All language subtitles for BBC.The.Story.of.the.Jews.1of5.In.the.Beginning.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org

SIMON SCHAMA: This is a Jew.

And so is this.

This is a Jew.

And this.

And this.

And so am I.

So what, if anything,
do we have in common?

Not the colour of our skin.

Not the languages we speak.

The tunes we sing.

The food we eat.

Not our opinions.
We're a fiercely argumentative lot.

Not even the way we pray,
assuming we do.

What ties us together is a story,

the story kept
in our heads and hearts.

A story of suffering and resilience.

Endurance and creativity.

It's the story that made me
want to be an historian
in the first place,

for I understood
when I was quite small

that there were two special things
about the Jews -

that we'd endured
for over 3,000 years,

despite everything
that had been thrown at us,

and that we had an extraordinarily
dramatic story to tell,

and, somehow, that these two things
were connected,

that we told our story to survive.

We ARE our story.

In the summer of 1938,
an eminent, elderly Jew -

recently arrived in London
from Vienna -

was interviewed by the BBC.

Dying of a cancer
that had eaten away half his jaw,

driven from Vienna by the Nazis
at the age of 82,

his daughter, Anna,
interrogated by the Gestapo,

his life's work demonised
as Jewish science.

But Sigmund Freud
was now safe in England.

Lovely, free, magnanimous England,
as he called it.

And he could return to the questions
that had haunted him for years -

where did the distinct identity
of the Jews come from?

And how, in spite of everything,
had it managed to survive?

Among Freud's collection
of ancient figurines and sculptures

from religions and cultures
long dead

was an artefact
that told a different story

about endurance and survival.

An ancient Hanukkah lamp,

a commemoration of the temple light
that tradition said kept burning.

It mattered supremely to Freud,

this little object
with its Hebrew inscription...

HE SPEAKS HEBREW

.."for the commandment is the lamp
and the teaching the light".

The Menorah is the most ancient and
enduring symbol of Jewish identity,

even for someone
who called himself a godless Jew.

Godless he may have been, but Freud
never gave up on his Jewishness,

and as the dark stain of Nazi
anti-Semitism began to spread,

he proclaimed it
publicly and loudly.

He was also driven to begin
his own exploration

of the roots of the Jewish story,

work that would dominate
the final years of his life,

first in Vienna and then in London.

Psychoanalysis,
Freud's great discovery,

was driven by the belief
that in our origins

lay the explanation
of everything that followed.

Dismayed by the dark hatreds
unleashed by the Nazis,

Freud applied his theory
to the Jews.

At the heart of their story
was an old obsession of Freud's,

Moses, the domineering father figure

who'd led the Jews
out of slavery in Egypt,

and had placed on their shoulders

the gift and the burden
of the Ten Commandments.

As the Nazi horror closed in,
Freud came back to Moses in earnest,

and to ask the question
why, how and when

the peculiar destiny of the Jews
got started,

and how was it
that the rest of the world

so often had decided
to make them pay dearly for it?

Freud's theory was outrageous.

The ancient Israelites had rebelled
against Moses and murdered him.

But then,
consumed by guilt and remorse,

had adopted the laws
he'd carried down from Mount Sinai

with an obsessive devotion
that had endured,

despite millennia of suffering,
exile and persecution.

When it was finally published,
it caused a scandal

which cast a shadow over Freud's
last few months of life.

Something supremely important
had been lost

in all the yelling and shouting,

and that was Freud's
passionate conviction that,

by preserving their religion,

whether consciously
or unconsciously,

the Jews had given themselves
an extraordinary possibility

of enduring, not just as a faith,
but as a people,

when everything else had been lost -
land, kingdom and power -

and that was the meaning
of the travelling Menorah

and why Freud had kept it,

the idea of sustaining an identity

around things intellectual,
cultural and spiritual.

WOMAN SPEAKS IN HEBREW:

MEN AND WOMEN: Amen.

BUZZ OF CONVERSATION

Like Freud, every Jew, godless,
devout or anywhere in-between,

must find their own Moses and
their own place in the Jewish story.

And at the annual feast
of Pesach, or Passover,

surrounded by family and friends,
that's what happens.

Welcome, everybody.

I don't know about you, but of all
the occasions in the Jewish year,

always since I was a little boy
and started to figure out

I was stuck with being a Jew,
and very happy about it I was too,

Pesach and Seder was the one thing
I always looked forward to

more than anything else,
so, um, I'm very happy you're here.

