When the procession stopped at the Temple of Jupiter, Simon and the rebel chieftains were executed; the crowds cheered; sacrifices were consecrated. There died Jerusalem, mused Josephus: ‘Neither its antiquity, nor its deep wealth, nor its people spread over the whole habitable world nor yet the great glory of its religious rites, were sufficient to prevent its ruin.’
The Triumph was commemorated by the construction of the Arch of Titus, which still stands in Rome.* Jewish spoils paid for the Colosseum and the Temple of Peace, where Vespasian displayed the prizes of Jerusalem – except for the Law scrolls and the purple veils of the Holy of Holies that were placed in the imperial palace itself. The Triumph and remodelling of central Rome celebrated not just a new dynasty but a rededication of the empire itself and victory over Judaism. The tax paid by all Jews to the Temple was replaced by the Fiscus Judaicus, paid to the Roman state to fund the rebuilding of the Temple of Jupiter, a humiliation fiercely enforced.* Yet most Jews, surviving in Judaea and Galilee, and in the populous communities of the Mediterranean and Babylonia, lived as they had lived before, accepting Roman or Parthian rule.
The Jewish War was not quite over. The Masada Fortress held out for three years, under Eleazar the Galilean, as the Romans raised a ramp to storm it. In April 73, their leader addressed his men and their families about the realities of this darknew world: ‘Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein?’ Jerusalem was gone and now they faced slavery:
We long ago my generous friends resolved never to be servants to the Romans nor to any other than God Himself. We were the first that revolted against them; we are the last that fight against them and I cannot but esteem it as a favour that God has granted us that it is still in our power to die bravely and in a state of freedom, in a glorious manner, together with our dearest friends. Let our wives die before they are abused and our children before they have tasted slavery.
So the ‘husbands tenderly embraced their wives, and took their children into their arms, giving the longest parting kisses to them with tears in their eyes’. Each man killed his wife and children; ten men were chosen by lot to slay the rest until all 960 were dead.
To most Romans, the Masada suicide confirmed Jews as demented fanatics. Tacitus, though writing thirty years later, expressed the conventional view that the Jews were ‘sinister and revolting’ bigots, with bizarre superstitions including monotheism and circumcision, who despised Roman gods, ‘rejected patriotism’ and ‘have entrenched themselves by their very wickedness’. Yet Josephus collected the details of Masada from the handful of survivors who hid during the suicide and could not conceal his admiration for Jewish courage.
BERENICE: THE JEWISH CLEOPATRA
Josephus lived in Vespasian’s old house in Rome. Titus gave him some of the scrolls from the Temple, a pension and lands in Judaea, and commissioned his first book, The Jewish War. The emperor and Titus were not Josephus’ only source. ‘When you come to me,’ wrote his ‘dear friend’ King Herod Agrippa, ‘I’ll inform you of a great many things.’ But Josephus realized that ‘my privileged position exacted envy and brought danger’: he needed the imperial protection he received up to the reign of Domitian, who solicitously executed some of his enemies. Yet even as Josephus basked in Flavian favour in his last years – he died around ad 100 – he hoped the Temple would be rebuilt, and his pride in the Jewish contribution to civilization surged: ‘We’ve introduced the rest of the world to a very large number of beautiful ideas. What greater beauty than inviolable piety? What higher justice than obedience to the Laws?’
Berenice, the Herodian princess, stayed in Rome with Titus but she offended the Romans with her flashy diamonds, her royal airs and the stories of her incest with her brother. ‘She dwelt in the palace cohabiting with Titus. She expected to marry him and was already behaving in every respect as if she were his wife.’ It was said that Titus had the general Caecina murdered for flirting with her. Titus loved her but the Romans compared her to Antony’s femme fatale, Cleopatra – or worse, since the Jews were now despised and defeated. Titus had to send her away. When he succeeded his father in 79, she returned to Rome, now in her fifties, but such was the outcry that he again separated from the Jewish Cleopatra, aware that the Flavians were far from secure on the throne. Perhaps she rejoined her brother, almost the last of the Herodians.*
Titus’ reign was short. He died two years later with the words: ‘I have only done one thing wrong.’ The destruction of Jerusalem? The Jews believed his early death was God’s punishment.1 For forty years, a tense exhaustion reigned over blighted Jerusalem before Judaea again exploded in a final and disastrous spasm of rage.
DEATH OF THE JESUS DYNASTY:
THE FORGOTTEN CRUCIFIXION
Jerusalem was the headquarters of the Tenth Legion, whose camp was set up in the present-day Armenian Quarter around the three towers of Herod’s Citadel – the base of the last of them, the Hippicus, stands today. The Legion’s rooftiles and bricks, always emblazoned with its anti-Jewish emblem, the boar, have been found all over the city. Jerusalem was not totally deserted but had been settled with Syrian and Greek veterans, who traditionally hated the Jews. This barren moonscape of gigantic rockheaps must have been eerie. But Jews must have hoped that the Temple would be rebuilt as it had been once before.
Vespasian allowed the rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had escaped Jerusalem in a coffin, to teach the Law at Yavneh (Jamnia) on the Mediterranean, and the Jews were not formally banned from Jerusalem. Indeed many of the wealthier Jews had probably joined the Romans, as Josephus and Agrippa had done. Nonetheless, they were not allowed onto the Temple Mount. Instead, pilgrims bitterly mourned the Temple, praying next to the Tomb of Zechariah* in the Kidron Valley. Some hoped for the Apocalypse to restore God’s kingdom, but for ben Zakkai the vanished city assumed an immaterial mysticism. When he visited the ruins, his pupil cried, ‘Woe to us!’ ‘Be not grieved,’ replied the rabbi (according to the Talmud, compiled several centuries later). ‘We have another atonement. It is acts of loving-kindness.’ No one realized it at this time, but this was the beginning of modern Judaism – without the Temple.
The Jewish Christians, led by Simon son of Cleophas, Jesus’ half-brother or cousin, returned to Jerusalem where they started to honour the Upper Room, on today’s Mount Zion. Beneath the present building lies a synagogue, built probably with Herodian debris from the Temple. Yet the growing number of gentile Christians around the Mediterranean no longer revered the real Jerusalem. The defeat of the Jews separated them for ever from the mother-religion, proving the truth of Jesus’ prophecies and the succession of a new revelation. Jerusalem was just the wilderness of a failed faith. The Bookof Revelation replaced the Temple with Christ the Lamb. At the End of Days, golden, bejewelled Jerusalem would descend from heaven.
These sects had to be carefuclass="underline" the Romans were on guard against any signs of messianic kingship. Titus’ successor, his brother Domitian, maintained the anti-Jewish tax and persecuted the Christians, as a way of rallying support for his own faltering regime. On his assassination, the pacific, elderly Emperor Nerva relaxed the repression and the Jewish tax. Yet this was a false dawn. Nerva had no sons, so he chose his pre-eminent general as heir. Trajan, tall, athletic, stern, was the ideal emperor, perhaps the greatest since Augustus. But he saw himself as a conqueror of new lands and a restorer of old values – bad news for the Christians, and worse for the Jews. In 106 he ordered the crucifixion of Simon, the Overseer of the Christians in Jerusalem, because, like Jesus, he claimed descent from King David. There ended the Jesus dynasty.