The great rebellion that was almost averted at the last moment/Dr. Yachiam Sorek

The great rebellion that erupted against the Romans was indeed motivated by ideological goals and deep conceptual tasks, but it was the property of individuals, of passionate zealots, who likened themselves to the messengers of heaven on earth, and in the name of this they wielded the miracle of rebellion and swept many good people against their will and against their good into the vortex of rebellion

The best scholars who discussed the history of the Great Revolt, 66-73 CE, mainly delved into the background to its outbreak, the circumstances of its incarnation, its organization, the internal struggles that unfolded in it, its leadership, the character of Joseph, the fanatics, the destruction of the house, the fall of Masada and the dire consequences of the rebellion. One issue was overlooked by them and the depth of the internal discussion they conducted regarding the rebellion and that is: was the rebellion inevitable or not. The truth is that this question is irrelevant to any historical event, small or large, simple or complex. Even if I am stimulated, while reading and perusing some text and certainly in the light of self-amusement, and even if "came across" by one of the students in an academic course, or alternatively during a panel or lecture at some scientific conference, I find myself drawing a "yellow card" to a questioner or an interested person And Mania-Vibia says: Since the hands of the clock cannot be turned back, there is no point and certainly no possibility of presenting the "million dollar" question: What would have happened if? Can it be prevented? And these difficulties are further formulated.
If so, my talk should end at this point in time, and not it. The question "Could the rebellion have been prevented?" Tomer with difficulty: "What point did they find in the rebellion initiative?" And spread with defiance: "Was the rebellion supported by the majority of the people?", or "Did it have a consensus?"

It is not my intention in my article to lay out for the learned, interested and intrigued reader, a series of reasoned, detailed and documented counter-arguments, for which I will have to expand the radius of the lecture to dozens of pages, I will content myself with presenting the image of the frame and the main plot and its colors.
Revolts and resistances throughout history have been measured by identifying the main goals that motivated them and pumped them with the "adrenaline" drug. National struggles based on an ideological background were seen as legitimate and swept into them extensive layers of the population as a whole, starting with the hard core, through the active supporters and ending with the passive layers. Such, for example, was the struggle of the Yishuv in Israel against the British rule, whose colors were mainly ideological-nationalist, and in the bottom line it was summed up in the sentence: "Let us ("hell") manage our own affairs", and in a cleaner language: "We want independence!". Different from it, of course, was the struggle of several ghettos against the Nazis, and especially the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish uprising. The issue of resistance in the Holocaust also carried ideological dimensions, although in a different channel than the revolt of the Indians against the British or the Algerians against the French, who also forged visions of freedom and liberty during the occupation.

In this article, I want to argue that the great rebellion that broke out against the Romans was indeed motivated by ideological goals and deep conceptual tasks, but that it was the property of individuals, of passionate zealots, who likened themselves to the messengers of heaven on earth, and in the name of this they wielded the miracle of the rebellion and swept away many good people against their will and without from their favor into the whirlwind of rebellion and inflicted on their brothers a mortal blow, unprecedented. And the claimant argued, and rightly so, as it turns out, in this language: perhaps it is a handful of rioters, but how do we explain the fact of the organization of many battalions of rebel-fighters to fight the Romans, when it is clear that they were not motivated by messianic ideology. This point will be clarified towards the end of the lecture and at this stage we will examine the degree of accuracy of a number of characteristics that many tend to attribute to the Great Rebellion. According to me, this tendency is fundamentally wrong.

Among the historians there are some who define the condemned rebellion, as well as the early Maccabean rebellion and the later Ben Kusva / Bar Kochba rebellion, as a resistance imbued with national symbols. This association is anachronistic and its place will not be recognized in the ancient era, even though sometimes many good people may stumble and fall into this kind of trap. "Light years" separate the characteristics of the ancient era from modern terms and concepts such as nationalism. Equipped with this basic assumption, we can easily shatter and discredit any attempt to attach ideological foundations of this kind to the Great Revolt and claim with almost certainty that in the absence of such a national element, it is doubtful whether a consensus could have been formed around the revolt in the Romans. And in fact this is good for all uprisings in the ancient era (which is why, by the way, we do not witness wide uprisings in the ancient era of a people against a foreign conqueror, with the exception of course of military confrontations between warring forces). It is also worth noting the assumption that the ancient population did not attach much importance, if at all, to the issue of freedom and sovereignty. For us, the people of the modern era, as those who grew up in a democratic and liberal and of course well-publicized environment, it will be difficult to assume and understand how ancient peoples did not attach great importance to the degree of political freedom that was given and/or denied to them. This phenomenon is rooted in the system of conventions of government, society and religion in ancient times. Only peoples who have tasted true freedom and have been deprived of each other or who are aware of other peoples' struggles for sovereignty, will agree to use all means in order to define themselves with the characteristic of self-determination and demand liberation and freedom (this is what we demanded from the British at the time and today the Palestinians demand this from us, the Basques from the Spaniards, the Kurds from the Iraqis and the Turks , the Chechens from the Russians and more). The system of truths and conventions of our ancestors was simply different: as long as the local's livelihood was not harmed and his possibility to maintain his religion, belief and worship existed, it was not of his interest to join a revolutionary-rebellious-insurgent movement, as a bystander or as an activist. Also, joining a resistance movement was of course a personal and collective risk, what's more, facing a strong, skilled, trained and terrifying Roman army was certainly an option that could not be neglected.

