Bar Kokhba revolt

Bar Kokhba's revolt
	; Judea in the 1st century
Date	132–135
Location	Judea
Result	Romans enslaved or massacred a large part of the Jewish population of Judea, suppressed Jewish religious and political authority, banned Jews from Jerusalem and renamed Iudaea Province to Syria Palaestina.
Belligerents
Roman Empire	Jews of Iudaea
Commanders and leaders
Hadrian	Simon Bar Kokhba
Strength
?	?
Casualties and losses
Unknown	580,000 Jews (mass civilian casualties), 50 fortified towns and 985 villages razed (per Cassius Dio).

Bar Kokhba’s revolt (132–135) against the Roman Empire, also known as The Second Jewish-Roman War or The Second Jewish Revolt, was a second major rebellion by the Jews of Iudaea and the last of the Jewish-Roman Wars. Alternatively, some sources call it The Third Revolt, counting also the riots of 115–117, the Kitos War, suppressed by the general Lusius Quietus who governed the province at the time.

Background

After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 as a result of the failed Great Jewish Revolt, the Sanhedrin at Yavne provided spiritual guidance for the Jewish nation, both in Judea and throughout the diaspora.

The Roman authorities took precautions against the rebellious province. Instead of a procurator, they installed a praetor as a governor and stationed there the entire tenth legion, the Legio X Fretensis.

In 129, the Roman Emperor Hadrian set sail to visit the Eastern provinces. In the next two years he visited the provinces of Greece, Syria, Judaea and Egypt. Whereever he went he was honored as its benefactor. In Judaea he visited the ruins of Jerusalem and at first sympathetic towards the Jews, he promised to rebuild the city, religious freedom and the restoration of the Temple; but the Jews felt betrayed when they found out that he had a change of plans and his intentions were to rebuild the Jewish holiest city as a pagan metropolis, and a new pagan temple on the ruins of the Second Temple was to be dedicated to Jupiter.

An additional legion, the sixth legion, the Legio VI Ferrata, was stationed in the province to maintain order, and the works commenced in 131 after the governor of Judaea Tineius Rufus performed the foundation ceremony of Aelia Capitolina, the city’s projected new name. "Ploughing up the Temple" was a religious offense that turned many Jews against the Roman authorities. The tensions grew higher when Hadrian abolished circumcision (brit milah), which he, an avid Hellenist, viewed as mutilation. A Roman coin announcing the founding and renaming of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina was minted in 131/132, inscribed with the new name Aelia Capitolina and showing Hadrian as founder wearing a toga and ploughing with a bull and cow.

Revolt

The Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva (alternatively Akiba) convinced the Sanhedrin to support the impending revolt, and regarded the chosen commander Simon Bar Kokhba to be the Jewish Messiah, according to the verse from Numbers 24:17: "There shall come a star out of Jacob" ("Bar Kokhba" means "son of a star" in the Aramaic language).

At the time Christianity was still a minor sect of Judaism, and most historians believe that it was this messianic claim in favor of Bar Kokhba that alienated many Christians (including Jewish Christians), who believed that the true messiah was Jesus, and sharply deepened the schism between Jews and Christians.

The Jewish leaders carefully planned the second revolt to avoid numerous mistakes that had plagued the first Great Jewish Revolt sixty years earlier. In 132, a revolt led by Bar Kokhba quickly spread from Modi'in across the country, cutting off the Roman garrison in Jerusalem.

"The Era of the redemption of Israel"

File:Barkokhba-silver-tetradrachm-bw.png

Bar Kokhba's tetradrachm/Sela or Shekel. Obverse: the Temple facade with the rising star above it, the text reads: "שמעון/Shimon" Reverse: A lulav, the text reads: "ש"ב לחר(ות) ישראל/Year two of the redemption of Israel"

A sovereign Jewish state was restored for two and a half years that followed. The functional public administration was headed by Simon Bar Kokhba, who took the title Nasi Israel (ruler or prince of Israel). The "Era of the redemption of Israel" was announced, contracts were signed and coins were minted in great quantity in silver and copper with corresponding inscriptions (all these coins were overstruck over Roman coins instead of making them from scratch).

Rabbi Akiva presided over the Sanhedrin. The religious rituals were observed and the korbanot (i.e., sacrifices) were resumed on the Altar. It has been believed that attempts were made to restore the Temple in Jerusalem, but the evidence—letters written in Jerusalem and dated to the revolutionary era—has turned out to belong to the revolt of 66–70.

Roman reaction

The outbreak took the Romans by surprise. Hadrian called his general Sextus Julius Severus from Britain, and troops were brought from as far as the Danube. The size of the Roman army amassed against the rebels was larger than that commanded by Titus sixty years earlier, but Roman losses were so heavy that the generals' report to the Roman Senate omitted the customary formula "I and my army are well".

The struggle lasted for three years before the revolt was brutally crushed in the summer of 135. After losing Jerusalem, Bar Kokhba and the remnants of his army withdrew to the fortress of Betar, which also subsequently came under siege. Some of the rebels were killed there, while others perished in the caves overlooking the Dead Sea.

