The Provinces of the Roman Empire 29

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 29

The demand for mutual understanding and agreement was on both sides just as warranted

of itself as it was impossible of execution. But above all a conflict

between the Jewish lord of the land and his subjects was a matter

of tolerable indifference for the empire; every conflict between

the Romans and the Jews in Jerusalem widened the gulf which yawned

between the peoples of the West and the Hebrews living along with

them; and the danger lay, not in the quarrels of Palestine, but in the

incompatibility of the members of the empire of different nationalities

who were now withal coupled together by fate.

 

[Sidenote: Preparation for the insurrection.]

 

Thus the ship was driving incessantly towards the whirlpool. In this

ill-fated voyage all taking part lent their help--the Roman government

and its administrators, the Jewish authorities and the Jewish people.

The former indeed continued to show a willingness to meet as far as

possible all claims, fair and unfair, of the Jews. When in the year

44 the procurator again entered Jerusalem, the nomination of the

high-priest and the administration of the temple-treasure, which

were combined with the kingly office and in so far also with the

procuratorship, were taken from him and transferred to a brother of

the deceased king Agrippa, king Herod of Chalcis, as well as, after

his death in the year 48, to his successor the younger Agrippa already

mentioned. The Roman chief magistrate, on the complaint of the Jews

caused a Roman soldier, who, on occasion of orders to plunder a

Jewish village, had torn in pieces a roll of the law, to be put to

death. The whole weight of Roman imperial justice fell, according to

circumstances, even upon the higher officials; when two procurators

acting alongside of one another had taken part for and against in the

quarrel of the Samaritans and the Galileans, and their soldiers had

fought against one another, the imperial governor of Syria, Ummidius

Quadratus, was sent with extraordinary full powers to Syria to punish

and to execute; as a result one of the guilty persons was sent into

banishment, and a Roman military tribune named Celer was publicly

beheaded in Jerusalem itself. But alongside of these examples of

severity stood others of a weakness partaking of guilt; in that same

process the second at least as guilty procurator Antonius Felix escaped

punishment, because he was the brother of the powerful menial Pallas

and the husband of the sister of king Agrippa. Still more than with the

official abuses of individual administrators must the government be

chargeable with the fact that it did not strengthen the power of the

officials and the number of the troops in a province so situated, and

continued to recruit the garrison almost exclusively from the province.

Insignificant as the province was, it was a wretched stupidity and an

ill-applied parsimony to treat it after the traditional pattern; the

seasonable display of a crushing superiority of force and unrelenting

sternness, a governor of higher rank, and a legionary camp, would have

saved to the province and the empire great sacrifices of money, blood,

and honour.

 

[Sidenote: High-priestly rule.]

 

[Sidenote: Ananias.]

 

But not less at least was the fault of the Jews. The high-priestly

rule, so far as it went--and the government was but too much inclined

to allow it free scope in all internal affairs--was, even according to

the Jewish accounts, at no time conducted with so much violence and

worthlessness as in that from the death of Agrippa to the outbreak of

the war. The best-known and most influential of these priest-rulers

was Ananias son of Nebedaeus, the “whitewashed wall,” as Paul called

him, when this spiritual judge bade his attendants smite him on the

mouth, because he ventured to defend himself before the judgment-seat.

It was laid to his charge that he bribed the governor, and that by a

corresponding interpretation of scripture he alienated from the lower

clergy the tithe-sheaves.[179] As one of the chief instigators of the

war between the Samaritans and the Galileans, he had stood before

the Roman judge. Not because the reckless fanatics preponderated in

the ruling circles, but because these instigators of popular tumults

and organisers of trials for heresy lacked the moral and religious

authority whereby the moderate men in better times had guided the

multitude, and because they misunderstood and misused the indulgence of

the Roman authorities in internal affairs, they were unable to mediate

in a peaceful sense between the foreign rule and the nation. It was

under their very rule that the Roman authorities were assailed with

the wildest and most irrational demands, and popular movements arose

of grim absurdity. Of such a nature was that violent petition, which

demanded and obtained the blood of a Roman soldier on account of the

tearing up of a roll of the law. Another time there arose a popular

tumult, which cost the lives of many men, because a Roman soldier had

exhibited in the temple a part of his body in unseemly nudity. Even the

best of kings could not have absolutely averted such lunacy; but even

the most insignificant prince would not have confronted the fanatical

multitude with so little control of the helm as these priests.

 

[Sidenote: The Zealots.]

 

The actual result was the constant increase of the new Maccabees. It

has been customary to put the outbreak of the war in the year 66; with

equal and perhaps better warrant we might name for it the year 44.

