History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Alexander Jannaeus, John’s son, took this policy of expansion and forcible conversion still further. He invaded the territory of the Decapolis, the league of ten Greek-speaking cities grouped around the Jordan. He swept into Nabataea and took Petra, the ‘rose-red city half as old as time’. He moved into the province of Gaulanitis. The Hasmoneans pushed north into the Galilee and Syria, west to the coast, south and east into the desert. Behind their frontiers they eliminated pockets of non-Jewish people by conversion, massacre or expulsion. The Jewish nation thus expanded vastly and rapidly in terms of territory and population, but in doing so it absorbed large numbers of people who, though nominally Jewish, were also half-Hellenized and in many cases were fundamentally pagans or even savages.

  Moreover, in becoming rulers, kings and conquerors, the Hasmoneans suffered the corruptions of power. John Hyrcanus seems to have retained a reasonably high reputation in Jewish tradition. Josephus says he was considered by God ‘worthy of the three greatest privileges: government of the nation, the dignity of the high-priesthood, and the gift of prophecy’.61 But Alexander Jannaeus, according to the evidence we have, turned into a despot and a monster, and among his victims were the pious Jews from whom his family had once drawn its strength. Like any ruler in the Near East at this time, he was influenced by the predominant Greek modes and came to despise some of the most exotic, and to Greeks barbarous, aspects of the Yahweh cult. As high-priest, celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem, he refused to perform the libation ceremony, according to ritual custom, and the pious Jews pelted him with lemons. ‘At this,’ Josephus wrote, ‘he was in a rage, and slew of them about six thousand.’ Alexander, in fact, found himself like his hated predecessors, Jason and Menelaus, facing an internal revolt of rigorists. Josephus says the civil war lasted six years and cost 50,000 Jewish lives.

  It is from this time we first hear of the Perushim or Pharisees, ‘those who separated themselves’, a religious party which repudiated the royal religious establishment, with its high-priest, Sadducee aristocrats and the Sanhedrin, and placed religious observance before Jewish nationalism. Rabbinic sources record the struggle between the monarch and this group, which was a social and economic as well as a religious clash.62 As Josephus noted, ‘the Sadducees draw their following only from the rich, and the people do not support them, whereas the Pharisees have popular allies’. He relates that at the end of the civil war, Alexander returned in triumph to Jerusalem, with many of his Jewish enemies among his captives and then ‘did one of the most barbarous actions in the world…for as he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified, and while they were living he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes’.63 There is a reference to this sadistic episode in one of the Qumran scrolls: ‘the lion of wrath…when he hangs men up alive’.

  Hence, when Alexander died in 76 BC, after he had (according to Josephus) ‘fallen into a distemper by hard drinking’, the Jewish world was bitterly divided and, though much enlarged, included many half-Jews whose devotion to the Torah was selective and suspect. The Hasmonean state, like its prototype the Davidic kingdom, had flourished in an age between empires. It was able to expand in the period when the Seleucid system was in hopeless decay but before Rome had grown strong enough to replace the Greeks. By the time of Alexander’s death, however, the advancing Roman empire was only just below the Jewish horizon. Rome had been an ally of the Jews when they were struggling against the old Greek empire, and it tolerated the existence, even the relative independence, of small and weak states. But an expansive-minded, irredentist Jewish kingdom, forcibly converting its neighbours to its own demanding and intolerant faith, was not acceptable to the Roman senate. Rome bided its time until the Jewish state was rendered vulnerable by internal divisions, as the Seleucid empire had been. Aware of this, Alexander’s widow, Salome, who reigned for a time after him, tried to restore national unity by bringing the Pharisees into the Sanhedrin and making their Oral Law acceptable in royal justice. But she died in 67 BC and her sons fell out over the succession.

  One of the claimants, Hyrcanus, had a powerful chief-minister, Antipater, an Idumean from a family which had been forcibly converted by the Hasmoneans. He was half-Jew, half-Hellenizer. For such men it was natural to come to terms with the new superpower Rome, which combined irresistible military technology with Greek culture. Antipater saw an arrangement with Rome, whereby his and other notable families flourished under Roman protection, as much preferable to civil war. So in 63 BC he came to terms with the Roman general Pompey and Judaea became a Roman client-state. Antipater’s son, who became Herod the Great, firmly locked the Jews into the administrative system of the Roman empire.

