The Roman war and the destruction of the Second Temple

By the first century CE, Judea was a restless Roman province. Herod the Great, a client king, had rebuilt the Second Temple on a colossal scale, and Jerusalem drew pilgrims from a diaspora that already stretched from Babylonia to Rome and Alexandria. Jewish society was lively and divided. The Sadducees, linked to the priestly elite, focused on the Temple; the Pharisees, popular teachers, taught that God’s law extended into every home and table through an oral tradition; the Essenes withdrew to purity communities, probably including the one that left the Dead Sea Scrolls. Apocalyptic hopes for a messiah ran high. One small Jewish movement among many followed a Galilean teacher named Jesus.^•

In 66 CE, after years of clashes with corrupt Roman governors, Judea rose in open revolt. Rome sent its legions. Galilee fell first; one of its commanders, Josephus, went over to the Romans and later wrote the history on which most of our knowledge depends. In 70 CE Titus, son of the new emperor Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem. The city, torn by fighting between rebel factions and starving, fell in late summer, and the Temple was burned. Josephus’s figure of over a million dead is generally considered exaggerated, but the slaughter and enslavement were immense. The last rebels held out at the desert fortress of Masada until 73 or 74. In Rome, the Arch of Titus still shows soldiers carrying off the Temple’s great menorah.^•

A second, messianic revolt led by Simon bar Kosiba, known as Bar Kokhba (“son of the star”), broke out in 132. Its defeat in 135 was even more devastating for Judea’s population. The emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from it, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina.^•

What saved Judaism was a change of centre. Rabbinic tradition tells how the sage Yohanan ben Zakkai was smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin and won permission from Vespasian to found an academy at Yavneh. Whether or not it happened that way, the story captures what followed. Heirs of the Pharisees, now called rabbis (“my teachers”), rebuilt Judaism around things that could be carried anywhere: study of the Torah, communal prayer three times a day in place of the Temple sacrifices, the Sabbath and festivals, acts of kindness, and a home table treated like an altar. The synagogue replaced the Temple; the scholar replaced the priest.^•

The war also helped separate Judaism and Christianity. Followers of Jesus, increasingly gentile, came to read the Temple’s fall as divine judgement on the Jews, an interpretation that fed centuries of Christian hostility.^•

For Jews, 70 CE became the hinge of history. Daily prayers ask for the return to Zion and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. On Tisha B’Av, the fast day of the ninth of Av, Jews mourn both Temples by reading the Book of Lamentations, sitting on the floor in the evening. A glass is broken at weddings partly in remembrance of Jerusalem amid joy. The Western Wall, a retaining wall of Herod’s Temple platform, became the most precious place in the Jewish world. Exile, galut, became not just a place but a way of seeing the world: incomplete, waiting, and yet able to flourish wherever Jews found themselves.^•

Why it matters today