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10Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 3 (2011 4) 363-371
УДК 141.412
Zealots' World View
Julia G. Matushanskaya*
Kazan State Technological University 68 K. Marx st., Kazan, 420015 Russia 1
Received 4.03.2011, received in revised form 11.03.2011, accepted 18.03.2011
Zealot had been a milleniaristic movements as well as Middle Age heresies. As we see their attitude to human life, material goods and archives, the Zealots believed that the time of history had come to the end. In the deposited Jerusalem they did the actions which contradicted to Halaha, thus showing the fact that it also had come to the end. Their attitude to the temple had been ambivalent - on the one side they believed that the Most High would save the Temple, but on the other side they questioned the sacrality of the Temple's space. The spatio-temporal continuum in the deposited Jerusalem had been probably perceived as some intermediate state between this present world and the Olam ha-Baha, descending from Heavens. The overcoming of the division of the worlds into phenomenal and transcendent had a natural social consequence the rejection of personalism.
Keywords: Zealots, Halaha, milleniaristic movements.
Point
The Zealots had been a group very close to Milleniaristic movements of the Middle Age Europe. If, like the researches of "The School of Annals", we would make conclusions on the materials of the texts left by witnesses, for instance by Josephus Flavius, then Zealots, as it can be seen, thought that the history comes to its end. That's why Zealots didn't value the human life high, violating ethic and ritual laws of Judaism.
Examples
The Apocalyptic had prepared the specific mentality of the Judea of the second Temple Age. According to Josephus Flavius, during the uprising a lot of Jews had been on the side of the radical Zealots' party. Josephus writes that
* Corresponding author E-mail address: jgm2007@yandex.ru
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"the people begun to suffer from mad passion to them during Gessius Flora's rule, who had been a governor and because of his abuse of power the Jews were made to rebel" (Josephus, Ant.Jud. XVIII,1,6). The Josephus' texts and the Talmud became the only sources for the reconstruction of the adequate conception of the mentality of Judea risen in arms.
In spite of the lack of material, in our opinion, the religious views of Zealots as well as their conception of History development (connected with their views) can be reconstructed by means of the modern methods. The most appropriate are the methods of historical anthropology. So, according to the methodology of the "School of Annals" it is stated that every memorial of the past is mute by itself. It becomes a source only being included by a scientist into the sphere of
his analysis. Instead of the narrative description on the basis of available sources, the principle "history - problem" had been stated. According to this principle the explorer formulates the problem in the light of which he selects the materials, which can serve as a source of knowledge about this problem.
Our stated problem if the Zealots' view to History and the forming of the historical conception of Josephus Flavius in the polemic with the Zealots. One of analogues of the antropologic research is the book of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie «Montaillou: village de occitan de1294 a 1324» (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975). The author reconstructs the living world of a village in Aquitania during the live of one generation, from the end of XIII th to the beginning of XIV century on the basis of the remained reports of questionings by the bishop of the town of Pamiers of Jacques Fournier. The texts contain the information of the different aspects of material life, family and culture. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie had re-grouped and reorganized the material in the style of monograph on agrarian history.
Our main source are the works of Josephus Flavius, who had been a witness of the fall of Jerusalem (Josephus, Bell.Jud. V). Besides, if we re-group and reorganize the material as in the book «Montaillou», then we can see in «Jewish War» and «Vita» some regularity, on the base of which we can classify Zealots as an apocalyptic movement typologically close the Middle-Age heresies.
The comparison of mentality of Zealots -the religious movement of Antiquity - and the mentality of Cathars - the heretics of the Middle-Age West states the problem of chronology. J. Le Goff, substantiating his conception of "the long Middle Age" views as one of the criterions the struggle of two almost equal powers - of God and Satan. According to J. Le Goff "Satan is born with the Middle Age and dies with the Middle Age"
(Le Goff, 1985). But the Biblical conception of the war between God and Satan had been developed in Jewish apocalyptic. The apocalyptic in turn influenced the birth of Christianity, which became the world outlook basis of the West European Civilization. Thus, either in makes sense to move the borders of "the long Middle Age" to the times of the birth of Christianity", or maybe the position of K Pomian (Pomian, 1979, p.455-457) is more appropriate in this situation. He called to reject every precise periodization, because every age is co-existence of anisochronous chains of historic events, abiding in different temporal dimensions to each other.
