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- [00:05]
A
Hi, everybody. Welcome to a very special and fascinating episode of Ask Aviv Anything. Today I'm going to be talking with Barry S. Strauss, an American military historian. Professor Strauss is the Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Bryson Edith M. Bomar professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is a leading American expert on ancient military history. He's written a dozen books on ancient Roman and Greek history and the Anatomy of Error, Ancient Military Disasters and Their Lessons from Modern strategists. There's a few people in the world today I want to send copies of that book to. But I'm really excited to interview Professor Strauss because he's published a book that to me was tremendously eye opening on the Jewish rebellions against Rome. But I actually, when I was a soldier, read a book that came out by Professor Strauss that was called the Battle of Solomon, the Naval Encounter that Saved Greece and Western Civilization. And it's a book that argues some complicated things about the strategy and about Themistocles and what he did and how he did it and how he took advantage of the Greek advantages and neutralized Persian advantages in that famous naval battle. But one of the things that I remembered, and I was a soldier in the IDF when I read it, one of the things I remembered really, really clearly and remember to this day was the explanation, the detailed explanation of how the fact that these, that the Greek rowers, the Greek sailors were citizens of a free state, were defending their homes and their polity in a way that the Persian sailors were not. They were conscripted, forced into military service, in many cases, radically changed how they fought and was a tremendous advantage to the Greeks, even though they were outnumbered in that battle. It was very hard not to see the advantages that a democratic army has over an undemocratic armies and apply it to my Israeli experience as an Israeli soldier in those years. So it, you know, here we are, 20 something, doesn't matter how many years later to talk about a different book. But I'm really excited to talk to someone I learned a lot from. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Shimon Parker. Shimon, thank you for this sponsorship. Shimon is a member of the Sydney Jewish community and he sponsors this episode in the hopes that his grandchildren, Ziggy, Archie and Duke will grow up to be proud Jews. Shimon asked to dedicate the episode to the victims of the massacre on Bondi beach on the first night of Hanukkah, and especially to Rabbi eli Schlanger the 41 year old assistant rabbi of the local Chabad who was murdered Sunday evening while hosting a Hanukkah celebration at the beach. Rabbi Schlanger had served for 18 years as an emissary of Chabad. He is remembered as a pillar of the local Jewish community who was devoted to enriching Jewish religion and culture. Generous with his time, kind to all. In the words of Levi Wolf, a rabbi at Sydney's central Synagogue. Elie was ripped from us in the midst of doing what he did best, spreading Yiddishkeit, spreading love and joy and caring for his people. He is survived by his wife Chile and their five children, including their two month old baby who was wounded in the attack. Our hearts go out to the Sydney community. We think of you every, every day, every hour. The world feels like it's changing and we're all kind of learning how to deal with that together. I also would like to invite you to join our Patreon. We have a Patreon community where you can ask the questions that guide the topics that we turn to, that we deal with on this podcast. There's also tremendous amount of discussion every single day. My phone beeps, you know, 50 times a day where people are talking, commenting, sharing resources, sharing fascinating readings that I have learned a lot from. And once a month we have a live stream where I answer all your questions live. It goes on quite a while and then it's posted to the Patreon. For people who can't make the event join us@patreon.com Ask about anything. The link is in the show notes. Barry, how are you?
- [04:32]
B
I'm great. Have you.
- [04:34]
A
I have learned tremendous things from you without even remembering that it was you. This new book came across my radar again and suddenly I'm like, wait a, I learned from this guy before. Today we want to talk about your new book, Jews vs. Rome. The Jewish wars against Rome. There these are, you know, the destruction of the temple, the war that begins in 66 to the end of the Bar Kochba revolt in the 130s, 135, 136. Jewish memory argues that the revolts were foolish. They were folly. The Jews were divided, therefore they could not fight Rome. They couldn't have fought Rome anyway. And what actually survived was the was the wise men at Yavneh. The retooling of the temple based religion to rab to a rabbinic religion, a textual religion. Accommodation. Accommodation as we head out into exile was the secret to our survival. And you argue that the Jews are too quick to tell themselves this could never have worked. It might have. It might have succeeded. Tell us about that.
