Berenice, the Herodian princess, stayed in Rome with Titus but she offended the Romans with her flashy diamonds, her royal airs and the stories of her incest with her brother. ‘She dwelt in the palace cohabiting with Titus. She expected to marry him and was already behaving in every respect as if she were his wife.’ It was said that Titus had the general Caecina murdered for flirting with her. Titus loved her but the Romans compared her to Antony’s femme fatale, Cleopatra – or worse, since the Jews were now despised and defeated. Titus had to send her away. When he succeeded his father in 79, she returned to Rome, now in her fifties, but such was the outcry that he again separated from the Jewish Cleopatra, aware that the Flavians were far from secure on the throne. Perhaps she rejoined her brother, almost the last of the Herodians.*
Titus’ reign was short. He died two years later with the words: ‘I have only done one thing wrong.’ The destruction of Jerusalem? The Jews believed his early death was God’s punishment.1 For forty years, a tense exhaustion reigned over blighted Jerusalem before Judaea again exploded in a final and disastrous spasm of rage.
DEATH OF THE JESUS DYNASTY:
THE FORGOTTEN CRUCIFIXION
Jerusalem was the headquarters of the Tenth Legion, whose camp was set up in the present-day Armenian Quarter around the three towers of Herod’s Citadel – the base of the last of them, the Hippicus, stands today. The Legion’s rooftiles and bricks, always emblazoned with its anti-Jewish emblem, the boar, have been found all over the city. Jerusalem was not totally deserted but had been settled with Syrian and Greek veterans, who traditionally hated the Jews. This barren moonscape of gigantic rockheaps must have been eerie. But Jews must have hoped that the Temple would be rebuilt as it had been once before.
Vespasian allowed the rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had escaped Jerusalem in a coffin, to teach the Law at Yavneh (Jamnia) on the Mediterranean, and the Jews were not formally banned from Jerusalem. Indeed many of the wealthier Jews had probably joined the Romans, as Josephus and Agrippa had done. Nonetheless, they were not allowed onto the Temple Mount. Instead, pilgrims bitterly mourned the Temple, praying next to the Tomb of Zechariah* in the Kidron Valley. Some hoped for the Apocalypse to restore God’s kingdom, but for ben Zakkai the vanished city assumed an immaterial mysticism. When he visited the ruins, his pupil cried, ‘Woe to us!’ ‘Be not grieved,’ replied the rabbi (according to the Talmud, compiled several centuries later). ‘We have another atonement. It is acts of loving-kindness.’ No one realized it at this time, but this was the beginning of modern Judaism – without the Temple.
The Jewish Christians, led by Simon son of Cleophas, Jesus’ half-brother or cousin, returned to Jerusalem where they started to honour the Upper Room, on today’s Mount Zion. Beneath the present building lies a synagogue, built probably with Herodian debris from the Temple. Yet the growing number of gentile Christians around the Mediterranean no longer revered the real Jerusalem. The defeat of the Jews separated them for ever from the mother-religion, proving the truth of Jesus’ prophecies and the succession of a new revelation. Jerusalem was just the wilderness of a failed faith. The Bookof Revelation replaced the Temple with Christ the Lamb. At the End of Days, golden, bejewelled Jerusalem would descend from heaven.
These sects had to be careful: the Romans were on guard against any signs of messianic kingship. Titus’ successor, his brother Domitian, maintained the anti-Jewish tax and persecuted the Christians, as a way of rallying support for his own faltering regime. On his assassination, the pacific, elderly Emperor Nerva relaxed the repression and the Jewish tax. Yet this was a false dawn. Nerva had no sons, so he chose his pre-eminent general as heir. Trajan, tall, athletic, stern, was the ideal emperor, perhaps the greatest since Augustus. But he saw himself as a conqueror of new lands and a restorer of old values – bad news for the Christians, and worse for the Jews. In 106 he ordered the crucifixion of Simon, the Overseer of the Christians in Jerusalem, because, like Jesus, he claimed descent from King David. There ended the Jesus dynasty.
Trajan, proud that his father had made his name fighting the Jews under Titus, restored the Fiscus Judaicus, but he was another Alexander hero-worshipper: he invaded Parthia, expanding Roman power into Iraq, home of the Babylonian Jews. During the fighting, they surely appealed to their Roman brethren. As Trajan advanced into Iraq, the Jews of Africa, Egypt and Cyprus, led by rebel ‘kings’, massacred thousands of Romans and Greeks, vengeance at last, possibly co-ordinated by the Jews of Parthia.
