The Jews’ Final Revolt Against Rome – 3

Today’s installment concludes The Jews’ Final Revolt Against Rome,
our selection by Charles Merivale.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of three thousand words. Congratulations!

Previously in The Jews’ Final Revolt Against Rome.

Time: 132
Place: Palestine

The last revolt of the Jewish people was precipitated apparently by the increased severity of the measures which the rebellion under Trajan had drawn down. They complained that Hadrian had enrolled himself as a proselyte of the Law and were doubly incensed against him as a persecutor and a renegade.

This assertion, indeed, may have no foundation. On the other hand, it is not unlikely that this prince, a curious explorer of religions of opinions, had sought initiation into some of the mysteries of the Jewish faith and ritual.

But however this may be, he gave them mortal offence by perceiving the clear distinction between Judaism and Christianity and by forbidding the Jews to sojourn in the town which he was again raising on the ruins of Jerusalem, while he allowed free access to their rivals. He is said to have even prohibited the rite of circumcision by which they jealously maintained their separation from the nations of the West.

At last, when they rose in arms, he sent his best generals against them. Tinnius Rufus was long baffled and often defeated; but Julius Severus, following the tactics of Vespasian, constantly refused the battle they offered him and reduced their strongholds in succession by superior discipline and resources. Barcochebas struggled with the obstinacy of despair. Every excess of cruelty was committed on both sides and it is well, perhaps, that the details of this mortal spasm are almost wholly lost to us.

The later Christian writers, while they allude with unseemly exultation to the overthrow of one inveterate enemy by another who proved himself in the end not less inveterate, affirmed that the barbarities of the Jewish leader were mainly directed against themselves.

On such interested assertions we shall place little reliance. In the counter-narration of the Jews even the name of Christian is contemptuously disregarded. It relates, however, how at the storming of Bethar, when Barcochebas perished in the field, ten of the most learned of the rabbis were taken and put cruelly to death, while Akiba, reserved to expire last and torn in pieces with hot pincers, continued to attest the great principle of the Jewish doctrine, still exclaiming in his death throes, Jehovah Erhad! (“God is one”).

The Jews who fell in these their latest combats are counted by hundreds of thousands and we may conclude that the suppression of the revolt was followed by sanguinary proscriptions, by wholesale captivity and general banishment. The dispersion of the unhappy race, particularly in the West, was now complete and final. The sacred soil of Jerusalem was occupied by a Roman colony, which received the name of Aelia Capitolina, with reference to the Emperor who founded it and to the supreme God of the pagan mythology, installed on the desecrated summits of Zion and Moriah.

The fane of Jupiter was erected on the site of the holy Temple and a shrine of Venus planted, we are assured, on the very spot hallowed to Christians by our Lord’s crucifixion. But Hadrian had no purpose of insulting the disciples of Jesus and this desecration, if the tradition be true, was probably accidental. A Jewish legend affirms that the figure of a swine was sculptured, in bitter mockery, over a gate of the new city. The Jews have retorted with equal scorn that the effigy of the unclean animal, which represented to their minds every low and bestial appetite, was a fitting emblem of the colony and its founder, of the lewd worship of its gods and the vile propensities of its Emperor.

The fancy of later Christian writers that Hadrian regarded their coreligionists with special consideration seems founded on misconception. We hear, indeed, of the graciousness with which he allowed them, among other sectarians, to defend their usages and expound their doctrines in his presence; and doubtless his curiosity, if no worthier feeling, was moved by the fact, which he fully appreciated, of the interest they excited in certain quarters of the empire. But there is no evidence that his favor extended further than to the recognition of their independence of the Jews, from whom they now formally separated themselves and the discouragement of the local persecutions to which they were occasionally subjected.

So far the bigoted hostility of their enemies was overruled at last in their favor.

In another way they learned to profit by the example of their rivals. From the recent policy of the Jews they might understand the advantage to a scattered community, without a local center or a political status, of erecting in a volume of sacred records their acknowledged standard of faith and practice.

The scriptures of the New Testament, like the Nuschua of the Jewish rabbis, took the place of the holy of holies as the tabernacle of their God and the pledge of their union with him.

The canon of their sacred books, however casual its apparent formation, was indeed a providential development. The habitual references of bishops and doctors to the words of their Founder and the writings of the first disciples, guided them to the proper sources of their faith and taught them justly to discriminate the genuine from the spurious.

Meagre as are the remains of Christian literature of the second century, they tend to confirm our assurance that the scriptures of the new dispensation were known and recognized as divine at that early period and that the Church of Christ, the future mistress of the world, was already become a great social fact, an empire within the empire.

This ends our series of passages on The Jews’ Final Revolt Against Rome by Charles Merivale. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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