  The reign of Herod, who was effective ruler of Judaea and much else from 37 BC to his death four years before the Christian era, is an episode in Jewish history with which Jewish historians, no less than Christian ones, have found it difficult to come to terms. Herod was both a Jew and an anti-Jew; an upholder and benefactor of Graeco-Roman civilization, and an oriental barbarian capable of unspeakable cruelties. He was a brilliant politician and in some ways a wise and far-seeing statesman, generous, constructive and highly efficient; but also naïve, superstitious, grotesquely self-indulgent and hovering on the brink of insanity—sometimes over it. He combines in one person the tragedy of Saul and the successful materialism of Solomon, who was clearly his idol; and it is a thousand pities there was no one close to him to record his character and career with the same brilliance as the author of the First Book of Kings.64

  Herod came to prominence and notoriety during his father’s time as Governor of Galilee. There, in the true spirit of Roman rule, he destroyed a band of semi-religious guerrillas, under a man called Hezekiah, and had the leaders executed, without any form of Jewish religious trial and solely on his authority. This was a capital offence under Jewish law, and Herod was arraigned before the Sanhedrin: only the presence of his guards, who overawed the court, prevented his conviction and sentence. Four years later, in 43 BC, Herod committed a similar religious crime by executing another fanatic Jew, Malichus, who had poisoned his father. Herod’s family, of course, supported the Hasmonean faction headed by Hyrcanus II, and he himself married into the family by espousing Mariamne. But in 40 BC the rival faction, led by a nephew, Antigonus, seized Jerusalem with the help of the Parthians. Herod’s brother Phasael, Governor of Jerusalem, was arrested and committed suicide in prison, and Hyrcanus was rendered ineligible as high-priest by mutilation, Antigonus himself biting off his uncle’s ears.

  Herod barely escaped with his life, but he made his way to Rome and put his case to the Senate. The senators responded by making him a puppet-king, with the formal title rex socius et amicus populi Romani, ‘allied king and friend of the Roman people’. He then returned to the East at the head of a Roman army of 30,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, retook Jerusalem and installed a completely new regime. His policy was threefold. First, he used his great political and diplomatic gifts to ensure that he always had the backing of whoever was in power in Rome. When Mark Antony flourished he and Herod were friends and allies; when Antony fell, Herod quickly made peace with Octavius Caesar. In the imperial Augustan age, Herod was both the most loyal and reliable of Rome’s oriental satellite kings, putting down pirates and bandits with ruthless efficiency and backing Rome in all her campaigns and quarrels. He was also the most richly rewarded, and with Rome’s backing he extended the kingdom up to and even beyond its Hasmonean boundaries and ruled it with far greater security.

  Secondly, he exterminated the Hasmoneans to the best of his ability. He handed Antigonus over to the Romans, who executed him. For his wife Mariamne, great-granddaughter of Alexander Jannaeus, he had, said Josephus, a jealous passion, and eventually he turned on her and all her kin. He had her brother, Aristobulus, drowned in a swimming bath in Jericho. He accused Mariamne herself of trying to poison him, convicted her b
efore a court of his own family, and put her to death. He then indicted her mother, Alexandra, for high treason and she too was executed. Finally, he accused his own two sons by her of conspiracy to murder him, and they in turn were tried, convicted and judicially strangled. Josephus wrote: ‘If ever a man was full of family affection, that man was Herod.’ That was true so far as his own side of the family was concerned, for he founded cities named after his father, mother and brother. But towards the Hasmoneans, or anyone who had ancestral claims to his possessions—such as members of the House of David—he behaved with paranoid suspicion and reckless brutality. The story of the Massacre of the Innocents, albeit exaggerated, has a historical foundation in his own actions.

  Herod’s third policy was to emasculate the destructive power of rigorist Judaism by separating state and religion and by bringing the diaspora Jews into play. His first act on assuming power in Jerusalem in 37 BC was to execute forty-six leading members of the Sanhedrin who, in his own case and others, had sought to uphold the Mosaic law in secular matters. Henceforth, it became a religious court only. He did not even attempt to become high-priest himself and divorced it from the crown by turning it into an official post, appointing and dismissing high-priests as acts of his prerogative, and picking them mainly from the Egyptian and Babylonian diaspora.

