From Abraham to Napoleon: Conclusion

Jewish Revival

The empire of the Babylonians was not fated to last, and Cyrus the Persian, after entering the city in triumph in 539, promulgated an edict authorizing the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem.  It has been conjectured that the Persians were rewarding Babylonian Jews for their covert assistance in the defeat of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, but, there is no need to posit such a special relationship.  Cyrus’s general policy was to reverse the forced resettlement of inflicted on subject nations by Babylonian and Assyrian rulers, whose strategy of divide et impera would be emulated by later tyrants.  There was probably no immediate return of Jews en masse, though groups of settlers gradually made their way back to the homeland.  It is important to note that a sizeable proportion of Jews did not return and continued to live in communities outside of Palestine.  

The rebuilding of the temple was actually undertaken about 520, and, despite their poverty and desolation, Jews set about the task of rebuilding their nation.  However, relations with their co-religionists in Israel did not improve.  The Israelites of Samaria offered to share in the cost and effort of rebuilding the temple, but their overtures were rebuffed, and the rupture was deepened with the arrival (perhaps, in the 5th century) of Ezra, who forbade intermarriage of the people of Judah with Samaritans (Israelites) on the grounds that the latter, after the overthrow of Israel, had intermarried with the strangers settled among them. 

Jewish opinion was not unanimous, however, and the stories of Ruth and Jonah may have taken shape at this time in protest against the policy of exclusivity. Samaritans accepted only first 6 books of the Old Testament, perhaps because some of the later books displayed an overt bias against the northern Kingdom. The break was made permanent, when the Samaritans constructed their own temple on Mt. Gezir, and in the Roman period animosity occasionally flared into open violence. 

The Persian Empire, while preferable in many respects to its predecessors, not only taxed its subjects but in adding the stipulation that taxes be paid in Persian coinage, worked additional hardship.  By the mid- mid-Fourth century, revolts broke out in Egypt and Phoenicia.  Jewish participation may have been the motive for their deportation to the wilderness of Hyrcania (on the Caspian Sea).  In 333, however, Alexander the Great defeated Darius III, and all of what was coming to be known as Judea (that is Judah and Israel) passed into the control of Alexander and his successors in Egypt and Syria.  

Although the Ptolemies, as successors to the pharaohs, attempted to maintain control of Palestine (323-c.200 B.C.),  Antiochus III the Great, the Seleucid ruler of Syria and Asia Minor, eventually succeeded in incorporating the region into his empire.  Under the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms, much of the Middle East swiftly became Hellenized, as the material and cultural advantages of Greek civilization became known.  In the early 3^rd century, there were even diplomatic overtures to the Spartans, though the claim (1 Maccabees 12: 5-23) that the Spartans acknowledged kinship with the Jews is highly implausible, though the Spartans, as a center of resistance to Macedonian power, may well have been admired and courted by the Jewish leadership. 

Judea was far from immune to this process of assimilation, but there were limits.  Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-63 B.C.) , strapped for cash, was bribed by Jason, a Hellenized member of noble priestly family who wanted to be appointed High Priest.  Jason added an additional douceur if the king would give Jerusalem the status of a Greek polis.  Antiochus granted the request, and was warmly welcomed by the elite class when he visited the country. 

Still short of money, however, the king took a second bribe from Menelaus, whom he appointed high priest, thus violating Jewish tradition.   The followers of the rival priests soon began attacking each other, and when Menelaus plundered the Temple,  opinion turned against him and the king who appointed him.  Antiochus, who hardly knew what deep waters he was getting into, responded to Jewish unrest by forbidding circumcision and temple ceremonies , and he even desecrated the temple itself.  This was an unprecedented act of religious persecution for a Greek ruler and very uncharacteristic of Antiochus, who was otherwise regarded as civilized and humane.  Jews were understandably outraged and even Hellenized Jewish aristocrats took part in the independence movement led by the priestly Hasmonean family (the  Maccabees).  Judas Maccabeus and Jonathan and Simon, his brothers and successors, with the invaluable support of his Roman allies, took advantage of Seleucid problems (foreign wars and disputed successions) to win independence for Israel and to establish a dynasty that ruled Palestine until the mid First Century B.C.   

