The Story of the Jews Page 14

  But Krokodopolis was not Alexandria, which was one of the great cities of Jewish history: nearly 200,000 Jews, a third of the population (though 4 per cent of all Egyptians).11 While not formally restricted, most of them were concentrated in distinctive Jewish quarters east of the quays, especially in the Delta district ‘on the harbourless shore’ as the hostile grammarian Apion would put it, but not that far from the royal palace. There were synagogues all over the districts, and dedicatory inscriptions to high patrons including the Ptolemies themselves survive, suggesting the kind of bonding with local power that Jewish communities throughout diaspora history would express.

  None, however, compared with the Great Synagogue, legendary even after the destruction of the community in the second century CE, not least to the sages of the Talmud like Rabbi Judah ben Ilai who insisted that ‘he who has not seen it has not seen glory’. In his somewhat fantastical account, the Alexandria synagogue boasted rows of double columns, and seventy golden chairs (in honour of the Septuagint) for each of the elders of the synagogue, studded with pearls, plus seating sections for each of the Jewish crafts and trades of the metropolis: goldsmiths, weavers, coppersmiths . . . The congregation and the building were so vast that the chants of the reader could get lost from the bimah – the platform for the reading of the Torah – so the chazzan would stand on the dais and wave a large white silk flag to alert the congregation to chant the amen when each of the portions of the reading concluded.

  As at Elephantine, a sense of the society of Jews – with one foot in their Jewish politeuma, the other in the wider world – is vividly registered in surviving papyri: in the Zenon archive of a tax official of the Ptolemies travelling to Palestine in the middle of the third century BCE; and even more richly in the Herakleopolis papyri from the Fayyum region. Typical is the case, made to the archon or ruler of the local community, by one Dorotheus, that out of the goodness of his heart (and in observance of a Torah commandment) he had taken his sick brother-in-law, Seuthes, into his house and looked after him ‘spending much of my means’ throughout his illness. Not only that, but Dorotheus had sprung his niece, Philippa, from debtor’s prison and brought her back home to be reunited with her ill father. A real mensch? No, says Dorotheus, just doing what the Torah requires. In return, before the invalid brother-in-law died, Philippa had been formally adopted as a member of the Dorotheus household. There she had stayed for four years. The domestic idyll had been interrupted by the sudden appearance of Philippa’s mother, Iona, who took the young woman off to the house of her aunt, thus depriving the said benefactor of a helpful member of the household. To argue his claim that the girl should now be restored to him, Dorotheus insisted that Philippa would return as cared-for and caring orphan to her guardian, rather than a useful housegirl for a master (heaven forfend). To the archon, Dorotheus invoked his faithful observance of the precept of Leviticus 25:35 that ‘if thy brother is waxen poor, he shall come not as a stranger into thy house’, although there was nothing in the Torah providing for the obligatory return of a niece. The archon, perhaps because this was a classic case of convergence between Jewish and Greek principles of guardianship, seems to have sided with Dorotheus.12

  Further down the Jewish pecking order, the record is more patchy. Ahibi the merchant is known only from a papyrus scroll written to his partner Jonathan recording shipments of barley and wheat, Tasa the daughter of Hananiah (neither Hellenised in their names) only from the record of her accusation against the Greek who had raped her, and a betrothed couple from widely separated diaspora communities – ‘the young man of Temnos’ (on the western Anatolian coast) and ‘the maiden of Kos’ – from the marriage contract that bound them together. The feel of the place and its citizens has to be pieced together from potsherds, inscribed dedications on synagogues, and especially inscriptions from Jewish tombs. It was at this time that underground tombs were being turned from common charnels into chambers with niches cut for specific families and where some individuals were buried laid out, their heads resting on stone or earth cushions. There are such inscriptions as early as the third century BCE, although the most eloquent date from Roman Alexandria.

  Arsinoe, the wayfarer: Stand by and weep for her . . . for her lot was hard and terrible. For I was deprived of my mother when I was just a little girl and when the flower of youth made me ready for a bridegroom. My father assented and Phoebus and Fate led me to the end of life when my first child was born.

  Rachelis: Weep for Rachelis, chaste friend to all; about thirty; but do not weep vainly for me.

