"SIMON SCHAMA:" "This is a Jew." "And so is this." "This is a Jew." "And this." "And this." "And so am I." "So what, if anything, do we have in common?" "Not the colour of our skin." "Not the languages we speak." "The tunes we sing." "The food we eat." "Not our opinions." "We're a fiercely argumentative lot." "Not even the way we pray, assuming we do." "What ties us together is a story, the story kept in our heads and hearts." "A story of suffering and resilience." "Endurance and creativity." "It's the story that made me want to be an historian in the first place, for I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews - that we'd endured for over 3,000 years," "despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell, and, somehow, that these two things were connected, that we told our story to survive." "We ARE our story." "In the summer of 1938, an eminent, elderly Jew - recently arrived in London from Vienna - was interviewed by the BBC." "Dying of a cancer that had eaten away half his jaw, driven from Vienna by the Nazis at the age of 82, his daughter, Anna, interrogated by the Gestapo, his life's work demonised as Jewish science." "But Sigmund Freud was now safe in England." "Lovely, free, magnanimous England, as he called it." "And he could return to the questions that had haunted him for years - where did the distinct identity of the Jews come from?" "And how, in spite of everything, had it managed to survive?" "Among Freud's collection of ancient figurines and sculptures from religions and cultures long dead was an artefact that told a different story about endurance and survival." "An ancient Hanukkah lamp, a commemoration of the temple light that tradition said kept burning." "It mattered supremely to Freud, this little object with its Hebrew inscription..." "HE SPEAKS HEBREW" ".."for the commandment is the lamp and the teaching the light"." "The Menorah is the most ancient and enduring symbol of Jewish identity, even for someone who called himself a godless Jew." "Godless he may have been, but Freud never gave up on his Jewishness, and as the dark stain of Nazi anti-Semitism began to spread, he proclaimed it publicly and loudly." "He was also driven to begin his own exploration of the roots of the Jewish story, work that would dominate the final years of his life, first in Vienna and then in London." "Psychoanalysis, Freud's great discovery, was driven by the belief that in our origins lay the explanation of everything that followed." "Dismayed by the dark hatreds unleashed by the Nazis," "Freud applied his theory to the Jews." "At the heart of their story was an old obsession of Freud's," "Moses, the domineering father figure who'd led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt, and had placed on their shoulders the gift and the burden of the Ten Commandments." "As the Nazi horror closed in, Freud came back to Moses in earnest, and to ask the question why, how and when the peculiar destiny of the Jews got started, and how was it that the rest of the world" "so often had decided to make them pay dearly for it?" "Freud's theory was outrageous." "The ancient Israelites had rebelled against Moses and murdered him." "But then, consumed by guilt and remorse, had adopted the laws he'd carried down from Mount Sinai with an obsessive devotion that had endured, despite millennia of suffering, exile and persecution." "When it was finally published, it caused a scandal which cast a shadow over Freud's last few months of life." "Something supremely important had been lost in all the yelling and shouting, and that was Freud's passionate conviction that, by preserving their religion, whether consciously or unconsciously, the Jews had given themselves an extraordinary possibility of enduring, not just as a faith, but as a people," "when everything else had been lost - land, kingdom and power - and that was the meaning of the travelling Menorah and why Freud had kept it, the idea of sustaining an identity around things intellectual, cultural and spiritual." "WOMAN SPEAKS IN HEBREW:" "MEN AND WOMEN:" "Amen." "BUZZ OF CONVERSATION" "Like Freud, every Jew, godless, devout or anywhere in-between, must find their own Moses and their own place in the Jewish story." "And at the annual feast of Pesach, or Passover, surrounded by family and friends, that's what happens." "Welcome, everybody." "I don't know about you, but of all the occasions in the Jewish year, always since I was a little boy and started to figure out" "I was stuck with being a Jew, and very happy about it I was too," "Pesach and Seder was the one thing I always looked forward to more than anything else, so, um, I'm very happy you're here." "It's, er..." "It's entirely a moment of celebration." "MURMURS OF AGREEMENT" "And at the heart of the celebration is the liberation of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the