History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

At Samaria, the royal quarter was totally destroyed. Megiddo was levelled and new, Assyrian-type buildings set up on the rubble. The walls of Hazor were torn down. Shechem disappeared completely. So did Tirzah. Thus the first great mass tragedy in Jewish history took place. It was, too, a tragedy unrelieved by ultimate rebirth. The holocaust-dispersion of the northern people of Israel was final. In taking their last, forced journey into Assyria, the ten tribes of the north moved out of history and into myth. They lived in later Jewish legend, but in reality they were simply assimilated into the surrounding Aramaean population, losing their faith and their language;

Jerusalem did, in fact, survive a fierce siege, by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, in 701 BC. The instrument of salvation was not so much the new walls and cistern, as a violent outbreak of bubonic plague, carried by mice, which struck the Assyrian camp, to which the Greek historian Herodotus later referred. In the Second Book of Kings it is seen as miraculous: ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning behold, they were all dead corpses.’212 The rulers of Judah also sought safety in various alliances, with small neighbouring states, and even with vast, feeble Egypt, ‘the broken reed’, on which, as the Assyrians sneered, ‘if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it’.213

Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we possess.216 The early Jews loved his sparkling prose with its brilliant images, many of which have since passed into the literature of all civilized nations. But more important than the language was the thought: Isaiah was pushing humanity towards new moral discoveries.

Jerusalem fell in 597 BC, the Babylonian Chronicle, now in the British Museum, noting: ‘In the seventh year, in the month of Kislev, [Nebuchudnezzar] mustered his troops, and having marched to the land of Hatti, besieged the city of Judah, and on the second day of the month of Adar took the city and captured the king. He appointed therein a king of his own choice, received its heavy tribute and sent [them] to Babylon.’ This gives us the exact date, 16 March. The Second Book of Kings adds that the King of Judah, Jehoiakim, was taken to Babylon with ‘all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and all the smiths’; none remained, except ‘the poorest people of the land’. The gold vessels in the Temple

If Jeremiah was the first Jew, it was Ezekiel and his visions which gave the dynamic impulse to the formulation of Judaism.

It was in exile that the rules of faith began to seem all-important: rules of purity, of cleanliness, of diet. The laws were now studied, read aloud, memorized. It is probably from this time that we get the Deuteronomic injunction: ‘These commandments which I give you this day are to be kept in your heart; you shall repeat them to your sons, and speak of them indoors and out of doors, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on the hand and wear them as a phylactery on the forehead; write them up on the doorposts of your homes and of your gates.’5 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. The decay set in rapidly after the conquest of Joshua; it again appeared under Solomon, and was repeated in both northern and southern kingdoms, especially under rich and powerful kings and when times were good; exactly the same pattern would return again under the Hasmoneans and under such potentates as Herod the Great. In self-government and prosperity, the Jews always seemed drawn to neighbouring religions, whether Canaanite, Philistine-Phoenician or Greek. 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.

Jeremiah was the first to perceive the possibility that powerlessness and goodness were somehow linked, and that alien rule could be preferable to self-rule. He comes close to the notion that the state itself was inherently evil.

The years 400-200 BC are the lost centuries of Jewish history. There were no great events or calamities they chose to record. Perhaps they were happy. The Jews certainly seem to have liked the Persians the best of all their rulers. They never revolted against them; on the contrary, Jewish mercenaries helped the Persians to put down Egyptian rebellion.

The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects. But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession. They probably produced, in sheer quantity, the greatest literature of antiquity, of which the Old Testament is only a small fragment.

By ‘justly accredited’, Josephus meant ‘canonical’. The word canon is very ancient, the Sumerian for ‘reed’, whence it acquired its sense of straight or upright; to the Greeks it meant a rule, boundary or standard. The Jews were the first to apply it to religious texts.

24 The canon began to emerge when the first five or Mosaic books, the Pentateuch, which later became known to Jews as the Torah, reached written form.

a southern source, referring to God as Yahweh, and going back to the original Mosaic writings; a northern source, calling God ‘Elohim’, also of great antiquity;

canon in all its holy integrity. They began with the Mosaic texts which, for convenience, were transcribed on to five separate scrolls: hence its name (though Pentateuch itself is Greek, as are the individual names of the books). To these were added the second division of the Bible, Prophets, in Hebrew Nevi’im. These in turn consist of ‘Former Prophets’ and ‘Later Prophets’. The former consist of the mainly narrative and historical works, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, and the latter the writings of the prophetic orators, themselves divided into two sections, the three major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel–the term signifying length, not importance–and the twelve minor ones, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. Then there are the works of the third division, the Ketuvim or ‘writings’, often known as the Hagiographa. This consists of the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Book of Job, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and the two books of Chronicles.