- [05:34]
B
Okay, sure. First of all, I would say just one quibble. I think the Zionist interpretation of the revolts is not as negative as the rabbinic interpretation of the revolts. After all, the early Zionists look back at the, the rebels as heroes and they name themselves after, after some of the rebels. Ben Gurion is a, a prime example. But yes, there's no question. The rabbinic tradition says the revolts were foolish, sad, ill, considered a terrible thing. And fortunately the rabbis were able to pick up the pieces. And yes, the rabbis were able to pick up the pieces and it was a very fortunate thing and heroic thing. But as you say, it's not quite as simple as that. And what intrigued me about the revolts, I guess my way into the subject was what I call the Iranian connection. And I started working on this book well before October 7th. I started working on it in 2020. It was already obvious that the Islamic Republic of Iran was the arch enemy of Israel, dedicated to its the destruction of the Jewish state. And I was intrigued by the fact that during the revolts the story was quite different, that the Iranian empire at the time, Parthia, was actually a friend of the Jews and a friend of the, of the rebels. In the end, a friend that didn't come through. But there are intriguing ways in which this connection shaped the rebellion. The rebel rebels greatest chance, their greatest hope was to get Parthian help. And I compare it to the American Revolution where the rebels greatest hope against Britain was to get French help. And they knew it from the word go. That was their goal, to get the French into the war. And the French were reluctant to get. And the French were intrigued but reluctant to get involved until they had proof. They wanted proof of two things. One, that the American rebels were serious, they really wanted a break from their cousins in Britain, and two, that the American rebels were capable of doing it. And so they waited until the Battle of Saratoga, which is the first great rebel victory. And then the French said, okay, this is serious and it could win if we help. So I look at the, the Great Revolt in particular as a similar kind of thing. The rebels, we know from Josephus, who is not telling us the whole story, that much we're sure of. We know from Josephus that the rebels were trying to get help from the Parthian Empire, either from the Parthian king or from the Jewish community in the Parthian Empire, which was extensive, or from the dynasty of Adiabeen, ancient Iraqi Kurdistan, which interestingly had Converted to Judaism. We'll talk more about that later. But that was their goal, that was their hope and didn't work out in part I think because they didn't play their cards right and they certainly didn't prove to the Parthians that they could pull this off. But that's what they saw as being able to help them.
- [08:39]
A
Walk us through that. Rome is, is, is Rome, right? It has conquered Gaul, it is expanding into, you know, Germania. It is an empire that feels unstoppable. And in the book you actually argue not only did the Jews have a chance, they gave Rome the biggest run for their money of anyone Rome had ever conquered up to that moment or ever. This rebellion was immense and long and multi front and could have won. Can you walk us through that? Because that to me is the stunning thing. That's something I never, never imagined.
- [09:20]
B
So just, just one slight emendation. The Germans had given the Romans the hardest time. The Germans actually succeeded in defeating the Romans and driving them out of Germany east of the Rhine. I mean, the Romans had already laid out town plans, they put up a statue of Augustus, they were ready to turn Germany up to the Elbe river into a province. And because of the defeat of the Roman legions, the Battle of the Teutoburg woods In the year 9 CE, the Romans had to give this up. And I think that was certainly a model for the Judean rebels. But probably closer to home was the fact that the emperor at the time was Nero. And I think if you think of the old Hollywood movie Quo Vadis and Peter Ustinov playing Nero as this decadent, I think that's what the world saw of Nero at the time, at the time the great world began, Nero wasn't even in Italy, he was in Greece. And he wasn't there in some sort of diplomatic mission. He was there to show the world, well, to show the Greeks that he was one of them and that he could win all of the Pan Hellenic games which the Greeks were forced put all them on in the same year instead of staggering them in different years. And lo and behold, Nero won every event that he competed in. There had been a conspiracy, a rebellion against Nero in Rome that had failed. But he was shaken. And most importantly, three years before the great revolt in 63, the Romans had been checked on their eastern frontier by the Parthians. The Parthians had violated an understanding with Rome and went back several decades and they had put a junior member of their dynasty, of the ruling dynasty on the throne of Armenia. Armenia was a bigger country in antiquity than it is today. It's an important buffer state between the two empires. And here were the Parthians laying claim to it. The Romans tried to stop them and they failed. They had a defeat and a humiliation on the eastern frontier and the whole world knew it. Nero tried to pretty up what had happened and he got the Parthians to agree that this new king of Armenia would come to Rome and make obeisance to Nero as if the Romans had put him on the throne and not the Parthians. But the reality was not hidden from anyone on the scene in eastern part of the Roman Empire. So if you're a rebel in a potential rebel in Jerusalem, you might think Rome is weaker than it's been in a while. And there's a real chance there still. There never would have been a rebellion if the Roman governor of Judea, a man named Florus, hadn't done a lot of offensive things. Not just stealing money from the Jews of Caesarea and stealing money from the temple, but unleashing his soldiers in a massacre of civilians in Jerusalem. Josephus says 3,600 people were killed. Now Josephus does have a tendency to exaggerate numbers, but let's say it's only 360. I think it's more than that. A significant number of civilians who are massacred by the governor in of Judea. And so there's a younger generation in the priesthood of all places that thinks this is the moment for revolt.
- [12:52]
A
What could the Jews feel in that moment? And at that time the Jews had.
