A Loop of Blue

The Hasmonean Order and the Mediterranean Diaspora

Introduction: Temple, Trade and Diaspora

In the previous articles we have expounded on the very material blessings that the Temple, even if looked upon as nothing but engine of consumption, had on the economy of Perso-Hellenistic and Hasmonean Israel. We have also observed how the benefits of this consumption were shared first in accordance with the Nehemiad pact and then in the Revolutionary democratic arrangement of the Hasmoneans. Before we move into the final stage, and the surprising resilience of the Jewish economy in the absence of the Temple between the late 1^st and the 8^th centuries, we must look at the effect Temple consumption had on Mediterranean trade, and, in particular, on the western diaspora.

The Temple required a range of goods that could not be found anywhere in the Jewish homeland, or at least not in sufficient quantity and quality: for the most mundane task of fitting the priests with garments containing at least some tekheleth (true blue, in fact, Murex "purple" of the highest quality, having the hue of the Israelite sky on  a clear summer day), the Temple had to have had foreign suppliers, direct or indirect. Most of the ingredients of the sacred incense are native or were traded through the Arabian Peninsula. Israel has no great deposits of gold, silver, or gemstones whose supply was necessary for the creation, mending and adornment of sacred vessels in daily use. Even the basic material of the priestly garments, linen, was more abundant abroad (and in higher quality) than at home.

Likewise, the Rabbinical sources contain a plethora of references to foreign expertise being employed in the Temple: artisans from Alexandria were said to have produced the Gates of Nikanor, and were sought after for the preparation of incense and the shewbread when the native talent grew too obnoxious (albeit, the Sages noted, the Alexandrians' work had proven materially inferior, which forced the Temple authorities to buckle in negotiations and acquiesce to their demands). 

I: The Exiles and the Prodigals: A Tale of Two Diasporas

The Western Jewish diaspora was a completely different phenomenon from its eastern counterpart, both in origin and in function.

The Eastern diaspora (the Jews of what the Greeks would term "Asia", that is, the lands between India and Mesopotamia) was the result of the original destruction of the Israelite kingdoms[1] in the 8^th and 7^th centuries and the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian policy of deportation and resettlement. These Jews were already nativized into their environment: they were for the most part farmers: either landowners or tenants. Doubtless, some were artisans, merchants, and civil servants, but there was no great specialization to set them and their neighbors apart. They were indeed Jews, a unique ethno-religious group, but the Old Empire teemed with diverse groups such as these, and the Jews of 'Babel" (as they themselves continued to call their entire diaspora centuries after the Persian conquest) were late in adoption of the synagogue and the Halakhah[2], which was a western institution and the most unique marker of Jewish exceptionalism in antiquity.

The Western diaspora, however, evolved in two phases:

In the Persian period, the Achaemenid kings undertook a policy of constructing a wide range of military colonies in the Levant and Egypt, by far their most troublesome regions. The Jews, who incessantly petitioned the kings for the restoration of their native land (which, conveniently, laid approximately at the center of the region) were the perfect candidate. Once the Jerusalemite and Transjordanian bases of operation were up and running, they could be used as support nodes for stations in Egypt and Syria.

In the Hellenistic period, however, while Jews evidently continued to serve in the Egyptian military (now turned to Macedonian and Ptolemaic service), the main drive of further colonization was commercial: Jews found themselves, as Philo and Josephus tell us, settled in the grand entrepots of the Eastern Mediterranean, Antioch and Alexandria, as equal citizens with the rights of Macedonians due to their military service, but that very settlement (as well as the generous monetary and loot compensation Alexander’s soldiers received) set them up for commercial enterprise. To which, the demand of the Temple (which the Ptolemies patronized heavily) supplied demand that they were equipped to understand and therefore supply best.

II: The Crisis of the 3^rd Century (BC) and the Severing of West from East:

The century of war between Hellenistic Egypt and the Seleucids in the 3^rd century, which plagued the Levant and the land of Judea in particular, caused two great developments: The old Imperial highway between Egypt and the Persian Gulf, which existed since the Assyrian period, was bifurcated into a “Western” and “Eastern” spheres and, in addition, the Seleucid were losing their grip on their eastern provinces. The victory over Egypt at Raphia in 217 BC could hardly have compensated for the loss of Parthia just twenty years prior and the start of the Eighty Years War, which was concluded only in the next century with total Parthian victory and the taking over of all the eastern Satrapies. Within fifty years of Raphia, the Maccabean Revolution would commence and Seleucid control over the Levant would shatter irrevocably.

