The movement in Trajan’s reign reveals, where inner class-relationships are concerned, certain common features with processes in Judaea in the years 66-70. To judge by the premature outbreak in Alexandria in October, 115, and by the passive attitude of the Jewish population of the city till it was attacked by the Greeks in 116, most of the wealthier class stood aside from the revolt, whereas in Cyrene, the elimination of the hellenizing upper group in 73 had opened the way for the radicalization of the Jewish masses and their adherence to the revolutionary movement. While the Jewish upper class in Jerusalem and Judaea did revolt in 66, it did so because it was swept away by the more powerful current of the social revolution — which was intimately connected with the extremist and Zealot trends — and was destroyed as a result. At that time the wealthy of the Diaspora in Alexandria and Cyrene recoiled from rebellion; in Egypt they collaborated with Rome to bring the extremists to book. In the Diaspora revolt in Trajan’s time, they stood aside, but were nevertheless overwhelmed and destroyed.
It may be doubted whether there ever arose in the early Roman Empire any movement which so imperilled Roman authority as did the Jewish Diaspora revolt in the reign of Trajan. No one of Rome’s subject peoples had risen in active rebellion on this scale, and none was both located within and without the imperial frontiers and distributed over several important provinces of the Empire itself. Nor do we know of any instance of so extensive a degree of cooperation between various communities which were both within the Empire and hostile to it. The aid given by the tribes of southern Britain to the peoples of northern Gaul in Julius Caesar’s time preceded the principate,[1819] and if the Dacian king Decebalus was in correspondence with the king of Parthia in order to strengthen his position against Rome,[1820] he did not succeed in forming an effective military alliance.[1821] Tacitus, writing not long before the Jewish rebellion, could express his satisfaction at the disunion and fratricidal strife of the Germans, and pray “that this mutual hatred persist and continue among the peoples if they cannot love us, since... fate can grant no greater boon than the quarrels of our enemies.”[1822] It remains but to add that the Parthian kingdom, for all its internal weaknesses, was the only power within reach of the Roman Empire capable of measuring up to her, and therefore constituted a constant threat to Rome; scanty as is our knowledge of the relations between the Jews of the Empire and Parthia during the period of 115-117 or immediately before, it is hard to refrain from supposing that the Jews saw in Parthia a potential ally, and that the Parthian rulers were ready to exploit Jewish hostility to Rome in the event of a military confrontation.
Jewish tradition saw the rebellion of Ben Kosba as a continuation of the Diaspora rising,[1823] and even if this is incorrect, it is clear that the events of 115-117 influenced the outlook of Hadrian, who ascended the imperial throne a short time after the tumultus had passed its height, and had previously taken part in its suppression in Cyprus. From Trajan he doubtless derived his estimate of the Jewish people as an important factor and a grave problem bearing on the safety of the eastern frontier. This attitude was also affected by his sympathy for hellenism, which inclined him to see the Jews of Eretz Yisrael as an element which marred the integrity of hellenism in the east. The tumultus, the last great collision between Jews and Greeks in the hellenistic and Roman periods, must have made a deep impression upon him, and may have decisively influenced his decision, fifteen years later, to transform Jerusalem into a citadel of Graeco-Roman civilization.
The revolt’s failure led directly to the destruction of the three important Jewish centres of Cyrene, Egypt and Cyprus. The archaeological evidence in Cyrenaica can be interpreted to indicate the renewal there of Jewish settlement as early as the 3rd century, but the supposition needs further confirmation.[1824] Jewish communities existed in Cyprus, according to inscriptions, by the 4th century, when the decree prohibiting Jewish entry appears to have been forgotten. Papyrological material in Egypt conveys that “Jewish life in the country was completely paralysed”;[1825] only in the 3rd century do we hear again of evidence for the existence of a Jewish population consisting of more than scattered individuals.[1826] The annihilation of these three large communities may well have intensified national feeling in Eretz Yisrael — one case at least is known of a Cyrenean Jew who fought among Ben Kosba’s warriors[1827] — but had not these Diaspora centres met their end under Trajan, they might have furnished vital assistance to Judaea’s war against Hadrian; their ruin doomed the second revolt to failure before it had begun.
As a result of the rising (Pulmus Qitos) the scholars of Eretz Yisrael prohibited the teaching of Greek to the younger generation.[1828] The prohibition, indeed, did not last, if it was ever rigorously applied — and some recent scholars have ascribed to it no more than qualified application — for the family of Rabban Gamliel “permitted the teaching of Greek to (its) sons because they were associated with the Roman government”;[1829] by the early 3rd century many epitaphs were being written in Greek in the great cemetery of Beth Shea’rim. But this did not mean that the Kultur-kampf of Judaism and hellenism was at an end; it merely died down, and revived in different form in the struggle between Judaism and Christianity in the 4th century.
The failure of the rising also terminated the period of the active onslaught of Judaism as a missionary religion proselytizing among gentiles outside Eretz Yisrael. The collision symbolized by the confrontation of the God of Israel and the god Serapis,[1830] no longer takes political form, except perhaps when imperial statues are smashed at Tiberias in the following century.[1831] On the other hand, it is not impossible that the defeat under Trajan caused the expansion of Jewish influence over the African continent. The report of the judaization of Libyan tribes in the Aurez Mountains of Algeria lacks, apparently, reliable evidence, and it is not easy to prove that Jewish influence in western Africa originated in the flight of Jews from Cyrenaica westward before and after the revolt. Yet archaeology permits no doubt that reciprocal influences were at work between Libyan Jewry and Libyan-speakers in the ist century of the current era, and the conclusion to be drawn from Jonathan the Weaver’s departure to the desert, which hints at the dispersal of extremist elements on the fringes of the Sahara, and derives confirmation from the instructive analogies of Hirbet Qumran and the work of the Sanusi order in Cyrenaica in the present century — assists the credibility of an influence exerted by the insurgents upon the nomadic Libyan tribes and even of active cooperation between them. The result of such influence is likely to have been the spread of Judaism over north and central Africa after the rebellion’s failure.[1832]
1821
Debevoise (
1824
An epitaph from Ptolemais, the style of whose letters seems to belong to the 3rd century, is Jewish (
1825
1828
M.
1832
J. Basnage,