- [12:57]
B
A strong military tradition. I mean, after all, they had won their independence against the Seleucids, the Syrian Greeks under the, the Hasmoneans, under the Maccabees. And they were particularly good at irregular warfare. Some of the rebels had served, some of them had served under King Agrippa II in, in the north, in his army. Some of them may have served in the Roman legions. I can only speculate about that. There's some little tidbits of evidence suggesting it, but no, no proof. And some of them may have learned from their fathers, from members of their family. But there is this strong military tradition, as I say, particularly good at irregular warfare. And at the very beginning of the revolt, they win this amazing victory. They ambush a Roman legion which had come to Jerusalem to try to intimidate them into giving up the revolt and failed because intimidation wasn't enough. They ambush them in the Beth Horon pass, you know, precisely where there had been a great Maccabean victory. And they destroy most of a Roman legion. And they do it entirely using irregular tactics. These are light armed troops. They're hurling spears, they're ambushing people. They're not fighting in a set battle, legion versus legion, phalanx versus phalanx. And that steals Nero to say, okay, this is a serious revolt. I've really got to send in the A team because the B team's not going to be enough to beat these people. So they've got that tradition, they've got that experience. There are clearly some people in their army who are soldiers. They're always in rebel armies. There's almost always some who have some military experience. They can't reinvent the wheel. They need to have some experience. They've got. We know they've got some people who have experience. They've also, from the word go, they've got some people from this funny country of Adiabin, modern Iraqi Kurdistan. As I said, the ruling dynasty had converted to Judaism several decades earlier. They built three palaces in Jerusalem in the, er, David. And they had sent their sons and grandsons to be educated in Jerusalem as Jews, much as Herod had sent his sons and grandsons to Rome to be educated as Romans. And they knew something about fighting. And. And presumably they came with servants and soldiers to help them. And so they're there to take part in the rebellion. And no doubt they're whispering into the eye, the ears of the rebels. We're going to talk to the king of Parthia because we're a client kingdom of Parthia. We're going to get your help from the East. So that's what they've gotten.
- [15:42]
A
Ian, can you tell us more about this kingdom, this Jewish kingdom that I had never heard of? Where does it come from?
- [15:51]
B
Who are these? Don't be embarrassed, because most of us don't go about it. And I only had the barest knowledge of it myself. So this is basically Assyria, ancient Assyria in its latest manifestation. It's the kingdom of Hadyab, I think it's called. They speak Aramaic, they speak Syriac, a version of the language that many of the Jews of the land of Israel spoke at the time. And their ruling dynasty had converted to Judaism, I think, around the year 40 CE. And the country as a whole had not converted to Judaism, but the rulers had. And so they have these close relations with Judea, the land of Israel. The Dowager Queen, Queen Helena, and as you know, there's a Helena Malky street in Jerusalem, goes to Jerusalem and she spends several years there in the 40s. She's a revered figure because she arranges for supplies to be brought at a time of famine to feed people in a difficult time. And she eventually, and she learns with sages in Jerusalem and she eventually goes back home, but she arranges to be buried in Jerusalem. And she is buried in Jerusalem, as are her two sons who succeed her on the throne. Probably the tomb is the Tomb of the Kings, the so called Tomb of the Kings in East Jerusalem. It was an amazing site to visit. So there is this very close connection. And it's partly religious because she's sincere about conversion. It's partly economic because her kingdom sits on the Silk Road. And the western end of the Silk Road is in Galilee, Golan and Phoenicia. That's where there are spinners who are turning silk into cloth and sometimes half silk cloth. But it's also political because it gives her and her kingdom a foothold in the Roman world. Both to spy on the Romans and to send intelligence back to the Parthians, but also to make deals with the Romans because they're not entirely on board with their suzerain, the Parthian king. So it's very, very useful thing for this little kingdom and it's punching above its weight because of this connection.
- [18:16]
A
So walk us through the revolt up to the destruction of Jerusalem in this context of Jewish military strategy.
- [18:26]
B
Yeah.
- [18:27]
A
One of the fundamental arguments, maybe the main point of the book, correct me if I'm wrong, what I take away from it is this was a serious rational enterprise that could have worked. How did they conduct this war? Why did they think they might win? And why did they lose in the end with the burning of the temple and then Masada in 73?
- [18:48]
B
Yeah, well, they thought they might win because they thought, above all they thought they were going to get help from the east. That's why they thought they could win, because they understood very well that Judea was just a small piece of a larger puzzle. And the larger puzzle is Rome versus Parthia. And the rebels thought that they were going to tire the Romans out. They believed, rightly, that Jerusalem was a very, very powerful fortress. It was all but impregnable on three sides. But unfortunately for them, as often in history, it was attackable from the fourth side, from the northern side, where there isn't a valley to protect the city. But they tried to rebuild the walls on the northern side to make it impregnable. What they did wrong was they did almost everything wrong. They did not have good military advice as to what they were doing. Instead of engaging in guerrilla warfare, which I think would have been their best move. After first trying to take the city of Ascalon, modern Ashkelon, by force and failing and being defeated badly and suffering bad casualties, including important leaders, they much, pretty much retreat into fortresses in various places, in Gamla, in Yodapata, in Galilee, and above all in Jerusalem. But they're divided. They're not united. That's their big, big. I think that's their biggest problem. From the word go, they're divided. And even among the people who supposedly are gung ho on the rebellion, you've got people who are playing both sides and saying, surely we can make a deal with the Romans. I'm really not sure this is going to work, so let's see what we can do. And the rebels totally divided among various groups divided against each other, this very quickly becomes a civil war of Jews versus Jew, which makes it close to impossible to win. So in order to pull this off, you've got to have a very unified polity, a very determined polity that's going to fight smart and going to fight through thick and thin. They don't fight smart and they're totally divided. So given those realities, it's kind of tough for them to pull this off. And if you're the king of Parthia, you're going to say, I don't think I really want to bet on these guys.
