by Paul Johnson
From the death of Nero the Great onwards, relations between the Jews and Rome deteriorated steadily, the rule of his grandson in Judaea being a brief halt on the downward spiral. The revolt might indeed have come during the reign of Caligula (37-41 AD), who sought to impose full-blooded emperor-worship, had it not been for his merciful assassination. The rise of Jewish apocalyptic nationalism was undoubtedly one factor, as Tacitus explicitly asserts: ‘Most Jews were convinced that it was written in the ancient priestly writings that in those times the East would gain in might and those who came forth from Judaea should possess the world.’110 But equally important was the growing Graeco-Jewish hatred. The Hellenized gentiles were the elite of Palestine. They, rather than Jews, supplied the rich men and the merchants. They constituted the local civil service and tax-collectors. Most of the soldiers in the Roman garrisons were gentiles recruited from Hellenized cities such as Caesarea and Samaritan Sebaste. Like the Greeks of Alexandria, the Hellenes of Palestine were notorious for their anti-Semitism: it was Greek-speakers from Jabneh and Ashkelon who put Caligula up to his anti-Jewish measures.111 Foolishly, Rome insisted on drawing its Judaean procurators from Greek-speaking gentile areas—the last, and most insensitive of them, Gessius Florus, came from Greek Asia Minor. Roman rule in first-century AD Palestine was clumsy and unsuccessful. It was also chronically insolvent, and raids on the Temple treasury for allegedly unpaid taxes were a source of outrage. There were numerous unpunished bands of brigands, swollen by insolvents and political malcontents. Many of the farmers were hopelessly in debt. In the towns with mixed Greek-Jewish populations the atmosphere was often tense.
Indeed, the revolt itself began in 66 AD not in Jerusalem but in Caesarea, following a Graeco-Jewish lawsuit, which the Greeks won. They celebrated with a pogrom in the Jewish quarter, while the Greek-speaking Roman garrison did nothing. The news caused uproar in Jerusalem, and feelings were raised still further when Florus chose that moment to take money from the Temple treasury. Fighting broke out, the Roman troops looted the Upper Town, the Temple priests suspended the sacrifices in honour of the people and emperor of Rome, and furious argument broke out between moderate and militant Jews. Jerusalem was filling up with angry and vengeful Jewish refugees from other cities where the Greek majority had invaded the Jewish quarters and burnt their homes. This element turned the tide in favour of the extremists, and the Roman garrison was attacked and massacred. So the Great Revolt was a civil and racial war between Greeks and Jews. But it was also a civil war among Jews, because—as in the time of the Maccabees—the Jewish upper class, largely Hellenized, was identified with the sins of the Greeks. As the radical nationalists took over Jerusalem they turned on the rich. One of their first acts was to burn the Temple archives so that all records of debts would be destroyed.
The Great Revolt of 66 AD and the siege of Jerusalem constitute one of the most important and horrifying events in Jewish history. Unfortunately it is badly recorded. Tacitus left a long account of the war but only fragments survive. Rabbinic accounts are made up of anecdotes with no clear historical context, or of sheer fantasy. There is very little epigraphical or archaeological evidence.112 Virtually our only authority for the war is Josephus, and he is tendentious, contradictory and thoroughly unreliable. The broad outline of events is as follows. After the massacre of the garrison in Jerusalem, the Roman legate in Syria, Cestius Gallus, assembled a large force in Acre and marched on the city. When he reached the outskirts he was dismayed by the strength of the Jewish resistance and ordered a retreat which turned into a rout. Rome then took charge and reacted with enormous force, no fewer than four legions, the V, X, XII and XV, being concentrated on Judaea, and one of the empire’s most experienced generals, Titus Flavius Vespasian, being given the command. He took his time, leaving Jerusalem severely alone until he had cleared the coast and secured his communications, reduced most of the fortresses held by Jews and settled the countryside. In 69 AD Vespasian was proclaimed emperor, and at the end of the year he left for Rome, leaving his eldest son, the twenty-nine-year-old Titus, in charge of the final phase of the campaign, the siege and capture of Jerusalem, which lasted from April to September 70 AD.
