History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Hadrian relentlessly carried through to completion his plan to transform ruined Jerusalem into a Greek polis. He buried the hollows of the old city in rubble to level the site. Outside the limits he removed the debris to get at and excavate the rock below to provide the huge ashlars for the public buildings he set up on the levelled site. The new city was the first to be broadly on the plan of the present Old City of Jerusalem. The main road from the north entered through the present Damascus Gate; the main east gate was the one later known as St Stephen’s Gate, spanned by a triumphal arch, whose ruins remain. The city he built was called Aelia Capitolina. Greek-speakers were moved in to populate it and the Jews were forbidden to enter on pain of death. This regulation may not have been strictly enforced, and in the mid-fourth century it was lifted under the pagan recidivist Emperor Julian. At any rate Jews contrived to visit a section of the old ruins, now known as the Wailing Wall, on the anniversary of the city’s destruction. Jerome, in his Commentary on Zephaniah, gives a picture which is both moving and harsh:

  On the day of the Destruction of Jerusalem, you see a sad people coming to visit, decrepit little women and old men encumbered with rags and years, showing both in their bodies and their dress the wrath of the Lord. A crowd of pitiable creatures assembles and under the gleaming gibbet of the Lord and his sparkling resurrection, and before a brilliant banner with a cross, waving from the Mount of Olives, they weep over the ruins of the Temple. And yet they are not worthy of pity.127

  These two catastrophes, of 70 and 135 AD, effectively ended Jewish state history in antiquity. There were two immediate consequences of great historical significance. The first was the final separation of Judaism and Christianity. Paul, writing in the decade around 50 AD, had effectively repudiated the Mosaic law as the mechanism of justification and salvation, and in this (as we have seen) he was consistent with Jesus’ teaching. At a meeting with the Jewish-Christian leaders in Jerusalem he had won the right to exempt his gentile converts from Jewish religious requirements. But none of this meant necessarily that Jews and Christians would come to regard their beliefs as mutually exclusive and their respective supporters as enemies of each other. The Gospel of Luke, written perhaps in the 60s, resembles in some ways the writings of Hellenistic Jews in the diaspora, directed at potential converts to Judaism. Luke’s aim seems to have been to summarize and simplify the Law, which he saw as an enlightened body of Jewish customs—the ethics of a specific people. Piety was the same among Jews and gentiles: both were the means by which the soul was prepared to receive the gospel. The gentiles had their good customs too, and God did not discriminate against those who did not possess the Law, i.e. Jewish customs. Nor did God discriminate against Jews. Both categories were saved by means of faith and grace.128

  The notion that gentiles and Jews could both subscribe to Christianity as a sort of super-religion could not survive the events of 66-70, which effectively destroyed the old Christian-Jewish church of Jerusalem.129 Most of its members must have perished. The survivors scattered. Their tradition ceased in any way to be mainstream Christianity and survived merely as a lowly sect, the Ebionites, eventually declared heretical. In the vacuum thus created, Hellenistic Christianity flourished and became the whole. The effect was to concentrate Christian belief still more fiercely on Paul’s presentation of Christ’s death and resurrection as the mechanism of salvation—itself clearly foreshadowed in Jesus’ teaching—and on the nature of this anointed saviour. What did Jesus claim to be? The term he himself used most often, and others used of him, was ‘Son of Man’. It may have meant a great deal; or little or even nothing at all—just Jesus saying he was a man, or the man for his particular mission.130 It can be argued that Jesus regarded himself as nothing more than a charismatic Jewish hasid.131 But the notion that Jesus was divine, implicit in his resurrection and his foresight of this miracle, and in his subsequent epiphanies, was present from the very beginnings of Apostolic Christianity. Moreover, it was accompanied by the equally early belief that he had instituted the ceremony of the eucharist, in anticipation of his death and resurrection for the expiation of sin, in which his flesh and blood (the substance of the sacrifice) took the form of bread and wine. The emergence of the eucharist, ‘the holy and perfect sacrifice’, as the Christian substitute for all Jewish forms of sacrifice, confirmed the doctrine of Jesus’ apotheosis. To the question Was Jesus God or man?, the Christians therefore answered: both. After 70 AD, their answer was unanimous and increasingly emphatic. This made a complete breach with Judaism inevitable. The Jews could accept the decentralization of the Temple: many had long done so, and soon all had to do so. They could accept a different view of the Law. What they could not accept was the removal of the absolute distinction they had always drawn between God and man, because that was the essence of Jewish theology, the belief that above all others separated them from the pagans. By removing that distinction, the Christians took themselves irrecoverably out of the Judaic faith.

