Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The Maccabee family was not yet exhausted: there was still one more brother.32 This was Simon, who refortified Jerusalem and rallied his army. Along with a sudden snowstorm, this forced the Greek to retreat, but he had his revenge: he executed Simon’s captive brother, Jonathan. In spring 141, Simon stormed and demolished the Acra,d razing the very hill on which it stood before celebrating in Jerusalem “with praise, palm branches, harps, cymbals, viols and hymns.” The “yoke of the heathen was taken away from Israel” and a Great Assembly hailed Simon as hereditary ruler, clothing him in royal purple buckled with gold, king in all but name. “The people began to write in their contracts: ‘In the first year of Simon the Great, High Priest, Commander-in-Chief and Leader of the Jews.’ ”

  JOHN HYRCANUS: EMPIRE-BUILDER

  Simon the Great was at the height of his popularity when, in 134 BC, he was invited to dinner by his son-in-law. There, the last of the first generation of Maccabees was assassinated, and the son-in-law then seized Simon’s wife and two of his sons. Assassins tried to catch his other son John—Yehohanan in Hebrew—but he made it to Jerusalem and held the city.

  John faced disaster on every side. When he pursued the conspirators to their stronghold, his mother and brothers were torn to pieces before him. As the third son, John had not expected to reign but he possessed all the family talents to become the ideal Jewish ruler, with “charismatic-Messianic traits.” Indeed, wrote Josephus, God granted John “three of the greatest privileges—the rule of the nation, the office of High Priest and the gift of prophecy.”

  The Seleucid king, Antiochus VII Sidetes, exploited this Jewish civil war to regain Palestine and besiege Jerusalem. The Jerusalemites were starting to starve, when King Sidetes signalled his willingness to negotiate by sending in “a magnificent sacrifice” of bulls with gilded horns for the Feast of Tabernacles. John sued for peace, agreeing to surrender Maccabee conquests outside Judaea, to pay 500 silver talents and to demolish the walls.

  John had to support his new master on campaign against the rising power in Iran and Iraq, the Parthians. The expedition proved a disaster for the Greeks but a blessing for the Jews. John may have secretly negotiated with the Parthian king, who had many Jewish subjects. The Greek king was killed and somehow John escaped from this quagmire, returning with his independence restored.e

  The great powers were distracted by their own internecine intrigues, so John was free to embark on conquests on a scale unseen since David, who ironically helped fund his wars: John plundered his rich tomb, presumably in the old City of David. He conquered Madaba across the Jordan, forced the conversion of the Edomites (who became known as the Idumeans) to the south, and destroyed Samaria before taking Galilee. In Jerusalem, John built the so-called First Wall around the growing city.f His kingdom was a regional power, and its Temple was the centre of Jewish life, though the growing communities around the Mediterranean conducted their daily prayers in local synagogues. It was probably in this newly confident time that the twenty-four books became the agreed text of the Jewish Old Testament.

  After John’s death, his son Aristobulos declared himself king of Judaea, the first monarch in Jerusalem since 586, and conquered Iturea in today’s northern Israel and southern Lebanon. But the Maccabeans were now almost as Greek as their enemies, using both Greek and Hebrew names. They started to behave with all the ferocity of Greek tyrants. Aristobulos threw his mother into jail and murdered his more popular brother, a crime that drove him mad with guilt. Yet as he died vomiting blood, he feared that his arrogant surviving brother, Alexander Jannaeus, was a monster who would destroy the Maccabees.33

  ALEXANDER THE THRACIAN: THE FURIOUS YOUNG LION

  As soon as he had secured Jerusalem, King Alexander (Jannaeus was the Greek version of his Hebrew name Yehonatan) married his brother’s widow and set about conquering a Jewish empire. Alexander was spoilt and heartless—soon the Jews loathed him for his debauched sadism. But Alexander enjoyed his freedom to wage war on his neighbours—the Greek kingdoms were collapsing, the Romans had not yet arrived. Alexander always managed to survive his frequent defeats thanks to the luck of the devilg and tenacious savagery: the Jews nicknamed him the Thracian for his barbarism and his army of Greek mercenaries.

