by Howard Fast
“Enough!” Ragesh roared.
“Enough,” Judas said.
“Be still, Jonathan, be still.”
Enoch of Alexandria rose, a white-bearded, splendid old man of seventy, tall and gentle and soft-eyed. He was one of the old Kohanim who had come back from Egypt, that he might spend the years left to him at the Temple, and now he spread his arms for silence.
“So be it, and peace. I am an old man, Judas Maccabeus, yet I do you honor and there is no man in Israel I put before you. Two things I wanted to see before I died, the holy Temple and the face of the Maccabee. I have seen both, and in neither was I disappointed. Yet I am a Jew—” He paused and sighed. “I am a Jew, my son, and our ways are not the ways of the nokri. Shall we kill without end? Then will we not become creatures of death instead of life? When I came through the villages, I saw that the people were at peace, building their houses again, and the grapes were heavy on the vine. What does God ask of man, but that he render justice and keep the covenant? Pride goeth, I tell you. We have driven home to the Greek well enough that the Jew is not a meek and humble creature with whom he can do his will, and now, in Antioch, one party wars against the other for power. I know that, my son, and I am old in the ways of kings and their courts. This Lysias will make peace with us, if we come to him with soft words instead of hard hearts. He would rather fight for power in Antioch and Damascus than here in Jerusalem—and if he asks tribute, we will ask peace and the right to our own ways and our own law and our own covenant with our own God. That is the best way, my son. We do not reject you. Indeed, we offer you the highest honor in all Israel, the priesthood of the Temple—”
They all looked at Judas, who stood with his arm around Jonathan. He did not answer at first, nor was there any sign of his emotions on that handsome, auburn-bearded face of his. Tall, tired, stained with the blood and dirt of the battle he had just come from, his striped cloak hanging from his great shoulders, the sword of Apollonius slung from his side, he was less and more than human. How many memories I evoke of Judas! Yet how little I can recapture him or find him or know him! The Jew was the essence of him—the making of him and the death of him; only a Jew could have listened to the old men as he listened, thinking of Eleazar, loving Eleazar as he must have loved him, remembering the hundred and more times Eleazar had fought beside him—as he said to me once, “How shall I come to harm, Simon, with that hammer on one side of me and your sword on the other?” Only a Jew could have listened, and asked finally, in a voice low with anguish:
“And all we have fought—all our battles, all our suffering and striving—all this you will place at the mercy of a Greek’s word?”
Even Ragesh pitied him then, and said insinuatingly, “Not the mercy of a Greek’s word, Judas, my son. There is a political balance of power now that did not exist five years ago, and this small defeat by the elephant troops does not change it We have arms and thousands of trained men, and we have taught the Greek that the Jew is not something to be laughed at. Therefore, we are in a position to bargain, to take full advantage of the delicate situation that the death of Antiochus left, and to turn it to our advantage. This is not a quick or hasty decision, Judas.”
“And if I had turned back the elephants,” Judas pleaded, “would you have spoken this way? You call me the Maccabee—is this the first battle I have fought? When no one could see hope, when we faced only death and destruction—when this very Temple was a desecration, did I not go out then with my father and my brothers and wage war for the freedom of Israel? And did I not triumph? Does one defeat wipe out every victory we have won? Why do you turn on me? Why do you turn on me? You offer me the high priesthood—did I want it? Did I fight for rewards? Look at me as I stand here—and this is all that I own in the world, the cloak on my back and the sword by my side! Is there any man who can say that he saw a son of Mattathias loot the dead? Do you think me ambitious? Go ask my brother Eleazar whose body lies back there, crushed by the feet of a hundred beasts! I want no rewards—I want only freedom for my land, and you tell me you will sell our freedom and bargain and pledge our lives to the word of a Greek!”
“Judas, Judas ben Mattathias,” Ragesh said patiently. “It is not one victory or one defeat. Even before the battle, we had met and discussed those terms we would ask from Lysias—”
“Before the battle,” Judas said. “And while I and my brothers fought, you palavered with them here, behind our backs! Ragesh, God have mercy on you, for you have sold me and you have sold my people!”
