← Unholy: Two Jews on the News
Unholy: Two Jews on the News
Middle East Past and Present: A deep dive into history with Tom Holland
01:00:52
In this special Pesach episode, Yonit and Jonathan discuss seder traditions and those who had to change due to the war. They are joined by Tom Holland — co-host of The Rest Is History and author of landmark books on Rome, Persia, and the roots of Western civilization — to explain why the Romans were wrong about the Jews, why the West fundamentally misunderstands Iran, and why secularism is itself a religious inheritance. From Cyrus the Great to the Iranian Revolution to Donald Trump, this is the episode that puts the present moment in full historical context.
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- [00:00]
A
It's unholy. I'm Jonathan Friedland in London.
- [00:03]
B
And I'm Yanit Levi in Tel Aviv.
- [00:05]
A
And it is just hours away as we speak the festival of Pesach, of Passover. And the voice you just heard there, Tom Holland, a globally renowned historian, co host of the Rest is History. He joins us as our special guest to reflect on the ancient history of our people. There's even a whole conversation, Yonit, about what we should be called as people. It's not been the same name. We're not consistent. But really diving deep into the ancient history we've got. It's all there. The First Temple, the Second Temple, the Judeans, the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians. You were big on the Persians in that conversation. I think it will be, you know, a lot of people use the festival, the hug, whatever hug it is actually as a time for just unplugging reading. A lot of people do that. Famously, Ben Gurion would spend religious days reading Aristotle. I'm not recommending that necessarily. But the idea of looking back at the history and the sort of deep history of our people stepping away from the kind of current noise of news, I think is something deep in our tradition. And so we're doing our own version of that in a way as we usher in Pesach by a reflective and really fascinating, illuminating conversation with one of the great historians of, of our period, Tom Holland. So that's all coming up. But otherwise, I mean, Pesach preparations will inevitably have a very different flavor this year just because of how people are living where you are in Israel. Yoni.
- [01:36]
B
Indeed, it is yet another irregular Passover here. I thought to myself, preparing for this conversation, that first of all, it will be the first Passover since October 7th where there are no hostages held by Hamas. And in a holiday that's theme is underlining. Theme is of course, from slavery to freedom. You think of that and that is a happy note. But of course, as you mentioned, we are in the middle of a war and Israel is, and Israelis particularly are bearing the brunt of a lot of missiles being launched at them from Iran. And the whole kind of, I have to tell you, the preparation for this holiday, which is kind of family and friends and all of them gathering around the table, the Seder table. You have this feeling like it feels a little bit like this holiday during COVID because everyone is thinking about the fact that if there's a huge family table, you all have to go to a shelter if there are missiles. And we estimate that the Iranians will Try and launch a lot of missiles during this holiday. So what do you do? And driving to your family in a different city is a whole big deal because the missiles can catch you while you're driving, which is, I can tell you from experience, a really unpleasant thing to occur. So everyone is kind of doing this calculation of a smaller center this year. That is part of it, I think. And the other thing I was thinking, thinking about, telling you, besides that idea of how do you celebrate a holiday of freedom in a shelter, in a bomb shelter, is the concept of many Israelis trying to kind of go abroad. It's Pesach vacation. It's also kind of a season where families go abroad, and it's hard to do that, almost impossible to do that through Ben Gurion Airport, which is almost shut down. So think of the fact that there are Israeli families who are traveling to Egypt to leave Israel through Egypt to other countries, because that is what is available to them as ground transportation either through Egypt or through Jordan. Irony of ironies doing that during Pesach. So those are the kind of just the thoughts going through my head as we connect Passover to the news of the day.
- [03:44]
A
I was hearing just at the weekend. Exactly. About that. Friends who are going through Sharm el Shecht in order to get out of the country. But, you know, it's meant to be about the country.
- [03:51]
B
Tell the pharaoh about that. Huh?
- [03:53]
A
Yeah, that gateway. It's about leaving Mitzrayim, not returning to Mitzrayim, to Egypt. Petach, I always feel the need to explain to people because we obviously, when we're talking to people who are not Jewish, we often say that Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Nevertheless, the analogy of Pesach, when I tried to explain to non Jews, it's much more similar in a way to the place in the calendar that perhaps people have with Christmas or Thanksgiving, meaning it's a time where families get together, they sit around the table, they eat a meal, and even the people who are. This was my intuition that even people who maybe no longer even mark Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, many of them will nevertheless be at a Seder. It is really widely marked. That was an intuition, as it happens just a couple of hours before you. And I gather that data has emerged. Admittedly, this is only about Britain, but I'm sure this is true of the wider diaspora. The Institute for Jewish Policy research discovers that 84% of British Jews last year attended a Seder. And that's an incredibly High number. It means by their measure, even those people who are in every other way, you know, the word they use is secular or culturally Jewish. Just people who don't observe anything else have very weak levels of observation. In the language of the statisticians and demographers, the participation rate is extremely high. And there will be people who don't get a synagogue, but they do sit with their family and mark this episode now in Jewish history. I say episode. It prompts me to remind listeners we are doing a whole bonus episode on Pesach and its sort of twin, which is Easter, which comes at the same time, almost always. More data on that. In that bonus episode. How often exactly does Peace, Pesach and Easter converge? You'll have to be a subscriber and listen to the bonus episode to find out exactly that. But the point is, this is a part of the Jewish calendar that is really central. Your recollection there of the COVID period really does come back to me. That was, you know, in a very different set of circumstances, but that too was a period where people couldn't gather as whole families and people set up zoom cameras. That was in their infancy then that. That technology. So. But the notion that people are not able to have the regular Pesach in Israel that they would normally be having, I think that will strike a chord because as I say, this is in way people who've given up everything else, they hold onto this Jewishly because of its place in Jewish hearts as well as on the calendar.