As far as the Jewish world was concerned, the difference between the Jews of the Western diaspora and the (now autonomous and allied to Ptolemaic Egypt and Republican Rome) homeland and those of the (now Parthian) Eastern diaspora ceased to be just of economic class and historical origins and became a genuine fissure of language, politics, and nearly impassable imperial geopolitics.

III: Synagogues and Halachah:

The synagogue originated in the western diaspora and has been the combination of two institutions of the Jewish garrisons in the service of Persia: The Bamah and the common hall.

The Bamah, or external altar, was an old Judahite institution that the Davidic Kings of Judah, despite repeated attempts, could never completely root out. Josiah made the most valiant (and brutal) attempt at centralizing sacrificial work in Jerusalem, but by the age of Jeremiah, on the eve of the Babylonian war, we still find it extant[3].

The common hall, on the other hand, is a descendant of the Gatehouse which served the (pre-Assyrian invasion) Iron-Age Israelite city as public square. As the Assyrians introduced siege engines to the Levant, these functions had to move inward – usually to a court[4], but, increasingly since the 5^th century BC onwards, to a dedicated building.

That, in a Jewish fort-colony, the functions of both shall be collapsed into a single, permanent institution (especially as the altar was removed with Jerusalem’s insistence on cultic exclusivity[5]), is quite natural, especially as such institutions would look familiar, sensible, and socially stabilizing to these Jews’ overlords, whether Persian or Macedonian. Temenoi (Sacred districts / temples), assembly buildings, and civic-religious associations (politeumata, a diminutive form of poleis) were abundant in the Hellenistic world. This is also the source of the framing of the Torah as “Law” (Nomos) or more commonly “Law of the Fathers”. Both the Persians and the Hellenistic kings employed soldiers from multiple regions, nations and poleis. Each of these had its own ritual and political constitution and each of these soldiers preferred, if possible, to associate with his own countrymen and practice at least some version of their laws[6].

Due to this development, and due to an ongoing process pushed forward by the prophetic schools and the Wisdom Literature since the 8^th century BC[7], the center of Israelite Religion is reframed from ritual to Law. To be a good Israelite (a term that Jews use for themselves down to the Middle Ages) is not merely to participate in the cult of the national God, but to study, know and follow the national Law and the national mos maiorum which accompanies and fills it “the Spirit of the Law”. From this combination we receive the new system of “Halachah” “the walk path” i.e. the orthopraxis which integrates ritual, law, and morals as a single, divinely ordered and humanly arbitrated system.

IV: The Hasidean Religious Revolution and the Emergence of Pharisaism:

The Hasidean movement was the spiritual and ideological force behind the Maccabean Revolution. Judging by the record that it left us in the Book of Maccabees (themselves Hasidean/Maccabean ideological literature), they have adopted the Diasporic (especially Alexandrian) reframing of the Torah as a Nomos and the local congregation as the mundane locus of connection with God (through the reading and contemplation of His Law). Rather than "anti-Hellenism" this movement should be understood as dedicated to the adoption of an interpretation of Israelite religion which already developed in a highly Hellenistic Jewish community – that of Ptolemaic Egypt.

The leader of the Hasideans, Yosei b. Yoezer of the Zereidah[8] is quoted in the Mishnah as saying:

Let thy house be a house of meeting for the Sages and sit in the very dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst[9]

Regardless of the question of the authenticity of this quote, the very fact that this quintessentially Pharisee idea (which sums up their worldview) is attributed to Yosei testified to the fact that the Pharisees saw Yosei as their founder: Indeed he is, alongside Yosei b. Yohanan of Jerusalem, according to traditional sources, the first generation of Pharisaism after the separation from the Sadducees (the traditional account claims the split was between disciples of Antigonos of Sochoh, Yosei's master)[10]. While the Sages' narrative on the origins of the Sadducees is late, biased, partisan, and sensational, the location of the split to the generation of the two Yosei, that is, the height of the Maccabean Revolution, happened to be accurate, since this is also the time the Scroll of the Covenant of Damascus emerges. This text, which rails against the main body of Jews in Jerusalem, calls them "traitors" and claims to be upholding the true Torah (which fits very well with the Sadducees' teachings, especially on the calendar), clearly is a polemic against a new movement – and the only movement it could be pointing to is the Hasidean/Pharisee one.

