Following the horror of October 7, 2023, the wars that followed, and the rise of antisemitism at home and abroad, I turned to history for context and solace. Much of Jewish history, understandably, focuses on what came after the fall of the Second Temple: the rise of Rabbinic Judaism, the long exile, and the traditions that define so much of modern Jewish life. But by going back even further, to the years before and during the destruction of the Temple, we can learn a great deal about the Jewish present and about the resilience that continues to define us.
In his latest book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, historian Barry Strauss tells story after story of Jews facing oppression from the empire in which they lived and hostility from the nations around them. And he explores the divisions within the ancient Jewish community—divisions that both strengthened it, and that ultimately became its Achilles’ heel, exploited by its enemies.
Strauss tells the story of the Jews under the Roman Empire through three great revolts across two hundred years: the Great Revolt of 66–70 CE, the Diaspora Revolt of 115–117 CE, and the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132–136 CE. Each ended in catastrophe, and yet none ended the Jewish people. When I read how the Jews were defeated repeatedly, and yet still survived, I knew how needed this book is at this moment.
Strauss is a great author to tell this story. A classicist and military historian at Cornell University and the Hoover Institution, author of Ten Caesars and The War That Made the Roman Empire, he is deeply versed in the nitty-gritty details of military history, but he also has the capacity to zoom out and understand how these individual pieces fit into a broader narrative and structure. In Jews vs. Rome, he turns that eye on the history of his own people, and the result is neither lamentation nor triumphalism. It is, instead, an honest report of Jewish survival.
No people rebelled against Rome so often, or at such cost, as the Jews did. Prompted by imperial oppression, religious zeal, national longing, and internal division, they fought the greatest empire in the world again and again.
The Great Revolt began in 66 CE when the Roman governor of Judea, Gessius Florus, repeatedly and brazenly raided the Temple. When the Roman legate Cestius Gallus marched on Jerusalem to restore order, the Jewish rebels cut his column to pieces in the pass at Beth Horon. Rome answered with its best. Vespasian and his son Titus ground through Galilee and closed on Jerusalem. The revolt was led by one of the most interesting characters in the book, Josephus—an unreliable narrator, yet the primary source for much of the events of the Great Revolt. He would ultimately surrender to Roman forces at Jotapata in 67 CE, but the revolt would continue for several years amid increasing strife within the Jewish community.
In the summer of 70 CE, hearing about the divisions among the Jews, Titus took advantage and invaded Jerusalem. The Temple was burned, by tradition, on the Ninth of Av. The Temple Menorah was paraded through Rome, and an image of the procession was carved into the Arch of Titus. According to Josephus, the Romans took so much plunder that the value of gold in Syria dropped by half.
A generation later, while Trajan was off conquering Parthia, the Jews of Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia rose in the Diaspora Revolt and were all but annihilated. Alexandria, home to the greatest Jewish community in the world, was devastated for generations.
Then Hadrian resolved to plow Jerusalem’s ruins under and rebuild the city as a pagan colony, Aelia Capitolina, with a temple to Jupiter where G-d’s house had stood. The Jewish response was the most disciplined revolt of the three. Shimon bar Kosiba, remembered as Bar Kokhba, “son of a star,” and hailed by no less than Rabbi Akiva as the messiah, built an underground state with its own coins, stamped “For the Freedom of Israel.” His letters, dug out of Judean desert caves in the 1960s, reveal a hard, exacting commander demanding supplies of wheat and salt and insisting on obedience.
It took Hadrian’s best general, Sextus Julius Severus, summoned all the way from Britain, and a scorched-earth campaign to break Bar Kokhba. The historian Cassius Dio claims 580,000 Jews died and 985 villages were razed. Akiva was martyred. Jews were barred from Jerusalem. And under Hadrian, Judea itself was renamed Syria Palaestina. As ancient Rome understood and later empires and movements would recognize, the power to rename a people’s homeland is the power to erase their claim to it.