- [21:22]
A
So this is obviously the part that tradition remembers very well, that Sinat Chinam, baseless hatred or all this, you know, the disunity, the burning of the silos of grains by different factions against other factions. They basically have this three year period where they could prepare what they know is the might of the Roman Empire coming to get them. And instead they spend the three year preparation years killing each other or burning each other's food supplies. That part the rabbis got pretty accurate, I feel.
- [21:56]
B
I think so, yeah.
- [21:57]
A
What does Masada really represent in the context of this war as a holdout and what happens to, to the rebels, to the survivors of the rebellion after the war, after Rome manages to actually squash the rebellion?
- [22:10]
B
Yeah, well, Masada in the hands of Josephus, becomes this symbol of freedom, Fanaticism, but freedom. And he puts in the mouth of a leading rebel there one of the most eloquent defenses of freedom in all of ancient Greek literature. Josephus writes in Greek and it really surprised me when I realized that, gee, this is one of the most powerful speeches about freedom that we've got from the ancient Greek world. So I think it's a symbol of defiance it certainly is in modern times, but I think even in ancient times, the fact that he chooses to end his book this way, I think undercuts the rest of his message. The message of his book, the Jewish War is don't do it again, don't try it again. The Romans are so brutal, you really don't want to mess with them. Be good subjects of the Roman Empire. And yet he ends with Masada. And we know that the ancients, the Greeks and the Romans admired people who committed suicide rather than surrendering. And he's certainly writing a book that he thinks the Romans are going to approve of. And maybe on some level he even approved of the Masada story because the Romans admired people who committed suicide rather than surrendering. As long as the Romans win in the end. And of course the Romans do win in the end.
- [23:34]
A
Yeah. There was an attitude I learned in college of the Romans to the Jews. They looked at the Jews religion as a kind of weird, obsessive little cult that doesn't make any sense. Pagans are much more open minded. Pagans have philosophy. But then the Romans would always say, but at least it's most, it's the traditions of their fathers. Yes, okay, so the Jews are nuts, but you know, their fathers were nuts. And there's a, there's a dignity to continuing the nuttiness of the generations. Right. There is this respect for the Jews, there is this deployment. Those forces that are deployed by 70, they're the elite legions and it takes them a long time to actually win this. And they really have to invest. What are Romans talking about when they talk about this? Maybe the space that Josephus had to talk positively about the Jews in Greek, in Rome suggests that the Roman conversation about the Jews wasn't, I don't know what eliminationist or enemy or evil.
- [24:37]
B
Not eliminationist, no, not at all eliminationist. I mean, after all, the Romans do not eliminate the Jews. They allow Jews to continue practicing their religion, but they continue to consider the Jews to be dangerous, very dangerous. Some of the rebels flee and they go to Egypt and Libya and they try to reignite the flames of revolt there and they need to be put down. Also in Egypt, outside of Alexandria, there is a second temple that the Jews had had built in Hellenistic times. And one of the things that Vespasian does is he says this temple needs to be destroyed as well. Because he understood correctly that the temple in Jerusalem is the heart and soul of the great revolt and he doesn't want another one. The other thing the Romans do, which to me is Amazing, because it's utterly unprecedented is they create a special tax on Jews everywhere in the empire, whether they supported the revolt or not, called the Jewish Fund, the Fiscus Judaicus. And just as the Jews had had to pay an annual tax to the temple, which they took very seriously, now they have to pay an annual tax to a different temple, to the pagan temple of Jupiter of the Capitoline Hill of Rome. So this is humiliating, but it's not simply a humiliation. I think it reflects the fact that the Romans fear the Jews. They know that these people could rise and revolt again. And the other thing about the Jews that really bothers them is they have a pipeline to the Parthians. There's this big, wealthy, powerful, significant Jewish community in the Parthian Empire who are friends with the Parthian king. And it bothers the Romans and it should have bothered the Romans. They were right.
- [26:20]
A
So that's it. So tell me, first of all, the Diaspora revolt. There's a series of revolts. One of them is what you just talked about. They flee to south to Egypt, Libya, and then they spark these revolts. What is the scale? What are we talking about?