It's, er... It's entirely
a moment of celebration.

MURMURS OF AGREEMENT

And at the heart of the celebration

is the liberation of the ancient
Israelites from slavery in Egypt,

the story of stories,

replayed around the Seder table
with the help of the Seder plate

and its symbolic foods, and a
ritual book called the Haggadah.

MAN READS:
"This is the bread of affliction

"which our ancestors ate
in the land of Egypt.

"All who are hungry,
let them come and eat..."

But this is about more than just
retelling an ancient story.

SIMON SINGS IN HEBREW

It's about reliving it.

What do we think, everybody, um,
salt water for tears or Red Sea?

PEOPLE GIVE DIFFERENT ANSWERS
What do we think?

Tears?
MAN: Is Red Sea an alternate, er...?

And the Haggadah provokes questions

that belong as much to the
here and now as to the long ago.

WOMAN: "In every generation, there
are those who rise up against us

"and seek to destroy us,

"but the Holy One, blessed be he,
saves us from their hands."

This is a tough passage, really.

I mean, this says
that we can predict, really,

that in every generation

there will be exterminators
just around the corner.

I mean, is Jewish culture
always expecting the worst?

Yes. Yes. Oh, Lily!
Yes, darling, yeah. Is there?

I just thought it was realistic.
Yeah.

LAUGHTER
The Jewish imagination
is paranoia confirmed by history.

LAUGHTER

BUZZ OF CONVERSATION

When it comes to history,

the Jews have certainly had
their fair share,

and that history is rooted
in a very particular place.

A sacred landscape
known by many resonant names -

the land of milk and honey,

the land of Israel,

the Holy Land,

the Promised Land.

This is the view
from Mount Nebo in Jordan.

According to the Bible,
this is where Moses died

after leading the Israelites
for 40 years through the wilderness,

on the very threshold
of the God-Promised Land

he was never actually
allowed to set foot in.

You don't have to accept the Bible
as literal truth to believe that,

3,500 years ago,
something extraordinary and fateful
in world history did happen

over there on the other side
of the Jordan Valley.

Trying to understand what

remains as urgent and necessary for
me as it once was for Sigmund Freud.

But the first people in the
modern era to actually go there

and explore the history of the Jews
from the ground up

weren't Jewish at all.

MUSIC: "Jerusalem"
by William Blake and Sir Hubert Parry

They were evangelical Christians,

Victorian scientists, surveyors,
clerics and military engineers,

funded by bishops
and philanthropists.

150 years ago,
the Palestine Exploration Fund

despatched a series of expeditions

to the place its supporters
called the Holy Land.

They wanted to prove
the truth of their Christian faith

by discovering the Jewish foundation
stones on which that faith stood.

Equipped with the latest
in technology that Victorian science
could provide,

they sought nothing less
than the precise grid references

for the places
where the miraculous events

described in the Book of Exodus
actually took place.

That's a lovely one, isn't it?
That's just beautiful!

'Felicity Cobbing,
curator of the PEF collection,

'showed me the fruits
of their labours.'

Yeah, and here's, you know,
an Ordnance Survey,

and we're used to thinking
about Ordnance Survey maps

and the hills in Wiltshire...

Yes. ...and here, um, you know,

1867-68,
the same painstaking passion

for measuring and producing

this glorious map
of the Sinai Peninsula,

you know, the place where the law
was given to Moses. Yes.

But for all their
painstaking precision,

they couldn't resist
the romantic appeal

of the land they were documenting.

You can see the spell being cast
in the crowd-pleasing photographs

that accompanied
the maps and surveys.

Focusing on the awesome peaks
of the Sinai Peninsula,

all objectivity was swept away.

Science may have supplied
the technology,

but the Bible provided
the place names.

They've gone for it,
it says Mount Sinai...

Yes! ..in the south end of base,
as though it is, um...

And there's the wonderful picture
of the place of assembly,

thought to be of the Israelites
gathered to witness Moses
coming down from Sinai

with the Ten Commandments
hot off the press, as it were.

What they're looking for
is a kind of theatre

or arena-like space... Yes.
..because they say,

"Well, the Bible says there are
600,000 Israelites..."

Yes, and they had to go somewhere.
"...and they all need to see Moses"!

Yeah. They've got to see him
coming down

looking angry
with the tablets of the law.

It's not a bad contender,
this one, is it?

No, it's fantastic.
Look, there it is!

Really, it's fantastic.
Actually, it'd make a great...

