Memoirs of Hadrian 

By Marguerite Yourcenar, translated from the French, New York, 1954-1963

[c.f. My People. The Story of the Jews, by Abba Eban, New York, 1984]

[Excerpts from pages 233-249 for the years 132-135 AD?]

"....Jewish affairs were going from bad to worse. The work of construction
was continuing in Jerusalem, in spite of the violent opposition of Zealot
groups. A certain number of errors has been committed, not irreparable in
themselves but immediately seized upon by fomenters of trouble for their own
advantage. The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when
its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace,
unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for
centuries by superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts),
mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and
read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel.

The festivals of the Jewish New Year, celebrated with a din of trumpets and
ram's horns, give rise every year to brawling and bloodshed; our authorities
accordingly forbade the public reading of a certain legendary account
devoted to the exploits of a Jewish heroine (Easther) who was said to have
become, under an assumed name, the concubine of a king of Persia (Iran),
and to have instigated a savage massacre of the enemies of her despised and
persecuted race. The rabbis managed to read at night what the governor
Tineus Rufus forbade them to read by day; that barbarous story, wherein
Persians and Jews rivaled each other in atrocities, roused the nationalistic
fervor of the Zealots to frenzy (a feast of Purim). 

Finally, this same
Tineus Rufus, a man of good judgement in other respects and not uninterested
in Israel's traditions and fables, decided to extend to the Jewish practice
of circumcision the same severe penalties of the law which I had recently
promulgated against castration (and which was aimed especially at cruelties
perpetrated upon young slaves for the sake of exorbitant gain or debauch).
He hoped thus to obliterate one of the marks whereby Israel claims to
distinguish itself from the rest of human kind. 

I took the less notice of
the danger of that measure, when I received word of it, in that many wealthy
and enlightened Jews whom one meets in Alexandria (Egypt) and in Rome have
ceased to submit their children to a practice which makes them ridiculous in
the public baths and gymnasiums; and they even arrange to conceal the
evidence on themselves. I was unaware of the extent to which these banker
collectors of myrrhine vases differed from the true Israel. As I said,
nothing in all that was beyond repair, but the hatred, the mutual contempt,
and the rancor were so. 

In principle, Judaism has its place among the
religions of the empire; in practice, Israel has refused for centuries to be
one people among many others, with one god among the gods. The most
primitive Dacians (Bulgarians) know that their Zalmoxis is called Jupiter in
Rome; the Phoenician Baal of Mount Casius has been readily identified with
the Father who holds Victory in his hands, and whom Wisdom is born; the
Egyptians, though so proud of their myths some thousands of years old, are
willing to see in Osiris a Bacchus with funeral attributes; harsh Mithra
admits himself brother of Apollo. 

No people but Israel has the arrogance to
confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of
divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of Deity, who contains all; no
other god has inspired his worshipers with disdain and hatred for those who
pray at different altars. 

I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a
city like others, where several races and several beliefs could live in
peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and
common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand. The clergy of the ancient
city were scandalized by the opening of schools where Greek literature was
taught; the rabbi Joshua, a pleasant, learned man with whom I had frequently
conversed in Athens, but who was trying to excuse himself to his people for
his foreign culture and his relations with us, now ordered  his disciples
not to take up such profane studies unless they could find an hour which was
neither day or night, since Jewish law must be studied night and day.

Ismael, an important member of the Sanhedrin, who supposedly adhered to the
side of Rome, let his nephew Ben- Dama die rather than accept the services
the Greek surgeon sent to him by Tineus Rufus. 

While here in Tibur means
were still being sought to conciliate differences without appearing to yield
to demands of fanatics, affairs in the East took a turn for the worse; a
Zealot revolt triumphed in Jerusalem. An adventurer born of the very dregs
of the people, a fellow named Simon who entitled himself Bar-Kochba, Son of
the Star, played the part of firebrand or incendiary mirror in that revolt.

I could judge this Simon only by hearsay; I have seen him but once
face-to-face, the day a centurion brought me his severed head. Yet I am
disposed to grant him that degree of genius which must always be present in
one who rises so fast and so high in human affairs; such ascendancy is not
gained without at least some crude skill. 

