From Yahweh to Zion Page 13
Ultimately, since eternity is granted only to the people as a race, it is as if the Jews were united by a collective, ethnic, genetic soul. Thus it is said that a Jew’s soul is the Jewish people. Or should this collective soul be named Yahweh? Maurice Samuel writes in You Gentiles (1924): “The feeling in the Jew, even in the free-thinking Jew like myself, is that to be one with his people is to be thereby admitted to the power of enjoying the infinite. I might say, of ourselves: ‘We and God grew up together.’”98 Likewise, Harry Waton writes: “The Jews should realize that Jehovah no longer dwells in heaven, but he dwells in us right here on earth.”99 This is reminiscent of the anthropological truth of religion as set forth by Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1841), according to which God is the objectified human essence: “The consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man.”100 Feuerbach was concerning himself with Christianity and its universal God, but his insight can also be applied to Judaism and its supremacist God. The profound truth of Judaism is that Yahweh is objectified Jewishness.
The Jewish people is haunted by its past, totally absorbed in it. That is the basis of its incomparable resistance to dissolution. It is inhabited by a unique destiny, and each Jew carries within himself a portion of that destiny. From an Osirian or spiritual point of view, the explanation for this peculiarity is the denial of the survival of the individual soul. The Jewish people’s collective character displays a form of monomania resembling the folkloric vision of dead men who haunt this world, stuck in their past earthly life, because, refusing the possibility of an afterlife, they do not even know that they have passed through death.
And yet, what appears horribly missing from Yahwism is at the same time its source of strength. For the individual has only a few decades to accomplish his destiny, while a whole people has centuries, even millennia. Thus can Jeremiah reassure the exiles of Babylon that in seven generations they will return to Jerusalem. Seven generations in the history of a people is not unlike seven years in the life of a man. While the goy awaits his hour on a scale of a century, the chosen people see much further. This explains the peculiar development of Jewish thought called “apocalyptic eschatology,” compared to which the hope of an individual future life is referred to as “minor eschatology.” The transfiguration that, in Greek culture, refers to the fate of the individual after his death, becomes in the Jewish apocalyptic literature of the intertestamental period (between the second century BCE and the second century CE) applied to the whole Jewish people, symbolized by the heavenly Jerusalem.
Many modern Jewish thinkers have identified this feature of Jewish religion as the source of its incomparable strength. For Moses Hess (Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question, 1862), the father of modern Jewish nationalism, “Jewish religion is, above all, Jewish patriotism.” “Nothing is more foreign to the spirit of Judaism than the idea of the salvation of the individual which, according to the modern conception, is the corner-stone of religion.” The essence of Judaism is “the vivid belief in the continuity of the spirit in human history.” This brilliant idea, “which is one of the fairest blossoms of Judaism,” is not, according to Hess, derived from a denial of individual immortality. On the contrary, it “has, in the course of ages, shrunk to the belief in the atomistic immortality of the individual soul; and thus, torn from its roots and trunk, has withered and decayed.”101
On this point Hess is mistaken, but only in part, for it is probably true that an exclusively individual conception of immortality tends to weaken the group spirit, and that before the great universalist religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam), the notion of individual immortality was not completely separated from the idea of a spiritual attachment of man to his clan (a clan soul). From that point of view, Christianity’s strictly individual notion of the soul (a new soul deposited by God in each new body) can be viewed as a cognitive limit: it sheds no light on the ancestral depths of the psyche.
The emphasis on the individual eternal soul (eternal even in hell) is also unconducive to a holistic vision of human destiny. Socialists of religious inclination, such as Jean Jaurès, have pointed out this weakness. In his view, there can be no purely individual salvation, because each man’s soul is linked to all other souls.102 This dialectic of individual versus collective soul is well encapsulated by Jim Casy in John Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. Casy, a disillusioned preacher, finds a new faith in humanity through social activism. He takes comfort in the idea that, “Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.”103 This narrowness of the Western concept of the soul, which may be the ultimate source of Western individualism, is best perceived in contrast with Buddhist philosophy, which asserts the impermanence and interconnectedness of all individual souls.
Chapter 4
THE LAST HERO
“Next, taking him to a very high mountain, the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’ Then Jesus replied, ‘Away with you, Satan!’”
Matthew 4:8–10
Jews, Greeks, and Romans
In 63 BCE, the general Pompeius annexed Syria to the Roman Empire. He took advantage of a rivalry between the two sons of the Hasmonean king John Hyrcan I to integrate Judea, Samaria, and Galilee into the province of Syria. Hyrcan II was maintained at the head of a reduced territory and downgraded from king to ethnarch, while his pro-Roman counselor, an Idumean (Edomite) by the name of Antipater, was accorded special powers. After the fall of Pompeius, Hyrcan II and Antipater pledged allegiance to Caesar. In 47, Antipater was made governor of all Judea.