story of stories, replayed around the Seder table with the help of the Seder plate and its symbolic foods, and a ritual book called the Haggadah." "MAN READS:" ""This is the bread of affliction" ""which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt." ""All who are hungry, let them come and eat..."" "But this is about more than just retelling an ancient story." "SIMON SINGS IN HEBREW" "It's about reliving it." "What do we think, everybody, um, salt water for tears or Red Sea?" "PEOPLE GIVE DIFFERENT ANSWERS What do we think?" "Tears?" "MAN:" "Is Red Sea an alternate, er...?" "And the Haggadah provokes questions that belong as much to the here and now as to the long ago." "WOMAN: "In every generation, there are those who rise up against us" ""and seek to destroy us," ""but the Holy One, blessed be he, saves us from their hands."" "This is a tough passage, really." "I mean, this says that we can predict, really, that in every generation there will be exterminators just around the corner." "I mean, is Jewish culture always expecting the worst?" "Yes." "Yes." "Oh, Lily!" "Yes, darling, yeah." "Is there?" "I just thought it was realistic." "Yeah." "LAUGHTER The Jewish imagination is paranoia confirmed by history." "LAUGHTER" "BUZZ OF CONVERSATION" "When it comes to history, the Jews have certainly had their fair share, and that history is rooted in a very particular place." "A sacred landscape known by many resonant names - the land of milk and honey, the land of Israel, the Holy Land, the Promised Land." "This is the view from Mount Nebo in Jordan." "According to the Bible, this is where Moses died after leading the Israelites for 40 years through the wilderness, on the very threshold of the God-Promised Land he was never actually allowed to set foot in." "You don't have to accept the Bible as literal truth to believe that, 3,500 years ago, something extraordinary and fateful in world history did happen over there on the other side of the Jordan Valley." "Trying to understand what remains as urgent and necessary for me as it once was for Sigmund Freud." "But the first people in the modern era to actually go there and explore the history of the Jews from the ground up weren't Jewish at all." "MUSIC: "Jerusalem" by William Blake and Sir Hubert Parry" "They were evangelical Christians," "Victorian scientists, surveyors, clerics and military engineers, funded by bishops and philanthropists." "150 years ago, the Palestine Exploration Fund despatched a series of expeditions to the place its supporters called the Holy Land." "They wanted to prove the truth of their Christian faith by discovering the Jewish foundation stones on which that faith stood." "Equipped with the latest in technology that Victorian science could provide, they sought nothing less than the precise grid references for the places where the miraculous events described in the Book of Exodus actually took place." "That's a lovely one, isn't it?" "That's just beautiful!" "'Felicity Cobbing, curator of the PEF collection, 'showed me the fruits of their labours.'" "Yeah, and here's, you know, an Ordnance Survey, and we're used to thinking about Ordnance Survey maps and the hills in Wiltshire..." "Yes. ...and here, um, you know, 1867-68, the same painstaking passion for measuring and producing this glorious map of the Sinai Peninsula, you know, the place where the law was given to Moses." "Yes." "But for all their painstaking precision, they couldn't resist the romantic appeal of the land they were documenting." "You can see the spell being cast in the crowd-pleasing photographs that accompanied the maps and surveys." "Focusing on the awesome peaks of the Sinai Peninsula, all objectivity was swept away." "Science may have supplied the technology, but the Bible provided the place names." "They've gone for it, it says Mount Sinai..." "Yes!" "..in the south end of base, as though it is, um..." "And there's the wonderful picture of the place of assembly, thought to be of the Israelites gathered to witness Moses coming down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments hot off the press, as it were." "What they're looking for is a kind of theatre or arena-like space..." "Yes." "..because they say," ""Well, the Bible says there are 600,000 Israelites..."" "Yes, and they had to go somewhere." ""...and they all need to see Moses"!" "Yeah." "They've got to see him coming down looking angry with the tablets of the law." "It's not a bad contender, this one, is it?" "No, it's fantastic." "Look, there it is!" "Really, it's fantastic." "Actually, it'd make a great..." "You know, the biblical rock concert." "Cecil B DeMille would be proud." "Yeah." "DIGGING AND SCRAPING, PEOPLE CHATTER" "But the archaeologists who followed in the century and a half since have had to tell a more sober story." "Despite a