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Jews in the West: From Herod to Constantine the Great
Natalie B. Dohrmann
1 Introduction
This chapter will look at three momentous centuries of Jewish life in the Roman Empire. The story of the Jews from the Herodian kings until the rise of Constantine is made up of many strands connecting several centers. It is an era that encompasses a disproportionate amount of political and social upheaval, violence, and religious evolution. Judea/Palestine with its geographical, historical, and cultural imperatives is the setting for an era marked by the rise, fall, and transformation of a series of empires: it opens with final gasps of the Ptolemaic Empire under Cleopatra VII, the messy demise of the Roman Republic, and the occasional incursions of unrealized Parthian ambition.1 The bulk of the period maps the explosion into history of the Roman Empire. At its end, in the fourth century, Rome refigures itself, portentously for Jews, as a Christian Empire—Christianity comes into being in this period, as does what we now recognize as »normative« or rabbinic Judaism.2
Jewish national and political history is bound to the particular destiny that is geography. The territory that Jews understood to be their God-given homeland stretched from the Negev to the Golan Heights—a small but strategically vital spit of land. Bound on the west with a largely port-free Mediterranean coast and to the east by mostly impassable desert, the land of Judea3 was at once the trade bridge connecting Mesopotamia and Egypt, and a strategic buffer zone between empires. As the bottle-neck of a series of lucrative trade routes, the inhabitants of this land had always to weigh their politics against the relative strengths and motivations of much larger neighbors. Strategic alliances might catapult Jews to positions of power, autonomy, and even expansion; unwise alliances could spell devastation. Indeed, other people’s empires have been determinative for the history of Judaism since its inception; and Jewish history cannot be told apart from the history of the dominant societies within which Jews were nearly always a minority or a subject people.
Beyond economics and military pressure, a third factor having an impact upon the history of Judaism came from the »soft« power of culture. Politically dominant neighboring or colonizing powers such as Persia, Syria, Greece, and Rome, often determined the vocabularies that the conquered used to define themselves: languages, materials, conceptual paradigms, aesthetics, and more. Jews were always part of these cultures: adapting, absorbing, and rejecting pieces of them in order to build their own distinctive identity.
Even in the political cauldron of the Hellenized East, the predominant reality that Judaism had to navigate politically, and with which all forms of Judaism had in some ways to engage conceptually, was Rome. The story of the Jews from the Herods until the rise of Constantine is incomprehensible outside of the context of Rome. As was shown in the previous chapter, Romans were as instrumental to the rise and success of the Hasmoneans (both actively as allies and passively in their weakening of the Seleucid hold on the region) as they were to the collapse of that dynasty under Pompey. Roman ambitions fueled Herod’s success, and so helped bankroll his massive expansion of the Jerusalem Temple. Less than a century later, Rome would raze that same Temple to the ground and enslave thousands of Jews. The Roman Empire was the soil from which both the rabbinic and Christian movements would grow.
In this chapter we will look at the rise of Judea as a Roman client kingdom under Herod the Great and the loss of Jewish political autonomy under the procurators, culminating in two devastating wars against Rome. It will trace the various Jewish responses to the loss of the Jerusalem Temple, the priestly aristocracy, and the cult, the most enduring of which finds it voice in rabbinic Judaism. It will also look at the fate of the Jewish diaspora, parts of which fared poorly in this era. The centuries-old, wealthy, religiously vibrant, and literarily productive Jewish community of Alexandria was destroyed early in the 2nd century—along with several other thriving diaspora communities—when a wave of revolts in Jewish Mediterranean communities failed to defeat Trajan’s forces. Yet Jews continue to live and fare well in Rome, Antioch, and elsewhere. In Palestine, scholars are divided about the nature of the relationship between rabbinic Judaism and the Roman world.4 While clearly deeply embedded in a Roman cultural sphere, rabbinic literature signals on a range of levels a different set of strategies for relating to the imperial environment than those we find reflected in the texts emerging from Greek-speaking Jewish worlds. By the end of this era, the Jewish sect we might label the Jesus movement takes root among predominantly Greek speaking populations, and as it grows and divorces itself from »Judaism« (and vice versa), the two religions reify around a set of defining and interrelated attributes that adhere and inhere even still.
2 Herod (37–4 BCE)
The Hasmonean dynasty fell victim to a toxic confluence of internal dissent and Roman might. In 63 BCE, in response to internal Hasmonean battles over succession to the throne, Roman general Pompey sacked Jerusalem and deposed the Hasmonean kings. He later reestablished Hasmonean leadership with Hyrcanus II as high priest, now significantly stripped of his royal title king (basileos) and much reduced in scope and power. Chaos prevailed in the region in the middle decades of the 1st century BCE, exacerbated by the years-long Roman civil wars leading up to and in the aftermath of the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE. Roman triumvir Marc Antony was based in Egypt and closely allied with Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra. They shared interests in Judea, which fell into their sphere of influence. Octavian was expanding his power base from the west. From the east the Parthians were looking for an opportunity to exploit this confusion to claim the rich territories of Judea for themselves.
Herod was an ambitious Jewish courtier who advanced amidst and because of this chaos. He was the son of Antipater I, a Jew of Idumean stock, whose father was forcibly converted under Hasmonean ethnarch and High priest John Hyrcanus. Antipater had effectively run the country for the Hasmonean weakling Hyrcanus II, the High priest and later titular head of the Hasmonean dynasty (ethnarch) even after it was subsumed under Rome. Like his father, Herod was a savvy political operator who understood that Rome was vital not only to his own success but to the stability and prosperity of Judea. He began his career in 47 BCE as a governor of the Galilee, a hotbed of banditry—allowing Herod to prove himself tough on crime. His successes there and his carefully cultivated relationships with local Roman officials led to the expansion of his realms.
In 40 BCE, simmering Jewish resentment against Roman rule propelled the ambitions of Hyrcanus II’s nephew Antigonus II, who, backed by the Parthians and popular with Judean Jews, rose to claim the Hasmonean throne. This apparent set back, one that left his brother dead and patron maimed, was Herod’s big break. Herod fled to Rome before the encroaching Parthian troops, and in that same year, backed by Marc Antony who recognized in him a strong ally in the region, was named king of Judea by the Roman senate (Rex socius et amicus populi Romani). His prime aim was ousting the Parthian-backed Antigonus and protecting Roman hegemony in the region. Herod returned to Judea in 39 and defeated Antigonus, whom Antony then executed in 37 BCE.5 Herod was now king of the Jews in more than just name.
As a client king, Herod was part of a recognized system of Roman rule of subordinated peoples. He had autonomy to rule more or less as he wished but had no freedom to execute his own foreign policy or keep a large standing army.
By most measures Herod was a successful minor potentate. Vitally, he stabilized the region. Indeed, he was so effective that when Antony