Trajan, proud that his father had made his name fighting the Jews under Titus, restored the Fiscus Judaicus, but he was another Alexander hero-worshipper: he invaded Parthia, expanding Roman power into Iraq, home of the Babylonian Jews. During the fighting, they surely appealed to their Roman brethren. As Trajan advanced into Iraq, the Jews of Africa, Egypt and Cyprus, led by rebel ‘kings’, massacred thousands of Romans and Greeks, vengeance at last, possibly co-ordinated by the Jews of Parthia.
Trajan, fearing Jewish treason in his rear and attack from Babylonian Jews as he advanced into Iraq, ‘was determined if possible to destroy the nation utterly’. Trajan ordered Jews to be killed from Iraq to Egypt, where, wrote the historian Appian, ‘Trajan was destroying totally the Jewish race.’ The Jews were now seen as hostile to the Roman Empire: they ‘regard as profane everything we hold sacred,’ wrote Tacitus, ‘while they permit all we abhor’.
Rome’s Jewish problem was witnessed by the new Governor of Syria, Aelius Hadrian, who was married to Trajan’s niece. When Trajan died unexpectedly without an heir, his empress announced that he had adopted a son on his deathbed: the new emperor was Hadrian, who devised a solution to end the Jewish problem once and for all. He was a remarkable emperor, one of the makers of Jerusalem and one of the supreme monsters of Jewish history.2
HADRIAN: THE JERUSALEM SOLUTION
In 130, the emperor visited Jerusalem, accompanied by his young lover Antinous, and decided to abolish the city, even down to its very name. He ordered a new city to be built on the site of the old one, to be named Aelia Capitolina, after his own family and Jupiter Capitolinus (the god most associated with the empire), and he banned circumcision, the sign of God’s covenant with the Jews, on pain of death. The Jews, realizing that this meant the Temple would never be rebuilt, smarted under these blows, while the oblivious emperor travelled on to Egypt.
Hadrian, now aged fifty-four, born in Spain to a family rich from the production of olive oil, was a man seemingly designed to rule the empire. Blessed with a photographic memory, he could dictate, listen and consult simultaneously; he designed his own architecture and composed his own poetry and music. He existed in perpetual movement, restlessly travelling the provinces to reorganize and consolidate the empire. He was criticized for withdrawing from Trajan’s hard-won conquests in Dacia and Iraq. Instead he envisaged a stable empire, united by Greek culture, a taste so marked that he was nicknamed the Greekling. (His Greek beard and hairstyle were groomed with curling irons by specially trained slaves.) In 123, on one of his tours in Asia Minor, he met the love of his life, the Greek boy Antinous, who became almost his consort.* Yet this perfect emperor was also an unpredictable control-freak. In a rage, he once stabbed a slave in the eye with a pen; and he opened and closed his reign with blood purges.
Now in Jerusalem, on the wreckage of the Jewish city, he planned a classic Roman town, built around the worship of Roman, Greekand Egyptian gods. A splendid three-gated entrance, the Neapolis (today’s Damascus) Gate, built with Herodian stones, opened into a circular space, decorated with a column, whence the two main streets, the Cardines – axes – led down to two forums, one close to the demolished Antonia Fortress and the other south of today’s Holy Sepulchre. There Hadrian built his Temple of Jupiter with a statue of Aphrodite outside it, on the very rock where Jesus had been crucified, possibly a deliberate decision to deny the shrine to the Jewish Christians. Worse, Hadrian planned a shrine on the Temple Mount, marked by a grandiose equestrian statue of himself.* Hadrian was deliberately eradicating Jerusalem’s Jewishness. Indeed he had studied that other Philhellenic showman, Antiochus Epiphanes, reviving his plan to build an Olympian temple in Athens.
On 24 October, the festival in which the Egyptians celebrated the death of their god Osiris, Hadrian’s lover Antinous mysteriously drowned in the Nile. Did he kill himself? Did Hadrian or the Egyptians sacrifice him? Was it an accident? The usually inscrutable Hadrian was heartbroken, deifying the boy as Osiris, founding a town Antinopolis and an Antinous cult, spreading statues of his graceful face and magnificent physique all over the Mediterranean.
On his way home from Egypt, Hadrian passed through Jerusalem, where he probably ploughed the furrow around the city-limits of Aelia Capitolina. Outraged by the repression, the paganization of Jerusalem and the obligatory nudes of the boy Antinous, the Jews stashed weapons and prepared underground complexes in the Judaean hills.
Once Hadrian was safely on his way, a mysterious leader known as the Prince of Israel launched the most terrible of the Jewish wars.3
SIMON BAR KOCHBA: THE SON OF THE STAR
‘At first the Romans took no account of the Jews,’ but this time the Jews were well prepared under one capable commander, Simon bar Kochba, self-declared Prince of Israel and Son of the Star, the same mystical sign of kingship that marked the birth of Jesus, prophesied in Numbers: ‘There shall come forth a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel and shall smite Moab.’ Many hailed him as the new David. ‘This is the King Messiah,’ insisted the respected rabbi Akiba (in the fourth-century Talmud), but not everyone agreed. ‘Grass will sprout on your chin, Akiba,’ answered another rabbi, ‘and the Son of David will still not have appeared.’ Kochba’s real name was bar Kosiba; sceptics punned that he was bar Koziba, the Son of the Lie.
Simon swiftly defeated the Roman governor and his two legions. His orders, discovered in a Judaean cave, reveal his harsh competence: ‘I shall deal with the Romans’ – and he did. He wiped out an entire legion. ‘He caught missiles on his knee then hurled them back and killed some of the enemy.’ The prince tolerated no dissent: ‘Simon bar Kosiba to Yehonatan and Masabala. Let all men from Tekoa and other places who are with you, be sent to me without delay. And if you shall not send them, you shall be punished.’ A religious zealot, he supposedly ‘ordered Christians to be punished severely if they did not deny Jesus was the Messiah’, according to Justin, a contemporary Christian. He ‘killed the Christians when they refused to help him against the Romans’, added a Christian, Eusebius, writing much later. ‘The man was murderous and a bandit but relied on his name, as if dealing with slaves, and claimed to be a giver of light.’ He was said to have tested his fighters’ dedication by asking each to cut off a finger.
The Son of the Star ruled his State of Israel from the fort of Herodium, just south of Jerusalem: his coins announced ‘Year One: The Redemption of Israel’. But did he rededicate the Temple and restore the sacrifice? His coins boasted ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem’, and were emblazoned with the Temple, but none of his coins have been found in Jerusalem. Appian wrote that Hadrian, like Titus, destroyed Jerusalem, implying that there was something to demolish, and the rebels, sweeping all before them, would surely have besieged the Tenth Legion in the Citadel and worshipped on the Temple Mount if they had had the chance, but we do not know if they did.
Hadrian hastened back to Judaea, summoned his best commander Julius Severus all the way from Britain, and mustered seven or even twelve legions who ‘moved out against the Jews, treating their madness without mercy,’ according to Cassius Dio, one of the few historians of this obscure war. ‘He destroyed in heaps thousands of men, women and children and under the law of war enslaved the land.’ When Severus arrived, he adopted Jewish tactics, ‘cutting off small groups, depriving them of their food and shutting them in’ so that he could ‘crush and exterminate them’. As the Romans closed in, bar Kochba needed severe threats to enforce discipline: ‘If you maltreat the Galileans with you,’ he told a lieutenant, ‘I will put fetters on your feet as I did to ben Aphlul!’