lot of digging, no hard evidence has yet come to light to make the Exodus, or the wandering in the wilderness, an historical reality." "Not a stone, not a clay fragment, not a scrap of papyrus or parchment." "To find some of the first solid archaeological evidence for the Jewish story, you have to fast forward a couple of centuries from the traditional date of the Moses epic and come here, to the Valley of Elah, in present-day Israel." "According to the Bible, this was where a giant called Goliath was brought low by a shepherd boy called David, armed only with a slingshot." "The valley lies on what was once an unquiet frontier between the coastal people, whom the Bible calls Philistines, and the hill people, the Judeans, the Iron-Age ancestors of the Jews with their capital in Jerusalem, a day's march northeast from here." "And commanding the valley was the Fortress of Elah." "It was excavated by the Israeli archaeologist, Yossi Garfinkel." "And here, for the first time, you have a heavily fortified city." "Some stones are up to eight tonnes." "In just one layer, it was suddenly destroyed, so it's a biblical Pompeii." "Yeah." "Yossi concluded early on that this stronghold must have belonged to the Judean hill people, not to the pig-eating Philistines from the coastal plain." "So, you found bones of goats and...?" "Thousands and thousands of animal bones were found in this site altogether." "Thousands?" "Goodness!" "Thousands, yes, it's very common, and we have sheep, goat and cattle, but we have no pigs at all." "So, the people here didn't consume pork." "Right." "Things got more intriguing when the site was carbon dated to around 3,000 years ago, a period traditionally associated with the reign of King David, that shepherd boy with the deadly aim." "For many archaeologists today, the Bible is a distraction with nothing useful to say about what actually happened and when." "But Yossi Garfinkel takes a more nuanced view." "So, it's not really important if David and Goliath are historical figures, but they are representing a process," "200 years of struggling over the border." "This is, I think, the biblical tradition, trying to tell us..." "Yeah." "..and not people taking, you know, the story literally." "You have metaphors here about a much longer and much more stronger historical processes." "Yeah." "That's the way I understand it." "Yes." "No, the Bible as an echo of some sort of reality is a wonderful way to put it." "But the most intriguing finds at the Fortress of Elah give us our first glimpse of a figure who looms very large in our story - the Jewish God." "This is really the earliest example that we have of purification before you enter a holy place." "Yeah." "'In cult rooms, complete with their own purification basins 'and sacred vessels," "'Garfinkel's team discovered a little altar for sacred offerings,' and two model shrines, or arks." "Tantalisingly, they are empty, prefiguring the empty holy of holies in the high temple, the chosen dwelling place on Earth of that extraordinary religious innovation - the faceless, formless God of Jewish monotheism." "That singular God was slow to emerge from the crowd of rival gods adored in the rest of the ancient world." "And from the abundance of fertility deities cupping their breasts found at many sites, it's clear that it took centuries for the ancestors of the Jews to accept their God as the one and only God." "When he did emerge, he would have neither face nor form, but many names." "He was Elohim" " God." "El - the Mighty One." "El Shaddai - the Almighty." "Adonai" " Lord." "Elyon - the Highest." "Avinu - our Father." "Tzevaot" " God of Hosts." "Ehyeh asher eyah" " I am what I am." "These are the names of power to be uttered only in sacred places." "In the profane world, he is known simply as HaShem - the Name." "With no divine images or sacred statues to channel their faith, the Jews of the ancient world expressed their allegiance to God with animal sacrifices before an empty holy of holies, the smoke rising from the temple to the heavens" "with nothing in-between." "But there would also be another channel of devotion open to the Jews." "The Hebrew Bible." "Sefer Torah, the sacred scrolls, containing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, are central to Jewish worship, objects of respect, veneration, even love." "CONGREGATION SINGS" "A high point in any synagogue service comes when the scroll is taken from the ark to be read." "But before the reading takes place, there's a ceremony designed to bring people and their sacred book together." "ORGAN PLAYS, SINGING BUILDS" "Now, there's much in this service, in the Reform tradition, that more Orthodox congregations would find, well, unorthodox." "Women and men together, female rabbis and readers, the choir and the organ." "And then there's that peculiarly English