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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from www.HowStuffWorks.com.

Katie Lambert

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I’m Katie Lambert.

Sarah Dowdey

And I’m Sarah Dowdey. We’ve been focusing a lot lately on charismatic rebel leaders, and specifically guerilla warfare. We’ve talked about Garibaldi, and we’ve talked about Toussaint L’Ouverture, and we have another one for you today.

Katie Lambert

His name is Bar Kokhba, and we had talked a bit about some Jewish revolts in our podcast on King Herod’s tomb. We talked a little bit about Masada, but this, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, or the second Jewish revolt, is an incredibly important event in Jewish history, and one Sarah and I had missed in history, so that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

To give you a very short summary, it’s the Jews versus the Romans in Judea in 132 to 135 A.D. Spoiler alert: The Romans win, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Sarah Dowdey

Things weren’t always that bad between the Jews and the Romans. We have Pompeii subduing Judea in 63 B.C. Between that, we have Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents, that bit of history that most people probably do know. But there was a policy of tolerance in this early Roman rule. They didn’t interfere much with Jewish religious practices.

Katie Lambert

Even though they thought they were a bit strange. They didn’t understand why Jews didn’t eat pork or have images of their god around, or why they circumcised babies, but there wasn’t a lot of animosity. It was more just, “Oh, look at your strange, quaint customs.”

But there were some big differences, fundamental differences, between the Jews and Romans. I was reading a little bit from Martin Goodman’s Rome in Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. He was saying basically that Rome was all about political and meatier power while Jerusalem was completely centered on religion. This was something that was bound to cause a clash at some point or another.

Sarah Dowdey

Yeah. It results in different ideas about government and about people.

Katie Lambert

And about morality.

Sarah Dowdey

One example, the Jews didn’t celebrate birthdays with any kind of ritual, while that is a huge deal for the Romans, especially celebrating the emperor’s birthday.

Katie Lambert

To give you an idea of how things usually went, people the Romans conquered generally assimilated fairly well into Roman culture. Local beliefs and local customs were absorbed, and things usually went fairly smoothly from there.