THE TEMPLE MOUNT was now a heap of rubble. Apart from the western wall of the Devir, only the huge walls supporting the Temple platform had survived the onslaught. Once they had dealt with the Temple, Titus’s soldiers began to smash the elegant mansions in the Upper City and pulled down Herod’s beautiful palace. Archaeologists have revealed how thoroughly and ruthlessly the Roman troops went about their task. Houses collapsed and lay buried under piles of debris that were never cleared away. The Tyropoeon Valley was completely blocked with fallen masonry and silted up by the torrents that poured down the hillsides during the winter rains. The city walls were wholly demolished except for a section to the west of the Upper City: this served to protect the Camp of the Tenth Legion Fretensis, which now occupied the site of Herod’s palace. Visitors found it difficult to believe that Jerusalem had ever been an inhabited city. The emperors were at pains to warn the Jews against attempting any further rebellion. For years after 70 they struck coins depicting a Jewish woman with bound hands sitting desolately under a palm tree, with the legend JUDAEA DEVICTA or JUDAEA CAPTA. The emperors Vespasian (70–79), Titus (79–81), Domitian (81–96), and Trajan (98–117) all ordered the Tenth Legion to hunt out and execute any Jew who claimed to be a descendant of King David. But the Romans tried to be fair. Palestine was now a full province of the empire, yet King Agrippa II, who had tried to keep the peace, was allowed to retain his title and rule Galilee, on the understanding that it would revert to Rome after his death. All Jewish land was confiscated and in theory became the property of the emperor, but in practice the Romans left most of the former owners in actual possession, recognizing that nearly all the surviving landlords of Palestine had been opposed to the revolt.
But despite these measured policies, the Roman victory continued to be a source of pain and humiliation for the Jews. They were reminded of it in so many distressing ways. The half-shekel Temple tax paid by all adult male Jews was now donated to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. In 81 a magnificent triumphal arch was erected in Rome to celebrate Titus’s victory, depicting the sacred vessels that had been carried away. A century later these objects were still proudly displayed in the imperial capital. Rabbi Eleazar said that he had seen the Temple Veil, which was still stained with the blood of the sacrificial victims, and the high priest’s headband inscribed with the words “Sacred to YHWH.”1 In Jerusalem, the soldiers of the Tenth Legion could display the imperial eagles freely now and make sacrifices to their gods in the ruined streets. They may also have built a shrine to Serapis-Asclepius, god of healing, near the Pool of Beth-Hesda.2
Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish world, was now little more than a base for the Roman army. The Tenth Legion has left little trace of its long sojourn, since the soldiers probably lived in wooden huts and tents beside Herod’s three great towers—Hippicus, Phasael, and Mariamne—which Titus had allowed to remain. Roman soldiers and Syrian and Greek civilians were also brought to live in the desolate city. But some Jews remained. A few houses had been left standing on the hill to the south of the Roman camp, which Josephus had mistakenly called Mount Zion. By the time of his writing, people had forgotten that the original ’Ir David had been on the Ophel hill; they assumed that David had lived in the Upper City in the better part of town, where their own kings and aristocrats had their residences. Today this western hill is still called Mount Zion, and, to distinguish it from the original, I propose to adopt the commonly used alternative spelling “Mount Sion.” Once a measure of calm had returned to the area, a small number of Jews settled on Mount Sion; they could not worship on the Temple Mount, since it had been totally polluted, but they built seven synagogues on this southern hill. Our sources are the Christian historians Eusebius of Caesarea (264–340) and Epiphanius of Cyprus (c. 315-403), who had access to local traditions and tell us that after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish Christians returned from Pella and settled alongside the Jews on Mount Sion under the leadership of Simeon. They used to meet in one of the houses that had survived destruction, which was later identified with the “Upper Room” where the disciples had seen the risen Christ and received the Holy Spirit. Epiphanius tells us that on their return from Pella, the Jewish Christians settled around the Upper Room “in the part of the city called Sion, which part was exempted from destruction, as also were some of the dwellings around Sion and seven synagogues … like monks’ cells.”3 Eusebius makes it clear that the Jerusalem church continued to be entirely Jewish, ruled by Jewish “bishops.”4 They shared many of the ideals of their Jewish neighbors on Sion. Unlike Paul’s converts, they did not believe that Jesus had been divine: after all, some of them had known him since he was a child and could not see him as a god. They viewed him simply as a human being who had been found worthy to be the Messiah. They probably honored the places in Jerusalem that were associated with Jesus, especially the Mount of Golgotha and the nearby rock tomb whence Jesus had risen from the dead. Many Jews liked to visit the tombs of their revered masters, and it would have been natural for them to commemorate Jesus’s sepulcher. Some of them began to engage in mystical speculation about Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. There was a Jewish legend that Adam had been buried on Mount Moriah, the site of Solomon’s Temple; by the second century, Jewish Christians said that he had been buried at Golgotha, the place of Adam’s skull.5 They were beginning to evolve their own mythology about Jerusalem, and this notion expressed their belief that Jesus was the new Adam, who had given humanity a fresh start. During this tragic period, many Jews entered their church: perhaps the idea of a crucified Messiah who had risen again helped them to hope for the revival of their old cult.