touch - top hats." "But whatever your tradition, the respect paid to the Sefer Torah is common to all." "And every reading is preceded by a moment of pure, sacred theatre." "ORGAN PLAYS, SINGING BUILDS" "This is the moment when Jews, I think, feel most Jewish." "The ark opens, you stand up, the Torah, the scrolls of the law, are held up, and you smile - at least, I always smile - at the pure beauty of it all, and it is an absolutely extraordinary thing, this," "the definition of worship through the sanctification of words." "And it is, and was, those words, read, remembered, perpetuated, that would ensure the survival of Jews and Judaism through the generations." "SINGS IN HEBREW" "The scrolls are so sacred that, when you read them, you must avoid touching the words directly with a finger of flesh and blood." "Instead, they're read with a silver or ivory yad, as if the writing finger of God were moving through the text." "SINGING CONTINUES" "And these words are not meant to be read silently, but publicly, out loud." "SINGING CONTINUES" "The Hebrew word to read, "krya", means as it sounds, "to cry out"." "And so, whatever your tradition, the words of your Torah will sound out in your synagogue for all to hear." "The Bible started to be written down around 2,700 years ago." "What a moment in literature that was." "What stories were delivered to the world!" "Adam and Eve, Cain murdering his brother, Abel," "Noah and his Ark," "Abraham called to sacrifice his son," "Jacob wrestling with the angel," "Joseph and his coat of many colours." "And that's just volume one, before Moses even makes an appearance in his basket of bulrushes." "SINGING AND CHANTING" "And these stories from the sacred scrolls are not the museum pieces of some carefully preserved folk tradition - they still matter to people in the here and now." "The arrival of a new scroll from the scribe is a cause for celebration." "Embroidery artist, Aviva Rahamim, is a Jew living in the Israeli city of Lod, but originally she's from an ancient Jewish community in Ethiopia, known as Beta Israel." "But life for the Jews there became perilous when Ethiopia was plunged into civil war and terrible famine." "In 1982, aged just 14, Aviva and a small group of companions set out on a perilous journey on foot to the Promised Land of Israel." "Her embroidery designs, which draw on the imagery of the Bible, also reflect her own personal exodus story." "Call it the Book of Aviva." "AVIVA SPEAKS FOREIGN DIALECT" "TRANSLATION:" "When I left for the road, it was very difficult." "There were predatory animals, there were robbers, bad people, and there wasn't anything to eat and there wasn't anything to drink." "It was very hot." "On the road, when people died, they covered them with dirt, and they covered them with leaves and cried." "It's painful, difficult, very grave." "One leaves behind young men, children who have died, and then we continued with the tears, with the pain, continued to walk on." "For me, Jerusalem to the end." "On Shabbat, we did not walk, we would wait." "When Shabbat was out, we walked." "At Passover, we ground flour on the spot, cooked it and ate." "We observed kosher completely." "If we were to make mistakes, we will not reach Jerusalem, land of Israel." "God Almighty helped me." "In spite of all the bedlam that had affected me, thanks to him, to God, I reached Israel." "We kissed the ground, we prayed." "On Pesach, you have your own Haggadah, really." "You have your own..." "You have your own Haggadah set up." "When I read the Passover Haggadah, I feel our aliyah is the same as the journey of our ancestors who came up with Moses." "But for all the inspiring stories of liberation and survival against the odds, as the chronicle of a people's history, the Bible can often make for tragic reading." "God may have chosen this people, but his book never soft-pedals the harsh fate of puny Jewish kingdoms, crushed between imperial superpowers Egypt, Assyria and Babylon." "When it was the Babylonians' turn to give the Jews the latest lesson in history, it came in the form of destroying Jerusalem after a year-long siege." "The high temple, said to have been built by King Solomon, was torn down, and the city's elite deported to Babylon, the first great exile in the story of the Jews." "But Jewish identity did not disappear in this alien land." "Beneath the shadow of the Ishtar Gate," "Jewish scribes continued the collective endeavour of Bible writing and Bible editing, making God's laws clearer, tougher, fiercer." "And so, when the Persians defeated the Babylonians and released the captive Jews, the exiles returned to Jerusalem with a Bible that bound Jews ever more closely to its rules and its commands." "The Jerusalem they came back to was a pathetic heap of ruins." "The temple was hurriedly rebuilt, but it wasn't really a patch on