CHAPTER XX.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.

Titus appears to have remained about a month in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, offering sacrifices and rewarding his soldiers; the spoils of the captives were sent to Cesaræa. The season, already far advanced, prevented the young captain from leaving for Rome. He employed the winter in visiting different cities of the East and giving fêtes. He took with him bands of Jewish prisoners, who were delivered to the beasts, burned alive, or forced to fight against each other. At Paneas, on the 24th October, the birthday of his brother Domitian, more than 2,500 Jews perished in the flames, or in these horrible games. At Beyrout, on the 17th November, the same number of captives perished, to celebrate the birthday of Vespasian. Hatred of the Jews was the dominant sentiment in Syrian cities. These hideous massacres were hailed with joy. What was perhaps most frightful was that Josephus and Agrippa did not quit Titus during this time, and were witnesses of these monstrosities.

Titus made after this a long voyage into Syria going as far as the Euphrates. At Antioch he found the people exasperated against the Jews—they accused them of a fire which would have consumed the city. Titus contented himself with suppressing the bronze tables on which were engraved their privileges. He made a present to Antioch of the veiled Cherubim which covered the ark. This singular trophy was placed before the great western gates of the city, which took from that the name of the Gate of the Cherubim. Near that he dedicated a guadriga to the moon, 268for the help which she had given him daring the siege. At Daphne, he caused a theatre to be erected upon the site of the synagogue; an inscription indicated that this monument had been constructed with the booty obtained in Judea. From Antioch Titus returned to Jerusalem; he found there the Tenth Fretensis, under the orders of Terentius Rufus, still occupied in searching the caves by the destroyed city. The appearance of Simon, son of Gioras, coming out of the sewers when they believed that no one was to found there, had caused the subterranean fights to be be commenced; in fact, every day they discovered some wretch and some new treasures. In looking on the solitude which he had created, Titus was unable, it is said, to restrain a motion of pity. The Jews who were near him exercised upon him a cross influence; the phantasmagoria of an Oriental Empire, which they had caused to glitter before the eyes of Nero and Vespasian, reappeared around him, and went so far as to excite umbrage at Rome. Agrippa, Berenice, Josephus and Tiberius Alexander were more in favour than ever, and many augured for Berenice the rôle of a new Cleopatra. On the morning of the defeat of the rebels, men were irritated at seeing people of such a kind honoured and all powerful. As to Titus, he accepted more and more the idea that he was fulfilling a mission in providence. He was pleased to hear them quote the prophecies which they said referred to him. Josephus claims that he connected this victory with God, and recognised that he had been the object of a supernatural power. What is striking is that Philostratus, 120 years after, admits clearly these data and makes them the basis of an apocryphal correspondence between Titus and Apollonius. To believe him, Titus would have refused the crowns which were offered him, alleging that it was not he who had taken Jerusalem—that he had done nothing but lend his services to an irritated God. It is scarcely to be admitted that Philostratus 269had known the passage in Josephus. He drew the legend, which had become common, from the moderation of Titus. Titus returned to Rome in the month of May or June, 71. He held essentially a triumph which would surpass all that had been seen up till then. Simplicity, seriousness, the somewhat common manners of Vespasian, were not of a nature to give him prestige with a population which had been accustomed to ask before everything from its sovereigns prodigality and a grand style. Titus thought that a solemn entry would have a grand effect, and managed to surmount the repugnances of his old father on that point. The ceremony was organised with all the skill of the Roman decorators of that time. What distinguished it was the choice of local colour and historical truth. It pleased them also to reproduce the simple rites of the Roman religion as if they had the desire to oppose it to the conquered religion. At the opening of the ceremony Vespasian appeared as pontiff, his head more than half veiled in his toga, and made solemn prayers, and after him Titus prayed also according to the same rite. The procession was a marvel. All the curiosities, all rarities, the precious products of Oriental art, besides works achieved by the Græco-Roman art, figured there. It appears as if on the day after the greatest danger which the Empire encountered, they should make a pompous exhibition of their wealth. Some moving scaffolding, rising to the height of three or four tiers, excited universal wonder. All the episodes of the war were represented there; each series of tableaux terminated with the living representation of the strange appearance of Bar-Gorias and his capture—the pale visage and the haggard eyes of the captives disguised by the superb garments with which they clothed them In the midst was Bar-Gorias being led with great pomp to death; then came the spoils of the temple, the golden table, the golden seven-branched candlestick, the veil of the holy of holies, and to 270conclude, the series of trophies, the captive, the conquered one, the culprit par excellence, the book of the Torah. The conquerors closed the procession. Vespasian and Titus were mounted on two separate oars. Titus was radiant; as to Vespasian, who saw nothing in all this but a day lost for business, he did not seek to dissimulate his vulgar appearance as a business man, because the procession did not move rapidly enough, and said in a low voice, “It is well done. I have deserved it . . . Have I been foolish enough at my age, too!” Domitian, who was robed and mounted on a magnificent horse, caracoled near his father and elder brother. They arrived thus at the Sacred way. At the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus the ordinary termination of a triumph was reached. At the Clivus Capitolinus they made a halt to disembarrass themselves of the gloomy portion of the ceremony—the execution of the chief enemies. This odious custom was observed from point to point. Bar-Gorias, drawn out of the band of captives, was seen led away with a cord round his neck, amid most ignoble insults, to the Tarpeian rock, where they slew him. When a cry announced that Rome’s enemy was no more, an immense applause burst out and the sacrifices commenced. After the customary prayers the princes retired to the Palatine; the rest of the day was passed by the whole city in joy and festivity.