You know, the biblical rock concert.
Cecil B DeMille would be proud. Yeah.

DIGGING AND SCRAPING, PEOPLE CHATTER

But the archaeologists who followed
in the century and a half since

have had to tell a more sober story.

Despite a lot of digging,

no hard evidence has yet come
to light to make the Exodus,

or the wandering in the wilderness,
an historical reality.

Not a stone, not a clay fragment,
not a scrap of papyrus or parchment.

To find some of the first solid
archaeological evidence

for the Jewish story, you have to
fast forward a couple of centuries

from the traditional date
of the Moses epic

and come here,
to the Valley of Elah,
in present-day Israel.

According to the Bible, this
was where a giant called Goliath

was brought low
by a shepherd boy called David,

armed only with a slingshot.

The valley lies on what was once
an unquiet frontier

between the coastal people,
whom the Bible calls Philistines,

and the hill people, the Judeans,
the Iron-Age ancestors of the Jews

with their capital in Jerusalem,
a day's march northeast from here.

And commanding the valley
was the Fortress of Elah.

It was excavated by the Israeli
archaeologist, Yossi Garfinkel.

And here, for the first time,
you have a heavily fortified city.

Some stones are up to eight tonnes.

In just one layer,
it was suddenly destroyed,

so it's a biblical Pompeii. Yeah.

Yossi concluded early on
that this stronghold

must have belonged
to the Judean hill people,

not to the pig-eating Philistines
from the coastal plain.

So, you found bones of goats and...?

Thousands and thousands
of animal bones were found
in this site altogether.

Thousands? Goodness!
Thousands, yes, it's very common,

and we have sheep, goat and cattle,
but we have no pigs at all.

So, the people here
didn't consume pork. Right.

Things got more intriguing
when the site was carbon dated

to around 3,000 years ago,
a period traditionally associated

with the reign of King David, that
shepherd boy with the deadly aim.

For many archaeologists today,
the Bible is a distraction

with nothing useful to say about
what actually happened and when.

But Yossi Garfinkel
takes a more nuanced view.

So, it's not really important
if David and Goliath
are historical figures,

but they are representing a process,

200 years of struggling
over the border.

This is, I think,
the biblical tradition,

trying to tell us... Yeah.

..and not people taking,
you know, the story literally.

You have metaphors here
about a much longer

and much more stronger
historical processes. Yeah.

That's the way I understand it. Yes.

No, the Bible as an echo of some
sort of reality is a wonderful
way to put it.

But the most intriguing finds
at the Fortress of Elah

give us our first glimpse
of a figure

who looms very large in our story -

the Jewish God.

This is really the earliest example
that we have of purification

before you enter a holy place. Yeah.

'In cult rooms, complete with
their own purification basins

'and sacred vessels,

'Garfinkel's team discovered a
little altar for sacred offerings,'

and two model shrines, or arks.

Tantalisingly, they are empty,

prefiguring the empty holy of holies
in the high temple,

the chosen dwelling place on Earth
of that extraordinary
religious innovation -

the faceless, formless God
of Jewish monotheism.

That singular God was slow to emerge

from the crowd of rival gods adored
in the rest of the ancient world.

And from the abundance of fertility
deities cupping their breasts

found at many sites,
it's clear that it took centuries

for the ancestors of the Jews
to accept their God

as the one and only God.

When he did emerge,
he would have neither face nor form,

but many names.

He was Elohim - God.

El - the Mighty One.

El Shaddai - the Almighty.

Adonai - Lord.

Elyon - the Highest.

Avinu - our Father.

Tzevaot - God of Hosts.

Ehyeh asher eyah - I am what I am.

These are the names of power
to be uttered only in sacred places.

In the profane world, he is known
simply as HaShem - the Name.

With no divine images or sacred
statues to channel their faith,

the Jews of the ancient world
expressed their allegiance to God

with animal sacrifices
before an empty holy of holies,

the smoke rising from the temple
to the heavens

with nothing in-between.

But there would also be
another channel of devotion
open to the Jews.

The Hebrew Bible.

Sefer Torah, the sacred scrolls,

containing the first five books
of the Hebrew Bible,

are central to Jewish worship,

objects of respect, veneration,
even love.

CONGREGATION SINGS

A high point in any
synagogue service

comes when the scroll
is taken from the ark to be read.

But before the reading takes place,
there's a ceremony

designed to bring people
and their sacred book together.