Josephus took a prominent part in these events and left two different accounts of them. His Jewish War, describing the years 66-70 in detail, and preceded by a history of the Jews in Palestine from the Maccabees onwards, was largely written while Titus, who succeeded Vespasian, was still alive. Then, about twenty years later, Josephus finished his Antiquities of the Jews, giving the entire history from the Creation onwards (based mainly on the Bible), ending in 66, but including an autobiographical Vita as an appendix. There are many discrepancies between the War and the Vita.113 Most historians of antiquity wrote from tendentious motives. The trouble with Josephus is that his motives changed between writing the two works. In his Vita he was responding, for instance, to an attack on his character by the Jewish writer Justus of Tiberias.114 But the main reason for his change of viewpoint was that he was an example of a Jewish phenomenon which became very common over the centuries: a clever young man who, in his youth, accepted the modernity and sophistication of the day and then, late in middle age, returned to his Jewish roots. He began his writing career as a Roman apologist and ended it close to being a Jewish nationalist.
Hence, as a recent analyst of Josephus has observed, it is easy to destroy confidence in his account but almost impossible to replace it with a truthful one.115 What light, then, does it throw on this tragic chapter in Jewish history? The overwhelming impression is that the Jews were throughout irreconcilably divided into many factions. The original massacre of the garrison was the work of a small minority. Only when Cestius Gallus was driven back and his force destroyed did the aristocratic element decide to raise troops, and even then it had mixed motives. Its object seems to have been to carry on government and await events. So bronze coins—shekels, half-shekels and small change—were minted. Josephus, a senior priest attached to the house of one of the aristocrats, Eleazar ben Ananias, was sent to Galilee with two other priests to prepare the population for the conflict. He found most of the population opposed to the war. The farmers hated the brigands (including the ultra-Jewish nationalists) and hated the cities too. They did not like the Romans either but were not anxious to fight them. Of the cities, Sephoris was pro-Roman; Tiberias was divided; Gabara favoured John of Giscala, one of the insurgent leaders. Josephus says he tried to unite the cities, the peasants and the brigands, but failed; the peasants would not join up and when conscripted soon deserted. So he retired on Herod’s old fortress of Jotapata and, after a token resistance, surrendered to Vespasian. Thereafter he served the Romans, first as an interpreter at the siege of Jerusalem, later as a propagandist. He took the same line as Jeremiah at the first fall of Jerusalem: it was all God’s will, and the Romans were His instruments; to fight the Romans was therefore not only foolish but wicked.116
Josephus was probably correct to see this long, savage and disastrous war as the work of small, malignant minorities on both sides. Later, he came to see the force of the Jewish demand for religious and political rights, to have some respect for the Maccabees, and to take pride and pleasure in Jewish particularism. Yet his original contention, that the resistance of Jerusalem was unconscionable, remains valid. Titus had 60,000 men and the latest siege equipment. He could rely on starvation and Jewish divisions to do their work. The defenders had about 25,000 fighters, split into groups: the Zealots, under Eleazar ben Simon, held the Antonia and the Temple; the extremist Simeon ben Giora and his Sicarii ran the upper city; and there were Idumeans and other partisans under John of Giscala. The mass of the citizens and refugees were the helpless prisoners of these militants. Josephus described the final stages of the siege in horrifying detail. The Romans had to fight all the way. They stormed the Antonia, then took the Temple, which was burned, then Herod’s citadel a month later. The people were sold as slaves, or massacred, or saved to die in the arenas of Caesarea, Ant
ioch and Rome. Simeon ben Giora was captured alive, taken to Rome for Titus’ triumphal process, then executed in the Forum. Titus’ arch still stands there, the Temple menorah he captured carved on its stone. He also preserved, in his palace, the curtain which screened the Holy of Holies and a copy of the scriptures—would that it had survived!
