The Provinces of the Roman Empire 31

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 31

The task of the assailants was not an easy one. It is true that the

army, which had received in place of the detachments sent to Italy

a considerable contingent from the Egyptian and the Syrian troops,

was quite sufficient for the investment; and, in spite of the long

interval which had been granted to the Jews to prepare for the siege,

their provisions were inadequate, the more especially as a part of

them had been destroyed in the street conflicts, and, as the siege

began about the time of the Passover, numerous strangers who had come

on that account to Jerusalem were also shut in. But though the mass of

the population soon suffered distress, the combatant force took what

they needed where they found it, and, well provided as they were, they

carried on the struggle without reference to the multitudes that were

famishing and soon dying of hunger. The young general could not make

up his mind to a mere blockade; a siege with four legions, brought to

an end in this way, would yield to him personally no glory, and the

new government needed a brilliant feat of arms. The town, everywhere

else defended by inaccessible rocky slopes, was assailable only on the

north side; here, too, it was no easy labour to reduce the threefold

rampart-wall erected without regard to cost from the rich treasures

of the temple, and further within the city to wrest the citadel, the

temple, and the three vast towers of Herod from a strong, fanatically

inspired, and desperate garrison. John and Simon not merely resolutely

repelled the assaults, but often attacked with good success the troops

working at the trenches, and destroyed or burnt the besieging machines.

 

[Sidenote: Destruction of Jerusalem.]

 

But the superiority of numbers and the art of war decided for the

Romans. The walls were stormed, and thereafter the citadel Antonia;

then, after long resistance, first the porticoes of the temple went

on fire, and further on the 10th Ab (August) the temple itself, with

all the treasures accumulated in it for six centuries. Lastly, after

fighting in the streets which lasted for a month, on the 8th Elul

(September) the last resistance in the town itself was broken, and

the holy Salem was razed. The bloody work had lasted for five months.

The sword and the arrow, and still more famine, had claimed countless

victims; the Jews killed every one so much as suspected of deserting,

and forced women and children in the city to die of hunger; the Romans

just as pitilessly put to the sword the captives or crucified them.

The combatants that remained, and particularly the two leaders, were

drawn forth singly from the sewers, in which they had taken refuge. At

the Dead Sea, just where once king David and the Maccabees in their

utmost distress had found a refuge, the remnants of the insurgents

still held out for years in the rock-castles Machaerus and Massada,

till at length, as the last of the free Jews, Eleazar grandson of Judas

the Galilean, and his adherents put to death first their wives and

children, and then themselves. The work was done. That the emperor

Vespasian, an able soldier, did not disdain on account of such an

inevitable success over a small long-subject people to march as victor

to the Capitol, and that the seven-armed candelabrum brought home from

the Holy of Holies of the temple is still to be seen at the present

day on the honorary arch which the imperial senate erected to Titus

in the market of the capital,[184] gives no high conception of the

warlike spirit of this time. It is true that the deep aversion, which

the Occidentals cherished towards the Jewish people, made up in some

measure for what was wanting in martial glory, and if the Jewish name

was too vile for the emperors to assign it to themselves, like those of

the Germans and the Parthians, they deemed it not beneath their dignity

to prepare for the populace of the capital this triumph commemorative

of the victor’s pleasure in the misfortunes of others.

 

[Sidenote: Breaking up of the Jewish central power.]

 

The work of the sword was followed by a change of policy. The

policy pursued by the earlier Hellenistic states, and taken over

from them by the Romans--which reached in reality far beyond mere

tolerance towards foreign ways and foreign faith, and recognised

the Jews in their collective character as a national and religious

community--had become impossible. In the Jewish insurrection the

dangers had been too clearly brought to light, which this formation of

a national-religious union--on the one hand rigidly concentrated, on

the other spreading over the whole East and having ramifications even

in the West--involved. The central worship was accordingly once for all

set aside. This resolution of the government stood undoubtedly fixed,

and had nothing in common with the question, which cannot be answered

with certainty, whether the destruction of the temple took place by

design or by accident; if, on the one hand, the suppression of the

worship required only the closing of the temple and the magnificent

structure might have been spared, on the other hand, had the temple

been accidentally destroyed, the worship might have been continued

in a temple rebuilt. No doubt it will always remain probable that

it was not the chance of war that here prevailed, but the flames of

the temple were rather the programme for the altered policy of the

Roman government with reference to Judaism.[185] More clearly even

than in the events at Jerusalem the same change is marked in the

closing--which ensued at the same time on the order of Vespasian--of

the central sanctuary of the Egyptian Jews, the temple of Onias, not

far from Memphis, in the Heliopolitan district, which for centuries

stood alongside of that of Jerusalem, somewhat as the translation by

the Alexandrian Seventy stood side by side with the Old Testament; it

too was divested of its votive gifts, and the worship of God in it was

forbidden.

