The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 2

by Theodor Mommsen

Titus against Jerusalem.Thus the insurgents had entirely free sway in Jerusalem from the summer of 66 till the spring of 70. What the combination of religious and national fanaticism, the noble desire not to survive the downfall of their fatherland, the consciousness of past crimes and of inevitable punishment, the wild promiscuous tumult of all noblest and all basest passions in these four years of terror brought upon the nation, had its horrors intensified by the fact that the foreigners were only onlookers in the matter, and all the evil was inflicted directly by Jews upon Jews. The moderate patriots were soon overpowered by the zealots with the help of the levy of the rude and fanatical inhabitants of the Idumaean villages (end of 68), and their leaders were slain. The zealots thenceforth ruled, and all the bonds of civil, religious, and moral order were dissolved. Freedom was granted to the slaves, the high priests were appointed by lot, the ritual laws were trodden under foot and scoffed at by those very fanatics whose stronghold was the temple, the captives in the prisons were put to death, and it was forbidden on pain of death to bury the slain. The different leaders fought with their separate bands against one another: John of Gischala with his band brought up from Galilee; Simon, son of Gioras from Gerasa, the leader of a band of patriots formed in the south, and at the same time of the Idumaeans in revolt against John; Eleazar, son of Simon, one of the champions against Cestius Gallus. The first maintained himself in the porch of the temple, the second in the city, the third in the Holy of Holies; and there were daily combats in the streets of the city between Jews and Jews. Concord came only through the common enemy; when the attack began, Eleazar’s little band placed itself under the orders of John, and although John in the temple and Simon in the city continued to play the part of masters, they, while quarrelling among themselves, fought shoulder to shoulder against the Romans.

Task of the assailants.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Christians.Nor did the destruction of the temple wholly fail in this its aim. There were not a few Jews and still more proselytes, particularly in the Diaspora, who adhered more to the Jewish moral law and to Jewish Monotheism than to the strictly national form of faith; the whole important sect of the Christians had inwardly broken off from Judaism and stood partly in open opposition to the Jewish ritual. For these the fall of Jerusalem was by no means the end of things, and within these extensive and influential circles the government obtained in some measure what it aimed at by breaking up the central seat of the Jewish worship. The separation of the Christian faith common to the Gentiles from the national Jewish, the victory of the adherents of Paul over those of Peter, was essentially promoted by the abolition of the Jewish central cultus.

Palestinian Jews.But among the Jews of Palestine, where the language spoken was not Hebrew indeed, but Aramaic, and among the portion of the Diaspora which clung firmly to Jerusalem, the breach between Judaism and the rest of the world was deepened by the destruction of the temple. The national-religious exclusiveness, which the government wished to obviate, was in this narrow circle rather strengthened by the violent attempt to break it down, and driven, in the first instance, to further desperate struggles.