Jewish traffic.The relations of the Jews in the time of the Roman empire were so peculiar and, one might say, so little dependent on the province which was named in the earlier period after them, in the later rather by the revived name of the Philistaeans or Palaestinenses, that, as we have already said, it appeared more suitable to treat of them in a separate section. The little which is to be remarked as to the land of Palestine, especially the not unimportant share of its maritime and partly also of its inland towns in Syrian industry and Syrian trade, has already been mentioned in the exposition given above of these matters. The Jewish Diaspora had already, before the destruction of the temple, extended in such a way that Jerusalem, even while it still stood, was more a symbol than a home, very much as the city of Rome was for the so-called Roman burgesses of later times. The Jews of Antioch and Alexandria, and the numerous similar societies of lesser rights and minor repute took part, as a matter of course, in the commerce and intercourse of the places where they dwelt. Their Judaism comes into account in the case only perhaps so far as the feelings of mutual hatred and mutual contempt, which had become developed or rather increased since the destruction of the temple, and the repeated national-religious wars between Jews and non-Jews must have exercised their effect also in these circles. As the Syrian merchants resident abroad met together in the first instance for the worship of their native deities, the Syrian Jew in Puteoli cannot well have belonged to the Syrian merchant-guilds there; and, if the worship of the Syrian gods found more and more an echo abroad, that which benefited the other Syrians drew one barrier the more between the Syrians believing in Moses and the Italians. If those Jews who had found a home outside of Palestine, attached themselves beyond it not to those who shared their dwelling-place but to those who shared their religion, as they could not but do, they thereby renounced the esteem and the toleration which the Alexandrians and the Antiochenes and the like met with abroad, and were taken for what they professed to be—Jews. The Palestinian Jews of the West, however, had for the most part not originated from mercantile emigration, but were captives of war or descendants of such, and in every respect homeless; the Pariah position which the children of Abraham occupied, especially in the Roman capital—that of the mendicant Jew, whose household furniture consisted in his bundle of hay and his usurer’s basket, and for whom no service was too poor and too menial—linked itself with the slave-market. Under these circumstances we can understand why the Jews during the imperial period played in the West a subordinate part alongside of the Syrians. The religious fellowship of the mercantile and proletarian immigrants told heavily on the collective body of the Jews, along with the general disparagement connected with their position. But that Diaspora, as well as this, had little to do with Palestine.
Province of Arabia.There remains still a frontier territory to be looked at, which is not often mentioned, and which yet well deserves consideration; it is the Roman province of Arabia. It bears its name wrongly; the emperor who erected it, Trajan, was a man of big deeds but still bigger words. The Arabian peninsula, which separates the region of the Euphrates from the valley of the Nile, lacking in rain, without rivers, on all sides surrounded by a rocky coast poor in harbours, was little fitted for agriculture or for commerce, and in old times by far the greater part of it remained the undisputed heritage of the unsettled inhabitants of the desert. In particular the Romans, who understood how to restrict their possession in Asia as in Egypt better than any other of the changing powers in the ascendant, never even attempted to subdue the Arabian peninsula. Their few enterprises against its south-eastern portion, the most rich in products, and from its relation to India the most important also for commerce, will be set forth when we discuss the business-relations of Egypt. Roman Arabia, even as a Roman client-state and especially as a Roman province, embraced only a moderate portion of the north of the peninsula, but, in addition, the land to the south and east of Palestine between this and the great desert till beyond Bostra. At the same time with this let us take into account the country belonging to Syria between Bostra and Damascus, which is now usually named after the Haurân mountains, according to its old designation Trachonitis and Batanaea.
Conditions of culture in eastern Syria.These extensive regions were only to be gained for civilisation under special conditions. The steppe-country proper (Hamâd) to the eastward from the region with which we are now occupied as far as the Euphrates, was never taken possession of by the Romans, and was incapable of cultivation; only the roving tribes of the desert, such as at the present day the Haneze, traverse it, to pasture their horses and camels in winter along the Euphrates, in summer on the mountains south of Bostra, and often to change the pasture-ground several times in the year. The pastoral tribes settled westward of the steppe, who pursue in particular the breeding of sheep to a great extent, stand already at a higher degree of culture. But there is manifold room for agriculture also in these districts. The red earth of the Haurân, decomposed lava, yields in its primitive state much wild rye, wild barley, and wild oats, and furnishes the finest wheat. Individual deep valleys in the midst of the stone-deserts, such as the “seed-field,” the Ruhbe in the Trachonitis, are the most fertile tracts in all Syria; without ploughing, to say nothing of manuring, wheat yields on the average eighty and barley a hundredfold, and twenty-six stalks from one grain of wheat are not uncommon. Nevertheless no fixed dwelling-place was formed here, because in the summer months the great heat and the want of water and pasture compel the inhabitants to migrate to the mountain pastures of the Haurân. But there was not wanting opportunity even for fixed settlement. The garden-quarter around the town of Damascus, watered by the river Baradâ in its many arms, and the fertile even now populous districts which enclose it on the east, north, and south, were in ancient as in modern times the pearl of Syria. The plain round Bostra, particularly the so-called Nukra to the west of it, is at the present day the granary for Syria, although from the want of rain on an average every fourth harvest is lost, and the locusts often invading it from the neighbouring desert remain a scourge of the land which cannot be exterminated. Wherever the water-courses of the mountains are led into the plain, fresh life flourishes amidst them. “The fertility of this region," says one who knows it well, "is inexhaustible; and even at the present day, where the Nomads have left neither tree nor shrub, the land, so far as the eye reaches, is like a garden.” Even on the lava-surfaces of the mountainous districts the lava-streams have left not a few places (termed Kâ’ in the Haurân), free for cultivation.
This natural condition has, as a rule, handed over the country to shepherds and robbers. The necessarily nomadic character of a great part of the population leads to endless feuds, particularly about places of pasture, and to constant seizures of those regions which are suited for fixed settlement; here, still more than elsewhere, there is need for the formation of such political powers as are in a position to procure quiet and peace on a wider scale, and for these there is no right basis in the population. There is hardly a region in the wide world in which, so much as in this case, civilisation has not grown up spontaneously, but could only be called into existence by the ascendency of conquest from without. When military stations hem in the roving tribes of the desert and force those within the limit of cultivation to a peaceful pastoral life, when colonists are conducted to the regions capable of culture, and the waters of the mountains are led by human hands into the plains, then, but only then, a cheerful and plentiful life thrives in this region.
