Bibi has become the new King Herod Imperial intrigues are a disaster for Jews

Every year, there is a curious omission from our Passover Seder, between the matzo and the four cups of wine. There is no mention of Moses, except elliptically and just once. This is not some accretive, historical quirk, but a profound political statement. When the rabbis began putting the Passover service together in the 2nd century, they didn’t want to gather the Jews once a year, making them sing of a great leader. Clinging on in their Galilean villages like other post-apocalyptic survivors of the destruction of the Temple, they knew that such men had cost them dear.

Back then, as the rabbis first struggled to sum up Judaism without a Temple, in what became known as the Mishnah, they preached against the temptations of kingship and Rome. “Love work,” they said, “abhor taking high office and do not seek intimacy with the ruling power.” Today, the Mishnah’s essential portion, The Ethics of The Fathers, reads like an almost incantatory list of generations of exclusively religious Jewish leaders. Originally, it was shocking because of who it omits: the rabbis had written out of history not only King Herod, but the messianic political leaders of the three great revolts against Rome.

The truth is that when it comes to national leaders, Jews have precious few examples to go by, having not held their homeland for over 1,800 years. Which is why it is telling, in the final build up to the war on Tehran, that Benjamin Netanyahu spent time rediscovering those rulers whom the rabbis wished to forget. To help him along, he read a recent book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, by Professor Barry Strauss. “Well, we lost that one,” Netanyahu explained to a reporter about the work. “I think we have to win the next one.”

This is perhaps the most unintentionally revealing thing Bibi has ever said. As his war planning with Washington gathered pace, the Israeli Prime Minister was reading a book about a vast historic reversal — how, in the space of a single lifetime, Jewish royalty went from playing politics in Rome, as their people gathered privileges and respect in the imperial center, to watching helplessly as the legions burnt the Temple and carried off its Menorah, their nation marched into slavery, humiliation and exile. At its core, this is the story of King Herod and the failure of his heirs: how a combination of runaway fundamentalism and diplomatic failure doomed a highly successful people to the status of near outcasts.

You cannot understand King Herod — or the depths of Bibi’s mind — without looking again at a map of Rome. The empire in the east was different from that of the west: not the uniformly subjugated barbarian provinces of Gaul and Britannia, but a patchwork of wealthy, civilized statelets, client kingdoms and provinces. Judea was one of those kingdoms, home to the largest temple complex of the ancient world at Jerusalem. It was a city whose sanctuary was so gilded, writes the inescapable ancient historian Josephus, that in the morning it “cast a fiery light”; so white was its marble that from a distance the sanctuary looked like a mountain capped with snow.

This, moreover, was a city that had produced in the Torah a literary tradition its people believed rivaled that of the Greeks, a city whose diaspora was spread across the known world’s two empires — the Roman, stretching west to the pillars of Hercules, and the Parthian, stretching east to the Hindu Kush, each studded with Jewish trading communities paying their own tithe back to the Temple.

Strauss calls this Judea “in essence a Temple state”; it had become ungovernable by 63 BC, when its elites first appealed to Rome to adjudicate in a civil war within its failing Hasmonean monarchy. Twenty-three years later, after a period of chaos, the Roman Senate made their most promising local ally King of all Judea, sent him back with military support to conquer his kingdom. His name was Herod.

This king would become so hated in both the Jewish and the Christian tradition that his actual reign was blotted out. But reading Jews vs. Rome, it is easy to realize what Netanyahu might see in him. It is all about the emperor. Herod, after all, made himself a Roman politician and not just a Jewish one. To avoid the territorial designs of Cleopatra, he sought and won the support of Mark Antony. But after his patron’s demise at the hands of Octavian, known to history as Augustus, Herod had the skill to then become the first Roman emperor’s greatest loyalist.

To succeed in Roman politics, Herod Romanized himself, naming his grandson after Augustus’s favorite general Agrippa, and even becoming president of the Olympic Games. To emphasize his loyalty, he also Romanized his landscape, raising a new city called Caesarea, on the coast south of modern-day Haifa. All this would pay off, not just for him, but for his Rome-educated grandson Herod Agrippa I, who was such an impressive Roman politician that in the chaos that followed the murder of his friend Caligula he installed Claudius as emperor.

There is no way Herod’s precedent was not on Bibi’s mind as he read this book, in those months when he pursued Trump with the most outlandish flattery — a man he has named a settlement after; offered the nation’s highest honors to; and sought to speak to through every Fox and Friends or Hannity. All this as he shuns his own media at home. Bibi knows that his bilingual, Israeli-American political identity, in a country where few in its traditional political-military class speak flawless English, is the source of his power, his ability to play politics in Rome.

Because of how it ended, the very Roman power of the Herodian dynasty has been forgotten. First came Herod the Great, who renovated the Temple, but his large kingdom disintegrated almost immediately on his death. Revolts broke out everywhere against the backdrop of his sadistic divide-and-rule, culminating in the murder of his own sons. But what the empire gifted, it could also take away. The second, Romanized generation, such as Herod Antipas of Galilee who executed John the Baptist, were demoted into ruling mostly as lesser Roman-appointed “tetrarchs” or “ethnarchs” of scraps of their old kingdom.

50 years later, the now extensively Romanized third generation would enjoy a brief resurgence, when Herod the Great’s grandson Herod Agrippa I ruled as King of all Judea: but only for around three years. The fourth generation, such as Herod Agrippa II of Galilee, were demoted yet again to minor clients. They were the last to rule in the land of Israel. The Herodians’ once very real regional influence would leave no mark on history. The Jewish-Roman alliance was doomed.

