My Glorious Brothers
Fast's Maccabees
 

My Glorious Brothers
Uri Avnery
Uri Avnery's English weekly
December 27, 2014
http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

When I was 15 years old and a member of the Irgun underground (by today's criteria, an honest-to-goodness terrorist organization), we sang "(In the past) we had the heroes / Bar Kochba and the Maccabees / Now we have the new ones / The national youth…" The melody was a German military marching song.

Why did we look for heroes in the remote past?

We were in desperate need of national heroes to emulate. For 18 centuries, Jews had not fought. Dispersed throughout the world, they saw no reason to fight for emperors and kings who mostly persecuted them. (Though some of them did. The first authentic hero of the new Zionist entity in Palestine was Josef Trumpeldor, one of the few Jewish officers in the Czar's army, who lost an arm in the 1905 Russian-Japanese war and was killed in a skirmish with Arabs in Palestine.)

So we found the Maccabees, the Zealots and Bar Kochba.

THE MACCABEES, in whose honor we celebrated Hanukka this week, revolted against "the Greeks" in 167 B.C. "My Glorious Brothers" Howard Fast called them in his famous novel.

Actually, "the Greeks" were Syrians. When Alexander the Great's empire was divided between his generals, Seleucus acquired Syria and the countries to the East. It was against this mini-empire that the Maccabees rose up.

It was not only a national-religious struggle against a regime which wanted to impose its Hellenic culture, but also a cruel civil war. The main struggle of the Maccabees was against the "Hellenizers", the cultured modernist Jewish elite who spoke Greek and wanted to be part of the civilized world. The Maccabees were fundamentalist adherents of the old-time religion.

In today's terms, they were the ISIS of their time. But that is not what we learned (and what is being taught today) in school.

The Maccabees (or Hasmoneans, their dynastic name) set up a Jewish state, the last one in Palestine, that lasted for 200 years. Unlike their successors and imitators, they had a lot of political acumen. Already during their rebellion they made contact with the up-and-coming Roman republic and secured its help.

Yet the Maccabees won by a quirk. Their revolt was a very risky adventure, and they owed their eventual victory to the problems that beset the Seleucid empire.

The irony of this story is that the Hasmonean kings themselves became thoroughly Hellenized and adopted Greek names.

THE NEXT great rebellion started in the year 66 AD. Unlike the Maccabee revolt, it was a totally mad affair.

The Zealots belonged to diverse competing groups, who remained disunited to the bitter end. Their rebellion, called "The Great Revolt", was also a fanatical national-religious affair.

At the time, messianic ideas filled the air in Palestine. The country absorbed religious influences from all directions – Hellenic, Persian, Egyptian – and mixed them with the Jewish traditions. It was in this feverish atmosphere that Christianity was born and the Book of Job and other later books of the Hebrew Bible were composed.

With the Messiah expected any moment, Jewish fanatics did something that now seems incredible: they declared war on the Roman Empire, which was then at the height of its power. As if Israel today would declare war on the US, China and Russia at the same time – something even Binyamin Netanyahu would think twice about doing.

It took some time before the Romans gathered their legions, and the end was as could be foreseen: the Jewish community in the country was squashed, the temple was destroyed (perhaps by accident) and the Jews evicted from Jerusalem and many other places in Palestine.

Throughout, the Zealots believed in their God. In besieged Jerusalem, already starving, they burnt each other's wheat, sure that God would provide. But God, it seems, was otherwise engaged.

At the height of the siege of Jerusalem, the venerable rabbi Yochanan Ben-Zakkai was smuggled by his pupils out of the city in a coffin, and the Romans allowed him to start a religious school in Yavneh, which became the focus of a new kind of anti-heroic Judaism.

HOWEVER, THE lesson of the catastrophe caused by the Zealots was not learned. Less than 70 years later, an adventurer called Bar Kochba ("Son of a Star") started another war with the Roman Empire, even more hare-brained than the last.

At the beginning Bar Kochba, like the Zealots, won several victories, before the Romans could gather their forces. At that time, the important rabbis supported him. But his megalomaniac nature caused him to lose their support. He is said to have told God: "You don't have to support me, but at least don't obstruct me!"

The inevitable defeat of Bar Kochba was an even greater disaster than the previous one. Masses of Jews were sold into slavery, some were thrown to the lions in the Roman arena. A legend recounts that Bar Kochba fought a lion with his bare hands and killed it.

