My Glorious Brothers

by Howard Fast

  At first, it was my intention to force him to keep his place, and to treat him as I would any chance guide, but I soon realized the futility of this and began to understand a maxim fairly common in these parts, to wit: take a Jew for a slave, and he will soon be your master. The Senate will acknowledge that I am not without experience in these matters, and as a centurian I learned to lead men and maintain their respect, but with these people, that is impossible. This Aaron ben Levi never failed to advise me upon any and all subjects under the sun; his advice was always patronizing and brooked no argument, and he consistently gave forth with that stark, somewhat sickening, proud and humble Jewish philosophy, which is compounded out of their history and their barbaric and somewhat vile religious beliefs, and embodied in what they call their “holy scrolls,” or, in their tongue, their Torah. For example, I asked him once why he, like all his people, insisted on burdening himself with his long woolen cloak, a garment that falls from head to feet and is striped all over in black and white, and instead of answering, he asked me:

  “And why, Roman, do you wear a breastplate that gets so hot under our sun that it probably burns your skin?”

  “It has nothing to do with your cloak.”

  “On the other hand, it has everything to do with my cloak.”

  “How?”

  He sighed and said, “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.”

  “And what, precisely, has that to do with it?” I asked.

  “All or nothing, as you will,” he said rather sadly, and that was the end of it. I could either kill him or send him packing, but neither would further my purpose, which was to get to Judea and open negotiations with the Maccabee. So I swallowed my anger and took refuge in silence, a thing one is forced to do with these people. Another time I asked him about the Maccabee, the first Maccabee, who was called Judas the son of Mattathias and who was slain early in their recent wars against the Greeks.

  “What sort of a man was he?” I asked.

  And this old, miserable, wretched camel driver looked at me with pitying commiseration and said, “You would not understand, even if I told you in the greatest details.”

  “Suppose you try to tell me.”

  “Life is short and death is forever,” he smiled. “Shall a man try to do what is futile?”

  It was then that I first used an expression which sooner or later, in one form or another, comes to the lips of everyone who has to do with these people, saying, “You filthy Jew!”

  The reaction was quite different from what I expected, for the old man straightened up; his eyes flashed such hatred and anger as I had not seen before, and he said very softly, “The Lord God is one, Roman, and I am an old man, but I led a twenty under the Maccabee, and I have my knife and you have your sword, so let us see what a man of the Maccabee is like, even if I cannot tell you what he himself was.”

  I resolved the difference without having to slay him, for I did not see that the purpose of Rome would be served in my killing an aged and rather feeble camel driver; yet it was a lesson to me in what these people are and how they must be approached. Difference is enshrined with them, and what we consider holy, they consider profane, and what we consider fine, they consider despicable. All things desirable to us are considered hateful to them, and all the tolerance we have toward the customs and the Gods of others is turned by them into a fierce intolerance. Even as they decry our pleasures, so do they blaspheme against our Gods and against the Gods of all people. Without a morality, they are also without a God, for they worship nonexistence, and their synagogues and their holy Temple in Jerusalem have no images or presence within them. Their God—if it is a God that they worship—is nowhere, and even its name, which is written, is forbidden to be spoken by any inhabitant of the land. This name is “Yahvah,” but never is it even whispered; instead they address this mysterious personage as Adonai, which means “my lord,” or as Melech Haolom, which means “king of all lands,” or in any one of a dozen similar fashions.

  At the root of this is a thing they call the b’rit, which may be freely translated as a covenant or agreement between themselves and their Yahvah. In a fashion, it is more this covenant they worship than the God himself, and to implement it they have a code of seventy-seven rules which they call “the Law,” though it is not judicial law as we know it, but rather the basis of this b’rit of theirs. Many of these are horrible and disgusting in the extreme, as for instance the law which forces the circumcision of all male children; others are senseless, such as the law which forces them to rest on the seventh day, to let the land lie fallow on the seventh year, and to free all slaves after seven years of servitude. Other laws make a fetish of washing, so that they are cleansing themselves eternally, and their law forbids them to shave, so that all the men of the land wear long hair and close-cropped beards.

  This I did not learn at once, nor the other similar matters which I will go into during the course of this report, but I feel it best to state them here in relation to this camel driver and his actions; for, as I pointed out, his actions could be taken almost as an exaggerated outline of the people I was to meet. I might also say that his dress was the dress of the Judean men, sandals, white linen trousers, a short coat, a sash, and over it the long, heavy woolen cloak, which they draw up over their heads when they enter the synagogue or the Temple. Nakedness is abhorred among them although they are shapely enough, the men of great bodily strength, the women of surprising attractiveness and appeal. These women insert themselves into the life of the community in a way that is quite alien to us; they seem to show no particular respect or obedience to the men, but rather share that objectionable Jewish haughtiness in an even greater degree. The dress of the women consists of a single long, short-sleeved garment that falls almost to the ankles and is belted by a bright-colored sash at the waist. Like the men, they frequently wear a long woolen cloak, but in their case it is never striped, and their hair they wear long and usually in two heavy braids.

