History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

because they could not accept the rules which the Christians now said were unnecessary. So the slow spread of the new religion accelerated. Ethical monotheism was an idea whose time had come. It was a Jewish idea. But the Christians took it with them to the wider world, and so robbed the Jews of their birthright.

The consolidation of Judaism round the rigorous enforcement of Mosaic law, as a result of the crushing of the reform programme by the Maccabees, was the essential background to the origin and rise of Jewish Christianity.

Both the great Jewish revolts against Roman rule should be seen not just as risings by a colonized people, inspired by religious nationalism, but as a racial and cultural conflict between Jews and Greeks.

the specific hostility towards the Jews, which began to emerge in the second half of the first millennium BC, was a function of Jewish monotheism and its social consequences. The Jews could not, and did not, recognize the existence of other deities, or show respect for them.

at least circumcision did not prevent social intercourse. The ancient Jewish laws of diet and cleanliness did. This, perhaps more than any other factor, focused hostility on Jewish communities.

As Greek ideas about the one-ness of humanity spread, the Jewish tendency to treat non-Jews as ritually unclean, and to forbid marriage to them, was resented as being anti-humanitarian; the word ‘misanthropic’ was frequently used.

The Greeks saw their œcumene, that is the civilized universe (as opposed to the chaos beyond it) where their ideas prevailed, as a multi-racial, multi-national society, and those who refused to accept it were enemies of man.

with the foundation of the empire and the adoption of emperor-worship, relations deteriorated swiftly. The Jewish refusal to practise the formalities of state worship was seen not merely as characteristic of Jewish exclusiveness and incivility–the charges always brought against them by the Greeks–but as actively disloyal. Official Roman hostility was eagerly whipped up by Greek intellectuals.

Indeed, the revolt itself began in 66 AD not in Jerusalem but in Caesarea, following a Graeco-Jewish lawsuit, which the Greeks won. They celebrated with a pogrom in the Jewish quarter, while the Greek-speaking Roman garrison did nothing.

Jerusalem was filling up with angry and vengeful Jewish refugees from other cities where the Greek majority had invaded the Jewish quarters and burnt their homes. This element turned the tide in favour of the extremists, and the Roman garrison was attacked and massacred. So the Great Revolt was a civil and racial war between Greeks and Jews. But it was also a civil war among Jews, because–as in the time of the Maccabees–the Jewish upper class, largely Hellenized, was identified with the sins of the Greeks.

As the radical nationalists took over Jerusalem they turned on the rich. One of their first acts was to burn the Temple archives so that all records of debts would be destroyed.

the Jews were throughout irreconcilably divided into many factions.

Anti-Semitic sentiment continued to spread. The fall of Jerusalem was cited as evidence that Jews were hated by God.

From the fragments of evidence we have, it looks as if Simon got little support from learned Jews and in the end lost what he had.

the men of the rebellion were orthodox Jews who took great trouble, despite desperate circumstances, to observe the Mosaic law–the Sabbath, the festivals, priestly and levitical dues for instance. But there is no evidence that Simon regarded himself as a Messiah, the anointed one or in any way a spiritual leader.

Hadrian relentlessly carried through to completion his plan to transform ruined Jerusalem into a Greek polis.

The city he built was called Aelia Capitolina. Greek-speakers were moved in to populate it and the Jews were forbidden to enter on pain of death.

These two catastrophes, of 70 and 135 AD, effectively ended Jewish state history in antiquity. There were two immediate consequences of great historical significance. The first was the final separation of Judaism and Christianity.

The notion that gentiles and Jews could both subscribe to Christianity as a sort of super-religion could not survive the events of 66-70, which effectively destroyed the old Christian-Jewish church of Jerusalem.

In the vacuum thus created, Hellenistic Christianity flourished and became the whole.

The effect was to concentrate Christian belief still more fiercely on Paul’s presentation of Christ’s death and resurrection as the mechanism of salvation–itself clearly foreshadowed in Jesus’ teaching–and on the nature of this anointed saviour.

This made a complete breach with Judaism inevitable. The Jews could accept the decentralization of the Temple: many had long done so, and soon all had to do so. They could accept a different view of the Law. What they could not accept was the removal of the absolute distinction they had always drawn between God and man, because that was the essence of Jewish theology, the belief that above all others separated them from the pagans.