- [06:30]
B
I'd like to make fun of you or tease you a little that Pesach is your favorite holiday. I would say Purim is the best holiday. But the truth is Pesach is an incredibly deep holiday and the tradition of it. I mean, obviously, as we said, the main theme from celebration of moving from becoming. We were slaves and now we're free. I think there's so much more in there. First of all, we were released from slavery and we were taken into the land of Israel. We were turned to our homeland, and it is this tribe of slaves becoming a nation. And I think, and since Pesach is a lot about asking questions, it's all in the Haggadah, the story of Pesach. And indeed, everyone is encouraged, even the youngest, particularly the youngest child, to ask a question during the settle. The question is, how is this night different from other nights? And you think about that. It is when we essentially became a nation. And I think it's also an important thing to ask ourselves today. What kind of nation do we Want to become. I think that is an important question to still ask. And another thing that I always found beautiful, part of Pesach, of that story is, yes, it's a celebration, but it's also. And this, Jews are quite good at this. They do this with dexterity. It's also having to live with this journey inside you, right? You are ordered, commanded, it's your mitzvah to tell this story over and over again of when you were slaves. And it is saying to you, however happy you are, and it is important to be happy, you always have to learn to live with that parcel of sadness. And that parcel of sadness changes. Those journey changes, the journey changes. It can be the journey from Europe to Eretz Israel. It can be what we have been going through since October 7th as a people, right, in the Diaspora and in Israel. But all of that exists, the story of how do we indeed live with that kind of sadness. And I can tell you, Jonathan, that when I think of our setters, I particularly think of my grandmother Annie, who lived a very challenging life through her family and was killed in Auschwitz and her husband died in. In Kazakhstan. She was never a sad person. Obviously, she had moments of sadness. But when I think of our setters, I think particularly of her and how she held herself and how she was this career woman and all of that. And I think that is what I think of personally when I think of
- [09:00]
A
these seders, I think you'll be speaking for so many people. Yonit, when you mention those who are missing at the seder, when you look around the table, it was really is a very poignant moment. That way. Obviously, we always remember family members, but the memory comes out much, much more sharply. I have found around Pesach time. I mean, my parents are no longer alive and my older sister Fiona, she's no longer with us. But when Seder comes, I look at the table and you hear the tunes and you remember who sang what, who did which, at what moment they come back. They're there at those moments. And I think a lot of people will feel that. Just on your point about the sadness, I feel that there is a theme emerging in many of our conversations about the festivals. Key moments in the festivals, which is they so. Or key moments of Jewish ritual, they hold simultaneously sadness and joy and, you know, obvious. The paradigmatic example is the wedding, the broken glass. Even at a moment of joy, remembering our tragedies, remembering the destruction of the temple. That's a motif that I think we've been noticing. We had it in our conversation With Angela Bukdal when we were going into Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. It happens over and over again. It is a theme. And this here will be felt very strongly.
- [10:19]
B
Yeah, we talked about the sadness and about the journey that we all carry within us. I think one of my favorite songs in the Seder is Dayenu, which is a whole kind of thank you to God for rescuing us and bringing us to Eretz Yisrael. And it's done in Dayenu means that would be enough. Right? So it's, for example, if he had just taken us through dry land and not pushed our enemies in, that would have been enough. The whole song is that. And it's very interesting, by the way, the new version, I saw this comic ensemble doing this version, a modern version. If we just had a preliminary alert and not a siren, that would be enough and that kind of thing. But to me, that is always a kind of moment where you say, I'm thankful for. I'm just pausing in this moment and I'm thanking. I'm thankful for what I have. And as you say, you look around the table and you say, yes, there are people that we. And we are very sad about that, but they're part of us and we're thankful for the people that are here around the table. That is one of my favorite parts. I will confess to you, Jonathan, that since both my father and my mother are only children and my sister, my older sister took her time having children, I think I was singing Manishtina, which is a song sung by the youngest person at the table until my late 20s. So that is my embarrassing confession from the center.
- [11:36]
A
But now, no, I think it's exempt from that. Thankfully, you are now exempt from that. Absolutely. We're going to hear from Tom Holland in a moment. One of the things he says in there is that when people talk about a kind of national myth or a creation myth, it doesn't mean it's not true. The word myth just really means in its strictest meaning, like a story or national narrative. Pessach is exactly that. And it is the kind of foundational myth, f foundational narrative of the Jewish people. For the reason you said, it's when we emerge and become the people of Israel and in Israel returning. But it has these two themes of exile and return. Both are in there that you are absolutely encouraged not just to sort of say they were slaves in Egypt. It's all in the first person. We were slaves in Egypt as if we remember it sitting around that table. And then, of course, it does culminate in. Or the story is resolved by the arrival, parting of the Red Sea and the arrival in the Promised Land.
- [12:38]
B
It's a very dramatic story, too.
- [12:41]
A
It's an epic story. It's an epic narrative. The seidr is the most brilliant sort of audio, visual and sensory multimedia experience devised long before any of those words or terms were even imagined. 2000 years and counting. Food, song, words, wine, ritual, all designed at a very deep sort of sensory level to convey memory. And it's just a remarkable bit of sort of portable Judaism where your national story is carried with you. Like you said, a parcel, a sort of backpack that Jews take with them in. In. And have carried with them in thousands of years. So I think you're right. It is probably my favorite festival. You know, there's a competition, crowded field. But I love it very much.
- [13:31]
B
And you love it so much you do it twice.
- [13:34]
A
Yeah, I do.
- [13:35]
B
No, not only you, we should say.
- [13:36]
C
But it does.