- [26:34]
B
So first of all, there are these many revolts right after the suppression, the revolt in judea in the 70s. But the diaspora revolts, also known as the Ketos War in Jewish tradition, they start there in the year 116, 117. So we fast forwarded about what we're now 40 years later, 45 years later, the Emperor Trajan has decided he wants to conquer the Parthian Empire. And so he's invaded Armenia and Iraq and he succeeds in conquering it all the way down to the Persian Gulf. This is in the year 115. But then the next year, insurrections begin an insurgency in Mesopotamia, in Iraq. And one of the leaders of the insurgency are the Jewish communities in Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, in the west, another revolt springs up. The Jews of Libya, Egypt and Cyprus have all risen in rebellion. They're led by what seem to be messiah figures, at least in Cyprus. And I forget whether it's in Libya or Egypt, Libya or Egypt. And they're causing them, they're doing a.
- [27:47]
A
Lot of damage, a lot of damage.
- [27:50]
B
The Romans are now fighting a two front war. And so they take a Trajan, takes a legion and he sends it back to the west to suppress the revolt, which unfortunately for the rebels, the Romans managed to do very well. And they massacre the Jewish community of Alexandria, which had been the largest diaspora community and at this point the largest Jewish city in the ancient world. And they wiped this community out. They decimate the Jewish communities of Libya and Cyprus as well. And they also put down the seeds of rebellion in Judea. This is very serious business. And to me, what's so fascinating about it is there's reason to think there was collusion between the Parthians in the east and the rebels in the West. We don't have a smoking gun. I can't prove it to the degree that I'd like to be able to prove it. But to me, it's a little strange that you've got these two rebellions going on at the same time. And we have lots of evidence that this communication back and forth between the different parts of the ancient world. So I find this utterly fascinating that this is going on. It works out really well for the Parthians who defeat the Romans. It doesn't work out so well for the Jews of the Roman Empire.
- [29:08]
A
How much of a role did those Jewish rebellions have in the Parthian defeat of the Romans? The Romans have to flee Parthia back to Roman lines.
- [29:14]
B
So. So you're the Roman emperor. So Trajan dies at the end of this revolt. He has a stroke and he dies, and he's replaced by Hadrian. And Hadrian says, I'm ending this war. We're pulling out. Pulls out of Mesopotamia. We're going back to the former frontier with Parthia. So you're Hadrian, you look around and say, why did we lose the war? And you got to say, which is accurate. One of the reasons, if not the main reason, one of the reasons is the Jews revolted. They've done it to us again. What they did in 70, they've now done again in 116, 117. And if in 70 we were concerned they were going to collude with the Parthians, now it looks really like they colluded with the Parthians in one way or another. And so what does Hadrian do? What's one of the first things that he decides to do to rebuild the ruins of Jerusalem as a pagan. Now, again, I don't have a smoking gun, but I would be really surprised if one of his motives wasn't to say to the Jews and to the Parthians, don't mess with us on Rome's eastern frontier. We're still here. We will not tolerate any more Jewish revolts. And Parthians, don't even think of getting involved in our affairs at Judea.
- [30:34]
A
And then comes a great Jewish revolt. Yes, tell us about that.
- [30:40]
B
Okay, this is the Barchokhba revolt. And this gives Rome the greatest headache of all. So Bar Kokhba, as you know, it's a nom de guerre. His real name is Bar Kosyeva Benkosseva Barkhovpa, the son of a star. He was a very experienced soldier. We don't know how, but he knew exactly what he was doing. He and his followers prepare for this revolt for years. They hoard weapons and they dig tunnels and they make shelters in caves and abandoned places to spring this revolt on the Romans. They do so two years after Hadrian officially dedicates the new city to replace Jerusalem, which he doesn't call Jerusalem anymore. That's going to be called Aelia Capitolina, because Aelia after him, since his name is Aelius Hadrianus Capitolina, after Jupiter of the Capitoline Hill, going to be a pagan city. So they spring this revolt and the Romans are totally unprepared for it, Totally surprised. These guys are coming up from underground. They are killing Romans. The Romans are incapable of putting this down. It looks like the rebels kill the governor. They're not really sure about that. The Romans have to send in troops from neighboring provinces. But that's not putting the revolt down either. The situation is so bad that Hadrian, when he goes to the Senate, the usual way for the Senate sent the Emperor to greet the Senate is I and the army are well, may you be well in addition. But he can't say that, he doesn't say that because the army isn't well. And the only way to put down this revolt is to send in the governor of far off Britain and his team to come to the east and slowly engage in a painstaking counterinsurgency, village by village, hamlet by hamlet, site by site, to wipe out this rebellion. As we know, the the rebels take refuge in Betar, not far from Jerusalem, and there the Romans surround them and wipe them out. But they're still rebels in caves. And it takes the Romans another year before they do all of that. The net net is to destroy most of Jewish life in Judea and Yehudah in Central. In central Israel. Not all of it, but most of it. And to kill many Jews, enslave many more Jews, send the survivors to the Galilee and the Golan, which becomes the place of refuge for Jews in the land of Israel. And finally, Hadrian says, to add insult to injury, he's going to change the name of the province. It will no longer be called Judea, it will be called Syria Palestina. Now, the Greek speakers in Judea had long called it Palestine but the Romans had worked with the Jews and they called it Judea rather than Palestine. The rebels, by the way, wanted to call it Israel, going back to an earlier name. Now the Romans are saying, we're