This is where Strauss’s account becomes a study in failure. Successive generations of Herodians became more and more hated by their people for their Hellenized foreignness. By the end, the rulers could do nothing but hide from their subjects’ religious passions, let alone steer or hope to calm them. It meant nothing that Herod Agrippa II of Galilee ended up fighting on the same side as the Romans in the Great Revolt that began in 66 AD. Nor that his sister Berenice was the lover of General Titus. Maybe he saved Galilee, and she a few of the captives, from worse reprisals, but neither of them could save the Temple nor Judea. Their stewardship had failed. After this disaster, the dynasty continued, but not in Judea and not as Jews. King Herod’s descendants would rule as kings in Armenia and Cetis in Anatolia, or serve as Roman senators, magistrates, and even a consul or two. Yet they did all this firmly as pagans.

Herod the Great’s heirs failed because they did not keep the zealots close enough to control them. And it is impossible, here, to read Strauss’s account and not see the signature of Bibi’s entire career: the zealots will be my zealots. For 30 years, Israel’s most American, most foreign of leaders has used fundamentalist rabbis and settlers as his auxiliaries and shields. This, in the end, is the political meaning of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. Of course, there is the cynicism, through which Netanyahu will do anything to stave off an election and avoid jail. But there is also a dark pessimism about the Jewish people that glues it all together, a sense that Netanyahu truly believes you cannot rule the Jews except when flanked by their zealots.

This was the Herodian legacy: Judea’s priests driven to hilltop villages in the Galilee, its princes pagans in the courts of Asia Minor. By the end of the Great Revolt in 70 AD, the Jews were now a people without a leadership, their temple and their monarchy in ruins. Incontinent, apocalyptic fanaticism spread like wildfire among the people. Two further revolts followed, in 115 AD and 135 AD. The result was what we would now call ethnic cleansing and genocide. Archaeological work in modern Israel has confirmed a scale of atrocity that shocked even Rome’s ancient historians. By the end of the first revolt, Titus’s slavery and butchery had reduced the population of Judea by a third. By the end of the third, by driving the Jews out of Judea and eradicating their settlements there, Hadrian had reduced it by as much as two thirds. During the second Trajan had, to quote the historian Appian, “utterly destroyed the Jewish people in Egypt”. Their doom, to a reader like Netanyahu, only confirms a conviction that the Diaspora is only safe if Israel succeeds.

In the space of a lifetime, the Jews had not only lost Jerusalem, their great spiritual city with all its treasures, but also Alexandria, their great diasporic port with all its wealth. The Jews were finished. Not as a nation, but as a great people in the ancient world. Their homeland was renamed Palestine — as the Greeks had long known it — to insult them. They were humiliatingly singled out by Rome to pay the fiscus Judaicus, a special tax to the emperor’s coffers and the city’s great temple of Jupiter, in lieu of the old tithe they had once so gladly paid their own temple. A vertiginous fall, in short, from privileges granted by Julius Caesar himself.

I don’t doubt that, reading Strauss’s book, Netanyahu imagines himself as Herod the Great: the only sound intercessor between Rome and the Jews. But there is another, unnerving reading, in which Netanyahu has got it all wrong. By betting everything on the House of Trump, is he not making the same mistake as the Herodians? From educating their children together to tying generations of friendships together, the House of Herod bet everything on the House of Augustus. But that didn’t work so well with the dynasties that came after: the cold military men of the Flavians and the Nerva-Antonines. After all,  dynasties could, and did, fall. What Judea needed, and so obviously lacked, were friends and allies across the Senate and the People of Rome.

Why the Temple was destroyed is one of the great aching questions of Judaism. In Jews vs. Rome, Strauss has attempted to answer it through politics. His own view is that disunity was key. The Jews were factionalized beyond belief, and broken into zealots and Hellenizers, fundamentalists and accommodationists, all at each other’s throats. Fractured like this, the people of Israel never stood a chance against the imperial legions.

And here too Bibi’s rule resembles that of King Herod — and not in a way that would please him. It’s not just the way he has got Trump to bully the Israeli President to grant him a pardon for his corruption trial, nor his benches of Knesset yes men and hate men. It’s also 30 years of stoking endless provocation and division. It’s the hate marches against Yitzhak Rabin, the anti-Arab rhetoric, his attempts to gut the Supreme Court, the relentless march to “baseless hatred”.

This odd phrase is what the Talmud uses to describe the political climate in ancient Israel when it seeks its own answer as to why the Temple was destroyed. And it is a term I recognize when I see Itamar Ben Gvir prancing in the Knesset with a bottle of champagne, celebrating a death penalty unique for Palestinians, as Bibi looks on and smiles.

Netanyahu thinks he is leading with the zealots close; but rather they are leading him. This is a mistake that Herod the Great did not make. Two millenniums later, it is clear that the King of Judea, in his decision to rebuild and glorify the Temple, understood, unlike most of his heirs, something fundamental about the passions of Judaism. In the soul of Israel, they are inescapable and volcanic. And a leader who seeks to be their ruler, must channel them, not follow them. Herod did so in the vast effort to rebuild the Temple. It is by its surviving Western Wall that we still pray. Netanyahu has done quite the opposite, governing by endless concessions to settler construction projects or draft-dodging Haredim. Their demands are pulling him ever closer to splitting the nation, and sparking the fury of Rome.

These are the limits to Bibi’s cynicism and pessimism. For it has no spiritual force to answer the prophetic warning of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. Scholem warned that on the far side of so much destruction and displacement, Israel would need to withstand its own impulses and not succumb to what he called “the messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up” — by returning to the land of our ancestors. After 1,800 years, we have abruptly picked up this uncannily familiar history of zealots, client-kings and emperors. And we need to learn from it, or pay the price, once again, for fundamentalism and baseless hatred.

---