Is Titus guilty or not?!

Titus is seen in the Sage sources as a despicable personality, as the one who was responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple. His malevolent and evil character has been taught throughout Jewish history, and as such has been deeply embedded in the collective memory of the people to this very day. Is it right?!

 The triumphal gate of Titus over Judah in Rome, with the vessels of the temple being raised in a procession. Photo from Wikipedia.

Titus is seen in the Sage sources as a despicable personality, as the one who was responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple. His malevolent and evil character has been taught throughout Jewish history, and as such has been deeply embedded in the collective memory of the people to this very day. Is it right?!

Let's first look through the window of Roman history, and what will we discover? We will discover that Titus, the son of Vespasianus (Vespasianus in the Sage sources), and his successor, was the emperor who aroused the greatest sympathy among the Romans, and earned the title "greed of the human race" (amor ac deliciae generic humani), mainly due to the many acts of aid he provided to the victims A disaster throughout the empire, and not just in Rome. However, he was known for his cruelty mainly because of his excessive love for the blood games in the circus (gladiator fights).

In the eyes of the Jews, as mentioned, Titus is considered to be the figure of the ultimate evil, the one who destroyed the temple and set it on fire, and because of that he was punished by God with a terrible illness and a strange death - a mosquito entered his head, his brain, and caused him to die in agony. Titus, by the way, died of an illness in 81 CE and is 42 years old, sitting on the imperial throne for only two and two months.

Let us enter into the thick of the events of the rebellion, and in fact towards its end. Vespasianus managed the confrontation with the rebels until 69 AD, on the eve of the storming of Jerusalem. He hastened to Rome to take refuge and entrusted the continuation of the military operations to his son Titus, with the highlight supposed to be breaching the walls of the besieged Jerusalem and its final surrender.
The walls were breached and the rebels were pushed up the city, towards the Temple Mount and the Temple, when from time to time a new Mignana line was built, and when it was breached, the rebels retreated into the Temple Mount itself. Due to the fact that the rebels did not surrender and continued to fight from within the Temple Mount, and from the clear knowledge and firm assumption that the future of the area, including the temple, would be damaged by the Romans, the Romans planned a combined attack on the site of the rebellion. Titus ordered four ramparts to be erected with emplacement and breaching towers, and from there heavy catapult stones were fired into the rebel compound. The Romans put iron rams on the ramparts to score the walls, but the walls held.

When the walls were breached, the Zealots fortified themselves in the Temple Mount compound to conduct the war against the Romans from there. It was clear to them that by doing so they were forcing the Romans, and contrary to the position of the majority of the residents of besieged Jerusalem, to break into the temple at some stage in order to finally suppress the rebellion, and this is exactly what Agrippa II meant, in his excited and agitated speech on the eve of the outbreak of the rebellion, that the Jews themselves would bring about the destruction of the temple, which they are interested in saving, preserving and fortifying.

Titus sent Joseph son of Mattathias to convince the rebels to lay down their weapons so that they would not bring about the destruction of the temple themselves, but instead glorified it at the request of Titus, and even defiled the temple by turning it into a place of their fortress. Titus reminded them that the Romans had erected a special grate that would prevent those unqualified and sanctified from entering the temple and defiling it (which is archaeologically confirmed in an inscription uncovered years ago in Caesarea in the name of Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator), and they themselves, the zealots, defile and desecrate the sanctity of the place with their feet and bodies. Titus ends his emotional reference to the rebels by saying - "And if you move your systems away from this place, no Roman will approach your temple or desecrate it, and I will guard the temple for your sake, also against your anger and your anger" (Wars, XNUMX:XNUMX).

A promise of this kind seems dubious and misleading on the face of it, but it is immediately apparent that such an attitude characterized the Romans in relation to the conquered peoples. In any case, the zealots rejected the Roman proposal with contempt and disgust, whether due to their strong faith, whether due to their standing on the edge of the abyss where there is no way back for them, or because they simply did not believe the Romans.

The Romans built a wide road for them from the ruins of the "capital" (the Antonia fortress which is northwest of the temple) towards the Temple Mount. And when they got close to the first wall that surrounded the mountain, they began to pour batteries (elevations). From then on, face-to-face battles were fought between the rebels and the Romans, which spilled a lot of blood on both sides, but the Romans, with their numbers, skill and fighting quality, slowly pushed the rebels towards the temple, the hall. It should be noted that during all these difficult confrontations, Titus tried to dissuade the fanatical rebels from continuing to fight, but in vain. Their mind was one and done with them - to fight to the end.