Greek influence in eastern Syria.The pre-Roman period had not brought such blessings to these lands. The inhabitants of the whole territory as far as Damascus belong to the Arabian branch of the great Semitic stock; the names of persons at least are throughout Arabic. In it, as in northern Syria, Oriental and Occidental civilisation met; yet up to the time of the empire the two had made but little progress. The language and the writing, which the Nabataeans used, were those of Syria and of the Euphrates-lands, and could only have come from thence to the natives. On the other hand the Greek settlement in Syria extended itself, in part at least, also to these regions. The great commercial town of Damascus had become Greek with the rest of Syria. The Seleucids had carried the founding of Greek towns even into the region beyond the Jordan, especially into the northern Decapolis; further to the south at least the old Rabbath Ammon had been converted by the Lagids into the city of Philadelphia. But further away and in the eastern districts bordering on the desert the Nabataean kings were not much more than nominally obedient to the Syrian or Egyptian Alexandrids, and coins or inscriptions and buildings, which might be attributed to pre-Roman Hellenism, have nowhere come to light.
When Syria became Roman, Pompeius exerted himself to strengthen the Hellenic urban system, which he found in existence; as indeed the towns of the Decapolis subsequently reckoned their years from the year 690–91 64–63 B.C., in which Palestine had been added to the empire.143 But in this region the government as well as the civilisation continued to be left to the two vassal-states, the Jewish and the Arabian.
The territory of Herod beyond the Jordan.Of the king of the Jews, Herod and his house, we shall have to speak elsewhere; here we have to mention his activity in the extending of civilisation toward the east. His field of dominion stretched over both banks of the Jordan in all its extent, northwards as far at least as Chelbon north-west from Damascus, southward as far as the Dead Sea, while the region farther to the east between his kingdom and the desert was assigned to the king of the Arabians. He and his descendants, who still bore sway here after the annexation of the lordship of Jerusalem down to Trajan, and subsequently resided in Caesarea Paneas in the southern Lebanon, had endeavoured energetically to tame the natives. The oldest evidences of a certain culture in these regions are doubtless the cave-towns, of which there is mention in the Book of Judges, large subterranean collective hiding-places made habitable by air-shafts, with streets and wells, fitted to shelter men and flocks, difficult to be found and, even when found, difficult to be reduced. Their mere existence shows the oppression of the peaceful inhabitants by the unsettled sons of the steppe. “These districts,” says Josephus, when he describes the state of things in the Haurân under Augustus, “were inhabited by wild tribes, without towns and without fixed fields, who harboured with their flocks under the earth in caves with narrow entrance and wide intricate paths, but copiously supplied with water and provisions were difficult to be subdued.” Several of these cave-towns contained as many as 400 head. A remarkable edict of the first or second Agrippa, fragments of which have been found at Canatha (Kanawât), summons the inhabitants to leave off their "animal-conditions" and to exchange their cavern-life for civilised existence. The non-settled Arabs live chiefly by the plundering partly of the neighbouring peasants, partly of caravans on the march; the uncertainty was increased by the fact that the petty prince Zenodorus of Abila to the north of Damascus, in the Anti-Libanus, to whom Augustus had committed the superintendence over the Trachon, preferred to make common cause with the robbers and secretly shared in their gains. Just in consequence of this the emperor assigned this region to Herod, and his remorseless energy succeeded, in some measure, in repressing this brigandage. The king appears to have instituted on the east frontier a line of military posts, fortified and put under royal commanders (ἔπαρχοι). He would have achieved still more if the Nabataean territory had not afforded the robbers an asylum; this was one of the causes of variance between him and his Arabian colleague.144 His Hellenising tendency comes into prominence in this domain as strongly and less unpleasantly than in his government at home. As all the coins of Herod and the Herodians are Greek, so in the land beyond the Jordan, while the oldest monument with an inscription that we know—the Temple of Baalsamin at Canatha—bears an Aramaean dedication, the honorary bases erected there, including one for Herod the Great,145 are bilingual or merely Greek; under his successors Greek rules alone.
The kingdom of Nabat.By the side of the Jewish kings stood the formerly-mentioned (iv. 140)iv. 134. “king of Nabat,” as he called himself. The residence of this Arabian prince was the city, known to us only by its Greek name Petra, a rock-fastness situated midway between the Dead Sea and the north-east extremity of the Arabian Gulf, from of old an emporium for the traffic of India and Arabia with the region of the Mediterranean. These rulers possessed the northern half of the Arabian peninsula; their power extended on the Arabian Gulf as far as Leuce Come opposite to the Egyptian town of Berenice, in the interior at least as far as the region of the old Thaema.146 To the north of the peninsula their territory reached as far as Damascus, which was under their protection,147 and even beyond Damascus148, and enclosed as with a girdle the whole of Palestinian Syria. The Romans, after taking possession of Judaea, came into hostile contact with them, and Marcus Scaurus led an expedition against them. At that time their subjugation was not accomplished; but it must have ensued soon afterwards.149 Under Augustus their king Obodas was just as subject to the empire150 as Herod the king of the Jews, and rendered, like the latter, military service in the Roman expedition against southern Arabia. Since that time the protection of the imperial frontier in the south as in the east of Syria, as far up as to Damascus, must have lain mainly in the hands of this Arabian king. With his Jewish neighbour he was at constant feud. Augustus, indignant that the Arabian instead of seeking justice at the hand of his suzerain against Herod, had encountered the latter with arms, and that Obodas’s son, Harethath, or in Greek Aretas, after the death of his father, instead of waiting for investiture, had at once entered upon the dominion, was on the point of deposing the latter and of joining his territory to the Jewish; but the misrule of Herod in his later years withheld him from this step, and so Aretas was confirmed (about 747 U.C.)7 B.C.. Some decades later he began again warfare at his own hand against his son-in-law, the prince of Galilee, Herod Antipas, on account of the divorce of his daughter in favour of the beautiful Herodias. He retained the upper hand, but the indignant suzerain Tiberius ordered the governor of Syria to proceed against him. The troops were already on the march, when Tiberius died (37); and his successor, Gaius, who did not wish well to Antipas, pardoned the Arabian. King Maliku or Malchus, the successor of Aretas, fought under Nero and Vespasian in the Jewish war as a Roman vassal, and transmitted his dominion to his son Dabel, the contemporary of Trajan, and the last of these rulers. More especially after the annexation of the state of Jerusalem and the reducing of the respectable dominion of Herod to the far from martial kingdom of Caesarea Paneas, the Arabian was the most considerable of the Syrian client-states, as indeed it furnished the strongest among the royal contingents to the Roman army besieging Jerusalem. This state even under Roman supremacy refrained from the use of the Greek language; the coins struck under the rule of its kings bear, apart from Damascus, an Aramaic legend. But there appear the germs of an organised condition and of civilised government. The coinage itself probably only began after the state had come under Roman clientship. The Arabian-Indian traffic with the region of the Mediterranean moved in great part along the caravan-route watched over by the Romans, running from Leuce Come by way of Petra to Gaza.151 The princes of the Nabataean kingdom made use, just like the community of Palmyra, of Greek official designations for their magistrates, e.g. of the titles of Eparch and of Strategos. If under Tiberius the good order of Syria brought about by the Romans and the security of the harvests occasioned by their military occupation are made prominent as matters of boasting, this is primarily to be referred to the arrangements made in the client-states of Jerusalem or subsequently of Caesarea Paneas and of Petra.
