Lamdan's Masada Revisited

1924 (Lipsker 2001). Second, by naming his “THE FINAL BATTLE” poem Masada rather than “Metzada,” as established OR “A BURNT OFFERING”?: by Simhoni, Lamdan may have followed the “modern” Russian LAMDAN’S MASADA REVISITED translation of The Jewish Yael S. Feldman holding together a privileged Wars, published by Ya. L. Chertok position: Josephus’s Jewish Wars, in 1900 (Lapidus). Third, by he career of the Masada retranslated anew from the Greek extricating Lamdan’s Masada from myth in twentieth-century (Simhoni 1923), and the epic- the clutches of Simhoni/Josephus’s THebrew imagination is well dramatic poem, Masada (Lamdan “historical” Metzada we may undo known. Recent scholarship has 1926), which catapulted its author a long-attested confusion about the amply recorded its ups and downs to fame and reputation that lasted poem’s multifocal, paradoxical take from the heyday of the 1920s for several decades. Given the on the knotty issue of national Zionist thirst for heroic ancestors; proximity of their publication dates, martyrdom. through the distraught 1940s, when recent historiography has coupled it became the ambivalent emblem of these texts as major contributors to Masada’s ostensibly paradoxical both victimage and heroic yet the creation of the Israeli “Myth of vision has been noted for some time desperate martyrdom; to the Metzada,” more often than not and has been described in detail in revisionist 1970s, when “The assuming that Simhoni’s Hebrew several recent studies. The general Masada Complex” came under fire, Josephus had inspired Lamdan’s agreement is that the poem is torn and the valence of its legacy was poem. between two contradictory moods altogether questioned and often or ideologies: desperate pessimism rejected. I beg to differ. First, Lamdan had and optimistic activism. On the side been working on his poem prior to of despondency we may count its Within this modern history two the appearance of the translation, detailed imagery of arid rocks and Hebrew texts seem to be linked, publishing segments of it as early as merciless sun, of doubt and fear, of tears, bereavement, gallows, and despair unto death. Yet the poem was mostly remembered, especially in 1943 Warsaw and its environs, for the bravado of its opening canto: “Against the hostile Fate of generations / A stubborn breast is there bared with a roar: / Enough! / You or I! / Here will the battle decide the final judgment!” (Yudkin 1971, trans.). If we add the sonorous cadences and trancelike rhythms of nightly dancing around the bonfires, straddling Hasidic and secular horas perfected by the pioneers, and the fervent invocation qua pledge, “Arise, the Aerial View of the Masada Fortress above the Dead Sea. Photo by Mosher Milner, 1993. Courtesy of the State of Israel Government Press Office. chain of dance / Never 30 shall Masada fall again!,” it is not “the last stand” or “fighting to the historiography. Here however I difficult to imagine the uplifting last man” associated in the Israeli would like to focus only on the role of Masada through the trials mind with “Metzada”: “After these curious persistence of Yosippon’s and tribulations of the 1930s and things, the men left the city and “Metzada” in the Israeli mind, 1940s in both Palestine and Europe. challenged the Romans to fight, despite the almost unanimous killing too many of them to count. “suppression” of the book itself in That this self-boosting retelling has, The Jews thus had fought until they twentieth-century scholarship. in fact, nothing to do with the story all expired in the battle, dying for as told by Josephus seemed to have God and his Temple” (430). (A The unacknowledged source concerned nobody. Nor was anyone second, apparently later version responsible for this feat of memory, bothered by the fact that the poem according to David Flusser, was, I suggest, precisely Lamdan’s is rife with sacrificial imagery that is also nowhere to be seen in THERE IS NO DOUBT THEN THAT THE RITUAL- Josephus. I therefore suggest that the long-accepted yoking together SACRAL TONE OF MASADA IS MUCH CLOSER TO of Lamdan and Simhoni’s Josephus is misleading and has not THE MOOD OF YOSIPPON’S METZADA THAN TO contributed to an understanding of the poem. To clear up this THE MASADA SCENE IN THE JEWISH WARS. LIKE confusion I propose an additional source of inspiration: the tenth- THE FORMER, IT MELDS “NATIONAL AND SACRAL century Book of Yosippon. This anonymous version of Josephus’s ELEMENTS” (FLUSSER, YOSIPPON II, 180), THUS history, translated and rewritten in beautiful Hebrew from early SETTING THE TONE AND PERHAPS THE NORM FOR medieval Latin texts, may indeed be THE NATIONAL MARTYROLOGICAL DISCOURSES the source that taught Lamdan to fuse the imagery of ritual sacrifice THAT WERE TO FOLLOW. (qua martyrdom) with Greco- Roman military noble death, a intensifies