Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The die was cast. Roman pride had to be avenged. The rebels chose the former high priest, Ananus, as the leader of independent Israel. He strengthened the walls, while the city echoed to the hammering and forging of armour and weapons. He also appointed generals, among them Josephus, the future historian, who now left the city as the commander of Galilee, where he found himself fighting a warlord, John of Gischala, more viciously than either of them fought the Romans.

  The new Jewish coins celebrated “The Freedom of Zion” and “Jerusalem the Holy”—yet it seemed this was a liberation that not many had wanted and the city waited like “a place doomed to destruction.” Nero was in Greece to perform his songs and compete in chariot-races in the Olympic Games (he won even though he fell out of his chariot), when he heard that Israel had rebelled.

  JOSEPHUS’ PROPHECY: THE MULETEER AS EMPEROR

  Nero feared victorious generals, so he chose as the commander of his Jewish War a dogged veteran from his own entourage. Titus Flavius Vespasianus was in his late fifties and often annoyed the emperor by falling asleep during his theatrical performances. But he had made his name in the conquest of Britain and his nickname—The Muleteer—revealed his unglamorous dependability and the fortune he had made by selling mules to the army.

  Sending his son Titus to Alexandria to collect reinforcements, Vespasian mustered an army of 60,000, four legions plus Syrian slingers, Arab archers and the cavalry of King Herod Agrippa. Then he marched down the coast to Ptolemais (Acre). In early 67, he methodically started to reconquer Galilee, resisted fanatically by Josephus and his Galileans. Finally, Vespasian besieged Josephus in his fortress of Jotapata. On 29 July that year, Titus crept through the shattered walls and seized the city. The Jews fought to the death, many of them committing suicide.

  Josephus and some other survivors hid in a cave. When the Romans trapped them, they decided to kill themselves and drew lots to determine who would kill whom. “By the providence of God” (or by cheating), Josephus drew the last lot and emerged alive from the cave. Vespasian decided to send him as a prize to Nero, which would entail an atrocious death. Josephus asked to speak to the general. When he stood before Vespasian and Titus, he said: “Vespasian! I come to you as a messenger of greater tidings. Do you send me to Nero? Why? It is you, Vespasian, who are and shall be Caesar and Emperor, you and your son.” The dour Vespasian was flattered, keeping Josephus in prison but sending him presents. Titus, who was almost the same age as Josephus, befriended him.

  As Vespasian and Titus advanced towards Judaea, Josephus’ rival, John of Gischala, escaped to Jerusalem—“a city without a governor” engaged in a frenzy of self-destructive butchery.

  JERUSALEM THE BROTHEL: THE TYRANTS JOHN AND SIMON

  The gates of Jerusalem remained open to Jewish pilgrims, so religious fanatics, battle-hardened cut-throats and thousands of refugees poured into the city, where the rebels expended their energies in gang warfare, orgiastic pleasure-seeking and vicious witch-hunts for traitors.

  Young, brash brigands now challenged the rule of the priests. They seized the Temple, overthrowing the high priest himself, electing by lot in his stead a “mere rustic.” Ananus rallied the Jerusalemites and attacked the Temple, but he hesitated to storm the inner courts and Holy of Holies. John of Gischala and his Galilean fighters saw an opportunity to win the entire city. John invited in the Idumeans, that “most barbarous and bloody nation” from south of Jerusalem. The Idumeans broke into the city, stormed the Temple, which “overflowed with blood,” and then rampaged through the streets, killing 12,000. They murdered Ananus and then his priests, stripped them and stamped on the naked bodies, before tossing them over the walls to be eaten by dogs. “The death of Ananus,” says Josephus, “was the beginning of the destruction of the city.” Finally, laden with booty and sated with blood, the Idumeans left a Jerusalem dominated by a new strongman, John of Gischala.

