(10) BARRY STRAUSS –

JEWS VS ROME: TWO CENTURIES OF REBELLION AGAINST THE WORLD’S MIGHTIEST EMPIRE (2025)

 

No surprise here for my wildcard tenth place entry for best of 2025 – this book has a fascinating subject written in an engaging style.

The Roman Empire has been argued to be the greatest empire in history, not least by me in my Top 10 Empires – a superpower that was almost unchallenged for the two centuries or so of its peak extent. Almost unchallenged, that is, as it faced revolts even at its peak and none more so than those of its Jewish subjects, with not just one but three revolts between 66 AD to 136 AD – two in the province of Judea itself and the third among the wider Jewish Diaspora outside the empire.

“No other people in the empire – and there were many other rebel nations – had such a record”.

The Great Revolt or Jewish War from 66 AD to 74 AD was the big one – at least in the historical record it left behind, primarily by the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus, a combatant on the Jewish side before swapping sides to the Romans, although also casting a shadow as far as the Gospels with their foreshadowing of Jerusalem’s doom.

After that came the Diaspora Revolt – or more precisely, Diaspora Revolts – from 116 AD to 117 AD, and then the other big one, the one in which Roman emperor Hadrian literally wiped the province of Judea off the map, the Bar Kokhba Revolt from 132 AD to 136 AD.

This book was an eye-opener, revealing the Jewish revolts to be more than the minor road bumps for the Roman Empire I had perceived them to be, albeit major for the Jews. The Romans took the revolts seriously indeed, terminating them with extreme prejudice – not only for the challenge the revolts themselves posed, but even more so for the bigger challenge that loomed behind them, the Parthian Empire, “the sole empire remaining in Rome’s orbit that could challenge its power”.

“The rebels of 66 CE humiliated the Roman legions. They first threatened, then succeeded in contributing to a Roman defeat at the hands of the only rival empire that Rome still feared. They cost the legions a huge expenditure in blood and treasure before finally the rebellions were put down”.

As this book points out, Rome committed an incredibly large proportion of its imperial armed forces to putting down revolts in a small province.

Here the book had further revelations – the Jewish revolts always seemed hopelessly doomed and self-destructive but this book illustrated the strategic and tactical calculations of the rebels that lent the revolts better prospects that one might have thought, albeit even if only from completely hopeless to mostly hopeless.

Only to shift back to completely hopeless again, from failure to play to their strengths and better prospects of guerilla warfare, but even more so from the fundamental disunity of the revolts, as the war against Rome was also a Jewish civil war.

In the end, the Jewish revolts amounted to something akin to a ghost dance – indeed, what I have dubbed half the Bible elsewhere, the great messianic ghost dance – but which contributed to the rise of a ghost dance that actually won, Christianity.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)