Josephus's The Jewish War by Martin Goodman;

Author:Martin Goodman;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.3. Masada. The site of the mass suicide of Sicarii according to book 7 of the Jewish War. Photo, courtesy of Andrew Shiva.

If the site of Masada struck a chord with viewers this will have been the result of the remarkable international publicity that surrounded the excavations on the site by Yigael Yadin in the mid-1960s. The site itself had been identified already in 1838 by the Americans Edward Robinson and Eli Smith. Recourse to the Jewish War was common among Christian visitors to sites in the Holy Land during the nineteenth century, and the book featured prominently in the private travel diary of Judith Montefiore following her first visit to Jerusalem with her husband Moses in 1827, presumably as a result of recourse to Christian travel guides. By the late 1920s the striking profile of the mountain against the background of the desert and Dead Sea had turned the rock into a focus of pilgrimage for Zionist Jews fired up by the rhetoric of Yitzhak Lamdan’s poem. The visit to the site took on an extra meaning for the students from Zionist high schools who arrived only after a grueling journey on foot through the desert; there was a temporary pause after a devastating earthquake hit the northern Dead Sea region in July 1927, but during the 1930s the pilgrimage featured regularly in the program of Zionist youth movements.44

Chief among those responsible for building up the Masada myth was the amateur archaeologist Shmaryahu Guttman. Guttman, born to Russian Jewish parents, had migrated to Palestine from Scotland in 1912 as a young child. In his late teens he became a kibbutznik and farmer, but as a Zionist activist in his early twenties, he dedicated himself to investigating the land of Israel, including the fortress of Masada, which he climbed in 1933. Guttman had no formal archaeological training, but he had enthusiasm and a good knowledge of the text of book 7 of the Jewish War, which had recently been published in Hebrew by Simchoni, and it was Guttman who discovered the ‘snake path’ used by the ancient Jewish defenders to reach the summit of the rock. To turn Masada into a national symbol, Guttman read the Josephus text selectively, ignoring the unhelpful depiction of the defenders of the fortress as Sicarii who had played only a minimal role in opposition to Rome and had preyed on their fellow Jews in Ein Gedi. Calling them ‘Zealots’, as Guttman did, directly contradicted Josephus, who explicitly distinguished zealots from sicarii precisely in his account of the defense of Masada, but ‘Zealot’ sounded heroic—and Guttman could assume that few visitors to the site would have read Josephus’s description of the Masada siege in the Jewish War (7.252–406) with sufficient attention to note the vituperation against the Zealots embedded within it (7.268–74).

Guttman’s enthusiasm for the Masada myth mushroomed through the increasingly dangerous years of the 1930s, and in January 1942 he convened a five-day seminar, attended by a large group of Zionist leaders, to

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