the original." "And it was 80 years before the city walls were finally repaired by a returned exile called Nehemiah." "But repairing the city fabric was just the start." "Next, those who'd been left behind in Jerusalem had to be reminded just who they were and what it was that made them Jews." "Torah law." "On the first day of the seventh month, so the Book of Nehemiah tells us, Ezra, the spiritual leader who returned from Babylon a dozen years before, did something absolutely extraordinary." "At one of the city gates, the repaired walls behind him, he assembled all the Jews of Jerusalem, women as well as men - the Bible makes a special point of saying that - as well as all those who could understand," "which almost certainly means slaves and servants too, and there, he read to them from the Torah, the law which had been brought from Babylonia where it had been edited for five generations, its monotheistic edge refined to a new sharpness." "And then, with the full authority of the Book behind him," "Ezra demanded that the Jerusalemites hold themselves aloof from their non-Jewish neighbours, and put away their foreign wives and their half-foreign children too." "This is brutal, a hardline purge that elevates religious and ethnic purity at the expense of social reality." "And although Ezra says, "This is the way it's always been for us Jews,"" "it's him who's actually gone out on a limb, not the Jerusalemites with their spontaneous co-existence with local clans." "How do we know this?" "Well, one answer lies 900 miles south, in a Jewish world startlingly different from the monolithic purism of Ezra and Nehemiah." "At precisely the same time that Jerusalem was being purified by the Babylonian exiles, here in the very Gentile world of Upper Egypt, exiles were living a Jewish life of a very different kind." "This is Aswan, where the Nile once plunged over the first cataract." "Here, on an island called Elephantine, stood a fortress town guarding the frontier between Egypt and Nubia to the south." "Since the 7th century BC, it had been manned by Judean mercenaries who lived on the island along with their families." "A century later, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and carried its elite into exile, some of the ordinary people, finding themselves abandoned, made their way south, an exodus in reverse." "There was one great formative moment when the Israelites became Jews, and that, of course, was the exodus from Egypt, and the Nile ran through that story like a silver thread." "That destiny had begun when Pharaoh's daughter had found the baby Moses in the river and taken him back to be brought up as a prince of Egypt at court." "When that prince turned liberator, his God had turned the Nile to blood in an effort to persuade Pharaoh to let the Israelites go." "So, to return to the Nile was to repudiate that history, to take away that covenant, to un-Jew themselves, yet, to the disgust and dismay of the prophets, back they went all the same." "Even today, it's easy to imagine what life must have been like in the narrow streets and close-packed, mud brick houses of Elephantine, where Judeans mixed with other races and creeds." "We know in detail about their lives, thanks to a rich trove of papyrus documents found on the site at the end of the 19th century." "Mostly, they're legal documents, marriages, divorces, property disputes, wills, but between the lines, we find out about the kind of Jews who lived here." "We know they honoured Moses's law, or as much of it as they knew." "They prayed to the Jewish God, but they also invoked his consort, the Queen of Heaven." "Some took Egyptian wives and husbands who converted to their religion and changed their names." "Just ask Jews in Los Angeles or St John's Wood today if any of this sounds familiar." "The people who feature in the Elephantine papyri are not the grandiose patriarchs and prophets of the Bible." "They're ordinary, everyday Judeans." "The documents really are the first complete portrait we have of an entire community of Jews." "But the Elephantine Jews did more than just build houses and lives here." "They also built themselves a temple." "According to the strict rules laid down in the Bible, the high temple in Jerusalem was the only place where it was permitted to make animal sacrifices to God, an essential part of the Jewish religious ritual of ancient times," "especially on high days and holy days, like Passover." "Perhaps the Elephantine Jews didn't know about the rule, or perhaps distance from Jerusalem made them indifferent to it, because they built their own temple, here in the heart of this alien land." "They boasted about its antiquity, how it was older than the rebuilt Jerusalem temple, with five monumental gateways, a holy of holies inside, with bronze hinges to the doors, a cedar roof, and gold and silver