More than that, one of the common mistakes among those who examine the period originates from the inability to detach from their modern time and look closely at the ancient time. What is the meaning of things? Only those who proceed from a point of assumption that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish public in the country were consumed with their existential problems; Only those who proceed from a point of assumption that the degree of friction of the Jewish public with the Roman army and the Roman bureaucracy was zero; Only those who proceed from the assumption that the Jewish public did not feel firsthand the system of tensions between the Roman Commission and the Jerusalem population, and that it was more connected to the municipal system of the city of the polis than to the central city of Jerusalem. Only those who depart from these starting points will understand that the desire of the Jewish public to rebel, even if it is to passively support the rebellion, not to say actively, aspired to zero in those days.

So let's summarize the gist of the claims: in the modern era, a nation may rise up and rebel to achieve its independence and sovereignty, and in the ancient era, as long as its livelihood was found and its religion and belief were not harmed, it would be very difficult to find any nation that rebelled against its master, in the conquering kingdom.
Equipped with these basic assumptions, we can examine against them the basic, "solid" positions of the best researchers who seek to summarize the main reasons that led the rebels (in their language - "the people", a term that I reject with both hands) to take up the weapon of the uprising against the Romans, and in the conventional language - The big rebellion.

The far-reaching ones seek to locate the germination of the seeds of reason in the soil of the Roman occupation of Judah and the swinging of the chopping ax on the House of Hasmoneans. These claim that the loss of Judea's freedom, Jewish fighters who fell for the defense of Jerusalem, land-demographic arrangements that created wedges of separation between parts of Judea, the Galilee and the coastal plain, legal-political and economic tensions that emerged between the polis cities in Israel (those that were promoted for obvious reasons by the government Roman) and the rural areas, saturated with the Jewish population and internal tensions in those cities between Jews and Greeks and Mediterraneans. All of these slowly poured the drops of resistance into the cup of rebellion. The researchers who support the accumulation of these factors but place the emphasis on events that took place close to the revolt such as: the heavy burden of taxes, corruptions in the Roman administration, the expedition of commissioners to the residents of Jerusalem and harassment of them, the clear Roman support of Romans in the position of the cities of the polis against the exercise of political rights of Jews, the termination of the continuation of the term of office of House of Herod and more. This system of oppressive and disturbing factors was used by zealous, messianic elements to create a supporting-rebellion atmosphere, and roll it over the entire nation. True, on the face of it one can divide between the residents of Jerusalem and the areas far from it and claim that we could have expected, if at all, that the flame of the rebellion would be ignited in Jerusalem and only in it, and the rest of the country has nothing to cling to in order to hang on to it in favor of initiating a rebellion against the Romans.

More than that, if divided, logically, the factors associated by researchers to drive the rebellion into several groups, there are economic factors (heavy taxation and corruption), political factors (support for the cities of the polis and rulings against the rights of Jews in these centers and also the attempts to control the leadership of the High Priesthood, the end of home rule Herod), social (tensions between Jews and the population of the cities of the polis), psychological (harassment of the commissioners and harm to the feelings of the Jews) eschatological (messianic phenomena and the feeling of the end times). I'm sorry, but these factors have nothing to lead the people to revolt: we find here neither the economic aspect that threatens the very existence nor the fear of stifling Jewish worship. We can start from a point of assumption that a Jew from Galilee, the Lowlands, a Samaritan, a Coastal and Trans-Jordanian asked himself: should he join the rebellion, and this without introducing into his system of considerations the question - did he even know or sense even a little of the above reasons and factors, and his answer was: for what ?!

Different parties in Jerusalem must have been tormented by these views, and they asked themselves the same question. One of them, a scion of the Herod family, Agrippa II, delivers a very interesting speech, right on the eve of the outbreak of the rebellion, in order to loosen the hands of the fanatics and cool down the enthusiastic and hot-tempered among the people who gathered and gathered in Jerusalem. It is not known whether this speech was actually delivered by Agrippa or whether it was implanted at the initiative of the writer, Joseph ben Mattathieu, and the truth is that it does not matter at all, as long as the speech reflected the position of the moderates - the members of the aristocracy, the high priesthood, the Sanhedrin and in fact those whose eyes were in their heads and not Roll your eyes up to the sky. The speech presents by way of elimination the totality of the rebels' goals and the belief in their success and drops the ground, one by one. He proves not only that the Jews have no one to rely on - not the help of the Diaspora, not the aid of Rome's enemies, not even the God of Israel, who is now, "what to do", more with the Romans than with the Jews. Agrippa even tries to prove that during the expected rebellion the Jews will have no choice but to obey the religious commandments, which they trust and rely on. Agrippa emphasizes that what was certainly clear was that the ability of the Jews to stand against the Roman power was bordering on zero, but that, despite the logic of his arguments and positions, the raging public in Jerusalem was captured by the spirit of fanaticism and was unwilling to come to his senses, step back a little and take stock of the chances of the rebellion's success.

