Two weeks ago I visited Rhodes.
On this sunny island, the fates of two historical queens crossed paths - one was Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, the love of Julius Caesar and later the spouse of Marcus Antonius, and the other of ours, Miriam the Hasmonean.
"This family, or this nation, is the oldest in human memory, a quality that, in my opinion, gives it a special honor... because if God has revealed himself to humans since time immemorial, then they are the ones to turn to in order to learn about the tradition...", wrote in his reflections Blaze Pascal, who started the theory of probability almost 400 years ago.
I've been starting and then deleting for years.
A collection of materials for a series, possibly a play, about the Hasmoneans.
The family of priests from Modi'in that forbade war on a Greek empire and ended up becoming Greek itself, degenerated into a fratricidal war and was exterminated by Herod.
"In the beauty of her body and in the majesty (of her walks) (and that) in conversation and achievement she surpassed the girls of her time more than can be expressed in words," wrote Josephus Ben Mattatihu (Joseph Flavius) about Miriam the Hasmonean.
She was born in 53 BC.
The eldest daughter of cousins Alexander II and Alexandra, children of the brothers Aristobulus and Hyrcanus.
At the age of 5, Miriam was promised to Herod as compensation for his father's murder and in 37 BC he married her, aged 15.
"More than that, he was strengthened by his love for Miriam, his wife, who burned within him like a fire and grew stronger day by day," wrote Josephus Flavius, "until he did not feel the pains that his beloved soul brought upon him. Because Miriam hated Herod with a hatred as intense as his love that she loved."
Rightly so, one might say.
The paranoid and cruel king wiped out her entire dynasty.
For example, he ordered her 17-year-old younger brother to be drowned in the pool of his palace in Jericho.
At a distance of three kilometers from the old city, on a hill, stands the Acropolis of Rhodes. The September sun was shining and somehow the ancient swords are always a little disappointing to tell the story I wanted to feel in my body.
To the south of the hill is an ancient theater, and above you can see the remains of the Temple of Apollo (Pythian Apollo).
Herod renovated this temple with his own money.
I open the Jewish Wars and read how Herod arrived here in 30 BC, less than a year after the Battle of Actium in which Octavian defeated Marcus Antonius, Cleopatra's lover and spouse.
Marcus Antonius commits suicide.
Also his lover Cleopatra.
Octavian becomes Emperor Augustus.
A problem for Herod, because he bet on Antony.
Herod sails to meet Augustus here to convince him of his loyalty.
At their meeting, Herod honestly describes his loyalty to Antony and reaches a point.
He tells how he pleaded with Antony to kill Cleopatra.
"Miriam walked towards death in a quiet spirit. Even in the last moments of her life she showed her nobility in the eyes of all those watching"
"I promised him both money and fortresses to achieve with them, and I said that I would go out with him in his wars after he killed this woman."
Augustus likes what he hears and leaves his kingdom to Herod and thereby rules out Miriam and the Hasmonean family.
Even before his trip to Rhodes, Herod accused Hyrcanus II, Miriam's grandfather, of plotting a coup, and had him executed.
Herod feared that Antony's defeat would cost him his crown, so before he left on his journey, he transferred Miriam and Alexandra her mother to the fortress of Alexandria (Sertabe) supposedly to protect them, but actually imprisoned them.
He orders to be killed if he does not return from his journey.
Miriam discovers this, and when Herod returns from his successful meeting with Augustus and tells her the good news, she is unable to hold back, bursts into tears and passes her sentence.
A storm will come upon her within a year.
"She walked toward death in a quiet spirit," describes Josephus Flavius, "even in her last moments she showed her nobility in the eyes of all the onlookers. This is how the woman who excelled in the conquest of the spirit and the heights of the spirit died."
Herod will not recover from killing her.
His madness will only increase.
His two sons from her, Aristobulus and Alexander, were accused of treason and executed.
He also killed his firstborn, from his first wife Doris, a few days before his own death.
The Herod plots are a macabre realistic inspiration for Game of Thrones episodes or any other violent fantasy.
It is hard not to agree with the famous statement attributed to the emperor Augustus: "It is better to be Herod's pig than his son."
Even before Herod, the Jews were an integral part of the island's history.
In 142 BC, the Jews of Rhodes were among the writers of the Roman Senate regarding the renewal of the alliance between it and the Jews in the days of Shimon the Hasmonean. The community went through the ups and downs of the times and reached prosperity following the Ottoman occupation and the absorption of the deportees from Spain.
The "Khal Kadosh Shalom" synagogue is considered the oldest in Greece.
1577. In 1840, at the same time as the blood plot in Damascus, the blood plot broke out here. The blood plots were deeply rooted in the consciousness of the Greek communities in the Middle East even before Christianity. The first blood plot took place in Alexandria , son of Matthew).
The false confessions obtained under excruciating torture in Damascus strengthened the conspirators in Rhodes as well.
A Jew named Eliakim Stamboli was tortured until he confessed.
The Rothschilds intervene.
Their friend, the Austrian chancellor Metternich, is working with the sultan and the pressure of the British ambassador in Constantinople, Lord Ponsonby, is also working.
The suspects are acquitted.
The court ruled that the confession obtained under excruciating torture was inadmissible.
The boy from Rhodes will be discovered a few months later on another island.
It is common knowledge that Western civilization stands on the shoulders of Jerusalem and Athens.
Jerusalem brings the morality, Athens the logos.
More than once, they are mentioned again and again as a kind of allies, sisters, against Marxism and progressivism.
mainly on the right.
But the one who coined the term, the political philosopher Leo Strauss, was far from idealized.
Between Jerusalem and Athens there is no dialectic and mutual fertilization, only a sharp and unceasing tension, a deep ideological enmity.
But religion cannot refute philosophy, philosophy cannot refute religion, and only on the basis of this truce can Western civilization develop.
Sometimes the truce is broken.
About a hundred meters from the synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, is the Martyrs' Square.
From there in July 1944 the Germans sent 1,700 Jews of Rhodes to Auschwitz.
Only 161 remained alive at the end of the war.
Rhodes was one of the unique Jewish settlements that existed for more than 2,000 years, and it ended in Auschwitz.
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