Thursday, July 23, 2015
After 2nd Temple Was Destroyed in 70 CE, What Happened To Our Families
Nadene Goldfoot
Our small trickle of a Jewish population of 14 million is so lucky to exist after millenniums of people trying to destroy us. We only make up 0.02% of the world population today, but long ago in King David's time, must have grown into a goodly %, for the great numbers slaughtered were huge. Above, Danny's father came from Russia with his family as a little boy via a guide in the night like the Mexicans of today leave Mexico. His mother was a German Jew, born in the USA with a paternal grandfather Greenstein from Russia. My paternal grandparents came from Lithuania. My grandfather died when my father was 4 years old so we knew nothing about his life, just that he came from "Russia." By the time my Bubba immigrated, her city of Lazdijai had been taken over by Poland. My mother had converted to Judaism. Here we live in the melting pot of the best country in the whole world for Jews since Judah had been destroyed.
The destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE was about to change the whole world and especially the Jews. Romans entered Judah when they replaced the Seleucids as the great power of the region. They granted the Hasmonean king Hyrcanus II limited authority under their Roman governor of Damascus.
Who was a Jew? In this Talmudic period from 100 BCE to 500 CE, anyone who had a Jewish mother was Jewish, or if the person had been rabbinically converted. Jews themselves are divided into 3 male castes; Cohen, Levi and Israelite. It is estimated that Cohanim and Levites each comprise about 4% of the Jewish people today, although about 40% that have tested their DNA are found to have the Cohen gene. This makes me wonder.
Herod was the son-in-law of Hyrcanus II and in 37 BCE was appointed King of Judea by the Romans. He was given almost unlimited autonomy in the country's internal affairs and became one of the most powerful monarchs in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. He loved Greco-Roman culture. So he launched a massive construction program including the cities of Caesarea and Sebaste, and the fortresses at Herodium and Masada. He also remodeled the Temple into one of the most magnificent buildings of its time. However, he failed to win the trust and support of his Jewish subjects He was not of the Davidic dynasty. He was the son of Antipater who was an Idumean and his mother was a Nabatean, named Cypros. His father appointed him governor of Galilee when he was a young man and he immediately showed a strong hand by executing dissidents. For this he was summoned by the Sanhedrin and only saved from death by the intervention of Hyrcanus and Sexus Caesar, governor of Syria.
In the middle of the 2nd century BCE, a Jewish writer of the 3rd book of the Oracula Sibyllina spoke to the "Chosen People" and told them that "every land is full of thee and every see." Other notables such as Strabo, Philo, Seneca, Luke-author of the Acts of the Apostles, Cicero, and Josephus all mentioned Jewish populations in the cities of the Mediterranean basin. Jews were in India and in China. King Agrippa I sent a letter to Caligula numbering the Jews in their provinces which were almost all of the Hellenized and non-Hellenized countries of the Orient. He didn't mention Italy or Cyrene having Jews, then. Josephus said that after Judea and Babylonia were in Syria and especially in Antioch and Damascus, where 10,000 to 18,000 Jews were massacred during the great insurrection. Philo said that Jews in Egypt numbered one million which was 1/8th of the population. Alexandria was the most important Jewish community. They were on par with their Ptolemaic counterparts and had close ties with them with Jerusalem before the destruction. Moving to Egypt then was a choice of the people there, not an imposition.
When Herod died in 4 BCE, Judah came under direct Roman administration. The population's anger kept growing against increased Roman suppression of their Jewish life and this resulted in sporadic violence which escalated into a full-scale revolt in 66 CE. Titus brought in his superior Roman forces and they were finally victorious by razing Jerusalem to the ground in 70 CE by burning it and defeating the last Jewish outpost at Masada in 73 CE.
The was total destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple's destruction was a huge catastrophe for the Jewish people. Hundreds of thousands of Jews perished in the siege of Jerusalem and elsewhere in the country, and then many thousands more were sold into slavery.
Shimon Bar Kokhba came along in 132 CE and regained Jerusalem from the Romans, giving the population a respite from Roman rule, but his attack on the ended in defeat after 3 years of fighting and he was killed in battle, regaining Judea as it was called by the Romans. The holy city was plowed up with a yoke of oxen. Judea was then renamed as Palaestinia just to be ornery against the Jews and Jerusalem was renamed as Aelia Capitolina.