  I go into these and other matters in such detail for two reasons: first, because I feel that this, as the first official report to the Senate concerning these people, bears a special responsibility in specifics as well as in general terms, and second because I see in the Jews a grave matter which Rome must surely face. For that reason too I shall attempt to be as objective as possible and to overcome the deep dislike for these people that I gradually assumed.

  The trip from Tyre to Judea was uneventful, for the entire coastal road is under the iron hand of Simon the Ethnarch, and he will tolerate neither banditry nor interference. On the Plain of Sharon, just opposite Apollonia, I saw my first Jewish military patrol, ten men on foot—which is their usual mode of travel, since their country is very small and mountainous throughout—and it served as good example of the Jewish custom of armament and war. Their soldiers, who unlike those of all civilized people are neither professionals nor mercenaries but volunteer peasants, wear no armor. For this they have, as with most matters, two explanations; one that it would be an affront to their Yahvah to put their trust in metal rather than in what they term, in their consistently contradictory fashion, his awful goodness, and secondly that it would so impede their movements in the mountains as to outweigh any benefit that might be derived from it.

  Instead of a sword, they carry long, heavy-bladed, slightly curved knives which they use with terrible effect in close combat, although their officers tend to wear Greek swords, both as a mark of victory over the invaders and in imitation of the first Maccabee, Judas ben Mattathias, who from the very beginning of his struggle used the sword as his only weapon. Their principal weapon, however, is the Jewish bow, a short, deadly weapon made of laminated ram’s horn. They have a secret process for softening the horn; it is then cut into thin strips which are glued together in the desired shape. Their arrows, which are twenty-seven inches long, are made of cedar, slender and iron-tipped;
and with these arrows they are most prodigal, filling the air with them, shooting one after another in such quick succession that they come down like rain, and in their narrow mountain defiles there is apparently no protection against such attack.

  Their table of organization consists of tens and twenties and hundreds and thousands, but there seems to be no perceptible difference in leadership since the captain of any group, whatever its size, is always known as the shalish. Also, there is no military discipline that would be understandable in Roman terms. Every action is discussed with all the men, and they make no move either offensive or defensive without unanimous consent of all the troops; anyone who disagrees with any particular tactic is permitted to leave the ranks and go home, and it seems that there is no particular onus upon him for so doing. Under these conditions, it seems incredible that any sort of military action could be maintained; yet it is a matter of record that they only recently emerged from twenty-seven years of continuous and bitter warfare.

  The fact that all their methods appear so unwarlike and that they are a people who literally worship peace should not lead the Senate to underestimate them; for it will emerge from this report that in all the world there is no people so dangerous and so deceitful as these same Jews. The patrol halted us and questioned us. There was no hostility whatsoever in their actions, yet my guide, Aaron ben Levi, took the very act of halting us to be a personal affront. When they asked where we were bound, he replied:

  “And am I a slave that I cannot walk where I will?”

  “With one of the nokri?” a word they use for all who are not Jews.

  “With ten of the nokri, you young fool who was sucking his mother’s pap when I already fought alongside the Maccabee.”

  And so it went with that peculiar insolence that Jews cannot refrain from using even against each other. Finally, it was ironed out and the patrol escorted us to the border of Judea, and all that distance they never ceased to ply me with questions about Rome, all of the questions subtly barbed and so construed to evoke points of their own superiority.

  Of Judea, of the land itself, I cannot speak too highly. To come on it out of the Phoenician lowlands is like coming from a desert into a garden. You enter the hills and on every hand the terraces rise, like enchanted hanging wonderlands. Even in the North, which is the least cultivated part, the country has the aspect of a carefully tended garden. In the whole land, there is only one city, Jerusalem. The mass of the population live in small villages, which cluster in the bottom lands or cling to the hillsides, and the population of the villages varies from twenty to one hundred families. The houses, which are usually set in two lines on either side a single street, are made of sun-baked mud bricks, coated with lime on the front, and in this temperate and gentle climate, the brick endures for generations. Very often, there is one stone building in the village, a sort of meetinghouse, which is called the “synagogue” and serves both as a school and as a place of prayer. Almost above all other things, these people esteem literacy, and I have never met a Jew who could not read and write. In all probabilities, this serves to increase their arrogance, and without question it feeds their contempt for the outside world where so few are scholars.

  Olive groves abound, and here and there on the mountains are carefully tended forests of cedar and hemlock. The terraces have been constructed over a period of a thousand years, and they are filled with soil carried by basket from the rich bottoms, where the humus lies thirty and forty feet deep. Everywhere on the hills are cisterns, with stone aprons to catch the rainfall, and one is constantly amazed by the prodigious amount of human labor that has gone into the making of this land—the more so when one learns this, of all places on earth, is the one with the least slaves. Whereas, in our last census, we numbered twenty-three slaves to each free citizen, here in Judea it would be the reverse, with perhaps one slave to twenty or thirty citizens. This in itself is a danger that must not be ignored, for these people free all slaves by law after a period, and among them it is a crime to strike a slave or to keep a slave in ignorance. And when one considers that free slaveholding is the very basis of Western civilization, the firm rock upon which the Roman republic so securely rests, one can see that the question of the Jew is not merely a local annoyance.

