A Tale of Three Revolts

When I was in middle school, I remember gathering wood each spring with my friends. The task grew into a passion or even a competition, as we raced to collect more. Did someone you know have a crate they were ready to part with for a good cause? What about a broken dining room chair? Why not clean out the loose sticks from the park on the other side of town? 

No, we were not Dickensian orphans desperate to heat our homes. Our quest was more pyromaniac in nature: We were stocking up for a special bonfire—Lag Ba’Omer, celebrated in May. The holiday’s origins are obscure, and there are several different stories connected with it. In modern Israel, where I spent my late elementary and middle school years, however, it has a special significance, as a celebration of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Wait, you might say, this is awkward. Bar Kokhba, the enigmatic messianic figure, did lead a revolt against the Roman Empire in AD 132–136, but it failed. He and his men were defeated utterly, with devastating consequences for the Jews. In addition to the high cost in human life, the Roman Emperor Hadrian punished the Jews by wiping off the map the very name of their land, changing Judea to Syria Palaestina, and paving the way to the modern name of “Palestine.” Hardly cause for celebration, right?

And yet, in his new book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, military historian Barry Strauss does find things to admire. His researched yet highly readable account covers the three major revolts of the Jews against Rome, but also explains the long-term significance of these revolts (and the Jews’ military losses) for the present. At a basic level, “This is a tale of empire and resistance. It is also a story of resilience, an intangible but essential factor. Resilience refers to the strength of a society’s sense of its national identity and values. A resilient society has the will to withstand defeat and to recover from it. That, in turn, requires a certain culture, leadership, and institutions. … Ancient Jewry is one of history’s great examples of how a people can lose on the battlefield and yet prevail.” 

The modern Israeli celebration of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, the final one in Strauss’s narrative, makes a lot more sense in this larger context. Sometimes a military loss leads to long-term victory through forging a stronger sense of national identity.

Ironically, the Romans knew this as well. Resilience, after all, was their theme song too. In 280–275 BC, for instance, the Romans fought King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who joined forces with Greek city-states in southern Italy to challenge Rome. Pyrrhus won two major battles, but at such extreme cost as to give rise to the expression “Pyrrhic victory.” As the biographer Plutarch reports, Pyrrhus remarked that another victory of that sort would finish him off. Why? Because the Romans’ losses had no effect on their willingness to keep going. Time and again in early Roman history, we hear of devastating losses like these. And every time, the Romans simply raised a new army and kept fighting—eventually winning the war. But with the Jews, more than any other people under Roman control, the Romans seem to have met their match—at least, when it comes to resilience.

Strauss structures the book around the story of three major revolts of the Jews against Rome: the Great Revolt that ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70; the Diaspora Revolt in AD 116–117; and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in AD 132–136. While the focus is on the Jews and the Romans, the third wheel accompanying this awkward “date” is Parthia, the major empire to the east, which has been a thorn in Rome’s side since at least the defeat of Crassus and his army at Carrhae in 53 BC. Parthia was just as interested in expanding westwards as Rome was in expanding eastward. It also had a significant Jewish population and was practically next door to Judea. “Empires do not have friends; they have interests,” Strauss observes. This applies to both Parthia’s and Rome’s interest in Judea. Had Parthia taken over Judea, this could have become a base for taking over other portions of the Roman Empire.

Strauss opens his narrative with some important background on the history of Judea under Rome. This matters because “Judea had been in Rome’s orbit for 225 years when it rebelled in 66. Rome couldn’t tolerate humiliation in an established part of the empire like Judea.” This leads to the key question: why would “an established part of the empire” rebel? 

When it comes to the Great Revolt, historians have, in a way, struck gold. Of particular significance is the Jewish historian Josephus. A Jewish leader in the revolt early on, he then defected to Rome and ingratiated himself into Roman citizenship and the patronage of the Flavian dynasty, although still retaining his Jewish faith. Following the precept of “write what you know,” Josephus proceeded to spend the rest of his life writing about Jewish history. And in his history of the revolt, The Jewish War, he argued that the vast majority of the Jews had no desire to revolt from Rome. The war—and the devastation that followed because of it—was all the fault of a few radicals. 

But, Strauss notes, Josephus had goals of his own in blaming just a few individuals for the war. Other sources suggest, rather, that Judea was a powder keg waiting to blow up for a while. Indeed, there were several close calls earlier—murmurs of revolts nearly averted. There were many reasons for this tension—for instance, no one likes living under occupation. But the most important reason has to do with the Jews’ religious differences from other residents of the empire. Because the monotheistic Jews considered God their king, no other authority could supersede him. Yet the Romans required emperor worship as part of their polytheistic state religion. Most of the time, the Jews got exemptions, but occasional crackdowns threatened their ability to practice their religion faithfully. In such an environment, all that was needed for a full-blown war was the right conditions. And so, “the outbreak of war in 66, disastrous for Judea and destabilizing for Rome, demonstrates the absence on both sides of what is essential for peace: statesmanship. Hope, fear, and wishful thinking, all replaced realism.” 

