Chapter III: “We have it in Our Power to Die Honorably as Free Men”: Masada (73/74 A.D.) and Warsaw (1943)

0.     But only 58 meters above sea level, because its base near the Dead Sea is so low.

0.     One of the principal reasons the Romans were so successful in war was not just that they were good fighters, but they were great builders as well. Roman engineers made the Empire possible.

0.     As we shall see in our account of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Chapter X, such prophecies often precipitate last stands, on one side or the other.

0.     Richard Strauss’s first great operatic success, Salome (with a German libretto based on Oscar Wilde’s French-language play), features a number of contentious Jewish figures. One of them sings: “Niemand kann sagen wie Gott wirkt. Seine Wege sind sehr dunkel. Es kann sein, daß die Dinge, die wir gut nennen, sehr schlimm sind, und die Dinge, die wir schlimm nennen, sehr gut sind. Wir wissen von nichts etwas…” (Nobody can say how God works. His ways are very dark. It’s possible that the things we call good are very bad, and the things that we call bad are actually very good. Therefore, we know from nothing…”)

0.     Who dismisses Josephus as “tendentious, contradictory and thoroughly unreliable.”

0.     Byzantium, which survived into the fifteenth century at Constantinople. Alexandrian Egypt was also Greek, culturally and politically, from the time of the Seleucids, through the arrival of the Romans, to the coming of Islam.

0.     And, one might add, in things military.

0.     Which would end, fittingly, with Cleopatra, the lover of both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

0.     Which temporarily liberated Judea in 167 B.C. This was the foundation of the Hasmonean dynasty, from which Josephus was descended. Handel wrote an oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus, on the subject in 1746.

0.   Imperial Rome was called the “Kingdom of the Wicked” by the Jews. See also Anthony Burgess’s 1985 novel of the same name, about the early days of Jewish Christianity, as the original disciples were eclipsed by the Hellenized Jews, such as St. Paul, and the persecuted Nazarene sect become the largest religion on the planet.

0.   Josephus was no fan of the Zealots. “They copied every crime there was, and zealously reinvented for their own purpose each and every previous horror remembered in the tradition … each of them came to an appropriate end, and God awarded them all the penalty they deserved.”

0.   Bar-Abbas, or the “son of the father.” Some biblical sources give his full name as “Jesus bar-Abbas,” adding to the literary irony.

0.   The “Paschal Pardon.” In some quarters this is, alas, the locus of Christian anti-Semitism.

0.   Not exclusively Jewish, as Pope Benedict XVI observed in his book Jesus of Nazareth (2007); in Catholic doctrine, the sole blame for Jesus’s condemnation and execution is laid on the Romans, in the form of Pilate, not upon the Jews.

0.   A citizen of Rome could not be crucified.

0.   Herod was neither of royal blood, nor a priest; indeed, he came from Idumea, south of Judea, whose population had been forcibly converted to Judaism a century earlier.

0.   Until Arminius and, a few centuries later, Odoacer.

0.   Titus is the main character in Mozart’s last opera, La Clemenza di Tito, written alongside The Magic Flute and commissioned for the crowning of the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold II, as the King of Bohemia in 1791. In the opera, Titus is nothing but merciful toward various plotters and mistresses who would overthrow him. He ruled Rome for only two years before his death in 81 A.D., and was succeeded by his brother, Domitian. The Empress Maria Louisa, who was in the audience in Prague for the premiere of Mozart’s work, called it una porcheria tedesca—“German swinishness.”

0.   The notion of apocalyptic divine retribution for the loss of faith is a common element throughout the history of last stands. One is reminded of the beginning of the narrative epic poem The Siege of Sziget, in which God punishes the Hungarians and Croats for their sinful ways by loosing the Ottoman Turks upon them. See Chapter VII.

0.   Josephus: “Anyone using this route has to proceed crabwise, transferring his weight from one foot to the other, with a fatal plunge a manifest possibility—at every point there yawns below him an abyss frightening enough to daunt the most courageous.”

0.   See Extract 7.

0.   Josephus, writes Johnson, “was an example of a Jewish phenomenon which became very common over the centuries: a clever young man who, in his youth, accepted the modernity and sophistication of the day and then, late in middle age, returned to his Jewish roots. He began his writing career as a Roman apologist and ended it close to being a Jewish nationalist.”