The Jews of the moderate party
were the first to accuse this supposed Son of the Star of deceit and
imposture; I believe rather that this untrained mind was of the type which
was taken in by its own lies, and that guile in his case went hand with
fanaticism. He paraded as the hero whom the Jewish people had awaited for
centuries in order to gratify their ambitions and their hate; this demagogue
proclaimed himself Messiah and King of Israel. 

The aged Akiba, in a foolish
state of exaltation, led the adventurer through the streets of Jerusalem,
holding his horse by the bridle; the high priest Eleazar rededicated the
temple, said to be defiled from the time that uncircumcised visitors had
crossed its threshold. Stacks of arms hidden underground for nearly twenty
years were distributed to the rebels by agent of the Son of the Star; they
also had recourse to weapons formerly rejected for our ordnance as defective
(and purposely constructed thus by Jewish workers in our arsenals over a
period of years). 

Zealot groups attacked isolated Roman garrisons and
massacred our soldiers with refinements of cruelty which recalled the worst
memories of the Jewish revolt under Trajan; Jerusalem finally fell wholly
into the hands of the insurgents, and the new quarters of Aelia Capitolina
were set burning like a torch. 

The first detachments of the Twenty-Second
Legion Deiotariana, sent from Egypt with utmost speed under the command of
the legate of Syria, Publius Marcellus, were routed by bands ten times their
number. The revolt had become war, and war to the bitter end. Two legions,
the Twelfth Fulminata and the Sixth Ferrata, came immediately to reinforce
the troops already stationed in Judea; some months later, Julius Severus
took charge of the military operations. He had formerly pacified the
mountainous regions of Northern Britain, and brought with him some small
contingents of British auxiliaries accustomed to fighting on difficult
terrain. Our heavily equipped troops and our officers trained to the square
or the phalanx formation of pitched battles were hard put to it to adapt
themselves to that war of skirmishes and surprise attacks which, even in
open country, retained the techniques of street fighting. 

Simon, a great man
in his way, had divided his followers into hundreds of squadrons posted on
mountain ridges or placed in ambush in caverns and abandoned quarries, or
even hidden in houses of the teeming suburbs of the cities. Severus was
quick to grasp that such an elusive enemy could be exterminated, but not
conquered; he resigned himself to a war of attrition. The peasants, fired
by Simon's enthusiasm, or terrorized by him, made common cause with the
Zealots from the start; each rock became a bastion, each vineyard a trench;
each tiny farm had to be starved out, or taken by assault. Jerusalem was not
recaptured until the third year, when last efforts to negotiate proved
futile; what little of the Jewish city had been spared by the destruction
under Titus was now wiped out. 

Severus closed his eyes for a long time,
voluntarily, to the flagrant complicity of the other large cities (which)
now become the last fortresses of the enemy; they were later attacked and
reconquered in their turn, street by street and ruin by ruin. In those times
of trial my place was with the army, and in Judea.... In the spring of the
third year of campaign the army laid siege to the citadel of Bethar, an
eagle's nest where Simon and his partisans held out for nearly a year
against the slow tortures of hunger, thirst, and despair, and where the Son
of the Star saw his followers perish one by one but still would not
surrender. 

Our army suffered almost as much as the rebels, for the latter,
on retiring, had burned the forests, laid waste the fields, slaughtered the
cattle, and polluted the wells by throwing our dead therein; these methods
from savage times were hideous in a land naturally arid and already consumed
to the bone by centuries of folly and fury. 

The summer was hot and
unhealthy; fever and dysentery decimated our troops, but an admirable
discipline continued to rule in those legions, forced to inaction and yet
obliged to be constantly on the alert; though sick and harassed, they were
sustained by a kind of silent rage in which I, too, began to share.... In my
dispatches to the Senate I suppressed the formula which is regulation for
the opening of official communications: 

THE EMPEROR AND THE ARMY ARE WELL.

The emperor and the army were, on the contrary, dangerously weary. At night,
after the last conversation with Severus, the last audience with fugitives
from the enemy side, the last courier from Rome, the last message from
Publius Marcellius of from Rufus, whose receptive tasks were to wipe up
outside Jerusalem and to reorganize Gaza, Euphorion would measure my bath
water sparingly into a tub of tarred canvas; I would lie down on my bed and
try to think. 

