the term “zealot” is not just a generic synonym for die-hard enthusiasts. Zealots in first-century Palestine were religiously motivated political partisans (or politically driven religious sectarians) who included, for example, the Sicarii, killer squads whose name meant “knife wielder.” Zealots were like the Taliban, or even perhaps Al Qaeda.11
While the Romans patiently built ramparts for an eventual assault on the city walls, the Jerusalem defenders ran so low on food that many starved, and others began to flee. Those caught by the Romans were promptly and prominently crucified, so that the Jews could see—and, as the corpses rotted, smell—whom they were dealing with. The siege lasted most of a year, during which something like ten thousand crosses sprouted in a ring around the inner city, each with its stinking cadaver.
In May of 70, the Romans succeeded in breaching the city wall. The Zealots concentrated their forces in the Temple itself, where they made a last stand, holding out for more than two months. At the end of July, the Romans took the Temple, killed its last defenders, looted its treasury, and set it afire. Those Jews not killed were enslaved. On the Hebrew calendar, it was the ninth day of the month of Av, a date memorialized in a Jewish liturgy of mourning to this day.
Jewish resistance continued in the hills of Judea and in the Jordan Valley, high above which stood a butte—Masada—which served as the last Jewish stronghold. It took the Romans nearly three years to finish off the die-hard rebels. When the Romans finally stormed Masada, Josephus reports, they found that of the 967 resisters, 960 had killed themselves. In all, the Jewish dead in the Great Revolt numbered, according to Josephus, 1.1 million.12
As the Roman Empire expanded its control to the east across Asia Minor and west along the north coast of Africa, Jewish communities in various cities were loath to surrender their religious and cultural prerogatives. In the Diaspora, too, the integrity of worship of the one God, Yahweh, was at stake. It was inevitable that such smoldering religious steadfastness would become inflamed, and in the year 115, four decades after the Great Revolt, it did. The restiveness of Jews in the coastal city of Cyrene, in present-day Libya, flashed into open rebellion against newly re-established Roman authorities. The uprising was quickly imitated by Jews in various other Mediterranean cities—in Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq. This was expressly Jewish resistance, beyond the far briefer and less potent reactions of other peoples laid low by Roman expansion.
Soon enough, Jews in Judea joined in the assaults, making this the second large revolt in half a century. Once again, Rome reacted with crushing power. In this conflict, the Roman general Lusius Quietus led the campaigns; one of his deputies was a fierce military leader named Hadrian. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, with Jewish communities in Cyprus and Libya entirely wiped out. The violence finally ended in 117. This Mediterranean-wide sequence of Jewish uprisings is known as the Kitos War, from a corruption of the name of the Roman commander, Quietus. In Hebrew, though, the wars are known as the Rebellion of the Exile.
For the following decade or so, Jews bided their time, nurturing their faith-supported conviction that a Messiah would yet deliver them from Roman rule—and quietly preparing for the next conflict.13 Rome, meanwhile, was beset by perennial intrigues of imperial succession. After the death of the emperor Trajan, Hadrian outmaneuvered Quietus, his former commander, to become emperor. He began a new campaign of solidifying the far-flung boundaries of Roman control. He built, for example, what we call Hadrian’s Wall, which still stands in Britain. His visit to Judea in 130 occasioned his order to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem and restore the city that still bore the scars of the Great Revolt in 70. But he gave Jerusalem a new name, Aelia Capitolina, and declared that the new temple would be dedicated to Jupiter. When Jews protested, Hadrian resolved to eliminate the unyielding people once and for all. He cut to the quick of Jewish identity by outlawing circumcision, making yet another Jewish revolt inevitable.14
In 132, it came. A Jewish force led by a Galilean named Simon Bar Kosiba surprised the Roman garrisons in the countryside, and then quickly wrested control of Jerusalem from the unprepared occupiers. Kosiba was proclaimed by Jews to be the longed-for Messiah, and he was given the name Bar Kokhba, “son of a star”—a reference to the messianic prophecy “A star shall come forth out of Jacob.”15 For more than two years, Bar Kokhba, centered in Jerusalem, led a powerful resistance to Rome’s armies, presiding over a reclaimed, if not restored, nation. Coins were struck bearing the inscription “Freedom of Israel.”16 The revolt spread to Jewish communities under Roman control in Arabia and Syria. Those in the Mediterranean diaspora who had been subdued and enslaved during the Kitos War saw another chance. Cassius Dio, the Roman historian, writes that “Jews everywhere . . . were gathering together and giving evidence of great hostility to the Romans.”
Hadrian was having trouble with vassal peoples all across the empire, from Britain to Dalmatia to the Danube, and word of the revolt in Judea spread. “The whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.”17 Hadrian’s hatred of Jews was one thing, but now Roman imperial hegemony itself was at stake. He ordered an unprecedented mobilization, including the emergency conscription of males throughout Italy. From as far away as Britain he summoned “his best generals,” Cassius Dio reports, and dispatched them to Judea, together with six full legions and sizable parts of six others—tens of thousands of crack soldiers. They arrived with ferocious determination and set about the plowing under of towns and villages, the razing of cities. Jewish resistance matched the Roman ferocity, and the fighting went on for more than two years. The Talmud says that the Romans “went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils.”18
By the time the Romans managed to suppress the revolt in the summer of 135, according to Cassius Dio, nearly 600,000 Jews were dead and nearly a thousand towns, villages, and cities had been razed—most especially including, again, Jerusalem. Not just the Temple Mount but the entire urban area was laid to waste. Still, Hadrian was not finished. He ordered the execution of all Jewish scholars. He outlawed Torah, halachic practice, the Jewish calendar. He ordered the torching of Torah scrolls on the site of the former Holy of Holies, and, in addition to a statue of Jupiter, he ordered one of himself erected on the Temple Mount. In an unprecedented act, Hadrian commanded that the province of Judea be renamed, now to be known as Syria Palaestina. Jews were henceforth banished from its capital, Aelia Capitolina—except one day a year, when they would be permitted entrance for the sole purpose of expressing their grief over the loss of Zion. Cassius Dio concludes, “Nearly the whole of Judea was made desolate.”19
As noted, the mortality figures supplied by ancient historians are to be taken more as broad indicators than precise counts, but even so, the picture that emerges of the cost of this Roman war is clear and historically reliable. However much the motives of the Caesars differed from those of the Führer two millennia later, the consequences of their assaults against the Jewish people are comparable. Hitler killed one in three of all living Jews, a ratio the Caesars may well have matched.20 My purpose here is not to compare war statistics, but to emphasize the extreme human suffering—the evil—that formed the context within which both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism came into being. To read, as all Christians do, the Gospel portraits of Jesus Christ without reference to the Roman War that raged exactly as those portraits were being composed, and first revered as Scripture, is like reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison without reference to events unfolding outside his cell as he wrote.
Return to the savage destruction of the Temple in 70—the event that began the slow-motion genocide we have tracked. Nothing defines the chasm separating Jewish and Christian perspectives more sharply than the difference between Jewish and Christian responses to what befell the Temple. For Jews, its destruction stands as the defining emblem of all Jewish suffering. The white woolen prayer shawl worn by Jewish men—a tallit—is marked with black stripes said to be a sign of mourning for the Temple’s destruction. The Jewish liturgical year is anchored, as noted, by the annual grief ritual Tisha B’Av, the ninth of Av—the date on the Hebrew calendar on which the Romans set fire to the Temple. In the Christian memory, that event, if it registers at all, is celebrated