The volume of the Thora and the hangings of the sanctuary were taken into the imperial palace, the articles of gold, especially the table of the shew bread and the candlestick, were deposited in a great edifice, which Vespasian caused to be built opposite the Palatine on the other side of the Sacred way under the name of the Temple of Peace, and which was in some sort the Museum of the Flavii. A triumphal arch of Pentelic marble, which exists to this day, kept up the memory of this extraordinary pomp, and the representation of the principal objects which were borne 271in it. The father and son assumed that day the title of Imperatores but they refused the epithet of Judaic, either because they attached to the name of Judæi something odious or ridiculous, or to indicate that this war in Judea had been not a war against a foreign people, but a simple revolt of slaves put down, or in consequence of some secret thought analogous to that whose exaggerated expressions Josephus and Philostratus have transmitted to us. A coinage, in which Judea chained weeping under a palm tree, figured with the legend Ivdæa Capta Ivdæa Devicta, kept the remembrance of the fundamental exploit of the dynasty of the Flavii. They continued to strike pieces of this type until the days of Domitian. The victory was indeed complete. A captain of our race, of our blood, a man like ourselves, at the head of legions in the position in which we shall encounter if we can read it, many of our ancestors, has crushed the fortress of Semiticism and inflicted upon the theocracy, this redoubtable enemy of civilisation, the greatest defeat which it had ever received. It was the triumph of Roman or rational law, a creation quite philosophic, pre-supposing no revelation, over the Jewish Thora, the result of a revelation. This law, whose roots were partly Greek, but in which the practical genius of the Latins had such a splendid part, was the excellent gift which Rome made to the conquered in return for independence. Every victory of Rome was a progress of reason. Rome brought into the world a better principle in many points of view than that of the Jews; I mean to say the profane State resting upon a purely civil conception of society.

Every patriotic movement is entitled to respect, but the zealots were not only patriots, they were fanatics, assassins, of insupportable tyranny. What they wished was the maintenance of a law of blood which would permit the stoning of the evil thinker. What they rejected was the common law, laic and liberal, which does not 272interfere with belief in individuals. Liberty of conscience ought to go the length of the Roman law, while that has never gone forth from Judaism. From Judaism nothing can go forth but the synagogue and the church, censure of manners, obligatory morality, the convent, a life like that of the fifth century when humanity would have lost all its vigour, if the barbarians had not relieved it. In fact the reign of the man of war has a better effect than the temporal reign of the priest. For the man of war does not interfere with the mind. People think freely under him, while the priest demands from his subject the impossible, that is, to believe certain things and to bind themselves that they will hold the priest’s ways to be true. The triumph of Rome was therefore legitimate in some measure. Jerusalem had become an impossibility; left to themselves the Jews would have demolished it. But a great lacuna was to render this victory of Titus unfruitful. Our Western races, in spite of their superiority, have always shown a deplorable religious nullity. To draw from the Roman or Gallic religion anything analogous to the church was impossible. Now every advantage gained over a religion is useless if it be not replaced by another, satisfying, at least as well as it can, the needs of the heart. Jerusalem will be avenged for her defeat. She shall conquer Rome by Christianity, Persia by Islamism, shall destroy the old fatherland, and shall become for all higher minds the city of the heart.