Outcome of the war

According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed, 50 fortified towns and 985 villages razed.^[1] ^[2] the Romans suffered great loses as well ^[3]

Hadrian attempted to root out Judaism, which he saw as the cause of continuous rebellions. He prohibited the Torah law, the Jewish calendar and executed Judaic scholars. The sacred scroll was ceremoniously burned on the Temple Mount. At the former Temple sanctuary, he installed two statues, one of Jupiter, another of himself. In an attempt to erase any memory of Judea, he wiped the name off the map and replaced it with Syria Palaestina, after the Philistines, the ancient enemies of the Jews; previously similar terms had been used to describe only the (smaller) former Philistine homeland to the west of Judaea. Since then, the land has been referred to as "Palestine," which supplanted earlier terms such as "Iudaea" (Judaea) and the antiquated "Canaan." Similarly, he reestablished Jerusalem as the Roman pagan polis of Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were forbidden from entering it.

Long-term consequences and historic importance

Constantine I allowed Jews to mourn their defeat and humiliation once a year on Tisha B'Av at the Western Wall. Jews remained scattered for close to two millennia; their numbers in the region fluctuated with time.

Modern historians have come to view the Bar-Kokhba Revolt as being of decisive historic importance. The massive destruction and loss of life occasioned by the revolt has led some scholars to date the beginning of the Jewish diaspora from this date. They note that, unlike the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War chronicled by Josephus, the majority of the Jewish population of Judea was either killed, exiled, or sold into slavery after the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, and Jewish religious and political authority was suppressed far more brutally. After the revolt the Jewish religious center shifted to the Babylonian Jewish community and its scholars. Judea would not be a center of Jewish religious, cultural, or political life again until the modern era, though Jews continued to live there and important religious developments still occurred there. In Galilee, the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the 2nd–4th centuries. Eventually, Safed became known as a center of Jewish learning, especially Kabbalah in the 15th century.

Historian Shmuel Katz writes that even after the disaster of the revolt: "Jewish life remained active and productive. Banished from Jerusalem, it now centred on Galilee. Refugees returned; Jews who had been sold into slavery were redeemed. In the centuries after Bar Kochba and Hadrian, some of the most significant creations of the Jewish spirit were produced in Palestine. It was then that the Mishnah was completed and the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and the bulk of the community farmed the land."

He lists the communities left in Palestine: "43 Jewish communities in Palestine in the sixth century: 12 on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and 31 villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley". ^[4]

The disastrous end of the revolt also occasioned major changes in Jewish religious thought. Messianism was abstracted and spiritualized, and rabbinical political thought became deeply cautious and conservative. The Talmud, for instance, refers to Bar-Kokhba as "Ben-Kusiba", a derogatory term used to indicate that he was a false Messiah. The deeply ambivalent rabbinical position regarding Messianism, as expressed most famously in the Rambam's (also known as Maimonides) "Epistle to Yemen", would seem to have its origins in the attempt to deal with the trauma of a failed Messianic uprising.

In the post-rabbinical era, however, the Bar-Kokhba Revolt became a symbol of valiant national resistance. The Zionist youth movement Betar took its name from Bar-Kokhba's traditional last stronghold, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, took his Hebrew last name from one of Bar-Kokhba's generals.

Further revolts against the Roman Empire

In the year 351, the Jews launched yet another revolt, provoking heavy retribution. ^[4]

In 438, when the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews' praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call "to the great and mighty people of the Jews" which began: "Know that the end of the exile of our people has come"! ^[5] ^[4]

In the belief of restoration to come, the Jews made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614, fought at their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and for five years governed the city. ^[4]

Sources

Unfortunately, the events lacked a major historian figure such as Josephus Flavius. The best recognized sources are Cassius Dio, Roman History (book 69) and Aelius Spartianus, Life of Hadrian (in the Augustan History). The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls has exposed some new historical data.

References

^ The 'Five Good Emperors' (roman-empire.net)
^ Mosaic or mosaic?—The Genesis of the Israeli Language by Zuckermann, Gilad
^ Cassius Dio, Roman history 69.14.3 "Many Romans perished in the war. Therefore, Hadrian, in writing to the Senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors: 'If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the army are in health.'"
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Katz, Shmuel, Battleground, (1974), page 96
^ Avraham Yaari, Igrot Eretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1943), p. 46.

External links

The Jewish History Resource Center Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
David Pileggi, "The Bar Kochva letters": discovery of the papyri
Archaeologists find tunnels from Jewish revolt against Romans by the AP. Ha'aretz March 14, 2006
Jewish Encyclopedia: Bar Kokba and Bar Kokba War
Bar Kochba with links to all sources

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[1] The 'Five Good Emperors' (roman-empire.net)

[2] Mosaic or mosaic?—The Genesis of the Israeli Language by Zuckermann, Gilad

[3] Cassius Dio, Roman history 69.14.3 "Many Romans perished in the war. Therefore, Hadrian, in writing to the Senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors: 'If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the army are in health.'"

[Katz-4] Katz, Shmuel, Battleground, (1974), page 96

[5] Avraham Yaari, Igrot Eretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1943), p. 46.

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