- [13:37]
A
Not only me. I mean, yes, in Diaspora, among traditional Orthodox Jews, there are two sederim. Two seders, first night, second night. Second night has become a bit of a challenge, because how do you make it not just a repeat of the first one? A lot of people do. Family on the first night, friends on the second night. That's what we're going to be doing.
- [13:53]
B
Do you think we should explain why it's done twice?
- [13:56]
A
There was ambiguity, I think, in the calendar. This is why Diaspora, because they were far from Israel, couldn't be exactly certain of the date. You know, in Jerusalem, you know exactly when, the dates. But in the days of before advanced communication, word would spread thousands of miles away. People would worry they got the date on the calendar wrong. So to be on the safe side, there's so many Jewish rules like that, including actually at Pesach, that so many foods are prohibited not because they are. You know, people know perhaps that leavened bread is not allowed. No loaves of bread. Instead, it's unleavened bread or matzah. Similarly, foods that might be confused for hametes, for leaven and leavened bread are themselves banned. Sephardim are much more sophisticated, advanced on this matter, and they have allowed a whole lot of food, legumes and nuts and so on, and pulses are allowed. But Ashkenazi Jews, many of them, stick with the idea that just to be on the safe side, they are forbidden. A whole range of things. And yes, you have it for two days. I mention often the haredi neighborhood that I live in for the last 10 days there has been remarkable activity on street level of cleaning, vacuuming their cars, vacuuming every last particle of dust out of those cars because through the air conditioning you never know what might come through. There could be a micro particle of Chametz that is hardcore. Pesach does tend to bring out the kind of extremist in quite a lot of people when it comes to the rules. There are many, many rules. I will be on the step ladder not too many hours after this conversation. Getting all the Pesach dishes, crockery, cutlery all down. We change the dishes. It's a whole thing. Anyway, I think we should move to our special guest, our conversation indeed.
- [15:52]
B
I think that we wanted, as you said, to take a deep dive into the history of our people, but also the history of this region and what it means for today in this region particularly. History could also be a powder keg, but it could definitely give you an insight into the way we act today and think today. So we have the privilege to talk to a very great historian on that.
- [16:15]
C
Foreign.
- [16:21]
A
Is a writer, historian and co host of one of the world's most popular podcasts. It's also acclaimed. It is. The rest is history. He is too an authority on the ancient world and on the early history of Christendom. And Tom Holland, we are delighted to welcome you to Unholy.
- [16:42]
C
Thank you very much for having me.
- [16:44]
A
It's a delight. So my sense is as a starting point that lots of listeners to this podcast, meaning quite a lot of Jews have a good feel for the biblical period. They know Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses. They're across that they know something of Jewish history over the last four or five centuries where, where I think they get a little bit murky and vague, is what we might call the ancient period, the age of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, where exactly their people, as it were fitted in, whether it's Hebrews, Judeans, Jews even really what they should be called. Yeah, I think there is some cloudiness on this. So before we go fully in, I thought to define our terms a bit, we might just ask you about when we talk about Jews in the ancient world, who exactly are we talking about?
- [17:35]
C
I. I think that there is a slight risk of anachronism if you're using English in talking about, say, the Jews in the Roman world, certainly before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. I mean, you say that, that, that. That Jews listening wouldn't know. I would, I guess they must know about the sack of Jerusalem, the destruction of Jerusalem and everything that that flows from that I mean it's one of the greatest epochal events in Jewish history. And I think in a way it creates what today we might describe as Judaism, which is a Christian phrase originally. It's a kind of Christian formulation, but I mean we'll use it as a shorthand. But you could the sense of Judaism as focused in synagogues, the Judaism of the rabbis, a Judaism that is not centered on a temple, not centered on a great cult center because that cult center is destroyed by the Romans and a new form of identity emerges. And I think that there is a risk in back projecting our understanding of that kind of Judaism, that kind of Jewish identity on what existed before the sack of Jerusalem. Because I think what needs to be appreciated is that the Jews in the eyes of the Romans are nothing particularly exceptional. The Romans see the people that they call the, the Judeans, the Judeoi in Greek, as very weird, as very odd, as very peculiar. But then to the Romans, pretty much everyone who isn't a Roman is peculiar and weird. And actually the, the Judeans, the, the people who live in what the Romans term the province of Judea, they're pretty habituated to Roman rule. I think the notion that, that the Romans and the, and that the Jews were condemned to come to conflict, that there was some kind of primal opposition between the polytheism of the Romans and the monotheism of the Jews. I think this is, this is not true. The Judeans were very habituated to the rule of great global empires. You know, they were accustomed to paying their taxes, to, to gratefully accepting the kind of the shield of first the Persians and then with exceptions the Greeks. I mean, you know, there was a bit of a bust up with the Greeks, but then by and large they were, they were pretty content under Roman rule. But then there is this kind of disaster that happens in the late 60s AD with the kind of catastrophic consequences which I think is one of the great decisive historical moments not just in Jewish history, but in world history, because it's also decisive on the emergence of Christianity as well.
- [20:27]
B
I wonder, since we are on the topic of Jews or Judeans of the time, most of the peoples that the Romans or the Persians conquered, and there's a long list, most of them eventually vanished, merged, lost their unique identity. Why is it that Judeans didn't?
