the roman jewish war essentially ended with the destruction of the temple
which demonstrated the futility of the immediate messianic hopes of the jews in the region
however fighting continued for a few more years either to the year 73 or possibly 74 of the common
era there are a few hold out fortresses of jews outside of jerusalem and the most significant of
those was undoubtedly masada which is shown here it's a dramatic cliff-top fortress it was actually
the palace of herod at one point his vacation palace and it's in a very forbidding part of the
judean desert and it is essentially impregnable the only way to really attack masada is to climb
its faces which are quite steep at least on two sides of it and uh very very difficult to actually
breach its defenses the rebels under al-azer ben yair had actually laid in a tremendous amount of
supplies so they could actually last there for many years nevertheless the romans were
brilliant and dogged engineers they ended up climbing the mountain and they built a siege tower
that was about 80 meters or 260 feet high to be able to breach the final wall when they
got to the very last barrier which was made of wood and they set it on fire the rebels located
within the compound realized that there was no way they could keep the roman soldiers out
and so on a very dramatic act almost a thousand rebels and we're talking here about families
not just soldiers but men women and children committed mass suicide overnight rather than
have themselves be turned over as slaves to the romans a very dramatic moment in jewish history
a complex moment that has reverberations in modern israeli ideology as well and hopefully we'll come
back to that when we get towards the end of the series the romans enacted significant punishment
on the remaining population and we will go into this in greater detail as we talk about the
diaspora and moving forward but for now let's just look at a few examples of it
symbolically we see the institution of the judea capta coins the romans actually printed quite a
few examples of this coin on the left they usually have a portrait of espage and you you can see him
wearing the laurel wreath of victory around his head and on the right there is a roman soldier
standing by a balsam pine which was one of the most important exports of israel at the time and
there is a forlorn woman with her head in her hand and she is representing the judean people
so judea capta means judea is taken captive and this was a form of propaganda you know coins are
like messages that circulate everywhere and people see them and it means something it was a very
important way of advertising state power uh just to show you a couple of examples of this data coin
sometimes the roman soldier is portrayed as being you know way out of proportion large compared to
the woman to show the the dominance of rome and in some especially chilling cases she's actually
shown with her hands bound behind her back as a slave to be uh taken away into captivity the
romans also celebrated this in rome proper with the erection of the arch of titus you see it here
and inside the arch when we zoom in a little bit there is a depiction of the romans taking
away spoils from the temple here's a better resolution look at it you can see that they're
clearly holding the candelabra called the menorah which would have stood in the
temple mount area a scholar at yeshiva university did some chemical analysis of the
the sculpture and actually was able to reconstruct how it would have looked to
the romans in the ancient period because they actually preferred their sculptures
to be painted so it would have looked like this to romans you can see on the left there's a sign
that says legends judeorum or the law of the jews perhaps that was referring to the
the tablets of the law or maybe a torah scroll you can see they're clearly carrying the menorah the
sign next to it says candelabra udeorum the jewish candelabra and on the right they have the sakura
yudayoram the holy thing of the jews which appears to be the shoghan with the the altar with the body
the uh the staves that would be used to uh carry it perhaps the romans also imposed some terrible
taxes uh and some restrictions on jewish activity which i'd like to explore in a later lecture
but there is a saving moment in all of this one thing that we have glossed over is the reaction
of the pharisees in particular a rabbi named jochen benzakai who saw early on that the revolt
against rome was doomed to failure and a rather dramatic moment he had himself smuggled out of
jerusalem to actually meet with vespasian directly this is one of the details that the talmud offers
and uh he makes a request of espacion actually three requests but the one that's especially
significant for us is he says to vespasian in hebrew we have the phrase taneli the khachameha
give me the city of yavna yamnya in greek and it's sages which meant that he wanted to have a safe
base where the pacifistic pharisees could retreat and could continue to engage in religious study
this ultimately was the seed from which future jewish leadership would grow and the future of
the jewish people would be preserved through these scholars studying the traditional values
and texts of judaism we will continue this in future lectures thank you very much for watching
you