by Paul Johnson
However, any possibility of Greeks and Jews living together in reasonable comfort was destroyed by the rise of a Jewish reform party who wanted to force the pace of Hellenization. This reform movement, about which we know little since its history was written by its triumphant fundamentalist enemies, was strongest among the ruling class of Judah, already half-Hellenized themselves, who wanted to drag the little temple-state into the modern age. Their motives were primarily secular and economic. But among the reformers there were also religious intellectuals whose aims were more elevated—in some respects akin to the Christians of the first century AD. They wanted to improve Judaism, to push it further along the logical road it appeared to be travelling. Universalism is implicit in monotheism. Deutero-Isaiah had made it explicit. In universal monotheism, the Jews had a new and tremendous idea to give to the world. Now the Greeks also had a big, general idea on offer: universalist culture. Alexander had created his empire as an ideal: he wanted to fuse the races and he ‘ordered all men to regard the world as their country…good men as their kin, bad men as foreigners’. Isocrates argued that ‘the designation “Hellene” is no longer a matter of descent but of attitude’; he thought Greeks by education had better titles to citizenship than ‘Greek by birth’.48 Could not the Greek notion of the unified oikumene, world civilization, be married to the Jewish notion of the universal God?
That was the aim of the reformist intellectuals. They reread the historical scriptures and tried to deprovincialize them. Were not Abraham and Moses, these ‘strangers and sojourners’, really great citizens of the world? They embarked on the first Biblical criticism: the Law, as now written, was not very old and certainly did not go back to Moses. They argued that the original laws were far more universalistic. So the reform movement broadened into an attack on the Law, as it was bound to do. The reformers found the Torah full of fables and impossible demands and prohibitions. We know of their attacks from orthodox complaints and curses. Philo denounces those ‘who express their displeasure with the statutes made by their forefathers and incessantly censure the law’; the seers added: ‘Cursed be the man who rears a pig and cursed be those who instruct their sons in Greek wisdom.’49 The reformers did not want to abolish the Law completely but to purge it of those elements which forbade participation in Greek culture—for instance, the ban on nudity, which kept pious Jews out of the gymnasium and stadium—and reduce it to its ethical core, so universalizing it. To promote their ultimate aim of a world religion, they wanted an immediate marriage between the Greek polis and the Jewish moral God.
Unfortunately this was a contradiction in terms. 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 Jews drew an absolute distinction between human and divine. 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.’ Needless to say, such notions were totally unacceptable to Jews of any kind. Indeed, there was never any possibility of a conflation between Judaism and Greek religion as such; what the reformers wanted was for Judaism to universalize itself by pervading Greek culture; and that meant embracing the polis.
In 175 BC the Jewish reform movement found an enthusiastic but dangerous ally in the new Seleucid monarch, Antiochus Epiphanes. He was anxious to speed up the Hellenization of his dominions as a matter of general policy but also because he thought it would raise tax-revenues—and he was chronically short of money for his wars. He backed the reformers entirely and replaced the orthodox high-priest Onias III by Jason, whose name, a Hellenization of Joshua, proclaimed his party. Jason began the transformation of Jerusalem into a polis, renamed Antiochia, by constructing a gymnasium at the foot of the Temple Mount. The Second Book of Maccabees furiously records that the Temple priests ‘ceased to show any interest in the services of the altar; scorning the Temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they would hurry to take part in the unlawful exercises on the training-ground’.50 The next stage was the diversion of Temple funds away from the endless, expensive sacrifices, and towards such polis activities as international games and dramatic competitions. The high-priest controlled the public funds, since taxes were paid to him, and from him to the tax-farmers (they were all intermarried), and the Temple treasury thus acted as a state deposit bank for the population. The temptation for Antiochus was to put pressure on his Hellenizing allies who controlled the Temple to yield more and more cash to build triremes and war-engines; and he gave way to it. Thus the reformers became identified not only with the occupying power but with oppressive taxes. In 171 BC Antiochus found it necessary to replace Jason as high-priest with the still more pro-Greek Menelaus, and he reinforced Greek power in Jerusalem by building an acropolis-fortress dominating the Temple.51
