Jason and Antiochus

A deliberate breach with the present can be conducted on either archaistic or futuristic lines.

Futuristic (and perhaps also archaistic) reforms are contagious and, unchecked, can advance from the “outworks” of dress and recreation to the “citadel of the soul”. The hellenising reforms of the Jewish High Priest Jason in the second century B.C. were futuristic. See recently Jason – יסון.

In the Syriac World in the fourth [this should be third] decade of the second century B.C. the High Priest Joshua – who was the leader of a faction in Jewry which was eager at that time to repudiate at least the external trappings of the Jewish community’s native cultural heritage – was not content to advertise his programme by the verbal gesture of hellenizing his own name from Joshua into Jason. The “positive act” which provoked the demonic reaction of the Maccabees was the adoption by the younger priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, at Joshua’s instigation, of the broad-brimmed felt sun-hat which was the distinctive headgear of the pagan dominant minority in the Achaemenian Empire’s Hellenic “successor-states”. In the sight of the orthodox Palestinian Jews of the day this spectacle was as shocking as it would be to the eyes of our twentieth-century Palestinian Arab Muslims if the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem were to air himself in the Haram-ash-Sharīf with a sola topee on his head. And in the Jewish case in point the rapid progress of the futurist furore was soon to give the puritans reason; for the young priests of Yahweh did not confine their revolutionary cult of Hellenism to the wearing of the petasus. Their Hellenic headgear was not so shocking as the Hellenic nakedness with which they practised Hellenic sports in a Hellenic palaestra. Hellenic athletic competitions led on to Hellenic dramatic festivals; and, almost before the conservatively orthodox majority of the Palestinian Jewish community had realized what was happening, the “raging tearing campaign” [Joseph Chamberlain?] of Futurism had arrived at its sacrilegious culmination.

“They shall pollute the sanctuary of strength and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate.” [Footnote: Dan. xi. 31. [...]]

Jason’s futuristic campaign had started as a voluntary movement; and, for all its radicalism, it had not trespassed beyond the limits of a secular field of action in which it might give offence to Jewish taste without driving Jewish consciences to desperation. But the Jewish High Priest Jason had been working under the patronage of the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes; and the patron held in the hollow of his hand a client who was merely the prelate of one of those diminutive temple-states which were embedded here and there in the vast body politic of the Seleucid Empire. When it suited Antiochus’s convenience he sold Jason’s office over Jason’s head to a rival aspirant [footnote: We have no record of the Jewish name which was hellenized into Menelaus by Joshua-Jason’s supplanter (Bevan, Edwyn: Jerusalem under the High Priests (London 1904, Arnold), p. 80).] who was not only a higher bidder for the Jewish High Priesthood but was also a more violent futurist; and, when the evicted Jason descended upon Jerusalem from his asylum in Transjordan and expelled his supplanter by a coup de main, Antiochus promptly took advantage of the opening given him by this act of Jewish rebellion in order to intervene personally with a high hand. He marched on Jerusalem; crushed the revolt; installed a Macedonian garrison; confiscated the treasure of the Temple for the benefit of his own insatiable exchequer; and put (as he supposed) the finishing touch to the work of Hellenization, in which Jason had played his part as pioneer, by courteously identifying “the Heaven-God of Jerusalem” [Yahweh] with the Olympian Zeus and graciously providing the necessary statue of the god – portrayed in the Emperor’s own image – to fill the void in a hitherto bleakly vacant Holy of Holies. [Footnote: For the measures taken by Antiochus Epiphanes at Jerusalem see Bevan, op. cit., pp. 81-2.] “The Abomination of Desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing where it ought not,” [footnote: Mark xiii. 14; cf. Matt. xxiv. 15.] was the swift and fearful nemesis of Joshua-Jason’s futuristic escapade. [Footnote: The swiftness of the nemesis is impressive if it is true that Antiochus’s devastating act of introducing the Hellenic idol into the Jewish Holy of Holies followed within eight years of Jason’s apparently innocuous act of putting his young priests into Hellenic hats.]

The ultimate outcome of this Jewish essay in Futurism in the second century B.C. was not a triumph like Peter the Great’s but a fiasco like Amānallāh’s; for the Seleucid Power’s frontal attack upon the Jewish religion evoked a Jewish reaction of a violence with which Epiphanes and his successors found themselves unable to cope. Yet the fact that this particular essay in Futurism happens to have been abortive does not make it any the less instructive; and one of the points which it illustrates is the impossibility of indulging in Futurism within fore-appointed limits. The essence of Futurism is a breach with the present; and, when once there has been a lesion at any point in the fabric of social life, the rent will extend itself and the threads will continue to unravel – even if the original rift was minute and even if the point at which it was made lay on the outermost fringe of the web. The êthos of Futurism is intrinsically “totalitarian”; and the evidence which points to this conclusion is by no means confined to the single instance which has led us up to it. Just as the Jew who takes to wearing the petasus soon learns to frequent the palaestra and the amphitheatre, so the Muscovite who has been dragooned into wearing a Western wig goes on to dance the fashionable Western dances and play the fashionable Western card-games, while in a later generation the Turk in a Homburg hat and the Persian in a Pehlevī cap cannot be kept off the football field or out of the cinema hall. In these cases, as in that, the abandonment of a traditional style of dress leads on to a general revolution in manners; and this is not the end of the futurist rake’s progress. For, while in the Islamic World to-day the post-war fever of Futurism is still in the innocuous preliminary external stage of the Jewish movement under Jason’s brief régime, Japan, who anticipated Turkey by three-quarters of a century in discarding her traditional male costume, is already being haunted by the spectre of “dangerous thought” [socialism and communism], while in Russia where the change of costume occurred about a century and three-quarters earlier than in Japan the process has culminated in our day in a campaign against the ancestral religion of the land which is being conducted with a far more powerful “drive” than Antiochus was able to put into his casual assault upon the traditional worship of Yahweh.