  Even though the Romans were not far away, John gave free rein to his Galileans and Zealots to enjoy their prizes. The Holy House became a bawdy-house; but some of John’s supporters soon lost faith in this tyrant and defected to the rising power outside the city, a young warlord named Simon ben Giora, “not as cunning as John but superior in strength and courage.” Simon “was a greater terror to the people than the Romans themselves.” The Jerusalemites, hoping to save themselves from one tyrant, invited in a second—Simon ben Giora—who soon occupied much of the city. But John still held the Temple. Now the Zealots rebelled against him, seizing the Inner Temple so that, in the words of Tacitus, “there were three generals, three armies” fighting each other for one city—even though the Romans were getting closer. When nearby Jericho fell to Vespasian, all three Jewish factions ceased fighting each other and worked to fortify Jerusalem, digging trenches and strengthening Herod Agrippa I’s Third Wall in the north. Vespasian prepared to besiege Jerusalem. But then all at once he stopped.

  Rome had lost its head. On 9 June 68, Nero, beset by rebellions, committed suicide with the words: “What an artist the world is losing in me!” In quick succession, Rome acclaimed and destroyed three emperors while three False Neros arose and foundered in the provinces—as if one real one had not been enough. Finally, the legions of Judaea and Egypt hailed Vespasian as their own emperor. The Muleteer remembered Josephus’ prophecy and freed him, granting him citizenship and appointing him as his adviser, almost his mascot, as he conquered first Judaea—and then the world. Berenice pawned her jewels to help fund Vespasian’s bid for the throne of Rome: the Muleteer was grateful. The new emperor headed via Alexandria to Rome and his son Titus, commanding 60,000 troops, advanced on the Holy City, knowing that his dynasty would be made or broken by the fate of Jerusalem.55

  PART TWO

  Paganism

  How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her.

  —LAMENTATIONS, 1.1–2

  Even while Jerusalem was still standing and the Jews at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire and the customs of our ancestors.

  —CICERO, Pro L. Flacco

  It is better for a person to live in the Land of Israel in a city entirely of non-Jews than to live outside the Land in a city entirely Jewish. He who is buried there it is as if he were born in Jerusalem and he who is buried in Jerusalem, it is as though he were born under the throne of glory.

  —JUDAH HANASI, Talmud

  Ten measures of beauty descended upon the world, nine were given to Jerusalem and one to the rest of the world.

  —MIDRASH TANHUMA, Kedoshim 10

  For the freedom of Jerusalem.

  —SIMON BAR KOCHBA, coins

  Thus was Jerusalem destroyed on the very day of Saturn, the day which even now the Jews reverence most.

  —DIO CASSIUS, Roman History

  CHAPTER 14

  Aelia Capitolina

  AD 70–312

  TITUS’ TRIUMPH: JERUSALEM IN ROME

  A few weeks later, once the city had been destroyed and he had completed his round of bloody spectacles, Titus again passed through Jerusalem, comparing her melancholy ruins with her vanished glory. He then sailed for Rome, taking with him the captured Jewish leaders, his royal mistress Berenice, his favourite renegade Josephus, and the treasures of the Temple—to celebrate the conquest of Jerusalem. Vespasian and Titus, crowned with laurel and clothed in purple, emerged from the Temple of Isis, were greeted by the Senate and took their places in the Forum to review one of the most extravagant Triumphs in the history of Rome.

  The pageant of divine statues and gilded floats, three or even four storeys high, heaped with treasure, afforded the spectators both “pleasure and surprise,” noted Josephus drily, “for there was to be seen a happy country laid waste.” The fall of Jerusalem
was acted out in tableaux vivants—legionaries charging, Jews massacred, Temple in flames—and on top of each float stood the Roman commanders of every town taken. There followed what was for Josephus the cruellest cut of all, the splendours of the Holy of Holies: the golden table, the candelabra and the Law of the Jews. The star prisoner, Simon ben Giora, was paraded with a rope around his neck.

  When the procession stopped at the Temple of Jupiter, Simon and the rebel chieftains were executed; the crowds cheered; sacrifices were consecrated. There died Jerusalem, mused Josephus: “Neither its antiquity, nor its deep wealth, nor its people spread over the whole habitable world nor yet the great glory of its religious rites, were sufficient to prevent its ruin.”

