Jews in Revolt

Jews are said to be noted for their resilience, resilience defined as the ability to successfully react to stress and maintain calm in the face of adversity. In the prologue to his Jews vs. Rome, Barry Strauss calls the survival of the Jews "one of history's great cases of resilience," and at his book's close, he notes that it has been "a story of resilience. … Ancient Jewry is one of history's great examples of how a people can lose on the battlefield and yet prevail."

Professor Strauss recounts three Jewish revolts against the all-powerful Roman Empire: the Great Revolt, also known as the Jewish War, which took place between 66 and 74 A.D.; the Diaspora Revolt, 116-17 A.D.; and the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132 to 136 A.D. Accounts of the last two revolts, alas, are thin—"the details, unfortunately," Strauss writes, "are murky"—owing to the want of archaeological evidence and literary sources. The Great Revolt is dominated by a single source, that of Josephus' The Jewish War. Josephus participated in the war and wrote his book—some 408 pages in its Penguin classics edition—in Rome, where he resided for roughly the last half of his life. (He was born in 37 A.D. and died sometime during the reign of the emperor Domitian.) Josephus did not so much favor the Romans as recognize and reconcile himself to their superior power. The Romans came to call him Flavius Josephus. As a Jew, Josephus came by his praenomen of Flavius through the offices of Vespasian, the Roman general whose rise to emperor he, Josephus, predicted.

Josephus' relation to Rome has long complicated his reputation, both in his lifetime among fellow Jews, many of who looked upon him as a turncoat, and in our day by anyone who reads his extraordinary work with an eye toward its point of view. As would anyone who writes about the Great Revolt, Strauss is deeply indebted to Josephus' The Jewish War. But it turns out to be a debt rather grudgingly paid. Strauss rarely mentions Josephus without appending a criticism to his citation. "Josephus is at pains," he writes, "to make the Jewish revolt seem like the work of a few radicals. It's one of the central themes of his book. The historical record suggests otherwise." Or, of the number of Jews killed in the town of Caesarea: "The figure is probably exaggerated, like most of Josephus's figures." Or: "Just what happened at Jerusalem is unclear, as the details of Josephus's account don't add up." And so on into the night.

Barry Strauss, like Josephus before him, has a complicated story to tell. The Jews never fought the Romans en masse. Many were zealous in their opposition to the Romans, others took up moderate positions, some even fought on the side of the Romans. If resilience is one aspect of Jewish life, so is a penchant for faction among themselves.

One is reminded of the old joke about the Jew, the sole survivor of a major shipwreck, who lands on an obscure island where he lives undiscovered for some 20 or so years. When one day the island is discovered, one of his rescuers asks the Jew about the various buildings he has built on the island. "This is my house," the Jew says. "This, next to it, is my workshop. The building across the way is my synagogue, and over there is my gymnasium. I use this building here as a warehouse. And there, just beyond the gymnasium, is the second synagogue." The rescuer asks, "A second synagogue? Why do you need a second synagogue?" "Oh," says the Jew, "I would never go into that one."

Josephus was made governor of Galilee during the Jewish Revolt. From there he sometimes fought off the Romans; more often he fought off the more zealous factions among his fellow Jews. In his fairly brief The Life of Flavius Josephus, Josephus recounts being under attack by both Romans and Jews, and saved by Vespasian and his son Titus, who brought him to Rome. He writes: "I had great care taken of me by Vespasian; for he gave me an apartment in his own house. … He also honored me with the privilege of a Roman citizen, and gave me an annual pension; and continued to respect me to the end of his life, without any abatement of his kindness to me … when Vespasian was dead, Titus, who succeeded him in the government, kept up the same respect for me which I had from his father. … Domitian, who succeeded, still augmented his respects to me."

In Rome Josephus did the writing for which he is known today: Antiquities of the Jews, The Jewish War, Against Apion, and more. The best known of these works, The Jewish War, is studded with rich anecdotes. Among them is a suicide pact rigged so that he, Josephus, is the sole survivor; an account of Jews, forced to flee, who swallow their gold coins and later redeem them after defecation; and, most horrifying of all, the Jewish woman, who, in utter despair, killed her infant son, "then roasted him and ate one half, concealing and saving up the rest."

As for the rivaling accounts of the war, Josephus has on his side that he was an actual participant; Strauss has the superior perspective that hindsight and the reliance on scholarship lend. "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" Josephus might have said to Strauss a la Baron Munchausen. "Better not to have been," Strauss might have replied, "for it is likely to have destroyed my objectivity." The Jewish War is literature and lively, Jews vs. Rome is scholarly and reliable.

Josephus' treatment by the Romans has long cast doubt on the truthfulness of The Jewish War. Josephus treats at some length his own adventures as governor of Galilee, opposed by various Jewish factions, everywhere favoring his own positions. He deals with Vespasian and Titus in the most gentle way, when it was Titus who in 70 A.D. was responsible for destroying the great Temple of Jerusalem, which, as Professor Strauss notes, Judea being "a Temple state," for the Jews "the Temple is everything." Yet Strauss concedes that even though "as the losing commander, as an apologist of his own career, and as an historian who was not shy about taking license with the facts … most of Josephus's story rings true."

The story, one of warring Jewish factions opposed by a great Roman superpower, is not easily told. For the most part it is a story without heroes. Unlike Strauss's earlier The War That Made the Roman Empire, with its brilliant portraiture of Octavian, Antony, and Cleopatra, the Jewish revolts provided no historical figures upon which he is able to lavish his talent for biographical portraiture. Herod, who built the great Temple in Jerusalem and who was appointed by the Romans as their governor of Judea, is treated by Strauss rather in passing. Pontius Pilate puts in a cameo appearance. Nor is there anything resembling a straight narrative line in these revolts. The sources are too scanty to provide one; the author too often has to fall back on informed speculation.

Interesting bits do arise. Strauss is excellent, for a notable example, on the mechanics of crucifixion, "the standard Roman punishment for rebels." He writes: "Depending on how the victim was affixed to the cross, he might have suffocated within minutes or suffered in agony for days. The sources make clear that the crucified could linger: they record cases of men talking from the cross, making legal contracts from the cross, and being cut down and spared after a bribe to the officer on guard. Some victims were displayed with special grotesqueness, to mock them, and some were crucified upside down. Some were tied to the cross by rope, while others were nailed to it." The Romans, known to cut out tongues, chop off hands, put entire towns (women and children included) to death, were not squeamish about violence. As Tacitus has a Scottish rebel remark of the Romans in victory, "They make a desert and call it peace."

Professor Strauss ends his book asking why the Jews rebelled so often. He cites several reasons, from their proud military tradition to their legacy of messianism. Ultimately, though, the Jews endured because the Jewish "nation's leaders, in this case its rabbis, determined that the Jewish people could survive by means of spiritual rather than material armor. It was a bold strategy, but a necessary one. And it worked. Despite many vicissitudes, despite the threats of persecution, dispersion, and assimilation, the Jewish people have survived for two thousand years since the Roman conquest of its national homeland. Jewish culture remains remarkably similar today to what it was in the Later Roman Empire."

Exhibit Number One, of course, is the beleaguered contemporary state of Israel. Barry Strauss's last words in Jews vs. Rome are: "Amid so many changes in history, some constants remain."

Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire
by Barry Strauss
Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $29.99

Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books).

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