done with the Jews, we're working with the Greeks, we're calling it Syria Palestina. And not long afterwards they just call it Palestina Palestine. So that is the net of these revolts. I don't want it to seem as if the Jews are the only people who rebel. They're certainly not. They're the only people who rebel so many times and cause so many headaches for the Romans. And it is a saga and it's something that should be taught to Jews and non Jews as well as part of Jewish history and part of the history of the empire. And I think it tells us something about why the Romans weren't all that fond of the Jews after these rebellions. And kind of amazing that the Romans never tried to eliminate the Jews. They wanted to keep them down, but they didn't eliminate them. And as one friend suggested to me, so after the Barkhba revolt, the Romans calmed down. They had forbidden circumcision, they'd forbidden Shabbat, they've forbidden the teaching of Torah. And then they say, okay, well, you know, we're not going to do that stuff anymore. We're going to let you people do all that. It's partly because the Romans could be nice, but it's partly, as a friend suggested, the Romans are afraid of the Jews and they don't want yet another rebellion. And indeed there are other rebellions later on. They're not as threatening as these. But there is the Gallus revolt, as it's called in the 4th century, 351 and 352. And then finally when another Iranian empire, the Sassanians, invade Roman or Byzantine Palestine in the seventh century, in 614, there's a strong Jewish contingent that joins them and helps them against the Romans and they are rewarded. The Jews are allowed to go back to Jerusalem and they're governing Jerusalem for a short period in the seventh century. So Jewish desire to rebuild the temple, Jewish desire to be independent, it doesn't go away. I mean, the Romans aren't able to defeat that. And the amazing thing that the rabbis do is that they keep it alive as, as, as other scholars have pointed out. It was a very near run thing. Very near run thing. I mean, explain that.
- [36:15]
A
What do the rabbis keep alive? Why is it a very near thing?
- [36:19]
B
Because at the suppression of the Bar Khopa revolt, the destruction of the temple, and then the suppression of Bar Khopba revolt. It's not a given that Judaism's going to survive. It's not at all a given that Judaism is going to survive. How do you hold these people together? Particularly when there is a group of Jews who are saying, you know what? We have the answer for why the temple was destroyed. And the answer is Jesus, Jesus Christ. So this is the form of Judaism we should be following now. And that might have made sense to some people who are looking for, why did all these things happen? How do we explain all this? And yet there is this group of people, the rabbis, who are at the fringes of society and who are not rebels. The rabbis say, you know what? The revolts were a terrible idea. We're now good, loyal citizens of the Roman Empire. We're not going to rebel anymore, but we're going to take this heritage that we have and we're going to preserve it. We're going to write it down as, you know, and practice it through different rituals, through different means, through different liturgy, but we're going to keep it alive. And there are also lots of Jews, I think, living in the northern part of the land of Israel would say, okay, time to be pagan. You know, the Romans had a point. If it can't beat them, let's join them. And we know that from the word go. There were Jews who had that attitude towards Rome. Hey, Roman Empire, it's a good thing. It's great to be part of the big world. Rome represents globalization. That's the wave of the future. We should be part of it.
- [37:58]
A
What is the scale of the people who said, look, at some point we give up. We're Romans. And what was the scale of the rebellions? Was the scale of the followers of the rabbis? You know, because the Talmud is the. Is the text, we all held this tradition alive with. The rabbis loom very large. But what you said they were fringe. How fringe? Who were these people?
- [38:19]
B
Okay, so the honest answer is we don't have great population statistics from the ancient world, and certainly not from ancient Judea. And I'm not a scholar of rabbinics, but those who I respect and who've worked on it more than me have convinced me that the rabbinic movement is a very small movement. I mean, these are mostly wealthy people or at the top echelon of society. And it's not as if they have zillions of followers out there. It's just a small group of people who are working on this. And it takes them centuries to convince Jews as a whole to that this is the way to go, that this is going to be the way of the future. And a lot of the work is done, as you know, not just in the land of Israel, but in so called Babylon in Mesopotamia, which becomes ultimately for a long time, the center of the Jewish world. So before the revolt, the Jewish elite in Judea, by and large is pro Roman and is collaborating with the Romans. The priesthood is pro Roman. The king, Herod and what's left of his dynasty are all pro Roman. It's Herod who builds Caesarea and he builds Sebaste near Nablus. It means Augusta. Sebaste is Augusta in Latin city dedicated to Augustus. Caesarea is dedicated to the house of the Caesars. And he also builds a spectacular temple to Augustus all the way in the north at the foot of Mount Hermon on the road to Damascus. So his policy is, yes, we're going to stay Jewish. And he also rebuilds the temple and rebuilds Jerusalem for this period of glory. But we're going to also make gestures to the Romans. One of the features of Caesarea is the annual Actian games in commemoration of Augustus victory over Mark Antony at the battle of Actium. Gladiatorial games which are anathema to the sages and to the scholars and traditional Judaism. Herod, who's putting this stuff on, the other thing he does that's so important is that he institutes daily sacrifices in the temple on behalf of the Roman emperor. And by the way, these sacrifices were paid for by the emperor, paid for by Augustus and his heirs. So it's as if the ruler of Judea and the ruler of Rome are shaking hands. You know, we're in this together and somehow we can make this work.