The oldest Biblical manuscripts of all, however, are those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-8, which include Hebrew fragments of all the twenty-four books of the canon, except Esther, and the entire text of Isaiah, plus some fragments of the Septuagint.28 It is quite possible that more early texts will be discovered, both in the Judaean Desert and in Egypt, and clearly the search for perfect texts will continue until the end of time.

The Jews knew all about Greek militarism, for they served the Greeks as mercenaries, as they had served the Persians. Greek military training began in the gymnasium, the primary educational instrument of the polis. But that was not its only function. Its main purpose was to promote Greek culture, as were the other institutions with which each polis was equipped: the stadium, the theatre, the odeum, the lyceum, the agora. The Greeks were superb architects. They were sculptors, poets, musicians, playwrights, philosophers and debaters. They staged marvellous performances. They were excellent traders too. In their wake, the economy boomed; living standards rose. Ecclesiastes laments the craze for wealth under Greek rule. What good, he asks, ever came from piling up immense fortunes?41

‘Now it happened that at this time all the principal men and rulers went up out of the cities of Syria and Phoenicia to bid for their taxes; for every year the King sold them to the men of the greatest power in every city.’ Joseph won by accusing his rivals of forming a cartel to lower the price; he held the contract for twenty-two years ‘and brought the Jews from poverty and misery to a better way of life’. Joseph went further than his namesake of pharaoh’s day. He developed into another archetype: the first Jewish banker.46 As such he stood for the Hellenizing principle in second-century BC Judah.

The Greeks were not monotheists but polytheists, and in Egypt they learned syncretism, that is the rationalization of innumerable overlapping deities by banging them together into synthetic polygods. One such mutant was Apollo-Helios-Hermes, the sun-god. They blended their own Dionysiac rites with the Egyptian Isis-cult. Their god of healing, Asclepios, was conflated with the Egyptian Imhotep. Zeus, the senior god, was the same as the Egyptian Ammon, the Persian Ahura-Mazda and, for all they cared, the Jewish Yahweh. That, needless to say, was not at all how pious Jews saw it. The truth, of course, was that the Greek idea of deity was greatly inferior to the Jewish concept of limitless power.

The Greeks constantly elevated the human–they were Promethean–and lowered the divine. To them gods were not much more than revered and successful ancestors; most men sprang from gods. Hence it was not for them a great step to deify a monarch, and they began to do so as soon as they embraced the orient. Why should not a man of destiny undergo apotheosis? Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor, argued in his Politics: ‘If there exists in a state an individual so pre-eminent in virtue that neither the virtue nor the political capacity of all the other citizens is comparable with his…such a man should be rated as a god among men.’

Simon was the last of the Maccabee brothers. The Maccabees were brave, desperate, fanatical, strong-minded and violent men. They saw themselves as reliving the Book of Joshua, reconquering the Promised Land from the pagans, with the Lord at their elbow. They lived by the sword and died by it in a spirit of ruthless piety.

Alexander Jannaeus, John’s son, took this policy of expansion and forcible conversion still further. He invaded the territory of the Decapolis, the league of ten Greek-speaking cities grouped around the Jordan. He swept into Nabataea and took Petra, the ‘rose-red city half as old as time’. He moved into the province of Gaulanitis. The Hasmoneans pushed north into the Galilee and Syria, west to the coast, south and east into the desert. Behind their frontiers they eliminated pockets of non-Jewish people by conversion, massacre or expulsion. 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.

The number of Jews, both born and converts, expanded everywhere, so that, according to one medieval tradition, there were at the time of the Claudian census in 48 AD some 6,944,000 Jews within the confines of the empire, plus what Josephus calls the ‘myriads and myriads’ in Babylonia and elsewhere beyond it. One calculation is that during the Herodian period there were about eight million Jews in the world, of whom 2,350,000 to 2,500,000 lived in Palestine, the Jews thus constituting about 10 per cent of the Roman empire.

