The Roman-Jewish Wars and Hebrew Cultural Nationalism

Abstract

The three Jewish revolts against the Roman empire in 66–70, 115–17, and 132–35 CE, in which the Jews were crushed each time, led to the total ban on Jewish residence in Jerusalem as the focal point of militant messianic Jewish nationalism. The Jewish population of Judaea (southern Palestine) was destroyed, enslaved, or exiled. A large part of the territory of Judaea was confiscated by the Romans as its Jewish owners had fought against Rome. Dozens of Jewish villages in Judaea were wiped off the map (Avi-Yonah 1976, pp. 15–16). The wholesale replacement of a Jewish by a gentile population is described by Millar (1993) as “the decisive transformation in the religious demography of the Holy Land in the Imperial Age” (p. 348). As a result, the living centre of Jewish culture moved north, to Galilee, where many Judaeans fled. In Galilee, synagogues and schools were built, and the legal and homiletic traditions flourished. Here the Mishnah, the basis of the Talmud, was edited by Judah Hanasi around 200 CE.This culture, mostly in Hebrew but also in Aramaic, fortified the Jews for what became, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, “an unbroken struggle against greater odds than any other human community has ever had to contend with” (1979, p. 253).