Institution of the province of Arabia.Under Trajan the direct rule of Rome took the place of these two client-states. In the beginning of his reign king Agrippa II. died, and his territory was united with the province of Syria. Not long after, in the year 106, the governor Aulus Cornelius Palma broke up the previous dominion of the kings of Nabat, and made the greater part of it into the Roman province of Arabia, while Damascus went to Syria, and what the Nabataean king had possessed in the interior of Arabia was abandoned by the Romans. The erection of Arabia is designated as subjugation, and the coins also which celebrate the taking possession of it attest that the Nabataeans offered resistance, as indeed generally the nature of their territory as well as their previous attitude lead us to assume a relative independence on the part of these princes. But the historical significance of these events may not be sought in warlike success; the two annexations, which doubtless went together, were no more than acts of administration carried out perhaps by military power, and the tendency to acquire these domains for civilisation and specially for Hellenism was only heightened by the fact that the Roman government took upon itself the work. The Hellenism of the East, as summed up in Alexander, was a church militant, a thoroughly conquering power pushing its way in a political, religious, economic, and literary point of view. Here, on the edge of the desert, under the pressure of anti-Hellenic Judaism and in the hands of the spiritless and vacillating government of the Seleucids, it had hitherto achieved little. But now, pervading the Roman system, it develops a motive power, which stands related to the earlier, as the power of the Jewish and the Arabian vassal-princes to that of the Roman empire. In this country, where everything depended and depends on protecting the state of peace by the setting up of a superior and standing military force, the institution of a legionary camp in Bostra under a commander of senatorial rank was an epoch-making event. From this centre the requisite posts were established at suitable places and provided with garrisons. For example, the stronghold of Namara (Nemâra) deserves mention, a long day’s march beyond the boundaries of the properly habitable mountain-land, in the midst of the stony desert, but commanding the only spring to be found within it and the forts attached to it in the already mentioned oasis of Ruhbe and further on at Jebel Sês; these garrisons together control the whole projection of the Haurân. Another series of forts, placed under the Syrian command and primarily under that of the legion posted at Danava (p. 95), and laid out at uniform distances of three leagues apart, secured the route from Damascus to Palmyra; the best known of them, the second in the series, was that of Dmêr (p. 149, n. 1), a rectangle of 300 and 350 paces respectively, provided on every side with six towers and a portal fifteen paces in breadth, and surrounded by a ring-wall of sixteen feet thick, once faced outwardly with beautiful blocks of hewn stone.
The civilisation of east Syria under Roman rule.Never had such an aegis been extended over this land. It was not, properly speaking, denationalised. The Arabic names remained down to the latest time, although not unfrequently, just as in Syria (p. 121), a Romano-Hellenic name is appended to the local one; thus a sheikh names himself “Adrianos or Soaidos, son of Malechos.”152 The native worship also remains unaffected; the chief deity of the Nabataeans, Dusaris, is doubtless compared with Dionysus, but regularly continues to be worshipped under his local name, and down to a late period the Bostrenes celebrate the Dusaria in honour of him.153 In like manner in the province of Arabia temples continue to be consecrated, and offerings presented to Aumu or Helios, to Vasaeathu, to Theandritos, to Ethaos. The tribes and the tribal organisation no less continue: the inscriptions mention lists of “Phylae” by the native name, and frequently Phylarchs or Ethnarchs. But alongside of traditional customs civilisation and Hellenising make progress. If from the time before Trajan no Greek monument can be shown in the sphere of the Nabataean state, on the other hand no monument subsequent to Trajan’s time in the Arabic language has been found there;154 to all appearance the imperial government suppressed at once upon the annexation the written use of Arabic, although it certainly remained the language proper of the country, as is attested not only by the proper names but by the "interpreter of the tax-receivers."
Agriculture and commerce.As to the advance of agriculture we have no witnesses to speak; but if, on the whole eastern and southern slope of the Haurân, from the summits of the mountains down to the desert, the stones, with which this volcanic plain was once strewed, are thrown into heaps or arranged in long rows, and thus the most glorious fields are obtained, we may recognise therein the hand of the only government which has governed this land as it might and should be governed. In the Ledjâ, a lava-plateau thirteen leagues long and eight to nine broad, which is now almost uninhabited, there grew once vines and figs between the streams of lava; the Roman road connecting Bostra with Damascus ran across it; in the Ledjâ and around it are counted the ruins of twelve larger and thirty-nine smaller townships. It can be shown that, at the bidding of the same governor who erected the province of Arabia, the mighty aqueduct was constructed which led the water from the mountains of the Haurân to Canatha (Kerak) in the plain, and not far from it a similar one in Arrha (Rahâ)—buildings of Trajan, which may be named by the side of the port of Ostia and the Forum of Rome. The flourishing of commercial intercourse is attested by the very choice of the capital of the new province. Bostra existed under the Nabataean government, and an inscription of king Malichu has been found there; but its military and commercial importance begins with the introduction of direct Roman government. “Bostra,” says Wetzstein, “has the most favourable situation of all the towns in eastern Syria; even Damascus, which owes its size to the abundance of its water and to its situation protected by the eastern Trachon, will excel Bostra only under a weak government, while the latter under a strong and wise government must elevate itself in a few decades to a fabulous prosperity. It is the great market for the Syrian desert: the high mountains of Arabia and Peraea, and its long rows of booths of stone still in their desolation, furnish evidence of the reality of an earlier, and the possibility of a future, greatness.” The remains of the Roman road, leading thence by way of Salchat and Ezrak to the Persian Gulf, show that Bostra was, along with Petra and Palmyra, a medium of traffic from the East to the Mediterranean. This town was probably constituted on a Hellenic basis already by Trajan; at least it is called thenceforth the “new Trajanic Bostra,” and the Greek coins begin with Pius, while later the legend becomes Latin in consequence of the bestowal of colonial rights by Alexander.