Others turned to asceticism. In the rabbinical writings we hear of Jews who wanted to ban meat and wine, since these could no longer be offered to God in the Temple. Life could not continue as before: Jews must express their changed status in rituals of mourning and abstinence. The loss of the Temple was a profound shock. Thirty years after the destruction, the author of the Book of Baruch suggests that the whole of nature should mourn: now that the Temple had gone, there was no need for the earth to bring forth a harvest nor the vine to yield grapes; the heavens should withhold their dew and the sun dim its rays:
For why should light rise again
Where the light of Zion is darkened?6
The Temple had represented the heart of the world’s meaning, the core of the faith. Now life had neither value nor significance, and it seems that in these dark days many Jews lost their faith. It is not true, as has often been asserted, that the Jews had wholly outgrown their Temple. Even those Jews who had begun to evolve other ways of experiencing the divine believed that Jerusalem and its sanctuary were central to their religion. Jews would need all their creativity to survive this devastating loss.
During the siege of Jerusalem, the distinguished Pharisee Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was smuggled out of the city in a coffin. Like many of the Pharisees, he had been totally opposed to the revolutionary extremism of the Zealots. The mass suicide in 73 of the Zealots of Masada, who preferred to die rather than submit to Rome, was repugnant to him. As a result of his determined moderation, he and his companions were the only Jewish leaders to retain credibility after the destruction of the Temple. Rabbi Yohanan approached Emperor Vespasian to ask his permission to found a school where Jews could study and pray: this, he insisted, would be a spiritual center, not a hotbed of revolutionary fervor. He was given leave to establish the academy of Yavneh on the coast, and there he and his fellow rabbis, many of whom had served as priests in the Temple, began to build a new Judaism. When the Jews lost their Temple in 586, they had found consolation in the study of Torah. Now at Yavneh and the other similar academies that developed in Palestine and Babylonia, the rabbis who are known as the Tannaim began to codify the body of oral law which had been developing over the centuries. Finally, this new law code would be called the Mishnah. It would become a symbolic new Jerusalem where Jews could experience the divine Presence wherever they happened to be. The rabbis taught that whenever a group of Jews studied the Torah together, the Shekhinah, God’s Presence on earth, would sit among them.7 Many of the laws were concerned with the Temple ritual, and to this day when Jews study this legislation they are engaged in an imaginary reconstruction of the lost Temple in which they recover a sense of the divine at its heart. Once the Tannaim had completed their work, later generations of rabbis known as the Amoraim would begin to comment on their exegesis. Finally the Talmud would enshrine these rabbinical discussions, wherein Jews argued—and continue to engage in passionate debate about their Torah—over the centuries, overcoming the barriers of place and time. The accumulated layers of commentary and interpretation would become, as it were, the walls of a symbolic Temple surrounding the Presence that Jews could glimpse during their studies.
The rabbis also stressed that charity and compassion could now replace the old animal sacrifices.
Once, as Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was coming forth from Jerusalem, Rabbi Joshua followed after him and beheld the Temple in ruins.
“Woe to us,” Rabbi Joshua said, “that this, the place where the iniquities of Israel were atoned for, is laid waste!”
“My son,” Rabbi Yohanan said, “be not grieved. We have another atonement as effective as this. And what is it? It is acts of loving-kindness, as it is said: ‘For I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ ”8
Practical compassion had long been seen as an essential accompaniment to the Zion cult: now acts of charity alone would have to atone for the sins of Israel—a revolutionary idea in the ancient world, where religion was still almost unimaginable without some form of sacrifice. Now that the Temple was gone, the rabbis would teach their fellow Jews to experience God in their neighbor. Some taught that the mitzvah “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” was “the great principle of Torah.”9 Offenses against a fellow human being were now said to be equivalent to a denial of God himself, who had made men and women in his image. Murder was, therefore, not merely a crime in Jewish law but a sacrilege.10 God had created a single man at the beginning of time to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had destroyed the whole world; similarly, to save a life was to redeem the whole world.11 To humiliate anybody, even a goy or a slave, was tantamount to destroying God’s image.12 Jews must realize that their dealings with others were sacred encounters. Now that the divine could no longer be experienced in sacred space, Jews must find it in their fellow human beings. The Pharisees had always stressed the importance of charity. But now the loss of the Temple had helped them to make that transition toward a more humane conception of the sacred, which we noted in the previous chapter.
The rabbis had not given up hope that one day their Temple would be rebuilt: the last time the Temple had been destroyed, there had been a restoration against all the odds. But they believed that it was wiser and safer to leave this rebuilding to God. Yet Jews must not forget Jerusalem. The rabbis drew up legislation to discourage emigration from Palestine and demanded that the Eighteen Benedictions be recited three times a day, in place of the Morning and Evening Sacrifice. Jews must recite these prayers wherever they were: if they were traveling, they should dismount and turn their faces in the direction of Jerusalem, or at least direct their hearts toward the ruined Devir.13 These benedictions show that in spite of everything, Jerusalem was still regarded as God’s habitation:
Be mindful, O Lord our God, in thy great mercy towards Israel, thy people, and towards Jerusalem, thy city, and towards Zion, the abiding place of thy Glory, and towards thy Temple and towards thy habitation, and towards the Kingdom of the House of David, thy righteous anointed one. Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, the builder of Jerusalem.14
Some rabbis imagined the Shekhinah (the personified divine presence) lingering still beside the western wall of the Devir, which had, providentially, survived the destruction.15 Others saw the Shekhinah leaving Jerusalem reluctantly, by slow degrees: for three years it had “stayed continuously on the Mount of Olives, and was crying out three times a day.”16 Jews remembered that Ezekiel had seen a vision of the Glory of YHWH returning to Jerusalem over the brow of the Mount of Olives, so they liked to gather there as a declaration of faith in God’s eventual return to their Holy City.
