The Story of the Jews Read online

  It could well be that Hyrcanus’ grandiose palace, removed as it was from the Judaean centre, is typical of nothing except the dynastic pretensions and ruthless power of the Tobiads, although as a rival power centre to Jerusalem it played its part in igniting the great upheaval that was about to take place in Judaea. At the very least it speaks of a culture in which a Jewish identity (for the Tobiads certainly identified with that) and Torah observance coexisted alongside Greek taste and culture, without the two being mutually exclusive. Likewise, the Hasmoneans who would recreate the first Jewish state since the Babylonian conquest, and who every Hebrew school student is brought up to believe were the antithesis of the Hellenes, turn out to be their imitators.

  Hellenistic and Jewish culture were coming together in subtle, material ways, mainly in the look of towns and the dwellings within them. Recent excavations in and around Jerusalem have uncovered houses and villas of surprising size and splendour, boasting spacious rooms with fresco-decorated walls. Vines curl, lilies unfurl, pomegranates press against the calyx. Amid the rubble and ruin, blood-red ceramicware made in the Greek city of Megara, richly decorated with flowers and flirtations, has been found; also, tall Rhodian jars and amphorae, and pearly, slender-necked Phoenician glassware. In and around Jerusalem, the local blond limestone was being used for the first time for drinking vessels, not least because stone was deemed impervious to ritual impurity (unlike ceramic). Local pottery also flourished and developed sweetly decorative forms, the most common being freehand floral painting on shallow dishes and bowls. With larger rooms, chandeliers and candlesticks became bigger, holding more and more candles on crimson-coloured disc or saucer forms.

  This was chapter one in the long history of Jewish shopping. On the Mediterranean coast, the new demand for Aegean goods made busy port centres of older towns like Gaza, Dor and Ashkelon, and created one major new port city in coastal Galilee: Ptolemais (later, Acco). Further inland at a crossroads between the Jezreel Valley and Lower Galilee, beside the hilltop site of an ancient Canaanite fortress town, Beit She’an became the Greek polis of Scythopolis, named for the Scythian mercenaries from the region between the Black and Caspian seas, who settled there, far from Persia. In many of these urban centres there were brick houses built on stone foundations, sometimes decorated with plaster, and colonnaded avenues boasting the three institutions that defined Greek civic life: the gymnasium, the school-cum-academy known as the ephebeum and the theatre.

  Those places were still on the periphery of Jewish life, and it seems unlikely that Jews migrated there yet in any significant numbers, although Sepphoris, near Nazareth (which was to become the great urban, mixed-culture centre of Lower Galilee), had a Jewish as well as Greek population from the beginning. Increasingly, the quasi-Hellenised, Greek-speaking Jews of heartland Judaea felt the magnetic pull of such places. For many the cultural flirtation with Hellenism would have met its sternest test at the door of the gymnasium, since exercises were performed in the nude and the circumcised penis prompted cackles of derision from the Greeks whose pride in the lengthy, tapered prepuce can be seen on innumerable vases and amphorae. Especially baffling and the subject of much sniggering was the notion that Jews deliberately cut away their foreskin to deprive themselves of sexual pleasure. Strabo the geographer even believed that Jews practised clitoral excision for the same misguided reason. And some of Philo’s fierce defence of the practice as intrinsic to leading the moral life (not to mention matters of cleanliness) only confirmed the pagan world in its bewildered contempt for Jewish self-denial. As far as they were concerned, showing off your finely elongated prepuce was so de rigueur among the very flower of Greek athletes that some took to wearing the kynodesme, or ‘dog leash’, a thin leather thong that would loop round your back, winding under the scrotum to be tied in a fetching little bow just where you wanted it.