Petra too had a Greek municipal constitution already under Hadrian, and several other places subsequently received municipal rights; but in this territory of the Arabians down to the latest period the tribe and the tribal village preponderated.
Stone buildings of eastern Syria.A peculiar civilisation was developed from the mixture of national and Greek elements in these regions during the five hundred years between Trajan and Mohammed. A fuller picture of it has been preserved to us than of other forms of the ancient world, inasmuch as the structures of Petra, in great part worked out of the rock, and the buildings in the Haurân, executed entirely of stone owing to the want of wood, comparatively little injured by the sway of the Bedouins which was here again installed with Islam in its old misrule, are still to a considerable degree extant to the present day, and throw a clear light on the artistic skill and the manner of life of those centuries. The above-mentioned temple of Baalsamin at Canatha, certainly built under Herod, shows in its original portions a complete diversity from Greek architecture and in the structural plan remarkable analogies with the temple-building of the same king in Jerusalem, while the pictorial representations shunned in the latter are by no means wanting here. A similar state of things has been observed in the monuments found at Petra. Afterwards further steps were taken. If under the Jewish and the Nabataean rulers culture freed itself but slowly from the influences of the East, a new time seems to have begun here with the transfer of the legion to Bostra. “Building,” says an excellent French observer, Melchior de Vogué, “obtained thereby an impetus which was not again arrested. Everywhere rose houses, palaces, baths, temples, theatres, aqueducts, triumphal arches; towns sprang from the ground within a few years with the regular construction and the symmetrically disposed colonnades which mark towns without a past, and which are as it were the inevitable uniform for this part of Syria during the imperial period.” The eastern and southern slope of the Haurân shows nearly three hundred such desolated towns and villages, while there only five new townships now exist; several of the former, e.g. Bûsân, number as many as 800 houses of one to two stories, built throughout of basalt, with well-jointed walls of square blocks without cement, with doors mostly ornamented and often provided with inscriptions, the flat roof formed of stone-rafters, which are supported by stone arches and made rain-proof above by a layer of cement. The town-wall is usually formed only by the backs of the houses joined together, and is protected by numerous towers. The poor attempts at re-colonising of recent times find the houses habitable; there is wanting only the diligent hand of man, or rather the strong arm that protects it. In front of the gates lie the cisterns, often subterranean, or provided with an artificial stone roof, many of which are still at the present day, when this deserted seat of towns has become pasturage, kept up by the Bedouins in order to water their flocks from them in summer. The style of building and the practice of art have doubtless preserved some remains of the older Oriental type, e.g. the frequent form, for a tomb, of the cube crowned with a pyramid, perhaps also the pigeon-towers often added to the tomb, still frequent in the present day throughout Syria; but, taken on the whole, the style is the usual Greek one of the imperial period. Only the absence of wood has here called forth a development of the stone arch and the cupola, which technically and artistically lends to these buildings an original character. In contrast to the customary repetition elsewhere usual of traditional forms there prevails here an architecture independently suiting the exigencies and the conditions, moderate in ornamentation, thoroughly sound and rational, and not destitute even of elegance. The burial-places, which are cut out in the rock-walls rising to the east and west of Petra and in their lateral valleys, with their façades of Doric or Corinthian pillars often placed in several tiers one above another, and their pyramids and propylaea reminding us of the Egyptian Thebes, are not artistically pleasing, but imposing by their size and richness. Only a stirring life and a high prosperity could display such care for its dead. In presence of these architectural monuments it is not surprising that the inscriptions make mention of a theatre in the “village” (κώμη) Sakkaea and a “theatre-shaped Odeon” in Canatha, and a local poet of Namara in Batanaea celebrates himself as a “master of the glorious art of proud Ausonian song.”155 Thus at this eastern limit of the empire there was gained for Hellenic civilisation a frontier-domain which may be compared with the Romanised region of the Rhine; the arched and domed buildings of eastern Syria well stand comparison with the castles and tombs of the nobles and of the great merchants of Belgica.
The south-Arabian immigration before Mohammed.But the end came. As to the Arabian tribes who immigrated to this region from the south, the historical tradition of the Romans is silent, and what the late records of the Arabs report as to that of the Ghassanids and their precursors, can hardly be fixed, at least as to chronology.156 But the Sabaeans, after whom the place Borechath (Brêka to the north of Kanawât) is named, appear in fact to be south-Arabian emigrants; and these were already settled here in the third century. They and their associates may have come in peace and become settled under Roman protection, perhaps even may have carried to Syria the highly-developed and luxuriant culture of south-western Arabia. So long as the empire kept firmly together and each of these tribes was under its own sheikh, all obeyed the Roman lord-paramount. But in order the better to meet the Arabians or—as they were now called—Saracens of the Persian empire united under one king, Justinian, during the Persian war in the year 531, placed all the phylarchs of the Saracens subject to the Romans under Aretas son of Gabalus—Harith Abu son of Chaminos among the Arabs—and bestowed on this latter the title of king, which hitherto, it is added, had never been done. This king of all the Arabian tribes settled in Syria was still a vassal of the empire; but, while he warded off his countrymen, he at the same time prepared the place for them. A century later, in the year 637, Arabia and Syria succumbed to Islam.
The history of the Jewish land is as little the history of the Jewish people as the history of the States of the Church is that of the Catholics; it is just as requisite to separate the two as to consider them together.
