3. What became of the Chief Actors.—By the events of the war Herod Agrippa had lost his kingdom and his reputation, but he had contrived to save his fortune, and that kept for him the friends he cared about. In Rome he was very much appreciated. He and his money and his charming sister Berenice were all made very welcome at the court of the Emperor Titus. Josephus was very often one of the party. He, in his retirement, took to literature, and almost managed to make that disreputable. He wrote the ‘Wars of the Jews’ and the ‘Antiquities of the Jews,’ and his own most instructive autobiography. Allthese works are very valuable contributions to history—are, in fact, the chief, and almost only, records extant of these events; but each one of his books shows proofs of the authorship plainly enough to make it a trifle untrustworthy. In compliment to his Roman patrons Josephus took the surname of Flavius. He lived in the full sunshine of imperial favour, and managed to find three women in succession to marry him. We may conclude that they were not Jewesses.
4. What became of the Country and the People.—Palestine was parcelled out into lots; parts of the land were given as loot to the Roman soldiers, and parts were sold to the highest bidders. Many of the people were slaughtered outright; many were reserved to be killed more artistically in gladiatorial shows, or in combat with wild beasts. Some of them were carried off into slavery, and some remained as slaves on the soil. The slave markets of the world were glutted, and Jewish captives became a drug in the marts. As citizens of a separate state the Jews ceased to exist. They had no longer a national centre. Long before the destruction of Jerusalem the dispersion of the nation had begun, but now it was complete, and, so to speak, official. There had been Jews in Alexandria from the time of the Ptolemies, and in Rome from the days of Pompey; they were to be found at this date in every place important enough to be remembered, throughout the wide Roman dominions. There were numbers of Jews in Antioch, in Greece, in Italy, on the north coasts of Africa, and in the sunny islands of the Mediterranean. But each and all of these dispersed and separated Jews had hithertoturned in loyal thought to Jerusalem, and a self-imposed tax from ‘him that was near and from him that was far off’ had been regularly forwarded to Jerusalem every year towards the support of the Temple. This very tax was now used as a means to crush the nationality out of the people. Titus decreed that a like sum should henceforward be contributed by every adult Jew in his dominions towards the support of the temple of Jupiter.
5. Salvage.—To put up tamely with preventable evils is only less weak than to fret unceasingly over unpreventable ones. The Jews, at this crisis in their history, fell into neither error. They realised the wreck, and looked bravely round to see what could be rescued. Their country was gone, their nationality was threatened, their religion was in danger. Their ‘Law’ remained to them. They made a raft of that, and saved Judaism.
6. Jochanan ben Saccai: the Schools.—After the fall of Jerusalem, some members of the now houseless Sanhedrin asked, and gained, permission of Titus to establish themselves with their scrolls at Jamnia, a village on the sea-coast, not far from the port of Jaffa. Jochanan ben Saccai was president of the Sanhedrin at the time, and he at once called his disciples together and set up a school. Soon such schools became general, but the one in Jamnia was the first and the most famous, and was known as the Vineyard. A good name, and prophetic, as it turned out; for a store of life-giving wine that vineyard came to yield. Their Law, in very little time, took the place of the Temple in the hearts of the people.It became the new Jewish stronghold, and by-and-by the Rabbis garrisoned it. It was a wise movement, and Jochanan was just the character to head it. He had sense as well as sentiment, and he was as practical as he was patriotic. ‘Fear God even as ye fear man,’ was the very last bit of counsel which Jochanan gave to his disciples. He was old then, and ill unto death, and some of those who listened criticised the words. They did not seem enough for the occasion. So much is expected of a last utterance. ‘What!’ said the disciples doubtingly, ‘fear God only as we fear His creatures?’ ‘Even so,’ came the answer, in weak, thrilling tones. ‘You fear to do wrong in the presence of man; you are always in the presence of God: therefore fear Him as you fear your neighbours.’