We have descriptions of Herod’s Temple in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews and his Jewish Wars,68 and in the Talmudic tractates Middot, Tamid and Yoma. These are supplemented by recent archaeology. To achieve the grandiose effects he desired, Herod doubled the area of the Temple Mount by building huge supporting walls and filling in the gaps with rubble. Around the vast forecourt thus created he erected porticos, and linked it all to the upper city by bridges. The sanctuary, at one end of the platform, was much higher and wider than Solomon’s (100 as opposed to 60 cubits), but since Herod was not of a priestly family and could not therefore enter even the inner court, he spent little on the interior, and the Holy of Holies, though lined in gold, was bare. Instead, cash was spent profusely on the exterior, gates, fittings and decorations being covered in gold and silver plate. Josephus says the stone was ‘exceptionally white’, and the glitter of the stone and the gleam of the gold–reflected many miles away in the bright sun–was what made the Temple so striking to travellers seeing it from afar for the first time. The prodigious platform, 35 acres in area and a mile in circumference, was more than twice the height as seen today from the bottom of the valley, for the lower courses of the great stone blocks are covered in the rubbish of centuries. Josephus says that some of these blocks were ‘45 cubits in length, 10 in height and 6 in breadth’, finished by imported craftsmen ...

Because of the huge number of animals, the slaughter, bloodying and carving up of the carcasses had to be done quickly; and to get rid of the copious quantities of blood, the platform was not solid but hollow, a gigantic cleansing system. It contained thirty-four cisterns, the largest, or Great Sea, holding over two million gallons. In winter, they stored the rainfall and in summer additional supplies were brought by aqueduct from the Pool of Siloam to the south. Innumerable pipes conveyed the water up to the platform surface, and a multitude of drains carried off the torrents of blood. Aristeas wrote: ‘There are many openings for water at the base of the altar, invisible to all except those making the sacrifices, so that all the blood is collected in great quantities and washed away in the twinkling of an eye.’

Herod’s Temple was world-famous and greatly esteemed, according to Josephus, and important gentiles offered sacrifices for pious reasons as well as to conciliate Jewish opinion. In 15 BC, for instance, Herod’s friend Marcus Agrippa made the grand gesture of offering a hecatomb (100 beasts).69

Herod’s dispositions for his kingdom did not work because his legatees, his sons by his first, Nabatean wife Doris, were no good. Archelaus, to whom he left Judaea, had to be deposed by the Romans in 6 AD. Thereafter it was governed directly by Roman procurators from Caesarea, they being responsible in turn to the Roman legate in Antioch. The old king’s grandson, Herod Agrippa, was able, and in 37 AD the Romans gave him Judaea. But he died in 44 AD, leaving Rome no choice but to impose direct rule again. The death of Herod the Great, then, effectively ended the last phase of stable Jewish rule in Palestine until the mid-twentieth century.

To a pagan who said he would become a Jew if he could be taught the Torah while standing on one foot, Hillel is said to have replied, ‘What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbour: this is the entire Torah. All the rest is commentary–go and study it.’88

Doing as you would be done by is not the entire Torah. The Torah is only in part an ethical code. It is also, and in its essence, a series of absolutist divine commands which cover a vast variety of activities many of which have no bearing at all on relations between men. It is not true that ‘all the rest is commentary’. 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.

In the third century BC, the Greek-speaking Egyptian priest Manetho wrote a history of his country, a few passages of which survive in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, attacking the Jewish account of the Exodus. Obviously he and other Egyptian intellectuals found it deeply offensive and responded in kind. He presented the Exodus not as a miraculous escape but as the expulsion of a leper colony and other polluted groups. Manetho reflected Greek notions of the Jews as misanthropic in his charge that Moses (whom he presents as Osarsiph, a renegade Egyptian priest) ordained that the Jews ‘should have no connection with any save members of their own confederacy’, but it is evident that Egyptian anti-Semitism antedated the Greek conquest of Egypt.

The Great Revolt of 66 AD and the siege of Jerusalem constitute one of the most important and horrifying events in Jewish history. Unfortunately it is badly recorded. Tacitus left a long account of the war but only fragments survive. Rabbinic accounts are made up of anecdotes with no clear historical context, or of sheer fantasy. There is very little epigraphical or archaeological evidence.