In 1958 the famous (and only one) methodological article of Braudel «History and historical sciences. Historic activity» (Braudel, 1958, p. 725 - 753) was published. It caused sharp discussions among intellectuals of the time. Sociologist G. Gurvich acknowledged the priority of sociology before history and he marked that «historical reality is just a privileged sector of a much wider circle - the circle of social reality». Unlike E. Durkheim, who tried sociologize various areas of scientific knowledge, Gurvich acknowledged «duumvirate» of sociology and history for integration of all social sciences (geography, ethnography, political economy, philosophy) in the framework of the one "Science about Man»( Gurvich, 1977). According to Gurvich, social reality consists of «a number of total social phenomena» such as deep levels of social life, types of social interactions, socials groups, global commonwealthes. Those social structures need to be studied with the help of analysis of different time rhythms typical to them: long-term of slowly moving time, illusory of sudden time, incorrectly pulsating time, explosion time, awaiting time etc. For Braudel Gurvich personified friendly, almost brotherly type of sociology, but the historian called the researchers to beware of the endless morphologies
of «chameleon-like time», which is a new but actually unchangeable formula of the same levels of immovable social architecture.
At the same time the historians were theoretically challenged by C. Levi-Strauss, who considered anthropology as a basis for unification of two sciences. Formally declaring parity and complementarity of two sciences, Levi-Strauss gave to history role of working only with «conscious manifestations of social life» and empiric plane of study, presenting to his own science the right to study its subconscious foundations, universal, out-of-time structures of human thought, which we see in customs, myths and languages of different nations (Levi-Strauss, 1993). Countering Levi-Strauss' ideas, Braudel marked that the out-of-time structures don't exist, because the society is movable and changeable, every society is a child of its own time.
Answering to polemic of Gurvich and Levi-Strauss Braudel introduces the concept of "time of big duration», which, according to his idea, must help to unify all the «sciences about man», historify them, giving to researched social reality the character of duration, extension, historicity. For a historian «the dialectic of time is a nucleus of social reality, living, innermost, constantly renewed contradiction between actual moment and slow flowing of time (Braudel, 1958, p. 117). Unlike Bergson, for whom time as duration («durée») has psychological and subjective character, Braudel imparts to «la longue durée» social and methodological sense. According to Braudel the perspective of long extension lets a historian contemplate «panorama of the whole mankind, in which the game of civilizations is displayed», and, moreover, can disclose the connections of history with present time, to determine «strong and week points in our move to future».
Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophic concept of time was especially close to Braudel. According
to Sartre, dialectic as a move of reality in impossible, if time is not dialectical i.e. if activity of future itself is denied. We have to understand that neither people nor their actions do not lie in time; time, as the specific attribute of history, is being created by people on the basis of their initial (Sartre, 1963). Thus, historical time was chosen by Braudel as a basis for creation of the common project of social-humanitarian sciences. Social-philosophical sense of dialectic connection of the past with the present and of the present with the future, lying in the foundation of Braudel's «la longue durée» lets talk about this category not as about final временной длине, but as about "long prolongation", about "time in the stage of realization", like «soft time», displayed on surrealistic canvases of S. Dali (Khakimov, 2009, p. 135-147).
For the removal of the lack of chronologic correspondence the anthropologic approach of V. Turner will be useful. V. Turner concentrates his attention on the aspects of human activity, intentionally brought out of the stream of social life and contrasted the everyday existence as "anti-structures" (Turner, 1984; Katz, 1984, p. 84-89). In the Turner's opinion in the most of cases the milleniaristic movements rose in those historical periods when the society had been in the transition from one cultural condition to another. The destruction of the Second Temple in the result of uprising brought to the rise of the Talmudic Judaism. The article of M.Goodman challenges the standard picture that religious variety within Judaism before 70 CE was focused on the Temple, and that variety was replaced by unity in 70 when the Temple was destroyed. Evidence is presented that different groups shared the Temple despite their disagreements on how the cult should be organised, and it is argued that the loss of this shared institution did not cause such groups to disappear, although it may have made it easier for them to ignore each other (Goodman, 2009,
p.202-213). But this shift of the emphasis from the Temple cult to hermeneutics of the Biblical text was conditioned by the development of Judaism of the beginning of the Christian Age itself, as being strongly influenced by Hellenistic philosophy. The translation of the Bible into Greek, and the works oh Philo and Josephus Flavius and Jewish apocalyptic texts, and also the spread of Christianity - all of them are just the stages of Jewish-Hellenistic syncretism, which led to the creation of Middle-Age society. The Antique anti-Semitism was the reaction if the Hellenes, and the war of Maccabeus and Jewish war are the Jews' reaction to cross-influence of cultures. Although the term for "apocalypse" is not attested as a title or genre definition in the extant corpus of Hebrew or Jewish Aramaic documents, some early Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic texts may contain rudimentary evidence in favor of the existence of a Hebrew or Jewish Aramaic equivalent for the term. Moreover, its reconstruction can contribute to better understanding of certain wide spread apocalyptic imagery, which must be closely connected to the semantics of this term (Kulik, 2009, p. 540-550).