  Herod was historically minded, like most Jews, and it is clear that he modelled himself on Solomon. His aim was to perpetuate his memory by colossal buildings and endowments, by magnificent expenditure in the public interest, and by unprecedented charities. He was thus the archetype of yet another Jewish specimen, the acquisitive philanthropist. His life was devoted to getting and spending on a gigantic scale. Like Solomon, he both exploited his position on the trade routes to tax commerce and himself engaged in manufacturing. He rented the Cyprus copper mines from the Emperor Augustus, taking half their products. He farmed the taxes of a vast area, sharing the profits with Rome. Josephus says that his expenditure exceeded his means and he was therefore harsh to his subjects, and he certainly built up a huge personal fortune chiefly by confiscating the property of those he declared state enemies, notably the Hasmoneans of course. But the general level of Palestinian prosperity rose during his reign, thanks to external peace, internal order and expanding trade. The number of Jews, both born and converts, expanded everywhere, so that, according to one medieval tradition, there were at the time of the Claudian census in 48 AD some 6,944,000 Jews within the confines of the empire, plus what Josephus calls the ‘myriads and myriads’ in Babylonia and elsewhere beyond it. One calculation is that during the Herodian period there were about eight million Jews in the world, of whom 2,350,000 to 2,500,000 lived in Palestine, the Jews thus constituting about 10 per cent of the Roman empire.65 This expanding nation and teeming diaspora were the sources of Herod’s wealth and influence.

  Indeed, it was Herod’s consciousness of the rising tide of Jews and Judaism, his feelings of racial and religious pride, which lay at the roots of his policy. Rather like the Jewish Hellenizers before him, he saw himself as a heroic reformer, trying to drag an obstinate and conservative Near Eastern people into the enlightened circle of the modern world. Rome’s power and new-found unity under its first emperor made possible a new era of international peace and universal trade, the foundations of an economic golden age in which Herod wanted his people to participate. To enable the Jews to take their rightful place in a better world, he had to destroy the debilitating elements of its past and in particular to rid Jewish society and religion of the selfish oligarchy of families which exploited both. He did this single-handed, and amid his paranoia and cruelty there was a strong element of idealism too.

  Herod also wanted to show the world that Jews included many gifted and civilized people, capable of making an important contribution to the new, expansive spirit of Mediterranean world civilization. To do this he looked beyond Jerusalem, with its mobs and fanatics, to the Jews of the diaspora. Herod was a close friend of Augustus’ leading general, Agrippa, and this friendship spread the special protection of Rome over the large, scattered and sometimes threatened Jewish communities in the Roman orbit. The diaspora Jews saw Herod as their best friend. He was also the most generous of patrons. He provided funds for synagogues, libraries, baths and charitable agencies, and encouraged others to do the same, so that it was in Herod’s day that Jews first became famous for the miniature welfare states they set up among their communities in Alexandria, Rome, Antioch, Babylon and elsewhere, providing for the sick and the poor, for widows and orphans, for visiting the imprisoned and burying the dead.

  Herod was not so foolish as to make the Jews of the diaspora the sole recipients of his largesse. He was the benefactor of many multi-racial cities throughout the eastern part of the empire. He backed and financed all the institutions of Greek culture, not least the stadium, for he was an enthusiastic sportsman—a reckless hunter and horseman, a keen javelin-thrower and archer, a fervent spectator. By his money, his powers of organization and his energy, he single-handedly rescued the Olympic Games from decay and ensured they were held regularly and in honourable pomp—thus making his name revered in many small Greek islands and cities, which gave him the title of life-president. For civic and cultural purposes he gave large sums to Athens, Lycia, Pergamum and Sparta. He rebuilt the Temple of Apollo in Rhodes. He re-walled Byblos, built a forum in Tyre and another in Beirut, gave Laodicea an aqueduct, built theatres in Sidon and Damascus, gave gymnasia to Ptolomais and Tripoli and provided a fountain and baths in Ascalon. In Antioch, then the largest city in the Near East, he paved the main street, 2.5 miles long, providing colonnades the whole length to shelter its citizens from the rain, and finished this great work in polished marble. There were Jews living in nearly all these places and they basked in the reflected glory of their munificent brother-Yahwist.