Now, indeed, I expected Ragesh to fly into a rage, but the whip of my brother’s words struck him like a lash across the face, and the proud little man bent his head while his lips moved in silence.
“Do what you will,” Judas said, “do what you will, old man. When you called me the Maccabee first, I said that I would put away my sword when you commanded me to. I put it away now.” And he turned to us, to John, to Jonathan and to me, and said, softly and gently, “Come, my brothers, and we will go away from here. There is no more for us to do here.”
Thus we walked from the council chamber, and more than one of the old men whom we left there, the Adons and the Rabbis, put their faces in their hands and wept…
So it was that the Assembly of Elders made their peace with Lysias the Greek. The tribute was a small one, ten talents of gold a year, compared to the hundreds that had been wrung from Judea in the old days. In return, the Jews were granted full religious freedom and the right to maintain the Temple against the Hellenists who still held the citadel and who refused to bend, either to Lysias or to the council of old men. Lysias also pledged that, apart from Beth Zur, no mercenaries would be maintained in Judea; and that Jewish volunteers would have the right to patrol the roads and the borders.
Thus it was; and in two days, Lysias and his elephant troops left Jerusalem for Antioch. By another gate of the ruined city, Judas and Jonathan and John and I also left, and in all the world, we had only our battle-stained clothes, our swords, our bows, and our knives. We went to Modin, where John’s wife and his two children already were living, and that same night, Judas and Jonathan and I slept in the grassy pasture on the hillside behind the house of Mattathias.
The next morning, we went to work on the house, clearing away the fire-blackened timbers, molding new bricks of mud and setting them out to dry in the hot summer sun. And so much is life the living of men, the simple, matter-of-fact, day-to-day living, that it did not take too long for the townsfolk to grow used to the fact of the Maccabee working there on the rooftree, arms and face blackened with the mud and dirt and sweat of toil. How quickly Modin had come to life again! Once more, Lebel, the schoolmaster, taught his classes behind the cool stone walls of the synagogue, pacing back and forth beside his students, rod in hand, bending a quick and critical ear to the slightest imperfection of pronunciation or enunciation. Once more, Ruben’s forge glowed red and furious, sending its shower of wonderful sparks over the open-mouthed children who watched, and once more the cisterns filled with olive oil, the wheat grew heavy on the terraces, and the grapes on the vines burst through their sun-laden skins. Again, the chickens ran through the dust of the village street, and again the mothers nursed their babes on their doorsteps, gossiping in the cool, dim evening.
And in the same evenings, Jonathan walked under the olive trees with Rachel, the daughter of Jacob ben Gideon, the tanner, and they climbed to the high pastures and terraces, that they might see the sun set in the west over the Mediterranean—and all the glory of life and living that is given to a man and a maid…
In those days, Judas and I lived very simply and quietly. When it was light, we worked—and we worked with the driving intensity of men who have no further object than the work itself. A little bread and wine, an onion and a radish, and now and then a piece of meat sufficed to feed us. We slept early and we rose early—and we tended ourselves to the few needs we had. Although almost every ma
n in the village was an old comrade in arms, something kept them from the Maccabee. They could not presume upon him. The Maccabee he was; the Maccabee he would always be, and though he worked at the same tasks as they did, he was something apart from them. So it was with Jews from other villages who came through Modin. They went to the Maccabee, saluted him, and sometimes kissed his hand or his cheek. For them, nothing could ever change Judas, nothing could demean him, nothing could lessen him.
And, himself, he changed too. Gentle, he was before, yet he became gentler now; it was almost as if a purity enrobed him, a purity that no other man could have worn with the same unconscious and selfless dignity. We were much together, the more so since Jonathan was like as not to be at the house of Jacob ben Gideon. We talked little, and when we did, it was of the past, not of the future.