The Jewish war had strongly expressed eschatological nature. Josephus writes about people who perished in the Temple, burn by the Titus' soldiers: "The initiator of their death was a false prophet who proclaims in those day in the city that God commanded to go up to the Temple in order to receive the Sign of Salvation" (Josephus, Bell.Jud. VI,5,3). So, the people in the deposited Jerusalem had been waiting the coming of the Messiah "here and now". According to Josephus, after the fall of Jerusalem one of the Zealots' leaders, Shimon bar Giora, who had been hiding in underground tunnels, came out in Romans' views from underground in the place of destructed Temple in the white tunic and red chlamys, presenting being a king (and probably the King-Messiah) (Josephus, Bell.Jud.VII,2,1).
According to a great number of false Messiahs, a lot of people of those times thought about being messiahs themselves. The conception of the Messiah as a political leader made possible the receiving the messianic role for every more or less charismatic person of the Second Temple Age.
The coming of the messianic age let the Zealots have the more simple attitude to the strictness of Jewish Law, which can be called the tendency to interiorization of the concept of freedom. This kind of freedom can in time become the freedom from all limitations and responsibilities, the freedom from morality. It had been a kind of sacral anti-behavior (Uspensky, 1996, p.460-476). The Zealots, transgressing the Jewish law, had been advancing the coming of new Messianic age. Josephus, rebuking the leaders of Zealots, Johanan from Gischala and Shimon bar Giora, writes that there had not left any crime not committed by them. So, Johanan, according to Josephus' words, "ate the forbidden food and rejected the originally stated purification" (Josephus, Bell.Jud.VII,2,1). In the deposited Jerusalem the Galileans under his leadership "robbed the houses of the rich, for fun killed the men and raped the women, and then drunk away the blood washed plunder. Because of satiety they committed themselves to feminine behavior: fixed their hair, dressed in women's garments, used perfumes and to be attractive they penciled their eyes. They imitated not only the garment but also the passions of women and in the extremes of their debauchery invented lawless pleasures" (Josephus, Bell.Jud.IV,9,10). This testifies the fact that the age of Halaha had passed for the Zealots as well as for Frankists who had been waiting for Messiah in the XVIII century. Jacob Frank had proclaimed that he came to deliver the world of all the laws (Scholem, 1974, p.139-217). From the other side Josephus possibly intentionally tries to show their opponents repulsive. But if we
consider that according to the rabbinic tradition Josephus tried to make this text as decorous as possible, it is less probable that he invented those accusations.
The attitude of Zealots to the sacral space of the Temple deserves special attention. Josephus writes that Johanan from Gischala had given the golden temple plate to re-melting. "He told to his close men that things which belonged to God they could fearlessly use for God-pleasing purposes, and for those who fight for the Temple it is permitted to take means for living from the Temple. For the same cause he devastated also the stores of sacred wine and oil, which had been kept by the priests in the Inner Temple for sprinkle of the burnt offering sacrifices and shared them between the crowd" (Josephus, Bell.Jud.V,13,6). Besides the Zealots refused to leave the Temple and not to use it as a fortress because, according to the words of the rebellions, "the Universe is the best Temple which God has. Nevertheless this very Temple will be saved by the One abiding in it" (Josephus, Bell.Jud. V,11,2). The next words in their essence discredited the service in the Temple, which had risen the indignation of the priests. But zealots had not been the only persons who had this attitude to the Temple. So Jesus' follower Stephanus tells in his sermon: "The Most High does not live in hand-made temples, as the prophet says: Heavens is the Throne of Mine and the Earth in pedestal for My feet» (Acts 7:1-53).