ORGAN PLAYS, SINGING BUILDS

Now, there's much in this service,
in the Reform tradition,

that more Orthodox congregations
would find, well, unorthodox.

Women and men together,

female rabbis and readers,
the choir and the organ.

And then there's that peculiarly
English touch - top hats.

But whatever your tradition,

the respect paid to the Sefer Torah
is common to all.

And every reading is preceded
by a moment of pure, sacred theatre.

ORGAN PLAYS, SINGING BUILDS

This is the moment when Jews,
I think, feel most Jewish.

The ark opens, you stand up,
the Torah,

the scrolls of the law, are held up,

and you smile -
at least, I always smile -

at the pure beauty of it all,

and it is an absolutely
extraordinary thing, this,

the definition of worship
through the sanctification of words.

And it is, and was, those words,

read, remembered, perpetuated,

that would ensure the survival
of Jews and Judaism
through the generations.

SINGS IN HEBREW

The scrolls are so sacred
that, when you read them,

you must avoid touching the words
directly with a finger
of flesh and blood.

Instead, they're read
with a silver or ivory yad,

as if the writing finger of God
were moving through the text.

SINGING CONTINUES

And these words are not meant
to be read silently,

but publicly, out loud.

SINGING CONTINUES

The Hebrew word to read, "krya",
means as it sounds, "to cry out".

And so, whatever your tradition,
the words of your Torah

will sound out in your synagogue
for all to hear.

The Bible started to be written down
around 2,700 years ago.

What a moment in literature
that was.

What stories were delivered
to the world!

Adam and Eve,
Cain murdering his brother, Abel,

Noah and his Ark,

Abraham called to sacrifice his son,

Jacob wrestling with the angel,

Joseph and his coat of many colours.

And that's just volume one,

before Moses even makes an
appearance in his basket
of bulrushes.

SINGING AND CHANTING

And these stories
from the sacred scrolls

are not the museum pieces of some
carefully preserved folk tradition -

they still matter to people
in the here and now.

The arrival of a new scroll
from the scribe

is a cause for celebration.

Embroidery artist, Aviva Rahamim,

is a Jew living
in the Israeli city of Lod,

but originally she's from an ancient
Jewish community in Ethiopia,

known as Beta Israel.

But life for the Jews there
became perilous

when Ethiopia was plunged
into civil war and terrible famine.

In 1982, aged just 14, Aviva
and a small group of companions

set out on a perilous journey on
foot to the Promised Land of Israel.

Her embroidery designs, which draw
on the imagery of the Bible,

also reflect
her own personal exodus story.

Call it the Book of Aviva.

AVIVA SPEAKS FOREIGN DIALECT

TRANSLATION: When I left for the
road, it was very difficult.

There were predatory animals,

there were robbers, bad people,

and there wasn't anything to eat
and there wasn't anything to drink.

It was very hot.

On the road, when people died,
they covered them with dirt,

and they covered them with leaves
and cried.

It's painful, difficult, very grave.

One leaves behind young men,
children who have died,

and then we continued with the tears,
with the pain, continued to walk on.

For me, Jerusalem to the end.

On Shabbat, we did not walk,
we would wait.

When Shabbat was out, we walked.

At Passover, we ground flour
on the spot, cooked it and ate.

We observed kosher completely.

If we were to make mistakes, we will
not reach Jerusalem, land of Israel.

God Almighty helped me. In spite of
all the bedlam that had affected me,

thanks to him, to God,
I reached Israel.

We kissed the ground, we prayed.

On Pesach,
you have your own Haggadah, really.

You have your own...
You have your own Haggadah set up.

When I read the Passover Haggadah,
I feel our aliyah

is the same as the journey of our
ancestors who came up with Moses.

But for all the inspiring stories

of liberation and survival
against the odds,

as the chronicle of
a people's history,

the Bible can often make
for tragic reading.

God may have chosen this people,

but his book never soft-pedals the
harsh fate of puny Jewish kingdoms,

crushed between imperial superpowers
Egypt, Assyria and Babylon.

When it was the Babylonians' turn
to give the Jews the latest
lesson in history,

it came in the form of destroying
Jerusalem after a year-long siege.

The high temple, said to have been
built by King Solomon,

was torn down, and the city's elite
deported to Babylon,

the first great exile
in the story of the Jews.

But Jewish identity did not
disappear in this alien land.

Beneath the shadow
of the Ishtar Gate,

Jewish scribes continued
the collective endeavour

of Bible writing and Bible editing,

making God's laws clearer,
tougher, fiercer.