After this, many Jews were taken as slaves and brought into other lands which they called "the Diaspora." By the 4th century CE, many of these slave populations may have served as the basis of later European Jewish communities.
The majority of Jews lived outside of Judea rather than in it, and they were already living outside of Judea at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. As many as a million Jews were already living in Alexandria. The Romans treated and put to the law all Jews, no matter where they lived. They collected an annual temple tax even though they had destroyed the Temple. They were treating Jews as a distinct ethno-national group.
There was a revolt in 115-117 CE in Egypt, Libya and Crete which likely decimated the Jewish Diaspora population. Wholesale massacres had taken place in Cyrenaica, Cyprus and Meseopotamia where there were large numbers of Jews. When Caesar Augustus had started his rule, there were over 7,000 Jews living in Rome, though this is only the number that is said to have escorted the envoys who came to demand the depositionof Archelaus. Bringmann talks of about 8,000 Jews who lived in Rome. Many sources say that the Jews made up about 1/10th of the population of Rome. In the year 62-61 BCE, the tax paid showed that the Jewish population of Asia Minor was about 45,000 adult males out of a total of at least 180,000 people. There was another in 132-135 of the Bar Kochba Revolt causing the Romans to engage in mass executions and enslavement. The Romans then destroyed large numbers of Judaean towns, and forbade Jews from settling in Jerusalem or its environs. there was no further Jewish government or overarching legal system in Judaea. Jews had now become permanently exiled people with no national homeland. The restrictions continued such as taxation, discrimination, social exclusion which further alienated and marginalized remaining Jews in the Negev and Galilee.
What the Romans did was favor the settlement of culturally pagan Syro-Phoenicians and others. These would have been the ancestors of the people the Arabs have displaced.
For Arabs came from the Arabian peninsula and regions nearby it, but left their land when Islam was created by Muhammad before and after 632 to proselytize. They burst forth from their homeland to conquer the greater part of the then civilized world. They are a Semitic people like the Jews, coming from Abraham's first son, Ishmael by the Egyptian woman, Hagar, who was Abraham's wife's handmaid.
Judaea became known as Syria Palestina. The Romans did their best to ensure that Jerusalem would ever rise again or that there would ever be another Jewish Temple.
Jewish people were now in exile. Some time around the year 615, Muhammad spoke to the Jews of Mecca and Medina as though they had been expelled 2 times from the land of Judaea by the servants of Allah and told them it was a punishment for their rejection of Jesus and of the prophet, (himself).
He was wrong. The outside world in which Jews were living in (the Diaspora) happened over the centuries since they had returned from Babylon where they had a taste of living outside. Then they had to live through the Roman destruction and the subsequent rule of Christians and Muslims. For generations to come, the Jews were to be seen as an exiled and persecuted people for much of their history. The Babylonian captivity created the promise of return and getting on with their lives.
So we find many Jews were living outside of the Land of Israel before the Roman imperial oppression and before the Jewish uprisings for independence and freedom from Roman rule in their homeland. Many went back to 4 BCE like the settlement in Puteoli, Italy and originated in voluntary emigration by the lure of trade and commerce. I would think that the scholars tended to remain in Judah for as long as they could until they too, saw the writing on the wall and fled, most likely before the burning started.
Jews were living in France before 70 CE. Organized Jewish communities were living there in the period of the Roman Empire. When Christianity entered, their position deteriorated because the church councils took steps to enforce the conventional anti-Jewish codes. Under the Merovingians, some Jews occupied prominent positions at their court.
From the 8th century on, Jews were under the protection of Charlemagne and his house, so Jewish merchants began to settle in France for purposes of trade, importing foreign luxuries and establishing new communities up the Rhone Valley and into Champagne. In the 9th century, southern France was the main center of the activity of the international traders, the RADANITES.
Sephardi originally meant Jews descended from the communities that existed in Spain before their expulsion of 1492. Today we use Sephardim to mean all descendants of the communities of North Africa and the Near East who follow the Sephardi rite of worship and their cultural traditions. Before the middle of the 20th century, gene flow between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi groups was restricted by distance, but some cities found both living there, each attending their own synagogues. Language would have been a barrier and some small differences in customs, for instance, Sephardi allowing rice to be eaten during Passover but Ashkenazis not allowing it. I wonder if Jacob's wife, Rachel, was this beautiful. I hope so.