  Herod tried to pursue this generous and universalist policy in Palestine itself, embracing outcast or heterodox elements in his pan-Judaism. Samaria, the city John Hyrcanus had levelled and flooded, was rebuilt with his aid, and named Sebaste after the Greek name for his patron Augustus. He gave it a temple, walls and towers, and a colonnaded street. He built another temple, of Egyptian granite, at Baniyas on the coast. Also on the coast, on the site of Straton’s Tower, he created a massive new city of Caesarea. According to Josephus, this involved designing an artificial harbour, ‘bigger than the Piraeus’ in Greece, which Herod’s engineers enclosed by planting ‘in 20 fathoms of water, blocks of stone which were mostly 50 feet long, ten broad and nine deep, sometimes even bigger’. This was the foundation of a giant breakwater 200 feet wide. The city, of 200 acres, had a theatre, market place and government building, all of limestone, with a fine amphitheatre where splendid games were held every four years. There, Herod set up a gigantic figure of Caesar not inferior, according to Josephus, to the Olympian Zeus, one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This became the natural Roman administrative capital for Judaea when Herod’s empire broke up at his death. Dotted about Palestine were Herod’s fortresses and palaces. These included the Antonia (citadel works) in Jerusalem, erected on top of the Hasmonean fort of Baris, built by Jonathan the Maccabee; but, in true Herodian fashion, the new fort was bigger, stronger and more sumptuous. Others were the Herodium, Cypros near Jericho, called after his mother, Machaerus on the east side of the Dead Sea, and his villa-fortress cut out of the rock at Masada, with its spectacular view over the wilderness.

  For Herod, building the Antonia fortress in Jerusalem was part of a political, almost a geopolitical, purpose. When he had first taken the city, in 37 BC, with the power of the legions, he had only with great difficulty persuaded his Roman allies not to expel all its inhabitants and pull it down, for they already took the view that it was an ungovernable place. Herod proposed to internationalize the city, to bring in new Jewry to redress the failings of the old, and to make the city the capital not just of Judaea but of the whole Jewish race. He saw the diaspora Jews as more enlightened than
the Palestinians, more receptive to Greek and Roman ideas, and more likely to encourage forms of worship in Jerusalem compatible with the modern world. He appointed diaspora Jews to public offices in the capital and he wanted to bolster their authority by encouraging other diaspora Jews to come there regularly. In theory the Law demanded that Jews make pilgrimage to the Temple three times a year, for Passover, the Feast of Weeks and Tabernacles.66 Herod decided to encourage this practice, especially from the diaspora, by providing Jerusalem with all the facilities of a modern Romano-Greek city and above all by rebuilding the Temple itself as a monument-spectacle worth coming to see. Herod was not merely a notable philanthropist; he was also an inspired propagandist and a great showman.

  He set about his programme for Jerusalem, the world’s most suspicious and edgy city, with system and forethought. The building of the Antonia gave him its physical mastery, and he strengthened his grip by erecting three powerful towers, the Phasael (later known as the ‘Tower of David’), the Hippicus and the Mariamne (completed before he murdered his wife). Having done this, he felt it safe to build a theatre and an amphitheatre, though these were judiciously placed outside the Temple area. Then, in 22 BC, he summoned a national assembly and announced his lifework: the rebuilding of the Temple, on a magnificent scale, exceeding even the glory of Solomon’s. The next two years were spent assembling and training a force of 10,000 workmen and 1,000 supervisory priests, who also worked as builder-craftsmen in the forbidden areas. These elaborate preparations were necessary to reassure the Jerusalem Jews that the destructive operation of tearing down the old Temple was the prelude to erecting a new and finer one.67 Herod took extraordinary care not to offend the religious scruples of the rigorists: for instance, for the altar and its ramp, unhewn stones were used so that they would be untouched by iron. The creation of the Temple as a functional place of sacrifice took only eighteen months, during which time elaborate curtaining screened the sanctuary from profane gaze. But the vast building as a whole needed forty-six years to complete and craftsmen were still finishing the decorations not long before the Romans tore the whole thing down in 70 AD, leaving not one stone upon another.