Jerusalem. The Biography

On each 9th of Ab Jerome gleefully watched the Jews commemorating the destruction of the Temple: ‘Those faithless people who killed the servant of God – that mob of wretches congregates and, while the Church of Resurrection glows and the banner of His Cross shines forth from the Mount of Olives, those miserable people groan over the ruins of the Temple. A soldier asks for money to allow them to weep a little longer.’ Despite his fluent Hebrew, Jerome hated the Jews, who raised children ‘just like worms’, and relished this gratifying freak show that confirmed Christ’s victorious truth: ‘Can anyone harbour doubts when he looks upon this scene about the Day of Tribulation and Suffering?’ The very tragedy of the Jews’ plight redoubled their love for Jerusalem. For Rabbi Berekhah this scene was a ritual as sacred as it was poignant: ‘They come silently and go silently, they come weeping and go weeping, they come in darkness of the night and depart in darkness.’
    Yet now Jewish hopes were to be raised again by the Empress who came to rule Jerusalem. 4
    BARSOMA AND THE PARAMILITARY MONKS
     
    Empresses tended to be described by chauvinistic historians as hideous, vicious whores or serene saints, but unusually Empress Eudocia was especially praised for her exquisite looks and artistic nature. In 438, this beautiful wife of the Emperor Theodosius II came to Jerusalem and relaxed the rules against the Jews. At the same time, a synagogue-burning ascetic, Barsoma of Nisibis, arrived on one of his regular pilgrimages with a thuggish retinue of paramilitary monks.
    Eudocia was a protector of pagans and Jews because she had been pagan herself. The striking daughter of an Athenian sophist, educated in rhetoric and literature, she came to Constantinople to appeal to the emperor after her brothers stole her inheritance. Theodosius II was a malleable boy, ruled by his pious and graceless sister, Pulcheria. She introduced Eudocia to her brother, who was instantly smitten and married her. Pulcheria dominated her brother’s government, intensifyingthe persecution of the Jews, who were now excluded from the army and public life, and condemned to be second-class citizens. In 425, Theodosius ordered the execution of Gamaliel VI, the last Jewish patriarch, to punish him for building more synagogues, and abolished the office for ever. Gradually, Eudocia became powerful and Theodosius promoted her to Augusta, equal in rank to his sister. A coloured stone inlay of her in a Constantinople church shows her regal style, black hair, slim elegance and delicate nose.
    In Jerusalem, the Jews, facing intensifying repression from Constantinople, begged Eudocia for more access to the Holy City, and she agreed that they could openly visit the Temple Mount for their chief festivals. This was wonderful news, and the Jews declared that they should all ‘hasten to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles for our kingdom will be established’.
    However, Jewish joy disgusted that other visitor to Jerusalem, Barsoma of Nisibis, a Syrian monk who was one of the new breed of militant monastic leaders. During the fourth century, certain ascetics started to react against the worldly values of society and the splendour of the clerical hierarchs and founded monasteries in the desert in order to return to the values of the earliest Christians. The hermits – from the Greek word for ‘wilderness’ – believed it was not enough to know the right formula for Christ’s nature, it was also necessary to live righteously, so they existed in hair-shirted, celibate simplicity in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. * Their self-flagellating feats of ostentatious holiness were celebrated, their biographies were written (the first hagiographies), their hermitages were visited and their discomforts became sources of wonder. The two St Simeons lived for decades, thirty feet up, atop columns and were known as the stylites (from
stylos
meaning ‘column’). One stylite, Daniel, was asked how he defecated: drily, like a sheep, he replied. Indeed, Jerome thought they were more interested in filth than in holiness. But these monks were far from peaceful. Jerusalem, which was now surrounded by new monasteries and contained many of its own, was at the mercy of these squadrons of street-fighting fanatics.
    Barsoma, who was said to be so holy that he never sat or lay down, was offended by the survival of Jewish and Samaritan ‘idolators’ and determined to cleanse