The most dangerous tendency of its Thora, a law in itself at once moral and civil, giving the advantage to social questions over military and political ones, shall rule in the church. During all the Middle Ages, the individual, censured and overlooked by the community, shall fear the sermon and tremble before excommunication, and that shall be a just return after the moral indifference of heathen societies, a protest against the insufficiency of the Roman institution to improve the individual. It is certainly a detestable principle the 273saw of coercion which has been accorded to religious communities over their members. It is the worst error to believe that there is a religion which must be exclusively the good; the good religion being for each man what renders him pleasant, just, humble and benevolent. But the question of the government of humanity is difficult. The ideal is very high, the earth is very low. Even only to haunt the desert of philosophy, there one meets at every step madness, folly and passion. The old sages did not succeed in claiming any authority but by impostures which, for want of material force, gave them a power of imagination. Where would civilisation be if during centuries people had not believed that the Brahmin could blast by his glance; if the barbarians had not been convinced of the terrible revenges of St. Martins of Tours. Man has need of a moral pedagogy, for which the care of the family and that of the state do not suffice. In the intoxication of success, Rome scarcely remembered that the Jewish insurrection lived still in the basin of the Dead Sea. Three castles, Herodium, Machero and Masada were still in the hands of the Jews. It needed a man to close his eyes to the evidence to retain any hope after the taking of Jerusalem. The rebels defended themselves with as much passion as if the struggle had but just commenced. Herodium was scarcely anything but a fortified palace; it was taken without great effort by Lucillus Bassus. Machero presented many difficulties. Atrocities, massacres, and the sales of whole bands of Jews recommenced. Masada made one of the most heroic defences that history has recorded. Eleazar, son of Jairus, grand-son of Judas the Ganlonite, had possessed himself of this fortress in the early days of the revolt and made it a haunt of zealots, assassins, and brigands. Masada occupies the platform of an immense rock of nearly fifteen hundred feet high upon the shores of the Dead Sea. To possess himself of such a place it was necessary that Fulvius Sylvia should work positive 274miracles The despair of the Jews was boundless when they saw to be lost a position which they believed impregnable. At the instigation of Eleazar they killed each other, and set fire to their property which they had heaped up. Nine hundred and sixty persons perished thus. This tragical episode took place on the 15th of April, 72.

Judea after these events was overturned from top to bottom. Vespasian ordered all lands to be sold which were unowned by the death or captivity of their proprietors. The idea was suggested to him which later occurred to Hadrian, to rebuild Jerusalem under another name, and establish a colony there. He did not wish this, and annexed the whole country to the emperor’s own domains. He gave only to eight hundred veterans the borough of Emmaus, near Jerusalem, and made of it a little colony, a trace of which is preserved to this day in the name of the pretty village of Kulonia. A special tribute (fiscus) was imposed upon the Jews. In all the empire they were to pay annually to the capital a sum of drachmas which they had been accustomed to pay to their temple at Jerusalem. The little coterie of allied Jews, Josephus, Agrippa, Berenice, and Tiberius Alexander, chose Rome as a residence. We see it continued to play a considerable part, at one time obtaining for Judaism favourable regard at court—at other times pursued by the hatred of the enthusiastic believers; at other times conceiving more than a hope, especially when it seemed to require little for Berenice to become the wife of Titus, and hold the sceptre of the universe.

Reduced to solitude Judea remained tranquil; but the enormous overthrow of which it had been the theatre continued to provoke difficulties in the neighbouring countries. The fermentation of Judaism lasted until the end of the year 73. The zealots who had escaped massacre, the volunteers of the siege, and all the madmen of Jerusalem, spread themselves in Egypt and 275Cyrenia. The communities of these countries, rich, conservative, and, far removed from the Palestinian fanaticism, felt the danger which these lunatics brought among them. They charged themselves with arresting them and giving them up to the Romans. Many fled into Higher Egypt, where they were hunted like wild beasts. At Cyrene a brigand named Jonathan, a weaver by trade, acted the prophet, and like all Messiahs, persuaded two thousand Ebionim, or poor people, to follow him into the desert, where he promised to let them see prodigies and strange signs. The sensible Jews denounced him to Catullus, the governor of the country, but Jonathan revenged himself by some informations which caused him endless trouble. Nearly all the Jewish community of Cyrene, one of the most flourishing in the world, was exterminated. Its property was confiscated in the name of the Emperor. Catullus, who shewed in this matter much cruelty, was disavowed by Vespasian; he died under frightful hallucinations, which, according to certain conjectures, must have furnished the subject of a theatrical piece of fantastic scenery, the “Spectre of Catullus.”