There is no denying it; that war in Judaea was one of my
defeats. The crimes of Simon and the madness of Akiba were not of my making;
but I reproached myself for having been blind in Jerusalem, heedless in
Alexandria, impatient in Rome. I had not known how to find words which would
have prevented, or at least retarded, this outburst of fury in a nation; I
had not known in time how to be either supple enough or sufficiently firm.
Surely we had no reason to be unduly disturbed, and still less need to
despair, the blunder and the reversal had occurred only in our relations with
Israel; everywhere else at this critical hour we were reaping the reward of
sixteen years of generosity in the Orient. 

Simon had supposed that he could
count on a revolt in the Arab world similar to the uprising which had
darkened the last years of Trajan's reign; even more, he had ventured to
bank on Parthian (Persian) aid. He was mistaken, and that error in
calculation was causing him slow death in the besieged citadel of Bethar:
the Arab tribes were drawing apart from the Jewish communities; the
Parthians remained faithful to the treaties. The synagogues of the great
Syrian cities proved undecided or lukewarm, the most ardent among them
contenting themselves with sending money in secret to the Zealots; the
Jewish population in Alexandria, though naturally so turbulent, remained
calm; the abscess in Jewish affairs remained local, confined within the arid
region which extends from Jordan to the sea; this ailing finger could safely
be cauterized, or amputated. And nevertheless, in a sense, the evil days
which had immediately preceded my reign seemed to begin over again..... The
evening courier had just informed me that we had re-established ourselves on
the heap of tumbled stones which I called Aelia Capitolina and which the
Jews still called Jerusalem; we had burned the Ascalon, and had been forced
to mass executions of rebels in Gaza. If sixteen years of rule by a prince so
pacifically inclined were to culminate in the Palestine campaign, then the
chances for peace in the world looked dim ahead. 

I raised myself on my
elbow, uneasy on the narrow camp bed. To be sure, there were some Jews who
had escaped the Zealot contagion: even in Jerusalem the Pharisees spat on
the ground before Akiba, treating that fanatic like an old fool who threw to
the wind the solid advantages of the Roman peace, and shouting to him that
grass would grow from his mouth before Israel's victory would be seen on
this earth. 

But I preferred even false prophets to those lovers of order at
all cost who, though despising us, counted on us to protect them from
Simon's demands upon their gold (placed for safety with Syrian bankers),
and upon their farms in Galilee. I thought of the deserters from his camp
who, a few hours back, had been sitting in my tent, humble, conciliatory,
servile, but always managing to turn their back to the image of my Genius.

Our best agent, Elias Ben-Abayad, who played the role of informer and spy
for Rome, was justly despised by both camps; he was nevertheless the most
intelligent man in the group, a liberal mind but a man sick at heart, torn
between love for his people and his liking for us and for our culture; he
too, however, thought essentially only of Israel. 

Joshua Ben-Kisma, who
preached appeasement, was but a more timid, or more hypocritical (than)
Akiba. Even in the rabbi Joshua, who had long been my counsellor in Jewish
affairs, I had felt irreconcilable differences under that compliance and
desire to please, a point where two opposite kinds of thinking meet only to
engage in combat 

Our territories extended over hundreds of leagues and
thousands of stadia beyond that dry, hilly horizon, but the rock of Bethar
was our frontier; we could level to dust the massive walls of that citadel
where Simon in his frenzy was consummating his suicide, but we could not
prevent that race from answering us "No".....I raised my head and moved
slightly in order to limber myself. 

From the top of Simon's citadel vague
gleams reddened the sky, unexplained manifestations of the nocturnal life of
the enemy. The wind was blowing from Egypt; a whirl of dust passed like a
spectre; the flattened rims of the hills reminded me of the Arabic range of
moonlight. I went slowly back, drawing a fold of my cloak over my mouth,
provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the
future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next
day, or to sleep. 

The collapse of Rome, if it were to come about, will
concern my successors; in that eight hundred and forty-seventh year of the
Roman era my task consisted of stifling the revolt in Judea and bringing
back from the Orient, without too great loss, an ailing army. In crossing
the (camp's) esplanade I slipped at times on the blood of some rebels
executed the evening before. I lay down on my bed without undressing, to be
awakened two hours later by the trumpets at down.