Judaea and the priestly rule under the Seleucids.The Jews in the land of the Jordan, with whom the Romans had to do, were not the people who under their judges and kings fought with Moab and Edom, and listened to the discourses of Amos and Hosea. The small community of pious exiles, driven out by foreign rule, and brought back again by a change in the hands wielding that rule, who began their new establishment by abruptly repelling the remnants of their kinsmen left behind in the old abodes and laying the foundation for the irreconcilable feud between Jews and Samaritans—the ideal of national exclusiveness and priestly control holding the mind in chains—had long before the Roman period developed under the government of the Seleucids the so-called Mosaic theocracy, a clerical corporation with the high-priest at its head, which, acquiescing in foreign rule and renouncing the formation of a state, guarded the distinctiveness of its adherents, and dominated them under the aegis of the protecting power. This retention of the national character in religious forms, while ignoring the state, was the distinctive mark of the later Judaism. Probably every idea of God is in its formation national; but no other God has been so from the outset the God only of his people as Jahve, and no one has so remained such without distinction of time and place. Those men returning to the Holy Land, who professed to live according to the statutes of Moses and in fact lived according to the statutes of Ezra and Nehemiah,157 had remained just as dependent on the great-kings of the East, and subsequently on the Seleucids, as they had been by the waters of Babylon. A political element no more attached to this organisation than to the Armenian or the Greek Church under its patriarchs in the Turkish empire; no free current of political development pervades this clerical restoration; none of the grave and serious obligations of a commonwealth standing on its own basis hampered the priests of the temple of Jerusalem in the setting up of the kingdom of Jahve upon earth.
Kingdom of the Hasmonaeans.The reaction did not fail to come. That church-without-a-state could only last so long as a secular great power served it as lord-protector or as bailiff. When the kingdom of the Seleucids fell into decay, a Jewish commonwealth was created afresh by the revolt against foreign rule, which drew its best energies precisely from the enthusiastic national faith. The high priest of Salem was called from the temple to the battlefield. The family of the Hasmonaeans restored the empire of Saul and David nearly in its old limits, and not only so, but these warlike high priests renewed also in some measure the former truly political monarchy controlling the priests. But that monarchy, at once the product of, and the contrast to, that priestly rule, was not according to the heart of the pious. The Pharisees and the Sadducees separated and began to make war on one another. It was not so much doctrines and ritual differences that here confronted each other, as, on the one hand, the persistence in a priestly government which simply clung to religious ordinances and interests, and otherwise was indifferent to the independence and the self-control of the community; on the other hand, the monarchy aiming at political development and endeavouring to procure for the Jewish people, by fighting and by treaty, its place once more in the political conflict, of which the Syrian kingdom was at that time the arena. The former tendency dominated the multitude, the latter had the preponderance in intelligence and in the upper classes; its most considerable champion was king Iannaeus Alexander, who during his whole reign was at enmity not less with the Syrian rulers than with his own Pharisees (iv. 139) iv. 133. Although it was properly but the other, and in fact the more natural and more potent, expression of the national revival, it yet by its greater freedom of thinking and acting came into contact with the Hellenic character, and was regarded especially by its pious opponents as foreign and unbelieving.
The Jewish Diaspora.But the inhabitants of Palestine were only a portion, and not the most important portion, of the Jews; the Jewish communities of Babylonia, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, were far superior to those of Palestine even after their regeneration by the Maccabees. The Jewish Diaspora in the imperial period was of more significance than the latter; and it was an altogether peculiar phenomenon.
The settlements of the Jews beyond Palestine grew only in a subordinate degree out of the same impulse as those of the Phoenicians and the Hellenes. From the outset an agricultural people and dwelling far from the coast, their settlements abroad were a non-free and comparatively late formation, a creation of Alexander or of his marshals.158 In those immense efforts at founding Greek towns continued throughout generations, such as never before and never afterwards occurred to a like extent, the Jews had a conspicuous share, however singular it was to invoke their aid in particular towards the Hellenising of the East. This was the case above all with Egypt. The most considerable of all the towns created by Alexander, Alexandria on the Nile, was since the times of the first Ptolemy, who after the occupation of Palestine transferred thither a mass of its inhabitants, almost as much a city of the Jews as of the Greeks, and the Jews there were to be esteemed at least equal to those of Jerusalem in number, wealth, intelligence, and organisation. In the first times of the empire there was reckoned a million of Jews to eight millions of Egyptians, and their influence, it may be presumed, transcended this numerical proportion. We have already observed that, on no smaller a scale, the Jews in the Syrian capital of the empire had been similarly organised and developed (p. 127). The diffusion and the importance of the Jews of Asia Minor are attested among other things by the attempt which was made under Augustus by the Ionian Greek cities, apparently after joint concert, to compel their Jewish fellow townsmen either to withdrawal from their faith or to full assumption of civic burdens. Beyond doubt there were independently organised bodies of Jews in all the new Hellenic foundations,159 and withal in numerous old Hellenic towns, even in Hellas proper, e.g. in Corinth. The organisation was placed throughout on the footing that the nationality of the Jews with the far-reaching consequences drawn from it by themselves was preserved, and only the use of the Greek language was required of them. Thus amidst this Graecising, into which the East was at that time coaxed or forced by those in authority, the Jews of the Greek towns became Greek-speaking Orientals.
Greek language.That in the Jew-communities of the Macedonian towns the Greek language not merely attained to dominion in the natural way of intercourse, but was a compulsory ordinance imposed upon them, seems of necessity to result from the state of the case. In a similar way Trajan subsequently Romanised Dacia with colonists from Asia Minor. Without this compulsion, the external uniformity in the foundation of towns could not have been carried out, and this material for Hellenising generally could not have been employed. The governments went in this respect very far and achieved much. Already under the second Ptolemy, and at his instigation, the sacred writings of the Jews were translated into Greek in Egypt, and at least at the beginning of the imperial period the knowledge of Hebrew among the Jews of Alexandria was nearly as rare as that of the original languages of Scripture is at present in the Christian world; there was nearly as much discussion as to the faults of translation of the so-called Seventy Alexandrians as on the part of pious men among us regarding the errors of Luther’s translation. The national language of the Jews had at this epoch disappeared everywhere from the intercourse of life, and maintained itself only in ecclesiastical use somewhat like the Latin language in the religious domain of Catholicism. In Judaea itself its place had been taken by the Aramaic popular language of Syria, akin no doubt to the Hebrew; the Jews outside of Judaea, with whom we are concerned, had entirely laid aside the Semitic idiom, and it was not till long after this epoch that the reaction set in, which scholastically brought back the knowledge and the use of it more generally among the Jews. The literary works, which they produced at this epoch in great number, were in the better times of the empire all Greek. If language alone conditioned nationality, there would be little to tell for this period as to the Jews.