Incredible fact! This long and terrible agony was not immediately followed by death. Under Trajan and under Hadrian we see the national Judaism revived, and still engaging in bloody combats; but the lot was evidently cast. The zealot was conquered beyond recovery. The way traced by Jesus, comprehended instinctively by the church of Jerusalem, who were refugees in Perea, became the way of Israel. The temporal kingdom of the Jews had been hateful, hard and cruel. The epoch of the Asmoneans when they enjoyed independence was their most sorrowful age. Was it Herodianism, Sadduceeism, that shameful alliance of a principality without grandeur with the priesthood, which was to be regretted? No, certainly, that was not the goal of “the people of God.” One would need to be blind not to see that the ideal institutions 276which pursued the Israel of God did not agree with national independence. These institutions, being incapable of making an army, could not exist in the vassaldom of a great empire, leaving much liberty to its rayahs, and disembarassing them of politics and not asking them for military service. The Achemidian empire had entirely satisfied those conditions of Jewish life, later the Caliphate, the Ottoman empire, satisfied them, and shall see developed in their bosom free communities such as those of the Armenian Parsees, the Greeks, nations without fatherland, brotherhood, supplying diplomatic and military autonomy, by the autonomy of the college and the church.

The Roman empire was not flexible, to lend itself to the communities which it united. Of the four empires, this was, according to the Jews, the harshest and most wicked. Like Antiochus Epiphanes, the Roman empire led the Jewish people astray from their true vocation, by causing it through reaction to form a kingdom or separate state. This tendency was not that of men who represented the genius of the race. In some points of view these last preferred the Romans. The idea of Jewish nationality became each day an obsolete idea, an idea of the furious and frenzied, against which the pious men made no scruple to claim the protection of their conquerors. The true Jew, attached to the Thora, making the holy books his rule and his life, as well as the Christian, lost in the hope of his kingdom of God, renounced more and more all nationality. The principles of Judas the Ganlonite, which was the soul of the great revolt, anarchical principles, according to which, God alone being “Master,” no man has the right to take that title, could produce bands of fanatics analogous to the Independents of Cromwell, they could found nothing durable. These feverish irruptions were the indication of the deep throes which threatened the heart of Israel, and which, by making it sweat blood for humanity, must necessarily cause it to perish in frightful convulsions.

The nations must choose in fact between the long peaceful and obscure destinies of that which lives for itself, and the trouble and stormy career of that which lives for humanity. The nation which agitates in its bosom social and religious problems is nearly always weak as a nation. Every country which dreams of a Kingdom of God, which looks for general ideas, which pursues a work of universal interest, sacrifices by this its particular destiny, grows feeble and loses its role as a terrestrial country. It was so with Judea, Greece, and Italy. It shall be so with France. One never carries with impunity fire within oneself. Jerusalem, the city of middle-class people, would have pursued indefinitely its mediocre history. It is because it had the incomparable honour of being the cradle of Christianity that it was the victim of the Johns of Gischala, of the Bar Giorases, in appearance plagues of their country, in reality the instruments of their apotheosis. Those zealots, whom Josephus treats as brigands and assassins, were politicians of the lowest order, military men with little capacity, but they lost heroically that which could not be saved. They lost a material city, they opened the spiritual Jerusalem, seated in her desolation much more gloriously than she was in the days of Herod and Solomon.

What did the conservatives and Sadducees desire? They wished something paltry; the continuation of a city of priests like Emesa, Tyana, or Comanus. Certainly they were not deceived when they declared that the rising of enthusiasts was the loss of the nation; but revolution and Messianism were indeed the vocation of this people, that by which it contributed to the universal work of civilisation. We deceive ourselves no longer when we say to France, “Renounce revolution or thou art lost”; but if the future belongs to some ideas which are elaborated obscurely in the heart of the people, it will be found that France will have its revenge by what caused in 1870-1871 its feebleness and its misery. At 278least of many violent strains given to truth, (everything in this sort is possible) our Bar-Giorases, our Johns of Gischala would never become great citizens, but they would play their part, and we shall perhaps see that more even than sensible people they were in the secrets of fate.

