Quote:Currently reading Rome & Jerusalem The Clash of Ancient Civilizations by Martin Goodman
About halfway through and while it is loaded with all manner of interesting info I must say it is not exactly what I had expected. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but I will reserve judgment until I get trough the fall of Jerusalem in 70.
I finished it back in January. The author tries to show both the cultural differences and (more interesting, IMO) similarities between the Romans and Jews. Marriage, for example, in both cultures was simply a contractual agreement as opposed to a sacrament (as in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which didn't happen until the 12th century AD). Upper class Jews in Jerusalem as well as ordinary Jews living in Rome preferred to speak in Greek. The Jewish practice of observing the Sabbath (i.e. not working on a single day of the week) had spread all over the Mediterranean world and beyond at least by the time of Josephus (who said as much). Jerusalem also had its own theater, amphitheater, and hippodrome. The point of describing these similarities is to show that the clash between the two civilizations wasn't due to cultural differences to the extent that one might suspect.
The author claims that Jerusalem was the most famous, beautiful city of the Eastern Mediterranean but I didn't know it enjoyed such a reputation among pagans. This reputation probably wasn't established, I suspect, until after Herod the Great beautified the city.
Another major theme of the book is why the Romans forbade the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple even after so many decades and centuries had passed. The author contends that this was due to the fact that the Flavian dynasty's legitimacy depended heavily on the conquest of the Jerusalem. Vespasian couldn't base his legitimacy solely on the fact that he won a bloody civil war but he could show that he was conqueror over a "foreign" enemy of Rome.
But there was a brief moment, the author says, when the Jews had a real chance to restore the Temple. When Nerva had succeeded Domitian he resorted to blackening his memory (and, by the extension, the Flavians) to help legitimize his accession. There was a new toleration under Nerva who had abolished the Flavian punitive tax placed on Jews. So, the Flavian policy of forbidding reconstruction of the Temple seemed to be on the brink of subsiding.
Of course, this did not happen because of Trajan's accession. Trajan's father was a commander in Judea during the Jewish Revolt so his legitimacy also depended heavily on the conquest of Judea. And since just about every Emperor after Trajan claimed some connection to him (or the Flavians directly) the Roman ban on rebuilding the Temple continued unabated (until briefly under Julian).
Now, I'm not so sure that there was an actual "ban" on rebuilding the Temple. Maybe the Romans just didn't want to foot the bill for rebuilding at the state's expense. Of course, later the Jews were expelled and banned from the city which had been renamed "Aelia Capitolina," rebuilt as a pagan city in the renamed province of "Palestine." But the ban on Jewish residency must have been lifted during the Christian period otherwise Julian's attempt to rebuild it makes little sense. Why wasn't there a grassroots effort by Jewish citizens to rebuild it themselves after Julian died ? Oddly enough, the author doesn't really address this possibility.
~Theo
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