The flight or enslavement of a million Jews so accelerated their spread through the Mediterranean that their scholars came to date the Diaspora from the destruction of Herod’s Temple. We have seen that this Dispersion had begun six centuries before in the Babylonian Captivity, and had been renewed in the settling of Alexandria. Since fertility was commanded and infanticide sternly forbidden by Jewish piety and law, the expansion of the Jews was due to biological as well as economic causes; Hebrews still played a very minor role in the commerce of the world. Fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem, Strabo, with anti-Semitic exaggeration, reported that “it is hard to find a single place on the habitable earth that has not admitted this tribe of men, and is not possessed by it.”61 Philo, twenty years before the Dispersion, described “the continents . . . full of Jewish settlements, and likewise the . . . islands, and nearly all Babylonia.”62 By A.D. 70 there were thousands of Jews in Seleucia on the Tigris, and in other Parthian cities; they were numerous in Arabia, and crossed thence into Ethiopia; they abounded in Syria and Phoenicia; they had large colonies in Tarsus, Antioch, Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna; they were only less numerous in Delos, Corinth, Athens, Philippi, Patrae, Thessalonica. In the west there were Jewish communities in Carthage, Syracuse, Puteoli, Capua, Pompeii, Rome, even in Horace’s native Venusia. All in all we may reckon 7,000,000 Jews in the Empire—some seven per cent of the population, twice their proportion in the United States of America today.63
Their number, dress, diet, circumcision, poverty, ambition, prosperity, exclusiveness, intelligence, aversion to images, and observation of an inconvenient Sabbath aroused an anti-Semitism that ranged from jokes in the theater and slurs in Juvenal and Tacitus to murders in the street and wholesale pogroms. Apion of Alexandria made himself the chief mouthpiece of these attacks, and Josephus answered him in an incisive pamphlet.III
After the fall of Jerusalem Josephus sailed to Rome with Titus, and accompanied the conqueror of his people in a triumphal procession that exhibited captive Jews and Jewish spoils. Vespasian gave him Roman citizenship, a pension, an apartment in his palace, and profitable lands in Judea.65 In return Josephus took Vespasian’s family name Flavius, and wrote The Wars of the Jews (ca. 75) to defend the actions of Titus in Palestine, to exonerate his own defection, and to discourage further revolt by showing forth the might of Rome. In his later years (ca. 93), feeling more keenly his isolation, he wrote The Antiquities of the Jews to regain the good will of his people by giving gentiles a more favorable view of Jewish achievements, customs, and character. His narratives are clear and forceful, and his account of Herod the Great is as engaging as Plutarch, but his bias and his aims impair his objectivity. The Antiquities required many years and exhausted the author’s strength; the last four of the twenty books were written by his secretaries from his notes.66 Josephus was still but fifty-six when the work appeared, but he was already worn out by a life of adventure, controversy, and moral solitude.
With their characteristic resilience the Jews gradually rebuilt their economic and cultural life in Palestine. Amid the siege of Jerusalem an aged pupil of Hillel, Johanan ben Zakkai, fearful lest the carnage should destroy all teachers and transmitters of the oral tradition, escaped from the city, and set up an academy in a vineyard at Yabne, or Jamnia, near the Mediterranean coast. When Jerusalem fell Johanan organized a new Sanhedrin at Jamnia, composed not of priests, politicians, and rich men, but of Pharisees and rabbis—i.e., teachers of the Law. This Bet Din or Council had no political power, but most Palestinian Jews recognized its authority in all matters of religion and morals. The patriarch whom the Council chose as its head appointed the administrative officers of the Jewish community, and had the power to excommunicate recalcitrant Jews. The stern discipline of the Patriarch Gamaliel II (ca. 100) welded into unity first the Council, then the Jews of Jamnia, then the Jews of Palestine. Under his leadership the contradictory interpretations of the Law transmitted by Hillel and Shammai were reviewed and voted on; those of Hillel were for the most part approved, and were made binding upon all Jews.
