220
II : The Second and Third Revolts
on the controversies surrounding the flight of the Palestinian Arabs during the 1947–1949 Israeli War of Independence and the debate over the restoration of Palestinian Arab statehood rights.
Summing Up: The Elements of Reality, Fantasy and Futility in Jewish Reactions to Roman Rule It is my contention that there were seeds of Jewish victory, if such is the right term, in each of the three revolts I have discussed. Had they been combined in a single uprising, it is quite possible that there might have been an honorable truce and a key role assigned to the strong, united and self-reliant Judaea that would have emerged from the contest. To suggest that the favorable elements in each could have been present in a single conflict is not merely an exercise in “what if ”— per Appendix IX. It points up the matrix of defeat. Recall that Herod Agrippa I, called “the great,” was considered a “friend of Rome” and, as such, his people enjoyed a relatively privileged place among the Empire’s outlying provinces. His personal instability was what caused the Jewish entity to fall from grace so to speak. Likewise, Herod Agrippa II (more commonly know as “Agrippa I”) in Caligula’s reign had gained for his kingdom the earmarks of a “favored nation” status with respect to Rome. It was only the paranoia of the emperor and Caligula’s impolitic demands regarding setting up his effigy in the Temple that unraveled the relationship. In my examination of the two-century Jewish struggle to guard the Jewish way of life against encroachments and insults both by local pagan neighbors and insensitive Roman administrators, I have found that the Jews of antiquity were as divided two millennia ago as they are in the fragmented Israeli parliamentary system of today. In assessing Judaism in the ancient world, scholars have found that there were many Judaisms, not a monolithic religious hierarchy. Often, the self-appointed arbiters of Jewish conduct, both in daily life and in matters of state, were sorely out of touch with the situation of the farmers and merchants whom they claimed to represent. Complicating this disconnect is the equally unrealistic and extremist promises made by would-be defenders of the common man, the divergent radical revolutionary movements, conveniently lumped together under such labels as Zealots, sicarii, etc. Given this oft-repeated pattern of secular accommodation, ecclesiastic rebuke and correction and revolutionary zealotry confronting the formidable forces arrayed against it, one might be excused for regarding the continued existence of Judaism, let alone the reconstitution of a Jewish state, to be a kind of heaven-sent miracle.