Second-Temple Arabs
Can they teach us anything about the Arab-Israeli conflict?
In a pre-Tisha B’av post on Facebook last week, Israel advocate Eylon Levy referred to a little-known story from the Jewish Revolt against the Romans in the first century CE. Describing Jews fleeing Jerusalem during the siege, Josephus writes:
Some of the deserters, seeing no other way, promptly jumped from the wall. Others advanced as if to battle armed with stones, then fled to the Romans. Their fate was worse than if they had stayed in the City, and the hunger they had left behind was, as they discovered, less lethal than the plenty the Romans provided. They arrived blown up by starvation as if by dropsy, then stuffed their empty bellies non-stop till they burst – except for those who were wise enough to restrain their appetites and take the unaccustomed food a little at a time. Those who escaped this danger fell victims to another disaster. In the Syrian camp one deserter was caught picking gold coins out of his excreta. As I mentioned, they swallowed coins before leaving, because they were all searched by the partisans [the Jewish rebel factions], and there was a great deal of gold in the City. In fact it fetched less than half the old price. But when the trick was discovered through one man, the rumour ran round the camps that the deserters were arriving stuffed with gold. The Arab unit and the Syrians [my italics] cut open the refugees and ransacked their bellies. To me this seems the most terrible calamity that happened to the Jews: in a single night nearly two thousand were ripped up.
When Titus learned of this atrocity he was on the point of surrounding the perpetrators with his cavalry and shooting them down. But far too many were involved; in fact those to be punished far outnumbered their victims. Instead he summoned both the auxiliary and the legionary commanders, some of whose men were accused of participating, and spoke angrily to both groups. Was it possible that some of his own soldiers did such things on the off chance of gain, and had no respect for their own weapons that were made of silver and gold? The Arabs and Syrians, serving in a war that was not the concern of their own nation, began by indulging their own passions in an undisciplined fashion, and ended up letting Romans take the blame for their bloodthirsty butchery and their hatred for the Jews; for some of his own soldiers shared their evil reputations [my italics]. The foreigners therefore he threatened to punish with death if any man was caught after committing such a crime…So what Caesar fore-bade with threats was still done to the deserters in secret, and the refugees, before the rest noticed them, were met and murdered by the foreign soldiers, who looked round in case any Roman saw them, then ripped them up and pulled the filthy money out of their bowels. In few however was any found, the majority being victims of an empty hope. Fear of this fate caused many of the deserters to return.
Those fleeing the fighting had swallowed the coins so that the Jewish rebels controlling the exits wouldn’t confiscate it, and that they’d have some money once they made it past the Romans. Instead, they had it ripped out of their stomachs by Arab and Syrian mercenaries so brutal that they shocked even Titus and caused some Jews to return to besieged Jerusalem. In his post, Levy described those fleeing the city as “looking like Buchenwald inmates or Eli Sharabi on his last day in Gaza,” and he seems to want to draw a straight line between the Arab atrocities described above and those of October 7. To address this question, we need to ask who were these Arabs and what was their relationship with Jews during the Second Temple period?
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