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ROMAN-JEWISH WARS

Death toll: 350,000

Rank: 94

Type: religious uprising, colonial rebellion

Broad dividing line: Jews vs. Romans

Time frame: 66–74 and 132–135 CE

Location: Palestine

Who usually gets the most blame: Romans

Another damn: rebellion against Rome

First Jewish Revolt (66–74 CE)

Following Alexander the Great’s conquests, Greeks had settled over the Middle East, where they usually formed an alien upper class resented by the natives. In Caesarea, the chief city of Roman Palestine, Greeks and Jews were always exchanging insults, but sometimes the heckling escalated to full-scale riots. After one round of riots, the Roman governor demanded that the Jewish community pay for all of the damages. The Jews, however, claimed that the Greeks were to blame for sacrificing some birds on the steps of a synagogue in the first place, so they refused. No problem; the Roman governor simply took the money out of the temple treasury in Jerusalem.

Jews all over the country rose up in anger at the blasphemy. Radical nationalists—the Zealots—easily chased the small Roman garrison into Syria. In the first flush of victory, it looked like God had restored the Jewish nation to its former glory until Emperor Nero sent a full army under Vespasian to put down the uprising. His Roman legions systematically eradicated the rebels in Galilee with sieges, massacres, and political maneuvering, and eventually they closed in on Jerusalem.

The war was interrupted in 68 when Roman generals fed up with Nero’s antics overthrew him, and one after another, every Roman general in the empire marched his legions on Rome to claim the throne for himself. Vespasian proved to be the last and most permanent of the four emperors proclaimed during this year and a half of chaos.

Emperor Vespasian turned the Jewish rebellion over to his son Titus, who surrounded Jerusalem. Siege engines were difficult to build in Palestine because trees were scarce and scraggly, but sheer Roman stubbornness kept Jerusalem sealed off for two years and brought its defenders toward the edge of starvation. Every day the Romans captured desperate foraging parties of Zealots outside the walls and nailed them up in plain view of the defenders. When Jerusalem finally fell in 70 CE, the Romans massacred the population and reduced the temple in Jerusalem to rubble. The five-foot-tall seven-branched gold candlestick that had graced the temple was hauled off to Rome and triumphantly paraded for the people.

Most of the city walls were demolished, but Titus ordered a short, impressive stretch of the temple-complex wall preserved as a lesson to future rebels that even the thickest walls can’t withstand the Roman army. This wall fragment (now known as the Western or Wailing Wall) is the holiest spot in Judaism, which proves that the real lesson for future rebellions is either (a) faith can indeed withstand the Roman army or (b) if you start to demolish a holy site, finish the damn job.^a

The last 960 Zealots retreated to the mountain fortress of Masada. The defenders watched helplessly as the Romans began to methodically build a massive ramp up the mountain in order to roll their siege engines into range. Knowing they were doomed, the trapped Zealots drew lots. The losers killed the winners and then drew lots again. The losers killed the winners, and so on, until only one defender was left alive to commit the unpardonable sin of suicide.

Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 CE)

The destruction caused by the first revolt was centered mostly on Jerusalem, and much of Palestine remained unravaged. Peace and prosperity gradually returned.¹ Then the Romans tried to assimilate the province into the larger Mediterranean cultural melting pot. Around 132, Emperor Hadrian banned genital mutilation throughout the empire, which sounds like an excellent idea until we remember that Judaism requires circumcision. Hadrian quickly revised his order to make an exception for Jews. Unfortunately, Hadrian also chose this moment to start rebuilding Jerusalem as a modern Roman city with a temple of Jupiter where the temple of Yahweh had stood.

The Jews would not accept any of this, and they rose up under Simon ben Kosiba, who gained the messianic nickname Bar Kokhba, “Son of the Star.”² The rebels were strongest in the countryside, where they built fortified strongholds interlaced with hidden access tunnels. The Romans sent three legions to put down the rebellion. It was a hard campaign, and one of the legions disappears from the history books after this, probably wiped out by the rebels. The war is said to have destroyed fifty strongholds and 985 villages. It was so destructive that we still don’t have the whole story or too many relics, just a few caves discovered in the cliffs near the Dead Sea. These caves housed the last of the rebels, and archaeologists named them after their most distinctive contents: the Cave of Scrolls, the Cave of Arrows, the Cave of Letters (including some written by Bar Kokhba), and the Cave of Horrors (forty skeletons, entire families dead of starvation), among others.

When the fighting was over, most of the Jews in Palestine were killed, exiled, or enslaved, and this time the Romans made certain there would not be a next time. The Romans depopulated much of the territory and restocked it with more cooperative ethnicities. The Jews were exiled from Palestine, and the Diaspora, the scattering of Jews across the globe, began.

Death Toll

Ancient historians claim that as many as 2 million Jews were killed in these and other revolts. The contemporary Jewish historian Josephus reported that 1,197,000 people were killed during the siege of Jerusalem in the first revolt, although Tacitus estimated a death toll of half that: 600,000.³ Cassius Dio⁴ reports that a total of 580,000 Jews were killed in battle during the second revolt. Ancient historians report the death toll for other rebellions by Jewish minorities in Cyrene and Cyprus (not included here) as 220,000 and 240,000.⁵ These unbelievable claims are usually held up as the perfect example of why not to trust the numbers in ancient histories.

Realistically, maybe one-fifth to one-half of the inhabitants of Palestine died in each of the revolts, but that’s still not a complete answer because no one knows how many people lived there to begin with. Estimates of the pre-revolt population of Palestine run anywhere from 0.5 million to 6 million. Religious historians tend to favor the high numbers, which are based on written sources like the works of Josephus; archaeologists favor the low numbers, which are based on land use and population densities.⁶ In any case, a reasonable estimate would be something like 350,000 deaths all told, which would be around one-third if the original population was 1 million, or one-half if it was 700,000, or one-fourth if it was 1.4 million. No matter what anyone says, it’s unlikely that the ancient population of the area came anywhere close to 2 million, which was the number of inhabitants at the time of independence in 1948.