Since the death of Agrippa warfare in Judaea had never ceased, and

alongside of the local feuds, which Jews fought out with Jews, there

went on constantly the war of the Roman troops against the seceders

in the mountains, the Zealots, as the Jews named them, or according

to Roman designation, the Robbers. Both names were appropriate; here

too alongside of the fanatics the decayed or decaying elements of

society played their part--at any rate after the victory one of the

first steps of the Zealots was to burn the bonds for debt that were

kept in the temple. Every one of the abler procurators, onward from

the first Cuspius Fadus, swept the land of them, and still the hydra

appeared afresh in greater strength. The successor of Fadus, Tiberius

Julius Alexander, himself sprung from a Jewish family, a nephew of the

above-mentioned Alexandrian scholar Philo, caused two sons of Judas the

Galilean, Jacob and Simon, to be crucified; this was the seed of the

new Mattathias. In the streets of the towns the patriots preached aloud

the war, and not a few followed to the desert; these bands set on fire

the houses of the peaceful and rational people who refused to take part

with them. If the soldiers seized bandits of this sort, they carried

off in turn respectable people as hostages to the mountains; and very

often the authorities agreed to release the former in order to liberate

the latter. At the same time the “men of the knife” began in the

capital their dismal trade; they murdered, doubtless also for money--as

their first victim the priest Jonathan is named, as commissioning

them in that case, the Roman procurator Felix--but, if possible, at

the same time as patriots, Roman soldiers or countrymen of their own

friendly to the Romans. How, with such dispositions, should wonders and

signs have failed to appear, and persons who, deceived or deceiving,

roused thereby the fanaticism of the masses? Under Cuspius Fadus the

miracle-monger Theudas led his faithful adherents to the Jordan,

assuring them that the waters would divide before them and swallow up

the pursuing Roman horsemen, as in the times of king Pharaoh. Under

Felix another worker of wonders, named from his native country the

Egyptian, promised that the walls of Jerusalem would collapse like

those of Jericho at the trumpet blast of Joshua; and thereupon four

thousand knife-men followed him to the Mount of Olives. In the very

absurdity lay the danger. The great mass of the Jewish population were

small farmers, who ploughed their fields and pressed their oil in the

sweat of their brow--more villagers than townsmen, of little culture

and powerful faith, closely linked to the free bands in the mountains,

and full of reverence for Jehovah and his priests in Jerusalem as

well as full of aversion towards the unclean strangers. The war there

was not a war between one power and another for the ascendency, not

even properly a war of the oppressed against the oppressors for the

recovery of freedom; it was not daring statesmen,[180] but fanatical

peasants that began and waged it, and paid for it with their blood. It

was a further stage in the history of national hatred; on both sides

continued living together seemed impossible, and they encountered each

other with the thought of mutual extirpation.

 

[Sidenote: Outbreak of the insurrection in Caesarea.]

 

The movement, through which the tumults were changed into war,

proceeded from Caesarea. In this urban community--originally Greek,

and then remodelled by Herod after the pattern of the colonies of

Alexander--which had developed into the first seaport of Palestine,

Greeks and Jews dwelt, equally entitled to civic privileges, without

distinction of nation and confession, the latter superior in number

and property. But the Hellenes, after the model of the Alexandrians,

and doubtless under the immediate impression of the occurrences of the

year 38, impugned the right of citizenship of the Jewish members of the

community by way of complaint to the supreme authority. The minister of

Nero,[181] Burrus († 62), decided in their favour. It was bad to make

citizenship in a town formed on Jewish soil and by a Jewish government

a privilege of the Hellenes; but it may not be forgotten how the

Jews behaved just at that time towards the Romans, and how naturally

they suggested to the Romans the conversion of the Roman capital and

the Roman headquarters of the province into a purely Hellenic urban

community. The decision led, as might be conceived, to vehement street

tumults, in which Hellenic scoffing and Jewish arrogance seem to have

almost balanced each other, particularly in the struggle for access

to the synagogue; the Roman authorities interfered, as a matter of

course, to the disadvantage of the Jews. These left the town, but were

compelled by the governor to return, and then all of them were slain in

a street riot (6th August 66). This the government had at any rate not

commanded, and certainly had not wished; powers were unchained which

they themselves were no longer able to control.

 

[Sidenote: Outbreak of the insurrection in Jerusalem.]

 

[Sidenote: Eleazar.]

 

If here the enemies of the Jews were the assailants, the Jews were

so in Jerusalem. Certainly their defenders in the narrative of these

occurrences assure us that the procurator of Palestine at the time,

Gessius Florus, in order to avoid impeachment on account of his

maladministration, wished to provoke an insurrection by the excessive

measure of his torture; and there is no doubt that the governors of

that time considerably exceeded the usual measure of worthlessness and

oppression. But, if Florus in fact pursued such a plan, it miscarried.

For according to these very reports the prudent and the possessors

of property among the Jews, and with them king Agrippa II., familiar

with the government of the temple, and just at that time present in

Jerusalem--he had meanwhile exchanged the rule of Chalcis for that

of Batanaea--lulled the masses so far, that the riotous assemblages

and the interference against them kept within the measure that had

been usual in the country for years. But the advances made by Jewish

theology were more dangerous than the disorder of the streets and

the robber patriots of the mountains. The earlier Judaism had in a

liberal fashion opened the gates of its faith to foreigners; it is true

that only those who belonged, in the strict sense, to their religion

were admitted to the interior of the Temple, but as proselytes of

the gate all were admitted without ceremony into the outer courts,

and even the non-Jew was here allowed to pray on his part and offer

sacrifices to the Lord Jehovah. Thus, as we have already mentioned (p.

189), sacrifice was offered daily there for the Roman emperor on the

basis of an endowment of Augustus. These sacrifices of non-Jews were

forbidden by the master of the temple at this time, Eleazar, son of the

above-mentioned high priest Ananias, a passionate young man of rank,

personally blameless and brave and, so far, an entire contrast to his

father, but more dangerous through his virtues than the latter was

through his vices. Vainly it was pointed out to him that this was as

offensive for the Romans as dangerous for the country, and absolutely at variance with usage; he resolved to abide by the improvement of piety and the exclusion of the sovereign of the land from worship.