Simon assumed the title “ethnarch,” and, although after his murder in 135, Antiochus VII reconquered Judea, his son John Hyrcanus I, again in alliance with Rome, restored independence and expanded his territory to include Idumaea.  His successors, Aristobulus and Alexander Jannaeus (the Greek names are significant!), annexed  Galilee, where a policy of proselytization and forced conversion was carried out under Aristobulus.  John also took over Samaria, where he destroyed the temple on Mt. Gerizim and destroyed the Hellenized town of Samaria.  His nephew Alexander Jannaeus, who assumed the title king, extended his power to include the coastline, where--hellenized, as he was--he treated the Greek cities with a brutal severity, arousing anti-Jewish resentments that would long outlast his reign.

Hasmonean kings forged the largest Jewish state since the time of Solomon, and the large number of Greeks and Hellenized cities included in their realm posed problems for a state founded in a war of religious liberation. On the other hand, the success of a thriving Jewish state was not sufficiently attractive to most Jews in the Middle East, who had never returned from the Babylonian Captivity and still preferred to live outside the borders of Judea.

Roman Judea

As an ally, Rome was all-too reliable, and in defeating the kingdoms established by Alexander’s successors (to say nothing of Carthage), the city on the Tiber became mistress of the Mediterranean world.   Lucullus had wrested Syria from Parthian control, and Pompeius Magnus established the region as a Roman province.  Putting his own candidate into the seat of the High Priest at Jerusalem, whose temple he profaned, the Roman general made Hasmonean Judea a client-state under the supervision of the Roman governor.  The days of Hasmonean rule were numbered, and Antipater, an “Arab” from Idumea (a territory of Edomite refugees who had recently converted, more or less, to Judaism), rose under John Hyrcanus II to become virtual dictator.  Under his son Herod (37 B.C.-4 A.D.), Judea was to experience one final moment of glory as a Jewish state.  

As a highly philohellenic convert (if that) to Judaism, Herod had to be a first-class statesman to foster Greco-Roman civilization without inciting rebellion among the Jewish majority.  He proved himself up to the job, though with the advancing years, controversies and conspiracies broke out in his complex family (he married perhaps ten times!)  His ruthless crackdowns and executions bore the mark of a paranoia that give some credibility to the otherwise uncorroborated biblical story of Herod’s slaughter of the innocent.  

Augustus divided up the kingdom among Herod’s surviving sons, but in 6 A.D. Judea became a Roman province (though for a few years it was part of the principality of Herod Agrippa in 41-44) governed by a praefectus, rather than by a governor of the senatorial order.  The Roman prefect, in succeeding to the position of Herod and his sons, also inherited the right to appoint high priests.  Whether ruled by tetrarchs or controlled directly by Rome, Judea was always on the verge of revolt.  Significant uprisings took place in 4 BC (Augustus’ census), in 6 AD, and again in 39, when Jews attacked gentiles for worshipping the emperor.  Caligula responded by ordering his own statue placed in the Holy of Holies.  The prudent local commander took his time about complying, and the emperor was assassinated before the deed  was done.

Despite their recalcitrance, Jews enjoyed a unique position within the Roman Empire, where they were found, not only in Syria and Palestine but also in the cities of Egypt, Italy, Asia (Turkey), Greece, and even in Gaul and Britain.  (A large number also lived under Parthian rule, especially in Babylonian territory.) Not only was their religion tolerated, but Jews were exempted both from military service and from the obligation to worship the emperor.  Nonetheless, the incompetence of the procurators combined with Jewish national sensitivities to create an unstable situation that burst into violence (in the 60’s) when, after a series of clashes between Syrians and Jews over who could claim Caesarea, the provincial capital rebuilt built by Herod.  When the decision went in favor of the Syrian Greeks, it was the signal for the wholesale revolt, which broke out in 66. 