Other Jews turned more readily to mysticism for consolation. This was a form of spirituality that the rabbis sometimes mistrusted, but the mystics themselves found no incompatibility between their mystical flights to God’s heavenly Throne and rabbinic Judaism. Indeed, they frequently ascribed their visions to some of the more distinguished rabbis in the academies. After the loss of the Temple, Throne Mysticism acquired a wholly new relevance. The earthly replica had, alas, been destroyed, but its celestial archetype was indestructible, and Jews could still reach it in their imaginary aliyah to the divine realm. Thus the author of 2 Baruch, who was writing some thirty years after the destruction of the Temple, insisted that the heavenly Jerusalem was eternal. It had been “with God” from before the beginning of time and “was already prepared from the moment that I decided to make Paradise.” It was graven forever on the palms of God’s hands, and one day this heavenly reality would descend to earth once more.17 It would take physical form again in an earthly city on the old sacred site, and God would dwell among his people in the mundane world. At about the same time, the author of 4 Enoch had a similar vision of the incarnation of the celestial Jerusalem. The earthly Zion had suffered and died but its heavenly counterpart was still with God. One day “the city that is now invisible [shall] appear.”18 This new Jerusalem would be the earthly paradise: those who dwelt within it would enjoy a perfect intimacy with God; sin would be vanquished and death swallowed up in victory.19 The anguish of severance, loss, and dislocation which had descended upon the Jewish world in 70 CE would be overcome and the primal harmony of Eden restored.
Jewish Christians also had Throne Visions. During the reign of Domitian, when the Christians were being persecuted by the Roman authorities, an itinerant preacher called John had a vision of the heavenly Temple, in which the martyrs were the new priests, clad in their white garments and serving before the throne. He imagined the celestial liturgy of Sukkoth but found a crucial difference from the old cult. There had always been a void at the heart of the Second Temple: once the Ark was lost, the Devir was empty. But John saw Christ, mysteriously identified with God himself, seated on the heavenly throne. He was, therefore, the fulfillment of the old Zion cult. Yet these Christians still shared the hopes of their fellow Jews and looked forward to a final restoration. One day the heavenly Jerusalem would descend to earth. In a final vision, John saw “the holy city, coming down from God out of heaven. It had all the radiant glory of God.”20 There would be no Temple in this New Jerusalem because Christ had taken its place. The divine man was now the principal locus of the “glory.” But Jerusalem was still such a potent symbol to a Jewish Christian like John that he could not imagine God’s final apocalypse without it. The celestial city would have to take physical form on earth for the Kingdom to be complete. At last the earthly paradise would be restored and the river of life well up from beneath God’s throne to bring healing to the whole world.21
Jews and Christians were experiencing their God in remarkably similar ways. They respectively saw Jerusalem and Jesus as symbols of the sacred. Christians were beginning to think about Jesus in the same way as some of the Throne Mystics were envisaging Jerusalem: as the incarnation of a divine reality that had been with God from the beginning and that would bring salvation from sin, death, and the despair to which humanity is prone. But despite this similarity, Jews and Christians were starting to feel extremely hostile and defensive toward one another. As far as we know, there were no gentile Christians living on Mount Sion or in the ruined city of Jerusalem. They were interested in the heavenly Jerusalem, as described by John the Preacher, but had no interest in the earthly city. In the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, written during the eighties and nineties, we can see the way that Christians who subscribed to Paul’s version of Christianity were beginning to regard Jerusalem and the Jewish people.
Interestingly, it was Luke, the gentile Christian, who had the most positive view of the parent faith. His gospel begins and ends in Jerusalem: it starts with the vision of Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, in the Hekhal and finishes with the disciples returning to Jerusalem after watching Jesus ascend to heaven from the Mount of Olives. They “went back to Jerusalem full of joy; and they were continually in the Temple praising God.”22 Continuity is very important to Luke, as it was for most people in late antiquity. Innovation and novelty were suspect, and it was crucial for religious people to know that their faith was deeply rooted in the sanctities of the past. Hence Luke, like Paul himself, did not want to sever all links with Jerusalem and Judaism. Jesus commands the disciples to begin their preaching in the Holy City, which is still the center of the world and the place where every prophet must meet his destiny. In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke makes his hero Paul very respectful of the Jerusalem church and deferential to James the Tzaddik. He paints a highly idealized picture of this early cooperation and tries to hide the bitterness that seems in fact to have characterized the relations of Paul and James. Luke shows Paul, like Jesus before him, feeling obliged and impelled to make the journey to Jerusalem, even though he is putting his life in danger. But Luke is equally clear that Christians cannot stay in Jerusalem: they must take the gospel from the Holy City to “all Judaea and Samaria and then to the ends of the earth.”23 Luke’s favorite name for Christianity is “the Way”: the followers of Jesus are continual travelers, with no abiding city in this world.