- [20:46]
C
I mean that is the, the great question and that is why actually the Judeans are, do turn out to be more unusual than the Romans had appreciated. Because the assumption in the Roman world was that if you destroyed the metropolis of a people, you were essentially destroying the people. So before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 BC the greatest city that had been destroyed by the Romans was Carthage. And Carthage had been the great enemy of the Romans. They'd fought three terrible wars against it. And in the end, Carthage is incinerated and effectively Carthaginian civilization vanishes. Carthage is rebuilt, but it's linked to the Carthage of Hannibal. And all of that is effectively gone. So the Roman assumption is that once they've destroyed Jerusalem, that will wipe out the Judeans, you know, that they will dissolve, that they will be kind of become a new people. Maybe it's, it's the plan of the Emperor Hadrian to build a colony on what had been a colonia and what had been the, of Jerusalem. So the assumption is that they will become kind of Hellenized, maybe they'll become kind of Romanized. This is what they think will happen, but it doesn't. Because the Judeans have something that no other people have, which is a collection of texts and scriptures that enable them to retain their cultural and religious identity even though their great cult center and their metropolis has been wiped out. And that is what makes them exceptional. And that is what gives rise to what we would now recognize, recognized as Rabbinical Judaism.
- [22:16]
A
So that's obviously an absolutely, as you said, a poke event in Jewish history. But I'm intrigued by what you said about why it's a huge event in world history because of its impact on Christianity. Just say a little bit more about why that is a turning point. Not just for this small people who the Romans thought would disappear in a way from the page of history, but for, for Christendom itself.
- [22:38]
C
Well, let's call them Jews and let's call them Christians in the first century A.D. they both have a sense of that the God they worship is by the standards of other gods, exceptionally potent. There is only the one God. He's all powerful, created the universe, you know, all of that. So the fact that his temple has been destroyed and his holy city has been brought tumbling down in flames is a massive problem. I mean, how is, how has this all powerful God allowed this to happen? And essentially what emerges as Judaism and Christianity are rival attempts to deal with that problem. And there is the further problem of what do you do with the fact that the holy city has been destroyed? And again Judaism and Christianity offer opposing solutions to that. So the solution of, of, of the people who come to be called the Jews is to focus it in synagogues, in rabbinical teaching, in the notion of scripture. Christians also of course have you know, they also regard what they come to call the Old Testament as their scriptures, but they have a more expansive notion of who God's people could be. So for them, they draw on the sense of God as not just having a chosen people, but as the creator of every human being on the face of the earth. And so that aspect of what had been Uday ismos before the destruction of Jerusalem kind of, it's a channel that goes into what becomes Christianity. And the notion of God as a, as. As a particular patron of a particular people goes into becoming what emerges as Judaism. So those two great kind of rivers, cultural ideological rivers, they flow from the destruction of Jerusalem.
- [24:40]
B
I'm moving to, if I may, to 538bc. And since we are at war, Israel and Iran are at war, we should say it wasn't always like this or the relationship between the Persian Empire and the Jews, not always like that. And I'm focusing on a great man who actually saved the Jews, and this is Cyrus the Great, allowing Jews freeing Judea from the Babylonian rule, allowing Jews to return, build their temple. You know, the Jews mention them in the Bible as the Messiah. He's someone who's not Jewish. And that's very poignant and also we should say, admired in Iran today. We can take this any direction you'd like, Tom, but I mean, what do you think that Cyrus would think of even of Iran of today?
- [25:26]
C
Well, I think. I think he would find. I mean, he'd be wildered by. By the fact that it wasn't the world's greatest power, which it was under him. I think he'd be very disappointed by that. I think he'd. Obviously, he would also be bewildered by Islam, which by his standards is a relatively late arrival. But I think he would also be impressed by the measure of continuity. He would find the sense that the Iranians still have, you know, they have a cultural identity which reaches back not just centuries, but millennia. And as you said, Cyrus is kind of celebrated even under the Islamic Republic as the great kind of father of Iranian civilization. Now that, it has to be said, is a relatively recent import. I mean, essentially it kind of derives from the Western fascination with Cyrus, which derives not just from the Bible, from Isaiah, but also from the Greeks. Herodotus, the first great historian, you know, a great fan of Cyrus, Xenophon, writes an entire book praising Cyrus the Great. So these two traditions which have been so influential on Western civilization, of Greek, of Athens and Jerusalem, if you want to put it that way, both of them think Cyrus is absolutely Brilliant. And that then gets picked up by the. The. The. The Shah's regime in the 20th century. And he has this notorious celebration at Persep in 1972, where kind of food is flown in from Paris, Princess Anne goes, and all kinds of other world leaders to celebrate it. And this provokes the ire of ayatollahs and puritanical Muslims in Iran. And it's a contributory factor, I think, to the downfall of the Shah. And so the sense of Cyrus as. As. As the great founder of Iranian civilization slightly goes under eclipse. But Ahmadinejad, he's a big fan of Cyrus. And so Cyrus starts to kind of reappear on the Iranian national stage. And now Cyrus and even the Sasanian empire, which is the empire that existed prior to the arrival of Islam in. In Iran, even the Sasanian kings are slightly being, you know, the kind of dusted down and brought back into. Into center stage. So there is that kind of tension still in Iran between the national, The Islamic aspects of it, and a kind of constant attempt to try and balance and integrate the two. One aspect, of course, of Cyrus's record that certainly the Islamic regime is not keen to emphasize is this role that he plays in Isaiah, as you say, the Messiah, the man who allows the Judean exiles to go back to their homeland and to rebuild the temple.
- [28:20]
A
Hearing you talk about the big bash in 1972 in Persepolis, some of us have heard the episode of the Rest Is History where you recall those events, which I think opens with your impersonation of Jimmy Carter. Yeah, yeah.
- [28:34]
C
Which. Which almost caused an international incident. So lots of Americans wrote in to complain how bad it was, and it was just when Trump had introduced his tariffs. So I said it was payback for. Payback for the tariffs that he'd imposed on British steel.