"In these battles" - Yosef ben Matthiyoh points out - "the Jews found many evils, and little by little the horrors of the war increased and they already reached the temple. Therefore, the Jews did as a person does with a corpse, in which rot has risen, to cut off the limbs to which the rot has adhered, lest it spread to the rest of the body. They set fire to the halls on the north and west sides, which connected the Temple Mount to the capital (Antonia Citadel), and then broke through the halls of the Temple Mount another twenty cubits (about 11.2 m). That's how the hands of the Jews began to burn the temple, and two days later, on the twenty-fifth of the aforementioned month (the Greek Panimos, which is the month of Tammuz), the Romans set fire to the hall closest to them, and after the flame had consumed a measure of fifteen cubits (about 8.4 m) , the Jews cut the beams of the hall, when they did first, and not in order to abandon these buildings (the halls) at once, but in order to destroy the parts that connect them with the capital (Castle of Antonia). Therefore, the Jews did not prevent the Romans from sending fire into the hall, even though this was against their God, and they returned their hands to their hips at the sight of the spreading fire, and gave it prey to the extent that it was useful to them" (Wars, XNUMX:XNUMX).

Even in this context, we need to refer to the speech of Agrippa II, who tried as much as he could to dissuade the rebels from the outbreak of the rebellion, mainly on the basis of the expected intimidation, that they might sabotage the temple, as an integral part of the battles. It is certainly not clear whether Agrippa really gave the speech, or whether it was rewritten by Joseph ben Mattathias, after the destruction and the destruction of the temple, and as someone who was undoubtedly influenced by the fact of the destruction, the destruction and the fire. In any case, we see before our eyes a phenomenon of desecration and desecration of the Temple Mount by the fanatics, who were the first to set fire to it.

The use of fire by the fanatical rebels was also intended to trap the Romans. In one of the cases, the rebels retreated out of fear, and when the Romans attacked them, they set fire to the space between the beams of the hall and its roof, which had been previously filled with dry twigs, clay, and tar, and set fire to the entire hall, "when suddenly a flame of fire rose to the top", according to Yosef ben Matthew in his discussed essay. Many Romans perished from the fire and along with them Jews, some of them the rebels themselves.

When the Romans finished pouring the batteries, Titus ordered on the eighth day of the month of Laos (the month of Av) to bring the iron rams closer to the western portico of the inner temple, that is "the help". This move was accompanied by severe clashes between the two sides. At the order of Titus, the Help Gate was set on fire, which spread to its surroundings. The Romans waited until the fire consumed the gate and its surroundings, and then extinguished the fire and cleared a path wide enough for the penetration of their legionary forces.

At this stage, when only the question of breaking into the temple remained, a strange, somewhat unusual incident took place in the entire conduct of the war. Titus gathers in his command tent the commanders of the Roman forces, six in number (the commander of all forces, four legion commanders and the governor of Judea), along with other commissioners and senior officers. Titus called them together to discuss what would happen to the temple. Some of them proposed to destroy the temple, because according to them the Jews will not stop thinking of rebellion as long as the temple stands, and there were some who proposed to spare the temple, if the Jews stop their rebellion, and not - to set it on fire. "But Titus" - recounts Yosef ben Matthew - "revealed his opinion that they would not come to take revenge from this house, which has no soul in it, for the sins of man and destroy the magnificent building with fire, if the Jews also came up to it to fight from there, because this thing would be The damage of the Romans, and if the temple remains in its place, it will be placed as a jewel in the crown of their kingdom." The forum dispersed with Titus' clear warning not to damage the temple and in the meantime continue vigorously to put out the remains of the fire in the area of ​​the Roman invasion.

