242 A History of Judaism
reformed Israel was guaranteed divine aid, and exile from the holy city
of Jerusalem would in due course come to an end.
This optimistic note of confidence in the power of the God of Israel
permeates the writings of Josephus, all of which were composed in the
aftermath of the war. The Roman readers of his Jewish War and Jewish
Antiquities might have been surprised to learn from his passionate nar-
ratives that the events which had culminated in the destruction of the
capital city of the Jews had been orchestrated by the same Jewish God
whose sanctuary had been ransacked, but this was precisely the message
which Josephus wished to convey. The corollary was that Jews needed
only to return to the path of piety for God again to look after his chas-
tened people.
Presumably not all Jews were equally sanguine about the future
under the care of the Jewish God. Some, like Tiberius Julius Alexander,
Philo’s nephew, are known to have left Judaism altogether as they
moved into the ranks of the Roman imperial elite. In the early second
century ce the names of descendants of Herod the Great can be found
on inscriptions which show no awareness of their Jewish connections.
Other Jews will simply have become unidentifiable in the evidence for
the mixed populations of Roman cities in which ethnic groups can be
observed only when they made an effort to preserve their distinctive
cultures.^2
But if most Jews understood the divine plan in the same biblical light
as Josephus, the theological implication was not change but continuity,
or, more precisely, a renewed commitment to the covenant of the Torah
which alone could ensure a reversal of fortunes through divine grace. It
is therefore reasonable to assume that understanding of the Torah will
have remained as varied after 70 ce as before. The version of Judaism
to which Pharisees reaffirmed their loyalty will have been Pharisaic. The
same, mutatis mutandis, for Sadducees and Essenes. It is noticed sur-
prisingly rarely that when Josephus writes in the 70s, 80s and 90s of the
first century ce about these different philosophies of the Jews, he did so
in the present tense, with no hint that any of them had ceased to exist
since the disaster of 70 ce. It was quite possible that Judaism would
become more and not less varied with the demise of the Temple as the
communal institution in which differences in theology and practice
were provided with a public platform.
The common claim by historians of Judaism that 70 ce marked an
end to such variety, and even to explain this change as a product of soli-
darity in the face of disaster, is based on an illusion caused by a change