- [40:53]
A
How did it work? Just religiously or in that weird political religious thing? There is in. In the Forum in Rome, there is a temple to Caesar, right? Caesar is deified by Augustus. And how. So how do they bring. How does a deified or the. The line of deified emperors bring a sacrifice to the temple in Jerusalem, to the Jewish one God? How does that work?
- [41:20]
B
Well, the sacrifice is made to God on behalf of the emperors, but they don't recognize the divinity of the emperors. That's the compromise that they make. So in a way, you're right. It totally makes no sense whatsoever. And you can imagine why many Jews said this is outrageous, that this happens and the rebels begin the revolt. One of the first things they do is they say, oh no, we've decided no more sacrifices in the temple by foreigners or on behalf of foreigners. That is a signal to Rome we're revolting. You know, you're out. We're taking down the Roman flag, as it were.
- [41:59]
A
A Roman emperor, a Roman governor would have seen the bringing of a sacrifice to the temple in Jerusalem on behalf of the Roman Emperor as a concession, but also a, is a Roman concession. Yes, you have a temple to your weird God that you think is the only God because you're idiots. And we are going to, you know, do this little game, this little thing that you have as a political act, but also we're conceding this. We're, we're, we're showing you that we're okay with this as also an act of you being part of this empire. In other words, you're, it's, it's almost a two way bow of respect, so to speak.
- [42:38]
B
Yes, the Romans were shrewd. Yes, they looked down on the Jews as nuts. But the Romans ruled this empire with 50 million people stretching from Britain to Syria. They only have a very small army, 300,000 men in this army that has got to keep down 50 million people, none of whom wanted to be conquered by Rome, or very few of them wanted to be conquered by Rome. And the way they do it is they make friends with the locals as much as possible and they even take some local gods and they bring them to Rome. They make altars, in some cases temples to these gods in Rome. That's not going to work with the God of Israel, but they're going to respect him to a degree, except when they don't. So Caligula famously, infamously demands that his statue be put up in, in the temple, which is totally unacceptable. And there would have been a Jewish revolt then if not for the fact that Caligula is assassinated. The local governor was dragging his feet because he knew that this would lead to rebellion. So there is this ungentleman's agreement between the governor who sits in Caesarea and the Jewish priesthood, an establishment that sit in Jerusalem that we're going to agree to disagree. In Caesarea, Herod builds a temple to Augustus and two other temples to Augustus around the land. But in Jerusalem, no. So it's this very uneasy peace.
- [44:08]
A
This had ramifications for Christianity. The Romans hardened against monotheism. Did that influence the Roman crackdown on Christianity? The brutality of the Roman crackdown on Christianity early on that they sort of took a lesson from the Jews ability to constantly rebel and said, you know, is this another kind of Judaism we're fostering in our midst.
- [44:30]
B
Yes, I think that's, that's a good point. I think it did make the Romans much more suspicious of the Christians and are they just Jews, but without the most majorem, without the end, without the seal of approval of ancestors, of being ancient. And I think it also made the Christians take pains to say we're not Jews. And actually it's not clear who's Christians and who's Jews. It takes centuries for that to become clear. Scholars of what we call today early Christianity have pointed out to me it's really not historically accurate to talk about early Christianity until sometime late in the second century ce because earlier on all you can really talk about is followers of Christ or followers of Jesus. Are they Jews, are they not Jews? It's not all that clear exactly what's going on and who they are. And I think that's one of the reasons why the Romans insist that Christians worship the Emperor. They want to make sure that they are patriotic Romans. The Jews, as one scholar has put it, are licensed atheists. The Romans know they're crazy and you know, they're willing to accept them as long as they don't, you know, rebel. And as long as they don't cause trouble. Christians are a little bit different. But also remember the Romans have a modus vivendi with the Christians and the advice that Trajan gives to his governor Pliny and what is now Turkey. Pliny writes him and says, what am I going to do about these Christians? And Trajan says basically, don't ask, don't tell, don't look for them, don't seek them out. If you catch them in the act and they're brazen, then you have to ask them to worship the emperor and otherwise they will be punished for it. But otherwise leave them alone. Because as I said, the Romans just don't have that big an army and that big a police force to have this to govern the whole empire. So they haven't. This attitude, don't look for trouble when there isn't any.