  The Triumph was commemorated by the construction of the Arch of Titus, which still stands in Rome.a Jewish spoils paid for the Colosseum and the Temple of Peace, where Vespasian displayed the prizes of Jerusalem—except for the Law scrolls and the purple veils of the Holy of Holies that were placed in the imperial palace itself. The Triumph and remodelling of central Rome celebrated not just a new dynasty but a rededication of the empire itself and victory over Judaism. The tax paid by all Jews to the Temple was replaced by the Fiscus Judaicus, paid to the Roman state to fund the rebuilding of the Temple of Jupiter, a humiliation fiercely enforced.b Yet most Jews, surviving in Judaea and Galilee, and in the populous communities of the Mediterranean and Babylonia, lived as they had lived before, accepting Roman or Parthian rule.

  The Jewish War was not quite over. The Masada Fortress held out for three years, under Eleazar the Galilean, as the Romans raised a ramp to storm it. In April 73, their leader addressed his men and their families about the realities of this dark new world: “Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein?” Jerusalem was gone and now they faced slavery:

  We long ago my generous friends resolved never to be servants to the Romans nor to any other than God Himself. We were the first that revolted against them; we are the last that fight against them and I cannot but esteem it as a favour that God has granted us that it is still in our power to die bravely and in a state of freedom, in a glorious manner, together with our dearest friends. Let our wives die before they are abused and our children before they have tasted slavery.

  So the “husbands tenderly embraced their wives, and took their children into their arms, giving the longest parting kisses to them with tears in their eyes.” Each man killed his wife and children; ten men were chosen by lot to slay the rest until all 960 were dead.

  To most Romans, the Masada suicide confirmed Jews as demented fanatics. Tacitus, though writing thirty years later, expressed the conventional view that the Jews were “sinister and revolting” bigots, with bizarre superstitions including monotheism and circumcision, who despised Roman gods, “rejected patriotism” and “have entrenched themselves by their very wickedness.” Yet Josephus collected the details of Masada from the handful of survivors who hid during the suicide and could not conceal his admiration for Jewish courage.

  BERENICE: THE JEWISH CLEOPATRA

  Josephus lived in Vespasian’s old house in Rome. Titus gave him some of the scrolls from the Temple, a pension and lands in Judaea, and commissioned his first book, The Jewish War. The emperor and Titus were not Josephus’ only source. “When you come to me,” wrote his “dear friend” King Herod Agrippa, “I’ll inform you of a great many things.” But Josephus realized that “my privileged position exacted envy and brought danger”: he needed the imperial protection he received up to the reign of Domitian, who solicitously executed some of his enemies. Yet even as Josephus basked in Flavian favour in his last years—he died around AD 100—he hoped the Temple would be rebuilt, and his pride in the Jewish contribution to civilization surged: “We’ve introduced the rest of the world to a very large number of beautiful ideas. What greater beauty than inviolable piety? What higher justice than obedience to the Laws?”

  Berenice, the Herodian princess, stayed in Rome with Titus but she offended the Romans with her flashy diamonds, her royal airs and the stories of her incest with her brother. “She dwelt in the palace cohabiting with Titus. She expected to marry him and was already behaving in every respect as if she were his wife.” It was said that Titus had the general Caecina murdered for flirting with her. Titus loved her but the Romans compared her to Antony’s femme fatale, Cleopatra—or worse, since the Jews were now despised and defeated. Titus had to send her away. When he succeeded his father in 79, she returned to Rome, now in her fifties, but such was the outcry that he again separated from the Jewish Cleopatra, aware that the Flavians were far from secure on the throne. Perhaps she rejoined her brother, almost the last of the Herodians.c

  Titus’ reign was short. He died two years later with the words: “I have only done one thing wrong.” The destruction of Jerusalem? The Jews believed his early death was God’s punishment.1 For forty years, a tense exhaustion reigned over blighted Jerusalem before Judaea again exploded in a final and disastrous spasm of rage.

  DEATH OF THE JESUS DYNASTY:

  THE FORGOTTEN CRUCIFIXION

  Jerusalem was the headquarters of the Tenth Legion, whose camp was set up in the present-day Armenian Quarter around the three towers of Herod’s Citadel—the base of the last of them, the Hippicus, stands today. The Legion’s rooftiles and bricks, always emblazoned with its anti-Jewish emblem, the boar, have been found all over the city. Jerusalem was not totally deserted but had been settled with Syrian and Greek veterans, who traditionally hated the Jews. This barren moonscape of gigantic rockheaps must have been eerie. But Jews must have hoped that the Temple would be rebuilt as it had been once before.