- [28:48]
A
Yeah, it was quite serious payback to inflict that. No, I loved it myself. Your reference right at the start, to a people that isn't just centuries old, but millennia old, that considers itself the heirs to an ancient civilization. Obviously, you could have been speaking about the people of Israel in the same way. It would be true of both of them. And I just wonder, in contemporary life, in international affairs, there are these civilizations that we make this point about. China would be another one. And we say these are countries with long memories or and so on. It's something that people refer to, but they don't take it much further than that. When you observe the current geopolitical scene, what difference does it actually make, if any, that some countries have this sense of themselves as being the heirs to very, very ancient traditions. And right now we've got two clashing directly with each other in the form of Iran and Israel. What impact does the past have on this collision in the present?
- [29:48]
C
I think it provides an immense resource for, for not just for continuity, but for reinvention. So all the, all the, all those countries that you mentioned, you know, they have, they're reconstantly recalibrating themselves. So China, the imperial system has gone, but you could argue that Xi Jinping is, you know, trying to reinstitute it and that he has to reinstitute it, because I think cultures do have something analogous to DNA. It can be very hard to completely reconstitute a system. In the case of Iran, as we've said, the, the, the sense of Cyrus is a recent one because the historical memory of Cyrus was obliterated, but almost uniquely in, in the, in the lands of the Middle east that were conquered by the Arabs and over the course of centuries, largely converted to Islam, Iran retained a sense of its pre Islamic identity. So the great national poem of Iran, for Darcy's Shahnameh, it doesn't commemorate Cyrus, but it does commemorate certain. It certainly commemorates the Sasanian kings. It commemorates some of the Achaemenid kings who are the kings that succeeded Cyrus and were overthrown by Alexander, who also features in the Shahnameh. And the Shahnameh has a sense of the, the monarchy of Iran going all the way back to the creation of the world. And that is obviously an enormous resource because it, it enables Iranians to have a sense of themselves that is older than the, the religion that governs them. And I think that it provides scope for reinvention. Therefore, and when and if the Islamic Republic collapses, there is material there to abet the reconstruction of a new order that is nevertheless very rooted in antiquity. True of the Jews as well.
- [31:49]
A
No, I was just going to say we had the scholar Ali Ansari, you'll know his work on the podcast just a few weeks ago, who was saying when those people are assuming there's a risk of that Iran could just disintegrate and break up. He was saying they underestimate the fact this has been a single coherent unit for millennia. It won't break easily.
- [32:07]
C
Yeah, I mean, you know, the Iranians have been conquered by the Mongols, by the Arabs, by Alexander the Great. You know, they've been through a lot of. Trump is just a tiny little buzzing gnat compared to those.
- [32:20]
B
Hey, we've been through a lot, too. I'm Just saying. Right.
- [32:22]
C
Oh, you know, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not arguing about that.
- [32:25]
B
That, yes, we're not in competition, but I mean, since we talked about Cyrus the Great, we talked about the sack of Rome, obviously, if we move a little bit forward, about 650 years forward in time, the Bar Kokhva revolt and the Romans essentially ending this, stamping Jewish independence, and Jews have been trying to return to their homeland. As a historian, when you hear these conversations, I'm not trying to get you into any hot water here, but when you hear these conversations that deny any connection between Jews and the land of Israel, you know, calling Jewish Jews colonizers, what do you make of that?
- [32:57]
C
I mean, clearly there's a.
- [32:59]
A
There's.
- [33:00]
C
I mean, it's mad to say there's no link. I mean, how could you. I don't really see how that's a credible argument.
- [33:07]
B
People should learn. History is what we're saying, basically.
- [33:10]
C
Well, there's a constant process of evolution, and history very easily blurs and blends into myth. But myth has an incredible potency and power. And the word myth is often used, is often equated with, you know, lie or fabrication. But. But it's not necessarily. I mean, it. It can embody a truth that is deeper than reality. And I think that the stories that the Iranians or the Jews or the Greeks or even the English tell about their origins, they cannot be reduced to the bare bones of what we can say with absolute certainty happened. That myth is a great kind of fertiliser from which flowers are constantly blooming.
- [34:04]
A
That's beautifully put. I mean, I suppose I don't want to draw you into this bear pit either, but something I wonder about myself. There are people who, in order to push back the settler colonial narrative, they will say, not only, look, there's obviously a historical link. The archaeology demonstrates it, if nothing else, but that actually the today's Jews, the people of. The people of Israel, are indigenous to the land of Israel because they were there 2,000 years ago and there was a continuous presence. What do you make of a word like that? I take your point about myths and national stories and narratives, but would you approve of that use of that word?
- [34:43]
C
I think indigenous has a particular shade of meaning in contemporary academic discourse, which essentially is what is driving this, because there's a sensitivity around it. On the one hand, to be indigenous privileges you. If you are an indigenous person in Australia or Canada or whatever, then that is an uncontested source of dignity. If you apply it to say the people, the, the Jews who have settled in Israel, it becomes a much more contested word. And that is obviously because there is a kind of enormous lineal gap, a chronological gap. But I think that the, the, the, the, the scope for argument around that reflects the fact that, as we said at the start of this episode, there is something unique about the traditions that enabled the people of Judea to survive the destruction of their metropolis and their temple. And more than that, that enabled people who define themselves as Judeans in the world that existed before the destruction of Jerusalem but lived beyond Judea in Alexandria or in Antioch or in Rome or in Carthage, still to preserve their identity as Judeans. And that is centered in this idea of scriptures. And the scriptures are so potent because they, among many other things, provide a history that links the people who study them and who are educated and raised to be familiar with them, to identify with specific places in a specific territory, a specific land. And there isn't really anything comparable to that anywhere else in any other kind of tradition that we've inherited from antiquity.