In 167 the conflict came to a head with the publication of a decree which in effect abolished the Mosaic law as it stood, replacing it with secular law, and downgrading the Temple into an ecumenical place of worship. This meant introducing the statue of an interdenominational god whose Greek name, Olympian Zeus, the rigorist Jews scrambled into ‘The Abomination of Desolation’. It is unlikely that Antiochus himself was the sponsor of this decree. He was not interested in Judaism and it was most unusual for a Greek government to stamp on a particular cult. The evidence suggests that the initiative came from the extreme Jewish reformers, led by Menelaus, who thought that such a drastic move was the only way to end, once and for all, the obscurantism and absurdity of the Law and Temple worship. It was not so much a desecration of the Temple by paganism as a display of militant rationalism, rather like the anti-Christian shows put on by republican deists in Revolutionary France. There is a rabbinical tale of how Miriam, who came from the same priestly family as Menelaus and had married a Seleucid officer, stormed into the Temple and ‘struck against the corner of the altar with her sandal and said to it “Wolf, wolf, you have squandered the riches of Israel.”’52
But both the Greeks and Menelaus himself overestimated his support. His activities in the Temple provoked an uproar. The priests were divided. The scribes sided with his orthodox opponents. So did most pious Jews or hasidim. There was one large category of Jews the reformers might have had on their side. This was the am ha-arez, the ordinary poor people of the land. They had been the principal victims when, after the return of the Judaic elite from Exile, Ezra had imposed religious rigour, with the full power of the Persian empire behind him. He had drawn a condescending distinction between the God-fearing, righteous ‘people of the Exile’, the bnei hagolah, and the am ha-arez, who were scarcely Jews at all, since in many cases, in his view, they were born of invalid marriages. He had not scrupled to punish them severely.53 Since then, being mostly illiterate and ignorant of the Law, they had been treated as second-class citizens, or pushed out altogether. They would have been the first to benefit if the rigorists had lost and the Law had been rationalized. But how could the reformers, who were essentially a party of the well-to-do and the placemen, appeal over the heads of the rigorists to the
common people? And how, in particular, could they hope to do so successfully when they were identified with high taxes, from which the poor suffered most? There were no answers to these questions, and so an opportunity to place universalism on a popular basis was missed.
Instead, Menelaus sought to impose reform from above, by state power. To make the decree effective, it was not enough to halt the old Temple sacrifices—that was welcome to many. The pious Jews had also to be forced to make symbolic sacrifices in the new way, on altars they regarded as pagan. The hasidim brushed aside the reformers’ argument that these rituals signified the ubiquity of the one God, who could not be penned into a particular place of human fabrication; to the pious, there was no difference between the new universalism and the old Baal-worship, condemned so many times in their scriptures. So they refused to bow, and they were prepared to die for it. The reformers were forced to make martyrs, such as the ninety-year-old Eleazar, described as ‘one of the principal scribes’, who was beaten to death; or the seven brothers, whose gruesome slaughter is described in the Second Book of Maccabees. It is from this date, indeed, that the concept of religious martyrdom appears, and the writings of the Maccabees, in which the sufferings of the faithful were fed into the propaganda of religious purity and Jewish nationalism, contain the first martyrologies.