Matthew and John, however, were far less positive about either Jerusalem or the Jewish people. Both were Jewish converts to Paul’s church, and their work may reflect some of the debates that were currently raging between Jews and Christians on such topics as the nature of Christ and the status of Jerusalem. Matthew has no doubts about the earthly Zion. It had once been a sacred place—he is the only evangelist to call it the Holy City—but it had rejected Jesus and put him to death, and, foreseeing this, Jesus had prophesied its destruction. Jerusalem had become the Guilty City. When Matthew makes Jesus describe the catastrophe that will befall the city in 70, he links it with the cataclysms that will occur at the End of History. He saw the destruction of Jerusalem as an eschatological event that heralded Jesus’s glorious return.24 When Jesus died on the hill of Golgotha outside the city, the Veil separating the Hekhal from the Devir had split in two: the old Temple cult had been abrogated, and now everybody—not merely the old priestly caste of the Jews—could gain access to the divine in the person of Christ. John emphasizes this even more strongly. Like others at this time, he insisted that God was no longer to be found in a Temple but in a divine man. In the Prologue to his gospel, he asserts that Jesus is the Logos, the “Word” that had existed “with God” from before the beginning of time and that God had uttered to create the world. This heavenly reality had now descended to earth, taken flesh, and revealed God’s “glory” to the human race.25 John was writing in Greek. There was no Greek equivalent of the Hebrew term “Shekhinah,” which Jews were careful to distinguish from the utterly transcendent reality of God itself. Besides seeing Jesus as the incarnate “Word” and the “glory” of God, John may also have seen him as the Shekhinah in human form.26
But like Matthew, John was extremely hostile to the Jews and shows them repeatedly rejecting Christ. Both evangelists thus laid the ground for the antagonism to the Jewish people that would lead to some of the most shameful incidents of Christian history. Increasingly, as we shall see, Christians found it impossible to tolerate their spiritual predecessors and from a very early date saw the integrity of their own faith as dependent upon the defeat of Judaism. Thus John indicates that Jesus set out by rejecting the Temple cult: he makes Jesus go to Jerusalem and drive the money changers out of the Court of the Gentiles at the very beginning of his mission, not at the end. He tells the Jews: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” John explains that he was “speaking of the Temple of his body.”27 Henceforth the risen body of the Logos would be the place where people would encounter the divine Presence. There was a confrontation between Jesus and the most sacred institution in Judaism from the start, therefore, and the days of the Temple were numbered. Jesus made it clear that holy places such as Jerusalem, Mount Gerizim, and Bethel had been superseded.28 The Shekhinah had withdrawn from the Temple precincts,29 and by rejecting this revelation the Jews had allied themselves with the forces of darkness.
The Christians must have seen the hand of God in the next development in Jerusalem. In 118, the Roman general Publius Aelius Hadrianus became emperor, one of the ablest men who ever held this office. His ambition was not to extend the empire but to consolidate it. Hadrian wanted to build a strong and united polity, a brotherhood in which all citizens, regardless of their race and nationality, could feel at home. One of the chief ways in which he tried to publicize and implement this ideal was by the royal progress through his imperial domains. Hadrian spent almost half his reign on the road with a huge and magnificent entourage, which was meant to give bystanders the impression of a whole capital city on the march. In each city he would hear petitions and present gifts to the local people, hoping to leave behind the image of a benign and powerful government. He particularly liked to leave a permanent memento of his visit, in the form of a building or monument: a temple for Zeus in Athens or aqueducts in Athens, Antioch, Corinth, and Caesarea. This would provide a physical link with Rome and permanently embody the emperor’s benevolence toward his people. When Hadrian arrived in Jerusalem in 130, he decided that his gift to the people of Judaea would be a new city. The generous emperor would replace the unsightly ruin and desolate army base of Jerusalem with a modern metropolis called Aelia Capitolina: it would thus bear his own name and honor the gods of the Capitol in Rome, who would be its patrons.
Hadrian’s plan filled the Jewish people with horror. There was actually going to be a temple to Jupiter on Mount Zion, the site of YHWH’s holy Temple. Shrines to other deities would also appear all over the city. Over the centuries, the names “Jerusalem” and “Zion” had become central to the identity of Jews all over the world: they were inseparable from the name of its God. Now these names were to be replaced with the names of a pagan emperor and his idols. Jewish Jerusalem had been in ruins for sixty years: now it would be buried by order of the imperial power. It could never rise again. Zion and all that it stood for would vanish from the face of the earth. Hitherto the people of Jerusalem had experienced war and destruction; they had twice watched a victorious army raze the city to the ground, several times seen their Temple polluted and the walls demolished. But this was the first time that a building project had been experienced as an inimical act. Building had always been a religious activity in Jerusalem: it had held the threat of chaos and annihilation at bay. But now construction and building had become a weapon in the hands of the victorious empire. Aelia Capitolina would annihilate Jewish Jerusalem, whose shrine had symbolized the whole of reality and the innermost soul of its people. All this would disappear under the Roman city. This imperial building program would be an act of de-creation: chaos would come again. It would not be the last time in the history of Jerusalem that a defeated people would have to watch their holy city and its beloved landmarks disappear under the streets, monuments, and symbols of a hostile power and feel that its very self had been obliterated.
To be fair to Hadrian, he almost certainly had not foreseen this reaction. Who would not prefer a pleasant, modern city to this miserable ruin? The construction would bring employment, and the new metropolis wealth to the area. As they stood, the ruins of Jerusalem were an unhealthy reminder of past enmity, which must be transcended in the interests of brotherhood and amity. Jews and Romans must put the past behind them and work together for the peace and prosperity of the region. Hadrian had no love for Judaism, which appeared to him a primitive religion. The stubborn particularity of the Jews militated against the ideal of a culturally united empire: they must be dragged—by force, if necessary—into the modern world. Hadrian would not be the first ruler to destroy, in the name of progress and modernity, traditions that were inextricably bound up with a nation’s sense of identity. In 131 he issued a set of edicts designed to make the Jews abandon their peculiar customs and fit in with everybody else in the Greco-Roman world. Circumcision—a barbaric practice, in his view—the ordination of rabbis, the teaching of Torah, and public Jewish meetings were all outlawed. This was another blow to Jewish survival. Once these edicts had been passed, even the most moderate rabbis realized that another war with Rome was unavoidable.