7. An Unforeseen Result of the War: Jewish Christians.—There was one wretched and long-lasting consequence of the war with Rome, which grew naturally out of the circumstances, but which cannot be laid directly to the charge of Rome. Thirty years had passed since the death of Jesus and the conversion of the zealous apostle Paul. The little following had become a sect, not very large, not very important, nor as yet very pronounced in their opinions. The members of the sect were known as Jewish Christians, and were perhaps at this time quite as much of the one as of the other. The war with Rome made the division between Jews and Christians sharp and final. The struggle on the side of the Jews had been a fight for life, for national existence. So impassioned were they, and so much in earnest, that even the helpof the Samaritans and of the Idumeans, for the first time in their history, had been accepted by the Jews. In the great and pressing need for united action all differences seemed small, and to be overlooked in face of the fact that their country was in mortal danger. The one unforgivable sin in the eyes of the Judeans was that any Jew, for any reason whatever, should coldly stand aloof. There was a peace party among the Jews; a small minority who, as we have seen, honestly and sadly believed in the impossibility of victory, and who counselled conciliation on the principle of saving what could be saved. This party would have let the country go—provided their religion was left to them intact. They, even, were not too popular. But the Jewish Christians were different from these. They hoped for the success of the Roman arms, and it was in the name of religion that they refused to help their countrymen. They professed to see the fulfilment of prophecy in the destruction of Jerusalem. They declined to be on the other side to the prophets. They believed the Temple was decreed to fall, and they would not fight to avert its fate. All this they urged quite earnestly and quite religiously in the light of their new and latest interpretation of the Scriptures. At any other time their opinions would have provoked only a discussion in the schools; at this crisis of national history it provoked national resentment. From the point of view of patriotic Jews, these others, Jews by race and by kinship, Jews who refused on religious grounds to strike a blow for Judea, were not only apostates, but traitors. The precepts of Jesus, andthe practice of these his earliest followers, came by degrees to be regarded as cause and effect. The whole movement grew hateful to the Jews, socially and religiously and politically hateful. Hate begets hate, and deepens division. The small sect of Jewish Christians grew gradually less and less Jewish, and more and more Christian. The distinct position they had taken up in the war gave them a certain standing, and was another cause of their growth in numbers and in importance. The rift which had been so tiny at first between the old teaching and the new widened and deepened, and new causes for enmity forbade it to close as the years rolled into the centuries.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE REVOLT UNDER HADRIAN.
1. Conquered Jews in the West.—The first few years after the fall of Jerusalem, by contrast with what had gone before, were not, strange as it may seem, an altogether unhappy time for the Jews in Palestine. The worst had come, and the worst proved hardly so terrible as the waiting for it. The Romans were stern masters, but not vindictive ones. So long as the Jews accepted the new conditions, these were not cruelly enforced, nor were any of the private religious arrangements of the dispossessed people interfered with. The slaves, in many cases, bought their liberty. Their schools supplied an interest to the conquered Jews, and a link between them; and dispersed as they were, and despised to some extent asthey were, the Jews did not become degraded. The existence of their Sanhedrin with its dignified literary labourers, chosen from their own ranks, kept up their sense of self-respect. Deep was the loyalty felt towards the president of the Sanhedrin. He became in some sort an uncrowned king of this fallen people. They called him their [a]נָשִׂיא] ‘prince’; and, without one inch of territory, a very wide and a very real dominion this spiritual potentate grew to have over the hearts and minds of his brethren. The internal government of the different Jewish communities in the Roman Empire varied. In Alexandria a head and chief, whom the Greeks called ethnarch, presided over a council of seventy elders. In Rome, each of the many synagogues had its own separate administration and its own separate name. Almost every place where Jews congregated had its own little council, a sort of miniature Sanhedrin, which looked after local Jewish matters. But all the various communities of the Western world, widely separated as they were, had one thing in common: they all acknowledged as supreme the authority of the [a]נָשִׂיא] or president for the time being of the Sanhedrin in Palestine. He came to be called the patriarch, and his head-quarters were first at Jamnia, then at Sepphoris, and afterwards at Tiberias.
2. Contemporary Jews in the East.—The exiles and captives in Babylonia and Mesopotamia had led a quiet life for centuries. They, like their brethren, were a captive race, but the Parthian kings, like the Persian kings, were milder masters than the Romans, and perhaps the Babylonian Jews themselves weremore patient than the Palestinian Jews. It was, at any rate, an easier thing to be subject in exile than to be subject on native soil. The scattered communities settled between the Tigris and Euphrates had gradually established schools and seats of learning in the Babylonian country. Besides the heads of these schools ([a]רֵישֵׁי כַלֵי]), there was a political head or chief whom the Eastern Jews invested with a good deal of general authority, and whom they called [a]רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא], Head or Prince of the Captivity.
3. Under Trajan.—The quiet time for the Jews ended in the reign of Trajan, who was Emperor of Rome from 98 to 117. He made a campaign against Parthia, and this roused all the Jewish subjects of Parthia to revolt, partly in help of their Parthian masters, and partly, perhaps, in dread of Rome and of the fate of their Western brethren. Trajan conquered Parthia in 114, but his death ended the Jewish fear of Roman rule in the East, for Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, gave up this latest conquest.