Sunt Lachrymae Rerum

Rome and Jerusalem (RJ) is in equal measures magisterial and flawed. It proposes a grand vision of the history of relations between the Jews and the Roman state—based on a probably unequaled command of both Roman and Jewish sources—which in the end proves problematic, and excessively reliant on hypothetical, variably plausible, reconstructions of single events presented as crucial turning points. Nevertheless, it provides some important correctives, and, though it makes few concessions to its hoped-for popular audience (one reviewer in the British press complained of the book's length and excessive detail), RJ will be required reading for scholars and students in the field. Goodman has always enjoyed leavening analysis of the deepest layers of causation with an almost playful tendency to highlight the importance of contingencies: in this way he sought to reconcile the two great traditions of later twentieth-century Anglo-American ancient history. Goodman embraced the structural-functionalism of Moses Finley and Keith Hopkins—both professors of ancient history at Cambridge (Finley entered the world, or at any rate, Paterson, New Jersey, as Finkelstein and taught at Rutgers before his refusal to take the Eisenhower-era loyalty oath drove him to the UK; notwithstanding this, Weber, not Marx, was the paramount influence on Finley, and on Hopkins following him). But Goodman was formed by the system-resistant empiricism of traditional British history, embodied in the work of the former Camden Professor of ancient history at Oxford, Fergus Millar. RJ provides evidence that Millar has won the battle for Goodman's mind.

RJ addresses a big question: was the catastrophic failure of Roman Jewish relations in 66 C.E. the result of an essential incompatibility of the Jews to Roman rule, or was it, as a Polybius or a Josephus might have argued, mere tykhe—fortune. Goodman's ostensible answer is the latter—it was the result of a string of errors and mischances. For the first hundred and thirty years after Pompey marched into Jerusalem (in 63 B.C.E.) the Jews had coped with Roman rule as well as any subject population; for their part the Romans felt little affection or admiration for the Jews but were nevertheless adequately tolerant. For them the Jews, when they bothered to notice them at all, were comparable to the Egyptians—people with peculiar and to some extent contemptible mores, possessing what the Romans regarded as a ludicrous sense of their own venerability and importance, but in the end as integratable into the Roman system as the Cilicians or the transalpine Gauls. The Egyptians never had a mass uprising and never suffered corporate destruction or real religious persecution, and if it had not been for bad luck the Jews' experience might not have differed: there was nothing inevitable in the cycle of rebellion and destruction.

Indeed, the rebellion began as a trivial uprising, and it would have been speedily crushed with no further damage to Jerusalem, the Temple and the Jewish people, if the first major Roman force to intervene—a legion commanded by Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria—had not retreated from Jerusalem at the first sign of local resistance. This was a baffling and uncharacteristic display of hesitance from a Roman general and set off a centuries-long sequence of misfortunes. The rebels' fluke victory over Gallus turned a bad riot into a disastrous revolt. Two years later Nero was assassinated and his commander of the war in Judaea, Titus Flavius Vespasianus (Vespasian), quickly emerged as one of the leading pretenders to the imperial throne. He thus needed—for it was his only potential claim to legitimacy—a decisive victory: quelling a minor native revolt in a remote province would not do. He had to crush a foreign nation. The victory over the Jews, and the destruction of the Temple (which Goodman implausibly follows Josephus in regarding as accidental) and Jerusalem, were thus transformed into the pretext...