A letter written in Aramaic by Bar Kochba, requesting palm branches, myrtles, citrons, and willows for the rituals of Sukkoth. It is possible that Bar Kochba tried to revive the cult on the ruined Temple Mount.
This time the Jews were not going to be caught unawares. Their new campaign was meticulously planned and organized down to the smallest detail. No fighting occurred until all preparations were in place. The revolt was led by Simon Bar Koseba, a hardheaded, practical soldier, who led his troops in guerrilla warfare, carefully avoiding pitched battle. Once the Tenth Legion had been forced to leave Jerusalem to fight the Jews in the countryside, Bar Koseba’s soldiers occupied the city. With the help of his uncle Eleazar, a priest, Bar Koseba forced all the remaining gentiles to leave the city and probably tried to resume as much of the sacrificial cult as possible on the Temple Mount. The great Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest scholars and mystics of his day, hailed Bar Koseba as the Messiah and liked to call him Bar Kokhba, “Son of the Star.” We have no idea whether Bar Koseba regarded himself in this light: he was probably too busy planning his highly successful campaign to have much time for eschatology. But coins were struck in Jerusalem bearing the legend SIMON THE PRINCE and ELEAZAR THE PRIEST, which could mean that they saw themselves as the kingly and priestly messiahs who had been regarded as the joint redeemers of Jerusalem since the time of Zerubbabel. Other coins bore the words FOR THE LIBERATION OF JERUSALEM. But it was hopeless. Bar Koseba and his men were able to keep their rebellion going for three years. Eventually Hadrian had to send one of his very best generals, Sextus Julius, to Judaea. The Jewish army was too small to hold out indefinitely against the might of Rome, and Jerusalem—still lacking either walls or fortifications—was impossible to defend. The Romans systematically wiped out one Jewish stronghold after another in Judaea and Galilee. Dio Cassius tells us that the Romans took fifty fortresses, devastated 985 villages, and killed 580,000 Jewish soldiers: “as to those who perished by hunger, pestilence, or fire, no man could number them. Thus almost the whole of Judaea was laid waste.”30 Finally in 135, Bar Koseba was driven out of Jerusalem and killed in his last citadel at Bethar. But the Jews had also been able to inflict such heavy casualties on the Romans that when Hadrian reported the victory to the Senate he could not use the customary formula “I am well and the army is well.”31 The Jews were no longer regarded as a miserable, defeated race. Their conduct in this second war had won the grudging respect of Rome.
This, however, gave the Jews little comfort. After the war, Jews were banned from Jerusalem and the whole of Judaea. The little community on Mount Sion was disbanded, and there were no Jewish communities left in the city’s environs. The Jews of Palestine now concentrated in Galilee: Tiberias and Sepphoris became their chief cities. They had to hear the painful news of the final obliteration of the Holy City and the creation of Aelia Capitolina. The work was entrusted to the legate Rufus Timeius. First the city and the ruins had to be plowed over, following an ancient Roman rite for the founding of a new settlement.32 To the Jews, this seemed a fulfillment of the prophecy of Micah: “Zion shall be plowed as a field.”33 Next Hadrian transformed the desolate site into an up-to-date Hellenic city, with temples, a theater, public baths, a pool dedicated to the nymphs (which may have been thought to have healing properties), and two marketplaces. One forum was in the east of the city, near what is now Stephen’s Gate, the other on the second-highest point of the Western Hill on what is now Muristan Square. The Camp of the Tenth Legion remained on the former site of Herod’s palace, on the highest point in town. Hadrian built no new city walls but instead erected a series of monumental arches. One was about 440 yards north of the city to commemorate his victory over Bar Koseba; another marked the main entrance to Aelia on the site of the present Damascus Gate; two others appeared in each of the forums. The arch in the eastern forum is known today as the Ecce Homo Arch, because Christians thought that it was the place where Pilate had displayed Jesus to the people, crying: “Behold the man!”34 The chief entrance gate in the north of Aelia led into a square with a column, which supported a statue of the emperor. The two main streets of Aelia (known as cardines, the “hinges,” of the city) issued from the square inside the main northern entrance gate: one cardo ran along the route of today’s Valley Street (Tariq al-Wad), while the Cardo Maximus followed the ridge of the Western Hill. Hadrian also laid down a grid of streets that is still, roughly, the basis of the city’s thoroughfares today.
Far more distressing to the Jews, however, were the religious symbols that appeared triumphantly in the Holy City of YHWH. Aelia was indeed dedicated to the three Capitoline gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, but after the Jewish War, Hadrian seems to have thought better of locating the Temple of Jupiter on the old Temple Mount. No visitor ever reports seeing a pagan temple on Herod’s platform, but they did see two statues there: one of Hadrian and the other of his successor, Antoninus Pius. The Temple of Jupiter could have been built beside the chief commercial forum of Aelia on the Western Hill. A temple to Aphrodite was also built beside the western forum on the site of the Golgotha hill. Christians would later accuse Hadrian of deliberately desecrating this holy place, but it is most unlikely that the emperor had even registered the existence of the obscure church of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. St. Jerome (c. 342-420) believed that this temple was dedicated to Jupiter but that the peak of the Golgotha hill protruded above the platform of the sanctuary surmounted by a statue of Aphrodite, although he does not explain how a temple to Jupiter came to have such a prominent statue of the goddess. Because the ground was so uneven in this part of the city, the architects had to fill in depressions by building supporting walls for a plaza, rather as Herod had done on the Temple Mount, though on a smaller scale. Aelia was now an entirely pagan, gentile city, indistinguishable from any other Roman colonial settlement. By the third century the town had spread eastward and there was extensive building at the southern end of the Temple Mount. When the Tenth Legion left Aelia in 289, the Romans built a new city wall. Jewish occupation of the city seemed a thing of the past.
