The Bar Kokhba Revolt

Sixty years after the temple burned, Judaea rose again. The leader was Simon bar Kosiba, who ruled a functioning administration for perhaps three years, issued coins dated to the redemption of Israel, and was acclaimed by Rabbi Akiva, the most eminent teacher of the age, as bar Kokhba, son of a star, a messianic title drawn from a verse in Numbers.

The war was fought largely from the caves and strongholds of the Judaean hills, and its end at Betar in 135 was total. Roman losses were heavy enough that the emperor is said to have omitted the customary formula about the health of the army in his report to the senate. Jewish losses were catastrophic: settlements destroyed, populations enslaved, and Jews barred from Jerusalem, which was refounded as the colony Aelia Capitolina. The province was renamed Syria Palaestina.

The revolt is unusually well attested for its period because of physical evidence. Letters written by Bar Kokhba himself and by his administration, on papyrus and wood, were recovered from caves above the Dead Sea in the twentieth century, along with the possessions of refugees who did not come out. They show an organised command, concerned with supplies, with the observance of the sabbath and festivals, and with discipline, in the leader's own dictated words.

The rabbinic tradition preserves both sides of the judgment on Bar Kokhba, and the preservation is itself the point. Akiva's acclamation is recorded, and so is the reply attributed to Yohanan ben Torta, that grass would grow from Akiva's jaw before the son of David came. The tradition kept the sceptical line, and history vindicated it.

The effect on Jewish thought was long. Messianic expectation did not disappear, but the idea that it might be brought about by armed action against an empire became suspect. Talmudic passages warn against forcing the end and against rebelling against the nations, and the pattern in later centuries is that messianic movements are met by rabbinic authorities with caution or open hostility rather than with enthusiasm. Two catastrophic wars in seventy years supplied the reason.

The other legacy is martyrological. The persecution that followed the revolt, including restrictions on Torah study and on circumcision, produced the tradition of the Ten Martyrs, with Akiva among them, whose deaths are recited in the liturgy of the Day of Atonement and of Tisha B'Av. A defeat that ended Jewish political existence in the land for eighteen centuries entered the prayer book not as a military disaster but as a record of people who kept teaching when teaching was a capital offence.