  Vespasian allowed the rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had escaped Jerusalem in a coffin, to teach the Law at Yavneh (Jamnia) on the Mediterranean, and the Jews were not formally banned from Jerusalem. Indeed many of the wealthier Jews had probably joined the Romans, as Josephus and Agrippa had done. Nonetheless, they were not allowed onto the Temple Mount. Instead, pilgrims bitterly mourned the Temple, praying next to the Tomb of Zechariahd in the Kidron Valley. Some hoped for the Apocalypse to restore God’s kingdom, but for ben Zakkai the vanished city assumed an immaterial mysticism. When he visited the ruins, his pupil cried, “Woe to us!” “Be not grieved,” replied the rabbi (according to the Talmud, compiled several centuries later). “We have another atonement. It is acts of loving-kindness.” No one realized it at this time, but this was the beginning of modern Judaism—without the Temple.

  The Jewish Christians, led by Simon son of Cleophas, Jesus’ half-brother or cousin, returned to Jerusalem where they started to honour the Upper Room, on today’s Mount Zion. Beneath the present building lies a synagogue, built probably with Herodian debris from the Temple. Yet the growing number of gentile Christians around the Mediterranean no longer revered the real Jerusalem. The defeat of the Jews separated them forever from the mother-religion, proving the truth of Jesus’ prophecies and the succession of a new revelation. Jerusalem was just the wilderness of a failed faith. The Book of Revelation replaced the Temple with Christ the Lamb. At the End of Days, golden, bejewelled Jerusalem would descend from heaven.

  These sects had to be careful: the Romans were on guard against any signs of messianic kingship. Titus’ successor, his brother Domitian, maintained the anti-Jewish tax and persecuted the Christians, as a way of rallying support for his own faltering regime. On his assassination, the pacific, elderly Emperor Nerva relaxed the repression and the Jewish tax. Yet this was a false dawn. Nerva had no sons, so he chose his pre-eminent general as heir. Trajan, tall, athletic, stern, was the ideal emperor, perhaps the greatest since Augustus. But he saw himself as a conqueror of new lands and a restorer of old values—bad news for the Christians, and worse for the Jews. In 106 he ordered the crucifixion of Simon, the Overseer of the Christians in Jerusalem, because, like Jesus, he claimed descent from King David. There ended the Jesus dynasty.

  Trajan, proud that his father had made hi
s name fighting the Jews under Titus, restored the Fiscus Judaicus, but he was another Alexander hero-worshipper: he invaded Parthia, expanding Roman power into Iraq, home of the Babylonian Jews. During the fighting, they surely appealed to their Roman brethren. As Trajan advanced into Iraq, the Jews of Africa, Egypt and Cyprus, led by rebel “kings,” massacred thousands of Romans and Greeks, vengeance at last, possibly co-ordinated by the Jews of Parthia.

  Trajan, fearing Jewish treason in his rear and attack from Babylonian Jews as he advanced into Iraq, “was determined if possible to destroy the nation utterly.” Trajan ordered Jews to be killed from Iraq to Egypt, where, wrote the historian Appian, “Trajan was destroying totally the Jewish race.” The Jews were now seen as hostile to the Roman Empire: they “regard as profane everything we hold sacred,” wrote Tacitus, “while they permit all we abhor.”

  Rome’s Jewish problem was witnessed by the new Governor of Syria, Aelius Hadrian, who was married to Trajan’s niece. When Trajan died unexpectedly without an heir, his empress announced that he had adopted a son on his deathbed: the new emperor was Hadrian, who devised a solution to end the Jewish problem once and for all. He was a remarkable emperor, one of the makers of Jerusalem and one of the supreme monsters of Jewish history.2

  HADRIAN: THE JERUSALEM SOLUTION

  In 130, the emperor visited Jerusalem, accompanied by his young lover Antinous, and decided to abolish the city, even down to its very name. He ordered a new city to be built on the site of the old one, to be named Aelia Capitolina, after his own family and Jupiter Capitolinus (the god most associated with the empire), and he banned circumcision, the sign of God’s covenant with the Jews, on pain of death. The Jews, realizing that this meant the Temple would never be rebuilt, smarted under these blows, while the oblivious emperor travelled on to Egypt.