Retention of nationality.But with this linguistic compulsion, at first perhaps severely felt, was combined the recognition of the distinctive nationality with all its consequences. Everywhere in the cities of the monarchy of Alexander the burgess-body was formed of the Macedonians, that is, those really Macedonian, or the Hellenes esteemed equal to them. By the side of these stood, in addition to foreigners, the natives, in Alexandria the Egyptians, in Cyrene the Libyans and generally the settlers from the East, who had indeed no other home than the new city, but were not recognised as Hellenes. To this second category the Jews belonged; but they, and they only, were allowed to form, so to speak, a community within the community, and—while the other non-burgesses were ruled by the authorities of the burgess-body—up to a certain degree to govern themselves.160 The “Jews,” says Strabo, “have in Alexandria a national head (ἐθνάρχης) of their own, who presides over the people (ἔθνος), and decides processes and disposes of contracts and arrangements as if he ruled an independent community.” This was done, because the Jews indicated a specific jurisdiction of this sort as required by their nationality or—what amounts to the same thing—their religion. Further, the general political arrangements had respect in an extensive measure to the national-religious scruples of the Jews, and accommodated them as far as possible by exemptions. The privilege of dwelling together was at least frequently added; in Alexandria, e.g. two of the five divisions of the city were inhabited chiefly by Jews. This seems not to have been the Ghetto system, but rather a usage resting on the basis of settlement to begin with, and thereafter retained on both sides, whereby conflicts with neighbours were in some measure obviated.
Extent of the Diaspora.Thus the Jews came to play a prominent part in the Macedonian Hellenising of the East; their pliancy and serviceableness on the one hand, their unyielding tenacity on the other, must have induced the very realistic statesmen who assigned this course of action, to resolve on such arrangements. Nevertheless the extraordinary extent and significance of the Jewish Diaspora, as compared with the narrowness and poorness of their home, remains at once a fact and a problem. In dealing with it we may not overlook the circumstance that the Palestinian Jews furnished no more than the nucleus for the Jews of other countries. The Judaism of the older time was anything but exclusive; was, on the contrary, no less pervaded by missionary zeal than were afterwards Christianity and Islam. The Gospel makes reference to Rabbis who traversed sea and land to make a proselyte; the admission of half-proselytes, of whom circumcision was not expected but to whom religious fellowship was yet accorded, is an evidence of this converting zeal and at the same time one of its most effective means. Motives of very various kinds came to the help of this proselytising. The civil privileges, which the Lagids and Seleucids conferred on the Jews, must have induced a great number of non-Jewish Orientals and half-Hellenes to attach themselves in the new towns to the privileged category of the non-burgesses. In later times the decay of the traditional faith of the country helped the Jewish propaganda. Numerous persons, especially of the cultivated classes, whose sense of faith and morality turned away with horror or derision from what the Greeks, and still more from what the Egyptians termed religion, sought refuge in the simpler and purer Jewish doctrine renouncing polytheism and idolatry—a doctrine which largely met the religious views resulting from the development of philosophy among the cultured and half-cultured circles. There is a remarkable Greek moral poem, probably from the later epoch of the Roman republic, which is drawn from the Mosaic books on such a footing that it adopts the doctrine of monotheism and the universal moral law, but avoids everything offensive to the non-Jew and all direct opposition to the ruling religion, evidently intended to gain wider acceptance for this denationalised Judaism. Women in particular addicted themselves by preference to the Jewish faith. When the authorities of Damascus in the year 66 resolved to put to death the captive Jews, it was agreed to keep this resolution secret, in order that the female population devoted to the Jews might not prevent its execution. Even in the West, where the cultivated circles were otherwise averse to Jewish habits, dames of rank early formed an exception; Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s wife, sprung from a noble family, was notorious for her pious Jewish faith and her zealous protectorate of the Jews, as for other things less reputable. Cases of formal transition to Judaism were not rare; the royal house of Adiabene for example—king Izates and his mother Helena, as well as his brother and successor—became at the time of Tiberius and of Claudius in every respect Jews. It certainly was the case with all those Jewish bodies, as it is expressly remarked of those of Antioch, that they consisted in great part of proselytes.
Hellenising tendencies in the Diaspora.This transplanting of Judaism to the Hellenic soil with the appropriation of a foreign language, however much it took place with a retention of national individuality, was not accomplished without developing in Judaism itself a tendency running counter to its nature, and up to a certain degree denationalising it. How powerfully the bodies of Jews living amidst the Greeks were influenced by the currents of Greek intellectual life, may be traced in the literature of the last century before, and of the first after, the birth of Christ. It is imbued with Jewish elements; and they are withal the clearest heads and the most gifted thinkers, who seek admission either as Hellenes into the Jewish, or as Jews into the Hellenic, system. Nicolaus of Damascus, himself a Pagan and a noted representative of the Aristotelian philosophy pleaded, as a scholar and diplomatist of king Herod, the cause of his Jewish patron and of the Jews before Agrippa as before Augustus; and not only so, but his historical authorship shows a very earnest, and for that epoch significant, attempt to bring the East into the circle of Occidental research, while the description still preserved of the youthful years of the emperor Augustus, who came personally into close contact with him, is a remarkable evidence of the love and honour which the Roman ruler met with in the Greek world. The dissertation on the Sublime, written in the first period of the empire by an unknown author, one of the finest aesthetic works preserved to us from antiquity, certainly proceeds, if not from a Jew, at any rate from a man who revered alike Homer and Moses.161 Another treatise, also anonymous, upon the Universe—likewise an attempt, respectable of its kind, to blend the doctrine of Aristotle with that of the Stoa—was perhaps written also by a Jew, and dedicated certainly to the Jew of highest repute and highest station in the Neronian age, Tiberius Alexander (p. 204), chief of the staff to Corbulo and Titus. The wedding of the two worlds of intellect meets us most clearly in the Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy, the most acute and most palpable expression of a religious movement, not merely affecting but also attacking the essence of Judaism. The Hellenic intellectual development conflicted with national religions of all sorts, inasmuch as it either denied their views or else filled them with other contents, drove out the previous gods from the minds of men and put into the empty places either nothing, or the stars and abstract ideas. These attacks affected also the religion of the Jews. There was formed a Neo-Judaism of Hellenic culture, which dealt with Jehovah not quite so badly, but yet not much otherwise, than the cultivated Greeks and Romans with Zeus and Jupiter. The universal expedient of the so-called allegorical interpretation, whereby in particular the philosophers of the Stoa everywhere in courteous fashion eliminated the heathen national religions, suited equally well and equally ill for Genesis as for the gods of the Iliad; if Moses had meant by Abraham in a strict sense understanding, by Sarah virtue, by Noah righteousness, if the four streams of Paradise were the four cardinal virtues, then the most enlightened Hellene might believe in the Law. But this pseudo-Judaism was also a power, and the intellectual primacy of the Jews in Egypt was apparent above all in the fact, that this tendency found pre-eminently its supporters in Alexandria.