There was one evening when Ruben came to the house. We were sitting there at our bread and wine when he entered, uncertainly, hesitantly, looking at us from under his black and shaggy eyebrows, coming step by step on his toes, incongruous, so huge and unwieldy was his short, powerful body—and then standing like an erring child, running his hands through his wiry black beard while he licked his lips nervously,
“Peace,” Judas said. “Peace unto you, Ruben, our friend.”
“Alaiechem shalom. And unto thee, peace,” Ruben apologized.
“Come in.” Judas smiled, and, rising, he took Ruben’s hands and led him to the table. I broke bread for him and poured him wine, and then he ate with us, alternately laughing and weeping throughout the meal. All that evening we sat there and talked—of old days, old glories, old fights, until the blood which had grown so cold and tired in my veins ran hot and proud again…
It was the day after that a deputation of Levites, led by Enoch, the old man, the Rabbi of Alexandria, came barefooted to our house and told Judas that the Assembly, convened at the Temple under Ragesh, had chosen him as high priest of all Israel.
Very quietly, he received the news, pausing to thank them and then going on with his work. They stood around uncomfortably until, after a while, Judas said, “I will live here at Modin, even as my father did, and plant my land. When you need me, I will come…”
It was the very same day, strangely enough, that we heard the news from the North. Demetrius, pretender to the throne of the King of Kings, brother of Antiochus, had ambushed Lysias, slain him, and hung his flayed body over the gates of Antioch—and the party of Lysias was smashed and dispersed.
That night, Judas said to me, “What was it that the old man, the Adon, would say—that only in blood is the price of freedom reckoned?” “Yes—in that way, something.” “So much for pacts,” Judas shrugged, “whereby freedom is calculated in shekels.”
***
So it was, as I told before, that Demetrius, the new King of Kings, sent his chief captain and warden, Nicanor, to seek out my brother, the Maccabee. Antiochus had been mad, perverted and cruel and mad, and Antiochus, his son, had been an idiot; but this Demetrius, brother to Antiochus, had been educated in the West, reared in Rome, and he had learned in Rome that it is not necessary to destroy a people to enslave them. His wardens were a new breed, too, straightforward with a veneer of honesty—yet in the end, in the full play of fact, Nicanor was no different from Pericles, or Apelles, or Apollonius; and in the end Judas slew him, with his own hand. But I will come to that.
In any case, Nicanor understood us better than the others had. Without slaves, he came, and on foot rather than in a litter, and only his armor-bearer was with him. Judas and I were working in one of the higher terraces, an ass dragging the plow to break land that had lain fallow these five years, when Nicanor and his armor-bearer came, led by Lebel, the schoolmaster, with Ruben and Adam ben Ebenezer and Jonathan and John following, and half a dozen other men, out of curiosity—and fear too, for we were unarmed and who knew but that the Greeks would send a man to kill the Maccabee as he worked in the fields? And with them were the Judean children, the wonderfully wise, wonderfully untouched children who had come through war, exile and privation, and still laughed more than they wept. Like a procession, they mounted to our terrace, and Nicanor bowed low to Judas, giving his greeting to the high priest, the Maccabee, the leader whose fame had penetrated to the very borders of civilization. And Judas, who had never been more than a dozen miles past the borders of our little land, returned the greeting with courtly grace. Work-stained, the sweat beading his brow, his long hair tied in a knot at the back of his head, barefoot and ankle-deep in the newly broken soil, he was yet the Maccabee, towering over the rest of them, his great height and great breadth of shoulder as simply borne as his gentle, winning manner. In a thousand places at a thousand times, I remember him, yet I like best to think of him as he was then, standing in the summer sunshine on that high terrace, his close-clipped beard glowing like red gold, his skin burned brown and yet a deeper brown where it was mottled with freckles, his long-fingered hands breaking and kneading a lump of soil. Still less than thirty years old—a good deal less—he was in the full flower of his young manhood, so tall and straight and beautiful that Nicanor, the Greek, could not help but give him that deference that all men paid him.