  For Jews for whom acceptance as a full citizen of the polis was more important than the covenant, and aware that graduation from the ephebeum academy would require nude gymnastics, partial foreskin restoration known as epispasm was available. Since circumcision in antiquity seems to have involved less than the removal of the entire prepuce, the remaining vestige could be stretched by traction, the skin mollified with honey or lotion from the pressed thaspia plant, a treatment routinely used for Gentiles who thought themselves short-changed in the prepuce department, and who suffered from inadvertent exposure of the glans with consequent outbreaks of embarrassing tittering in the gym.15 When, as was inevitable, those who had gone through epispasm suffered stretchers’ remorse, the rabbis (who took all this with the utmost seriousness, for the covenant was involved) debated whether complete re-circumcision was mandatory for a return to Judaism or whether it was too dangerous an operation. But from then till now, along with repeated Talmudic insistence that the prepuce was intrinsically revolting, the Mishnaic requirement for the brit milah ceremony has involved complete and irreversible foreskin removal. Nothing done by halves.16

  And yet it was a high priest who proposed establishing a gymnasium in Jerusalem, making Jews (in the shocked description of 2 Maccabees) ‘wear Greek hats’ (hats being a very big deal to Jews), and who was pleased to send a delegation of Hellenised Jews to the cinquennial games at Tyre. This daringly renegade high priest was the usurper Jason, who in 172 BCE had displaced his brother, the incumbent Onias III, by bribing his way to the office. The gymnasium was but one part of a larger scheme launched by Jason to transform Jerusalem into a Greek polis. Once its people had been through the ephebeum that was also to be created, they would qualify as citizens and their city would henceforth be known as ‘Jerusalem in Antioch’. The quasi-apostasy of a high priest amounted to a repudiation of the founding act of Israelite difference: the covenant made between Abraham and YHWH, dramatically renewed when the excited Zipporah flung the bloody foreskin of her son at her husband Moses and proclaimed, ‘Now thou art a bridegroom to me.’ The Seleucid king, Josephus writes, wanted the Jews to be like everyone else, but the desire sprang in the first place from the wholly Jewish high priest, Jason.

  The force of this development is especially shocking because nothing about the Seleucids had suggested that they were bent on coercive Hellenisation as a matter of policy any more than the Ptolemies. When the cavalry of Antiochus III (conspicuous for the top-to-toe armour enveloping not just its troops but also their mounts) had smashed the Ptolemid army of Scopas at the battle of Banion on the foothills of Mount Hermon in 200 BCE, one of the earliest actions of the victorious king was to issue edicts promising to be, if anything, an even more solicitous protector of the ‘ancestral laws and practices’ of the Jews, banning foreigners from the Temple precincts and the import of forbidden meats and animals, including (perhaps redundantly) leopards and hares from Jerusalem. Temple sacrifices were to be maintained, damages from the war made good, and the priests permanently exempted from taxes, the rest of Jerusalemites for three years.

  Antiochus III’s decrees were everything the old Jerusalem Temple establishment could have asked for and in keeping with three centuries of the relationship between imperial overlords and the Jews, but they did not survive the campaigns or the life of the king himself. Tempted into overreach, Antiochus III rashly tried to exploit his advantage by taking the war to Egypt itself where he was routed by the coming power of the Romans at the battle of Magnesia. It was a turning point. The Romans exacted a ferocious indemnity and took young Antiochus (later the IV) hostage in Rome where (according to Polybius) he established a precocious reputation for peevish eccentricity. But the strain on the military chest for the Seleucid north was such that they may have regretted the easy-going hands-off largesse that Antiochus III had promised Jerusalem.

  Under his successor, Seleucus IV, that shortage of funds became so acute that the king could no longer afford to keep his hands off the much-publicised gold and silver of the Temple. A raid by the finance minister Heliodorus may or may not have happened, but it became the subject of yet another miracle st
ory when the would-be plunderer is stopped in his tracks by – naturally – the angelic rescuers who got around fast in the world of Judeo-Hellenic fantasy literature.

  It was this very specific, entirely pragmatic fiscal-military predicament of an insecure mini-empire, not any sort of preordained clash of religious cultures, that triggered the events leading to the great Hasmonean rebellion. It certainly became a war of Jewish resistance against cultural and even ethnic annihilation, and the Books of the Maccabees, committed to depicting the Hasmoneans as guardians of the Torah, present it that way.