The broad outline of events is as follows. After the massacre of the garrison in Jerusalem, the Roman legate in Syria, Cestius Gallus, assembled a large force in Acre and marched on the city. When he reached the outskirts he was dismayed by the strength of the Jewish resistance and ordered a retreat which turned into a rout. Rome then took charge and reacted with enormous force, no fewer than four legions, the V, X, XII and XV, being concentrated on Judaea, and one of the empire’s most experienced generals, Titus Flavius Vespasian, being given the command. He took his time, leaving Jerusalem severely alone until he had cleared the coast and secured his communications, reduced most of the fortresses held by Jews and settled the countryside. In 69 AD Vespasian was proclaimed emperor, and at the end of the year he left for Rome, leaving his eldest son, the twenty-nine-year-old Titus, in charge of the final phase of the campaign, the siege and capture of Jerusalem, which lasted from April to September 70 AD.

He took his time, leaving Jerusalem severely alone until he had cleared the coast and secured his communications, reduced most of the fortresses held by Jews and settled the countryside. In 69 AD Vespasian was proclaimed emperor, and at the end of the year he left for Rome, leaving his eldest son, the twenty-nine-year-old Titus, in charge of the final phase of the campaign, the siege and capture of Jerusalem, which lasted from April to September 70 AD.

Titus had 60,000 men and the latest siege equipment. He could rely on starvation and Jewish divisions to do their work. The defenders had about 25,000 fighters, split into groups: the Zealots, under Eleazar ben Simon, held the Antonia and the Temple; the extremist Simeon ben Giora and his Sicarii ran the upper city; and there were Idumeans and other partisans under John of Giscala. The mass of the citizens and refugees were the helpless prisoners of these militants. Josephus described the final stages of the siege in horrifying detail. The Romans had to fight all the way. They stormed the Antonia, then took the Temple, which was burned, then Herod’s citadel a month later. The people were sold as slaves, or massacred, or saved to die in the arenas of Caesarea, Antioch and Rome. Simeon ben Giora was captured alive, taken to Rome for Titus’ triumphal process, then executed in the Forum. Titus’ arch still stands there, the Temple menorah he captured carved on its stone. He also preserved, in his palace, the curtain which screened the Holy of Holies and a copy of the scriptures–would that it had survived!

Hadrian introduced pan-Hellenistic policies throughout the East and one of his projects was to create a new, pagan polis on the ruins of Jerusalem, with a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter on Temple Mount. Dio Cassius, the Roman historian who is our chief source for these years, says the Jews did not dare rise while Hadrian was in the East, though they armed secretly and built hidden fortifications. There were two legions stationed in the area. But as soon as Hadrian departed, the Jews of Judaea struck and, says Dio, ‘the Jews in the entire world also rose and joined them and created a great deal of trouble for the Romans, secretly or openly, and even many gentile people came to their aid’.

there is no evidence that Simon regarded himself as a Messiah, the anointed one or in any way a spiritual leader. The letters show him ruling an extensive territory, concerned with farm leases, agricultural supplies, the mobilization of the countryside to supply men and food for his war. He was in every respect a secular ruler, a nasi as he calls himself in his letters, harsh, practical, unbending, ruthless: ‘I call Heaven to witness…I shall put you in chains’; ‘if you will not do this you will be punished’; ‘You are living well, eating and drinking off the property of the house of Israel, and care nothing about your brethren.’125 The later rabbinic legends woven around the ‘Son of a Star’ seem to have no basis in fact. Simon was more of a prototype for a modern Zionist fighter: unromantic and professional, a man who lived and died a guerrilla and nationalist.

580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judaea was laid waste.’.126 In the late fourth century, St Jerome reported from Bethlehem a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale that the price dropped to less than a horse.