Nero, the emperor when the war broke out, was known for many things. Statesmanship is not one of them. But Nero inadvertently paved the way for the establishment of the next imperial dynasty, the Flavians, by appointing the elderly statesman and seasoned general, Vespasian, to subdue this revolt. Nero’s reasoning? Vespasian was of too low a birth to be a candidate for power. Therefore, he could be trusted to not take advantage of access to multiple legions during this war to do something bigger, like make an imperial bid. 

The history of the tail end of the decade proves Nero wrong. The revolt of Vindex in Germany in AD 68 was just the first in a series of revolts across the empire and indirectly precipitated Nero’s suicide. (Vindex has also yielded top-notch modern Roman historian jokes about “windexing” Nero out of power.) In the empire-wide chaos that was AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian rightly decided that he could make a successful bid after all. Leaving his son Titus to manage the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian departed Judea for Italy. Just three years after Nero appointed him to lead the Roman forces in suppressing the Jewish Revolt, Vespasian was emperor. Having a military commander for a son proved to be key for his ability to subdue a rebellious province and defeat another imperial contender all at the same time.

Throughout this revolt, the best documented of the three in this book, Strauss provides the play-by-play reports of military action that armchair military historians love. But I appreciated even more his interest in humanizing the various actors through trying to understand their motives. Who was Josephus? Who was Vespasian? Who was Titus? How and why did they do what they did? We get to know them at least a little bit in the process. 

Adding further depth to the story Strauss tells, reminding us of the complexities of history, lesser-known figures come out of the historical shadows—like Helena, a queen from Adiabene on the edge of Parthia, who converted to Judaism a generation before the revolt, and whose descendants supported the Jews in the war. And then there is another Jew in Roman service, in addition to Josephus—one Tiberius Julius Alexander, who was Titus’s chief of staff during the war. What must it have felt like for him to serve the Roman commander in defeating his own people? He was, in fact, not the only one.

Then there were the ordinary residents of Jerusalem, who were sold into slavery afterwards. Strauss brings up the story of one young woman, whose tombstone yields details about her life: Claudia Aster (perhaps her Jewish name was Esther) was enslaved in Jerusalem and taken to Italy. The man who bought her freed her and married her. It is he who set up the tomb, mourning the death of his wife, aged just 25. Was she captured as a child, or was the capture close to her time of death? We don’t know. But we see how some of the captives, at least, were incorporated into Roman society. Such was the Roman way. 

But this was not the end of the revolt—or its mystique. The siege of the Jewish rebels’ final stronghold at Masada, once Herod’s luxury refuge castle-cum-palace, did not conclude until AD 74, another four years after the fall of Jerusalem. Yet again, we have every reason to question Josephus’s account: was this operation quite so spectacular and heroic as he recounts? In this case, it’s not the winners who tell history, but the losers: “Josephus makes Masada into a parable. He pits Jewish love of freedom—romantic, foolish, doomed, but noble—versus Roman power—brutal, relentless, irresistible, and yet ungrudging in its admiration of courage, even on the part of its enemies.” This view of Masada became the bedrock of modern Zionism, the mystique of the tragic loss continuing to be held up as a model of bravery and perseverance—national resilience against all odds. 

Strauss devotes nine chapters to the Great Revolt, supplying the context and then detailing the war. The other two revolts receive only a single chapter each. The reason is familiar to historians of ancient history—it has to do with the nature of evidence available. We simply do not know nearly as much about either the Diaspora Revolt or the revolt of Bar Kokhba. Neither had a Josephus to document it. We are, as a result, at the mercy of archaeology and occasional references from other writers—although in the case of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, a few letters from the man himself have survived. 

Still, the mere existence of these two revolts after Rome’s crushing defeat of the Jews in the first one says something in and of itself. “The Diaspora Revolt (AD 115–116) demonstrates the enduring military traditions of the Jewish people, even without a state of their own.” So does the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which also shows the Jews’ mastery of guerrilla warfare—the one type of warfare the Roman legions had a difficult time countering. The legions were just too well-trained and used to fighting in formation. 

Nevertheless, the Romans eventually prevailed, and following the crushing defeats in three successive revolts, the Jews finally learned the lesson: “war was not the proper means to ensure national survival.” Instead, the answer was spiritual. In this way, Strauss notes, the revolts and their consequences inspired the rise of Rabbinic Judaism, a Judaism that did not rely on the Temple for spiritual access to God. This period of successive Jewish revolts also saw the solidification of the split between Judaism and Christianity. Military events, after all, have ramifications beyond simply geopolitical. 

Nearly two millennia later, we see the continued resilience of the Jewish people—and continued testing of that resilience by Israel’s modern neighbors. True, Strauss notes, we should not underestimate the horrors of antisemitism, both historical and more recent. And yet, the same resilience is now on display in the nation of Israel, into whose stories of patriotism the revolts against Rome have been woven—cue my middle school Lag Ba’Omer celebrations. 

And yet, there’s a warning here as well. Patriotism’s relationship to history is bound to be complicated. Good historians take what seems simple and straightforward and make those straight paths crooked—and, as a result, more factually accurate. Strauss is a skilled guide to these crooked paths in all their complexities.