Could the rebellion have been stopped at this point? Certainly certainly, but what, the people who gathered in Jerusalem still toyed with the delusional hope that the "mini-rebellion" they were planning would shock the Romans and make them prepare in a different, sound and responsible way, for the continued control of Judea, and at the very least would remove from office the last Maasian procurator - Gesius Florus. This is expressed in the crowd's reaction to Agrippa's speech, saying that he did not want to fight the Romans but Florus. It can be said that this is narrow-mindedness and naivety mixed with heightened excitement, but in any case the separation between the criticism of the commissioner and the criticism of the Romans indicates that the crowd's desire to rise up and rebel against the Romans was not so strong.

But things started to get out of control when the rabid fanatics started making crazy moves in Jerusalem that created a maddening dynamic that ended in a revolt against the Romans. And he added Beit Shammai and poured oil into the bubbling fire in the form of "Decree XNUMX Devar" that came to destroy every bridge between Jews and Gentiles, including the Romans. The Sicrian zealots set fire to the archive where the promissory notes were stored in order to recruit the loan sharks, the palaces of Agrippa and Bernice, and the house of the high priest. This physical combustion fueled the existing centers of violence. At the same time, Menachem ben Yehuda the Galilean arrives in Jerusalem at the head of his zealots for Jerusalem, after he took control of Masada and escalated the war. The rebels took control of the upper city and the citadel of Antonia and besieged Herod's palace. Hananiah the high priest was murdered by Menachem, who wanted to crown his head with sole rule, and this served as a signal for the beginning of the civil war in Jerusalem.

Incidentally, it is interesting to carefully read the descriptions of the rebellion in Jerusalem as expressed in Josephus Ben Matthew's instructive essay "The History of the Jewish War with the Romans" in order to sense and see to what extent the anti-rebellion groups, the pursuers of peace in Jerusalem, have reached, and not necessarily from personal and political-economic motives, when their voice He was suffocated and trampled by the instigators of strife and strife - by the brawling fanatics, some of whom, by the way, were more concerned with internal wars than with rebellion among the Romans. And the Sages were so right in summing up the tragic dimension of the rebellion in one sentence: "The second house... Why is there a sword? Because there was gratuitous hatred in him" (Yuma XNUMX XNUMX). This sentence is attributed, not in his favor and of no interest, to a quarrel, as it were, between the pursuers of peace and the pursuers of war and not her. The sages specifically directed their claim and cry towards the fanatics, who from their excess of stupidity and madness dragged the people into a dizzying and tragic vortex of blood. These were more involved in internal quarrels and crazy moves against the peace camp and the public that came because of the rebellion, than in the actual rebellion itself

And here we come to the crux of the point raised at the beginning of the article: if we are talking about a handful, how do we explain the massive recruitment of Jewish warriors for such a long and tiring revolt against the Romans? Well, shortly after the outbreak of the rebellion, the fanatical, the quarrelsome, the extremists, without any choice, the "Dear Jerusalem", the representatives of the moderate camp, take the leadership of the rebellion so that it does not go on the axis of a certain crash. They set up the government of the rebellion and organize its actions and conduct. This trend explains the joining of many Jews to the rebellion, most of them recruited, almost reluctantly for the almost lost mission. The government of the rebellion knew without a doubt that its chances were slim and zero and even apparently prepared itself for the stage of an orderly surrender to the Romans. However, following the events of the rebellion, the fanatics took the lead again, mainly in Jerusalem and Masada, and the bitter end is well known.

In conclusion, we will present the following points: 1. The ideological foundation of the rebellion was the property of a group of zealots; 2. There is nothing to look for national foundations in the rebellion, because the national idea is rooted in religion many centuries later; 3. The majority of the people, outside of Jerusalem, either did not know about the existence of the rebellion or disowned it; 4. A people whose routine of life is not disturbed and especially the occupation of his existence and the management of his religious-ritual life, will not wave the miracle of rebellion; 5. The "hate of nothing" feature presents the real tragedy of the rebellion; 6. The rebellion began to unfold as a domino effect from the fanatical core through a mini-rebellion against the Commissioner, organized by the moderate rebel government and finally appropriated by fanatical elements; 7. The rebellion could indeed have been avoided if the initial connection had not been made between the extreme fanatical nucleus and the clamor of the masses in Jerusalem, which resulted in the establishment of the "rebellion government".

Imagine, therefore, that disillusionment from jealous and messianic blindness and the exercise of wise judgment would have prevented the outbreak of the rebellion. The entire history of the people of Israel would then change from end to end.