Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 81

The Jerusalem temple was burned to the ground by Titus’s army in August of 70, and the land was fully subdued soon thereafter. Any recognizable Jewish infrastructure was gone and a Roman garrison was stationed in Jerusalem. The number of Jewish casualties, of death and enslavement, was enormous. Moreover, vast tracts of Jewish lands were turned over to the direct ownership of the emperor, rendering Jews tenant farmers, working what had in many cases been their own land.

All Jews were made to pay a new tax, the fiscus Judaicus. This punitive measure regulated that the annual half-shekel that all Jews had previously paid to maintain the Temple cult, now be paid to the cult of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome. While not economically burdensome, it galled.

Though many thousands of those Jews who survived were sold into slavery (Josephus reports some 97,000) and the land was in shambles, Rome did not exact exceptional retributions, and in some ways, Judea emerged in better shape in the war’s aftermath. Most Jewish rights were reinstated, and the unrest inspired the Romans to upgrade the provincial status of Judea. Perhaps having learned from the disastrous mismanagement of the procurators, after the war Judea became an imperial province, ruled by a governor of senatorial class with a legion at his disposal (in the coming decades Judea would be made a Consular Province called Syria Palaestina). As before the war, the seat of the provincial government was Caesarea. What this meant in quotidian terms for Jews was that the province was better run. Law and order could be maintained, among Jews no less than among the Roman leadership, retarding at least one of the accelerants of the uprising. The influx of Roman soldiers and their salaries would have been a boon to the economy as well.

Jewish sources for the interbellum are sparse, but we know that enormous changes took place in Judaism between the war and the appearance of the Mishnah at beginning of the 3rd century. The theological and political extremism of the Zealots and other messianic groups did not vanish, though it was subdued. Apocalyptic texts such as 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch were likely composed late in the first or early in the second century and communicate both a despair over foreign rule and a cautious hope for eschatological judgement. Dreams of liberation and vindication lingered. Without the temple’s infrastructure, the priestly class seem to have vanished as a leadership force. Surprisingly, there is no record of a new high priest being anointed; the Sadducees leave no records. The Pharisees, whose authority, according to Josephus and the Gospels was based in their religious and Torah expertise and popularity with the people, more than in than temple proper, survive and reemerge, altered, in what becomes the rabbinic movement.

If there were Jewish attempts to rebuild the temple in the immediate aftermath of the destruction, there is no record of it. This did not mean that statist or revolutionary thinking vanished, rather that the land and its people were, for a time, exhausted. The claims of Hasmomean-Herodian royal lineage whether real or symbolic, which was so highly prized by Josephus and his ally Agrippa II, makes its final stand in the Bar Kokhbah rebellion of 132–36 CE.

The causes of revolt are murky. The main sources upon which scholars have relied are found in Roman histories: a passage in Historia Augustus (v.Had 14.2, late 3rd–early 4th c.) blames the war on a Hadrianic ban on circumcision; Cassius Dio (3rd c.) says Emperor Hadrian’s (117–138 CE) decision to make Jerusalem a Roman colony, Colonia Aelia Capitolina, sparked war (Hist.Rom. 69.12). Though both sources have problems, recent scholarship agrees that the ban on circumcision cannot have been the cause of the rebellion.²¹ More likely, for Jews imagining that their temple would ever be revived, the erection of a pagan altar in its precincts may have driven the pious among them to action.

To learn about the events of the war itself, we have a trove of letters and documents relating to the revolt that was discovered in 1960s in a cave near the Dead Sea, as well as coins and archaeological remains from Judea and the Galilee. Other evidence for the uprising comes from Christian polemical materials and equally biased rabbinic mentions.

Whatever the precise causes, in 132 CE a man named Shimon bar/ben Kosibah led a rebellion against Rome. Bar Kosibah’s movement was inspired both by the messianic ideologies of the late 1st century CE and by Hasmonean symbolism. Carefully foregoing the title king (melekh), Simon bar Kosibah adopts the title nasi (prince, leader)—a title with biblical roots, which evades the Bible’s explicitly anti-monarchic ideology, and sets him as Israel’s charismatic »redeemer« in pious subordination to religious sensibility. Nonetheless, despite the avoidance of the title king, monarchic ideology suffuses his rule. Schäfer traces the title’s possible messianic genealogy through prophetic and late second temple sources such as those found at Qumran.²² Bar Kokhbah, »son of a star« is a messianic play on his name that casts him as the fulfillment of certain messianic prophecies:

a star shall come out of Jacob,and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the borderlands of Moab, and the territory of all the Shethites. (Numbers 24:17, NRSV)

Words on the coins minted during the rebellion such as »redemption« and »freedom« signal ideological sympathy with the extremists of the first rebellion. A temporal monarchic ambition is visible as well; Bar Kokhbah coinage adopts distinctly Hasmonean symbols of the lulav and Temple as well as their use of paleo-Hebrew on their coins—a self-consciously archaizing choice, being neither the current Aramaic letter forms nor the commonly-spoken Aramaic of the rebels. Bar Kosibah is the new Judah Maccabee, harnessing his revolutionary credentials and the promise of dynasty.

The war itself was hard fought and at first the Jews met with military success unanticipated by the Romans (perhaps even by the Jews themselves). Coins audaciously proclaim sovereignty and the beginning of a new era; one reads: »Year two of the freedom of Israel.« When the Roman army under General Sextus Julius Severus finally put down the last of it, the devastation to Judea was utter. Hadrian instituted harsh anti-Jewish policies that lasted as long as his reign (most were rescinded by his successor, Antoninus Pius, 138–161 CE). In the years that followed, the land and cities of Judea, emptied of Jewish bodies, were refilled with Roman colonies and reshaped as a Hellenized landscape, replete with images of pagan gods.²³ Hadrian, in a final coup, wiped the name Judea off the map calling the region instead Syria Palaestina.

Despite the prominent place of halakhic observance in his correspondence and the possibility of sympathy felt for the struggle by Rabbi Akiba²⁴, Bar Kosibah was not an early politically-ambitious harbinger of the rabbinic movement. The uprising was instead, Peter Schäfer argues²⁵, the last gasp of temple-based Judaism. Only in the smoldering aftermath of the Bar Kokhbah rebellion do Judean Jews begin to digest the possibility of Judaism without animal sacrifice.