The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict Read online

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  Hieroglyphics

  Judea and Judah are both terms used for the southern part of historic Israel, which included the cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, and Bethlehem. Judea is the Roman rendering of the Hebrew Yehuda (or Judah). The word “Jew” comes from the Latin Judaeus, meaning an “inhabitant of Judea.”

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  As the civil war was brewing between Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, the Roman army, under the command of General Pompey, conquered Syria, a land situated along Israel’s northern border. It was Pompey to whom Aristobulus turned for help. In a classic case of being careful what you wish for, the Romans helped Aristobulus regain power for only a brief time before conquering the Jewish kingdom for Rome in 63 B.C.E. and renaming it Judea.

  The last Jewish kingdom survived roughly 80 years. The grandsons of the Hasmoneans who had won Jewish independence lost it in large part because of their jealousy and greed. In all likelihood, however, with their own empire expanding, the Romans would not have permitted the Jews to keep their kingdom much longer anyway.

  Caesar Comes Calling

  After Pompey took power, Aristobulus rejected Roman rule and Hyrcanus, who Pompey had initially ordered off the throne, submitted to the Romans. Pompey subsequently decided to make Hyrcanus the high priest and gave him a new title—ethnarch—which gave him authority over the Judean people, though with less power than that of a king. Pompey also appointed a man from Idumea, an area south of Judea, named Antipater as the political adviser to Hyrcanus.

  After Pompey was defeated by Caesar in 48 B.C.E., Antipater convinced the new emperor to make him the administrator of Judea. When Antipater was murdered by his own family in 43 B.C.E., his son Herod succeeded him.

  Herod Takes Command

  Herod went to Rome to win favor from the powers that be, which, after the assassination of Caesar, was Octavian. Herod’s efforts worked; he was appointed king of the Jews. He then ordered Hyrcanus executed. The other brother, Aristobulus, had been captured by Pompey and released by Caesar. On his way back to Judea, Pompey’s allies poisoned him.

  With the feuding brothers out of the picture, only one Hasmonean remained: Antigonus, son of Aristobulus. He had fled to Parthia after his father’s capture. While Herod was in Rome, Antigonus convinced the Parthians to join him in a revolt against the Romans. He drove the Romans out of Judea and reestablished a kingdom, placing himself on the throne and making himself high priest.

  After three years of fighting, Herod’s Roman-backed army wrested control of Jerusalem and the rest of Judea from Antigonus (who was executed). Herod now sat on the throne and was truly “king of the Jews.” During his three decades of despotic rule, Herod murdered members of the Sanhedrin and limited its authority, killed two of his sons who were descendants of the Hasmoneans, and ordered the death of all male infants in Bethlehem because of a prophecy that a rival to his power would be born there.

  The Second Temple

  Although he was despised by the Jews, Herod left a number of lasting monuments to his rule that are now of particular significance to Jewish history. The most significant of Herod’s projects was the rebuilding of the second Temple in the first century B.C.E. It took 10,000 people and 1,000 priests 9 years to complete the project.

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  Ask the Sphinx

  Today the holiest spot in the world for the Jews is the Western Wall. This is not the remaining wall of the Temple itself, but of the Temple Mount on which the Temple stood.

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  The first Temple, built by King Solomon, was a relatively small building on top of Mount Moriah. Herod doubled the area of the Temple Mount and surrounded it with four massive retaining walls. The western wall is the longest—1,591 feet—and includes the Jewish area of prayer known as the Western Wall. The largest stone in the wall is 45 feet long, 15 feet wide, 15 feet high, and weighs more than a million pounds.

  The Destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple

  When Herod died, two of his sons were appointed to rule the Jews. They continued their father’s despotic tradition, but were eventually replaced by a series of procurators, or governors, who ruled Judea. As Roman rule grew more repressive, two factions once again emerged among the Jewish population: those who favored accommodation with the Romans, and those who wanted to rebel. The latter became known as the Zealots.

  In 66 C.E., after the procurator Florus provoked the Jews through a variety of activities that ranged from stealing silver from the Temple to desecrating the vestments of the high priest, the Zealots started a revolt. At first they were successful, routing Roman armies in Jerusalem, but the Romans returned with a much larger force based in Syria and conquered the base of most of the radicals in Galilee.

  The Jews hoped to hold off the Romans in fortified Jerusalem, but they began a fratricidal battle in which the Zealots murdered Jewish leaders who refused to go along with their rebellion. The Romans laid siege to the city and, in the year 70 C.E., they overwhelmed the remaining defenders and destroyed the second Temple. Though the Jews held the mighty Romans at bay for four years, the Romans’ ultimate victory was never in doubt, and the consequences of the Jews’ defeat was devastating. Not only was the Temple destroyed, but also perhaps as many as one million Jews were killed and many survivors enslaved.

  After the victory, the Roman emperor Vespasian and his son Titus, who had led the campaign against the Jews, conducted a procession in which they displayed ritual objects and captured rebel leaders. This event is portrayed on the Arch of Titus in Rome.

  The Rabbi in the Coffin

  Although what is known as the Great Revolt was a disaster for the Jewish people, one important development came out of the defeat, which helped the Jews survive in the long run.