Thus began the “century of Herod,” from the name of Antipater’s son who took the title of king of Judea in 37. Herod the Great, as he would be called, reigned for 40 years as a “friend”—that is, client—of Rome. He equipped the country with roads, ports, bridges, aqueducts, racetracks, and amphitheaters. But his biggest project was dedicated to the national religion: the construction of a gigantic temple, completed in 64 CE under his great-grandson and destroyed soon after by Titus’s army in 70. After Herod’s death in 4 CE, his sons Antipas and Aristobulus reigned in Galilee and Samaria, while the Romans placed Judea under the rule of a Roman governor, the position occupied by Pontius Pilate from 26 to 37.
Herod’s reign was a period of relative peace and prosperity. Roman authority and cultural influence in Judea were tolerated, as were Roman offerings to the Temple, aimed at making Yahweh favorable to the emperor. But at Herod’s death, the fundamentalist movement, which had been kept in check, regained momentum. Riots broke out whenever Roman paganism intruded into the Holy City, as when Pilate introduced military banners with the emperor’s effigies (Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XVIII.3).
Members of the priestly class (high priests and Sadducees), who already formed the core of the Hasmonean party and remained a powerful hereditary class under the Herodians, used their capacity to mobilize crowds in their power struggles. Many were ready to conspire for the restoration of a true theocracy independent from Rome. Under their leadership, the Sadducee Eleazar, son of the high priest who defied Roman power by opposing the daily sacrifices offered in the Temple in the name and at the expense of the emperor, launched an armed rebellion in 66. The war ended in 70 when Roman legions under the command of Titus besieged, plundered, and destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple, and then other strongholds of the insurgents. The last, Masada, fell in 73.
When the rebellion broke out against Rome, the Samaritans remained loyal to the Romans and provided support. Under the Hasmoneans, they had resisted circumcision and conversion to the Jerusalem-centered cult. After Herod’s death, open hostilities broke out again between Judeans and Samaritans. Galilean Jews who had to cross Samaria on their way to Jerusalem were in hostile territory, and many skirmishes resulted. However, Galilee itself was far from completely submissive to religious centralism: in the middle of the first
century CE, Jerusalemites still referred to it as “Galilee of the nations” (Matthew 4:15). Hellenistic cults flourished in the Galilean cities of Sepphoris and Magdala, where Jews were a minority.
The progressive degradation of the relationship between Rome and Jerusalem followed a parallel course in the rest of the empire. Under the Hasmoneans and until the end of Herod the Great’s reign, the Diaspora Jews were faithful allies of the Romans, and treated as such. In Alexandria as in Judea, Jews who had supported Caesar against the Greeks were rewarded with increased privileges. The same was true in all the Greek eastern cities that fell under Roman control. Jews enjoyed freedom of cult, judicial autonomy, discharge from any obligation on the Sabbath, exemption from military service, low taxation, and exemption from compulsory emperor worship (a mere civil formality as a token of loyalty). Moreover, they were allowed to collect funds and send them to the Jerusalem Temple bureaucracy.104
This situation inevitably fostered resentment from the Greeks who enjoyed none of these privileges, though they were recognized as Roman citizens. Many governors of Greek cities preferred facing penalties rather than implementing the imperial measures in favor of Jews. The famous lawyer Cicero gives us a glimpse of these tensions in his plea Pro Flaco (59 CE). His client, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, governor of Asia, had prevented the Jewish communities under his jurisdiction from sending their annual contributions to Jerusalem. These contributions had been seized in several cities, to the satisfaction of non-Jewish residents. Cicero defended Flaccus’s measure as economically wise.
In Alexandria, where the Jews composed up to one-third of the population, the Jews’ preferential treatment caused much unrest. Historian Michael Grant writes: “The Greeks nursed many long-standing grudges against the huge local Jewish community—religious, racial, economic and social alike. But what they objected to most of all was that the Jews collaborated so willingly with the Roman authorities. For the Greeks, disillusioned after half a century of Roman rule, had now produced a party of extreme anti-Roman nationalists. Being anti-Roman, they were strongly anti-Jewish as well—influenced still further in this direction by the native Egyptians, who were known to exceed all other peoples in the hatred they felt for the Jews.”105 Following anti-Jewish riots in 38, Jews and Greeks from Alexandria each sent a delegation to Rome to settle their differences. They were briefly received by Caligula, then by his successor Claudius. The Jewish delegation was headed by Philo, who gives his account in Legatio ad Gaium. Isidoros, representing the Alexandrian Greeks, stated about the Jews in front of the emperor Claudius: “I accuse them of trying to stir up the entire world.” Claudius was much better disposed toward Jews than Caligula, who had challenged Jewish separatism by ordering that his statue be erected in Jerusalem’s Temple, but had died before his order could be executed. For having insinuated that Claudius’s court was filled with Jews, Isidoros was condemned to death.106
Nevertheless, the edict issued by Claudius after the arbitration hearing concluded that, if Jews continued to sow dissent and “to agitate for more privileges than they formerly possessed, […] I will by all means take vengeance on them as fomenters of what is a general plague infecting the whole world.” This edict was followed by another addressed to all the Jewish communities of the empire, asking them not to “behave with contempt towards the gods of other peoples.”107 Finally, after more outbreaks of violence between Greeks and Jews, the Romans turned against the Jews, and, from 115 to 117, the Greeks themselves joined with their Roman conquerors in the violent repression that stamped out the Jewish community of Alexandria, of which no more is heard.
