בתשעה באב נגזר על אבותינו שלא ייכנסו לארץ וחרב הבית בראשונה ובשניה ונלכדה בית תור ונחרשה העיר
Last week I wrote about one of the five tragedies that we remember on the 9th of Ab: the day that the city of Jerusalem was plowed. Hadrian desecrated Jerusalem and founded a new pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, through a ceremony known in Latin as sulcus primigenius (see here) delimiting the perimeter of the new city using a bronze plow pulled by a two white oxen. This deliberate desecration of our Holy City took place on the 9th of Ab
Today we will begin to explain the fifth catastrophe that we remember in Tisha BeAb: the falling of the city of Betar (in the ancient Sepharadic prayer books used for the qinot of Tisha B’Ab this city is called “Bit-ter”).
we should understand first that the falling of Betar was not an isolated event, or a minor battle. It was the conclusion of a horrific war against Hadrian’s empire that took three and a half years: the rebellion of Bar Kokhba. The aftermath of this rebellion, which ended with the falling of Betar, was disastrous: 90% (sic) of the inhabitants of Judea were killed. As we will see later, this genocide was meant to be recorded in our collective memory, since not only do we remember it in Tisha B’Ab but unlike other tragedies, we refer to it every day, when we say the Birkat haMazon.
According to most historians Jerusalem was desecrated in the year 130 and Betar fell in 136. There are those who say, following the Mishnah, that although Hadrian’s plans to profane Yerushalayim were declared in 129, the city was plowed after the fall of Betar. One of the reasons that the details of this great national catastrophe are not very well known is that there is very little material written in our Talmudic sources on this subject: I calculate a little more than a dozen direct references. What we do find in the Talmud and the Midrashim are hundreds of stories —some explicit, other not—that describe the persecutions that we suffered, the murder of our Sages, the execution of the 10 martyrs, and many other tragedies that occurred in the times of Hadrian, who died in 138.
GEZEROT HASHMAD
in 129 Hadrian began his religious war against the Jews. His decree to penalize circumcision with death and the transformation of Jerusalem into a Roman idolatrous colony, was only the beginning. Hadrian also banned with the death penalty the study of the Tora in public, since he considered the Tora a code of law which was not recognized by the Roman Empire. He forbade the rest of Shabbat, since for the Romans, Shabbat was an unjustified leisure day, and in the Empire everyone had to work to maximize the production of taxes for the general benefit of Rome. He also forbade the reading of Megillat Esther and the lighting of the Hanukkah candles, because those Jewish stories were irrelevant to the Roman cultural heritage. He also prohibited other laws such as the use of the Mikve, the Tefiilin, the Talit and the Mezuza. In all this Hadrian exceeded himself more than any other tyrant, including the infamous Antiochus Epiphanes, the Greek ruler who died in 164 BCE. These anti-religious laws are known in Hebrew as “gezerot hashmad” or “gezerot adrianus“, the decrees that intended the elimination of Judaism and the Jewish people, which was Hadrian’s ultimate goal.
Hadrian was a passionate admirer of Greek culture. And unlike the previous Roman emperor, Trajan (reigned from 98 until 117), Hadrian did not intend to conquer more territories for Rome. But he did want to impose a cultural and religious hegemony: he wanted all citizens of Rome, including the Jewish population of the Roman province “Judea”, to follow laws and traditions of the Empire. For the Jews this would mean to renounce to the Tora, and assimilating collectively, that is, a national suicide. That is why from the year 130, Jews began to organize very courageous and risky rebellion against the Roman Empire. This rebellion was headed by Shimon Bar Kosiba (שמעון בן כוסיבא), later known by his “battle name”, Bar Kokhba.
For two years, between 130 and 132, Bar Kokhba secretly organized all the logistics and the strategy of the rebellion. The Gemara tells us, for example, that Bar Kokhba recruited 400,000 warriors, who had been trained in guerrilla tactics and in physical resistance. Among other tests, the men who wished to join Bar Kokhba’s army had to be able to uproot a tree while riding a horse.
To be continued….