0.   The term Nazi—an abbreviation of Nationalsozialisten—was largely a term invented by the party’s opponents, both a cognate to the term Sozi (a shortening of Sozialdemokrat—and a colloquial play on the Christian name Ignaz, a Bavarianism best translated as “bumpkin.” The National Socialists rarely referred to themselves as “Nazis.” The promiscuous use of the word today is ahistorical and inaccurate.

0.   Our contemporary notions of “right” and “left” are not particularly useful in analyzing the politics of post–World War I Germany. As in Fascist Italy, the industrialists and the Prussians had no problem making common cause with various forms of state socialism. Bismarck, the Prussian under whom Germany was united, was by our measure a socialist. Hitler, who despised the representative democracy of the Weimar Republic, was never an ally of Britain or the United States, but he was an ally of the Soviet Union.

0.   The Protocols were exposed in 1921 as a forgery, largely plagiarized from other sources (one of them satirical).

0.   Although the National Socialists would occasionally pay some lip service to “God,” they viewed Christians as little better than Jews, viewing the followers of the Jew Jesus as a very large and successful sect of Judaism. Many pastors and priests died in the death camps.

0.   The main Vernichtungsläger, or extermination camps. Others, such as Buchenwald, not far from the capital city of German culture, Weimar, contained a large number of Soviet prisoners of war, as well as Jews and other political prisoners. The effect, however, was the same: some 43,000 people died at Buchenwald, with another 10,000 shipped off to the death camps.

0.   The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes them in this way: “These Jewish municipal administrations were required to ensure that Nazi orders and regulations were implemented. Jewish council members also sought to provide basic community services for ghettoized Jewish populations. Forced to implement Nazi policy, the Jewish councils remain a controversial and delicate subject. Jewish council chairmen had to decide whether to comply or refuse to comply with German demands to, for example, list names of Jews for deportation.”

0.   The number of German Jews killed in the Holocaust is estimated at between 160,000 and 180,000. Between 1933 and 1939, approximately 304,000 German Jews had already fled the country—more than half the original population of about 522,000.

0.   At Hitler’s request, Frank was authorized to investigate the ethnic origins of his grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, who had been a shabbos goy in the prosperous Jewish home of the Frankenberger family in Graz when she became pregnant and was sent home. Frank advised Hitler that Maria had very likely been impregnated by one of the Frankenbergers, but modern scholars dismiss this and argue it’s far more likely that Alois Schicklgruber, Hitler’s father, was most likely the product of Austrian hill-country incest. Maria eventually married Johann Hiedler, whose name was recorded as “Hitler” (the pronunciation can be very similar, depending on the dialect), and the rest is history.

0.   The terrible moral dilemma was illustrated by the case of The Attorney-General of the Government of Israel v. Malchiel Gruenwald in Israel in 1955. Gruenwald, a Hungarian Jew who had survived the Holocaust and who was living in Israel, accused Rezső (Rudolf) Kasztner, a fellow Hungarian Jew, of having collaborated in July 1944 with Adolf Eichmann and SS officer Kurt Becher in Budapest in order to save some 1,700 friends and members of his own family at the expense of thousands of others, who were sent to the camps. The Israeli government sued Gruenwald on Kasztner’s behalf. Gruenwald was acquitted of libel at trial—Kasztner, one of the judges wrote, had “sold his soul to the devil”—and Kasztner was assassinated in 1957. Shortly thereafter, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the original verdict, preferring to see Kasztner as a man who did the best he could in an impossible situation.

0.   Something similar happened in far-off Shanghai, where between 1941 and 1945 the Germans leaned on their Japanese allies to herd the city’s sizable Jewish population, many of them refugees from the Soviet Union, into the restricted Shanghai Ghetto, where they shared living quarters with the Chinese. The Japanese, however, were uninterested in killing the Jews or turning them over to the Germans. Among the “Shanghai Jews” who eventually came to America are Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy, and concert pianist Misha Dichter.

0.   “Aktion,” in German, does not simply mean “action” but violent action; the American student radicals of the 1960s adopted it in their phrase, “direct action.”

0.   See Chapter XII.

0.   Who two decades later created the role of the Phantom of the Opera for Andrew Lloyd Webber.

0.   The double double-entendre was entirely intentional.

0.   As my friend James Levine, the greatest conductor in the history of the Metropolitan Opera, once said to me in Salzburg: “There are some Jews who won’t go to Germany. I’m one of the ones who has to go to Germany.”