- [36:41]
B
I'm zooming out to pull us out from dangerous territories, if there are any. I'm zooming out to ask. The first great clash between east and west was between Persian and Greek empires. I think I saw this funny drawing a few days ago of someone reading from their phone the news that says Greece is sending ships to defend Cyprus from the Persians. And so someone's saying, wait, is it 20, 26 or 478 BC? But obviously that was the first clash. And ever since that, in a way, the east and west have been clashing over territory, over influence. Are we doomed to be living the same kind of war over and over? Or am I, you know, overgeneralizing completely?
- [37:17]
C
Well, I mean, you say that that is the first clash, but the reason that we think that's the first clash is because that's how it's framed by Herodotus, who is the first person who writes a history that enables us to know what was going on.
- [37:27]
A
On.
- [37:28]
C
But Herodotus frames the. The invasion of Greece by the Persian kings as being part of a continuum that reaches back beyond the Trojan War to Phoenicians coming and kidnapping various Greek princesses and then the Greek going and kidnapping Phoenician princesses. And so it goes on and on and on. And it's such a. I suppose, because Herodotus identifies it with the notion of Europe and Asia, so continents, geography, and patterning it onto cultural conflict. But actually, Herodotus himself was born in Halic Manassas, which is now Bodrum in what's now Turkey. So he was a subject of the Persian king. It's much more. And, and the Greeks have lived in what is now, you know, the Aegean seaboard of Turkey for thousands of years again. And they were expelled as part of that same kind of process of population expulsions and movements that helped create the, the, the, the state of Israel. The collapse of the Ottomans, who were the last of the kind of the successor empires to Cyrus's empire. This notion of a vast, kind of immense empire in which people of diff, who worship different gods and had different ethnic identities and so on could nevertheless kind of live under a single imperial order. The implosion of that is what upended identities that, and that that in many ways went back, as we said, millennia. And I think that kind of 20th century history, and certainly 21st century history as well, is a process of trying to adjust to the seismic scale of the change that the collapse of that imperial, that notion of imperial order has left in the Middle east and which included the Balkans as well.
- [39:11]
A
I'm aware that we're jumping around a bit, but I'm thinking about your read of the ancient world and how it does, how it's understood now in the contemporary world. And one thing particularly is about the Romans. Roman Republic, which becomes the Roman Empire. And in the United States there are plenty of people who see themselves as the Rome and the Romans of today. There are some who are worried that they're on that hinge point out of republic and into empire. Some say they're further down that road. They're into already the decline and fall stage. They've got their Nero slash Caligula figure in the White House, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But just based on, on your scholarship about, of ancient Rome, when you look at today's empire, the United States, what stage in the, in the trajectory is it in?
- [40:01]
C
Well, I think that we, we in the west are so influenced by the model of Rome as an empire that rises and then declines and falls that we tend to assume that it's, it's part of, of geopolitical reality. It's almost like the laws of physics that anything that rises has to fall. All the perspectives, say, of the Chinese, I think would be slightly different because China emerged as a great empire on the opposite end of Eurasia from Rome. And it essentially is still a going concern. So their perspective might be slightly different. I don't think there's anything that says that America has to follow the template that was established by Rome. The only reason that it haunts the American imagination so profoundly is because America consciously drew on the archetype of the primal republic for, you know, the name of, of, of the Hill on which Congress stands. So you have a Capitol, you have a Senate. The architecture of Washington is modeled on Rome. And if you, if you're going to found a republic modeled on Rome, of course you're going to be shadowed by a nervousness about what happened to that republic, the emergence of a Caesar. And so the whole framework of the Constitution in America was arranged to try and stop a Caesar. But more than that, even more than the fact that the Roman Republic fell, you're aware that the Roman Empire fell. And so that also is a kind of shadow hanging, hanging over America. I don't think there's any, any inevitability about it at all.
- [41:32]
B
Americans would love to know that for sure.
- [41:35]
C
Well, I mean, but, you know, but people have been worrying about the rise of a Caesar right from the beginning. So when, you know, Benjamin Franklin came out and they'd been working out what kind of government they're going to have and they said, what kind of government is going to be? And he says, a republic if you can keep it. So that's two and a half centuries they've been worrying about this.
- [41:54]
A
Yes.
- [41:56]
B
So if we are back in modernity a little bit, I always make this joke and Jonathan's very patient in hearing this joke over and over. I used to say to him a lot, it's the British and the French who made this mess in the Middle east in the first place. And I just wonder how much of that joke is true. I mean, how much of the fact that there were the French and the English as, I'm sorry, true colonizers here, drawing the lines and promising sep, you know, tribes, whatever, all promises they can't keep. How much is that to do with the mess we're seeing today and still living it?
- [42:31]
C
Oh, I mean, I.
- [42:33]
B
Can you give me a green light to keep making that joke is what I'm trying to ask.
- [42:38]
C
I think like the Iranians, you are over emphasizing the agency of Britain in 20th century history there. I think you are ascribing a notoriety to us that is way above our station.
- [42:50]
B
I was blaming the French too.
- [42:52]
C
I mean, the Sykes, Picot, the drawing of lines, all of that, the establishment of mandates and so on. Western power was already in retreat at that point. The First World War had dessanguinated Europe. The collapse of Ottoman power was nothing that the British or the French control. They were like jackals moving in to have a pick at the corpse of this great beast that had been felled. But they, you know, they were not going to last very long. Not least because the discovery of oil, while it enabled the Royal Navy to, To power its battleships for a few decades, Britain, let alone France, in the wake of the Second World War, simply lacked the capacity to impose itself on the Middle east, and, and America essentially inherited that role. And whether America has the ability to impose itself now, I mean, I think that, that America may be facing its, you know, the moment that Britain faced and France at Suez. I don't think that it is the fault of Britain and France that the Middle east is in the state that it was. I don't think the British and French helped, but I don't think they caused the message.