Jesus, Rome, and Jerusalem
For obvious reasons, the aforementioned context is crucial for understanding the birth of the “Jesus movement” in Palestine from the year 30, and its development in Syria and Egypt after 70. If we are to believe the Gospels, Jesus was Galilean like most if not all of his early disciples, and it was in Galilee and neighboring Syrian towns that his reputation first spread. For that reason alone, his reception in Jerusalem was predictable. He was neither a Judean Jew nor an orthodox Jew, and was probably not even perceived as an ethnic Jew; he was a marginal Jew, to quote John Meier’s recent three-volume biography.108 Jesus was a former disciple of John the Baptist, whose movement was active in Samaria and Transjordania. Jesus’s harsh criticism of the Temple cult must also be considered as akin to the Samaritans’ politico-religious worldview. In the Gospel of John, the use of the term oi Ioudaioi (71 times) to designate Jesus’s enemies is generally regarded as meaning “Judeans.”109 By contrast, the same author puts Jesus in friendly contact with the Samaritans, although, normally, “Jews, of course, do not associate with Samaritans” (John 4:9). When Jesus talks to a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, she mentions the bone of contention between Samaritans and Judeans: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, though you say that Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.” In response, Jesus announces reconciliation: “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. […] But the hour is coming—indeed is already here—when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (4:20–23). Hearing this, the Samaritans hail him as “the Savior of the world” (4:42). On the other hand, the Jerusalem authorities condemn him in these terms: “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and possessed by a devil?” (8:48). In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus challenges the Jerusalemites’ ethnic and religious chauvinism with his parable of the “good Samaritan” who acted more morally than a priest and a Levite (Luke 10:29–37). In brief, Jesus was not a Samaritan, but he was certainly reaching out to the Samaritans, and deeply critical of the Judeans’ hostility to them. In that sense, he was already a peacemaker.
What can be said about Jesus’s attitude toward the Romans? For two centuries, mainstream historians have depicted the tragic story of Jesus as an episode in the struggle between Jews and Romans. But their critical exegesis of the Gospels focused on the Jewishness of Jesus and on the responsibility of the Romans for his execution cannot change the fact that the four canonical Gospel writers present the Jews (Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and Judeans in general) rather than the Romans as Jesus’s mortal enemies. The synoptic account is unambiguous. During the great Easter festival at Jerusalem, “the chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by some trick and have him put to death,” but they decided “it must not be during the festivities, or there will be a disturbance among the people” (Mark 14:1–2). They corrupted one of his followers, Judas Iscariot, who told them where to find him, and they had him arrested in the middle of the night by “a number of men armed with swords and clubs” (14:43). Then, “all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes assembled” (14:53) in order to find against him, by false testimonies, a chief accuser to report to the Romans, for they had no legal right to execute him themselves. Under the pretext that he had claimed to be “Messiah,” they delivered him, chained, to the Roman authorities, as a seditious would-be “king of the Jews.” Pontius Pilate found no basis in this accusation; although not known for his leniency, he was reluctant to condemn Jesus, “for he realized it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over” (Mark 15:10). When Pilate addressed “the crowd,” proposing to release him, it was “the chief priests” (members of the powerful priestly families) who “incited the crowd to demand that he should release Barabbas for them instead” (15:11).
So even though it is Pilate who, “after having Jesus scourged, handed him over to be crucified” (15:15), the Gospel narrative clearly defines the range of responsibilities. The Jewish elite wanted Jesus dead but, having no legal right to execute him, they incited the crowed against him and compelled Pilate to convict him. This justifies the shortcut used by Paul when he writes that the Jews “put the Lord Jesus to death” (1 Thessalonians 2:15), or when Peter speaks to the Sanhedrin of “Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified”
(Acts 4:10), or said to the Jews gathered in Jerusalem, “this man […] you took and had crucified and killed by men outside the Law” (2:23).
This New Testament narrative has been challenged by modern historical criticism. The evangelists, we are told, were eager to please Rome, and therefore portrayed their Christ as innocent of the crimes for which he was crucified, and blamed the Jews for having turned the Romans against him. For the same reason, these modern critics allege, the evangelists also cleared Pilate of the miscarriage of justice by inventing the scene in which he proposes to release Jesus and then washes his hands. According to this interpretation, the evangelists, and Paul even more so, founded Christian anti-Semitism on a historical lie. In Who Killed Jesus? for example, John Dominic Crossan writes for the purpose of “exposing the roots of anti-Semitism in the Gospel story of the death of Jesus.”110
The thesis is not entirely specious. It is undeniable that the Gospel narrative exonerates Jesus of all sedition against Rome, and in so doing also exonerates Pilate, perhaps excessively, from any hostility toward Jesus. (An apocryphal tradition expands on Matthew 27:19 to give Pilate the wife “Saint Procula” and claims that Pilate himself converted.)