However, the basic Zionist tenet that the Jews were expelled from Palestine by force and that this was the beginning of the Diaspora (the "Exile") is a legend. The Jewish peasant population remained in the country, and most became Christians, and later Muslims. Today's Palestinians are probably mostly descendants of this Jewish population which clung to their soil. At one time, David Ben-Gurion supported this theory.

The Jewish religion was actually born in the Babylonian exile, some 500 years before Christ, and from the beginning the majority of the Jews lived outside Palestine, in Babylon, Egypt, Cyprus and many other countries around the Mediterranean. Palestine remained an important religious center which played a significant part in the transition of Judaism into a Diaspora religion based principally on the Talmud.

THE HANUKKA feast symbolizes the basic change of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple – and the counter-change effected by the Zionists in modern times.

The rabbis were against the cult of heroism, whether God-fearing or not. They belittled the battles of the Maccabees and found another reason to celebrate. It appears that a great miracle had happened, which was much more important than military victories: when the Temple was re-dedicated after being defiled by the "Greeks", the sacred oil left sufficed only for one day. By divine intervention, this small quantity of oil lasted for a whole week. Hanukka was dedicated to this huge miracle. (Hanukka means literally inauguration, dedication).

The Book of the Maccabees, which recounts the struggle and the victory, was not included in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew original was lost.

(Hanukka, like Christmas, was originally a pagan festival celebrating the winter solstice, much as Passover and Easter are based on the pagan celebration of the spring equinox.)

The Jewish sages were determined to stamp out, once and for all, the craving for revolts and military adventures. Not only was Hanukka turned into an innocuous feast of sacred oil, but the Zealots and Bar Kochba were ignored or belittled in rabbinical writings, which shaped Judaism and Jewish life since then until this very day. Jews were supposed to adore God, not human heroes.

Until Zionism appeared on the scene. It resurrected the ancient heroes and turned them retrospectively into Zionists. The Maccabees, Zealots and Bar Kochba became our models. The mass suicide of the Zealots on the Masada mountain after the Great Revolt was celebrated as a glorious deed, generations of children were and are taught to admire them.

Today we have national heroes in great abundance, and really do not need all these ancient myths any more. But myths die slowly, if at all. Still, more and more voices of historians and such are cautiously raising doubts about their role in Jewish history. (I may have been the first, in an essay I wrote some four decades ago.)

ALL THIS may reaffirm the saying that "nothing changes as much as the past". Or, in the words of Goethe: "What you call the spirit of the times is nothing but the spirit of the lords in which the times are reflected."

Zionism was a great spiritual revolution. It took an ancient ethnic-religious Diaspora and re-shaped it into a modern European-style nation. To effect this, it had first of all to re-shape history.

It could base itself on the works of a new generation of Jewish historians, led by Heinrich Graetz, who painted a new picture of the Jewish past influenced by the German nationalist historians of their time. Graetz himself died a few years before the First Zionist Congress, but his impact was and remains immense.

While the Germans resurrected Hermann the Cherusker and built a huge statue of him on the site of his great victory over the Romans in the Teutoburger forest, shortly before the Jewish Great Revolt, the early Zionists resurrected the Jewish heroes, ignoring the disasters they caused. Many European peoples, large and small, did the same. It was the Zeitgeist.

Three generations of Israeli children were brought up from kindergarten on these myths. They are almost completely cut off from world history. They learn that the Greeks were the people whose yoke was thrown off by the Maccabees, but learn next to nothing about Greek philosophy, literature or history. It creates a very narrow, egocentric state of mind, good for soldiers, but not so good for people who need to make peace.

These children learn nothing at all about the history of the Arabs, Islam and the Koran. Islam, for them is a primitive, murderous religion, bent on killing Jews.

The exception is the autonomous Orthodox school system which teaches nothing much except the Talmud, and is therefore immune to the cult of heroes, but also to world history (except the pogroms, of course).

The great political change we need must be accompanied by a profound change of our historical outlook.

The heroes of antiquity are perhaps due for another revision of their status.

Fast's Maccabees
Morris U. Schappes
Masses  & Mainstream
November, 1948
http://www.trussel.com/hf/schappes.htm
 

Masses & Mainstream
November, 1948

Fast's Maccabees

My Glorious Brothers, by Howard Fast.
Little, Brown. $2.75.

THE writing of this novel was an act of defiance. The book was composed during the year in which Howard Fast, as part of that valiant group of the Spanish Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, was in the front line of battle against the tyranny of the Thomas Committee. Together with Dr. Barsky and his associates, Fast had been unbendingly obedient to the law of the class struggle never to surrender names to the enemy. The process of completing the volume was in part a race against the time when he would be compelled to serve a prison sentence for his stand. Since the publication date finds Fast still on bail, I commend the book to the attention of the judges of the Supreme Court, which is now deciding whether to review the case.

