THE JOSEPHUS GENERATION

by Abraham Josephine Riesman

The last time the Jewish people were sovereign in the land of Israel, the endeavor ended in blood and fire.

In 70 CE, the Romans, provoked by anti-imperial insurgency, laid siege to Jerusalem. The land of Judea had been a Roman suzerainty, under increasing imperial control but nominally self-governed. Now, the fragile status quo had been shattered by the Jewish-nationalist Zealots, and the overwhelming Roman war machine moved in. They burned Jewish villages, enslaved survivors, and finally reduced Jerusalem to ashes.

In terms of Jewish roles in history, the situation in today’s Israel/Palestine is very different from the Roman-Jewish War of the First Century. Today, the Jews—though provoked by Hamas’ unconscionable attack of Oct. 7—are the overwhelming military power laying siege to a vastly outmatched subject territory. Indeed, Israel is in possession of nuclear weapons, capable of salting the earth in ways the Romans never dreamed of. 

But the experience of the Roman conquest remains so imprinted on the psyche of Israeli nationalists that it's hard for them to see themselves as anything but a desperate remnant: outnumbered, surrounded, and facing certain death. 

“We will win here because our existence is at stake,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said near the war’s beginning. He called it “a war between forces of light and forces of darkness, between humanity and animalism.”

“Israel will continue the war against Hamas, with or without international support,” Israel’s foreign minister said a few months later. "A cease-fire at the current stage is a gift to the terrorist organization Hamas, and will allow it to return and threaten the residents of Israel.”

This kind of mindset may seem somewhat ridiculous, given Israel’s military might and the utter futility of the Palestinian resistance. But after the thousands of years of trauma that followed the Roman victory, it’s hard to break my people’s tendency toward seeing themselves as the victim in any confrontation. Ergo the legions of American and Israeli Jews who continue to oppose a ceasefire, even as the death toll in besieged Gaza passes 30,000 and an even greater number of Palestinian children find themselves homeless and orphaned.

Outside the Jewish world, public opinion is heavily weighted against Israel in this violence. Outrage at Israeli warmaking has never been at more of a fever pitch across the globe. Diaspora Jews are left in an impossible position: either defend our people and sign on to an immoral and indiscriminate slaughter — or betray a nationalist Jewish identity and walk away. 

This second option might seem like a betrayal — of our people, our ancestors, and the suffering they survived. But in fact, we only know as much as we do about the siege of 70 CE and the war surrounding it because of one man who took the second option: treason. Understanding how he made that choice, and what the ultimate consequences of it were, is a crucial matter for any Jew wrestling with the dilemma of our responsibilities while the mass death continues.

His name was Joseph ben Matthias, but he is known to us as Josephus. 

Say what you will about Josephus — and many still have choice words for him, two millennia later — but you cannot accuse him of being a “self-hating Jew.”

In his voluminous histories and apologias, the surviving versions of which were written in Greek for a Gentile audience, he remains proud in his defense of the Jewish people, Jewish scriptures, and the Jewish God. Indeed, he’d been a Jewish priest at the Second Temple, while it still stood, and after war between the Jews and Romans broke out in 66 CE, he served as a general in the north of Judea, coordinating resistance to the invaders.

When the Romans inevitably defeated Josephus’ men, he and a final contingent of them holed up in a cave in a town known as Jotapata. Ardent nationalists, his men voted to commit mass suicide rather than be taken prisoner. Only Josephus and one other man chose instead to escape the cave alive and surrender themselves to the Roman general.

Though Josephus would later claim that a divine revelation had influenced his actions, a far more likely explanation was that he was scared — and not enough of a true believer in the cause to believe it was worth killing himself for.

Josephus lived out the rest of the war as a kind of pet Jew to the general leading the attack, Vespasian. According to Josephus, upon surrendering, he prophesied that Vespasian would become the emperor. As it turned out, that accession happened in 69 CE, and Vespasian left the ongoing war campaign in the hands of his son, Titus.

When Titus’ forces finally marched on Jerusalem, Josephus was made to witness the siege and repeatedly urge his fellow Jews to surrender to the inevitable. Most refused. Josephus wrote that he grieved as he watched the holy Temple torched by the Romans. 

But he watched it burn from within the safety of the Roman camp.

In the years to follow, Josephus became an historian and essayist. His works are still read today, but for centuries he was remembered among Jews primarily as a kind of Benedict Arnold figure: a traitor. Even Yigael Yadin, the Israeli politician/archeologist who in the Twentieth Century excavated many of the sites of the Roman-Jewish war known only through Josephus' writings, called the scribe "a great historian and a bad Jew."

