic tradition altogether, and they vanished like the Sadducees themselves.

On the other hand, there was the school of Hillel the Elder, Shammai’s contemporary. He came from the diaspora and was later referred to as ‘Hillel the Babylonian’.87 He brought with him more human...

To Hillel, the essence of the Torah was its spirit: if you got the spirit right, the detail could take care of itself.

‘What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbour: this is the entire Torah. All the rest is commentary–go and study it.’

Jesus was a member of Hillel’s school, and may have sat under him,

But of course, taken literally, Hillel’s saying about the Torah is false. Doing as you would be done by is not the entire Torah.

If it had been, other peoples, and the Greeks in particular, would have had far less difficulty in accepting it. ‘All the rest’, from circumcision, to diet, to the rules of contact and cleanliness, far from being commentary were injunctions of great antiquity which constituted the great barriers between the pious Jews and the rest of humanity. Therein lay the great obstacle, not merely in universalizing Judaism but even in making its practice possible for all Jews.

Jesus’ teaching career saw him translate Hillel’s aphorism into a system of moral theology and, in doing so, strip the law of all but its moral and ethical elements.

To most learned Jews, this was false doctrine because Jesus was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith.

Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion–Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough. So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome.

The portion of humanity ready and waiting for this message was enormous.

Many of these diaspora Jews were pious to a fault and were to remain staunch observers of the Torah in its essential rigour. But others were waiting to be convinced that the essence of their faith could be kept, or even reinforced, by abandoning circumcision and the multitude of ancient Mosaic laws which made life in modern society so difficult. Still more ready for conversion were vast numbers of pious gentiles,