Note 34 — Chapter XXXI · The Difficulties of a Leader

—page 253. The record of history at the basis of this part of the narrative is, that immediately after the capture of Masada, “Manahem—a younger son of the celebrated Judas of Galilee, who had perished in a revolt soon after the exile of Archelaus, leaving to a powerful party the watchword, ‘We have no king but God,’—proclaimed himself the leader of the zealots and marched upon Jerusalem. The outworks of the palace were mined and burned, and the garrison capitulated. The Jews and the troops of Agrippa were allowed to depart; the Roman soldiers retired to the three strong towers built by Herod, and all left in the palace were put to death. The success was followed by the execution of the High Priest Ananias and his brother, who were found hidden in an aqueduct; but these and other excesses displeased the people; and when Manahem proceeded to assume the royal diadem, he was put to death by the partizans of Eleazar. In him the insurgents lost the only hope of a competent leader. The Roman soldiers in the towers were soon compelled to surrender on promise of their lives; but they had no sooner piled their arms than they were cut to pieces. This baptism of blood, by which the zealots committed themselves to a war of extermination, which they at the same time deprived of the dignity of a patriotic struggle, was perpetrated on a Sabbath; and on the same day the Jews of Cæsarea were massacred by the Greeks to the number of 20,000. These deeds mark the character of the conflict, not only as an insurrection of Judea against the Romans, but as an internecine struggle of the Jewish and Greek races in Palestine and the neighboring lands.”—Philip Smith, “History of the World.”