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Introduction
The successful revolt of the Maccabees against the bloody persecutions of the Assyrian king Antiochus Epiphanes, about B.C. 164, inaugurated a glorious epoch in Jewish history. From that time the Jews enjoyed their freedom under the dynasty of their priest-kings till, B.C. 63, the Romans under Pompey took possession of Jerusalem. A period of Roman tyranny and oppression followed. In A.D. 66-70 a great revolt of the Jews occurred. The Romans burned Jerusalem to the ground. Josephus says the number killed in this revolt was one million one hundred thousand and the number of prisoners ninety-seven thousand. Of those who survived, “all above seventeen years old were sent to Egypt to work in the mines or distributed among the provinces to be exhibited as gladiators in the public theatres and in the combats against wild beasts.”
About fifty years later, A.D., 116, a tremendous uprising occurred among the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean, in which many lives were lost. It was quickly suppressed by the emperor Trajan and the punishments were similar in cruelty to those which followed the previous insurrection.
But this dauntless people were not yet conquered. When the emperor Hadrian, A.D., 130, arrived at Jerusalem on his tour of the empire, he resolved that the holy city of the Jews should be rebuilt as a Roman colony and its name changed to Aelia Capitolina; and the Jews were forbidden to sojourn in the new city. By this and other measures the spark of revolt was once more kindled among the religious and patriotic spirits of the Jewish nation. The Jews in Palestine flew to arms, A.D., 132, encouraged by the prayers, the vows and the material support of their compatriots in Rome, Byzantium, Alexandria and Babylon. The Jewish war-cry echoed around the civilized world.
A fitting leader for the insurrectionists soon appeared in the person of Simon Barcochebas. Julius Severus, who was in Britain ordering the affairs of that distant province, was summoned to the East to quell the disturbance, which had swollen to the dimensions of a revolution and threatened to abolish Roman authority in Palestine. The conflict which ensued lasted from A.D. 132 to 135, and was very bitterly contested on both sides. It was not before the Hebrew leader fell amid thousands of his followers that the Jewish forces were defeated. We are told that in this last revolution the Romans took fifty fortresses, nine hundred and eighty-five villages were occupied and that the people killed numbered five hundred and eighty thousand. The Jews were dispersed to every quarter of the known world and remain so to this day. The new city of Hadrian continued to exist but did not prosper; and the Jews were prohibited under penalty of death from ever setting foot in Jerusalem.
This selection is by Charles Merivale.
Time: 132
Place: Palestine
The thread of imperial life could hardly snap without a jar which would be felt throughout the whole extent of the empire. Trajan, like Alexander, had been cut off suddenly in the Far East, and, like Alexander, he had left no avowed successor. Several of his generals abroad might advance nearly equal claims to the sword of Trajan; some of the senators at home might deem themselves not unworthy of the purple of Nerva.
On every side there was an army or faction ready to devote itself to the service of its favorite or its champion.
The provinces lately annexed were at the same time in a state of ominous agitation; along one half of the frontiers Britons, Germans and Sarmatians were mustering their forces for invasion; a virulent insurrection was still glowing throughout a large portion of the empire. Nevertheless, the compact body of the Roman Commonwealth was still held firmly together by its inherent self-attraction. There was no tendency to split in pieces, as in the ill-cemented masses of the Macedonian conquest; and the presence of mind of a clever woman was well employed in effecting the peaceful transfer of power and relieving the State from the stress of disruption.
Of the accession of Publius Aelius Hadrianus, A.D., 117, to the empire; of the means by which it was effected; of the character and reputation he brought with him to the throne; of the first measures of his reign, by which he renounced the latest conquests of his predecessor, while he put forth all his power to retain the realms bequeathed him from an earlier period — is matter for another story.
But let us turn to a review of eastern affairs; to the great Jewish insurrection and the important consequences which followed from it. Trajan was surely fortunate in the moment of his death. Vexed, as he doubtless was, by the frustration of his grand designs for incorporating the Parthian monarchy with the Roman and fulfilling the idea of universal empire which had flitted through the mind of Pompius or Julius but had been deliberately rejected by Augustus and Vespasian, his proud spirit would have been broken indeed had he lived to witness the difficulties in which Rome was plunged at his death, the spread of the Jewish revolt in Asia and Palestine, the aggressions of the Moors, the Scythians and the Britons at the most distant points of his dominions.
The momentary success of the insurgents of Cyprus and Cyrene had prompted a general assurance that the conquering race was no longer invincible and the last great triumphs of its legions were followed by a rebound of fortune still more momentous.
The first act of the new reign was the formal relinquishment of the new provinces beyond the Euphrates. The Parthian tottered back with feeble step to his accustomed frontiers. Arabia was left unmolested; India was no longer menaced. Armenia found herself once more suspended between two rival empires, of which the one was too weak to seize, the other too weak to retain her.
All the forces of Rome in the East were now set free to complete the suppression of the Jewish disturbances. The flames of insurrection which had broken out in so many remote quarters were concentrated and burned more fiercely than ever in the ancient center of the Jewish nationality.
Martius Turbo, appointed to command in Palestine, was equally amazed at the fanaticism and the numbers of people whose faith had been mocked, whose hopes frustrated, whose young men had been decimated, whose old men, women and children had been enslaved and exiled. Under the teaching of the doctors of Tiberia faith had been cherished and hope had revived. Despised and unmolested for fifty years, a new generation had risen from the soil of their ancestors, recruited by the multitudes who flocked homeward, year by year, with an unextinguishable love of country and reinforced by the fugitives from many scenes of persecution, all animated with a growing conviction that the last struggle of their race was at hand, to be contested on the site of their old historic triumphs.
It is not perhaps wholly fanciful to imagine that the Jewish leaders, after the fall of their city and Temple and the great dispersion of their people, deliberately invented new means for maintaining their cherished nationality. Their conquerors, as they might observe, were scattered like themselves over the face of the globe and abode wherever they conquered; but the laws, the manners and the traditions of Rome were preserved almost intact amid alien races by the consciousness that there existed a visible center of their nation, the source, as it were, to which they might repair to draw the waters of political life. But the dispersions of the Jews seemed the more irremediable as the destruction of their central home was complete.
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Some History Moments selections posted before 2012 need to be updated to meet HM’s quality standards. These relate to: (1) links to outside sources for modern, additional information; (2) graphics; (3) navigation links; and (4) other presentation issues. The reader is assured that the author’s materiel is faithfully reproduced in all History Moments posts.
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