- [46:41]
A
One of the most interesting things in the Talmud to me, and I learned this from Professor Doron Mendels at Hebrew University, is that the Talmud almost never speaks about the Greek and Latin speaking Western Jews. You almost don't hear of this vast thing called the Jewish community of Alexandria that was producing philosophers and texts and trade networks. You almost don't hear of these rebellions that aren't the rebellions that produce Rabbinic Jewish. The Rabbinic Jewish response to Rome. It was the Rabbinic Jewish response is the story. So the rabbis don't do historiography on the Herodotus model. So I don't expect them to lay out for me the kinds of things that I'm learning from you. But I do expect them to notice millions and millions of Jews or, you know, a million Jews that are totally missing. And those Jews of the west, the Latin and Greek speakers, they disappear. To us, they must have written, but those writings don't survive very much, or there's very little of it relative to what you would expect from thriving Jewish communities. And the Talmud doesn't see them. Did the Romans win? Was Jewish culture ultimately Jewish society, Jewish identity, Jewish religion, ultimately wiped out, overwhelmed, and could really only survive by transporting itself out of Roman lands and Roman controlled areas?
- [48:07]
B
That's a really fascinating question. They didn't disappear. They're still Jews in the Roman Empire, they're Jews in the Byzantine Empire. And I'll be honest, I'm not a scholar of that period. I don't know that much about these centuries. We might call them missing centuries and I'm sure there are people who do. But there's no doubt that the accuracy of what you say, that the center of the Jewish world, the cultural spiritual powerhouse, moves to the east and it moves to Iraq for a long time. And ultimately the Jews of the west are dependent on the Talmud and Talmudic Judaism which comes westward. I don't know the roots of transmission or the process by which it happened. I do know there are still Jewish communities in the West. They don't disappear entirely. Justinian and the Justinian code goes to the trouble of trying to persecute and suppress the Jews in the West. So they're still there. They're absolutely still there, but they're not there in the strength they once had in the Roman Empire. So yeah, the Romans do a lot of damage. The Romans do a lot of damage. But fortunately the Jews found other places of refuge and managed to come back very strong.
- [49:28]
A
Last question. What should our takeaway be? How much does that moment, does the assessment of that moment from a sort of critical historical lens and also from a military analysis lens, what does it.
- [49:40]
B
Teach us the story of the Jews in the land of Israel? It's part of a much bigger picture that was true in antiquity and it's obviously true today. And I think it's very important for people to see the big picture, not just to look at the little picture. I mean, for me, the way into the story was what I call the Iranian connection, which I think is so important, both for understanding what the rebels were trying to do and for understanding the way the Romans looked at this rebellion and the way the Romans looked at the Jews. So Jewish history in the ancient world is part of this really big, big tableau. This really. It's a small piece of a much bigger puzzle, but it's involved in the larger pieces of the puzzle as well. So that's one big takeaway. The other one, which many historians have said, is that disunity kills and, you know, the disunity of the Jews during the Great Revolt in particular, it basically took away any possibility that the rebels had of succeeding. And, you know, democratic societies have to have debate, they have to have disagreement. But both in Israel and in the United States, there's a point where disunity can be dysfunctional, and we have to keep that in mind as well.
- [51:03]
A
One of the beautiful things that I took away from the book was understanding how much Rome invested in the PR around these rebellions. The Romans partly took our story from us because they, for imperial reasons, had to minimize the revolt and had to minimize the scale of it and how hard it was for them to actually put it down. They minted more coins about the victory over Judea than any other. I forget exactly what. Than any other event.
- [51:30]
B
Right, yeah, yeah. And think about this. What's the most famous building in the Roman world? The iconic building, it's the Coliseum, that's about the Jewish revolt. Can you believe that?
- [51:40]
A
Because that was built from loot from.
- [51:42]
B
Judea, in part financed by loot from Judea. And it celebrated Vespasian's victory. And it said to the Roman people, this guy Vespasian, who comes from a middle class family, he's a nobody. He's not a member of the nobility. He's a legitimate emperor because of what he did. Conquered. Yeah.
- [52:02]
A
Professor Barry Strauss, thank you so much. This book really felt a little bit like a reclamation of a Jewish story that was forgotten because the empire that tried to stamp out the Jews didn't want it told. And now we're we. I felt this is new to me. It's definitely going to be new to a lot of us. And I deeply recommend and urge people to read this wonderful, wonderful book, Jews vs. Rome. If you're just a fan of military history and think tactics are a cool subject, and if you really want to open up an entire window into a Jewish. A Jewish world that Jews forgot about, this is the book to do it in. Jews versus Rome. Thank you so much for joining me.
- [52:39]
B
Thank you, Javi. It's my pleasure.