- [44:02]
A
I just want to follow up what you said about Suez, because that's really arresting. You say they might be at that point in the sense what of realizing the limits of their own power, the limits of their ability to shape them, the Middle East.
- [44:13]
C
The Operation Suez was a tremendous military success. Britain and France with Israel. I mean, you know, it all went brilliantly, but. But the British and the French couldn't maintain it because that their economies would have imploded if they'd, if they just kept grinding on. And it may be that that's the situation that the United States faces as well, because if, if the entire global economy comes kind of collapsing down in rubble, then that would very dramatically demonstrate the limits of American power.
- [44:44]
A
It's a fascinating thought, these moments that sort of puncture hubris and they happen in that region disproportionately. Actually, the question I had in my mind was also a sort of contemporary policymaker question, in a way, which is your very good series that you recently, west is History about the Iranian revolution. I mean, couldn't have been more timely. And there was so many moments and key sort of decision points where the Americans kind of read it wrong, most obviously with Jimmy Carter saying, you know, you're the Shah and you're going to be here for hundreds of years ruling in perpetuity and glory and so on. But I just wondered, you know, you've got, obviously got influential listeners all over the world, but is there one bit of that or one part of it, a lesson, if you like, from that recent deep dive you took that you think those people who are making the calling the shots today in Washington would have benefited from hearing before they made their decision on February 28th or March 1st.
- [45:41]
C
I think that it is really important to accept that when people say they believe something, they do actually believe it. It's not just performative, it's not just kind of fancy dress. The leaders of the Iranian Republic have a very distinctive understanding of the cosmos, of the divine, of humanity's relationship to the divine, of the past, of the future, of the shadow of apocalypse, of the role of prophecy. And if you don't understand that, then you don't know what you're taking on. Jimmy Carter was a very devout Christian who took religion very seriously. As a Christian, of course, he had an understanding of apocalypse. He would be familiar with the Book of Revelation. He would have been familiar with the idea of. Of prophecy and of. Of God's finger tracing patterns on the face of world politics. But it seems he never applied that perspective to what was going on in Iran, on with the Ayatollah and the Iranian revolution. I don't think that Donald Trump has any sense whatsoever of that dimension to Iranian identity, because I don't think he's ever read a book. I don't think he's even read the Art of the Deal. And he's supposed to have written that. And that's not me being. I'm not being an intellectual snob about that. I mean, he's become the President of the United States. He's an incredibly consequential president. He. His kind of ability to trust, his instinct has enabled him to win the presidency twice. But I think that sometimes trusting overly to your instinct can lead you into, well, into quagmires. And I think that in the Middle East, a succession of American presidents have failed to think through the implications of people there who genuinely believe what they say they believe bid in Iran, be it in Iraq, be it in any of the. Of the Middle Eastern countries that they've intervened in.
- [47:57]
B
I'm tying to something that you said about the understanding, and part of it, of course, is understanding the religion. You yourself, you know, have faced backlash for questioning the traditional narrative of early Islam. Can you talk a little bit? I guess it's two different questions. One is, how do you do history and inquiry when everything is a powder keg, particularly in this region? And if at the end of the day, we talked a lot about, you know, who's to blame for what is going on? But religion is a big part of what is going on here. And if it is that, how can it ever.
- [48:33]
C
I think that the West's kind of rise to global hegemony coincided with the retreat of religious faith among its elites. So the heyday of Victorian Britain was the same period that saw Darwin emerge and then Marx and Freud and Nietzsche and all these figures who undermined the confidence that the kind of people who were in charge of the various European powers and, you know, America and so on, the confidence that they had in, in religion as a way of making sense of the world. And I think that that was kind of fine when they had the big guns and they had the economic power and the financial power and the technological power, because they could just impose their understanding of the world, the secular understanding, the agnostic, sometimes atheist understanding of the world on everybody else. But I think as Western hegemony has retreated, I think that becomes more difficult. And I think there's an obligation to try and see the world through the eyes of people who are not like you, because that's generally what you have to do as a human being unless you're overweeningly powerful. And we in the west are no longer overweeningly powerful. But we still seem to have a trouble, we still seem to find it difficult to think outside our own secularist boxes.
- [50:08]
A
You speak there as if you think this is not just a sort of loss of analytical insight that the west is less able to understand the rest of the world. There's some other loss that I think I'm hearing in what you're describing there about the west in moving towards secularism and, and being the west rather than being Christendom. Something has been lost of value. Could we, am I right? Well, no, no.