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  Mysteries of the Desert

  One of the Galilean generals who fought the Romans was a Jew named Joseph ben Mattathias, better known as Flavius Josephus (38–100 C.E.). When his army was defeated, Josephus was captured and brought before Roman Emperor Vespasian, who took a liking to him. Josephus subsequently accompanied the Roman legion during the Judean campaign and recorded what he saw in the History of the Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, the two most important eyewitness accounts of this period. Because he joined the Romans and his writings were clearly biased toward their point of view, Josephus has always been considered a traitor by the Jews.

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  During the siege, one of the leading Jewish teachers, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, foresaw that the battle would be lost and that the Jewish people faced a catastrophe if they didn’t find some way to perpetuate the faith. His idea was to create an academy to educate future generations of Jews. He had one small problem, however; he was trapped in Jerusalem, and the Zealots killed anyone who tried to leave the city.

  The rabbi devised a ruse. His followers announced that the great Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had succumbed to the plague. They asked the Zealot leaders for permission to bury him outside the city walls to prevent the spread of the dreaded disease. The Zealots agreed, and the rabbi was carried in a coffin out of the city and delivered to the camp of General Vespasian.

  It is hard to imagine the bizarre scene that must have taken place when the bearded rabbi emerged from the coffin and told the mighty Roman leader he had a prophecy and a request to make. The rabbi told Vespasian that he would soon be emperor. He then asked that he be allowed to establish a Jewish school when this happened. Vespasian agreed to the request on the condition that the prophecy was correct.

  The rabbi was apparently an astute political analyst. A year after his prophecy, the Roman Senate made Vespasian emperor. Vespasian, in turn, fulfilled his promise and allowed Yochanan ben Zakkai to open his academy in the town of Yavneh, north of Jerusalem.

  Like the prophets who helped establish a Jewish tradition in Babylonia after the destruction of the first Temple, Yochanan ben Zakkai helped Judaism survive after the destruction of the second Temple by creating a religious model that
didn’t depend on a temple building, sacrifices, or even independence.

  Zealots at Masada

  After the Great Revolt, 960 Jews escaped to the Herodian fortresses at Masada. For two years, this small band of Zealots held off the Roman Tenth Legion. Anyone who has walked up the snake path to the top of the plateau that is Masada—a trip that takes about 45 minutes—knows how imposing the Romans’ task must have been.

  The Romans tried attacking Masada with catapults and other weapons, but they were ineffective. Finally, General Silva hit upon the idea of forcing Jewish slaves to build a dirt ramp to the top of the mountain. When his soldiers then marched up to the fortress in the year 73 C.E. and began to set fire to the walls, the Jews made a fateful decision. Faced with the certainty that if they were not killed they would become slaves, the leader of the Zealots, Elazar ben Yair, decided that all the defenders should commit suicide.

  Ten men were chosen by lot to kill the rest. Then one man was selected to kill the other nine before taking his own life. Two women and five children hid and survived. The reason we know anything about the story (and some still doubt its authenticity) is that one of the survivors told historian Flavius Josephus what had happened, including the final speech made by the leader Yair:

  Since we long ago resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God Himself the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice. We were the very first that revolted, and we are the last to fight against them; and I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom.

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  Ask the Sphinx

  Israeli soldiers hold swearing-in ceremonies on top of Masada, swearing the oath that “Masada shall not fall again.” The term Masada complex refers to the idea that it would be better for Jews to die than to surrender and lose their independence.

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  It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

  After the suppression of the Jewish revolt, relative calm settled on the Holy Land for nearly 60 years. The Emperor Hadrian even considered rebuilding the Temple. He did build a temple; however, it was in honor of Jupiter rather than the god of the Jews. He also renamed Jerusalem “Aelia Capitolina” and made it a Roman city. This insult, as well as other indignities of being Roman subjects, provoked yet another rebellion beginning in 132 C.E.—this time under the charismatic leadership of Simeon Bar-Kokhba. It took nearly three years for the Romans to pacify the country. When they were done, roughly 600,000 Jews were dead (including Bar-Kokhba), and Judea had been devastated.

  Hadrian renamed the entire province Syria Palaestina, marking the time when the name Palestine would come to apply to the area. Jerusalem became a pagan city that Jews were forbidden to enter, and the repression of Judaism became widespread.

  Interestingly, the Christians, who also were persecuted by the Romans, did not join the revolt. The main reason was probably that Bar-Kokhba had claimed to be the Messiah, and the Christians would not accept anyone other than Jesus in that title. Caught in the middle of the war, the Christians therefore also suffered, but they saw the defeat of the Jews as evidence that God had abandoned his people.

  Life in Exile

  When a people is exiled, it usually disappears, but this was not the case for the Jews, who found a way to adapt, and even flourish, outside their homeland. Jews who live somewhere other than Israel are said to be in the Diaspora, and they trace the beginnings of their exile to the Persian conquest of Babylonia. As you read in Chapter 2, the Jews in Babylonia helped create a tradition that made Jews less dependent on priests and worship in the Temple in Jerusalem and more capable of living as a minority group elsewhere.