the description of the poetic creation, Masada. Could not conflation that perfectly suited his heroic death, while erasing the his celebrated line, “Here will the ambivalent yet fully sympathetic religious overtones [431].) battle decide the final judgment!” vision. This vision is totally missing have been inspired by the Jewish in Josephus but was fashioned with As Yael Zerubavel has already “noble death” in a “final battle” great dexterity by the author of observed, “Jossipon’s [sic] later invented by the author of Yosippon Yosippon. modified version of Masada fits the for his Metzada heroes? Certainly activist conception of heroism in much more than Masada à la To begin with, writing in Italy in secular national Hebrew culture Josephus! But there is more. the tenth century, the author of much better than Josephus’s Yosippon begins the closure of the Yosippon seems to have anticipated original version.” Zerubavel further dramatic event with the words those contemporary readers who suggests that it is “most curious” “After these things . .” So what is find the collective suicide described that “the activist commemorative the famed opening of Genesis 22, in The Jewish Wars hard to accept. narrative derives its legitimation the aqedah, doing here? So, instead of having the Jews of from Josephus’s historical account,” “Metzada” (NB: not the Sicarii of while “Jossipon’s version has been I suggest that by referring to the “Masada”!) fall on their swords (or largely ignored in the modern events of the day before with this worse, kill each other), as they do in Hebrew commemoration of phrase, the author cleverly links the both Josephus’s history and in Masada.” I could not agree more. slaughter of the families with the Yosippon’s Latin source, the Pseudo- Yet this “curious” act of omission offering demanded of Abraham Hegesippus, the anonymous was not limited to the Israeli “after these things.” This is in fact Hebrew author has El’azar send commemoration of Masada. As Yosippon’s second innovation in this them off “to fight the enemy and Steven Bowman has suggested, the episode. El’azar has to negotiate die like heroes” (Sefer Yosippon, ed. ascendancy of Josephus’s history at with his men the dreadful act of Flusser, 1978). Yosippon’s closing the expense of Yosippon may attest putting their loved ones to death so statement neatly summarizes this to biases, conscious or not, running that they would not suffer at the innovation, echoed in the idea of deep in modern Hebrew and Jewish hands of the Romans. To do so he 31 not only presents this deed, just like “joyously, his head full of dew veqodesh!) for the impending final El’azar in Josephus’s version, as an drops,” confident that his gift (of battle; they moreover offer a selfless act of compassion; he also promises life? of death?) “will be pleasing donation of “the springs of our the men that this “mercy killing” [accepted]” (teratzeh, derived from youth” and the “first fruit of our “will be considered as a sacrificial the same root and meaning as the lives,” not to mention “handful of burnt offering that will please God verb used in Yosippon, “leratzon”). hearts,” “gold of dreams,” and (qorban olah leratzon la’adonay; Lamdan comes even closer to the “baskets of love.” p. 429). This addition, which helps language of the medieval text when turn the objects of murder into he describes the despair of being There is no doubt then that the “sacrificial victims” and hence abandoned by an absent God as the ritual-sacral tone of Masada is much sanctified martyrs, is also absent in lack of authority that would approve closer to the mood of Yosippon’s either Josephus or Yosippon’s Latin or accept as pleasing (yeratzeh) “the Metzada than to the Masada scene source. It follows logically however offering of our life and the sacrifice in The Jewish Wars. Like the former, from the opening of El’azar’s of our youth and love . .” it melds “national and sacral speech, where a list of historical (“Weeping,” 63). elements” (Flusser, Yosippon II, precedence begins with “Do 180), thus setting the tone and remember your Father Abraham Finally, replacing Josephus with perhaps the norm for the national who took his only son to offer him to Yosippon may explain still another martyrological discourses that were God . .” (emphasis is mine). general feature of Masada, its to follow. Should we then be overall religious vocabulary. As the surprised that the distinctive This is not the place to engage poetry of an ostensibly secular sacrificial image of bikkurim, rather Yosippon’s difficult negotiation with pioneer, Lamdan’s work is than the more common aqedah the prefigural Christian overtones of surprisingly preoccupied with the (“first fruit offering, a spring Isaac in his Latin source. I propose presence or absence of God.

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