Hence it was not the reformers but the rigorists who were able to appeal to the deep-rooted Biblical instinct to overturn the existing order, and transform a religious dispute into a revolt against the occupying power. Like most anti-colonial struggles, it began not with an assault on the garrison but with the murder of a local supporter of the regime. In the town of Modin in the Judean foothills 6 miles east of Lydda, a Jewish reformer, who was superintending the new official ceremony, was slaughtered by Matthias Hasmon, head of an old priestly family from the Temple ‘Watch of Jehoiarib’. The old man’s five sons, led by Judas the Maccabee, or ‘Hammer’, then launched a guerrilla campaign against Seleucid garrisons and their Jewish supporters. In two years, 166-164 BC, they drove all the Greeks out of the area around Jerusalem. In the city itself they penned reformers and Seleucids alike in the Acra, and purged the Temple of its sacrileges, rededicating it to Yahweh at a solemn service in December 164 BC, an event the Jews still celebrate at the Feast of Hanukkah, or Purification.
The Seleucids, who had a multitude of troubles of their own, including the rising power of Rome, responded rather as modern colonial powers did in the mid-twentieth century, oscillating between fierce repression and increasing dollops of self-rule, to which the insurgent nationalists responded by demanding more. In 162 BC Epiphanes’ son and successor, Antiochus v, turned on Menelaus, ‘the man to blame for all the trouble’, who had, in the words of Josephus, ‘persuaded his father to compel the Jews to give up their traditional worship of God’, and executed him.54 The Hasmonean family responded in 161 BC by signing an alliance with Rome, in which they were treated as the ruling family of an independent state. In 152 BC the Seleucids abandoned their attempt to Hellenize Judah by force and recognized Jonathan, now head of the family, as high-priest, an office the Hasmoneans were to hold for 115 years. In 142 they virtually recognized Judaean independence by exempting it from taxation, so that Simon Maccabee, who had succeeded his brother as high-priest, became ethnarch and ruler: ‘And the people of Israel began to engross their documents and contracts, “In the year one of Simon, great high-priest, military commissioner, and leader of the Jews”.’55 Thus Israel became independent again after 440 years, though it was not until the following year that the desperate reform Jews in the Acra were finally starved into surrender and expelled. Then the Hasmoneans entered the fortress, ‘carrying palms, to the sound of harps, cymbals and zithers, chanting hymns and canticles, since a great enemy had been crushed and thrown out of Israel’.56
In this upsurge of nationalist sentiment, the religious issues had been pushed into the background. But the long struggle for independence from Greek universalism left an indelible mark on the Judaic character. There were thirty-four bitter and murderous years between the attack on the Law and the final expulsion of the reformers from the Acra. The zeal and intensity of the assault on the Law aroused a corresponding zeal for the Law, narrowing the vision of the Jewish leadership and pushing them ever more deeply into a Torah-centred religion.57 With their failure, the reformers discredited the notion of reform itself, or even any discussion of the nature and direction of the Jewish religion. Such talk was henceforth denounced in all the official texts as nothing less than total apostasy and collaboration with the foreign oppression, so that it became difficult for moderates of any kind, or internationally minded preachers who looked beyond the narrow enclave of Orthodox Judaism, to get a hearing. The Hasmoneans spoke for a deeply reactionary spirit within Judaism. Their strength lay in atavism and superstition, drawn from the remote Israelite past of taboo and brutal physical intervention by the deity. Henceforth, any external tampering with the Temple and its sanctuaries instantly roused up a ferocious Jerusalem mob of religious extremists swollen by the excited rabble. The mob now became an important part of the Jerusalem scene, making the city, and so Judea as a whole, extremely difficult to govern by anyone—Greeks or Hellenizers, Romans or their tetrarchs, not least the Jews themselves.
Against this background of intellectual terror by the religious mob, the secular spirit and intellectual freedom which flourished in the Greek gymnasia and academies was banished from Jewish centres of learning. In their battle against Greek education, pious Jews began, from the end of the second century BC, to develop a national system of education. To the old scribal schools were gradually added a network of local schools where, in theory at least, all Jewish boys were taught the Torah.58 This development was of great importance in the spread and consolidation of the synagogue, in the birth of Pharisaism as a movement rooted in popular education, and eventually in the rise of the rabbinate. The education provided in these schools was entirely religious, rejecting any form of knowledge outside the Law. But at least these schools taught the Law in a relatively humane spirit. They followed ancient traditions inspired by an obscure text in Deuteronomy, ‘put it in their mouths’,59 that God had given Moses, in addition to the written Law, an Oral Law, by which learned elders could interpret and supplement the sacred commands. The practice of the Oral Law made it possible for the Mosaic code to be adapted to changing conditions and administered in a realistic manner.