  For beauteous Horna, shed a tear; three of us are here, husband, daughter Eirene and I.

  This is classical funerary style, and when tombs are decorated, they are carved with architectural motifs – especially columns – indististinguishable from their Greek neighbours. Hebrew inscriptions, quotations from the Bible which would become formulaic in Jewish cemeteries, are entirely missing. Even in death, then, there is little sense that the Ioudaioi were in exile. Their connection to Jerusalem and Judaea was constant; the norms that made them Jews, perfectly clear, but not at odds with their homes in Hellenised Egypt. Yet they were not so deluded as to imagine they were universally loved by the host cultures amid which they lived. If they knew the third-century BCE history of the priest-grammarian Manetho, they would know that they were associated not just with the cast-out lepers but with the Hyksos foreign kings who bore a reputation for harsh exploitation of native Egyptians. There was always the possibility that for all their settled existence, ugliness might be round the corner just as it had been for the Elephantine Judaeans before them.

  This we know from the cautionary tale of the narrow escape from death by war elephants. Related in the so-called Third Book of the Maccabees, which itself was too apocryphal to make it into the Apocrypha (but is in the even less canonical Pseudepigrapha), the story was well-enough known among Egyptian Jews to be the basis for a local Alexandrian festival of deliverance organised in exactly the same way that Purim became the festival of a thwarted plot to massacre the Jewish population of Persia, and Hanukkah the festival of liberation from Seleucid tyranny. Akin to those parallel, contemporary histories, the Egyptian story features a crazed Jew-hater, the threat of mass killing, and more fabulously than in Susa or Jerusalem, a not-a-moment-too-soon intervention of angels.

  3 Maccabees and Josephus disagree as to precisely which Ptolemy was involved and thus when the episode took place, but a convincing case has been made by the historian Joseph Modrzejewski for the earlier date of Ptolemy IV Philopator in the third century BCE. Campaigning, and briefly victorious against the Seleucids in Palestine, the king presumes to violate the sanctity of the Temple by forcing a royal entry. The result, of course, is that on the very threshold of his trespass he is paralysed, unable to move a limb. Consumed with hatred for the Jews who humiliated him, once back in Egypt Ptolemy orders the imprisonment in Alexandria’s hippodrome of all the Jews. There (in a sinister and quite astounding anticipation of what would be visited on the Jews of Paris in the bicycling stadium of the Vélodrome d’Hiver in 1942) they are exposed to brutal heat and toil for forty days.

  This, however, is not enough to slake the ruler’s thirst for revenge, so, inspired by a vicious persecutor (whose name, Harmon, is suspiciously close to the villain of the Purim story, Haman), he orders five hundred war elephants to be maddened with incense and strong liquor, and set on the captive Jews. Farce briefly intervenes. The confused king forgets the plan only to remember it again the following day. On with the massacre! Summon the staggering pachyderms! Crowds converge on the hippodrome to watch the fun. Trumpeting jumbos, out of their skulls on booze, dopey with smoke, tromp through the streets, followed by chuckling soldiery. At the last minute (as is their wont), two angels show up, flap their wings around a bit, and hey presto, the elephants go into reverse gear, swiftly wiping the smiles off grunts and plebs who get mashed underfoot in the melee. Duly impressed, the sadistic king repents and restores the Jews to life,
limb and location.

  It’s a fabulous ending, but the writer of 3 Maccabees knew his story was a cautionary alert. Settled as they were, there might still come a time when the distant trumpeting of incensed heavyweights could again be caught on the breeze and the ease of their lives would disappear. That, after all, was what had happened in Jerusalem.