The main road from the north entered through the present Damascus Gate; the main east gate was the one later known as St Stephen’s Gate, spanned by a triumphal arch, whose ruins remain. 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. This regulation may not have been strictly enforced, and in the mid-fourth century it was lifted under the pagan recidivist Emperor Julian. At any rate Jews contrived to visit a section of the old ruins, now known as the Wailing Wall,

bitter. The Jews could not concede the divinity of Jesus as God-made-man without repudiating the central tenet of their belief. The Christians could not concede that Jesus was anything less than God without repudiating the essence and purpose of their movement. 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 Christians took from Judaism the Pentateuch (including its morals and ethics), the prophets and the wisdom books, and far more of the apocrypha than the Jews themselves were prepared to canonize. They took the liturgy, for even the eucharist had Jewish roots. They took the notion of the Sabbath day and feast-days, incense and burning lamps, psalms, hymns and choral music, vestments and prayers, priests and martyrs, the reading of the sacred books and the institution of the synagogue (transformed into the church). They took even the notion of clerical authority–which the Jews would soon modify–in the shape of the high-priest whom the Christians turned into patriarchs and popes. There is nothing in the early church, other than its Christology,

One or more of the Flavian emperors might easily have become a Jew, just as Constantine was to become a Christian 250 years later. Josephus was entitled to boast: ‘There is not one city, Greek or barbarian, nor a single nation where the custom of the seventh day, on which we rest from all work, and the fasts and the lighting of candles are not observed…and as God permeates the universe, so the Law has found its way into the hearts of all men.’

A century later, the whole process had been reversed. Jerusalem was no longer a Jewish city at all. Alexandria, once 40 per cent Jewish, lost its Jewish voice completely. The huge casualty figures cited by such authors as Josephus, Tacitus and Dio for the two revolts (Tacitus said 1,197,000 Jews were killed or sold as slaves in the 66-70 struggle

This great enterprise in social metaphysics began humbly enough in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The hereditary priestly families, and the traditional Jewish upper class as a whole, perished in the ruin of the city. Henceforth the Jews formed themselves into a cathedocracy: they were ruled from the teacher’s chair. This had always been inherent in Judaism–for were not prophets instruments through whom God taught his people? But now it became explicit. Tradition says that the Pharisaic rabbi, Johanan ben Zakkai, the deputy head of the Sanhedrin, was smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin.

Hillel the Elder laid down: ‘Separate not thyself from the community and trust not in thyself until the day of thy death.’

A wise man must give of his wisdom to the community, just as a rich man must give of his wealth. So it is a sin not to serve when required. Prayer for others is a duty. ‘Whoever is able to plead God’s mercy for his fellows and does not do so is a sinner.’

Christianity became the norm throughout the Roman empire in the late fourth century and paganism began to disappear. As it did so, the Jews became conspicuous–a large, well-organized, comparatively wealthy minority, well educated and highly religious, rejecting Christianity not out of ignorance but from obstinacy. They became, for Christianity, a ‘problem’, to be ‘solved’.

St Augustine (354-430), the most influential of all the Latin theologians, argued that the Jews, by their mere existence, were part of God’s design, since they were witnesses to the truth of Christianity, their failure and humiliation symbolizing the triumph of church over synagogue. The policy of the church, therefore, was to allow small Jewish communities to survive in conditions of degradation and impotence.

But if, as the Christians alleged, the Persians had given, in return, a promise to restore the city to the Jews, they certainly did not keep their word. In any case, Heraclius retook the city in 629 and a massacre of Jews followed. But this was the last act of Greek power in Palestine. The same year, Mohammed completed the conquest of Mecca. The Byzantines were decisively defeated at the battle of the Yarmuk in 636, and within four years the Moslems occupied all Palestine and most of Syria too. Chalcedonians and Monophysites, Nestorians and Copts, Seleucians and Armenians, Latins and Greeks, Samaritans and Jews, were all collectively submerged beneath the flood of Islam.

In the year 1168 an exceptionally observant Jewish traveller from Spain–probably a gem-merchant–visited the great Byzantine capital city of Constantinople. We know virtually nothing about Benjamin of Tudela save that he wrote a Book of Travels about his extensive journeys around the northern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the years 1159-72. It is the most sensible, objective and reliable of all travel books written during the Middle Ages, was published as early as 1556, thereafter translated into almost all European languages, and became a primary source-book for scholars of the period.1

Historians have frequently noticed, at different periods and in diverse societies, that the weakening of clericalism tends to strengthen economic dynamism. During the second century AD, clericalism virtually disappeared from Jewish societies. The Temple priests, the Sadducees, the teeming servitors of a state-supported religion all vanished. The rabbis, who replaced the clerics, were not a parasitic caste. It is true that some scholars were supported by the community, but even scholars were encouraged to acquire a trade. Rabbis as a whole were specifically enjoined to do so. Indeed rabbis were often the most assiduous and efficient traders.