After the fall of Jerusalem, only three Jewish centres of resistance remained: Herodium, which was taken soon after; Machaerus, taken in 72 AD; and Masada, the spectacular, 1,300-foot high rock on the edge of the Judaean desert, which Herod had turned into a great fortress, 37-31 BC. It could only be approached by what Josephus called ‘a snaky path’. It fell to the Jews in 66 by ‘a stratagem’, the hero of this episode being Menahem, son of the Zealot founder and executed revolutionary, Judah the Galilean.117 But Menahem was murdered during one of the many struggles for power in Jerusalem and the Masada command devolved on his nephew Eleazar. When the Roman general Flavius Silva finally invested it at the end of 72 AD, there were 960 insurgents and refugees in the fortress, men, woman and children. In 1963-5, the site was exhaustively excavated by Yigael Yadin with a huge force of archaeologists and thousands of volunteer helpers from all over the world. The details of the siege have been vividly recreated. Silva had the entire Xth legion, plus auxiliaries, and countless Jewish prisoners of war as labourers. Taking the place was essentially a problem in military engineering of precisely the type in which Rome excelled. Its fall was inevitable and, when this became apparent, Eleazar forced or persuaded the remaining defenders to engage in an act of mass suicide. Josephus gives what purports to be his final speech. Two women, and their five children, survived by hiding in a cave. Scraps of clothing, sandals, bones, entire skeletons, baskets, fragments of personal belongings—storerooms left intact to prove to the Romans that the mass suicide had not been dictated by hunger—nationalist coins, armour-scales and arrows are mute witnesses of the siege. They testify to the hopeless valour of the defenders far more eloquently than Josephus’ powerful description. Among the ostraca found are what appear to be the lots cast by the last ten survivors to determine who was to kill the other nine and then himself. Abundant evidence of services in the fort’s synagogue and parts of fourteen scrolls of Biblical, sectarian and apocryphal books indicate that this was a God-fearing garrison of militants, profoundly influenced by the terrible power of Jewish literature.118
Jerusalem was left a ruined city by the siege, its Temple destroyed, the walls nothing but rubble. But the woeful experience of these seven bloody years did not end the Graeco-Jewish clash nor the capacity of religious sentiment to drive pious Jews, young and old, to violent defence of their faith, however hopeless. Anti-Semitic sentiment continued to spread. The fall of Jerusalem was cited as evidence that Jews were hated by God. Philostratus asserted in his Vita Apollonii that when Helen of Judaea offered Titus a victory wreath after he took the city he refused it on the grounds that there was no merit in vanquishing a people deserted by their own God. This sounds highly unlikely coming from a professional commander who had fought a hard war against a very determined enemy. But it is typical of the anti-Semitic propaganda which now appeared everywhere. Horace and Martial were muted in their criticisms but Tacitus summarized all the Greek smears. From about 100 AD onwards, the Jews were attacked even more fiercely for subverting the lower orders and introducing novel and destructive ideas—a charge which was to echo through the ages.119 So there were constant troubles in the diaspora cities, especially in 115-17.
The last Jewish risings were precipitated by a wave of government hostility to the Jews under the Emperor Hadrian, who was in the East 128-32. Initially sympathetic to Judaism, he later swung into hostility, possibly under the influence of the Tacitus circle. He came to dislike oriental religions in general, and developed a particular loathing for circumcision, which he classified with castration, a form of self-mutilation forbidden on pain of death. Hadrian introduced pan-Hellenistic policies throughout the East and one of his projects was to create a new, pagan polis on the ruins of Jerusalem, with a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter on Temple Mount.
