Masada

MASADA

site of jewish revolt and martyrdom, 74 c. e.

An isolated mountain on the western shore of the Dead Sea, Masada was turned by King Herod the Great of Judea (37–34 b.c.e.) into a major stronghold. In 66 c.e., at the onset of the Jewish revolt against Rome, the extremist Sicarii ("dagger-men") captured Masada; after the revolt's suppression, it remained the last Jewish fortress to hold out. When the Romans were about to storm its walls in the spring of 74 c.e., the defenders, preferring death to slavery, decided to commit collective suicide. Men slew their women and children, then killed one another—thus relates Flavius Josephus, the only historian to describe these events. The story of the mass suicide is supported by comparable occurrences in the Greco-Roman world.

In traditional Judaism, Masada went largely un-mentioned for centuries. Only with the advent of Zionism did it gain prominence, with the defenders portrayed as freedom-loving heroes and their stance hailed as an example to live by. In Yitzhak Lamdan's influential poem of 1927, Masada came to symbolize the entire Zionist enterprise, with the most famous line announcing, "Masada shall not fall again." From the 1940s, Masada became the goal of ritual treks organized by Zionist youth movements; from the 1950s, recruits of Israel's army swore their oath of allegiance in ceremonies atop Masada. The excavation of the fortress in the 1960s enhanced still further its salience in Israeli consciousness.

The veneration of Masada was never total; for instance, in 1946 David Ben-Gurion coined the slogan "Neither Masada nor Vichy." From the 1970s onward, the Masada myth repeatedly came under attack. The credibility of Josephus's account was questioned; the cruelty of Masada's "dagger-men" toward other Jews was emphasized; and the portrayal of the perpetrators of a group suicide as national heroes was decried as incongruent with Judaism's teachings and educationally misguided. Hard-line Israeli leaders were accused of being possessed by a "Masada complex"—that is, of so identifying with Masada's desperate situation that they were no longer reacting to the reality of their own times.

In 2002 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) proclamation of Masada as a World Heritage Site entailed another round of exchanges between Masada's admirers and detractors.

Bibliography

Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Josephus, Flavius. The Jewish War, translated by H. St. John Thackeray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Kedar, Benjamin Z. "Masada: The Myth and the Complex." The Jerusalem Quarterly 24 (1982): 57–63.

Yadin, Yigael. Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966.

benjamin kedar