vessels." "More outrageously, animals were, indeed, sacrificed to Elephantine along with offerings of grain and fruit." "There was much curling of smoke and sprinkling of blood." "But circumstances were about to deal the proud Elephantine Jews a cruel blow." "Their temple stood right next to the Egyptian temple of Khnum, the ram's-headed god who presided over the annual life-giving flood of the Nile." "The Egyptians held rams sacred, but the Jews sacrificed them to a God they proclaimed as the one and only." "Not tactful." "The priests of Khnum bribed the commander of the local Persian garrison to attack and destroy the Jewish temple." "A catastrophe for the Jews of Elephantine." "But, for the temple authorities in Jerusalem, it was an opportunity, when they were asked to support a petition to rebuild the temple." "There was a lot of stonewalling at first, but eventually permission was granted, but on the strict condition that only cereal and fruit offerings were going to be made in Elephantine in the future." "No more animal sacrifices, no more blood, no more smoke." "The Elephantine Jews had been put firmly in their place." "They couldn't really describe their place as a temple any more, it was merely a sanctuary." "Hard Jerusalem rules had definitely won." "By then, a new power was emerging in the region - the Greeks." "And the Jews were faced with a new kind of threat - annihilation through assimilation." "In the 4th century BC, led by a warrior king called Alexander, the Greeks took over the ancient world." "In the wake of the warriors came the philosophers, poets, architects and artists, who made their own cultural conquests." "The hard military power of Assyria or Babylon had sought to destroy Jewish identity through invasion and deportation." "The soft power of Hellenism threatened to submerge it beneath its welcoming waters." "I was brought up to believe that Hellenism and Judaism was one of the great dividing paths in the history of culture." "You couldn't be Jewish and Greek-ish." "Which was it going to be - philosophy or the psalms?" "The nude or the word?" "God as a formless, invisible being or God as the ideal vision of the human body?" "Beauty or law?" "So, what do we make of this?" "This spectacular palace, 40 miles east of Jerusalem, was built in the 2nd century BC for a rich Jewish family, the Tobiads, who'd made a pile collecting taxes for the Greek government in Egypt, but it was still kosher enough to marry into the family of the high priest." "Their cash bought them an authentic, Jewish, classical masterpiece, a combination of grace and power." "Like the Tobiads, many Jews were seduced by Hellenism." "Some even went through the painful operation of reverse circumcision, an eye-watering procedure involving weights and pulleys, so that they could appear without embarrassment alongside the body-worshipping Greeks in the gymnasium." "More significantly, the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, an important bridge that connected Judaism to the wider world." "But although individual Jews could cross that bridge, and many did, Jewish identity itself could not if it was to remain distinctly Jewish." "You could build yourself an elegant palace in the latest Greek fashion, you could speak Greek, you could dress like a Greek, you could read the Bible translated into Greek, you could even tell yourself that Plato and the Greek philosophers" "must have read Moses the Lawgiver." "But in the end, an absolute fusion of the two cultures was actually impossible." "Zeus was not a beefier version of the Jewish God, and the favourite residence of that God was not a limestone palace, but a house of words." "It was loyalty to this god of words that in the end prevented Jewish identity from being swallowed whole by cosmopolitan Greekness." "Like the orthodox faithful of today, the lure of assimilation provoked stubborn resistance." "And when a Greek ruler desecrated the high temple itself, and banned circumcision, resistance turned into open rebellion." "The Jews, led by the Maccabees, rose in revolt and established an independent Jewish state ruled by priest kings that lasted for almost a century." "The Hasmoneans were succeeded by the decidedly un-priestly Herod the Great." "He owed his throne to the Romans, who'd taken over from the Greeks as regional superpower, and he built big and lavishly in the Roman style - ports, palaces and aqueducts." "But he didn't neglect the high temple either, massively extending its lofty perch." "It was this immense pile, with its conveyer belt of continual sacrifice, that in the final century BC appeared to express most clearly what Judaism was all about." "Not, however, for everyone." "For some pious Jews, the smoke of temple sacrifice was in danger of obscuring the words of Moses's law, and so they sought out places where they