Note 41 — Chapter XLI · The Granddaughter of Ananus

—page 328. This chance meeting with Naomi, the granddaughter of Ananus, the late High Priest, furnishes the key to many of the situations and strange adventures of the closing volume of this romance. It was during the period of Salathiel’s incarceration in the dungeon, and while Vespasian was pushing on to Jerusalem, that the death of Ananus occurred. Josephus represents Ananus, or Annus, as a man who might have saved the nation from destruction. At this time he shared the supreme power in Jerusalem, under the Sanhedrin, with Simon, the son of Garion, the bravest of the zealots, the moderate party being thus the controlling power in the city. Later, however, when the tide of devastation directed by Vespasian had entirely swept over Galilee and Perea, the death of Nero brought a brief respite until Vespasian himself had been chosen Emperor. Meanwhile the efforts of Ananus to make preparation for defense were paralyzed by the zealots. The historian relates how “Jerusalem became the refuge and sink of the fugitives from every quarter. Crowds brought fresh confusion, and added to the fatal power of the zealots. At length John of Giscala arrived, with his panting men and horses, from the fall of the last Galilean fortress. In spite of the tale which their appearance told, the crafty leader announced that the Romans were exhausted, and pointed to the long resistance of the northern cities as a presage of their failure before Jerusalem. His arrival animated the zealots; and the robbers and assassins who had come into the city from every quarter enacted scenes which are only paralleled by the September massacres of Paris in 1792.” Ananus set himself against this sacrilegious reign of terror, but the zealots prevailed, and he was put to death, and his naked corpse “thrown out to the dogs and vultures, in a land where it was a sacred custom to bury even the worst malefactors before sunset. The moderate party was crushed, and the zealots followed up their triumph, first by a series of massacres, in which, says Josephus, ‘they slaughtered the people like a herd of unclean animals,’ to the number of 12,000, and then by murders under the form of law.” Faction then ran riot as the doomed city awaited the coming of Titus, who succeeded his father Vespasian, for its final destruction.