In the first and most important popular uprising against the Roman Empire, Jewish rebels unexpectedly defeated the Roman army (an unprecedented action) and forced it into retreat.  The disorders continued until the arrival of Vespasian, a seasoned commander, in 67.  On the death of Nero, Vespasian, returning to Rome to make himself emperor, left the war to his son Titus who captured and destroyed.  Judea became an imperial province governed by an imperial legate with Caesarea, not Jerusalem as the capital. 

Although Jews retained their privileges within the empire, they were no longer treated as political community.  Jews continued to give Romans trouble, and uprisings were serious enough to distract Emperor Trajan (115-16 A.D.) from re-exerting Roman control over Southern Mesopotamia.  In a classic case of escalation, Jews increased the disturbances, while Hadrian, determined to end the problem, forbade the reading of the Torah and the observance of the Sabbath. Under the brilliant (though doomed) leadership of Simon “Bar Kochba” (or Son of the Star-- he was acknowledged as messiah by Aqiba, the greatest rabbi of the day), Jews recaptured Jerusalem, and it took two years for the Roman army, in a merciless campaign, to restore imperial authority. The province was renamed “Syria Palaestina” and to finish the job of denationalizing the Jews, Hadrian established a Roman colony at Jerusalem (renamed Aelia Capitolina) and erected an altar to Jupiter on the site of the temple. Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem and its environs as well as other specified locations. The privileged status of Jews within the empire, however, went unchanged, and the rabbis turned from political aspirations to a renewed study of law and religion that they carried out in schools established in Galilee and all over the Middle East.

Judea became very much of a backwater in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.  However, Jerusalem, which had sunk into insignificance, took on new significance with the conversion of Constantine, who restored the city as center of Christendom.  The entire province, which benefited from the construction of churches and from the steady stream of pilgrims, grew more prosperous, perhaps, than it has ever been.  Constantine’s anti-Christian nephew Julian, for rather different motives, sought to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, though his efforts were deterred by a combination of earth tremors and fireballs.

In the division of the Empire between East and West (395), Palestine was inevitably included in the portion assigned to Constantinople.  With the loss of the West and increasing Gothic pressures, eastern provinces such as Palestine and Syria assumed greater importance by end of 5th century.  Although Palestine was predominantly Christian, a sizable Jewish population existed, but even without a state or even a province to call their own, Jews remained a problem for the empire.  When Theodosius II (in 438) excluded  pagans and Jews (and thus also Samaritans) from public offices that conferred honor and forbade construction of new synagogues, the situation became dangerous.  In 484 Samaritans staged an uprising in which Christians were massacred, and a similar tumult took place under Justinian in 529.  The Samaritans must have expected help from the Persians, who naturally supported every uprising within the empire.   In 503 Emperor Anastasius, at war with the Persians, was informed that the Jews of Constantia were planning to deliver the city to the enemy.  Discovery of the plot led to a general massacre of Jewish inhabitants. 

During the dark days of the empire, after the loss of the West and the failure of Justinian’s glorious but impossible project to restore the empire, the Persians succeeded in conquering Syria in 611 and, with the help of Galilean Jews, Palestine in 614.  In the sack of Jerusalem, the Persians were assisted by Jerusalem’s Jewish population which rose up for revenge and were accused of playing a leading role in massacring much of the Greek Christian population.  The province was recovered by Heraclius, who in 630 restored the Holy Cross to Jerusalem.  

The Byzantine triumph was short-lived.  There were serious religious tensions between the Orthodox- Catholic rulers in Constantinople who accepted the Athanasian understanding of the Trinity and the Syrian and Palestinian Christians who inclined toward monophysitism (which minimized or eliminated the distinction between the Father and the Son).  And, in conquering the Persian state, Heraclius eliminated the last buffer that might have absorbed some of the shock of the rising power in the Middle East: the Arab followers of Mohammed, who, under the leadership first of Abu Bekr and then Omar, conquered Syria and Palestine a few years later (by 640).  

