CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 2
The Jews under Foreign Rule
1. From Cyrus to Vespasian
Cyrus, the founder of the persian empire (559–529 B.C.), and his successors were the most enlightened imperialists the ancient world had seen up to their day. They saw the wisdom of keeping their subject-nations contented. Instead of deporting them forcibly to distant regions in order to break their will or capacity to rebel, as the Assyrians and Babylonians had done, they allowed them to live in their homelands (unless they themselves preferred to live elsewhere). Instead of compelling them to worship the gods of the master-race, they encouraged them to practise their ancestral religion and even on occasion extended financial aid to this end. There is evidence for this policy in Egypt (which they conquered in 525 B.C.) and among the Greek settlements of Western Asia Minor as well as in their dealings with the exiles from Judaea whom they authorized to return to their native territory from which they had been uprooted by the Babylonians. There were two levels of administration of the province of Judaea under the Persians. The Persian king was represented by a governor, who might be a Jew himself (as Nehemiah was) or a non-Jew. The governor was responsible for safeguarding the imperial interests, like the maintenance of security and the collection of tribute. But the internal administration of Judaea was in the hands of the high priest—always a member of the family of Zadok. Judaea under the Persians comprised a limited area centred on Jerusalem; it was organized as a temple-state, and Jerusalem itself was given the status of a holy city.1 There were other temple-states similarly constituted within the Persian Empire, and they preserved this constitution when the Persian supremacy was superseded by that of the Greeks and Macedonians after the conquests of Alexander the Great (336–323 B.C.). When Alexander’s empire was broken up after his death, Judaea found itself subject first to the dynasty of the Ptolemies, ruling from Alexandria, and then (after 198 B.C.) to that of the Seleucids, ruling from Antioch in Syria. But Jerusalem and Judaea retained their sacral constitution, apart from intervals when attempts were made to abolish or modify it, until the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in A.D. 66.
The most notable attempt to abolish the sacral constitution of Jerusalem and Judaea was made by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (175–164 B.C.) who, largely for reasons of external security, tried to assimilate his Jewish subjects in culture and religion to the Hellenistic way of life followed throughout his dominions. Judaea lay on the frontier between his kingdom and Egypt, and this became a sensitive frontier after the Romans assumed the rôle of protectors of Egypt against Seleucid ambitions in 168 B.C. Antiochus’s policy was ill-advised and ended in failure. The Jews, under Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers, put up a resistance which led to their regaining religious freedom in 164 B.C. and, twenty-two years later (thanks largely to civil strife within the Seleucid kingdom), to the gaining of political independence. For nearly eighty years Judaea was ruled by the native Hasmonaean dynasty of priest-kings.
When Judaea fell under Roman control in 63 B.C., the Hasmonaean kingship was abolished but the sanctity of Jerusalem was preserved. For a time the Romans preferred to control Judaea indirectly through Jewish rulers—in particular, through Herod the Great (37–4 B.C.), who violated its temple constitution more ruthlessly than did any Gentile overlord, with the exception of Antiochus IV. But when, in A.D. 6, Judaea was made a Roman province, it was given the same kind of two-tier administration as it had enjoyed under Persian and Graeco-Macedonian rule. The Roman Emperor appointed a provincial governor, called a prefect or procurator, who was responsible for maintaining peace and order and for ensuring the efficient collection of the “tribute to Caesar”. But the internal affairs of the Jews in Judaea were administered by the high priest together with a council of seventy elders (the Sanhedrin) over which he presided ex officio. The high priest and his colleagues naturally recognized that supreme power was wielded by Rome, and made it their business to maintain reasonably good relations with the governor. This was no easy task at times, because of the inexperience or insensitivity of some of the governors. Yet, as a last resort, the high priest and his colleagues had channels of communication with Rome, so that they could go over the governor’s head and lodge a complaint which might lead to his being severely reprimanded or even dismissed from office. One of the best examples of this interplay between the two seats of authority in the province is the action and reaction between the chief priests and Pontius Pilate in the gospel records of the trial of Jesus.
Despite the fact that their internal interests were in the hands of their own religious establishment, many of the Jews of Judaea found Roman rule irksome. For one thing, they had to endure double taxation: tribute to Caesar had to be paid over and above their temple dues (which included considerably more than the tithe, or ten per cent. income tax).2 The chief priests and leading members of the Sanhedrin were wealthy, to a point where they had insufficient appreciation of the economic stress under which their poorer fellow-countrymen lived; they knew, moreover, that the continued enjoyment of their wealth depended on the maintenance of the existing order. Their consequent modus vivendi with the occupying power did nothing to endear them to the common people.
