The Penguin Epics edition of The Fall of Jerusalem is an extract from The Jewish Wars in which Josephus details the final stages of the battle for Jerusalem between the Romans under the command of heir apparent Titus battle the Jewish rebels for control over the city of Jerusalem in the year 70AD. The Jewish Wars is a chronicle of the 7 years of conflict between the Roman Empire and Jewish rebels. The extract in The fall of Jerusalem loses a huge amount of the context and suffers greatly because of it. The narrator Josephus is himself a part of the story but his backstory is not present in this extract and what is left is wildly exaggerated and at times either nonsensiscal or just plain malicious. Reading this extract without context leaves a modern reader with a disinct and unpleasant taste of anti-semitism.

The narration begins with the two armies ready for battle. The description of the Jewish positions inside the city and the Romans outside is a great piece of history. This is what is very positive about the work of Josephus in that he chronicles in significant detail one of the defining moments in Roman, Jewish, and Middle Eastern history. The fall of the city and the destruction of some of the most ancient of its monuments such as the Temple is an occasion that still resonates today nearly 2000 years later.

Josephus is not the only historian to cover the era and his is not the only source in existence but it is by far the most in-depth and widely known. As a piece of history, it depicts an epoch-making event that essentially constituted a massacre of Jews, the destruction of the Jewish capital, and the dispersion of the Jewish people into slavery and exile. The Jewish defeat paved the way for the Romans to later attempt to de-Judiaise the area and usher in Palestinian ownership.

Josephus is extremely vivid in his description and this adds an enormous amount of colour to the proceedings. The work depicts the extraordinary suffering the inhabitants faced during the siege - from the conflict to the effects of disease and starvation. In the Penguin Epics edition, there is no real reference to the size and make-up of the Roman forces and it is somewhat unclear from this work what and who exactly the Jewish forces faced militarily.

The work depicts the various turns of events that took place during the siege, daring raids from either side, ebbs and flows of the overall battle, and personal tragedy in abundance. The depiction of battle is a reasonable read and Josephus places great emphasis on those who showed valour in battle. Many of the individual battle scenes are not especially honest though. On a few occasions, brave Romans are undone by slipping over unfortunately and being set upon by fortuitous Jews. It just doesn't read reliably when it happens so often.

The description of motivation is mostly laughable. Poor Titus is thwarted on occasion by his own humility or love of peace and he is forced to take decisions that he would so much rather not - like crucifying hundreds of Jews. Those Jewish rebels who attempted to flee and were caught by Titus could not be spared just in case it was a ruse. Of course, Josephus was writing for a particular audience and that in itself is somewhat instructive but as a piece of history it fails badly because of how dreadfully unreliable so many of the descriptions are.

The burning of the Temple is a classic case of clear mis-description. The over-eager legionnaries just cannot help themselves in their acts despite the best efforts of Titus to preserve a monument that the Jewish rebels themselves are defiling.

Josephus inserts himself into a leading role and this is a role that seems to have been accepted by historians. As a native speaker and a Jew himself, Josephus is at times the negotiator with the rebel leaders. If what Josephus says is at all true then he is an absolutely useless negotiator. The idea that a negotiator would serve his purpose through the use of outrageously exaggerated insult beggars belief.

The worst of the exaggeration comes with the description of the acts the Jews carry out. Quite frankly the most rabid anti-semite would struggle to dream up a passage more despicable than the description of infanticide and cannibalism that Josephus ascribes to a Jewish woman. The insults poured upon the Jewish people involved in the defence of Jerusalem make reading this work akin to reading some of the most depraved nonsense of more modern racism. It is one thing to exaggerate results or actions but quite another to continuously infest a history with such an enormous number of unnecessary and at times sickening descriptions of hatred towards a people.

This is a most fascinating time in human history. The description of that history by Josephus in this extract from his broader work is a dark and unpleasant read. It remains fashionable to support anti-semitism but few could enjoy this horrid description of a people fighting for their survival and freedom. ( )