could bury themselves in sacred texts and await the coming of the Messiah." "And what better place to wait than here, on an inhospitable fringe of land on the shores of the Dead Sea, far from the swaggering aristocracy of the temple." "This is Qumran, where that astounding collection of documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls, was found." "Around the same time as the birth and death of a Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth, this was the place where the sacred texts of the Jews were pored over by a group of pious mystics known as the Yachad." "The community of together." "What a place for a sacred library, an extraordinary collection of 850 separate manuscripts, not just the Bible." "There were the wild and wacky mystical books around its fringe, so-called wisdom books, books which revisited the creation in startlingly unorthodox ways which really explode the idea of what being Jewish, what the Jewish sacred texts were," "because these were incredibly imaginative." "Angels and demons, a demon wrestling with the creation of God, stalk through the scrolls among the Book Of Jubilees, the Book Of Enoch." "And, you know, I always think when I stand here, it's not just the rocks of the caves, not just the Dead Sea, but this immense dome of the sky seen by day and night." "They were great sky watchers, astronomers, astrologers, obsessed with the run of time." "It was in this huge vault, hung with stars, all this enormous blue expanse, that they saw their visions." "They could see the demons and the angels walk through it, they could see the battles between the sons of darkness and the sons of light, they could see the great upheavals of the cosmic acts of creation and destruction." "This was as close as you could get to the rough hand of God." "In the cool laboratories of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project in Jerusalem, it's possible to come face to face with the holy books that so gripped the Yachad, thanks to the work of a team of specialists who preserve, record and publish these extraordinary documents." "Yes, so what you see in front of you is a plate, one of 1,260." "In this case, it's of parchment." "80% of the scrolls are written on parchment, 20% are written on papyrus, and this is a sample of one of the copies of the community rule, and the portion in the copy that talks about the prohibition" "of doing any kind of work on the Sabbath, except, of course, what is allowed or what is demanded of one." "Hmm." "OK?" "And you see we're saving every little scrap..." "A micro-tiny scrap, yes." "Every little scrap of parchment is saved." "It's so striking how clear..." "I mean, the Hebrew there is the Hebrew I learned for my Bar Mitzvah and at cheder." "It is so extraordinary to actually be able to read it." "Well, this is what always excites us, that we're talking about 2,000-years-old scrolls, and any 6th grader that learns to read can come and read this, and I think there's nothing more moving than being able to read your Bible from 2,000-years-old scrolls." "Among the hundreds of manuscripts, one in particular captures the apocalyptic expectations that gripped the pious Jews of Qumran." "It's known as the War Scroll." "The War Scroll is an extraordinary, high-pitched, slightly kind of feverishly poetic document, which is about this impending battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness." "It wouldn't be any good as a military manual, because a lot of the War Scroll is actually about writing which is inscribed on the weapons, and, um..." "God will fight because of the covenant, of course, on behalf of the sons of light." "Yeah, they saw themselves as the sons of light." "They saw themselves sons of light in a world where battle was going on, and maybe there was a very, very big battle about to happen." "The big battle, anticipated with such poetic excitement in the War Scroll, became grim, bloody reality in 66 AD." "An immense rebellion against Roman rule broke out in Galilee," "Samaria and Judea." "A maelstrom of violence that required the weight of three legions under the command of the general, Vespasian, and his son, Titus, to crush it." "Our only written source for what then unfolded comes from the hand of someone whose life was torn between the Classical and the Jewish world." "He even had two names." "Born into a priestly family as Yosef ben Matityahu, he would die in Rome as Flavius Josephus, the in-house historian of the Emperor Vespasian." "As a boy, I was taught to look down on Josephus as turncoat and traitor." "Having taken up arms against Rome at the siege of Yotapata, he chose to surrender rather than to kill himself, as his comrades did." "Worse still, he then joined Vespasian's entourage as a local advisor, cheerleader and pet Jew." "But Josephus's history, The Jewish War, is all we have