  II. The Quarrel of the Priests

  Approaching the city from the west, you would have smelled Jerusalem before you saw it: a pall of woodsmoke hanging over the roofs and walls, capturing the aroma of charring flesh. Fires at the Temple altar had to be kept stoked day and night, such was the demand for animal sacrifices offered to YHWH every morning and every afternoon as the Torah required.13 The perpetual roasting was called the tamid, Hebrew for constant, but there was a Greek word too for such ritual cremation of whole animals, and that word was holocaust. This is something else the two societies had in common. Among all the cultures from Egypt to Mesopotamia and Persia, only Greeks and Jews made fire sacrifices of whole animals. So thousands of goats, sheep, cattle and oxen were driven into the city from the surrounding hill pastures and farms. For the new moon alone, a ceremonious Temple sacrifice of two young bullocks, one ram, seven lambs and a kid (as well as an offering of grain meal, oil and wine) was required by Numbers 28:11–15. Not all the sacrifices offered in the Temple were whole ‘burnt offerings’ (olim) – some were ‘slaughter sacrifices’ (korban) in which the carcass was divided into portions for consumption while rendered fat and collected blood were separated as the portion devoted to the Almighty and burned away in dedicated vessels. But around the turn of the second century BCE, whole animal roastings dominated the offerings. While they were proceeding, Levites would chant psalms, but as yet there seem to have been no prayers.

  The ritual of the tamid was elaborate and painstaking. At first sight, the shedding of so much animal blood seems jarringly at odds with the fierce ban on eating it, but the two sets of practices were connected. Animal sacrifice was so common because of the abhorrence of eating bloody flesh.14 It may well be, as David Biale suggests, that the combination of bloody animal sacrifice and bloodless diet was meant to establish a counter-culture against the more sanguine dietary habits of the peoples around them. The Bible insists that in the blood of a creature was its nefesh – its vital essence, sometimes translated as ‘soul’. So do not imagine a Temple courtyard saturated with sanguine. After being killed, most often by a priest, the blood would be fastidiously collected in a basin. What was not needed for the offering was drained away through sluices, leaving the sacrificial area clean. Then the animal would be flayed and the carcass fed to the fire, where it would remain until entirely consumed, bones and the occasional goat beard sometimes remaining. The much-prized skins usually went to the high priest who might bestow them on other priests; but there could be much contention over those hides.

  On pilgrim festivals, the tempo of sacrifice increased, and with them the volume of spectators and participants thronging to Jerusalem for the solemnities and festivities. Physically, Greek Jerusalem around 200 BCE seems to have been growing fast, in population if not physical size. The figure given by Hecataeus of Abdera of 120,000 is entirely fantastic, but the people might have numbered in their tens of thousands, and the size of the city had expanded to around eight square kilometres. Certainly, the increased demand for food had prospered the surrounding countryside that had taken generations to recover from Babylonian destruction. The rolling Shephelah to the south-west, with abundant rainfall in winter and spring, was producing wheat again while the drier hillsides were dotted with olive groves, vines and pasture. To feed the multitudes of incoming pilgrims, the Judaean farms selling their produce on stalls near the walls were supplemented by vendors from further afield: Tyrians who brought fish; merchants from the coastal cities of Askelon, Ptolemais and Gaza who sold ceramics from the Aegean, increasingly in demand; northerners selling Phoenician glass.

  Though there were already synagogues in and around the city, as much hospitality centres as places of reading and prayer, ultimately Jerusalem was the Temple, with its relentless conveyor belt of sacralised animal slaughter, the calendar of festive pilgrimage and atonement holy days, the Sabbath pause (an innovation in the ancient world) and the regular readings of the Torah that Ezra had inaugurated two and a half centuries earlier. Kingless, but rich with the literary ghosts of David as the purported author of the Psalms, and Solomon as the writer of his sensual Song and the apocryphal ‘Wisdoms’, the charisma of authority was concentrated in the imposing figure of the high priest, around whom the rhythm, the social meaning of the city, revolved.

  With the royal dynasty broken, it mattered – for a little longer anyway – that the high priest was a lineal descendant of Zadok who had been at David’s side and who had crowned Solomon. And it also mattered that Zadok was himself descended from the elder of Aaron’s two sons, Eleazar – hence that latter name so often recurring in the high priesthood. Indeed, it was even possible to stretch the lineage all the way to Levi, the son of Jacob and Leah. So the high priest’s public appearance in the Temple, and the rare, exclusive entries into the Holy of Holies, were consciously majestic and dense with symbolism. (The appearance of the miraculously clad high priest was the closest Jews got to the apparition of divine exaltation in human form.)