Afterwards, many of the folk of Modin talked of that day. Like me, they remembered Judas best as he was then—and when they talked, the tears in their eyes would not deny the pride they felt in being of the same people as this man who was like no other man.
Nicanor himself was a well-knit, middle-sized and worldly professional soldier. He was neither the degenerate Apelles was nor the sadistic beast Apollonius was, but rather a shrewd and calculating court climber who desired money and power and would stop at nothing to obtain them. Both he and his master Demetrius knew well enough that the thousands of mercenaries whose bones lay in our Judean valleys represented a fortune that would grace the coffers of any king—and they also knew that there would be no secure domination of Israel so long as the Maccabee was against them. Whereupon, Nicanor proceeded not too well, observing that under the King of Kings there were other kings, quite naturally; and why should not a son of Mattathias sit on the throne of Israel?
Judas smiled a little, studying the dirt that he crumpled in his hands, and shrugged his shoulders. “Why should I be king?” he asked, and all of it was in that simple question. I think Nicanor would have liked to talk to him alone, yet the Greek knew instinctively that Judas would not—that it was now or never, for all that so many folk from Modin crowded around.
“All men want glory,” Nicanor said.
“And haven’t I had glory enough?” Judas murmured.
“And power—and wealth.” The Greek stood with his feet spread, one hand rubbing his chin, staring quizzically at this tall Jew, deeply puzzled, I think, at how to approach him and where to approach him—as if here was a pattern of being and thinking that defied all he knew.
“What would I do with power and wealth?” Judas asked.
“Much, Judas,” Nicanor answered sincerely. “You are a stubborn people, but there is more to life than a plow and a bit of land. You make a religion of hating Greeks and all that is Greek—but who has equaled the beauty and wisdom we gave the world? To have that—to taste it—”
“As we have tasted it in Judea?”
“From these Syrian swine. The very dream of freedom you fight for, Judas, was a dream born in Greece three centuries ago. You cannot deny that.”
“And how long did such dreams last when you knew power, wealth and conquest?” Judas said thoughtfully. “Were you like us then—without slaves, without mercenaries? Then I salute the dead glory of Greece; I see no glory today and I want none of the gifts. I would not know how to use them.”
The Greek was growing angry. “I did not come here to be made a fool of,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” Judas said—and the Greek realized that he was telling the truth, that he did not understand. I wat
ched Nicanor, and in his eyes there was a fleeting vision of what Judas was, a shadow of regret, a struggle to grasp what could not be grasped; and then his eyes went past my brother, over the lovely, tumbled Judean hills, the greening pattern of the terraces and the blue, cloud-mottled sky beyond.
“Are you married?” he asked suddenly.
Smiling, Judas shook his head.
“You should be,” the Greek said slowly. “Otherwise, when you die, there will be no more like you.”
Judas shook his head. He was, I think, puzzled and disturbed.
“I did not know what you would be,” Nicanor went on. “Perhaps it would be better if you were king, perhaps it would not. I don’t think it would be any use for me to argue with you.”
“We don’t have kings in Judea,” Judas said. “Once we had kings, and they brought suffering to us, and that was a time of sorrow we still weep for in our synagogues.”
For a while then, Nicanor was silent; when he spoke, it was almost offhand. “And they say, in Antioch and in Damascus too, that if the Maccabee were dead, there would be peace.”
“They don’t understand,” Judas answered softly. “The Maccabee is nothing. He comes out of the people, and what he does, he does because the people desire it. And when there is no more need for him, he is no different from any other man.” Rubbing the dirt from his hands, Judas added thoughtfully, “Because we were slaves in Egypt, I think, it is held among us that resistance to tyrants is the first obedience to God. When you go back through Modin, if you look at the cornerstone of our synagogue, you will see it graven there, if you read the old Hebrew, and the synagogue is a very ancient place. I was obedient,” he said. “That is all. If I am slain, the people will find a new Maccabee for themselves. It will make no difference,”
“I think it will make a great difference,” Nicanor said. “I think too that we will meet again.”