  Alexander conquered Gaza and Raphia on the borders of Egypt and the Gaulanitis (Golan) in the north. Ambushed by the Nabataean Arabs in Moab, Alexander fled back to Jerusalem. When he officiated as high priest at the Feast of Tabernacles, the people bombarded him with fruit. Encouraged by the more religious Pharisees (who followed oral traditions as well as the written Torah), they taunted him with the claim that, since his mother had been a prisoner, he was unfit to be high priest. Alexander responded by unleashing his Greek mercenaries, who massacred 6,000 people in the streets. The Seleucids exploited the rebellion to attack Judaea. Alexander fled to the hills.

  He bided his time, planning his revenge. When the king re-entered Jerusalem, he slaughtered 50,000 of his own people. He celebrated his victory by cavorting with his concubines at a feast while he watched 800 rebels being crucified around the hills. The throats of their wives and children were slit before their eyes. “The furious young lion,” as his enemies called him, died of alcoholism, leaving his wife Salome Alexandra a Jewish empire that included parts of today’s Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. He advised her to conceal his death from the soldiers until she had secured Jerusalem, then to govern with the Pharisees.

  The new queen was the first woman to rule Jerusalem since Jezebel’s daughter. But the genius of the dynasty was exhausted. Salome Alexandra (Salome being the Greek version of Shalomzion—Peace in Zion), shrewd widow of two kings, ruled her little empire into her sixties with the help of the Pharisees, but she struggled to control her two sons: the elder, the high priest John Hyrcanus II, was not energetic enough, while the younger Aristobulos was too energetic by far.

  To the north, Rome advanced relentlessly around the Mediterranean, swallowing first Greece then today’s Turkey, where Roman power was resisted by Mithridates, the Greek King of Pontus. In 66 BC, the Roman general Pompey defeated Mithridates, and moved south to fill the vacuum. Rome was coming to Jerusalem.

  a His family is correctly known as the Hasmonean dynasty, but for simplicity they are identified in this book as the Maccabeans. The Maccabee became the medieval prototype for Christian chivalry alongside King Arthur and Charlemagne. Charles “Martel”—the Hammer—who defeated the Arabs at the Battle of Tours in 732, Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth century and Edward I (1272–1303) promoted themselves as latterday Maccabees. Later, Rubens painted Judah the Maccabee; Handel wrote an oratorio dedicated to him. The Maccabees have especially inspired Israel, where many of the football teams are named after them. As the heroes of Hanukkah, Jews traditionally regard them as freedom-fighters against a genocidal tyrant, a precursor of Hitler. But some have suggested another view, inspired by today’s struggle between American democracy and jihadist terrorism, in which the Greeks are the civilized ones fighting Maccabee religious fanatics who resemble a Jewish Taleban.

  b This new high priest was not even a member of the Zadokite House of Onias. Its rightful heir was Onias IV, who now fled with his followers to Egypt where he was welcomed by King Ptolemy VI Philometer. Philometer allowed him to build a Jewish temple on the site of a disused Egyptian shrine at Leontopolis in the Nile Delta, and there he created his own Jerusalem, still known as Tell al-Jahudiya—Hill of the Jews. These Jewish princes became powerful military commanders in Egypt. Onias’ temple lasted until Titus ordered its destruction in AD 70.

  c Philometer’s successor was hostile to the Jews because Onias and the Alexandrian Jews had supported Philometer. Even by the family’s vicious standards, Ptolemy VIII Euergetes, nicknamed Fatso (Physkon) by the Alexandrian mob, was a monster. Fatso took revenge on the Jews in Egypt, massing his elephants to trample them, but, perhaps in a divine miracle, the elephants trampled the king’s entourage instead. The climax of his cruelties was th
e murder of his own fourteen-year-old son who totally trusted his father: Fatso had the boy’s head, legs and hands cut off and sent to his own mother, Cleopatra II. When another of the family, Cleopatra Thea who married the Syrian king Demetrius II, decided to murder her own son, she offered him a cup of poison. But the son forced the mother to drink it. Such was family life among the Ptolemies.

  d No trace has been found of the Acra. Some scholars believe it stood just south of Temple Mount. Herod the Great was to extend the Temple Mount, so probably the razed hill of the Acra is now beneath the Temple platform where al-Aqsa Mosque stands. For those who question why so little survives from the reign of, say, King David, this demonstrates that enormous constructions can leave no archaeological trace.