  Moreover, they did so in a way which made antagonism between the two forms of monotheism inevitable, irreconcilable and bitter. The Jews could not concede the divinity of Jesus as God-made-man without repudiating the central tenet of their belief. The Christians could not concede that Jesus was anything less than God without repudiating the essence and purpose of their movement. If Christ was not God, Christianity was nothing. If Christ was God, then Judaism was false. There could be absolutely no compromise on this point. Each faith was thus a threat to the other.

  The quarrel was all the more bitter because, while differing on the essential, the two faiths agreed on virtually everything else. The Christians took from Judaism the Pentateuch (including its morals and ethics), the prophets and the wisdom books, and far more of the apocrypha than the Jews themselves were prepared to canonize. They took the liturgy, for even the eucharist had Jewish roots. They took the notion of the Sabbath day and feast-days, incense and burning lamps, psalms, hymns and choral music, vestments and prayers, priests and martyrs, the reading of the sacred books and the institution of the synagogue (transformed into the church). They took even the notion of clerical authority—which the Jews would soon modify—in the shape of the high-priest whom the Christians turned into patriarchs and popes. There is nothing in the early church, other than its Christology, which was not adumbrated in Judaism.

  Not least, the Christians sprang from the Jewish literary tradition and therefore they inherited, among other things, Jewish sacred polemic. As we have seen, this was a legacy of the Maccabee martyrologies and a very important element in Judaic writing during the first century AD. The very earliest Christian writings assume the hostile tone with which Jewish sectarians addressed each other. Once the break between Christianity and Judaism became unbridgeable, the only form of discourse between them was polemical. The four gospels, which quickly became the Torah of Christianity, incorporated the Jewish polemic-sectarian tradition. Their language is very similar in this respect to some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and like the scrolls should be seen as an inter-Jewish argument. The expression ‘the Jews’ appears five times each in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, six in Mark and seventy-one in John. This is not necessarily because John reached written form later and is therefore more hostile to Judaism. In its original form John may, indeed, have been the earliest of the gospels. In John ‘the Jews’ appears to mean many different things—the Sadducees, the Pharisees, or both together, the Temple police, the Jewish establishment, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling class-but also the people. The most common meaning is ‘the opponents of Jesus’ teaching’.132 John is simply heresy-polemic. When the Qumran monks write of ‘the sons of Belial’, they are referring to their opponents within Judaism and making exactly the same point as in John: ‘You are of your father the devil.’ Equally, the Qumran Damascus Document used ‘Jews’, ‘land of Judah’ and ‘house of Judah’ in exactly the same way as John, meaning their Jewish opponents who currently have the predominant voice.133 The most offensive and damaging passa
ge in the gospels is, in fact, in Matthew, sometimes cited as the most ‘pro-Jewish’ text in the New Testament. This occurs when, after Pilate washes his hands, ‘the people’ exclaim: ‘His blood be upon us and on our children’,134 because this explicitly shows Jews accepting the death of Jesus as a burden to be borne by their progeny. The incident is given even more emphasis in the passion narrative of the apocryphal ‘Gospel of Peter’.135

  Alas, these professional religious polemics, these literary exercises in odium theologicum, were lifted out of their historical context and became the basis for a general Christian indictment of the Jewish people. Polemic should be avoided, Erasmus was later to observe, ‘because the long war of words and writings ends in blows’. The collective guilt charge in Matthew, and the ‘sons of the devil’ charge in John, were linked together to form the core of a specifically Christian branch of anti-Semitism which was superimposed on and blended with the ancient and ramifying pagan anti-Semitic tradition to form in time a mighty engine of hatred.

