Bar Kochba was a man of tremendous strength, leadership qualities and also of great scholarship. In fact, if it were not for the fact of his scholarship, Rabbi Akiva would not have thrown his support behind him.
Bar Kochba fielded an army of 100,000 men, which actually succeeded in ejecting the Romans from the land of Israel, an unprecedented feat at that point in Roman history. The Jewish people declared independence and started preparing the building materials for the Third Temple.
This the Romans could not allow. Hadrian sent Julius Severus--who had conquered England--to crush the revolt. At first they were unsuccessful--to the extent that the entire 22nd Roman legion was destroyed in an ambush. By the end of the Bar Kochba revolt, the Romans had almost half their entire army--12 of 28 legions and 120,000 soldiers--in Israel trying put down the Jewish revolt.
Beitar was the site of Bar Kochba's last stand. The Romans killed everyone in the city--though they sustained punishing losses themselves. As many as 500,000 Jews lost their lives and some 1,000 towns and cities were wiped out before the revolt was put down.
(By way of comparison, in 1948 the British had some 100,000 soldiers in Israel, trying to control 600,000 Jews; at the same time, the British also had about 100,000 in India, trying to control a half billion people. It is one sign that when the Jewish people are united, their power is most formidable indeed.)
After the revolt, Hadrian set out to make an example of the Jewish people. While at times the Romans could be remarkably tolerant, if they chose not to be, they were cruel nearly beyond human description. During the years 135-138, Rome embarked on a policy of massive spiritual and physical destruction of the land of Israel. The Romans executed many of the generation's leading Sages, including Rabbi Akiva. The Temple Mount was ploughed under, an event that was forseen in the prophesy of Micha (3:12), and Jerusalem was turned into a pagan city. (The Cardo is a remnant of that undertaking.)
Finally, as a result of the Roman oppression, Jews became a minority in the land of Israel for the first time in 1000 years. It would remain that way for nearly 2000 years.
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Byzantine rule is generally considered to have stretched from 324-612. Over time the Byzantines combined traditional Roman anti-Semitism with Christian anti-Semitism, and the Jewish community in Israel fell into a period of decline during these centuries. The Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of the Jewish people, stopped sitting in Israel. In the 4th century, the system of declaring the new moon had to be abandoned in favor of the fixed calendar. In spite of these unfavorable conditions, the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled from the ancient Oral Tradition in 368.
Finally, in the 5th century, the Roman empire no longer recognized the position of the President of the Jewish People. Although a strong Torah presence always continued in the land of Israel, by the end of the Byzantine era the Jewish academies in Babylon became major centers of Torah scholarship.
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- MICHA 3:12
- "Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps of rubble, and the mountain of the house like the high places of the forest."
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- MISHNAH
- A generation after the Hadrian oppressions, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius would
maintain a more favorable policy toward the Jews. He learned with the great sage, Rabbi
Yehuda Hanasi, who is also known as Rebbe.
It was Rebbe who brought together a thousand Sages in his effort to formalize the Mishnah. What emerged was a work that contains all of the major principles of Jewish law, including a detailed description of the full range of activities that took place in the Temple.
Jewish children today compete with their friends to memorize the more than 2,500 separate mishnayos, which are arranged in six separate subheadings. It is the Mishna that serves as the basis for the Gemora--the backbone of higher Jewish learning in the yeshivas--which includes the full commentary and explanation of the mishnah.
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- SAMARITANS
- Before the destruction of the First Temple, the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom
of Israel and sent them into exile. This was actually part of their overall policy of
mixing the nations, so that we no longer know which people are descended from which of the
original 70 nations.
In Israel, the Assyrians replace the 10 tribes with the Samaritans. Over time, they more or less converted to Judaism--they have a Torah scroll written in the Samaritan, for example.
However, from our perspective, the supposed good Samaritans were not good to the Jews. They were constantly instigating against the Jewish community in the land of Israel. Thus, when the Jews started to come back to the land of Israel to rebuild the Temple, the Samaritans beseeched the Persians not to allow them to do so.
They remained enemies of the Jewish people through Roman times, often revolting against the Jewish population in Israel. Today there are less than 1,000 Samaritans left, living primarily near the town of Shechem.
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