And so, when the Persians
defeated the Babylonians

and released the captive Jews,

the exiles returned to Jerusalem
with a Bible that bound Jews

ever more closely to its rules
and its commands.

The Jerusalem they came back to
was a pathetic heap of ruins.

The temple was hurriedly rebuilt,

but it wasn't really a patch
on the original.

And it was 80 years before the city
walls were finally repaired

by a returned exile called Nehemiah.

But repairing the city fabric
was just the start.

Next, those who'd been left behind
in Jerusalem

had to be reminded
just who they were

and what it was that made them Jews.

Torah law.

On the first day
of the seventh month,

so the Book of Nehemiah tells us,
Ezra, the spiritual leader

who returned from Babylon
a dozen years before,

did something absolutely
extraordinary.

At one of the city gates,
the repaired walls behind him,

he assembled all the Jews of
Jerusalem, women as well as men -

the Bible makes a special point
of saying that -

as well as all those
who could understand,

which almost certainly
means slaves and servants too,

and there,
he read to them from the Torah,

the law which had been
brought from Babylonia

where it had been edited
for five generations,

its monotheistic edge
refined to a new sharpness.

And then, with the full authority
of the Book behind him,

Ezra demanded that the Jerusalemites
hold themselves aloof

from their non-Jewish neighbours,

and put away their foreign wives

and their half-foreign children too.

This is brutal, a hardline purge

that elevates religious
and ethnic purity

at the expense of social reality.

And although Ezra says, "This is the
way it's always been for us Jews,"

it's him who's actually
gone out on a limb,

not the Jerusalemites

with their spontaneous co-existence
with local clans.

How do we know this?

Well, one answer lies
900 miles south,

in a Jewish world
startlingly different

from the monolithic purism
of Ezra and Nehemiah.

At precisely the same time

that Jerusalem was being purified
by the Babylonian exiles,

here in the very Gentile world
of Upper Egypt,

exiles were living a Jewish life
of a very different kind.

This is Aswan, where the Nile once
plunged over the first cataract.

Here, on an island
called Elephantine,

stood a fortress town
guarding the frontier

between Egypt and Nubia
to the south.

Since the 7th century BC, it had
been manned by Judean mercenaries

who lived on the island
along with their families.

A century later, when the
Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem

and carried its elite into exile,
some of the ordinary people,

finding themselves abandoned,
made their way south,
an exodus in reverse.

There was one great formative moment

when the Israelites became Jews,

and that, of course,
was the exodus from Egypt,

and the Nile ran through that story
like a silver thread.

That destiny had begun
when Pharaoh's daughter
had found the baby Moses

in the river and taken him back to
be brought up as a prince of Egypt
at court.

When that prince turned liberator,
his God had turned the Nile to blood

in an effort to persuade Pharaoh
to let the Israelites go.

So, to return to the Nile
was to repudiate that history,

to take away that covenant,
to un-Jew themselves,

yet, to the disgust and dismay
of the prophets,

back they went all the same.

Even today, it's easy to imagine
what life must have been like

in the narrow streets
and close-packed, mud brick houses
of Elephantine,

where Judeans mixed
with other races and creeds.

We know in detail about their lives,

thanks to a rich trove
of papyrus documents

found on the site
at the end of the 19th century.

Mostly, they're legal documents,

marriages, divorces,
property disputes, wills,

but between the lines,
we find out about the kind of Jews
who lived here.

We know they honoured Moses's law,
or as much of it as they knew.

They prayed to the Jewish God,

but they also invoked his consort,
the Queen of Heaven.

Some took Egyptian wives
and husbands

who converted to their religion
and changed their names.

Just ask Jews in Los Angeles
or St John's Wood today

if any of this sounds familiar.

The people who feature
in the Elephantine papyri

are not the grandiose patriarchs
and prophets of the Bible.

They're ordinary, everyday Judeans.

The documents really are
the first complete portrait we have

of an entire community of Jews.

But the Elephantine Jews
did more than just build houses
and lives here.

They also built themselves a temple.

According to the strict rules
laid down in the Bible,

the high temple in Jerusalem was the
only place where it was permitted

to make animal sacrifices to God,

an essential part of the Jewish
religious ritual of ancient times,

especially on high days
and holy days, like Passover.

Perhaps the Elephantine Jews
didn't know about the rule,

or perhaps distance
from Jerusalem made them
indifferent to it,

because they built their own temple,

here in the heart
of this alien land.