For My Glorious Brothers deals with obedience to law. Resistance to tyrants, we learn from this retelling of the heroism of the Maccabees, is the truest obedience to law. We derive the lesson from this inspiriting novel deeply and movingly. The writing of it must have been not a distraction from, but an intensification of, his still uncompleted experience of resistance to the American fascists. In forging his Maccabees, Fast hammered steel for his own use; his own conduct in battle steadied the flame with which the Maccabees burn.

Not since Longfellow wrote his drama has an American writer of distinction taken the Maccabees as his theme, and it is more than fifty years since any American novelist has handled it. In Fast's own case, this is the first of his ten novels in which the setting is outside the United States and the time other than, in the historian's sense, modern. It is of course significant that he turned to the ancient history of his own people.

Yet if the antiquity of 2,100 years ago and the setting in Judea seem unexpectedly close to the reader today, that is because Fast is the kind of historical novelist to whom time and place are secondary and the conflict between progress and reaction is primary. Unlike a Thomas Mann or a Sholem Asch, who provide a many-layered panorama when they deal with the world of antiquity, Fast excites the reader with a sense of urgent immediacy by confining himself to telling a heroic tale of people made easily recognizable in situations and conflicts in which the reader can find his own place. If one does not learn history from Fast – and rare is the novelist from whom one does – one surely learns how to fight more courageously today. And of such inspiration we can never have enough.

Fast deals not with the Maccabean dynasty, whose rule from about 140 B.C. to about 30 B.C. was far from popular with the masses, but with the Maccabean revolt against Greek-Syrian religious and political oppression, from 166 to 160 B.C. Taking the skeleton of none-too-plentiful fact which the old chroniclers furnish, Fast has fleshed it with the insight derived from study of the resistance movements of the past decade.

He knows that resistance does not come easy and is not instantaneous. In the source-material, when the Greek King of Syria, Antiochus IV, orders the Jews, on pain of death, to abandon their religious practices, to worship Greek gods, eat swine's flesh, violate the Sabbath and abandon the practice of circumcision, the Maccabees (the aged priest Mattathias and his five sons, John, Simon, Judas, Eleazar and Jonathan) spontaneously rise up, kill a Jew who would obey and the Syrian mercenaries who would enforce the order, and take to the hills.

To this bald and, in modern experience, unconvincing outline, Fast skillfully adds the following elements: initial fear of an overweening enemy; doubt as to the possibility of victory over such a power; the need for organizing and equipping even a small guerrilla force; and, most significantly, the vitality that the mood of the people themselves gives to their leaders. When the degenerate emissaries of Syrian terrorism first come to Modin, the little village not far northwest of Jerusalem where the Maccabees live, a child is wantonly killed and the old Mattathias is slapped by Appelles, the Greek warden. There is no resistance. But soon after, Judas, who is to become the foremost of the Maccabees, beset by fears and doubts, goes off for five weeks to roam through Judea to see what, if anything, can be done. Appelles and his mercenaries come again to Modin and publicly burn the holy scrolls while the whole village stands by. They kill Ruth, the beloved of both Judas and Simon, who loves Simon only. There is no resistance. But when Judas returns the next morning, he comes bringing both the spirit and a plan of resistance.

The spirit he has imbibed from a Rabbi Ragesh, a character through whom Fast represents the mass Judean sect of ultra-pious Hassidim, which fought splendidly for religious freedom but later refused to support Judas's struggle for political independence. Together Rabbi Ragesh and Judas convince the villagers of Modin to organize themselves, forge such weapons as they can and prepare for action. As Mattathias says to the still hesitant Simon, "Only the people can make out of themselves a Maccabee and raise him up."

Even the observance of the Sabbath, which had stood in the way of resistance because the enemy cunningly attacked on that day knowing that the Jews would not fight, is made subservient to life when Mattathias judges that "The Sabbath day is holy, but life is holier." The next time the mercenaries descend upon Modin, the Jews refuse to worship Pallas Athene, exterminate the troops of the enemy and evacuate the entire village and its movables to the hills. "We learned the new war," says Simon, "the people's war that is not fought with armies and wealth, but with the strength that comes out of the people."

The Maccabees rouse the whole countryside, the well-equipped legions of the enemy are cut to pieces by the mobile guerrilla tactics best suited to Judean hills, and the Temple at Jerusalem is restored and rededicated in a celebration that became the festival of Hanukah, the first non-Biblical holiday in Jewish history. Greek-Syrian armies keep coming and are beaten back (with the minor aid of an international brigade of Alexandrian Jews) until palace rivalries lead the Regent of Syria to offer peace with religious freedom and a reduction in taxes.