- [50:36]
C
Well, I think, I mean, I, I, I think it's a kind of conceit that by, by being secular, the west has emancipated itself from its theological inheritance. I don't think that, I mean, I think that the, the, the kind of, the concept of the secular is ultimately an inheritance from medieval Christendom and going ultimately even further back. In other words, it's very culturally continge the Shiism of the Iranian Republic is contingent, or the Hinduism of Narendra Modi or the Islam of the Sunni powers. We all, we all have blinkers, but the worst form of blinker is a blinker that you're not even aware is
- [51:18]
A
there, you just said it in passing about secularism itself being an outgrowth of Christianity. And I've heard you explain that before, but for people who haven't heard you explain that, just unpack that idea because it's such an interesting, interesting sort of seemingly paradoxical idea. But you, but you, you know, you can explain it well I think, I
- [51:35]
C
mean, I mean, so this is going out a Passover, but also over Easter, and I think at Easter. The power of that story is the fact that Jesus rejects the, the temple establishment he's brought before the Sanhedrin. He. He. He refuses to recognize the. What he sees as the intermingling of the dimension of the divine and the dimension of, of the earthly that he finds embodied in their same is true of Pilate, the Roman, who ultimately sent us into death, because Pilate as well, intermingles a sense of the divine and the human. You know, he is the servant of Caesar who is the, you know, the adoptive son of a God in the form of Augustus. And what is radical about Jesus as he's portrayed in the Gospels, is this sense that he's preaching the kingdom of God, which is something distinct from the world as it exists, and it's there. It's like a kind of tiny acorn from which this massive oak will grow. And it structures, for instance, the theology of Augustine, who is the. The great church father of the Latin west, who separates out what he calls the dimension of the cyculum. Which is. The cyculum is the span of a human life. So it's kind of shorthand for the sense that there is a constant flux, that everything is born, lives and dies. And the, the. The dimension of heaven which is eternal and which can only be accessed by the religio, the bond that the Church provides. So he's setting up this counterpoint between the cyculum and religio. And over the course of the Middle Ages and into the, the early modernity, this, this becomes, in, in English, it becomes anglicized into what we would call secular and religious. And so the notion of the secular and the notion of there being things called religions that are separate from something called the secular is a very distinctively Christian perspective which, which the Europeans with their empires then imposed on the rest of the world. So they imposed it on India, they imposed it on the lands of Islam. And people in India and people in the, in the Islamic world are struggling to cope with those conceptualizations. And of course, in, in, in Europe, the Jews of France after the revolution were allowed citizenship of France, but that required them essentially to abrogate their identity as the children of Israel and to accept that their. That identity was, was properly a religion. So this is where the notion of Judaism as a religion comes in. Jews are expected to see themselves as belonging to Judaism in the way that Christians belong to Christianity. And now, of course, Muslims in the west are required to belong to a religion called Islam. And it's always difficult when conceptualizations that have emerged from a particular ideological tradition are transposed and people from other traditions have to kind of, you know, adjust to it.
- [54:55]
B
I'm very glad that we. We stopped on that point because it is a fascinating thought. And I don't know why, because all of our conversation about the west, and I think of this line from one of my favorite plays, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and it ends with the protagonist saying, the world always spins forward. And we, like. We in the west like to pat ourselves on the back and think, you know, the world is always moving forward and technology and medicine and in science. But history actually proves that that is not always the case and that societies can go backwards and can, you know,
- [55:26]
C
I mean, the idea that. That history is progress, that it's an arrow firing from, you know, a creation point to a termination point, this is obviously something that Judaism shares with Christianity and with Islam and with Zoroastrianism. And almost certainly that sense is a legacy of the time that the. The Judean exiles spent spelt in. In Babylon, then came under the influence of these kind of ideas that were present probably in the time of Cyrus. So in that sense, that is a shared identity. Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims do have that sense that time is an arrow rather than a circle. Circle.
- [56:10]
A
We've been talking to somebody who is, yes, a historian, and you're talking to two people who pride themselves on being kind of history nerds, but we're also all podcasters. Does it. Has it surprised you that of all things, to become the subject of what is a global sensation of a podcast with this massive audience. It's history. Did you think there would be, when you started on the Rest Is History, that it would be a box office blockbuster smash, that there was that degree of interest in the past?
- [56:41]
C
No, I mean, Jonathan, as you will know, when you write a book, you seize any publicity opportunity that you can get. You spent all this years alone with your thoughts and your immortal prose, and you want to get it out there. So I think both Dominic Sambrook, who I do the podcast with, and I both wanted to do the podcast because we thought it would amplify our books. What we never imagined was that it would end up reaching so many people that we would no longer have time to write our books, which is very tragic.
- [57:19]
A
But as tragedies go,
- [57:22]
C
hey, listen, it's a first world problem. I'm not denying it. Yeah, no, I never thought. I never. It Never crossed my mind mind. And I, I think it reflects very well on, on the world that they are this interested in history.
- [57:36]
A
Yeah, I think, I think so too.
- [57:39]
C
I mean the thing is, history is infinitely interesting. The stories are. I mean, ultimately it's about the narratives. I think we, we, we can tell from the viewing figures that the more narrative there is, the more, the more popular the. The episode tends to be. But I think it is also the kind of the revelation of how many different ways there have been over the course of time and over the span of the globe to be human. You know, it's a reminder of how infinite we are as a species perhaps.
- [58:14]
A
I think it is also an index of these are very confusing times in the present and people find some guidance and wisdom behind examining the past. The podcast, of course, is the rest is history. Tom Holland, thank you so much for being with us for this special episode of Unholy.
- [58:32]
C
Thank you very much for having me.
- [58:38]
B
That was a remarkable conversation. We're so grateful to him for coming on and I think in very good timing as well for this Pesach festival.
- [58:48]
A
Really good timing. I think this is one of the, like I said at the start, I think this is a period in the year when you start looking back to the. You retell at the Seder the ancient story, the foundational story of our people and you look back over the very, very long story of the Jews over thousands of years. And to do that with someone who has the perspective of the whole, who isn't just looking at it from the point of view of, of us as it were, but the whole of ancient history and where the Jews, the Judeans, the Hebrews slotted into that. It was absolutely a privilege illuminating to hear. Tom Holland hopefully that gets you in the right frame of mind as you and we celebrate Pesach. If you're celebrating something else at this time of year. A reminder, we have a bonus episode on the relationship between Pesach and Easter. But otherwise, if it is a festival for you, as for so many others, we. We do hope for a peaceful one, a joyous one with family, with friends. So Chag, same to you, Yonit, and all of yours. And I hope it is peaceful and uninterrupted at the very least. Yoseda and we will see you all next week.
- [59:58]
B
Sameh.