By contrast, the Temple priests, dominated by the Sadducees, or descendants of Zadok, the great high-priest from Davidic times, insisted that all law must be written and unchanged. They had their own additional text, called the Book of Decrees, which laid down a system of punishment: who were to be stoned, who burned, who beheaded, who strangled. But this was written and sacred: they would not admit that oral teaching could subject the Law to a process of creative development. With their rigid adherence to the Mosaic inheritance, their concept of the Temple as the sole source and centre of Judaic government, and their own hereditary position in its functions, the Sadducees were naturally allies of the new Hasmonean high-priests, even though the latter had no strict title to this position by descent. The Sadducees soon became identified with Hasmonean rule in a rigid system of Temple administration, in which the hereditary high-priest performed the functions of a secular ruler, and a committee of elders, the Sanhedrin, discharged his religious-legal duties. To mark the supremacy of the Temple, Simon Maccabee not only smashed the walls of the Acra into rubble but went on (according to Josephus) ‘to level the very hill on which the citadel had stood, so that the Temple might be higher than it’.
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. Most of them met violent ends. Simon was no exception, being treacherously murdere
d by the Ptolemies, along with two of his sons. Simon was a man of blood, but honourable in his fashion, not self-seeking. Despite his triumphant installation as high-priest and ethnarch, he retained the spirit of the religious guerrilla leader; he had the charisma of heroic piety.
Simon’s third son, John Hyrcanus, who succeeded him and reigned 134-104 BC, was quite different: a ruler by birth. He issued his own coins, stamped ‘Jehohanan the High-Priest and the Community of the Jews’, and his son Alexander Jannaeus, 103-76 BC, actually called himself ‘Jonathan the King’ on his coinage. The recreation of the state and kingdom, originally and ostensibly on a basis of pure religious fundamentalism—the defence of the faith—rapidly revived all the inherent problems of the earlier monarchy, and in particular the irresolvable conflict between the aims and methods of the state and the nature of the Jewish religion. This conflict is reflected in the personal history of the Hasmoneans themselves, and the story of their rise and fall is a memorable study in hubris. They began as the avengers of martyrs; they ended as religious oppressors themselves. They came to power at the head of an eager guerrilla band; they ended surrounded by mercenaries. Their kingdom, founded in faith, dissolved in impiety.
John Hyrcanus was imbued with the fundamentalist notion that it was God’s will he should restore the Davidic kingdom. He was the first Jew to seek military inspiration and geopolitical guidance from the ancient historical texts of the Bible, telescoping the books of Joshua and Samuel. He accepted as literal truth that the whole of Palestine was the divine inheritance of the Jewish nation, and that it was not merely his right but his duty to conquer it. To do this he created a modern army of mercenaries. Moreover, the conquest, like Joshua’s, had to extirpate foreign cults and heterodox sects, and if necessary slaughter those who clung to them. John’s army trampled down Samaria and razed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim. He stormed, after a year’s siege, the city of Samaria itself, and ‘he demolished it entirely, and brought streams to it to drown it, for he dug ditches to turn it into floods and water-meadows; he even took away the very marks which showed a city had ever been there’.60 In the same way he pillaged and burned the Greek city of Scythopolis. John’s wars of fire and sword were marked by massacres of city populations whose only crime was that they were Greek-speaking. The province of Idumaea was conquered and the inhabitants of its two main cities, Adora and Marissa, were forcibly converted to Judaism or slaughtered if they refused.