Resource: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Romans.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
The Jews of Khazaria 2nd edition, Kevin Alan Brook
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0007_0_07174.html- Genetic Ancestry, Jewish
https://www.google.com/search?q=Sephardi+Jews,+pictures&biw=1024&bih=677&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDYQ7AlqFQoTCL3W3rPn8cYCFc1biAodOZ0PrA#imgrc=sWBiEDr6U7q7MM%3A
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| Danny and I and our Aliyah party 1980 Danny's mother's surname was Cohen. His father was a Levite, making him one, too. He became a high school history teacher and then earned his master's in testing and evaluation and became a counselor. His father's surname had been Iskowitz, but changed to become more American. |
Our small trickle of a Jewish population of 14 million is so lucky to exist after millenniums of people trying to destroy us. We only make up 0.02% of the world population today, but long ago in King David's time, must have grown into a goodly %, for the great numbers slaughtered were huge. Above, Danny's father came from Russia with his family as a little boy via a guide in the night like the Mexicans of today leave Mexico. His mother was a German Jew, born in the USA with a paternal grandfather Greenstein from Russia. My paternal grandparents came from Lithuania. My grandfather died when my father was 4 years old so we knew nothing about his life, just that he came from "Russia." By the time my Bubba immigrated, her city of Lazdijai had been taken over by Poland. My mother had converted to Judaism. Here we live in the melting pot of the best country in the whole world for Jews since Judah had been destroyed.
The destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE was about to change the whole world and especially the Jews. Romans entered Judah when they replaced the Seleucids as the great power of the region. They granted the Hasmonean king Hyrcanus II limited authority under their Roman governor of Damascus.
 |
| Danny's Bar Mitzvah and family in Brooklyn 1951 His grandmother was Sarah Cohen nee Greenstein |
In the middle of the 2nd century BCE, a Jewish writer of the 3rd book of the Oracula Sibyllina spoke to the "Chosen People" and told them that "every land is full of thee and every see." Other notables such as Strabo, Philo, Seneca, Luke-author of the Acts of the Apostles, Cicero, and Josephus all mentioned Jewish populations in the cities of the Mediterranean basin. Jews were in India and in China. King Agrippa I sent a letter to Caligula numbering the Jews in their provinces which were almost all of the Hellenized and non-Hellenized countries of the Orient. He didn't mention Italy or Cyrene having Jews, then. Josephus said that after Judea and Babylonia were in Syria and especially in Antioch and Damascus, where 10,000 to 18,000 Jews were massacred during the great insurrection. Philo said that Jews in Egypt numbered one million which was 1/8th of the population. Alexandria was the most important Jewish community. They were on par with their Ptolemaic counterparts and had close ties with them with Jerusalem before the destruction. Moving to Egypt then was a choice of the people there, not an imposition.
When Herod died in 4 BCE, Judah came under direct Roman administration. The population's anger kept growing against increased Roman suppression of their Jewish life and this resulted in sporadic violence which escalated into a full-scale revolt in 66 CE. Titus brought in his superior Roman forces and they were finally victorious by razing Jerusalem to the ground in 70 CE by burning it and defeating the last Jewish outpost at Masada in 73 CE.
 |
| Leaving Jerusalem |
Shimon Bar Kokhba came along in 132 CE and regained Jerusalem from the Romans, giving the population a respite from Roman rule, but his attack on the ended in defeat after 3 years of fighting and he was killed in battle, regaining Judea as it was called by the Romans. The holy city was plowed up with a yoke of oxen. Judea was then renamed as Palaestinia just to be ornery against the Jews and Jerusalem was renamed as Aelia Capitolina.
 |
| The Arch of Titus leading away the loot from the Temple and Jewish slaves |
The majority of Jews lived outside of Judea rather than in it, and they were already living outside of Judea at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. As many as a million Jews were already living in Alexandria. The Romans treated and put to the law all Jews, no matter where they lived. They collected an annual temple tax even though they had destroyed the Temple. They were treating Jews as a distinct ethno-national group.