Titus' instruction-guidance is not perceived as reliable and authentic on the face of it, and this is due to the cynicism that has stuck to today's curious readers on the one hand, and due to the assimilation of Roman guilt, Roman cruelty and its vandalism, especially towards the people of Israel, as pervaded over many centuries of formal and informal study in the Jewish communities In Europe, and then in the Zionist society and from the founding of the state to the present day.
In this context, it is appropriate to emphasize what is not so well known to the cynical inquisitors, and that is that the Romans usually protected local temples of controlled and enslaved peoples, and these are few rare cases like the total destruction that the Romans imposed on Carthage (Carta Hadta) after the Third Punic War. Also for pragmatic reasons - not to develop the embers of rebellion; Both for magical-ritual reasons - fear of the revenge of local gods (belief in ancient times was local), and also for prestige - without the remains of a temple, or another monument, the world did not know, according to the Romans, who was victorious and who was defeated. These points confirm Titus' instruction about the temple.
It should be noted, by the way, that the dramatic meeting of the Roman command with the house of Titus is implied in the literature of the Sages, albeit in a Midrashic formulation.

Joseph ben Matthew continues to describe what happened in a very dramatic way - "Titus returned to the capital and decided to attack the temple the next day at dawn at the head of all his army and conquer it, but God had already decreed from the first days to give the temple to the fire and here comes the day of judgment at the end of time, it is today The tenth of the month of Luos (Av) ... and from the hands of the Jews the fire came out for the first time and from them was the cause. Because after Titus left the battlefield again, the rebels took a breather and went out once more to fight the Romans. The guards of the temple clashed with the haters (the Romans) who were putting out the fire (in the inner courtyard of the House of God) and they tempted the Jews and chased them to the temple" (Wars XNUMX:XNUMX). In other words, the rebels themselves entered an ecstatic, catatonic state of "I will die mentally with..." and asked to prevent the Romans from extinguishing the fire. After all, they should have spared the temple that was about to catch fire, but they didn't. In their rage, just like burning the food treasures in starving Jerusalem, and conducting criminal "operations" of liquidating accounts during the siege, they were ready for anything, including the destruction of the temple.

And the end of the story is well-known and dark: contrary to Titus' instructions, one of the legion soldiers threw a burning torch through the window onto the wooden walls of the temple, and the fire took hold of the building just like a fire in a field of thorns. When Titus learned of this, he jumped up from his bed and ordered the soldiers to put out the fire, but in vain. It was too late and in the midst of all the commotion and the noise of the battles, the fire consumed the temple, while the legionnaires, in the fury of the attack, slaughtered the rebels. "Thus was the temple to eat fire in spite of the emperor (Titus who will be emperor) and his anger" - Joseph ben Matthieu concludes the dramatic story about the beams of the temple during the siege. And then unfolds the speech of Titus in the presence of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Not of joy for Eid, but a terrible disappointment from the Jewish rebellion movement that consumed every good part of the population since the beginning of the days of the Roman takeover in the days of Pompey. Also disappointed by the conciliatory words that the Romans showed towards the rebels at the beginning of the rebellion and during it, "but you" - continues Titus and says in pain and anger - "you have tired of all my words, and your hands have sent fire into the temple".

Sage sources do not blame Titus or Vespasian for the destruction of the temple and its burning. The blame falls on the shoulders of the fanatical rebels. This position confirms the historiographical reliability of Josephus. The members of the Sanhedrin after the destruction of the Second Temple specifically stated: "Second temple... why a sword? Because there was gratuitous hatred in him" (Talmud Babili, Tractate Yoma, XNUMXth XNUMXb). And what unnecessary and unnecessary hatred did the Sages mean when they said this? Not for the confrontation between the fanatical rebels and the opponents of the rebellion, but for the bloody fratricidal war of the rebels among themselves. A sharp criticism is made here, albeit indirectly, towards those who caused the rebellion, and this is supported by the Sage's reserved position towards the rebellion in general against the Romans, and from here to seeing the rebels as guilty of the destruction of the house and its burning is a very short road.

Blaming the Romans and Titus for the historical memory of the people of Israel for generations, recalls the cynical message that emerges from the play "The Story of the Suburbs", when the group of Puerto Ricans points the arrows of blame for their difficult situation in all directions - to the police, the social worker, the courts, and society in general, and does not bother to show the mirror In front of her face, and this in the lovely song dear officer krupky.

It is interesting, by the way, that the collective historical memory also attributes the destruction of the First Temple to the Babylonians, led by Nebuchadnezzar, but the destruction was the result of a chain of futile rebellions in Babylon, and from these delusional moves the first temple met its tragic end, and so the prophet Isaiah testifies in his vision, that It was actually written in retrospect: "Your children hasten, from your destruction and your enemies they will come out of you" (Isaiah Matt, 17)