Since the Law was now the indispensable cement of scattered and stateless Jewry, the teaching of the Law became the chief occupation of the synagogue throughout the Diaspora; the synagogue replaced the temple, prayer replaced sacrifice, the rabbi replaced the priest. Tannaim—expositors—interpreted one or another of the orally transmitted laws (Halacha) of the Jews, usually supported it with scriptural quotation, sometimes added to it, and illustrated it with stories, homilies, or other material (Haggada). The most famous of the Tannaim was Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph. At the age of forty (ca. A.D. 80) he joined his five-year-old son at school, and learned to read. Soon he could recite the whole Pentateuch by heart. After thirteen years of study he opened his own school under a fig tree in a village near Jamnia. His enthusiasm and idealism, his courage and humor, even his lusty dogmatism, brought him many students. When, in 95, word came that Domitian was planning new measures against the Jews, Akiba was chosen with Gamaliel and two others to make a personal appeal to the Emperor. While they were in Rome Domitian died. Nerva heard their plea favorably, and ended the fiscus Iudaicus—the tax laid upon Jews for rebuilding Rome. On his return to Jamnia Akiba set himself the lifelong task of codifying the Halacha; his pupil Rabbi Meir and their successor Judah the Patriarch (ca. 200) completed the undertaking. Even in this classified form the Halacha remained part of the oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation by scholars and professional memorizers—living textbooks of the Law. Akiba’s methods were as absurd as his conclusions were sound; he derived liberal principles from a weird exegesis in which every letter of the Torah, or written law, was held to have a mysterious meaning; perhaps he had observed that men will accept the rational only in the form of the mystical. From Akiba came that painstaking organization and exposition of theology and ethics which passed down through the Talmud to Maimonides, and ultimately to the methods of the Scholastic philosophers.
In his ninetieth year, when he had grown weak and reactionary, Akiba found himself, as in his youth, surrounded by revolution. In 115-16 the Jews of Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia rose once more against Rome; the massacre of gentiles by Jews, and of Jews by Gentiles, became the order of the day; 220,000 men, says Dio, were killed in Cyrene, 240,000 in Cyprus; the figures are incredible, but we know that Cyrene never recovered from the devastation, and that for centuries thereafter no Hebrew was allowed in Cyprus. The uprisings were suppressed, but the surviving Jews kept fiercely alive their hope of a Messiah who would rebuild the Temple and restore them in triumph to Jerusalem. Roman stupidity reanimated the revolt. In 130 Hadrian declared his intention to raise a shrine to Jupiter on the site of the Temple; in 131 he issued a decree forbidding circumcision and public instruction in the Jewish Law.67 Under the leadership of Simeon Bar Cocheba, who claimed to be the Messiah, the Jews made their last effort in antiquity to recover their homeland and their freedom (132). Akiba, who all his life had preached peace, gave his blessing to the revolution by accepting Bar Cocheba as the promised Redeemer. For three years the rebels fought valiantly against the legions; finally they were beaten by lack of food and supplies. The Romans destroyed 985 towns in Palestine, and slew 580,000 men; a still larger number, we are told, perished through starvation, disease, and fire; nearly all Judea was laid waste. Bar Cocheba himself fell in defending Bethar. So many Jews were sold as slaves that their price fell to that of a horse. Thousands hid in underground channels rather than be captured; surrounded by the Romans, they died one by one of hunger, while the living ate the bodies of the dead.68
Resolved to destroy the recuperative virility of Judaism, Hadrian forbade not merely circumcision, but the observance of the Sabbath or any Jewish holyday, and the public performance of any Hebrew ritual.69 A new and heavier poll tax was placed upon all Jews. They were allowed in Jerusalem only on one fixed day each year, when they might come and weep before the ruins of their Temple. The pagan city of Aelia Capitolina rose on the site of Jerusalem, with shrines to Jupiter and Venus, and with palaestras, theaters, and baths. The Council at Jamnia was dissolved and outlawed; a minor and powerless Council was permitted at Lydda, but public instruction in the Law was prohibited on pain of death. Several rabbis were executed for disobeying this injunction. Akiba, now ninety-five, insisted on teaching his pupils; he was imprisoned for three years, but taught even in jail; he was tried and condemned, and died, we are told, with the basic tenet of Judaism on his lips: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”70
Though Hadrian’s decrees were softened by Antoninus Pius, the Jews did not for centuries recover from the disaster of Bar Cocheba’s revolt. From this moment they entered their Middle Ages, abandoning all secular learning except medicine, renouncing every form of Hellenism, and taking comfort and unity only from their rabbis, their mystic poets, and their Law. No other people has ever known so long an exile, or so hard a fate. Shut out from their Holy City, the Jews were compelled to surrender it first to paganism, then to Christianity. Scattered into every province and beyond, condemned to poverty and humiliation, unbefriended even by philosophers and saints, they retired from public affairs into private study and worship, passionately preserving the words of their scholars, and preparing to write them down at last in the Talmuds of Babylonia and Palestine. Judaism hid in fear and obscurity while its offspring, Christianity, went out to conquer the world.
I The Talmud attributes to Hillel’s reply the additional words, “This is all the Law, the rest is commentary.”36
II The word Messiah (Heb. mahsiah) occurs frequently in the Old Testament. The Jews who made the Septuagint (ca. 280 B.C.) translated it into the Greek Christos, the Anointed, he upon whom has been poured a chrism or holy oil.
III Josephus rejoiced to learn that an ulcer had compelled Apion to be circumcized.64