 

In the further carrying out of the new order of things the high

priesthood and the Synhedrion of Jerusalem disappeared, and thereby

the Jews of the empire lost their outward supreme head and their

chief authority having jurisdiction hitherto generally in religious

questions. The annual tribute--previously at least tolerated--on the

part of every Jew, without distinction of dwelling-place, to the temple

did not certainly fall into abeyance, but was with bitter parody

transferred to the Capitoline Jupiter, and his representative on

earth, the Roman emperor. From the character of the Jewish institutions

the suppression of the central worship involved dissolution of the

community of Jerusalem. The city was not merely destroyed and burnt

down, but was left lying in ruins, like Carthage and Corinth once upon

a time; its territory, public as well as private land, became imperial

domain.[186] Such of the citizens of the populous town as had escaped

famine or the sword came under the hammer of the slave market. Amidst

the ruins of the destroyed town was pitched the camp of the legion,

which, with its Spanish and Thracian auxiliaries, was thenceforth to

do garrison duty in the Jewish land. The provincial troops hitherto

recruited in Palestine itself were transferred elsewhere. In Emmaus, in

the immediate neighbourhood of Jerusalem, a number of Roman veterans

were settled, but urban rights were not conferred on this place. On

the other hand, the old Sichem, the religious centre of the Samaritan

community, perhaps a Greek city even from the time of Alexander the

Great, was now reorganised in the forms of Hellenic polity under the

name Flavia Neapolis. The capital of the land, Caesarea, hitherto

a Greek urban community, obtained as “first Flavian colony” Roman

organisation and Latin as the language of business. These were essays

towards the Occidental municipalising of the Jewish land. Nevertheless

Judaea proper, though depopulated and impoverished, remained still

Jewish as before; the light in which the government looked upon

the land is shown by the thoroughly anomalous permanent military

occupation, which, as Judaea was not situated on the frontier of the

empire, can only have been destined to keep down the inhabitants.

 

[Sidenote: The end of the Herodians.]

 

The Herodians, too, did not long survive the destruction of Jerusalem.

King Agrippa II., the ruler of Caesarea Paneas and of Tiberias,

had rendered faithful service to the Romans in the war against his

countrymen, and had even scars, honourable at least in a military

sense, to show from it; besides, his sister Berenice, a Cleopatra on

a small scale, held the heart of the conqueror of Jerusalem captive

with the remnant of her much sought charms. So he remained personally

in possession of the dominion; but after his death, some thirty years

later, this last reminiscence of the Jewish state was merged in the

Roman province of Syria.

 

[Sidenote: Further treatment of the Jews.]

 

No hindrances were put in the way of the Jews exercising their

religious customs either in Palestine or elsewhere. Their religious

instruction itself, and the assemblies in connection with it of their

law-teachers and law-experts, were at least permitted in Palestine;

and there was no hindrance to these Rabbinical unions attempting to

put themselves in some measure in the room of the former Synhedrion of

Jerusalem, and to fix their doctrine and their laws in the groundwork

of the Talmud. Although individual partakers in the Jewish insurrection

who fled to Egypt and Cyrene produced troubles there, the bodies

of Jews outside of Palestine, so far as we see, were left in their

previous position. Against the Jew-hunt, which just about the time

of the destruction of Jerusalem was called forth in Antioch by the

circumstance that the Jews there had been publicly charged by one of

their renegade comrades in the faith with the intention of setting the

town on fire, the representative of the governor of Syria interfered

with energy, and did not allow what was proposed--that they should

compel the Jews to sacrifice to the gods of the land and to refrain

from keeping the Sabbath. Titus himself, when he came to Antioch, most

distinctly dismissed the leaders of the movement there with their

request for the ejection of the Jews, or at least the cancelling of

their privileges. People shrank from declaring war on the Jewish faith

as such, and from driving the far-branching Diaspora to extremities; it

was enough that Judaism was in its political representation deleted

from the commonwealth.

 

[Sidenote: The consequences of the catastrophe.]

 

The alteration in the policy pursued since Alexander’s time towards

Judaism amounted in the main to the withdrawing from this religious

society unity of leadership and external compactness, and to the

wresting out of the hands of its leaders a power which extended not

merely over the native land of the Jews, but over the bodies of Jews

generally within and beyond the Roman empire, and certainly in the

East was prejudicial to the unity of imperial government. The Lagids

as well as the Seleucids, and not less the Roman emperors of the

Julio-Claudian dynasty, had put up with this; but the immediate rule

of the Occidentals over Judaea had sharpened the contrast between

the imperial power and this power of the priests to such a degree,

that the catastrophe set in with inevitable necessity and brought its

consequences. From a political standpoint we may censure, doubtless,

the remorselessness of the conduct of the war--which, moreover,

is pretty much common to this war with all similar ones in Roman

history--but hardly the religious-political dissolution of the nation

ordained in consequence of it. If the axe was laid at the root of

institutions which had led, and could not but with a certain necessity

lead, to the formation of a party like that of the zealots, there was

but done what was right and necessary, however severely and unjustly

in the special case the individual might be affected by it. Vespasian,

who gave the decision, was a judicious and moderate ruler. The question

concerned was one not of faith but of power; the Jewish church-state,

as head of the Diaspora, was not compatible with the absoluteness

of the secular great-state. From the general rule of toleration the government did not even in this case depart; it waged war not against Judaism but against the high priest and the Synhedrion.