Yet, surprisingly, the Jews’ relations with Rome improved during these years. Emperor Antoninus Pius (138–61) relaxed Hadrian’s anti-Jewish legislation, and the practice of Judaism became legal once more. The Bar Kokhba war had shown Rome that it was important to send able men to Judaea who had firsthand knowledge of the region, and the rabbis obviously appreciated this. They often praised the conduct of the Roman legates.35 In Galilee they were allowed to develop a new type of leadership: in 140, Rabbi Simon, a descendant of Hillel, was proclaimed patriarch. Gradually he assumed monarchical powers and came to be recognized as head of all the Jews of the Roman empire. Since Simon was also said to be a descendant of King David, he united the ancient with the modern, rabbinic authority. The patriarchate gave Jews a new political focus that compensated in some small degree for their loss of Jerusalem; it reached its apogee under Simon’s son Judah I (200–20), who was known as “the Prince” and lived in regal splendor. He was said to be a personal friend of Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (206–17), who was not of Roman descent, and therefore did not despise foreigners, and was particularly interested in Judaism.
Like most of the rabbis, the patriarchs believed that it was essential to accept the political situation. There were a few radicals, such as Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, who lived as a fugitive in hiding from the Roman authorities until his death in 165. But the majority were convinced it was dangerous for Jews to nurture dreams of reconquering Jerusalem and rebuilding the Temple. Jews should wait for God to take the initiative. “If children tell you, Go build the Temple—do not listen to them,” warned Rabbi Simeon ben Eliezar.36 This task was reserved for the Messiah. Instead, the rabbis made other places the focus of Jewish spiritual life. Developing an insight of the Pharisees, they taught that the home had in some sense replaced the Temple, calling the family house a mikdash m’at (“small sanctuary”): the family table replaced the altar, and the family meal replicated the sacrificial cult. In the same way, the synagogue was also a reminder of the Temple. The building itself had an element of holiness and, like the vanished Jerusalem sanctuary, had a hierarchy of sacred places in which only certain people were allowed. The women had their own section, as in the Temple; the room where the sacrifice was conducted was holier; then came the bimah (reading desk) and, finally, the Ark containing the scrolls of the Torah, the new Holy of Holies. Thus people could still approach the inner sanctum step by step. The bimah was usually placed on a higher level so that it became a symbolic sacred mountain: when a member of the congregation was called upon to read the Torah, he still had to make an ascent (aliyah) as he mounted the podium. Under the rabbis, the Sabbath also acquired a new importance. Observing the Sabbath rest was now held to be a foretaste of the world to come: once a week, therefore, Jews could enter another dimension of existence. Shabbat had become a temporal temple, where Jews could meet their God in consecrated time, instead of in sacred space.
Now that Jerusalem had become inaccessible to Jews and the Temple had gone, the rabbis had had to develop their understanding of the divine Presence. What had it meant to say that God dwelt in a man-made building? Had he been present nowhere else? The rabbis would often compare the Presence in the Devir to the sea, which could entirely fill a cave without reducing the amount of water in the sea as a whole. Again, they frequently asserted that God was the Place of the world but the world was not his place.37 His immensity could not be contained by the physical world; on the contrary, God contained the earth. Some of the rabbis even suggested that the loss of the Temple had liberated the Shekhinah from Jerusalem. The exiles in Babylon had believed that YHWH had left the Temple to join them in exile.38 Now the rabbis insisted that throughout Jewish history the Shekhinah had never deserted Israel but had followed them wherever they went: to Egypt, to Babylon, and back to Jerusalem in 539.39 Now the Shekhinah had gone into exile with the Jews yet again. It was present whenever Jews studied Torah together; it skipped from one synagogue to another and stood at the door of the synagogue whenever Jews recited the Shema.40 Indeed, God’s presence with Israel had made the Jewish people a temple for the rest of the world. In the old days, YHWH’s Temple on Zion had been the source of the world’s fertility and order. Now this function was performed by the Jews: “Were it not for [God’s presence in Israel]”, the rabbis argued, “the rain would not come down, nor would the sun shine.”41 But always the emphasis was on community. God’s presence was conditional upon the unity and charity of the people. It was felt when two or three Israelites studied Torah together; prayer was not valid unless ten men assembled to form a minyan; if Jews prayed “with devotion, with one voice, one mind, and one tone” the Shekhinah would be in their midst; if not, it ascended to heaven to listen to the harmonious worship of the angels.42
After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Jewish home came to replace the lost Temple. At Passover, Jews could no longer sacrifice lambs in the traditional manner; instead, they commemorate their liberation from Egypt with a family meal at which the father, clad in white, officiates as a priest, the table becomes a new altar, and the candlesticks recall the Temple Menorah.