  And yet, although a genealogy of succession has survived – with the names Simon and Onias recurring – almost nothing is known about individual high priests, nor even the details of their duties and ceremonies outside of biblical prescription (and not much of that). The epitome of rabbinical tradition remains the nebulous figure known as ‘Simon the Just’, although characteristically there is no agreement beyond placing his priesthood somewhere in the third century BCE, only that he exemplified the union of personal piety, Judaic justice and ceremonious authority. (Sensibly, there is no entry for him, for instance, in the otherwise exhaustive Encyclopedia of Early Judaism.)

  We do know, however, that the high priest was not alone in his grandeur, wealth and power. He was at the centre of a dynastic establishment and a priestly aristocracy, all of whom came with extended families, estates, officials and hangers-on. Josephus also mentions a gerousia, a council of elders in Jerusalem, similar to the one that existed in Alexandria and which might negotiate with the Greek overlords on the crucial and perennial matters of taxes, and subsidies for the upkeep of the Temple (another inheritance from the Persian period). Together, this Jerusalem–Judaean elite, increasingly managerial and worldly as much as spiritual, constituted a ruling establishment responsible for sustaining the distinctive social culture that Judaism was fast becoming.

  Amid all this guesswork one startling fact leaps from the record (at least according to Josephus) and which speaks volumes about the pragmatic reality of the Temple aristocracy. Sometime towards the late third century BCE the High Priest Onias, the latest in the Zadokite line and son of Simon the Just (and, according to Josephus, endowed with itchy palms where money was concerned), married off his daughter to an aggressive man on the make from across the Jordan. This Tobiah became the godfather of a powerful clan on whom Josephus spends many pages, and their dramatic story might well have been relegated to another historical fable had not letters shown up in the Zenon archive from one ‘Tubias’, a commander of a fort on the east side of the Jordan. The letters were written to the Ptolemid treasury, and were obviously from a tax-collecting heavy, pretty much identical with Josephus’ armed notable, and matrimonial prospect. Originally an Ammonite, thus not of the Judaean ethnos, Tobiah’s wealth and power had made him Jewish enough to marry into the highest rank of the priestly aristocracy. The way that he had made his pile was to morph military function into tax farming on behalf of the Ptolemid government, increasingly pressed for funds to finance the endless wars with the Seleucids. Tobiah was delivering money up front to the finance minister Apollonius and recovering it – plus hefty bonuses – from the local population. In other words he was the kind of fam
iliar figure who always thrives at times of constant war: a combination of local warlord, robber baron and government contractor, rich enough and Jewish enough to be a catch for the high priest’s daughter.

  Josephus makes a great deal of Tobiah and his son, Joseph, who in the way of the second generation polishes the rough edges off his father’s fortune and rises to be the Indispensable Man, negotiating tricky arbitrations between the Ptolemies and Seleucids. But it was Tobiah’s grandson, Hyrcanus, who, by transforming what the Zenon letters make clear was originally a local fortress into an opulent limestone palace east of the Jordan, left the most spectacular architectural evidence of what the life of this Hellenised clan might have been like at the turn of the second century BCE.

  Qasr el-abd (or Iraq al-Amir as it is now known), set in its fertile Jordanian valley, is one of the most seductive remains of the Hellenistic world anywhere. Graceful columns appear on the facade of its two storeys; more columns line the interior of the spacious courtyard; lions and panthers prowl on the limestone facade. One of the sculptors endearingly allowed his creative imagination to get the better of his zoological knowledge as he has a fully maned lion suckling a brood of cubs on the palace roof. Originally, the palace was encircled by an ornamental lake in which its graceful lines would have been mirrored. But that lake, as well as the platform on which the palace was raised, preserved in its elegance the lines of its original function as strong man’s bastion. In all likelihood it was also the administrative centre of a Tobiad micro-state, with its full complement of scribes, officials and tax collectors. When the High Priest Jason (who had deposed his brother, the incumbent Onias III, by offering to the new Seleucid king Antiochus IV the treasure and tribute needed for yet another campaign against the Ptolemies) was himself replaced by an even more fawning ingratiator, Menelaus, it was to Hyrcanus’ palace in ‘Ammonitis’ that Jason fled. There he gnashed his teeth and bided his time, before mobilising a private army that, when the moment was opportune, would march on Jerusalem.