So why did Jerusalem fall? Strauss will not let us blame Rome alone–and neither does Jewish tradition.
Inside the besieged city, rival Jewish factions fought one another as savagely as they fought Titus, and burned grain stores that might have allowed the defenders to outlast the siege. The Talmud’s verdict is that the Second Temple was destroyed by sinat hinam, or “causeless hatred,” among Jews. Strauss, following the military history of Judea, is able to arrive at the same conclusion as the Rabbis: the factionalism that made the Jews impossible to pacify also made them impossible to unite. This double-edged sword proves time and time again to be a source of strength and weakness for the Jewish community.
If that doesn’t make you wince in 2026, you weren’t paying attention in 2023, when Israelis spent the months before October 7 tearing at one another over “judicial reform” while their enemies took notes. The lesson is not that Jews must agree. Jews have been defined by our curiosity and willingness to engage with new perspectives, and arguing is the cornerstone of the Jewish community. The lesson is that a people can survive its arguments; it cannot survive making enemies of its arguers.
So why read two centuries of repeated defeat? Because defeat is not the story. Survival is.
As Jerusalem starved, tradition records, the sage Yohanan ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of the city so he could stand before General—soon to become Emperor—Vespasian. He did not ask for the city or a throne, but instead for a school focused on the study of the Torah. Out of that small academy would emerge the “seedbed” of Rabbinic Judaism. According to one historian’s assessment, “The Torah may well have been all that remained of the Jews after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, but it was the single most important thing in Judaism, its essence and its real strength, which ultimately even proved to be stronger than Rome.” Rome’s other defeated nations assimilated into the empire and vanished. The Jews lost a Temple and built a library.
Memory itself became a weapon. Masada, a defeat, became modern Israel’s oath, “Masada shall not fall again,” sworn by young soldiers on the mountaintop. Bar Kokhba, a failure, lent his name to Zionist youth movements and Lag B’Omer holiday bonfires. Strauss is clear-eyed about the alchemy: the rebels failed, and their failure created the foundation for the movement that, 18 centuries later, restored what they died for. Today’s Jews hold everything Bar Kokhba’s generation prayed for–a sovereign state, an army, and powerful friends. October 7 was answered not by a sage smuggled across enemy lines, but by reservists overseas who got on planes, and by squadrons of F-35s. Rabbi Akiva would have been astonished. It should, however, not make us complacent. The other half of the ancient lesson, sinat chinam, is still an ongoing challenge for Israel and the Jewish diaspora.
My complaints about the book are small. The Diaspora Revolt chapter is the thinnest, but this is no failure of Strauss; the sources are scraps of papyrus and late chroniclers, and he wrings from them what can be wrung.
And readers seeking the inner spiritual world of the early rabbis will be disappointed. This is a military history, and the book lives more on the battlefield than in the Beit Midrash, the study hall. At times, Strauss’s battlefield focus leaves the reader wanting more of the legal imagination, theological crisis, and communal reinvention that made survival possible after military defeat. But that is also a reminder of what this book is and what it is not. Strauss has written a history of revolt, war, leadership, failure, and endurance. On those terms, the book succeeds.
These are quibbles about a book that does exactly what this moment in history demands: it hands an anxious generation facing an uncertain future the long view. It is an antidote to the endless, moment-by-moment news cycles and the short-sightedness of many of today’s commentators. It demonstrates that Jewish survival has never been a given, but that despite many defeats, Jews continue to survive. It is a reminder that we have outlasted bigger and stronger enemies than these.
Rome had the legions, the siege engines, and a Colosseum gilded with the Temple’s gold. But today, ancient Rome is a ruin; the Jews are a state, a people, and an argument that never ends. Resilience is not a slogan but a two-thousand-year discipline—to absorb the blow, adapt, rebuild, and refuse to hate each other more than the enemy hates us. Barry Strauss has written not only a history of rebellion, but a field manual for survival.
Michael Johnson is the programming director of the Jewish Policy Center.