  e And with a new nickname, Hyrcanus, surely the result of his Parthian adventures, even though he never reached Hyrcania on the Caspian. He consolidated his power abroad with a new Roman alliance and in Jerusalem through the backing of the rich Temple elite, the Sadducees, descendants of the house of Zadok—hence their name.

  f The city wall extended from the Temple Mount to the Siloam Pool and thence to the Citadel, where the foundations of his towers remain today, and where one can see little residential houses of Maccabean Jerusalem. Sections of his wall survive at various places: on the south slope of Mount Zion, just west of the Catholic Cemetery, there is a place where John’s wall still stands next to the bigger stones of Hezekiah’s and the much later ones of the Byzantine empress Eudocia. In 1985, Israeli archaeologists discovered a subterranean aqueduct and large pool built by John and the Maccabees. British, German and French archaeologists in the nineteenth century had uncovered this Struthion Pool underground in 1870 when the Sisters of Zion convent was built on the Via Dolorosa. The aqueduct reveals how the Struthion Pool was supplied and, beneath the Convent, close to the Via Dolorosa, visitors can walk along this aqueduct, now part of the Temple Tunnel. The Maccabees also built a bridge across the deep valley between the Temple Mount and the Upper City. John himself resided in his Baris stronghold, north of the Temple, but he also probably started to build a palace in the expanding Upper City.

  g When he attacked the Greek city Ptolemais, Ptolemy IX Soter, then ruling in Cyprus, intervened and defeated Alexander. But he was rescued by Jewish connections: Soter was at war with his mother Cleopatra III, Queen of Egypt, who feared her son’s power in Judaea. Cleopatra’s commander was the Jewish Ananias, the son of the ex-high priest Onias, who rescued the Maccabean king. Cleopatra considered annexing Judaea, but her Jewish general advised against this, and she was in no position to take on her own army.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Romans Arrive

  66–40 BC

  POMPEY IN THE HOLY OF HOLIES

  When Queen Salome died, her sons fought. Hyrcanus II was defeated near Jericho by his brother Aristobulos II. The brothers were reconciled, embracing before the Jerusalemites in the Temple, and Aristobulos became king. Hyrcanus retired, but he was advised and controlled by a cunning outsider, Antipater. This Idumean potentatea was the future. His son would become King Herod. Their talented and depraved family would dominate Jerusalem for over a century and essentially create the Temple Mount and Western Wall as they are today.

  Antipater helped Hyrcanus flee to Petra, the “rose red city half as old as time,” the Nabataean Arab capital. King Aretas (Harith in Arabic), fabulously rich from the Indian spice trade and related to Antipater’s Arab wife, helped them defeat King Aristobulos, who fled back to Jerusalem. The Arab king gave chase, besieging Aristobulos in the fortified Temple Mount. But all this sound and fury signified nothing, because to the north Pompey was setting up headquarters in Damascus. Gnaeus Pompeius, the most powerful man in Rome, was a maverick commander who without official position had led his private army to victory in the Roman civil wars in Italy, Sicily and North Africa. He had celebrated two Triumphs and won vast wealth. He was a cautious general with a cherubic face—“nothing was more delicate than Pompey’s cheeks”—but this was deceptive: Pompey was, wrote the historian Sallust, “honest in face, shameless in heart,” and his early sadism and greed in the civil wars had earned him the nickname “the young butcher.” Now he had established himself in Rome but the laurels of a Roman strongman required constant refreshment. His nickname “Magnus”—the Great—was at least partly sarcastic. As a boy he had worshipped Alexander the Great, and his Homeric, heroic kingship, along with the unconquered provinces and prizes of the East, would henceforth prove irresistible to every Roman oligarch on the make.

  In 64 BC, Pompey terminated the Seleucid kingdom, annexed Syria and was happy to mediate between the warring Jews. Delegations arrived from Jerusalem representing not only both the feuding brothers but also the Pharisees, who begged Pompey to rid them of Maccabeans. Pompey ordered both princes to await his judgement, but Aristobulos, who had not quite grasped the steely power of Rome, rashly double-crossed him.