to go on for an account of what happened when the Roman legions moved on to Jerusalem to administer the coup de grace." "Josephus was there, outside the city walls, while inside, fanatical zealots instigated a reign of terror to deter any talk of surrender, and while the population, who included Josephus's own mother, very slowly and very painfully starved to death." "Josephus says that ever since the siege at Yotapata and ever since he came to Jerusalem with the Roman army, his only concern was to spare his own people unnecessary cruelty, suffering and death." "He'd long ago come to the conclusion, he says, that God had chosen the Romans as his instrument for punishment, just as he'd chosen the Babylonians generations before." "And now the Jews were facing impossible odds, hopelessly outnumbered, facing the strongest imperial army in the world, and they had turned on each other like wild beasts." "What was the point of going on?" "And you think, "Oh, sure, you're just trying to save your skin" ""and save your reputation for posterity," ""from your cushy billet in the Emperor Vespasian's apartments."" "The spirit of the defenders finally crumbled." "The city walls were breached, and Josephus was there to witness the greatest disaster to befall the Jewish people since the Babylonian invasion more than 650 years before." "The temple, established as the exclusive focus of Jewish prayer and piety, went up in smoke and flames." "The Roman legionnaires prised the massive masonry blocks from the top of the Temple Mount and sent them crashing onto the fine limestone pavement below." "The destruction of Jerusalem was the making of Vespasian's family, the Flavians." "Vespasian was declared Emperor, and Jewish loot and Jewish slaves provided the cash and the muscle for the building of the Colosseum, a massive bribe to buy the allegiance of Rome's bread and circus mob." "On the arch, dedicated to Vespasian's son and co-general, Titus, you can see the triumphant Romans making off with the loot from the temple, including the giant Menorah." "And among the loot was Josephus himself, carried to Rome and installed in the Flavian family compound." "But no-one in Rome thanked him for doing the right thing." "The kind of people you'd expect him to hang out with - historians, philosophers, playwrights and politicians - all despised the Jews." "They didn't mind saying so." "At some point, Josephus had had enough of all this ignorance and gloating." "About 20 years after he wrote The Jewish Wars, he took up his pen again, this time to explain, with patient dignity and a note of firm defiance, and over considerable length, just what Judaism was and what it did." "It's the first serious attempt by a Jew to make a sceptical, non-Jewish world understand that Judaism is not, as the Romans liked to sneer, a mere superstitio, a superstition, but a true religio, an authentic religion." "And so Josephus, like Sigmund Freud many centuries later, turned to the lawgiver, Moses." "To be Jewish, he explains, is simply to observe the laws that Moses brought down from Sinai, laws that teach, not impiety, but are enemies to injustice, and have a care of righteousness." "SHE SINGS IN HEBREW" "These laws require honour to parents, they abhor killing, they require charity and succour for the sick and old." "At last, this compromised, sycophantic, creepily self-exonerating historian stands tall, brimful with pride in his Judaism, and says in a phrase I find genuinely moving," ""We have become the teachers of men in the greatest of things."" "Given the hammer blows of the Roman legions, and coming as they did after century upon century of blows from Egyptians, the Syrians and Babylonians, there would have been scant reason to suppose that the Jews would survive as a people," "and yet, 2,000 years later, the Jews are still here." "How?" "Well, one answer can be found back at the Arch of Titus, not something that's here, but something that's not." "When Josephus describes the procession of loot and prisoners paraded through the streets of Rome, he says," ""And last of all of the spoils was carried, the laws of the Jews."" "But where are the laws?" "Where are the Torah scrolls?" "Conspicuously, tellingly, they are absent." "What were scrolls of law anyway?" "Just so many words on parchment, not really worth the time of a sculptor or the cost of the marble." "But words copied, memorised, internalised, made unforgettable, will beat swords any time." "You can't hold words captive." "The Roman Empire has come and gone, but go into a synagogue any Saturday and you'll still hear those words." "In September 1913, Dr Sigmund Freud, the godless Jew, was in Rome." "And he sent a postcard of the Arch of Titus to a friend." "On it he wrote, "Der Jude ubersteht's."" "The Jew survives it." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"