Read an Excerpt
I
Sovereignty and Imperialism in Antiquity
At the end of his great history of the Jewish revolt against Rome of 66-70 C.E., Josephus Flavius wrote:
So fell Jerusalem in the second year of Vespasian’s reign..., captured five times before and now for the second time laid utterly waste.... From King David, the first Jew to reign over it, to the destruction by Titus was 1,179 years. But neither its long history, nor its vast wealth, nor its people dispersed through the whole world, nor the unparalleled renown of its worship sufficed to avert its ruin.
Thus, according to one view of Jewish history, ended the glorious age of Jewish sovereignty, not to be regained until the Zionist movement reestablished the state of Israel in 1948. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. is commonly considered to demarcate the fundamental political watershed in Jewish history: the end of political independence and the beginning of the powerlessness of exile. The rabbis, who became the sole leaders of the nation in the wake of the revolt against Rome, instituted radical changes in the nature of Judaism. They not only constructed a religion without Temple sacrifices, but they are said to have abdicated all interest in politics and power in favor of a solely spiritual existence. It was this apolitical Judaism that became the Judaism of the Middle Ages, but the memory of the age of political power was preserved in messianism, the hope for the restoration of the golden age “when the Temple still stood.”
This view of the ancient period and the role of the rabbis, so widely accepted in Jewish consciousness, is more romantic than historical. The golden age of Jewish power in antiquity is largely a myth based on exceptions instead of the norm: the political status of the Jews throughout most of antiquity was not full sovereignty but a partial and tenuous independence in an imperial world. For at least two centuries after the destruction of the Temple, the Jews in both the Land of Israel and the Diaspora were not powerless at all but in fact enjoyed forms of self-government similar in many ways to those of the Second Temple period. Rather than an abrupt shift from power to powerlessness, Jewish power in the early rabbinical period, and especially in the century after the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-35 C.E.), was, if anything, greater than in most of the preceding ages.
The destruction of the Temple dictated a religious revolution for the Jews, but its political meaning was more complex. It brought about a change in leadership from priests to rabbis, but the nature of Jewish power, both internally and in relation to the outside world, remained fundamentally the same. The rabbis built a much more durable political system than had any of the earlier leaders, whether tribal elders, kings, or priests, who were only partially successful in confronting an imperial world and in maintaining some partial semblance of Jewish sovereignty. Yet these earlier attempts, both in their successes and their failures, prepared the ground for the work of the rabbis, which in turn laid the foundations of Jewish life in the Middle Ages.