As in other milleniaristic movements the Zealots touch the problem of the social justice. Thus, recruiting the rebellions into his army, Shimon bar Giora had promised the freedom the slaves (Josephus, Bell.Jud.IV,9,3). Having captured the Jerusalem, the rebellions has burned the archives where the obligatory bill had been kept, so the debtors had become free from their debts (Josephus, Bell.Jud. II,17,6). It caused some of the scientist to regard the Jewish revolt a kind of social revolution. The Soviet scientist
A.G. Bokschanin (Bokschanin, 1954, p. 179) states the Zealots, who, according to Josephus' words "going to death count as nothing, and also despise the death of their friends and relatives, only not to admit the domination of other human being" (Josephus, Ant.Jud.XVIII,1,6), were the representatives of the revolutionary circles. But, in his opinion they had not gone to the end in their political strives, as sikaries did afterwards. Also Bokschanin doesn't trust to the Josephus' report of the sikaries as hired assasins, which "mixed with crowd and killed there their personal enemies as well as those against whom they were hired for money" (Josephus, Ant.Jud. XX, 8, 5), because it doesn't correspond with the image of a revolutionary.
According to Acts.21:38, where it is written about 4000 outlaws which "sikarion" led to the desert, another Soviet historian A.V. Ranovich makes a conclusion that the sikaries were a separated revolutionary group (Ranovich, 1937, p.131-132). In the Ranovich's opinion the memoirs of the sikaries as of people who violently took the land from the rich and gave it out to the poor are reflected in Mishna in the statement about lawless owners of the land - sikaricon (Ranovich, 1937a, p. 301). It can be connected with the fact that the sikaries who sat in the fortress of Masada robbed the closest villages. For instance Josephus tells about the robbing the village of Ein-Gedi (Josephus, Bell.Jud.IV,7,2). The troops of Shimon bar Giora captured Idumea (Josephus, Bell. Jud.IV,9). During the famine in the deposited Jerusalem the rebellions took the food firstly from the rich, and then from everybody who had some food. The Zelots themselves had no need because they stored for future (Josephus, Bell.Jud.V,10,2). Besides Johanan gave out the Temple stores of food to the crowd, as Josephus tells (Josephus, ell.Jud.V,13,6). The Zealots made court examinations of the rich, accusing them in conspiracy, with the purpose to get their goods
(Josephus, Bell.Jud.V,10,4). When during the first of such court examinations the religious court had justified the prisoners at the bar, the accused had been killed anyway and the judges had been beaten. So the historic memory could be kept for long time (Josephus, Bell.Jud.IV,5,4).
As theory and practice of studying of ethnic conflict show, they are one of the most complicated type of conflicts, first of all because of duration and changeability of forms in time. Contradictions lie in the basis of every conflict and for solving of them sides are struggling. The content of ethnic conflict is often territorial claims of sides, undividedness of spheres of influence and consequently, presence of different stages of conflict, - from psychological incompatibility of existence of sides and peaceful confrontation to an armed conflict - and vice versa. Ethnic conflicts in the ranks of one state often develop in the result of pressure and falsification by one side of history, culture, mentality of another one. The tactic of capture and keeping of defending side in unnatural state, often relied with physical and psychological violence, permanently applied during centuries, i.e. in situation of constant challenges, leads to changes of social settings of whole society and individual person. Ethno-cultural unity of opinions in relation to settings and claims from the outside is being formed. Ethnos feels constantly restrained and waiting the danger of restraining from the opponent, in result of which new social-cultural model of its existence in the condition of conflict is formed. The given model is a sum total of orientations (political, economic, cultural) of the person and society as whole, supported by its élite part as a regular practice. Practices formulate corresponding socio-cultural models, value and norm patterns of interactions between persons and institutes of society (Kvitsinia, 2010, p. 166-171).
The revolutionary nature of the Jewish revolt was emphasized by those scientists who were themselves connected with revolutionary struggle of their time. So K. Kautsky regarded Zealots as Jewish paupers and lumpen-proletarians, but he thought that the terror of the lowest classes in Judea begun too late to save the Jewish state (Kautsky, 1909, p. 271). However not politically engaged A. Appelbaum expressed an opinion that during the conquest of the Judea by Pompey (63 B.C.), the Jews were sent out from the considerable part of agricultural lands. They filled the army of the country proletariat which become the driving force of the rebellion. Besides the taxation in the Herod's time became heavier. All this caused the fact that the most of population of Judea was involved into revolt against Rome (Appelbaum, 1972, p.355-396).