How shall Judaism, deprived of its holy city and its temple, transform itself? How shall Talmudism leave the position which events have made to the Israelite? That is what we shall see in our fifth book. In a sense, after the production of Christianity, Judaism has no longer a raison d’etre. From this moment the spirit of life has gone from Jerusalem. Israel has given all to the son of its sorrow, and it has been exhausted in this childbirth. The Elohim whom they believed they heard murmur in the temple: “Let us go forth, let us go forth!” spoke truly. The law of great creations is that the creator virtually expires in transmitting existence to another. After the complete inoculation of life with that which should continue it, the initiator is nothing but a dry stem, an attenuated being. But it is rare, nevertheless, that this sentence of nature is accomplished at once. The plant which has yielded its flower does not consent to die because of that. The world is full of these walking skeletons who survive the doom which has struck them. Judaism is of this number. History has no spectacle stranger than that of this conservation of a people in the state of a ghost, of a people who, during nearly a thousand years, have lost the sentiment of fact, have not written a readable page, have not transmitted an acceptable instruction. Should one be astonished if, after having thus lived for ages outside of the free atmosphere of humanity, in a cellar, if I may say so, in a condition of partial madness, it should come forth, astonished by the light etiolated?

As to the consequences which resulted for Christianity from the destruction of Jerusalem, they are so evident 279that one has but to indicate them. Already even many times we have had occasion to remark upon them.

The ruin of Jerusalem and of the temple was for Christianity an unequalled good fortune. If the argument attributed by Tacitus to Titus is exactly reported, the victorious general believed that the destruction of the temple would be the ruin of Christianity, as well as of that of Judaism. Never were men more completely deceived. The Romans imagined to cut away at the same time the shoot, but the shoot was already a bush which lived by its own life. If the temple had survived, Christianity would certainly have been arrested in its development. The temple, surviving, would have continued to be the centre of all Judaic works. They could never have ceased from looking upon it as the most holy place in the world, going there on pilgrimage and bringing tributes thither. The church of Jerusalem, grouped around the sacred parvis, would have continued, by the name of its primacy, to obtain the homages of all the world, to persecute the churches of Paul, demanding that to have the right to to call himself a disciple of Jesus, one must practice circumcision and observe the Mosaic code. Every fertile propaganda would have been forbidden, letters of obedience signed at Jerusalem would have been exacted from the missionary. A centre of indisputable authority, a patriarchate, composed of a sort of college of cardinals, under the presidency of persons analogous to James, pure Jews belonging to the family of Jesus, would have established itself and would have constituted an immense danger for the nascent church. When one sees St. Paul after so much ill-usage remain always attached to the church at Jerusalem, one can conceive what difficulties a rupture with these holy personages would have presented. Such a schism would have been considered an enormity equivalent to the abandonment of Christianity. The separation between it and Judaism would have been impossible; now this 280separation was the indispensable condition of the existence of the new religion, as the cutting of the umbilical cord is the condition of a new being. The mother will kill the infant. The temple, on the contrary, once destroyed, the Christians thought no more of it; soon they even held it to be a profane place. Jesus shall be everything to them. The church of Jerusalem was by the same blow reduced to a secondary importance. We shall see it reforming itself in the element which makes its strength, the desposyni members of the family of Jesus, the sons of Clopas; but it shall reign no more. This centre of hatred and exclusion, once destroyed, the reconciliation of parties opposed to the church of Jesus shall become easy. Peter and Paul shall be reconciled officially, and the terrible duality of nascent Christianity shall cease to be a mortal wound. Forgotten at the base of Batanea or Hauran, the little group which is connected with the relatives of Jesus, the Jameses, the Clopases, became the Ebionite sect and died slowly through insignificance and unfruitfulness.

The situation much resembles some things in the Catholicism of our days. No religious community has ever had more internal activity, more of a tendency to send forth from its bosom original creations than Catholicism for sixty years back. All these efforts, nevertheless, remain without result for one single reason; that reason is the absolute rule of the court of Rome. It is the court of Rome which has chased from the church Lamennais, Hermes, Döllinger, Father Hyacinthe, and all the Apologists who have defended it with some success. It is the court of Rome which has distressed and reduced to powerlessness Lacordaire and Montalembert, it is the court of Rome which by its Syllabus and its council has cut the whole future from liberal Catholics. When is this sad state of things to be changed? When Rome shall be no more the pontifical city, when the dangerous oligarchy which 281Catholicism has possessed itself of shall have ceased to exist. The occupation of Rome by the King of Italy will one day be probably reckoned in the history of Catholicism for an event as fortunate as the destruction of Jerusalem has been in the history of Christianity. Nearly all Catholics have groaned over it, just as without doubt the Judeo-Christians of the year 70 looked upon the destruction of the temple as the most sad calamity. But the result will shew how superficial this judgment is. Whilst weeping over the end of Papal Rome, Catholicism will draw from it the greatest advantages. To material uniformity and death we shall see following in its bosom discussion, movement, life, and variety.