Fellowship of the Jews generally.Notwithstanding the internal separation which had taken place among the Jews of Palestine and had but too often culminated directly in civil war, notwithstanding the dispersion of a great part of the Jewish body into foreign lands, notwithstanding the intrusion of foreign ingredients into it and even of the destructive Hellenistic element into its very core, the collective body of the Jews remained united in a way, to which in the present day only the Vatican perhaps and the Kaaba offer a certain analogy. The holy Salem remained the banner, Zion’s temple the Palladium of the whole Jewish body, whether they obeyed the Romans or the Parthians, whether they spoke Aramaic or Greek, whether even they believed in the old Jahve or in the new, who was none. The fact that the protecting ruler conceded to the spiritual chief of the Jews a certain secular power signified for the Jewish body just as much, and the small extent of this power just as little, as the so-called States of the Church in their time signified for Roman Catholics. Every member of a Jewish community had to pay annually to Jerusalem a didrachmon as temple-tribute, which came in more regularly than the taxes of the state; every one was obliged at least once in his life to sacrifice personally to Jehovah on the spot which alone in the world was well-pleasing to Him. Theological science remained common property; the Babylonian and Alexandrian Rabbis took part in it not less than those of Jerusalem. The feeling, cherished with unparalleled tenacity, of belonging collectively to one nation—a feeling which had established itself in the community of the returning exiles and had thereafter contributed to create that distinctive position of the Jews in the Greek world—maintained its ground in spite of dispersion and division.
Philo.Most worthy of remark is the continued life of Judaism itself in circles whose inward religion was detached from it. The most noted and, for us, the single clearly palpable representative of this tendency in literature, Philo, one of the foremost and richest Jews of the time of Tiberius, stands in fact towards the religion of his country in a position not greatly differing from that of Cicero towards the Roman; but he himself believed that he was not destroying but fulfilling it. For him as for every other Jew, Moses is the source of all truth, his written direction binding law, the feeling towards him reverence and devout belief. This sublimated Judaism is, however, not quite identical with the so-called faith in the gods of the Stoa. The corporeality of God vanishes for Philo, but not His personality, and he entirely fails in—what is the essence of Hellenic philosophy—the transferring of the deity into the breast of man; it remains his view that sinful man is dependent on a perfect being standing outside of, and above, him. In like manner the new Judaism submits itself to the national ritual law far more unconditionally than the new heathenism. The struggle between the old and the new faith was therefore of a different nature in the Jewish circle than in the heathen, because the stake was a greater one; reformed heathenism contended only against the old faith, reformed Judaism would in its ultimate consequence destroy the nationality, which amidst the inundation of Hellenism necessarily disappeared with the refining away of the native faith, and therefore shrank back from drawing this consequence. Hence on Greek soil and in Greek language the form, if not the substance, of the old faith was retained and defended with unexampled obstinacy, defended even by those who in substance surrendered before Hellenism. Philo himself, as we shall have to tell further on, contended and suffered for the cause of the Jews. But on that account the Hellenistic tendency in Judaism never exercised an overpowering influence over the latter, never was able to take its stand against the national Judaism, and barely availed to mitigate its fanaticism and to check its perversities and crimes. In all essential matters, especially when confronted with oppression and persecution, the differences of Judaism disappeared; and, unimportant as was the Rabbinical state, the religious communion over which it presided was a considerable and in certain circumstances formidable power.
The Roman government and JudaismSuch was the state of things which the Romans found confronting them when they entered on rule in the East. Conquest forces the hand of the conqueror not less than of the conquered. The work of centuries, the Macedonian urban institutions, could not be undone either by the Arsacids or by the Caesars; neither Seleucia on the Euphrates nor Antioch and Alexandria could be entered upon by the following governments under the benefit of the inventory. Probably in presence of the Jewish Diaspora there the founder of the imperial government took, as in so many other things, the policy of the first Lagids as his guiding rule, and furthered rather than hampered the Judaism of the East in its distinctive position; and this procedure thereupon became throughout the model for his successors. We have already mentioned that the communities of Asia Minor under Augustus made the attempt to draw upon their Jewish fellow-citizens uniformly in the levy, and no longer to allow them the observance of the Sabbath; but Agrippa decided against them and maintained the status quo in favour of the Jews, or rather, perhaps, now for the first time legalised the exemption of the Jews from military service and their Sabbath privilege, that had been previously conceded according to circumstances only by individual governors or communities of the Greek provinces. Augustus further directed the governors of Asia not to apply the rigorous imperial laws respecting unions and assemblies against the Jews. But the Roman government did not fail to see that the exempt position conceded to the Jews in the East was not compatible with the absolute obligation of those belonging to the empire to fulfil the services required by the state; that the guaranteed distinctive position of the Jewish body carried the hatred of race and under certain circumstances civil war into the several towns; that the pious rule of the authorities at Jerusalem over all the Jews of the empire had a perilous range; and that in all this there lay a practical injury and a danger in principle for the state.