On this showing, we may expect to see Futurism invade the sanctuary of Religion sooner or later in any society in which this contagious way of life has once asserted itself in the trivial and frivolous spheres of dress and recreation; but in its victorious advance from the outworks to the citadel of the Soul a futuristic movement has to traverse the intermediate zones of Politics and Secular Culture [...].

A further long footnote in this passage suggests that in treating the Jews heavy-handedly Antiochus was compensating for humiliations which he was suffering at the hands of Rome.

[...] The Seleucid Empire was already labouring under the shock of its collision with Rome by the time when Antiochus Epiphanes (no doubt unwittingly) challenged Jewry to a fight to the death with the Emperor’s Hellenism. Within ten years of the conquest of Coele Syria [a region of southern Syria, essentially Beqaa Valley, which the Seleucids had disputed with the Ptolemies] by Antiochus the Great in 198 B.C. the Seleucid conqueror of the Ptolemy had been routed by Scipio Asiagenus at Magnesia and had been compelled, as part of a peace settlement which was dictated to him by the Roman Government, to consent to a drastic limitation of Seleucid armaments. And Antiochus Epiphanes himself had been publicly humiliated by a Roman Commissioner before the walls of Pelusium [...] only a few months before he stormed the walls of Jerusalem and desecrated the Temple. The main lines of Epiphanes’ ill-starred policy can all be traced back to the effects of Roman pressure. His abortive campaign of forcible Hellenization was an ill-judged effort to reinvigorate his empire by consolidating it. His abortive invasion of Egypt was a hazardous attempt to take advantage of the Romans’ preoccupation with Perseus in order to secure a belated territorial compensation for the loss [to the Romans] of the former possessions of the Seleucid Monarchy north-west of Taurus. The financial straits which tempted Antiochus to resort to the fatal expedient of robbing his Jewish subjects of their temple-treasures were the price of his own costly military adventure in Egypt following upon the payment of the heavy war-indemnity which had been exacted by the Romans from his predecessor Antiochus the Great. Before the Seleucid Government was pushed or led into these fatal courses in consequence of its encounter with Rome, its yoke had weighed lightly, by comparison with the rival Ptolemaic Government’s yoke, upon its Oriental subjects’ necks [...].

Another places the whole of Russian history from Peter the Great to the Bolshevik revolution in a single continuum. A contagious futurism had been launched, in which one thing led to another. At first, a few western externals were introduced, and finally the western ideology of communism.

The pace of Futurism in Russia has, of course, been much slower than the pace at which it moved in Palestine in the second century B.C.; for while, as we have seen, the installation of “the Abomination of Desolation” in the Holy of Holies may have followed within eight years of the adoption of the petasus by Joshua-Jason’s young men, there it an interval of no less than 228 years between the date of Peter the Great’s effective accession to power in A.D. 1689 and the date of the Bolshevik Revolution of A.D. 1917. This difference of pace is evidently due to one signal difference in the course of events. The hand which placed the statue of Zeus Olympius in the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem was the hand of an alien intruder; and the fact that Antiochus was not a Jew but a Greek accounts both for the swiftness with which the Palestinian drama reached its culmination and for the fierceness of the reaction which eventually rendered the whole movement abortive. If Joshua-Jason’s Seleucid patron and master had had the wisdom to refrain from intervening in person, and had left the Jewish futurist movement to work itself out at its own natural pace under exclusively Jewish auspices, it is conceivable that the first century of the Christian Era might have witnessed an eradication of the worship of Yahweh by Jewish hands instead of witnessing, as it did, the outburst of Jewish Zealotism [in the Maccabean Revolt] which culminated in the great Romano-Jewish War of A.D. 66-70 [...].

Today, insistence on the hijab, burqa, chador and other garments by some Muslims living in predominantly non-Muslim countries is based, in part, on a fear that “one thing will lead to another” if they are abandoned. Opposition to them is sometimes based on a fear that if they are tolerated or encouraged one thing will similarly lead to another, until the “citadels” of the dominant culture are threatened. Are strict Moslems archaists?

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939