In our opinion the Zealot's attitude to human life expresses their "liminality" first of all (Turner, 1975). So in Jerusalem the habitant of the city who had not wished to take the side of the rebellions, were tortured and murdered (Josephus, Bell.Jud.IV,5,3). Besides, the repressions against the members of their own movement. Thus, Simon executed Matityahu, who helped him enter Jerusalem, and hid three sons, probably as a punishment for the fact that the fourth son took the part of Romans (Josephus, Bell.Jud.V,13,1). On the accusation that the members of King's family betrayed the idea of freedom they also had been executed (Josephus, Bell.Jud.IV,3,4). Also it had been forbidden in the city to come together and have conversation and also to express some sorrow for the condemned, and the punishment was death (Josephus, ell.Jud.V,13,1). The purpose of Zealots was to bring fear into Jewish community and make them to refuse totally from any contacts and of course from service to the Roman Empire, and also to push those who had been hesitating to the proper support of Jewish-Roman conflict.
Although the rebellions gave a lots of promises to set the slaves free and to forgive the debts, commune had not been their social ideal. The robbery the Essean settlement in Ein-Gedi (the Esseans according to Flavius lived as commune (Josephus, Bell.Jud. II,8)) and the murder of about 700 habitants by the Sikaries who had been hidden in Masada (Josephus, Bell.Jud.IV,7,2), confirms once more the fact of essence of the left revolutionary attitude among the later. As to the burning of archives (Josephus, Bell.Jud. II, 17,6), this act is ambiguous. Besides the direct profit from the refuse to pay the debts there's also a sacral meaning in this act. In the opinion of Levi- Strauss the archives brings us into contact with history. The history becomes material in the archive (Levi-Strauss, 1962). Thus the struggle of Zealots with archive had been also the struggle with history and a sign of its end.
The struggle with the rich in the name of the Most High typologically resembles the religious movements of Middle Ages and New Time. Thus, peasants and the poor follows the medieval leader of insurgents in the name of the pure faith, which is proclaimed by the poor to the poor and have nothing to do with the riches of the official church. The call to the creation of the just society in the mouth of the ideologists of the religious revolts caused the fact that in historiography of the socialistic states those revolts are considered first of all as social revolutions. The same attitude
to religious movements in Russian science has a long tradition. N. A. Osokin stated that Savonarola used the religion for the advancing of the social purposes (Osokin, 1865, p. 148). In this sense the research of Zealots' world view in Soviet historiography made in accordance with common Soviet methodology, applied for the research of the religious revolts of all the times. This approach significantly impoverishes our understanding of the complicated phenomenon of milleniaristic movements.
Resume
Thus, Zealot had been a milleniaristic movements as well as Middle Age heresies. As we see their attitude to human life, material goods and archives, the Zealots believed that the time of history had come to the end. In the deposited Jerusalem they did the actions which contradicted to Halaha, thus showing the fact that it also had come to the end. Their attitude to the temple had been ambivalent - on the one side they believed that the Most High would save the Temple, but on the other side they questioned the sacrality of the Temple's space. The spatio-temporal continuum in the deposited Jerusalem had been probably perceived as some intermediate state between this present world and the Olam ha-Baha, descending from Heavens. The overcoming of the division of the worlds into phenomenal and transcendent had a natural social consequence the rejection of personalism.
References
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Мировоззрение зелотов
Ю.Г. Матушанская
Казанский государственный технологический университет Россия 420015, Казань, ул. К.Маркса, 68
Зелоты были милленаристским движением, подобным средневековым ересям. Судя по их отношению к человеческим жизням, материальным ценностям и архивам, зелоты считали, что время истории кончилось. В осажденном Иерусалиме они предпринимали действия, явно противоречащие Галахе, тем самым, показывая, что время ее действия истекло. Их отношение к Храму было амбивалентным, с одной стороны, они считали, что Всевышний сохранит Храм, а с другой стороны - сакральность пространства Иерусалимского Храма зелоты оспаривали. Пространственно- временной континуум в осажденном Иерусалиме, по-видимому, воспринимался как промежуточное состояние между этим миром и спускающимся свыше Олам Хаба. Это преодоление разделения миров на феноменальный и трансцендентный имело своим естественным социальным следствием отрицание персонализма.
Ключевые слова: зелоты, галаха, милленаристское движение.
