The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
What Have the Rebels Ever Done for Us?
A balance sheet of three major Jewish revolts against Rome.
While writing my new book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2025), I asked myself if anything good can come from a failed revolt. The Jews of the Roman empire experienced not one but three major failed revolts as well as several minor ones. The three are the Great Revolt or Jewish War (66-70), which was followed by the most famous postscript in military history, Masada (74); the Diaspora Revolt or Kitos War (116-117) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-136). Each one led to disaster for the rebels and for the Jewish people.
The Great Revolt caused the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple at the hands of Rome as well as the death, deportation or enslavement of well over a hundred thousand Jews. It also led the Romans for centuries to stigmatize all Jews in the empire by making them pay a special tax (the "Jewish Fund") to the chief pagan god of Rome, Jupiter of the Capitoline Hill. No other rebel nation in the empire ever suffered a similar humiliation.
The Diaspora Revolt led to the ethnic cleansing of the large Jewish populations of Libya, Cyprus, and Egypt—whose capital city, Alexandria, was possibly the largest Jewish city in the world. Many if not most of the Jewish inhabitants were killed or enslaved.
The Bar Kokhba Revolt saw the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish heartland around Jerusalem, the area known as Judah. Hundreds of Jewish towns and villages were destroyed, their inhabitants murdered or sent into slavery. With a few exceptions, Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel was concentrated in Galilee or the Golan. Before the revolt, the province was known as Judea after its most prominent inhabitants, the Judeans—that is, the Jews. After the revolt the Romans imposed a new name on the province. They called it Syria Palaestina, after its Gentile inhabitants, a significant population especially in the cities. Rome had changed the name of provinces before but never as a punishment for rebellion.
Jewish life continued in the Diaspora both in the Roman empire and further east in the Parthian empire, an ancient Iranian realm that stretched from Syria to today's Turkmenistan. Southern Iraq in particular was a center of Jewish life and thought. In the former Judea, however, it was very much reduced.
The rebels had a messianic, apocalyptic vision of the world. They thought that with the aid of Heaven, they would defeat the evil empire and usher in an age of freedom and redemption. But at least some of them also had a geostrategic vision. Like the American rebels of 1776 they looked for help from abroad. The Americans came knocking on the door of France while the Jews sought assistance from Parthia, which was Rome's primary rival. Parthia had a large Jewish population, but it never gave more than indirect aid to the rebels and usually provided less.
The rebels were wrong, and they paid a big price for their failure. What then can be said in their favor? "Little or nothing" is the answer given by the rabbis who eventually emerged as Judaism's leaders in the centuries after the revolt. The rabbis preached spiritual resistance to Rome but otherwise counseled obedience. They criticized the rebels for their "senseless hatred" toward other Jews and for raising false messiahs.
Had the rebellions accepted Roman rule, and had the three revolts never happened, hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives would have been saved. Had the Jews not rebelled they might have avoided exile. They might have remained a people in their own land. They would not, however, have been what the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah" ("Hope") calls for: they would not have been "a free people in our land." (Italics mine.) They would have been subjects of the Romans, and like all subjects of the Romans, they would have had to bend the knee.
The Jews of Judea would have become Romanized, and in doing so, they would slowly have sloughed off Judaism. One did not become a Roman governor or senator and keep the Sabbath or eat kosher food. It is unlikely that the Romans would have kept their greedy hands off the Temple and its treasure. Indeed, they already had begun plundering it when the revolt began.
Might the Judaism of the rabbis and the synagogues have survived? Perhaps. Or perhaps the Jews would have disappeared like the Phoenicians or the Galatians or the Numidians and many other once proud ancient peoples. Perhaps, like the ancient Greeks, they would have kept their ethnic identity but not their religion, i.e., in the (pre-Christian) Greek case, paganism.
The Jewish rebels against Rome made a choice. They chose between freeing their souls and freeing their bodies. They couldn't have both. They chose their souls—and survived as a people. The price was physical exile. Spiritually, however, they never left Israel.
The determination and resilience of the rebels might have inspired the determination and resilience of the rabbis. Certainly, those rebels inspired the founders of Zionism many centuries later.
From Spartacus to the European rebels of 1848 to the abortive Russian revolution of 1905 failed rebellions have left a legacy of inspiration. Ancient Jewish rebels, for all the suffering they incurred, also did some good.
"What have the Romans ever done for us?" asks a disgruntled Jew of ancient Judea in Monty Python's comedy, The Life of Brian. The answer turns out to be, plenty: baths, roads, sanitation, medicine, and more. If we ask a similar question about the rebels, the answer might be: for all their flaws, the rebels did something for us.