The war aims of the Hassidim having been satisfied, they withdraw from the struggle despite Judas's exhortations to fight for total independence instead of relying on the mercy of the occupying power. Rather than surrender, as is demanded, Judas and Simon continue the resistance until Judas is killed in battle. It is at this point that Fast breaks off the stirring narrative, although, historically, complete Judean independence was not achieved for almost twenty years.

Fast has elected to tell the story in the form of a reflective reminiscence written out in the first person by Simon the Maccabee, the elder brother and close companion of Judas. For his purpose Fast has developed a mildly mannered but simple style that is flexible enough to be effective for many moods, from boyhood recollections to the vividly evoked battle scenes. The style is sometimes tinged with the movement of biblical prose, sometimes it recalls the narrative pace of the Malory of Morte D'Arthur, and sometimes, when Simon's mood becomes one of brooding over the events of twenty years before, the prose takes on some of the involutions of Edwin Arlington Robinson's dramatic monologues. In his previous writings which sometimes were marked by an undistinguished bareness, I do not remember having noted such happy diversity as he reveals here.

Whether placing the story in Simon's mouth was the most fruitful way of telling it is open to question. Thinking in what he considers to be Simon's terms, Fast has lifted the heroic foreground almost entirely out of the complex background of the clash of ancient empires (Greek, Syrian, Egyptian and Roman) in which Judea was, so to speak, in the vortex. For Simon, and it would seem for Fast too, Judea is the center of the universe, geographically, politically and even morally. This emphasis is one of the unfortunate nationalistic elements running through the heart of the main conception of the book. Simon sees the Jews as somehow the focus of the hatred of the whole world "because to all nations and all peoples the Jew was the same, an abomination whose ways were not their ways." Simon believes Antiochus IV orders the regimentation of Judea out of some mysterious anti-Semitism caused by the "separateness" of the Jews, and not because of the strategic and financial considerations that scholars have assigned for the action. Throughout the volume there is an unqualified scorn for Greek civilization that is by no means redressed by Simon's noting, in a fleeting and unimpressive passage, that his hatred is not for the glory that was Athens but for the oppression that inevitably accompanied Greek imperial domination of other lands.

Simon also disappointingly spares us details of the treachery of the urban upper class of Judea and of the corrupt highpriesthood, which were the main "Hellenizing" agents of Antiochus and sold out the Jews for their own class and personal interests. Simon's viewpoint is that of a narrow religious nationalism in which the Jews are the chosen people, the fount of all good and the enemy of all evil. Fast even exaggerates the military strength of Judea by having the imperial power of Rome send a legate to Jerusalem to offer a treaty to Judea, when in point of fact, as far as we know, it was the Judeans who sent emissaries to Rome to ask for a treaty that would help secure their independence from Syria, and the alliance gained was decisive.

That Fast does not entirely share Simon's nationalistic views is suggested in the lengthy coda to the narrative consisting of the Roman legate's report of his visit to Simon in Jerusalem. The legate challenges Simon's concept of the chosen people. He tells Simon of the real relationship of international forces which made possible Judea's independence. "'Can you survive against the whole world, Simon? ... You say you fought for your freedom and you will never fight for any other cause. That is a bold statement, Simon – for I will not believe that a Jew is so different from all others....'

"The Jew stared at me, his pale eyes puzzled and sad. He was disturbed, not with fear, but with a deep uncertainty. Then, he made as to dismiss me."

The Roman talks sense, but because it comes from one who confesses he hates the Jews, one is impelled to discount it. The deep uncertainty, however, still seems to be Fast's.

Nevertheless, from My Glorious Brothers the Maccabean heroism shines with new concreteness and splendor, pointed for the reader in America's hysterical epoch. The same story inspired the early Christians for the first four centuries of their era, when they celebrated the Maccabees on August 1, and has been an almost universal model to the Jews since the Middle Ages. Erasmus, in the days of the Inquisition, braced himself and his companions by rehearsing the great deeds of defiance of Mattathias and his five sons. And row, wherever this latest version by Howard Fast is read, Jew and non-Jew will breathe more deeply and fashion themselves into bolder opponents of contemporary tyrants. Fast's Maccabees are heroic Jews and heroic people. Because they were once slaves in Egypt, they know their duty to be resistance to oppression. The loss of six million in the last war has not blunted the lesson. Nor is the finger pointed at Jews alone.