  The collapse of the Jewish-Christian church after 70 AD and the triumph of Hellenistic Christianity led the Jews, in turn, to castigate the Christians. Jewish daily prayers against heretics and opponents date from the Hellenistic reform programme of the second century BC—Ecclesiasticus, the wisdom-polemic by the rigorist Ben Sira (which the Sicarii had with them at Masada), asked God: ‘Rouse your fury, pour out your rage, destroy the opponent, annihilate the enemy.’136 The prayer against heretics, originally known as ‘the Benediction to Him who humbles the arrogant’, became part of the daily service, or Amidah, as the Twelfth Benediction. At one time it was specifically directed against the Sadducees. Under the rule of Raban Gamaliel II (c. 80-c. 115 AD), the Twelfth Benediction or Birkat ha-Minim (‘Benediction concerning heretics’) was recast to apply to Christians and this seems to have been the point at which the remaining Jewish followers of Christ were turned out of the synagogue. By the 132 rising, Christians and Jews were seen as open opponents or even enemies. Indeed Christian communities in Palestine petitioned the Roman authorities to be given separate religious status to Jews, and the Christian writer Justin Martyr (c. 100-c. 165), who lived in Neapolis (Nablus), reported that the followers of Simon bar Kokhba massacred Christian as well as Greek communities. It is from this period that anti-Christian polemic begins to appear in Jewish Bible commentaries.

  The second consequence of the final failure of state Judaism was a profound change in the nature and scope of Jewish activities. From 70 AD, and still more so after 135 AD, Judaism ceased to be a national religion in any physical and visible sense, and the Jews were depatriated. Instead, both Jewry and Judaism became coextensive with the study and observance of the Torah. It is difficult to fit Jewish history into any general taxonomy of national and religious development because it is a unique phenomenon. Indeed, the historian of the Jews is constantly faced with the problem of categorizing a process of which there is no other example anywhere. The concentration of Judaism and the Jewish nation on the Torah had proceeded steadily since the last phase of the Davidic kingdom. The reforms of Josiah, the Exile, the Return from Exile, the work of Ezra, the triumph of the Maccabees, the rise of Pharisaism, the synagogue, the schools, the rabbis—all these developments in turn had first established, then progressively consolidated, the absolute dominance of the Torah in Jewish religious and social life. It had, in so doing, emasculated the other institutions of Judaism and Jewry. After 135, its rule became complete because there was nothing else left. The rigorists, partly by design, partly by the catastrophes they had provoked, had driven everything else out.

  Was this providential or not? In the short-term perspective of the second century AD, the Jews appeared to have been a powerful national and religious group which had courted ruin, and achieved it. During most of the first century, the Jews not only constituted a tenth of the empire, and a much higher proportion in certain big cities, but were expanding. They had the transcendent new idea of the age: ethical monotheism. They were almost all literate. They had the only welfare system that existed. They made converts in all social groups, including the highest. One or more of the Flavian emperors might easily have become a Jew, just as Constantine was to become a Christian 250 years later. Josephus was entitled to boast: ‘There is not one city, Greek or barbarian, nor a single nation where the custom of the seventh day, on which we rest from all work, and the fasts and the lighting of candles are not observed…and as God permeates the universe, so the Law has found its way into the hearts of all men.’ A century later, the whole process had been reversed. Jerusalem was no longer a Jewish city at all. Alexandria, once 40 per cent Jewish, lost its Jewish voice completely. The huge casualty figures cited by such authors as Josephus, Tacitus and Dio for the two revolts (Tacitus said 1,197,000 Jews were killed or sold as slaves in the 66-70 struggle alone) may be exaggerated but it is clear that the Jewish population of Palestine fell rapidly at this time. In the diaspora, the expanding Christian communities not only purloined the best Jewish theological and social ideas, and so the role of ‘light to the gentiles’, but made increasing inroads into the Jewish masses themselves, diaspora Jews forming one of the chief sources of Christian converts.137

  Not only did the Jewish population fall dramatically, in both the homeland and the diaspora, but there was an equally dramatic narrowing of the Jewish horizon. In the age of Herod the Great, the Jews were beginning to take a prominent part in the cultural and economic life of the new empire. A man like Philo Judaeus (c. 30 BC—c. 45 AD), a member of one of the richest and most cosmopolitan diaspora families in Alexandria, brought up on the Septuagint, speaking and writing beautiful Greek, at home in all Greek literature, a historian and diplomat, and a major secular philosopher in his own right, was at the same time a pious Jew and a voluminous commentator both on the books of the Pentateuch and on the whole corpus of Jewish law.138 Philo embodied the best tradition of Jewish rationalism. Christian scholars were later to be deeply indebted to him for their understanding of the Old Testament, especially in an allegorical sense. Philo’s presentation of the spirit of Judaism is profound, original and creative, and the fact that he seems to have known no Hebrew indicates the extent to which enlightened Jews, by the beginning of the Christian era, had made themselves a part of international civilization and secular culture without forfeiting anything essential of their faith. By the mid-second century however, a man of Philo’s breadth of outlook could not have been accommodated within the Jewish community. It had ceased to write history. It no longer engaged in speculative philosophy of any kind. All its traditional forms—wisdom, poetry, psalmody, allegory, historical novellae, apocalyptic—had been abandoned. It was engaged, with passionate concentration and sincerity, on a solitary form of literary work: commentary on the religious law. And it continued this task, oblivious of its richer past, unaware of any intellectual ferment in the world outside, for hundreds of years.

  Yet the turning in upon itself of Judaism, the logical culmination of seven centuries of increasing rigorism, was probably the condition of its very survival, and the survival of the Jewish people as a distinct entity. The Jews did not simply vanish from the historical record, as did so many peoples in the great convulsive population movements of late antiquity. They did not lose their identity in the emergent Dark Age communities—like Romans and Hellenes, Gauls and Celts or, indeed, like the millions of diaspora Jews who became Christians. Judaism and the Jewish remnant were preserved in the amber of the Torah. Nor was this preservation and survival an inexplicable freak of history. The Jews survived because the period of intense introspection enabled their intellectual leaders to enlarge the Torah into a system of moral theology and community law of extraordinary coherence, logical consistency and social strength. Having lost the Kingdom of Israel, the Jews turned the Torah into a fortress of the mind and spirit, in which they could dwell in safety and even in content.

  This great enterprise in social metaphysics began humbly enough in the aftermath of the fall
of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The hereditary priestly families, and the traditional Jewish upper class as a whole, perished in the ruin of the city. Henceforth the Jews formed themselves into a cathedocracy: they were ruled from the teacher’s chair. This had always been inherent in Judaism—for were not prophets instruments through whom God taught his people? But now it became explicit. Tradition says that the Pharisaic rabbi, Johanan ben Zakkai, the deputy head of the Sanhedrin, was smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin. He had opposed the revolt and spoke for the long-established element in Judaism who believed that God and the faith were better served without the burden and corruption of the state. He obtained permission from the Roman authorities to set up a centre for the regulation of the Jewish religion at Jabneh (Jamnia), near the coast west of Jerusalem. There the Sanhedrin and the state were buried, and in their place a synod of rabbis met, in a vineyard near a dovecote, or in the upper chamber of a house. The rabbi and the synagogue became the normative institutions of Judaism, which from now on was essentially a congregationalist faith. The academy at Jabneh made the annual calculations of the Jewish calendar. It completed the canonization of the Bible. It ruled that, despite the fall of the Temple, certain ceremonies, such as the solemn eating of the Passover meal, were to be regularly enacted. It established the form of community prayers and laid down rules for fasting and pilgrimage. The new spirit of Judaism was in marked reaction to the violent exaltation of the zealots and nationalists. ‘Do not hurry to tear down the altars of the gentiles’, the Rabbi Jonathan was remembered as saying, ‘lest you be forced to rebuild them with your own hands.’ Or again: ‘If you are planting trees, and someone tells you the Messiah has come, put the sapling in first, then go and welcome the Messiah.’139 At Jabneh, the sword was forgotten, the pen ruled. The system was a self-perpetuating oligarchy, the academy selecting or ‘ordaining’ new rabbis on the basis of learning and merit. But authority tended to be vested in families distinguished for their scholarship. In due course the progeny of Rabbi Jonathan were ousted by Rabbi Gamaliel II, son of the man who had taught St Paul. He was recognized by the Romans as nasi or patriarch.