Which was precisely why, in the opinion of Justinian, it needed to be reminded of its proper place. The Jews were not alone in laying claim to Galilee: Christians as well revered it as a region hauntingly touched by the sacred. Christ Himself had lived there for much of His life: He had toured its villages, delivered sermons from its mountains, walked on the waters of its lake. Galilee was second only to Jerusalem on the itineraries of Christian tourists. Granted, their behaviour was not always all it might have been: whether carving their names on furniture used by Christ or ogling the famously attractive Jewish women, they had a certain tendency to gaucheness. Yet although, as one Italian visitor ruefully reported, “there is no love lost between the Jews and us,”41 it was not pilgrims who were chiefly responsible for this mood of tension. As elsewhere in Palestine, so in Galilee: many Christians aimed to be more than tourists. Land was their truest heart’s desire—the soil once trodden by Christ. As a result, churches had come to colonise Jewish fields, whole villages of settlers to be planted throughout the region, and walls, bristling emphatically, to gird even the smallest monastery, the most insignificant Christian hamlet. Now, with the arrival of Justinian’s workmen on the slopes above Tiberias, the time had come for the rabbis themselves to be issued with a notice of imperial intent. A huge church, designed to glower over the streets below, was to be raised directly on the summit of Mount Berenice. A massive ring of fortifications, complete with the latest fashion in watchtowers, was to be constructed around it. As elsewhere in the empire, so in the very stronghold of Judaism, an emphatic statement was to be made: no defiance of the Christian faith anywhere but the gaze of the emperor, unblinking and all-seeing, would be upon it.
True, there was an element of bluff in this eyeballing of the rabbis. Justinian, who had thought nothing of driving the philosophers of Athens into exile, had no corresponding intention to force the closure of the schools of Tiberias. In fact, to a large degree, they served his purpose. The rabbis offered to the emperor a living assurance that there did authentically exist a religion such as “Judaism,” one with authority figures and a clearly defined orthodoxy: the mirror-image of his own. The alternative—to acknowledge that in the great ocean of belief there might still be those who swam untrammelled beyond the twin dragnets of Christianity and Judaism—was infinitely more unsettling. The rabbis themselves would probably not have disagreed. After all, it was hardly unflattering to their pretensions to imagine a world in which there were Jews and Christians, and no one else. It was telling, perhaps, that the watchtowers built on Mount Berenice were not confined to its summit. Although the presence of the great church clearly established where the supremacy lay, Justinian did not neglect to offer his protection to the Jews as well. The fortifications ran right down the slope of the mountain and enclosed the entire city.42 The Jews may have been second-class subjects—but they were at least within the fold.
There remained others, however, who were harder to sort. Not everyone who trod the sacred dust of the Holy Land could be categorised neatly as a Christian or a Jew. Much though both emperors and rabbis might have wished it otherwise, Palestine was simply too God-haunted, too dream-crowded, too memory-stalked for that. Right in the heart of the province, for instance, there was a people who openly derided both Christian churches and Jewish synagogues as abodes of idolatry, and all those who worshipped in them as upstarts. The Samaritans, inhabitants of a region midway between Jerusalem and Galilee named Samaria, claimed that they, and they alone, had preserved the unadorned wishes of heaven. “There is no God but One,”43 they declared. “Let us believe in Him and in Moses, His Prophet.”44 From these simple presumptions, so it seemed to the Samaritans, much else inevitably flowed: all the scriptures penned since the time of Moses, whether by Jews or Christians, were mere deluded vanity; the purity of the teachings that God revealed to His Prophet had been corrupted by any number of subsequent accretions; Jerusalem, far from being a holy city, had been promoted as such by David and Solomon for purely political reasons. In truth, it was neither the Temple Mount nor the rock of Golgotha that constituted the centre of the world, but rather a wooded peak in Samaria—Mount Gerizim. It was here—on a flat expanse of rock named the “Eternal Hill” by the Samaritans—that Noah’s ark had landed, Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and the laws given to Moses had been preserved. To believe any differently, as the Jews and the Christians did, was to distort the primal teachings that God had revealed to the ancient prophets. It was to neglect the principal duty of humanity: due submission to God.45
None of which, needless to say, did much for the Samaritans’ popularity with their neighbours. Jewish scorn for their pretensions ran particularly deep. For centuries, in a blatantly tit-for-tat manner, the rabbis had accused the Samaritans themselves of being the idolators—this on the supposed grounds that they were descended from pagans and worshipped a dove. As a result, far from embracing them as potential allies, most Jews refused even to sit down with them, let alone consume their wine or food—although the odd rabbi was prepared to grant that it might be legitimate to tuck into one of their boiled eggs.46 As for Christians, the sanctions they applied would prove, in the long run, to be of an altogether more forceful order of brutality: an exercise in state-sponsored violence bred of wholly predictable tensions. Despite the fact that the Samaritans were permitted to serve in the Roman army, and indeed had long enjoyed an impressive reputation among their commanders for martial savagery, Christian relic-hunters had still ransacked Mount Gerizim, and Christian colonists had still flooded into Samaria. In 484, Samaritan patience had finally snapped. A bishop had been mutilated in his own cathedral; churches had been desecrated; open rebellion had blazed right across central Palestine. The provincial authorities, although initially taken by surprise, had been ruthless in crushing the revolt. Samaria had been left littered with some ten thousand corpses. All Samaritans, unsurprisingly, had been demobbed from imperial service for good. The crowning act of vengeance, however, had been to ban them from the sacred slopes of Mount Gerizim, and to build, on its previously unadorned summit, a church within a fortress. And on the church, as one Samaritan historian would bitterly record, “there was constructed a very high tower which was painted white, and from which lamps were hung to glow in the night, so that all in Constantinople and Rome might see them.”47
There was, of course—as any Jew could have pointed out—nothing particularly ground-breaking about this display of imperial vindictiveness. The Samaritans, however, had not had four hundred years to adjust to the loss of their holiest sanctuary; nor could they quite bring themselves to believe that God would permit its continued desecration. Desperation and rage duly festered. A few decades on from the great revolt, when a small band of Samaritan insurgents, “prompted by the suggestion of a woman,”48 sought to seize back the summit of Mount Gezirim from its Christian garrison, the incipient rebellion was quarantined only with difficulty; and in 529, when rioting saw a number of Jews and Christians killed by a mob of Samaritans, the spark proved sufficient to light a second conflagration. For a brief while, it seemed as though not only Palestine but the whole empire might be cut in two: for a warlord who shared with the long-dead pagan emperor the sinister name of Julian, a man variously described as a king, a messiah, or “a bandit chief,”49 proclaimed the foundation of a Samaritan empire, blocking the roads from the north, and menacing Jerusalem. Adding yet further spice to the rebellion, the insurgents staged a number of highly pointed atrocities, of which the most spectacular was the incineration of a bishop on a bonfire fuelled by the relics of Christian martyrs. Insults such as these, of course, might almost have been calculated to provoke a devastating response. The imperial vengeance, when it finally came, was inevitably a terrible one. The rebel army, brought to battle, was annihilated with such efficiency that twenty thousand Samaritan warriors were left dead, including a summarily decapitated Julian. New, more impregnable fortifications were raised around the summit of the Eternal Hill, and the slopes of Mount Gezirim scoured clean of every last trace of a Samaritan presence. Meanwhile, across the rest of Samaria, the ruin was universal. Land that had once been hailed as “the most fertile in the world”50 was now a wilderness of carrion, rubble and weeds.