V: The Diaspora and Its Role in the Hasmonean Period

The collapse of the Seleucid Empire in the 2^nd century BC led not only to the emergence of the Jewish Republic (which was transformed in the 3^rd generation to the Hasmonean Kingdom) but also with the de-facto independence of various Hellenistic poleis in the previously Seleucid Levant.

The Hasmoneans, which set themselves early on as overlord of their own coast, maintained a sophisticated alliance system with the cities of the Lebanon which were already major commercial hubs trading in purple dye, Judean glass, and other luxury goods. Tyre, which had its own liberation movement approximately in parallel to the Maccabean Revolution[11], was a natural ally.

Urban Diasporic Jews already or soon to be present in these cities were material in fostering such economic and political ties. By 59 BC, when the Hasmonean power was already on the decline, Jews from as far west as Asia Minor, Italy and the Hispanic provinces, according to Cicero, raised the half shekel tax to the Temple. Temple implements would come to be used as symbols of Jewishness in the Western Diaspora (not only Menorahs[12]’ but incense shovels and other items). Jews in places such as Sardis, Crocodilopolis and others enjoyed royal proximity and patronage and often had kings and queens as official benefactors of their associations [13]. In I Maccabees 15:23, it is clear that diplomatic declarations regarding Jerusalem had to be sent to as faraway peoples and kings as:

 “Kings Demetrius, Attalus, Ariarthes and Arsaces; to all the countries—Sampsames, the Spartans, Delos, Myndos, Sicyon, Caria, Samos, Pamphylia, Lycia, Halicarnassus, Rhodes, Phaselis, Cos, Side, Aradus, Gortyna, Cnidus, Cyprus, and Cyrene.”

It is therefore safe to suggest that the prestige and financial standing of the Western Diaspora rested in a great part on the basis of the contact with the homeland, and with the Temple and the High Priesthood. The greatest thinker of the Western Diaspora, Philo of Alexandria, dedicates enormous amount of his writing to the argument that Moses’ Tabernacle, and, the Jerusalem Temple) is a model of the Divine world, and further, that the Temple of Jerusalem is a superior model and the completion of the Tabernacle:

And while he was still abiding in the mountain he was initiated in the sacred will of God, being instructed in all the most important matters which relate to his priesthood, those which come first in order being the commands of God respecting the building of a temple and all its furniture.

 (72) If, then, they had already occupied the country into which they were migrating, it would have been necessary for them to have erected a most magnificent temple of the most costly stone in some place unincumbered with wood, and to have built vast walls around it, and abundant and well-furnished houses for the keepers of the temple, calling the place itself the holy city. (73)

But, as they were still wandering in the wilderness, it was more suitable for people who had as yet no settled habitation to have a moveable temple, that so, in all their journeyings, and military expeditions, and encampments, they might be able to offer up sacrifices, and might not feel the want of any of the things which related to their holy ministrations, and which those who dwell in cities require to have.

 (74) Therefore Moses now determined to build a tabernacle, a most holy edifice, the furniture of which he was instructed how to supply by precise commands from God, given to him while he was on the mount, contemplating with his soul the incorporeal patterns of bodies which were about to be made perfect, in due similitude to which he was bound to make the furniture, that it might be an imitation perceptible by the outward senses of an archetypal sketch and pattern, appreciable only by the intellect; (75) for it was suitable and consistent for the task of preparing and furnishing the temple to be entrusted to the real high priest, that he might with all due perfection and propriety make all his ministrations in the performance of his sacred duties correspond to the works which he was now to make (On The Life Of Moses II, XV)

Therefore, we can see that the Temple occupied deeply the minds of Diasporic Jews. It supplied them with an anchor to their identity, ethnoreligious prestige, arbitration, diplomatic ties, and economic basis for commercial activity.

Conclusion: The Maccabean Revolution as a Mediterranean Event

The success of the long and bloody Maccabean Revolution depended not only on battlefield victories, which the Maccabeans failed to achieve as often as they succeeded. It was a cross-generational masterful diplomatic, military, and political project which took advantage of the last moment in which the Mediterranean world was still not consolidated under a single empire to anchor the Jewish Commonwealth and the Temple in the Mediterranean world. In this task, the Western Diaspora was a vital component since it could supply the Temple and advocate in each state where it was presence for the real diplomatic, economic, and cultural benefits of positive relations with Judea.

