It is for this programme that an adequate explanation is wanting. There is nothing really quite like it in Greek history. Not that religious persecution, or the suppression of an obnoxious cult, was an unheard-of undertaking. The establishment of the worship of Dionysus had encountered vigorous opposition in continental Greece. A probable tradition recounts the attempts at thorough repression with which several Greek communities, notably Thebes, met the intruder.[[138]] But this movement had as its object the preservation of an ancestral religion, not its destruction. To compel anyone to abjure his national customs, to forsake τὰ πάτρια, must have seemed monstrous to all people in whom the sense of kinship with the deity, and the belief in the god’s local jurisdiction, were as strong as they were among the Greeks.
Somewhat later, among the Romans, a successful attempt was made to extirpate the Druidic ritual in Cisalpine Gaul. As far as this was an effort to destroy root and branch an ancient and established form of worship, it presents many analogies to the project of Antiochus. But the persecution of the Druids was based on specific charges of immoral and anti-social practices associated with their ritual, especially that of human sacrifices. That may have been a pretext. The Druids may not after all have been guilty of these enormities. However, the pretext was at least advanced, and the exile of Druidic brotherhoods and the destruction of their sanctuaries were publicly justified only by that.[[139]]
In the case of the Jews no such assertions are to be discovered. Antiochus, instigated by renegade Jews, sets about a systematic obliteration of the distinctively Jewish ritual. The synagogue services were to be checked by the destruction of the Torah. Perhaps periodic reunions in the synagogue were forbidden altogether, since meetings of citizens were proverbially looked at askance in monarchies.[[140]] The temple was rededicated to the Olympian Zeus, and the ceremony of circumcision was made a capital offense. Observance of the Sabbath was construed as treason. No detail was overlooked.
This complete scheme is not to be explained by the existence of a strong animosity toward the Jews. There is, in the first place, none of the evidence that was met with in Egypt, that such animosity existed. And, secondly, animosity between racial groups expressed itself in bloody riots, not in a carefully prepared plan for extirpating a religion while sparing its professors. Nor can we find in the personal character of Antiochus a sufficient cause for the persecution. He undoubtedly exhibited the gusts of passion common enough among those who wield irresponsible power, but the sustained and bloody vindictiveness of such a programme is a very different thing.
It has been frequently suggested that his cherished policy was the thorough Hellenization of his empire, that among the Jews only was there a determined resistance, that upon learning that the basis of their resistance was a devoted attachment to their ancestral superstition, he determined to root out the latter. The difficulties with this view are, first, that opposition was not confined to the Jews, but was met with everywhere—a dull and voiceless opposition, which, however, unmistakably existed. Secondly, among the Jews a very large number, we are told, “were persuaded”; and it is highly likely that Antiochus came in direct contact wholly with the latter, or almost wholly, so that the situation in Judea cannot have impressed him as radically different from that of Syria or Babylonia.
But, above all, it is the conclusion that the obstacles to his policy would lead to persecution on his part, which is more than doubtful. No one could have known better than he did himself that ancestral religious customs are not to be eradicated by violence. The Egypt which was so nearly in his grasp might have taught him that, if nothing else could. There the indigenous religion had triumphed. He himself, upon his entry into the kingdom, had crowned himself more Aegyptico, “after the Egyptian fashion,”[[141]] that is, with full acknowledgment of the sovereignty of Ptah and Isis over their ancient demesnes.
We shall probably have to look to the Hellenizing Jews not only for the initiation, but for the systematic carrying out, of the policy of persecution. And, as has been suggested, it is one of the commonest phenomena of ancient life. There was scarcely a Greek city in which a defeated faction had not at some time summoned the public enemy into the city, and by their aid taken a cruel vengeance on their opponents. If the Hellenizing faction in Judea found its influence waning, its action was from the point of view of ancient times natural enough. It appealed to foreign aid and strove systematically to stamp out the institutions it opposed, just as at Athens the Athenian oligarchs, placed in power by Spartan arms, tried to maintain themselves by wholesale proscription and by systematically removing all the democratic institutions that had developed since Clearchus.[[142]]
It is likely too that the impelling motive was not solely the rancor which apostates feel for the faith or nation they have quitted. They saw themselves in the presence of a real danger. Among them was to be found most of the wealth of the community, and no doubt a great deal of the intellectual culture. Many of them were already in the third or fourth generation of Hellenistic Jews. The ancient ritual had for these men no personal associations whatever. In the various communes they enjoyed the position which wealth necessarily, and in those days especially, brought. That there was any virtue in poverty or privation in themselves had not yet been preached to the world, and would have seemed a wild paradox; and although the vanity of wealth without wisdom was a philosophic truism, ordinary wits would not always trust themselves to make the distinction.
When these men, who formed almost a hereditary nobility, and already cherished a superb aloofness from the mass, felt their influence and power challenged, perhaps saw themselves outvoted in the governing councils of the synagogues and communes, and the foundations of their petty glory sapped, they were roused to a counter-effort, of which the results have been indicated. The danger in which they found themselves came from the Hasidim, the group of brotherhoods that made a conscious opposition to Hellenism their bond of union. In Egypt the opposition had found its organs in the caste-like corporations of priests. In Judea the organs had to be created. And that they were successful, the words of I Maccabees testify. They contained the leaders of the nation; their position was already one of dominating influence.
It is unnecessary to detail the course of the Hasmonean revolt. Even the brilliant successes of Judas in the field, and the less splendid but equally solid triumphs of his brothers, would have had fewer political consequences than they had except for the chaos in the Seleucid succession. But of the permanent triumph of the movement there was never any doubt. If the revolt had ended with the death of Judas, the discomfiture of the Hellenists would have been complete. No Macedonian king would ever be tempted to provoke another revolt by a similar project. It could never be a part of a sane ruler’s policy to sacrifice valuable military material in order to gratify a local faction. And it must never be forgotten that the Greek rule of the Syrian kingdom was the domination of a military class. Every diminution of the army was a dead loss.