If Christ was not God, Christianity was nothing. If Christ was God, then Judaism was false. There could be absolutely no compromise on this point. Each faith was thus a threat to the other.

The quarrel was all the more bitter because, while differing on the essential, the two faiths agreed on virtually everything else.

Alas, these professional religious polemics, these literary exercises in odium theologicum, were lifted out of their historical context and became the basis for a general Christian indictment of the Jewish people. Polemic should be avoided, Erasmus was later to observe, ‘because the long war of words and writings ends in blows’. The collective guilt charge in Matthew, and the ‘sons of the devil’ charge in John, were linked together to form the core of a specifically Christian branch of anti-Semitism which was superimposed on and blended with the ancient and ramifying pagan anti-Semitic tradition to form in time a mighty engine of hatred.

The second consequence of the final failure of state Judaism was a profound change in the nature and scope of Jewish activities. From 70 AD, and still more so after 135 AD, Judaism ceased to be a national religion in any physical and visible sense, and the Jews were depatriated. Instead, both Jewry and Judaism became coextensive with the study and observance of the Torah.

After 135, its rule became complete because there was nothing else left. The rigorists, partly by design, partly by the catastrophes they had provoked, had driven everything else out.

Was this providential or not? In the short-term perspective of the second century AD, the Jews appeared to have been a powerful national and religious group which had courted ruin, and achieved it. During most of the first century, the Jews not only constituted a tenth of the empire, and a much higher proportion in certain big cities, but were expanding. They had the transcendent new idea of the age: ethical monotheism. They were almost all literate. They had the only welfare system that existed. They made converts in all social groups, including the highest. One or more of the Flavian emperors might easily have become a Jew, just as Constantine was to become a Christian 250 years later.

A century later, the whole process had been reversed.

In the diaspora, the expanding Christian communities not only purloined the best Jewish theological and social ideas, and so the role of ‘light to the gentiles’, but made increasing inroads into the Jewish masses themselves,

Not only did the Jewish population fall dramatically, in both the homeland and the diaspora, but there was an equally dramatic narrowing of the Jewish horizon.

In the age of Herod the Great, the Jews were beginning to take a prominent part in the cultural and economic life of the new empire.

By the mid-second century

the Jewish community.

had ceased to write history. It no longer engaged in speculative philosophy of any kind. All its traditional forms–wisdom, poetry, psalmody, allegory, historical novellae, apocalyptic–had been abandoned. It was engaged, with passionate concentration and sincerity, on a solitary form of literary work: commentary on the religious law. And it continued this task, oblivious of...

Yet the turning in upon itself of Judaism, the logical culmination of seven centuries of increasing rigorism, was probably the condition of its very survival, and the survival of the Jewish people as a distinct entity. The Jews did not simply vanish from the historical record, as did so ...

The Jews survived because the period of intense introspection enabled their intellectual leaders to enlarge the Torah into a system of moral theology and community law of extraordinary coherence, logical consistency and social strength. Having lost the Kingdom of Israel, the Jews turned the Torah into a fortress of the mind and spirit, in which they could dwell in safety and even in content.

Johanan ben Zakkai,

Jabneh (Jamnia),

The system was a self-perpetuating oligarchy, the academy selecting or ‘ordaining’ new rabbis on the basis of learning and merit.

Constructing the Jewish history of these times is difficult, for the Jews themselves had ceased to write

Pharisee or rabbinical Judaism came to Babylonia as a direct result of the Bar Kokhba revolt,

the chief memorials to this age of collective and individual scholarship are the Jewish holy writings themselves.

series of layers, each dependent on its predecessor.

Penta...

the books of the prophets, the psalms and wisdom literature,

To this were added various non-canonical works

the Greek translation of the Bible, or Septuagint; the works of Josephus; the Apocrypha and various papyri.

The next layer or stage was the sorting out and writing of Oral Law, which had been a...

This was a practice termed Mishnah, meaning to repeat or study, since it was originally memorized and recapitulated. Mishnah consisted of three elements: the midrash, that is the method of interpreting the Pentateuch to make clear points of law; the halakhah, plural halakhot, the body of generally accepted legal decisions on particular points; and the aggadah or homilies, including anecdotes and legends used to convey understanding of the law to the o...