However, the founders of modern Judaism had much in common with Josephus. Like him, the earliest rabbis of the Talmud ultimately rejected territorial nationalism and the cause of Jewish sovereignty. They chose instead to create a new Jewish identity in diaspora: a Judaism that could withstand any siege — by being portable and decentralized. 

In fact, the writers of the Talmud and centuries of subsequent rabbis went further, explicitly rejecting attempts to retake the Land of Israel, especially by force. Only God, they argued, could restore Jews to rule in their sacred place. In the decades prior to World War II, most Jews around the world rejected Zionism as either heretical or foolish.

However, we now live in a world with a nationalist majority among Jews. So many of my people believe an exclusively Jewish — or at least Jewish-controlled — national homeland is required for their people’s survival. I fear for them, as Josephus feared for the nationalists of his day. The threat of a wider regional war around Israel/Palestine grows larger every day, meaning Israel may no longer be so unevenly matched against its opponents. But even if the war ended in a massive Israeli victory tomorrow, Zionism would still likely be doomed.

Today, the greatest threat to Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land isn’t Rome, it’s a far greater foe: climate change. Within a century, the place will likely be too blighted by heat, drought, and bloodshed to sustain human life.

It seems increasingly certain that, in the lifetimes of our grandchildren, no amount of military triumph or apartheid will be enough to prevent Zionism from becoming a thing of the past. Nature is seeing to that.

Those of us alive today, not just Jews, are the Josephus Generation. We were born in our species’ golden age of climate, and we are burdened with the task of watching our natural Promised Land slip away. And yet, we go on, just as Josephus did.

One is forced to ask whether the Jewish story and Jewish sovereignty in Israel, or any other land, are the same thing.

They aren't. They can't be. The story continues. The Jews survive. Indeed, we have survived because we did not relish martyrdom.

There have been exceptions, of course.

The most lasting legacy of Josephus’ writings today, ironically enough, is the legend of Masada: a tale, based solely on his second-hand account, of nearly a thousand Jewish Zealots who chose mass suicide at the mountain fortress known as Masada, during the last stages of the Roman war.

The site has since become a Zionist touchstone, with decades of regular visits to the site by Birthright groups and IDF trainees. Modern Jewish nationalists venerate the purity and nobility of the men at Masada who killed their families and then themselves, and they vow to never let it come to that again.

But the rabbis of the Talmud never even once mentioned Masada, despite its likely fame as a story by the time of the text’s writing. Josephus only included it as a cautionary tale. It was never supposed to be our symbol.

Josephus accomplished more for the Jewish people in surrender than the Zealots ever accomplished with their glorious deaths. As we enter a strange new future, we should focus less on the suicides committed at Masada than the one avoided at Jotapata. 

Joseph ben Matthias lived a long and fruitful life after the war. For his consul and soothsaying, he was granted Roman citizenship, income-generating land titles, and even an apartment in Rome itself. Perhaps his riches were blood money, but he put his remaining years to good use.

First, he wrote The Jewish War, a painstaking (and often self-congratulatory) account of the conflict  and his role in it. Today, it is the only detailed source of this world-changing clash. I often say Josephus was the first Jewish journalist: He witnessed Jewish calamity and wrote down what he saw, as best he could.

Then, he wrote Antiquities of the Jews, an even longer work that attempted to summarize and normalize Jewish history in a Greco-Roman context. It surveyed then-contemporary Jewish views about my people’s history, from the Creation onward. It is the earliest surviving non-Biblical compendium of Jewish history and thought.

What’s more, his shorter Against Appion, written later in his life, is the earliest surviving defense of Jews against antisemitism.

These are no small accomplishments, and they wouldn’t have been possible without Josephus’ ostensibly traitorous act at Jotapata.

The legacy of Josephus for Jews should not be a memory of betrayal, but rather an urgent lesson: Life is more precious than soil. Continuing the Jewish story is far more important and far less deadly than trying to keep Jewish supremacy enshrined.

In Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1932 historical novel Josephus: A Historical Romance, the author imagines a dialogue between Josephus and the founder of Rabbinic Judaism, Yohanan Ben-Zakkai. 

"Our Kingdom is lost,” Yohanan tells Josephus. “But it is not the Kingdom that holds us together. Other peoples, too, have founded kingdoms. They have fallen. And new kingdoms will arise, and they too will fall. The Kingdom is not the greatest thing." 

Yohanan continues: “We shall surrender the Temple. In place of the visible house of God, we shall build an invisible one. We shall shield the breath of God within walls of words instead of stone."

And finally, the old priest concludes on a note of hope: “Power is always suspicious of the spirit,” he says. “But the Spirit is resilient. No door can be closed tightly enough to keep it out."

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