Yet just as the Babylonian exiles had evolved a sacred geography when there was no possibility of returning to their holy land, the rabbis still praised the holiness of Jerusalem long after the city had been polluted and the Temple destroyed. They still put Zion and the Devir at the center of the Jewish map of the world:
There are ten degrees of holiness: the land of Israel is holier than other lands.… The walled cities of the land of Israel are still more holy … within the walls of Jerusalem is still more holy.… The Temple Mount is still more holy … the rampart is still more holy … the Court of the Women is still more holy … the Court of the Israelites is still more holy … the Court of the Priests is still more holy … the space around the Altar is still more holy … the Hekhal is still more holy … the Devir is still more holy, for none may enter therein save only the high priest on Yom Kippur.43
The rabbis continued to speak of Jerusalem in the present, even though the building no longer existed: the reality that it symbolized—God’s presence on earth—was eternal, however, and still worthy of contemplation. Each level of holiness was more sacred than the last, and as the worshipper gradually ascended to the Holy of Holies, the groups of people who were permitted to enter were progressively reduced. As in the former exile, this spiritual geography had no practical relevance but was a mandala, an object of contemplation. The rabbis now insisted that all the key events of salvation had taken place on Mount Zion: the primal waters had been bound there on the day of creation; Adam had been created from its dust; Cain and Abel had offered their sacrifices there, as had Noah after the Flood. The Temple Mount had been the site of Abraham’s circumcision, his binding of Isaac, and his meeting with Melchizedek; finally the Messiah would proclaim the New Age from Zion and redeem the world.44 The rabbis were not interested in historical fact. They would not have been perturbed to hear that Noah’s Ark had first touched down on Mount Ararat, not on Mount Zion, or that another ancient tradition located Abraham’s meeting with Melchizedek at En Rogel. Jerusalem was a symbol of God’s redemptive Presence in the world, and in that sense all saving events must have taken place there. Now that it was a forbidden city, Jerusalem was a more effective symbol of transcendence than ever. Whatever the physical state of Aelia, the spiritual reality that the Temple and city had replicated was eternal. We shall see that Jews continued to meditate on the ten levels of holiness for centuries when Jerusalem was still closed to them or the Temple Mount in alien hands. It became a model which helped them to imagine how God could make contact with humanity and also a map of their internal world.
Yet by the beginning of the third century, some Jews were beginning to renew contact with the earthly Jerusalem. The ban was still on the statute books, but under the sympathetic emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the Romans did not enforce it as strictly as before. First, some Jews of humbler rank had begun to slip through the Roman lines. Simon of Kamtra, a donkey driver, told the rabbis that in the course of his work he often had to pass the Temple Mount: did he really have to tear his clothes every time he saw the ruins?45 Then Rabbi Meir was given permission to live in Aelia with five or six of his pupils, though this small community survived only a few years.46 There were certainly no Jews living permanently in Jerusalem after the death of Patriarch Judah I in 220. Yet by the middle of the third century, Jews were allowed to go to the Mount of Olives and mourn the Temple from afar. At some point after this—we do not know exactly when—they were also given permission to go up to the ruined Temple Mount on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction. According to a document found in the Cairo Geniza, the pilgrims would begin by standing barefoot on the Mount of Olives, gazing at the ruins, and tearing their garments, crying: “This sanctuary is destroyed!” Then they would go into Aelia, climb up to the Temple platform, and weep “for the Temple and the people and the House of Israel.” These sad rites were very different from the old joyful pilgrimages, because the Jews now encountered desolation and emptiness instead of a Presence. Yet the annual ceremony on the Temple Mount helped them to face up to their grief, confront it, and come through on the other side. The ceremony would end with prayers of thanksgiving, and then the pilgrims would “circle all the gates of the city and go around all its corners, make a circuit and count its towers,” just as their forefathers had done when the Temple was still standing.47 They were not deterred by the fact that these gates had been built by the Romans; this was a symbolic rite of passage from despair to hope. In circling the city as though it still belonged to them, the pilgrims were looking forward to the final messianic deliverance: “Next year in Jerusalem!”
After the Bar Kokhba war, the Jewish Christian community had also been expelled from Aelia, because, whatever their religious persuasion, the ban had applied to them too as circumcised Jews. But some of the Greek and Syrian colonists imported by Hadrian were probably Christians, because we hear of a wholly gentile church in Aelia thereafter.48 These non-Jewish Christians took over the “Upper Room” on Mount Sion, which was outside Aelia proper and had therefore been spared by Hadrian’s contractors. This was just an ordinary private house: Christianity was not yet one of the permitted religions of the Roman empire and, indeed, was often persecuted by the authorities. Christians were not permitted to build their own places of worship. But they liked to call the house of the Upper Room the “Mother of the churches,” since this was where Christianity came into being. The gentile Christians also possessed a throne which, they believed, had belonged to James the Tzaddik, the first “bishop” of Jerusalem. There were not many other Christian “holy places” in Aelia, however. The city that Jesus had known had now been obliterated by Hadrian’s new town. Golgotha, for example, was now buried under the Temple of Aphrodite, and Christians would not want to worship there. But, Eusebius tells us, the site was “pointed out” to visitors.49 Melito, bishop of Sardis, had seen it when he visited Palestine in 160, and he told his flock back home that Golgotha was now in the middle of the city.50 In Jesus’s day, of course, Golgotha had been outside the walls, but now the buried hillock was next to Aelia’s main forum.