  After the destruction of the second Temple, the center of Jewish life shifted north from Jerusalem to the city of Yavneh, where Yochanan ben Zakkai’s academy was turning out scholars who had been taught to carry on the Jewish tradition.

  Over the next two centuries, conditions for the Jews improved, with Rome even granting them citizenship in 212 C.E. Jewish life began to flourish in the Galilee region, where the Sanhedrin—a sort of Jewish supreme court—was established. Around 200 C.E., Rabbi Judah the Prince decided to record the oral law, largely out of fear that it would be forgotten if it were not written down. This systematic code is known as the Mishna. Over the next three centuries, rabbis who studied the law produced a great corpus of discussions and commentaries. These works were edited by rabbis in Palestine around 400 C.E., and the collection is known as the Palestinian Talmud. A more extensive compilation was completed a century later by rabbis in Babylonia, whose work is known as the Babylonian Talmud. It is this volume that is commonly used today.

  While Jewish law and tradition continued to evolve, a new religion took root in the Middle East.

  The Rise of Christianity

  Scholars now believe Jesus Christ was actually born sometime between 4 and 7 B.C.E. and was crucified either in 30 or 33 C.E. Like other major figures in religious history (including Moses and Muhammad), little is known about Christ’s childhood beyond the fact that he visited Jerusalem when he was about 12. He does not reappear in the Gospels (the New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) until he is 30, when he was baptized by John the Baptist.

  When his adherents began to speak of him as the king of the Jews and the Messiah, however, the Romans became suspicious that a rebel might be in their midst. According to Christian tradition, it was the Jewish Sanhedrin, however, that ordered his arrest and execution for blasphemy. The Gospels record that the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, reluctantly certified the sentence out of fear of the Jews.

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  Hieroglyphics

  Jesus Christ is Greek for “Joshua the Messiah.” The word messiah is derived from the Hebrew word mashiah, meaning “one who is anointed.”

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  Tut Tut!

  From the standpoint of Jewish tradition, a number of flaws appear in the story of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. For one thing, the Jews never crucified anyone; Jewish law would have required that Jesus be stoned if he were found guilty of the accusation. Also, Pilate was a tyrant who would have paid little attention to his relatively insignificant Jewish subjects. It is more likely that Pilate saw Jesus, like others who claimed to be a messiah, as a potential threat to Roman rule. Nevertheless, Jews would be blamed for nearly 2,000 years for Jesus’ death, often with tragic consequences.

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  After the crucifixion, Jesus’ followers remained Jews for a time. The Christians were a sect within Judaism until Paul made his break with the Jews, began to preach that Jesus was the son of God (as Jesus himself claimed), and abandoned two of the most important laws that set Jews apart: the prohibition against eating nonkosher food and the commandment that male infants be circumcised. Christianity truly becomes a distinct religion when Paul’s followers adopted these views.

  As they gained new converts, Jesus’ disciples began to relax some Jewish laws for the Gentile believers, who had no previous experience with or understanding of Jewish laws. Finally, after the destruction of the second Temple and Jerusalem itself in 70 C.E. (which uprooted surviving traditional Jews and Jewish believers alike, forcing them into Gentile lands) and the Gentiles began to merge their newfound religion with pagan traditions, Christianity broke away from being a Jewish sect and became a distinct religion.

  Rome Gets Religion

  As Christianity began to grow in influence, Rome’s concern intensified and the Emperor Diocletian (284–305 C.E.) tried to stem its growth with his violent persecution of Christians. His policies were reversed, however, by his successor Constantine, who was tolerant of the new faith. When Constantine himself became interested in Christianity’s teachings and decided to be baptized, Christianity reached a turning point from which it would never look back. Over the next two centuries, the Roman Empire became Christianized, and the religion came to be the dominant
faith in the Western world.

  In 330, Constantine made the dramatic decision to move the capital of the empire from Rome to the city of Byzantium (an ancient city on the site of modern day Istanbul), which he renamed Constantinople after himself. For the next 1,000 years, Byzantine emperors succeeded in keeping the Byzantine Empire intact, though its size expanded and contracted through the centuries. Constantinople was finally conquered in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks, marking the end of the Byzantine Empire. Long before that, however, the Middle Eastern states of the empire fell to a new power based on yet another faith that had its roots in the region: Islam.

  The Least You Need to Know

  The Hasmonean kingdom founded by the Maccabees collapsed in large part due to divisions among the Jews.

  The Romans were invited into the land of Israel and decide to stay.

  Herod rebuilt the Temple, but Roman legions destroyed it to quell the Jewish rebellion.

  Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was spirited out of the besieged city of Jerusalem and convinced the future Roman emperor to allow him to create a Jewish academy that sowed the seeds of Judaism’s future growth.

  Rome renamed Jerusalem “Aelia Capitolina,” and the Jews were barred from the city.

  Christianity grew out of Judaism to become the religion of the Roman Empire, which shifted its capital from Rome to Constantinople.

  Chapter 4

  The Crescent Moon

  In This Chapter

  Muhammad changes the world

  Islam: first a religion, then an empire

  Golden and not-so-golden ages for Jews