  We proceeded inland by way of a poor road—none of their roads are of any worth compared to ours—that paralleled a pleasant little stream, which dashed and tumbled through the hills until we came to the town of Modin. I was particularly interested in this village, for it is the ancestral home of the Maccabeans, and throughout their rebellion it was used as a rallying point for their forces. For this place, the Jews have a peculiar veneration; my guide spoke of it with awe; and any man who was born in Modin—few are left, so many having perished in the wars—is entitled to the honors of an Adon, their name for local people of dignity and respect. When we came to Modin, he went into the synagogue to pray and I wandered through the town by myself for over an hour. Aside from the fact that it was an unusually pretty and well-kept village, ideally situated in the rolling foothills, I could not see that it was too different from countless other Judean villages. The people there seemed healthy and well-formed, and they were very pleasant. All of Judea is wine country, but this village lies in the center of their best vineyards; and I was constantly offered goblets of the local wine, of which they are very proud. Though never, during all of my stay in Judea, have I seen a case of drunkenness, these people drink wine as readily as water; they have endless variety of white and red wine, and they are all well versed in a peculiar lore of the grape. Wine drinking, as other things, they surround with endless ceremony and prayer, and they expressed great pleasure when I spoke highly of their brew.

  From Modin, we continued along the road to Jerusalem, going through the thickly populated heart of their land. In the day’s journey between Modin and Jerusalem, I counted twenty-one villages. Every inch of the land was terraced and planted. The cribs were filled with corn; sheep and goats nibbled on the reaped fields; cheese hung over every doorway, and cisterns filled with olive oil abounded. Baking is done in common, and in many villages, we were greeted by the fragrant odor of mountains of newly baked bread. Chickens, a basic food and the standard meat dish of the land, were at home everywhere, in the roads, the fields, and in and out of the houses too, for these are a people who rarely close their doors, and that curse of Rome, thievery, is practically absent here. The children, who appear to be numberless in Judea, are round-cheeked and happy; the whole aspect of this land under Simon the Ethnarch is one of such health, richness, and satisfaction that though I have traveled in three continents and seen at least a hundred great cities, I have never encountered elsewhere the same fruitful life. Nor is this land plagued, as we are, with the scum of free men who do no work and have no means, but bleed their betters, the plebeian curse. As a matter of fact, differences in wealth and station, which were great at the outbreak of the war, disappeared almost entirely as the whole people suffered. The very rich sided with the invaders, and were either slain or exiled, and so many died during the wars that in the end there was a shortage of men rather than land.

  I enumerate these virtues that the picture may be fulfilled; yet I must add that you cannot like a Jew for what you would admire in others, for they are too conscious of their achievement. They take nothing for granted, not courtesy, not good manners, not virtue, but must always underline and underline again that these things are the result of their being Jews. They worship peace, yet never allow you to forget at what cost they achieved it; their family is like a stone arch over their heads, but this they know, and always they despise the nokri for his lack of the same virtue. Power and those who wield it, they hate; all other Gods than theirs they malign; and all other culture than theirs is offensive to them. So that even while you admire so much that which they have, you build a seething hatred for them. This combines with the fact that they possess so little of the grace and delicate knowledg
e that makes for noble human beings.

  It was toward evening that we reached Jerusalem, a noble and beautiful city, crowned with the holy building of all the Jews, their Temple. Half of the city is given to the Temple, its many buildings, its courts and walks and the massive walls that surround it—as massive as the walls that surround the city itself. It is not size or architectural splendor that gives the city its beauty, but rather its location and style, so that it almost breathes the fanatical love which their people bestow upon it. With my guide, I approached it toward sunset, when all the walls and buildings and the Temple too were bathed in the rosy glow of twilight. We passed through the gates, and even as we did, we could hear the deep, sonorous chanting of the priests and Levites from the Temple courts. In spite of myself, in spite of the resistance to the people that had already rooted itself within me, I could not but be moved and impressed by the beauty of the music and the strange gentleness that overcame the people while it was in progress. So childlike and simple was their air toward each other, and toward me as well, that I was moved to ask Aaron ben Levi the reason. He answered enigmatically:

  “We were slaves once, in the land of Egypt.”

  It was the first time I heard that phrase, which is never far from the thoughts of these people, and afterwards I discussed it in some detail with Simon the Maccabee.

  As we entered the city, a handful of the soldiers who kept a rather loose and easy guard at the gates went with us, nor did they interfere with us as we climbed through the city toward the Temple. It was fairly dark now; the singing died away; and through the open doors of the houses, we could see families sitting down to their evening meal. The streets were clean and new, as were most of the houses built either of stone or mud brick and always painted or lime-coated white. Compared to one of our Western cities, Jerusalem is amazingly clean, but except for the Temple, it is more like a group of villages than what we know as a city. The inhabitants live in an easy and free companionship; their doors are never closed; and both their laughter and their tears are common property.