They boasted about its antiquity,

how it was older
than the rebuilt Jerusalem temple,

with five monumental gateways,
a holy of holies inside,

with bronze hinges to the doors,
a cedar roof,

and gold and silver vessels.

More outrageously, animals were,
indeed, sacrificed to Elephantine

along with offerings
of grain and fruit.

There was much curling of smoke
and sprinkling of blood.

But circumstances were about to deal
the proud Elephantine Jews
a cruel blow.

Their temple stood right next
to the Egyptian temple of Khnum,

the ram's-headed god who presided
over the annual life-giving flood
of the Nile.

The Egyptians held rams sacred,
but the Jews sacrificed them

to a God they proclaimed
as the one and only.

Not tactful.

The priests of Khnum
bribed the commander
of the local Persian garrison

to attack and destroy
the Jewish temple.

A catastrophe
for the Jews of Elephantine.

But, for the temple authorities
in Jerusalem, it was an opportunity,

when they were asked to support
a petition to rebuild the temple.

There was a lot of stonewalling
at first,

but eventually permission
was granted,

but on the strict condition
that only cereal and fruit offerings

were going to be made in Elephantine
in the future.

No more animal sacrifices,
no more blood, no more smoke.

The Elephantine Jews
had been put firmly in their place.

They couldn't really describe
their place as a temple any more,

it was merely a sanctuary.

Hard Jerusalem rules
had definitely won.

By then, a new power was emerging
in the region - the Greeks.

And the Jews were faced
with a new kind of threat -

annihilation through assimilation.

In the 4th century BC, led by
a warrior king called Alexander,

the Greeks took over
the ancient world.

In the wake of the warriors

came the philosophers, poets,
architects and artists,

who made their own
cultural conquests.

The hard military power
of Assyria or Babylon

had sought to destroy Jewish
identity through invasion
and deportation.

The soft power of Hellenism
threatened to submerge it
beneath its welcoming waters.

I was brought up to believe
that Hellenism and Judaism

was one of the great dividing paths
in the history of culture.

You couldn't be Jewish
and Greek-ish.

Which was it going to be -
philosophy or the psalms?

The nude or the word?

God as a formless, invisible being

or God as the ideal vision
of the human body?

Beauty or law?

So, what do we make of this?

This spectacular palace,
40 miles east of Jerusalem,

was built in the 2nd century BC
for a rich Jewish family,

the Tobiads, who'd made a pile
collecting taxes for the Greek
government in Egypt,

but it was still kosher enough
to marry into the family
of the high priest.

Their cash bought them an authentic,
Jewish, classical masterpiece,

a combination of grace and power.

Like the Tobiads,
many Jews were seduced by Hellenism.

Some even went through the painful
operation of reverse circumcision,

an eye-watering procedure
involving weights and pulleys,

so that they could appear
without embarrassment

alongside the body-worshipping
Greeks in the gymnasium.

More significantly, the Hebrew Bible
was translated into Greek,

an important bridge that connected
Judaism to the wider world.

But although individual Jews
could cross that bridge,

and many did,
Jewish identity itself could not

if it was to remain
distinctly Jewish.

You could build yourself an elegant
palace in the latest Greek fashion,

you could speak Greek,
you could dress like a Greek,

you could read the Bible
translated into Greek,

you could even tell yourself that
Plato and the Greek philosophers

must have read Moses the Lawgiver.

But in the end, an absolute fusion
of the two cultures
was actually impossible.

Zeus was not a beefier version
of the Jewish God,

and the favourite residence
of that God

was not a limestone palace,
but a house of words.

It was loyalty to this god of words

that in the end prevented
Jewish identity

from being swallowed whole
by cosmopolitan Greekness.

Like the orthodox faithful of today,

the lure of assimilation
provoked stubborn resistance.

And when a Greek ruler
desecrated the high temple itself,

and banned circumcision,

resistance turned
into open rebellion.

The Jews, led by the Maccabees,
rose in revolt

and established
an independent Jewish state

ruled by priest kings
that lasted for almost a century.

The Hasmoneans were succeeded
by the decidedly un-priestly
Herod the Great.

He owed his throne to the Romans,

who'd taken over from the Greeks
as regional superpower,

and he built big and lavishly
in the Roman style -

ports, palaces and aqueducts.

But he didn't neglect
the high temple either,

massively extending its lofty perch.

It was this immense pile,

with its conveyer belt
of continual sacrifice,

that in the final century BC
appeared to express most clearly

what Judaism was all about.