  The truth is more squalidly complicated and thus more historically credible. Sensing what the Seleucid governments wanted, rival factions of the Temple elite competed in monetised ingratiation in return for official favour for their party in the high-priesthood wars. Both contenders for the office after the accession of Antiochus IV Epiphanes – Jason and his rival in bribery, Menelaus – were Hellenisers, each outbidding the other in offering monetary sweeteners to the Seleucids. Three years into his high priesthood, Jason was the loser. Since his successor Menelaus had Onias (the original high priest and Jason’s brother) assassinated, Jason lost no time in getting himself across the Jordan to Hyrcanus’ palace fort.

  A little giddy at finding himself the high priest to end all high priests (literally), Menelaus authorised the establishment of the akra citadel for foreign troops, which had the effect of turning Jerusalem into an occupied city (notwithstanding that it was supposed to be a free polis). The building of the citadel required the demolition of a swathe of property in an increasingly crowded town.17 And demolition politics in Jerusalem has always been a recipe for trouble. The wrecking crews moved in, triggering violent riots. So the war between Jews and Greeks did not start with the Maccabee revolt in Modi’in but an urban insurrection against the citadel (albeit armed with just sticks, knives and stones) and Menelaus’ brother, the deputy high priest Lysimachus, and his officers. According to 1 Maccabees, the crowds also threw ashes at their enemies. Supposing any of the ‘dust’ or ‘ash’ landed on its targets, it is unlikely to have caused the oppressors much discomfort, but the point of the gesture was symbolic: the residue of the sacrifices flung on those who had outlawed them.

  However he heard about the riot, Jason, sitting in Hyrcanus’ big-cat palace across the Jordan, knew this was a precious political opportunity. Now he could pose as the defender of Jewish tradition. Believing his own propaganda, and giving off waves of unmerited righteousness, Jason mustered the spear carriers.

  His timing was determined by a report that Antiochus IV was dead. The Seleucid had marched south to mix it up as usual with the Ptolemies, had been thwarted by the Romans but had survived – indeed, had come to some sort of agreement with the victors.18 Jason, meanwhile, believed this to be his moment. Leading a small army he had raised with the help of Hyrcanus, he crossed the Jordan, attacked Jerusalem and slaughtered not just the foreign troops and mercenaries defending the city for the Seleucid king, but thousands of Jews who he decided had been accomplices of the Greeks.

  But in fact Antiochus IV was very much alive. Released from his Egyptian predicament by a treaty with the Romans, he turned apoplectic at Jason’s coup. Thwarted in one military theatre, he was not about to have Seleucid power humiliated in another. So the king turned monster, and the jokes that he was not, as represented on his coins, epiphanes (God-manifest), but epimanes (lunatic), suddenly became serious. It was, moreover, madness with a method, or at least a precedent. Jason – and the enthusiastic reception he had received from many quarters in Jerusalem – had put Judaea out of bounds of civilised consideration and made it liable to be treated as ‘captive of the sword’, no longer bound by the agreements Antiochus III had made, but delivered to the absolute power of the conqueror for him to deal to its people, holy places, customs and property whatever he wished.

  And what he wished was grim: a three-day butchery which according to the Books of the Maccabees took 40,000 lives, including women and children, and an equal number enslaved who were shipped off to be sold on the Phoenician slave markets for sums that would ease the Seleucid treasury problem. The author of 1 Maccabees adds, with sinister poetic indirection, that the trauma threatened the biological survival of the Jews, since ‘virgins and young men were made feeble and the beauty of women was changed’.19

  Then came the cultural annihilation, famous from the Books of the Maccabees: the ban on all the rituals that made Judaeans Jews: Torah reading, circumcision, ritual purification, Sabbath observance. Instead of abstaining from pork, Jews were forced to eat it. By robbing the Temple of all its vessels and ritual furnishings – the golden altar, the shewbread table and its array of loaves and meal offerings, the menorah candlestick with its deep meaning of the blossoming of light, and the curtain veil that defined the Holy of Holies – Antiochus not only made it impossible for any sort of sacrifices or the cereal and bread offerings to be made, but for the Temple to exist at all as the defining focus of Judaism. What replaced them – the statuary, the parodic sacrifice of pigs at a new altar, the Dionysiac cults, the harlots, the ivy-processions to Bacchus – were a footnote to this comprehensive eradication. Just as would be the case when the Roman armies finally put an end to the Jewish insurrection, the Temple had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. When the troops of Apollonius, the general whom Antiochus had sent on a follow-up expedition of retribution, ran through the streets of Jerusalem, killing all in their way on the Sabbath, it served notice that henceforth the Jews were the helpless prisoners of a terror state.