  Pompey swooped on Jerusalem. He captured Aristobulos, but the Maccabean’s retainers occupied the fortified Temple Mount, breaking down the bridge that linked it to the Upper City. Pompey, encamped north of the Bethesda Pool, besieged the Temple for three months, using catapults to bombard it. Once again taking advantage of Jewish piety—it was the Sabbath and a fast—the Romans stormed the Temple from the north, cutting the throats of the priests who guarded the altar. Jews set alight their own houses; others threw themselves from the battlements. Twelve thousand were killed. Pompey destroyed fortifications, abolished the monarchy, confiscated most of the Maccabean kingdom and appointed Hyrcanus as high priest, ruling just Judaea with his minister Antipater.

  Pompey could not resist the opportunity of seeing inside the famous Holy of Holies. The Romans were intrigued by Eastern rites yet proud of their many gods and disdainful of the primitive superstition of Jewish monotheism. The Greeks sneered that the Jews in secret worshipped a golden ass’s head or fattened up a human sacrifice to cannibalize later. Pompey and his entourage entered the Holy of Holies, an unspeakable sacrilege given that even the high priest visited it only once a year. The Roman was probably only the second gentile (after Antiochus IV) ever to penetrate the Sanctuary. Yet he respectfully examined the golden table and the holy candelabra—and realized that there was nothing else there, no godhead, just an intense sanctity. He stole nothing.

  Pompey hurried back to Rome to enjoy the Triumph celebrating his Asian conquests. Hyrcanus meanwhile was tormented by the rebellions of Aristobulos and his sons, but the real ruler, his minister Antipater, possessed a genius for winning support in Rome which was now the source of all power. However, even that most serpentine of politicians was challenged by the twists of Roman politics. Pompey was forced to share power in a triumvirate with two other leaders, Crassus and Caesar, the latter soon to make his name conquering Gaul. In 55 BC, Crassus, the next Roman oligarch looking for glory in the East, arrived in Syria, keen to equal the conquests of his rivals.34

  CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

  Crassus, known in Rome as Dives, the Rich Man, was notorious for his avarice and cruelty. He had added victims to the Roman dictator Sulla’s death-lists purely to seize their money, while he had celebrated his suppression of the Spartacus rebellion by crucifying 6,000 slaves along the Appian Way. Now he planned an expedition to throw back the new Parthian kingdom that had replaced the Persians and Seleucids in today’s Iraq and Iran.

  Crassus funded his invasion by raiding the Temple in Jerusalem, whence he stole 2,000 talents untouched by Pompey and the “beam of solid gold” in the Holy of Holies. But the Parthians annihilated Crassus and his army. The Parthian king Orad II was watching a Greek play when Crassus’ head was tossed on stage. Orad had molten gold poured into Crassus’ mouth, saying, “Be satisfied now with thy life’s desire.”35

  Now Rome’s two strongmen, Caesar and Pompey, competed for supremacy. In 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon from Gaul and invaded Italy, defeating Pompey eighteen months later. Pompey fled to Egypt. Elected dictator of Rom
e, Caesar gave chase, arriving in Egypt two days after the Egyptians had murdered Pompey. He was horrified yet relieved to receive Pompey’s pickled head as a welcoming gift. He had campaigned in the East thirty years earlier. Now he found Egypt divided in a vicious struggle between King Ptolemy XIII and his sister-wife Cleopatra VII to secure for Rome the richest prize of the East: Egypt. But he could not have foreseen how this young queen, deposed from the throne and in desperate straits, would shape his will to her own ends.

  Cleopatra demanded a secret audience with the master of the Roman empire. This accomplished impresario of sexual-political pantomime had herself carried into Caesar’s palace wrapped in a laundry bag (not a carpet)—perhaps divining that he was susceptible to such theatrical excitement. Gaius Julius Caesar, battleworn and grizzled, was fifty-two and self-conscious about his balding pate. But this astounding if somewhat chilling life-force, possessed of all the talents of war, letters and politics, and the remorseless energy of a younger man, was also a sexual adventurer who had slept with the wives of both Crassus and Pompey. Cleopatra was twenty-one: “her beauty was absolutely not without parallel but her physical attractions, combined with her persuasive charm and the aura she projected” exerted a powerful fascination, even if, as coins and statues suggest, she possessed the aquiline nose and pointed chin of her forebears. She had a kingdom to reclaim and a peerless lineage to live up to. Both Caesar and Cleopatra were keen practitioners of the adventurous school of politics. They embarked on an affair—she soon bore him a child, Caesarion—but, more importantly, he was now committed to back her.