Not, however, for everyone.

For some pious Jews,

the smoke of temple sacrifice
was in danger of obscuring

the words of Moses's law,

and so they sought out places
where they could bury themselves
in sacred texts

and await the coming of the Messiah.

And what better place to wait
than here,

on an inhospitable fringe of land
on the shores of the Dead Sea,

far from the swaggering aristocracy
of the temple.

This is Qumran, where that
astounding collection of documents,

the Dead Sea Scrolls, was found.

Around the same time
as the birth and death of a Jew
known as Jesus of Nazareth,

this was the place where the sacred
texts of the Jews were pored over

by a group of pious mystics
known as the Yachad.

The community of together.

What a place for a sacred library,

an extraordinary collection
of 850 separate manuscripts,

not just the Bible.

There were the wild and wacky
mystical books around its fringe,

so-called wisdom books,
books which revisited the creation

in startlingly unorthodox ways

which really explode the idea
of what being Jewish,

what the Jewish sacred texts were,

because these were
incredibly imaginative.

Angels and demons, a demon
wrestling with the creation of God,

stalk through the scrolls among the
Book Of Jubilees, the Book Of Enoch.

And, you know,
I always think when I stand here,

it's not just the rocks of the
caves, not just the Dead Sea,

but this immense dome of the sky
seen by day and night.

They were great sky watchers,
astronomers, astrologers,

obsessed with the run of time.

It was in this huge vault,
hung with stars,

all this enormous blue expanse,
that they saw their visions.

They could see the demons
and the angels walk through it,

they could see the battles
between the sons of darkness
and the sons of light,

they could see the great upheavals
of the cosmic acts of creation
and destruction.

This was as close as you could get
to the rough hand of God.

In the cool laboratories
of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project
in Jerusalem,

it's possible to come face to face
with the holy books
that so gripped the Yachad,

thanks to the work
of a team of specialists

who preserve, record and publish
these extraordinary documents.

Yes, so what you see in front of you

is a plate, one of 1,260.

In this case, it's of parchment.

80% of the scrolls
are written on parchment,

20% are written on papyrus,

and this is a sample of one of
the copies of the community rule,

and the portion in the copy
that talks about the prohibition

of doing any kind of work
on the Sabbath,

except, of course, what is allowed
or what is demanded of one.

Hmm. OK?

And you see
we're saving every little scrap...

A micro-tiny scrap, yes. Every
little scrap of parchment is saved.

It's so striking how clear...

I mean, the Hebrew there

is the Hebrew I learned
for my Bar Mitzvah and at cheder.

It is so extraordinary
to actually be able to read it.

Well, this is what always
excites us,

that we're talking about
2,000-years-old scrolls,

and any 6th grader
that learns to read

can come and read this, and I
think there's nothing more moving

than being able to read your Bible
from 2,000-years-old scrolls.

Among the hundreds of manuscripts,
one in particular

captures the apocalyptic
expectations that gripped
the pious Jews of Qumran.

It's known as the War Scroll.

The War Scroll
is an extraordinary, high-pitched,

slightly kind of
feverishly poetic document,

which is about this impending battle
between the sons of light

and the sons of darkness.

It wouldn't be any good
as a military manual,

because a lot of the War Scroll
is actually about writing

which is inscribed on the weapons,

and, um...God will fight
because of the covenant, of course,

on behalf of the sons of light.

Yeah, they saw themselves
as the sons of light.

They saw themselves sons of light in
a world where battle was going on,

and maybe there was a very,
very big battle about to happen.

The big battle, anticipated
with such poetic excitement

in the War Scroll, became grim,
bloody reality in 66 AD.

An immense rebellion against
Roman rule broke out in Galilee,

Samaria and Judea.

A maelstrom of violence that
required the weight of three legions

under the command
of the general, Vespasian,

and his son, Titus, to crush it.

Our only written source for what
then unfolded comes from the hand

of someone whose life
was torn between the Classical
and the Jewish world.

He even had two names.

Born into a priestly family
as Yosef ben Matityahu,

he would die in Rome
as Flavius Josephus,

the in-house historian
of the Emperor Vespasian.

As a boy, I was taught
to look down on Josephus
as turncoat and traitor.

Having taken up arms against Rome
at the siege of Yotapata,

he chose to surrender rather than to
kill himself, as his comrades did.

Worse still,
he then joined Vespasian's entourage

as a local advisor,
cheerleader and pet Jew.