Dio Cassius, the Roman historian who is our chief source for these years, says the Jews did not dare rise while Hadrian was in the East, though they armed secretly and built hidden fortifications. There were two legions stationed in the area. But as soon as Hadrian departed, the Jews of Judaea struck and, says Dio, ‘the Jews in the entire world also rose and joined them and created a great deal of trouble for the Romans, secretly or openly, and even many gentile people came to their aid’.120 The revolt lasted four years. Roman losses, says Dio, were heavy. Legions had to be concentrated in Palestine from all over the empire, including Britain and the Danube, so that eventually the Jews were facing no fewer than twelve. Once again the Roman methods were slow but systematic and sure, splitting up and isolating the rebel forces, starving outlying pockets into surrender, then gradually closing in on the remaining centres of resistance. The Jews occupied Jerusalem for a time but it had no walls and was not defensible. They held various fortresses and their tunnelling, as for instance at Herodium, has been excavated. They seem to have made their headquarters in what was then the town of Betar, in the Judaean hills south-west of the capital, and this final stronghold fell to the Romans in 135 AD.
The extent and the initial success of the revolt were made possible by the fact that on this occasion the Jews, or at least their militant elements, were united and under the leadership of a single strong personality. Simon bar Kokhba or Kosiva is one of the most enigmatic personalities in Jewish history, and his name or names alone have excited intense but inconclusive scholarly argument. The more enterprising Jewish rebels, like Judah of Galilee, called themselves the Messiah to attract wider support-the main reason the Romans were willing to crucify Jesus Christ. According to Bishop Eusebius, a hostile Christian source, Simon did make messianic claims and his name Kokhba or ‘star’ referred to the prophecy in Numbers ‘there shall come a star out of Jacob and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab and destroy all the children of Sheth’.121 A rabbinic source says he was recognized as Messiah by the greatest scholar of the age, the rabbi Akiva ben Joseph (c. 50-135 AD).122 Akiva is an interesting social case, for he came of very humble stock, the am ha-arez, with no tradition of literacy, and for a long time (as he says) hated scholarship and worked as a shepherd. In time he became prodigiously learned but he retained a passionate concern for the poor, and this may be why he joined the rebellion (if he did: the tradition has been disputed). But other rabbis did not follow him. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, when Akiva said of Simon, ‘This is the King Messiah’, Rabbi Johanan ben Torta replied: ‘O Akiva, grass will sprout between your jaws and the Son of David will still not have come.’123
Simon did not call himself ‘star’ but ‘Koseva’ and the coins he issued make no mention of the Messiah and refer to him as ‘Simon Nasi [prince] of Israel’. His chief spiritual adviser was not Akiva but his uncle, Eleazar of Modin, whose name also figures on some of his coins; but in the final stages of the revolt the two men quarrelled and Eleazar was murdered by his nephew.124 From the fragments of evidence we have, it looks as if Simon got little support from learned Jews and in the end lost what he had. In the years 1952-61, archaeologists working in the Judaean desert found objects connected with the revolt in various locations, especially in what is termed ‘the Cave of the Letters’. Many of these documents, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, were written and signed on his behalf. These discoveries show that the men of the rebellion were orthodox Jews who took great trouble, despite desperate circumstances, to observe the Mosaic law—the Sabbath, the festivals, priestly and levitical dues for instance. But there is no evidence that Simon regarded himself as a Messiah, the anointed one or in any way a spiritual leader. The letters show him ruling an extensive territory, concerned with farm leases, agricultural supplies, the mobilization of the countryside to supply men and food for his war. He was in every respect a
secular ruler, a nasi as he calls himself in his letters, harsh, practical, unbending, ruthless: ‘I call Heaven to witness…I shall put you in chains’; ‘if you will not do this you will be punished’; ‘You are living well, eating and drinking off the property of the house of Israel, and care nothing about your brethren.’125 The later rabbinic legends woven around the ‘Son of a Star’ seem to have no basis in fact. Simon was more of a prototype for a modern Zionist fighter: unromantic and professional, a man who lived and died a guerrilla and nationalist.
Simon was killed in Betar. Akiva was captured, imprisoned, finally tortured to death, the flesh torn from his body ‘by iron combs’. Dio says that of the rebels ‘very few were saved’. The Roman vengeance was awe-inspiring. Fifty forts where the rebels had put up resistance were destroyed and 985 towns, villages and agricultural settlements. Dio says 580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judaea was laid waste.’.126 In the late fourth century, St Jerome reported from Bethlehem a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale that the price dropped to less than a horse.