The Arab conquest was an unmitigated disaster for Christians in the Middle East.  People living in the country side, even before the actual conquest, had been subjected to terror-raids in which a vast amount of property was destroyed and large numbers of peasants killed or forced into slavery.  Christians and Jews in the cities, seeing the alternative, were quick to capitulate, and while they were able to preserve their lives and, in some cases, their property, they quickly were reduced to the status of “dhimmi,” (an ironical term meaning the protected ones) subject to punitive taxation and deprived of the ordinary civil rights (e.g., the right to testify against a Muslim in court) they had enjoyed under Roman and Byzantine rule.  Nonetheless, educated Christians and Jews were an indispensable source of trained bureaucrats and public officials.

 The situation was eventually stabilized, and under the Abassid Caliphs of Damascus, Jerusalem began to be treated as a holy city to rival Mecca.  Caliph Abdalmalik endowed the city with the Dome of the Rock.   During his reign and under his successors (early 8^th century),  conversion to Islam increased, and Muslims began to replace Christians and Jews in government service.  Palestine slowly lapsed into being a backwater, subject to raiding parties of predatory Bedouins.

Emperor John Tzimiskes temporarily reconquered Syria and most of Palestine in the late 10th century, and the region became a bone of contention between Constantinople and Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt who took Palestine in 969.  At first, Fatimid rule meant few changes for Jews and Christians, but by the early 11th century Caliph Hakim began an insane persecution of Christians and Jews, and utterly destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, though after Hakim’s death, the Byzantine Empire negotiated the right to rebuild the church.

Jerusalem had been taken and sacked in 1070 by Seljuq Turks, who were less “lenient” than the Arabs had been, not only in their treatment of local Christians but also in denying access to Western pilgrims.  The violence so alarmed Emperor Alexios Komnenos that he called upon western rulers to assist him in delivering Middle-Eastern Christians from Islamic oppression.  Pope Urban II responded by calling a crusade whose objects were to protect Eastern Christians and to liberate the Holy Sepulchre.  Jerusalem was captured during the First Crusade (1099) and made capital of the small Latin kingdom under Godfrey of Bouillon.  Jews, who had supported the Muslims against the Crusaders, were badly treated.  The situation of the crusader states, if only because of the distance from their home base, was inherently precarious, and in 1159 King Baldwin III of Jerusalem put his kingdom under protection of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, but by 1187 the Kurdish Prince Saladin defeated the Latin forces at the battle of Hattin and entered Jerusalem.

Neither the Frankish crusaders nor Saladin’s successors showed the determination of earlier generations, and Emperor Frederick II signed a treaty with the Egyptian Sultan to restore Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth to the Christians for a period of ten years, but Mongol invaders, who had  taken service with the  rulers of Egypt, ravaged Syria and Palestine and massacred the inhabitants of Jerusalem.  This devastation was followed by Tatar raids in the second half of the 13th century.  Egypt was saved by the energetic action of the Mameluke Sultan’s general Bibars, who first made himself Sultan and then proceeded to the expel Christians from their remaining possessions in Palestine.  Mameluke means slave in Turkish, and most of these were  Turkish or Circassian mercenaries.  It was not until the 14th century that Christians felt safe enough to come out of hiding and return to Palestine.

The Ottoman Turks, extending their empire in the eastern Mediterranean, conquered Mameluke Egypt in 1516 and took over Syria, Palestine included, and for three centuries the peoples of Palestine shared the vicissitudes of the Ottoman Empire.  In theory Palestine was ruled, except for a brief period when northern Palestine was incorporated into the Lebanese kingdom of Fakhr ed-Din (1596-1634), more or less directly from Constantinople.  In practice,  Ottoman power was often diffused.  The pashalik of Damascus  controlled ten sanjaks, including the sanjaks of Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus, Sidon, and Beirut, which corresponded roughly with the territory of Palestine.  Suleiman the lawgiver rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in 1537,  and those are the walls which encircle ancient Jerusalem today.  