The failure of the revolts against Rome in 40 BC, 66 AD, and 132 AD all failed while the Maccabean Revolution succeeded: Simply put the rebels had no way to contract Mediterranean alliances since Rome dominated the entire Mediterranean region. At most they could have (as in 40 BC) strike an alliance with the Parthians (and later, the Sassanians) but the Parthians / Persians were always the weaker power in their competition with Rome and never managed, after the reign of Alexander the Great, to hold onto the Land of Israel.

The decline of the Jewish Commonwealth after the Second Jewish Civil War starting 67 BC, precipitated the decline of the standing of the Western Diaspora. It is at that period in which we start to hear of prosecutions, periodic bans and, in the early principates, even the first expulsions from the imperial seat of Rome. Only once the post-Bar Kochba settlement stabilized in the Homeland (with the Antonine Emperors officially recognizing the standing of the Nasi (the “Patriarch”) that we see the status of Diasporic Jews being stabilized and their prosperity restored – and that is in direct association with the Patriarch and his Sanhedrin[14]. Far from being disconnected and dispersed, the Western Diaspora had the most connections to and interest in the Jewish life of the Homeland. 

[1]  There is compelling evidence that the exiles of the Assyrian deportations of the 7^th century retained their Israelite identity and were eventually, upon the rise of the Neo-Babylonian kingdom, were included in the deportation of Assyrians to Babylon. Therefore, they would meet, in less than a century, their Judahite relatives and be ready to welcome them. This is by far more plausible than the (traditional) idea that the Joachimite exiles had enough time to develop the infrastructure to welcome the one of Zedekiah's reign.   (Ran Zadok: Israelites and Judaeans in the Neo-Assyrian Documentation (732–602 b.c.e.): An Overview of the Sources and a Socio-Historical Assessment, Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research Volume 374, November 2015)

[2] That is, the idea of a local religious organization sustained and governed by the believers' community, and the idea of a religious detailed "Law" rather than a list of generalized taboos and practices. Both these practices, with their sectarian variations, are first attested in the western diaspora and the Homeland Jewry of the 2^nd Temple period and took centuries to reach the Jews of the East.

[3] Jeremiah 17:3. Despite Jeremiah calling these Bamoth “Baal’s Bamoth” and accusing their worshippers of sacrificing their children (19:5), since the verse finishes with the protestation: “Which I commanded them not nor had it ever occurred to me” (ibid) it appears these were altars of El-Y.H.W.H, which the prophet is calling “Baalite” by way of insult and denunciation. Evidently, most Bamoth served for animal (and plant) sacrifice, the ones of the Topheth being a special case.

[4]  This seems to be the function of חצר המטרה  “The Court of the Targets” mentioned in Jeremia (especially 32:12. One must not wonder it was utilized as a prison as well, since such use of the place of public business was convenient and is attested down the centuries in Jewish and non-Jewish cultures alike). The same function is fulfilled in Ezra 10:9 and Nehemiah 8:1 by the “Broad Place of the House of God” / “the Broad Place… in front of the Water Gate” (i.e. the Temple Mount walled plaza).

[5] As we saw, it is evident from the Elephentine / Yev Letters to Jerusalem, the Persian era Egyptian diaspora cared a great deal about the High Priest of Jerusalem’s opinion.

[6] Xenophon mentions, with distinct disapproval, that the Spartans were unique in their eagerness to shake off their laws once they have been outside their own country.

[7] The Prophetic literature can be easily understood as a series of exhortation for people to follow the values of the Wisdom literature as a moral guide and of the Deuteronomistic and Holiness literature as practical guides.

[8]  The old Zionist maxim that "Man is cast in the mold of his homeland" seems to apply very sharply to Yosei. His town, the Zereidah is named so since it is "Pinched" (cf. מכה באצבע צרידה "To snap one's (pinched) finger") by the Shiloh stream which surrounds it from three sides. It is a natural fortress which was also the birthplace of Jeroboam b. Nebat, the quintessential and most successful religious and political rebel against a supposedly corrupt Jerusalemite authority.

[9] Ethics 1:4

[10] Ethics According to Rabbi Nathan 5:2

[11] https://nelc.ucla.edu/event/better-story-tyrian-resistance-hasmonean-valor-authority-narrative/

[12] See for instance, the decorations of the Phanagoria Synagogue in the Black Sea region, dated to 51 BC

[13]  Multiple such inscriptions survived showing successive Ptolemaic royal couples and their children dedicating synagogues 

[14] See for instance the inscriptions of the Stobi synagogues in which any person who violates the founding charter of the Synagogue is to pay a significant amount to the Patriarch.