in the WestThe internal dualism of the empire expresses itself in nothing more sharply than in the different treatment of the Jews in the respective domains of the Latin and Greek languages. In the West autonomous bodies of Jews were never allowed. There was toleration doubtless there for the Jewish religious usages as for the Syrian and the Egyptian, or rather somewhat less than for these; Augustus showed himself favourable to the Jewish colony in the suburb of Rome beyond the Tiber, and made supplementary allowance in his largesses for those who missed them on account of the Sabbath. But he personally avoided all contact with the Jewish worship as with the Egyptian; and, as he himself when in Egypt had gone out of the way of the sacred ox, so he thoroughly approved the conduct of his son Gaius, when he went to the East, in passing by Jerusalem. Under Tiberius in the year 19 the Jewish worship was even prohibited along with the Egyptian in Rome and in all Italy, and those who did not consent openly to renounce it and to throw the holy vessels into the fire were expelled from Italy—so far as they could not be employed as useful for military service in convict-companies, whereupon not a few became liable to court-martial on account of their religious scruples. If, as we shall see afterwards, this same emperor in the East almost anxiously evaded every conflict with the Rabbi, it is here plainly apparent that he, the ablest ruler whom the empire had, just as clearly perceived the dangers of the Jewish immigration as the unfairness and the impossibility of setting aside Judaism, where it existed.162 Under the later rulers, as we shall see in the sequel, the attitude of disinclination towards the Jews of the West did not in the main undergo change, although they in other respects follow more the example of Augustus than that of Tiberius. They did not prevent the Jews from collecting the temple-tribute in the form of voluntary contributions and sending it to Jerusalem. They were not checked, if they preferred to bring a legal dispute before a Jewish arbiter rather than before a Roman tribunal. Of compulsory levy for service, such as Tiberius enjoined, there is no further mention afterwards in the West. But the Jews never obtained in heathen Rome or generally in the Latin West a publicly recognised distinctive position and publicly recognised separate courts. Above all in the West—apart from the capital, which in the nature of the case represented the East also, and already in Cicero’s time included in it a numerous body of Jews—the Jewish communities nowhere had special extent or importance in the earlier imperial period.163
and in the East.It was only in the East that the government yielded from the first, or rather made no attempt to change the existing state of things and to obviate the dangers thence resulting; and accordingly, as the sacred books of the Jews were first made known to the Latin world in the Latin language by means of the Christians, the great Jewish movements of the imperial period were restricted throughout to the Greek East. Here no attempt was made gradually to stop the spring of hatred towards the Jews by assigning to them a separate position in law, but just as little—apart from the caprice and perversities of individual rulers—was the hatred and persecution of the Jews fomented on the part of the government. In reality the catastrophe of Judaism did not arise from the treatment of the Jewish Diaspora in the East. It was simply the relations, as they became fatefully developed, of the imperial government to the Jewish Rabbinical state that not merely brought about the destruction of the commonwealth of Jerusalem, but further shook and changed the position of the Jews in the empire generally. We turn to describe the events in Palestine under the Roman rule.
Judaea under the republic.The state of things in northern Syria was organised by the generals of the republic, Pompeius and his immediate successors, on such a footing, that the larger powers that were beginning to be formed there were again reduced, and the whole land was broken up into single city-domains and petty lordships. The Jews were most severely affected by this course; not merely were they obliged to give up all the possessions which they had hitherto gained, particularly the whole coast (iv. 142)iv. 136., but Gabinius had even broken up the empire formerly subsisting into five independent self-administering districts, and withdrawn from the high priest Hyrcanus his secular privileges (iv. 158)iv. 151.. Thus, as the protecting power was restored on the one hand, so was the pure theocracy on the other.
Antipater the Idumaean.This, however, was soon changed. Hyrcanus, or rather the minister governing for him, the Idumaean Antipater,164 attained once more the leading position in southern Syria doubtless through Gabinius himself, to whom he knew how to make himself indispensable in his Parthian and Egyptian undertakings (iv. 345)iv. 329.. After the pillage of the temple of Jerusalem by Crassus the insurrection of the Jews thereby occasioned was chiefly subdued by him (iv. 355)iv. 339.. It was for him a fortunate dispensation that the Jewish government was not compelled to interfere actively in the crisis between Caesar and Pompeius, for whom it, like the whole East, had declared. Nevertheless, after the brother and rival of Hyrcanus, Aristobulus as well as his son Alexander, had on account of their taking part for Caesar lost their lives at the hands of the Pompeians, the second son, Antigonus, would doubtless after Caesar’s victory have been installed by the latter as ruler in Judaea. But when Caesar, coming to Egypt after the decisive victory, found himself in a dangerous position at Alexandria, it was chiefly Antipater who delivered him from it (iv. 452)iv. 430., and this carried the day; Antigonus had to give way before the more recent, but more effective, fidelity.
Caesar’s arrangements.Caesar’s personal gratitude was not the least element in promoting the formal restoration of the Jewish state. The Jewish kingdom obtained the best position which could be granted to a client-state, complete freedom from dues to the Romans165 and from military occupation and levy,166 whereas certainly the duties and the expenses of frontier-defence were to be undertaken by the native government. The town of Joppa, and thereby the connection with the sea, were given back, the independence of internal administration as well as the free exercise of religion was guaranteed; the re-establishment, hitherto refused, of the fortifications of Jerusalem razed by Pompeius was allowed (707)47 B.C.. Thus under the name of the Hasmonaean prince, a half foreigner—for the Idumaeans stood towards the Jews proper that returned from Babylon nearly as did the Samaritans—governed the Jewish state under the protection and according to the will of Rome. The Jews with national sentiments were anything but inclined towards the new government. The old families, who led in the council of Jerusalem, held in their hearts to Aristobulus, and, after his death, to his son Antigonus. In the mountains of Galilee the fanatics fought quite as much against the Romans as against their own government; when Antipater’s son Herod took captive Ezekias, the leader of this wild band, and had caused him to be put to death, the priestly council of Jerusalem compelled the weak Hyrcanus to banish Herod under the pretext of a violation of religious precepts. The latter thereupon entered the Roman army, and rendered good service to the Caesarian governor of Syria against the insurrection of the last Pompeians. But when, after the murder of Caesar, the republicans gained the upper hand in the East, Antipater was again the first who not merely submitted to the stronger but placed the new holders of power under obligation to him by a rapid levying of the contribution imposed by them.