Some of the provinces of the empire assimilated Roman civilization so thoroughly that their inhabitants came to think of themselves as Romans, and their descendants to this day speak a language which has developed from “vulgar Latin”.3 The Jews of Judaea were perhaps the least assimilable of all Rome’s subject-nations. This was due to their unique and exclusive religion, the practice of which was guaranteed to them by imperial decrees, as it had been safeguarded by earlier imperial overlords. Under these earlier Gentile rulers, it had never been suggested that the Jews’ payment of tribute to them was in some way offensive to the God whom they worshipped. In so far as this payment of tribute to foreigners was given a religious significance, it tended to be interpreted as a token of Yahweh’s displeasure with his people: if he allowed foreigners to rule over them, the payment of tribute to those foreigners was an act of submission to divine judgment. But when Judaea became a Roman province in A.D. 6 and its population incurred liability to pay tribute direct to the emperor, a new doctrine was voiced—that for the people of Israel, living in the holy land, to acknowledge a pagan ruler by paying him tribute was to be guilty of high treason against the God of their fathers, Israel’s true king. The principal teacher of this new doctrine was Judas the Galilaean, who at that time led a rising against the Roman government of the new province.4 The rising was put down, but the teaching lived on, and became a dominant feature of the policy of the Zealots. The party of the Zealots, which made no distinction between what we should call politics and religion, became active from about A.D. 44 onwards, and although it did not initiate the revolt against Rome of A.D. 66, it soon took over the leadership of the ensuing war.5
The insurgents continued throughout the war to hope against hope. They had taken up the struggle in vindication of the crown rights of Israel’s God: he could not let them down. They relied upon an ancient oracle—perhaps a combination of oracles—which they understood to be due for fulfilment just then, according to which world dominion was to pass from the Gentiles into Jewish hands.6 An initial victory over much superior Roman forces imbued them with the confidence that the successes of Judas Maccabaeus (who, with his associates, had been similarly activated by zeal for God) would be repeated in their experience. The internecine fighting throughout the empire, and in Rome itself, which marked the “year of the four emperors” (A.D. 69).7 made them think that Gentile imperialism, embodied in the Roman state, was undergoing its death-throes. But in the event it was the Jewish commonwealth, in the form which it had taken since the return from the Babylonian exile six centuries before, that collapsed. The temple in Jerusalem was burned, the city was sacked and laid in ruins, its sacred status was abolished, the chief-priestly establishment was no more, the sacrificial order was at an end. The annual half-shekel which adult Jews throughout the world had hitherto paid for the maintenance of the temple, under the protection of the Roman authorities, had henceforth to be paid into a special fund—the fiscus Iudaicus—for the support of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill in Rome.
But even in Judaea the situation of the Jews might have been worse. Permission was obtained for the institution of a new Sanhedrin of scholars for the codification of religious law, and indeed Jewish religious life flourished all the better for the disappearance of the temple and its ritual.
2. The Jews of the dispersion
Then as now, however, there were many more Jews living outside Judaea than within its frontiers, and (apart from the business of the fiscus Iudaicus after A.D. 70) those Jews of the dispersion suffered no disabilities in relation to Roman law as a result of the war. There were anti-Jewish riots and pogroms in a number of cities in Syria and Egypt, but that was another matter. In fact, a succession of edicts issued by the highest authorities had secured to Jews throughout the Roman Empire quite exceptional privileges, and these were not rescinded.
The history of the Jewish dispersion can be traced back to the beginning of the sixth century B.C. At that time we have ample evidence of Jewish settlements in Egypt8 and a hint of others in Asia Minor as far west as Sardis, capital of the kingdom of Lydia (the Sepharad of Obadiah 20). A large number of the exiles in Babylonia settled in their new home and did not avail themselves of permission to return to Judaea. Under Persian rule they were to be found in all the territories of the Persian Empire, even on the shore of the Caspian Sea;9 and Alexander’s conquests enabled them to spread even farther afield.10 There was a Jewish population in Alexandria from its foundation in 331 B.C.; by the first century A.D. Jews formed a majority in two out of the city’s five wards. About 300 B.C. the first Ptolemy settled a body of Jews in Cyrenaica to help ensure the loyalty of that province.11 A century later, the Seleucid king Antiochus III, with a similar purpose, moved many Jews into Phrygia and Lydia, and after he wrested Judaea and Coelesyria from the Ptolemies he encouraged Jewish settlement in Antioch, his capital, and other cities of his kingdom.12 In Rome itself there was a Jewish colony even before the incorporation of Judaea into the empire in 63 B.C., and it was greatly augmented in the years that followed.13 It is estimated that by the beginning of the first century A.D. there were between 40,000 and 60,000 Jews in Rome—about as many, probably, as in Jerusalem itself.14 The discovery and examination of six Jewish catacombs in Rome have greatly increased our knowledge of Jewish life in the city. The Jews of Rome appear to have been concentrated on the right bank of the Tiber (Trastevere), where most of the eleven synagogues attested by inscriptions were probably situated.15
The extent of the Jewish dispersion in the apostolic age is indicated in Luke’s catalogue of the “Jews, devout men” who were present in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost in A.D. 30, from the “Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia” in the east to the “visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes” in the west (Acts 2:5–11).16