  Back in his palatial fortress Hyrcanus took the hint. Not waiting for the fate to be visited on him, the last of the Tobiads fell on his sword, observed by the limestone panthers. Deprived of his shelter, Jason – who, by the lights of the writer of 2 Maccabees, had initiated this chain of catastrophe – now became a houseless fugitive, running ‘from city to city, pursued before all men as the hated forsaker of the law’, fleeing first into Egypt and then further to the land of the Lacedemonians where he died, fittingly, in Greek exile. ‘He that had cast out many unburied had none to mourn for him nor any solemn funeral at all nor sepulchre with his fathers.’20

  III. Maccabiad

  When everything else had been consumed in the Babylonian annihilation, a single perpetuated flame of the Temple’s sacrificial fire was carried away into exile by the priesthood. The flame was preserved in a secret pit, but when its guardian, Nehemiah, came to recover it for the restoration of Jerusalem, the pit had filled with ‘thick water’ and the fire was extinct. When the time came for a burnt offering, Nehemiah told the baffled priests to sprinkle that water on the wooden kindling. Bemused, they did as they were told, at which moment a ray of supernal sun appeared and transubstantiated the saturation into self-igniting fuel. The ancestral sacred fire had been restored.21

  Or so the author of the Second Book of the Maccabees, his literary imagination itself a leaping flame, wants his Jewish readers to believe. Though they are radically dissimilar, the Maccabees 1 and 2 together constitute the liberty-epic of the Jews, in their way every bit as stupendous, fantasy-filled and thrilling as the foundation story of the Mosaic exodus.22 The miracle of the oil for the rededicated Temple lamp, sufficient for one day yet burning for eight, is not among those wonders recorded by either book. That legend, understood by all modern Jews to be the central meaning of Hanukkah, is a purely rabbinic invention, added at least three centuries later. But the Maccabiad in both its versions – especially in the second book – is packed with marvels as well as history: a mélange of factual chronicle and fabulous invention, of exactly the Greek flavour the Maccabees were supposed to be repudiating.

  Both books were written late in the second century BCE as propaganda histories on behalf of the Hasmonean-Judaic kingdom which had been established forty years earlier amid the fraying remnant of Seleucid power. The epic story of the patriarch Mattathias (significantly of priestly descent) and his five sons who led the revolt against the Ant
iochus persecution, was meant to legitimise the claims of the Hasmonean dynasty (neither Zadokite nor Davidian) as simultaneously both kings and high priests, a shockingly unprecedented innovation. Tellingly, neither book professes any concern about the violation of a separation of roles established as far back as Moses and Aaron. And the ‘Asideans’ – sometimes rendered in Hebrew, a little misleadingly, as Hasidim, or the Pious Ones – were among the most militant of the Hasmoneans’ rebel allies, though there is no indication yet that they thought of themselves as a purer-than-pure vanguard of Torah orthodoxy, much less as the founding generation of Pharisees. On their guard against accusations of usurping the priesthood (the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus would be pelted with citron fruit by a Jerusalem mob when he tried to lead the celebration of Tabernacles in the Temple), the Hasmoneans needed to present themselves as the makers of divinely wrought miracles, simultaneously military and religious, the appointed guardians of Torah Judaism against Hellenistic contaminations, even when the true story was a lot more ambiguous. For the first time, too, Jewish power presumed to amend Torah commandments when they put its side at a disadvantage. After the defenceless population of a Judaean village was put to the sword on a Sabbath, Judas Maccabeus, ‘the Hammerer’, resolved that, if necessary, they could and would fight on the day of rest, a decision vindicated by a turning of the tide. There is every sign that, just like the ego-giddy emperors of the pagan world, the Hasmoneans came to believe their own sense of divine appointment. The official festival they invented – Hanukkah – enshrined them as the cleansers and reconsecrators of the defiled Temple.