Not many Christians came to Palestine as pilgrims. Eusebius says that “crowds” came “from all over the world” to visit Jerusalem,51 but even he could only name four pilgrims, one of whom was Melito, who had absolutely no interest in the city of Aelia. It was “worthless now because of the Jerusalem above.”52 Melito had come to Palestine for scholarly, not devotional, reasons: he hoped to further his biblical studies by researching the country’s topology. Gentile Christians were primarily interested in the heavenly Jerusalem, as described by John in the Book of Revelation—a text that was quoted more frequently in the second century than any other Christian scripture. They looked forward to the New Jerusalem that would descend to earth at the end of time and transform its earthly counterpart.53 But nobody was particularly interested in visiting Aelia. Eusebius was writing apologetics: he wanted to get Christianity legalized, and he probably exaggerated the number of pilgrims to demonstrate the universal appeal of his faith. There is no evidence that Jerusalem was a major pilgrim center for Christians during the second and third centuries. In fact, gentile Christians tended to agree with the gospels of Matthew and John. Jerusalem was now the Guilty City because it had rejected Christ. Jesus had said that in future people would not gather in such holy places as Jerusalem but would worship him in spirit and truth. Devotion to shrines and holy mountains was characteristic of paganism and Judaism, both of which Christians were anxious to transcend.
Thus Jerusalem had no special status on the Christian map. The bishop of Caesarea was the chief prelate of Palestine, not the bishop of Aelia. When Origen, the illustrious Christian scholar, settled in Palestine in 234, he chose to establish his academy and library in Caesarea. When he traveled around the country he was, like Melito, chiefly interested in biblical topology. He certainly did not expect to get a spiritual experience by visiting a mere geographical location, however august its associations. It was, he believed, only pagans who sought God in a shrine and thought that the gods dwelt “in a particular place.”54 It was interesting to visit a place such as Bethlehem, where Jesus had been born, and see the manger (which had—apparently—been preserved), because it proved that the gospel story was accurate. But Origen was a Platonist. In his view, Christians should liberate themselves from the physical world and seek the wholly spiritual God. They should not cling to earthly places but “seek the heavenly city in place of the earthly.”55
Yet even though there was no widespread cult of Jerusalem, it seems that the local Christians of Aelia liked to visit sites outside the city connected with Jesus. Eusebius tells us that they frequented the summit of the Mount of Olives, whence Jesus had ascended to heaven; the Garden of Gethsemane in the Kidron Valley, where he had prayed in agony before his arrest; and the River Jordan, where he had been baptized by John the Baptist.56 Grottoes were regarded as particularly numinous places in the Greco-Roman world, and Aelia’s Christians also visited two caves. The first was in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus; the second was on the Mount of Olives, where the risen Christ was said to have appeared to the apostle John.57 Christians did not go to these caves to remember Jesus the man; there was, as yet, little interest in Jesus’s earthly life. The caves were important because they had witnessed a theophany: in both, the incarnate Logos had been revealed to the world.
But the cave on the Mount of Olives had an added significance. It was said to be the place where Jesus had instructed his disciples about the forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem and the Last Days.58 The Christians seem to have been much stirred by the sight of the Jews mourning their lost Temple on the Mount of Olives. Origen found these ceremonies pathetic and misguided, but he also noted that the plight of the Jews was another proof of the veracity of the gospels. Prophecy and inspired oracles were very important in late antiquity, so the fact that Jesus had accurately predicted the destruction of the Jewish Temple would have impressed Origen’s pagan adversaries. Ever since they had rejected Jesus, he pointed out, “all the institutions in which the Jews took such pride, I mean those connected with the Temple and the Altar of Sacrifice and the rites which were celebrated and the vestments of the high priests, have been destroyed.”59 This was profoundly satisfying. The Christians of Aelia seem to have developed their own counter-ceremony on the Mount of Olives. Eusebius says that they liked to go up to the cave there “to learn about the city being taken and devastated.”60 Looking down on the desolate Temple platform, with the statues of the victorious emperors, they could contemplate the defeat of Judaism and the survival of their own faith, which may not have been winning many converts in Palestine at this time but was making great strides in the rest of the empire. As they meditated on Roman Aelia, reflecting on the fact that it had been built on the ruins of the Guilty City, they had visual proof of the truth of their own religion. Yet there was a disquieting note. Like the rabbis, Jesus and Paul had both stressed the supreme importance of charity and loving-kindness. In fact, Jesus had gone so far as to say that Christians should love their enemies. But these third-century Christians seem to have indulged in some rather unholy gloating when they contemplated the fate of the Jews who had dwelt in this city before them. Monotheists have always had to come to terms with the fact that previous occupants of Jerusalem venerated it as a holy city, and the integrity of their own tenure often depends upon their response to this fact. The Christians of Aelia did not seem to have got off to a good start here: it did not seem as though the experience of living in the city where Christ had died and risen again had inspired them to live up to their noblest ideals.
Eusebius became bishop of Caesarea in 313, a date of great significance for the Christians of the Roman empire. Like Origen, Eusebius was a Platonist and had no interest in shrines or sacred space. Christianity, in his view, had left these primitive enthusiasms behind. There was nothing special about Palestine, he asserted: “it in no way excels the rest [of the earth].”61 Aelia was simply the Guilty City: it was quite unworthy of veneration and helpful to Christians only insofar as it symbolized the death of Judaism. By this time few people even remembered the original name of the city: Eusebius himself always called it Aelia. For him—as for most gentile Christians—“Jerusalem” meant the heavenly Zion, a reality that was entirely out of this world. But in 312, Constantine had defeated his imperial rival Maxentius at the battle of Milvian Bridge and attributed his victory to the God of the Christians. In 313, the year of Eusebius’s accession, Constantine declared that Christianity was one of the official religions of the Roman empire. From being persecuted, marginalized, with no stake in this world, no political power and no holy cities, Christianity would now begin to acquire a mundane dimension. Ultimately this would radically change the way that Christians saw “Aelia.”