But Josephus's history,
The Jewish War,

is all we have to go on
for an account of what happened

when the Roman legions
moved on to Jerusalem

to administer the coup de grace.

Josephus was there,
outside the city walls,

while inside, fanatical zealots
instigated a reign of terror

to deter any talk of surrender,

and while the population,
who included Josephus's own mother,

very slowly and very painfully
starved to death.

Josephus says that
ever since the siege at Yotapata

and ever since he came to Jerusalem
with the Roman army,

his only concern
was to spare his own people

unnecessary cruelty,
suffering and death.

He'd long ago come
to the conclusion, he says,

that God had chosen the Romans
as his instrument for punishment,

just as he'd chosen the Babylonians
generations before.

And now the Jews
were facing impossible odds,
hopelessly outnumbered,

facing the strongest imperial army
in the world,

and they had turned on each other
like wild beasts.

What was the point of going on?

And you think, "Oh, sure, you're
just trying to save your skin

"and save your reputation
for posterity,

"from your cushy billet in
the Emperor Vespasian's apartments."

The spirit of the defenders
finally crumbled.

The city walls were breached,
and Josephus was there to witness

the greatest disaster
to befall the Jewish people

since the Babylonian invasion
more than 650 years before.

The temple, established
as the exclusive focus
of Jewish prayer and piety,

went up in smoke and flames.

The Roman legionnaires
prised the massive masonry blocks

from the top of the Temple Mount

and sent them crashing onto
the fine limestone pavement below.

The destruction of Jerusalem
was the making

of Vespasian's family,
the Flavians.

Vespasian was declared Emperor,
and Jewish loot and Jewish slaves

provided the cash and the muscle
for the building of the Colosseum,

a massive bribe to buy
the allegiance of Rome's
bread and circus mob.

On the arch,
dedicated to Vespasian's son
and co-general, Titus,

you can see the triumphant Romans
making off with the loot
from the temple,

including the giant Menorah.

And among the loot
was Josephus himself,

carried to Rome and installed
in the Flavian family compound.

But no-one in Rome thanked him
for doing the right thing.

The kind of people
you'd expect him to hang out with -

historians, philosophers,
playwrights and politicians -

all despised the Jews.

They didn't mind saying so.

At some point, Josephus had had
enough of all this ignorance
and gloating.

About 20 years after
he wrote The Jewish Wars,

he took up his pen again,

this time to explain,

with patient dignity
and a note of firm defiance,

and over considerable length,

just what Judaism was
and what it did.

It's the first serious attempt
by a Jew

to make a sceptical,
non-Jewish world understand
that Judaism is not,

as the Romans liked to sneer,

a mere superstitio, a superstition,

but a true religio,
an authentic religion.

And so Josephus, like Sigmund Freud
many centuries later,

turned to the lawgiver, Moses.

To be Jewish, he explains,
is simply to observe the laws

that Moses brought down from Sinai,

laws that teach, not impiety,
but are enemies to injustice,

and have a care of righteousness.

SHE SINGS IN HEBREW

These laws require
honour to parents,

they abhor killing,

they require charity and succour
for the sick and old.

At last, this compromised,
sycophantic,

creepily self-exonerating historian

stands tall,

brimful with pride in his Judaism,

and says in a phrase
I find genuinely moving,

"We have become the teachers of men
in the greatest of things."

Given the hammer blows
of the Roman legions,

and coming as they did
after century upon century of blows

from Egyptians,
the Syrians and Babylonians,

there would have been scant reason
to suppose

that the Jews would survive
as a people,

and yet, 2,000 years later,
the Jews are still here.

How?

Well, one answer can be found
back at the Arch of Titus,

not something that's here,
but something that's not.

When Josephus describes
the procession

of loot and prisoners paraded
through the streets of Rome,
he says,

"And last of all of the spoils
was carried, the laws of the Jews."

But where are the laws?

Where are the Torah scrolls?

Conspicuously, tellingly,

they are absent.

What were scrolls of law anyway?

Just so many words on parchment,

not really worth the time of a
sculptor or the cost of the marble.

But words copied,
memorised, internalised,

made unforgettable,
will beat swords any time.

You can't hold words captive.

The Roman Empire has come and gone,

but go into a synagogue any Saturday

and you'll still hear those words.

In September 1913, Dr Sigmund Freud,
the godless Jew, was in Rome.

And he sent a postcard
of the Arch of Titus to a friend.

On it he wrote,
"Der Jude ubersteht's."

The Jew survives it.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd