Aphrodite and the Rabbis

by Burton L. Visotzky

  Another oft-told rabbinic story recounts the very cusp of Judaism’s (re)invention, in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. This Talmudic tale about the first rebellion against Rome and the siege of Jerusalem involves three emperors and also confronts the ambiguities of the relationship between rabbinic Judaism and Roman culture.

  Our House [the Temple] was destroyed; our Sanctuary was burned; we were exiled from our land. He sent Nero Caesar against them. As he came, Nero shot an arrow to the East; it landed on Jerusalem. To the West; it landed on Jerusalem. To all four points of the compass; it landed on Jerusalem.

  Nero asked a child, “Tell me the verse of Scripture you are studying.”

  The child said, “I will wreak My vengeance upon Edom, through the hand of My people Israel” (Ezek. 25:14).

  Nero reasoned, “The Blessed Holy One seeks to destroy His house and then wipe His hands on me.”

  So he fled and converted to Judaism. His descendant was Rabbi Meir. (Babylonian Talmud Gittin 56a–b)

  The story opens with tragedy. The “He” of the narrative is God, using Rome as a scourge against the Jews. Their sin? According to the Talmudic narrative preceding this passage, the sins of the Jews were the twin transgressions of factionalism and baseless hatred of one another. The emperor Nero comes to make war and, as he does, shoots off arrows and quizzes a schoolchild in order to take omens on the eve of battle. All signs point to his conquest of Jerusalem, but there’s a catch. Although Nero might win the battle, he will lose the war, as God will then hold him culpable for Jerusalem’s destruction and punish him accordingly. The verse of Ezekiel, “I will wreak My vengeance upon Edom,” tells us that the rabbis relating this tale see Nero as a stand-in for all of Rome.

  The rabbis also understand that the relationship of Rome to Judaism is exemplified by the very omens Nero performs. The first is martial; he shoots arrows. The second is more religiously inclined. He asks a child to recite a verse of Scripture. This might foreshadow Nero’s imagined conversion to Judaism. But Nero’s method of using a child’s verse as a predictor of things to come is found not only among Jewish texts but also among Christian and, yes, pagan works, too.

  The rabbis tell this tale while under Rome’s thumb. So the verse about God’s vengeance against Rome is presumably aspirational, and Nero is, I suppose, to be credited with a long view of history. It is entirely irrelevant to our narrator that Nero never stepped foot in Palestine—not to mention that he certainly never converted, nor was he the ancestor of a famous rabbi. So what, then, is the point of making claims that are so patently false? The rabbis also take the long view of history. It is as though they say, “Yes, Rome destroyed Jerusalem and God’s Temple. But be patient. Ultimately we will conquer them.” Why does the Talmud go so far as to imagine that Nero converts and engenders a great rabbi? Is this a subtle recognition that Judaism underwent transformation as a result of Rome’s elimination of the Temple cult? It is as much to say that with the Temple gone, Rome itself will help father the new entity represented by the great sage, Rabbi Meir.

  Our Talmudic tale continues:

  He sent Vespasian Caesar against them. He came and besieged them for three years. . . .

  Now the Jews had enough provisions to feed the besieged Jerusalemites for twenty-one years; but among them were thugs who called themselves the “capital guards.” The rabbis said to them, “Let us go out and make peace with the Romans.” But those thugs did not permit them to do so.

  The “capital guards” said, “We will go out and make war upon them.” The rabbis said, “The matter will not have support from Heaven.” So those “capital guards” arose and burned the storehouses of wheat and barley, and famine ensued.

  Now our story has taken a turn toward the historical. Vespasian actually was the general sent to besiege Jerusalem in 66 CE. Alas, the Talmud also accurately represents the internecine fighting among the various factions within the Jewish community. This sad fact is also attested to by Josephus. The famine that ensued is corroborated by his as well as pagan Roman narratives of the war.

  What follows in the rabbis’ telling, however, has less to do with history and more to do with how the Jewish community related to Rome in the aftermath of the war. One might even go so far as to say that the rabbis collaborated with Rome and against the Jewish rebels. I must consider the possibility that later rabbis are offering an indictment that places an act of betrayal at the very birth of the rabbinic movement. Revisionist history is never welcome, but I think it is fair to ask whether it was the rabbis or the rebels who cared more for the Jewish community and its future. The nature of the cooperation with Rome does, in any case, define the future of rabbinic Judaism—so this story may not be historically accurate but is otherwise self-defining.

  Abba Sikra, the head of the “capital guards” in Jerusalem, was the nephew of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai. Yohanan sent him the message, “Come to me in secret.” When he arrived, Yohanan asked, “How long will you continue doing this, killing everyone with famine?”

  He replied, “What can I do? If I say anything to them they will kill me!”

  Yohanan said, “Let’s see if there is a way for me to leave Jerusalem. It might be possible that I can save a small bit.”

  He said, “Pretend you are ill and have everyone come and ask after you. Then put something smelly nearby and have them say that your soul has gone to its rest. Let your disciples enter—and do not let anyone else do it, lest they feel that you are too light—for everyone knows that a living person feels lighter than a corpse.”

  We have no historical information regarding Abba Sikra. Some associate his name, Sikra, with a movement of rebels whom Josephus calls sicarii, so named for the stilettos (sicarii in Latin) they carried. With these daggers they killed their Jewish opponents. The term I have translated as “capital guards” could as well be translated simply as “thugs.” Thugs, indeed; yet apparently our relatives. The story of escape from a besieged city by playing dead is an old one, found among other Greco-Roman siege accounts. Is it historically accurate? I do not know. Does it tell us that the rabbinic self-perception is one of Judaism that has died and been resurrected? I believe so. The drama of this escape comes with the recognition that the Temple and its cult are over. The afterlife comes when a rabbi encounters an emperor and a new synthesis begins. Of course, death and resurrection are not so easily achieved, so the story still has a few bumps to work out.

  Rabbi Eliezer carried him from one side and Rabbi Yehoshua carried him from the other side. When they came to the gate with the “corpse,” the guards sought to stab the body to be sure it was really dead. The disciples protested, “Do you want people to say that you desecrated the body of our master by stabbing him?”

  They thought to just shove him. The disciples again protested, “Do you want people to say that you desecrated the body of our master by shoving him?” They relented and opened the gate. They went out.

  The bluff worked! It is as though the rabbis said to the Roman besiegers, “Do you really want the media to cover this while you abuse our venerable rabbi’s corpse?” With that the gates open and Rabbi Yohanan was able to carry out his secret mission to General Vespasian.

  When Rabbi Yohanan got to the general’s camp, he said, “Peace be upon you O King; peace be upon you, O King!”

  Vespasian replied, “You have condemned yourself twice over. First, I am not emperor and you have committed Lèse majesté by hailing me as emperor! Further, if I were emperor, what took you so long to come?”

  Rabbi Yohanan responded, “As for your saying that you are not emperor, surely you are an emperor, otherwise Jerusalem would not be given into your hands. . . . And as for your asking why I did not come sooner, those thugs would not permit it.”

  Vespasian said, “If you had a barrel of honey with a serpent coiled around it, would you not destroy
the barrel to kill the serpent?”

  Rabbi Yohanan was silent.

  Rabbi Yosef, and some say it was Rabbi Aqiba, recited the verse, “‘It is I, the Lord, Who turns sages back and makes nonsense of their knowledge’ (Isa. 44:25). What he should have said to him was, ‘Take a pair of tongs, remove the serpent, and leave the honey barrel intact.’”

  This is a very popular story in rabbinic literature, repeated many times, in many versions. Until fairly recently, historians of the period treated this as an historical narrative. I assuredly do not. But I can report with delight that in one ancient version of the telling, Rabbi Yohanan greets Vespasian with the words (nicely transliterated into Hebrew characters) Vive Domini Imperator, exactly how the emperor was saluted in the Roman world. In our Hebrew/Aramaic version the rabbi says, “Shalom.” The point of the story seems to be that when you have escaped a siege and are making a bargain with the enemy (who is about to become your new friend), you are in a “one-down” position. Vespasian has the witty reply while Rabbi Yohanan, in what is surely an unusual moment for any rabbi, is silent. Of course, it doesn’t take very long for rabbis who were not there on the scene to second-guess him and tell him what he should have said.

  Vespasian speaks a little Greek in his reply, for the term for serpent, for which there are certainly good biblical Hebrew terms (think Eve and the apple), is, instead, drakon. That word also supplies our English term dragon, but in Greek of the period the word is somewhat less dramatic. Our story continues.

  Just then a military attaché [Greek: paristake] arrived from Rome and said, “Arise, for Caesar has died and the nobles of Rome wish to seat you at their head.”

  Vespasian had just put on one boot; but when he tried to put on the second, it would not go on. So he tried to remove the first boot, but could not. He asked, “What’s this?”

  Rabbi Yohanan explained, “Don’t worry, it’s just the good news you’ve received, as it is said, ‘Good tidings fatten the bone’ (Prov. 15: 30). What is the remedy? Bring someone whom you are unhappy with and have him pass before you, as it is said, ‘Despondency dries up the bones’” (Prov. 17:22).

  He did so and his boot went on.

  Vespasian said, “I must leave now and will send someone in my stead. But ask of me some favor that I may grant it.”

  He said, “Give me Yavneh and its sages; and the Gamalielite line; and a physician to heal Rabbi Tzadok.”

  So much for Vespasian: he’s gone from being the witty general to being Little Diddle Dumpling, “one shoe off and one shoe on.” Rabbi Yohanan’s “prophecy” about Vespasian’s ascent to the throne is confirmed. The rabbi is the clever one now, while the new emperor of Rome cannot even get his boots on without a little rabbinic interpretation of Scripture. Presumably this all took place before the invention of the shoehorn.

  In classic folk-tale fashion, Rabbi Yohanan gets three wishes. It is through Rome that Yohanan gets the benefits of a place to study and laissez-passer for the Jewish leadership of Gamaliel’s family during rebellion. It is intriguing that Yohanan asks favor for his political opponents, the Gamalielite dynasty. That family became the leadership of the Palestinian Jewish community immediately following Rabbi Yohanan’s triumph. Gamaliel and his offspring ruled the Jewish community in Roman Palestine into the fourth century. Among his illustrious offspring was Rebbi Judah the Patriarch.

  Rabbi Yohanan also asks Vespasian for a doctor to heal Rabbi Tzadok, who had been fasting for forty years to prevent the destruction of Jerusalem. He apparently foresaw the coming horror through either his political savvy or his prophetic piety. Although Rabbi Tzadok, a priest, ultimately failed in his mission to save the Holy City, he stayed alive and became a model rabbinic disciple.

  Rabbi Yohanan’s first wish, for the town of Yavneh and its sages, is anachronistic. In fact, when the rabbi met the general, the town was not called Yavneh, but rather Jamnia—it was then the garrison town for the Greek-speaking soldiers of the Roman legions. In other words, Yohanan met Vespasian in the heart of the Roman army encampment and asked for that very town to become the place where he and his disciples could study going forward. Maybe Yohanan needed military protection from the Jewish zealots after sneaking out of Jerusalem and breaking the siege. Only later in rabbinic memory did Jamnia, which the rabbis called “Greek town” after the language the troops spoke (in Hebrew: Yevvani), come to be called Yavneh, which in Hebrew means “to build” or, equally possibly, “to understand.” The Roman military center gave way to the place where Judaism was rebuilt through understanding of Torah. The pun is subtle, but the mythmaking is undeniable. Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem:

  Vespasian left and sent Titus.

  “And he said, ‘Where is their God, the Rock in Whom they sought refuge?’” (Deut. 32:37). This verse refers to Titus, that evil one, who blasphemed against Heaven.

  What did he do? He took a whore by the hand, entered into the Holy of Holies, spread forth a Torah scroll, and committed a transgression upon it. Then he took his sword, penetrated the veil of the Temple, and a miracle occurred and blood spurted forth. Titus thought he had killed God, as it is said, “Your foes roar in the midst of Your meeting place, they place their standards as ensigns” (Psalm 74:4). . . .

  What did Titus do? He took the veil of the Temple and used it like a basket [Greek: girguthani] in which he put all of the vessels of the Sanctuary. He loaded them on a ship and went to have a triumph in his city of Rome. . . .

  A storm arose at sea and threatened to capsize him. Titus reasoned, “It seems to me that their god only has power upon water. When Pharaoh came, he drowned him in water. When Sisera came, he drowned him in water. Now he wants to drown me in water. If the god of the Jews really has power, let him make war with me upon dry land!”

  A voice came forth and said to him, “Evil one, son of an evil one, offspring of the evil Esau. I have a simple creature in My world named a gnat.” Why is it called “a simple creature?” For it has a mouth but has no rectum. “Get up on dry land and make war with it!”

  When Titus arrived at dry land, a gnat flew up his nose and drilled into his brain for seven years. . . .

  When he died they opened his head and that gnat had grown to the size of a dove, two liters (Greek) in weight. (Babylonian Talmud Gittin 56a–b)

  Titus was Vespasian’s son and became Rome’s emperor after him. His triumph over Jerusalem is commemorated in the (in)famous Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, depicted below. As can be seen in the picture, Titus really did take the vessels of the Jerusalem Temple back to Rome. But let us look at how the story of Titus is spun by the rabbis. We can assume this is rabbinic fantasy by the simple expedient that much of the action takes place in the Holy of Holies, where no Jew would dare venture. So, they made it all up. Titus is “credited” with transgressing the three cardinal sins of Judaism at one fell swoop: he spills blood, he has forbidden sex, and if we count his sexual blasphemy as an act of sacral prostitution, he commits idolatry. In a medieval telling of this tale (Avot D’Rabbi Nathan 1), Titus smacks the altar with his penis and brays, “Lykos, Lykos You consume the flocks of the Jews and give them nothing in return.” Give that storyteller credit for a memorable scene—the vulgar Titus calling God Lykos, Greek for a ravenous wolf (think: lycanthropy).

  Arch of Titus—Rome

  I cannot help but think that the tale of Titus and his whore is inspired by his real-life mistress Berenice. Titus met his girlfriend well before the revolt against Rome. She was the daughter of the Jewish client King Herod Agrippa I and sister to his successor, King Herod Agrippa II—a genuine Jewish princess. Titus was about a decade younger than Berenice, and he successfully wooed her for his own. Poor Berenice. After Titus was elevated to emperor, the Roman courtiers forced him to send her back to her Jewish community in ignominy. You really can’t make this stuff up.

  Back in our Talmudic tale: when God deigns to
seek vengeance for Titus’s blasphemies, Titus is at sea. The story imagines how the polytheist thinks. “Well,” says Titus, as he dutifully recites a version of Jewish history, “God must be like Neptune, limited in his power only to the seas.” It is curious that the rabbis presume the pagan emperor had some knowledge, however fractured, of Jewish history. He mentions Sisera and Pharaoh. According to the Bible, Sisera’s chariots were mired in mud when rain swamped him (see Judges 4–5). And Pharaoh and his troops were drowned during the Israelite crossing of the Red Sea (Ex. 14–15). Thus did God defeat Israel’s enemies.

  In our story, Titus avoids drowning and makes it back to Rome for a triumphal procession celebrating his and his father’s victory over the Jews. God has other plans. Instead of a triumph, God sends Titus a tumor. Here, too, we are in the realm of fantasy. The revenge the Jews imagine for the man who destroyed the Temple is cruel and follows the rabbinic rule of punishment measure for measure. Titus, that a—hole, is destroyed by a creature so lowly it does not even have a rectum. And the gnat/tumor grows to the size of a two-liter dove—exactly what used to be sacrificed to God on the altar that Titus trashed.

  There is an undercurrent of irony here. Vespasian and his son, precisely because they put down the rebellion against Rome, are reviled in rabbinic memory, even as there is ambivalence about them. Among the emperors of Rome, Vespasian fared far better in history than the rabbis allow. He became emperor in the long year after Nero’s reign, a year referred to by Romans as the year of the four emperors. Between Nero and Vespasian were the emperors Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, none of whom died a natural death. Is it any wonder that the man who controlled the Roman armies ascended to the royal purple? And yet, Vespasian was an old soldier, emphatically not a patrician of the Julio-Claudian emperors’ family. He compensated by being the first to endow a chair of learning in Rome—the imperial chair of rhetoric. While others remember him for his contributions to Roman culture, the Jews have a more fraught recollection. In retrospect, I wonder whether Vespasian’s endowment of an academic chair helped give rise to the rabbinic notion that he helped found the town of Yavneh, where the rabbis gathered to study Torah after the Temple’s destruction.