delanceyplace.com 11/8/11 - five hundred jews were crucified each day

• 0 COMMENTS

In today's excerpt - in 70 CE, just a few decades after the itinerant preachings of Jesus of Nazareth and after the Jews had rebelled against Roman rule, the Romans laid siege and destroyed the city of Jerusalem and its glorious temple, casting the Jews of that land into a global diaspora that did not see an end until the 20th century:

"On the 8th of the Jewish month of Ab, in late July AD 70, Titus, the Roman Emperor Vespasian's son who was in command of the four-month siege of Jerusalem, ordered his entire army to prepare to storm the Temple at dawn. The next day happened to be the very day on which Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem over 500 years before. Now, Titus commanded an army of four legions—a total of 60,000 Roman legionar­ies and local auxiliaries who were eager to deliver the final blow to the defiant but broken city. Within the walls, perhaps half a million starving Jews survived in diabolical conditions: some were fanatical religious zeal­ots, some were freebooting bandits, but most were innocent families with no escape from this magnificent death-trap. There were many Jews living outside Judaea—they were to be found throughout the Mediterranean and Near East—and this final desperate struggle would decide not only the fate of the city and her inhabitants, but also the future of Judaism and the small Jewish cult of Christianity—and even, looking forward across six centuries, the shape of Islam.

"The Romans had built ramps up against the walls of the Temple. But their assaults had failed. Earlier that day, Titus told his generals that his efforts to preserve this 'foreign temple' were costing him too many sol­diers and he ordered the Temple gates set alight. The silver of the gates melted and spread the fire to the wooden doorways and windows, thence to the wooden fittings in the passageways of the Temple itself. Titus ordered the fire to be quenched. The Romans, he declared, should 'not avenge themselves on inanimate objects instead of men.' Then he retired for the night into his headquarters in the half-ruined Tower of Antonia overlooking the resplendent Temple complex.

"Around the walls, there were gruesome scenes that must have resem­bled hell on earth. Thousands of bodies putrefied in the sun. The stench was unbearable. Packs of dogs and jackals feasted on human flesh. In the preceding months, Titus had ordered all prisoners or defectors to be crucified. Five hundred Jews were crucified each day. The Mount of Olives and the craggy hills around the city were so crowded with cruci­fixes that there was scarcely room for any more, nor trees to make them. Titus' soldiers amused themselves by nailing their victims splayed and spread-eagled in absurd positions. So desperate were many Jerusalemites to escape the city that, as they left, they swallowed their coins, to conceal their treasure, which they hoped to retrieve when they were safely clear of the Romans. They emerged 'puffed up with famine and swelled like men with dropsy,' but if they ate they 'burst asunder.' As their bellies exploded, the soldiers discovered their reeking intestinal treasure troves, so they started to gut all prisoners, eviscerating them and searching their intestines while they were still alive. But Titus was appalled and tried to ban these anatomical plunderings. To no avail: Titus' Syrian auxiliaries, who hated and were hated by the Jews with all the malice of neighbours, relished these macabre games. ... 

"Prisoners and defectors brought news from within the city that especially upset [the historian] Josephus, whose own parents were trapped inside. Even the fighters started to run out of food, so they too probed and dissected the quick and the dead, for gold, for crumbs, for mere seeds, 'stumbling and staggering like mad dogs.' They ate cow dung, leather, girdles, shoes and old hay. A rich woman named Mary, having lost all her money and food, became so demented that she killed her own son and roasted him, eating half and keeping the rest for later. The delicious aroma crept across the city. The rebels savoured it, sought it and smashed into the house, but even those practised hatchetmen, on seeing the child's half-eaten body, 'went out trembling.' "