The region, throughout the Turkish period, was scarcely ever entirely safe from brigandage and  turmoil.    After Fakhr ad-Din’s bid for an independent power base in Lebanon and Palestine was squelched, the area fell increasingly under the power of Bedouin sheikhs of first the Tarabin tribe.    In the 18th century, Acre became a center of independent power under Dahir el-Amir of the Beni Zaidan tribe.   He was remembered for his fairness to Christians and Jews and his vigor in stopping the Bedouin raids.  He defeated a coalition put together by Osman, the pasha  of Damascus, but his rebellion was put down by a former protégé, the Albanian Ahmad “the butcher,” who made the mistake (in 1797) of expelling a French merchant colony, thereby giving Napoleon Bonaparte a reason for taking Acre  as a step toward conquering the Middle East.

The ancient land of Palestine, the passageway from Egypt to Asia, through which invading armies had to travel in every century, hallways had a diversified population, and to this day it has never acquired the ethnic stability that is the dream of either Palestinian or Israeli nationalists.  There is no “pure” Jewish race and no authentic Palestinian ethnicity. Ancient Jews intermarried and interbred with neighbors, subjects, and conquerors in the Middle East, and with the Slavic, Germanic, and Latin peoples of Europe.  The current Muslim population of Palestine is an amalgam of ancient Syrian and Canaanite peoples with a strong infusion of Arab settlers, who came in as a result of the Muslim conquest—to say nothing of the Greeks, Franks, Italians, and Turks, who came to trade, conquer, and rule the area.  The political myths of Zionists and Palestinian nationalists are just that, myths, and like most nationalist myths, their main effect is to inspire hated against “the other.”

Jews are defined by religion, not race, which is why the Israeli government has finally accorded citizenship to Ethiopian Jews.  The case of Palestinian ethnicity is still more complicated, since until fairly recent times a sizable number of Palestinians were Christian.  However, after centuries of Islamic persecution, which seriously depleted their numbers, Christians have been subject, since the late 1940’s, to unfair and discriminatory treatment from the government of Israel, which lumps them together with Palestinian Muslims.  That Christians in Palestine often side with the descendants of their persecutors speaks volumes about their attitude and their experience.

Ethnic and religious conflicts almost always can be illustrated as a conflict of historical myths that are invoked to justify current acts of aggression.  According to the Palestinian myth, the Palestinian people, who have lived on the land virtually forever, were driven from their homes by Zionist colonists from Europe, who continue to persecute Arabs and are forever extending their territory by making unauthorized  and illegal settlements at the expense of the peaceful Palestinians.  In the Israeli myth, peace-loving and harmless Jews were driven from their homeland at the point of Roman swords some 2000 years ago, persecuted by Christians in Europe and nearly exterminated by Nazis in the 1940’s.; returning to the homeland of their ancestors, they acquired the  land fair and square,  only to be set upon by Arab neighbors who want only to destroy them.  The current Palestinian terror campaign, an exact parallel with the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, only proves their case.

There is some truth in both versions, as there usually is in nationalist myths.  But there was no Palestinian people or nation before the creation of the state of Israel, only a population of Muslim and Christian Arabs living under Turkish rule before the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and then under the British Mandate.  In the 20^th century, their national dream, if they had one, was of a united Arab state liberated from Turkish officials.  They were no more native to the soil than the Greeks or Turks or Franks, who had come to the region, and to the extent they were Arabs, they represented an invading force that had stolen the land from Syrian Christians and Jews who lived under Byzantine rule.

The Jews, on the other hand, were never entirely expelled from Israel, but the vast majority of Jews, since the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, have always preferred to remain outside Israel. European Christians were not kind to the Jews who lived among them, but no less kind than the Jews had been to the non-Jewish populations they once ruled.  Their return to Palestine, which began in the 19^th century, was facilitated by Turkish rulers who regarded them as, at the very least, unsusceptible to Arab nationalism.   Zionist settlers, it is true, legitimately acquired much of their property—though under circumstances that do little credit to either party—but since 1948 the Israeli government has made much use of the fiction that Palestinians who were driven from their homes in fear of persecution and murder, had left to join the enemies of Israel and had thus forfeited their claims.