There was a revolt in 115-117 CE in Egypt, Libya and Crete which likely decimated the Jewish Diaspora population. Wholesale massacres had taken place in Cyrenaica, Cyprus and Meseopotamia where there were large numbers of Jews. When Caesar Augustus had started his rule, there were over 7,000 Jews living in Rome, though this is only the number that is said to have escorted the envoys who came to demand the depositionof Archelaus. Bringmann talks of about 8,000 Jews who lived in Rome. Many sources say that the Jews made up about 1/10th of the population of Rome. In the year 62-61 BCE, the tax paid showed that the Jewish population of Asia Minor was about 45,000 adult males out of a total of at least 180,000 people. There was another in 132-135 of the Bar Kochba Revolt causing the Romans to engage in mass executions and enslavement. The Romans then destroyed large numbers of Judaean towns, and forbade Jews from settling in Jerusalem or its environs. there was no further Jewish government or overarching legal system in Judaea. Jews had now become permanently exiled people with no national homeland. The restrictions continued such as taxation, discrimination, social exclusion which further alienated and marginalized remaining Jews in the Negev and Galilee.
What the Romans did was favor the settlement of culturally pagan Syro-Phoenicians and others. These would have been the ancestors of the people the Arabs have displaced.
Judaea became known as Syria Palestina. The Romans did their best to ensure that Jerusalem would ever rise again or that there would ever be another Jewish Temple.
Jewish people were now in exile. Some time around the year 615, Muhammad spoke to the Jews of Mecca and Medina as though they had been expelled 2 times from the land of Judaea by the servants of Allah and told them it was a punishment for their rejection of Jesus and of the prophet, (himself).
He was wrong. The outside world in which Jews were living in (the Diaspora) happened over the centuries since they had returned from Babylon where they had a taste of living outside. Then they had to live through the Roman destruction and the subsequent rule of Christians and Muslims. For generations to come, the Jews were to be seen as an exiled and persecuted people for much of their history. The Babylonian captivity created the promise of return and getting on with their lives.
So we find many Jews were living outside of the Land of Israel before the Roman imperial oppression and before the Jewish uprisings for independence and freedom from Roman rule in their homeland. Many went back to 4 BCE like the settlement in Puteoli, Italy and originated in voluntary emigration by the lure of trade and commerce. I would think that the scholars tended to remain in Judah for as long as they could until they too, saw the writing on the wall and fled, most likely before the burning started.
 |
| Worms, Germany |
Jews migrated into NW Europe, including NE France and N. Germany with settlement documented back to the 6th century.
Jews were living in France before 70 CE. Organized Jewish communities were living there in the period of the Roman Empire. When Christianity entered, their position deteriorated because the church councils took steps to enforce the conventional anti-Jewish codes. Under the Merovingians, some Jews occupied prominent positions at their court.
From the 8th century on, Jews were under the protection of Charlemagne and his house, so Jewish merchants began to settle in France for purposes of trade, importing foreign luxuries and establishing new communities up the Rhone Valley and into Champagne. In the 9th century, southern France was the main center of the activity of the international traders, the RADANITES.
From the 10th century, Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish which was written with Hebrew letters but using a language that was mostly from German.
Jews were in Lithuania from 1321. By 1398 a community of Karaites lived in Troki. by 1495 (3 years after the 1492 Spanish expulsion) Jews were living in Vilna, Grodno and Kovno totalling 10,000.
Poland had Jews living there since the 9th century. They were thought to have come there from Germany or Bohemia or from the kingdom of Kiev or the Byzantine Empire and reinforced by some from Khazaria.
Ukraine's Jews are thought to have come from Khazaria in waves, the Caliphate and Byzantium between the 9th and 12th centuries, from Central Europe in the 14th-15th centuries, and from Poland in the 16th to 17th centuries. It's always been an anti-Semitic center.
Latvia had Jews from the 16th century. 2,000 lived there in 1795 when it was annexed to Russia. In 1835 Courland and Livland were excluded from the Pale of Settlement where Jews were allowed to live as they couldn't live in Russia proper according to Catherine II"s law.
Belarus or Belorussia was called White Russia. Jews moved there from Poland and were living in Grodno in the 12th century at Brest-Litovsk in the 14th century and Pinsk from 1506; capital is Minsk.
Crimea had Jewish settlement from the 1st century BCE. From the 7th century to 1117, eastern Crimea was controlled by the Khazars. Karaites ived there from the 12th century centered at Kaffa. Many of those Jews converted to Islam under Tatar rule.
Russia had Jews since since classical times. In 986 Jews lived there, but Catherine II put a stop to that in 1791 and the law remained till WWI.
Jews were in Lithuania from 1321. By 1398 a community of Karaites lived in Troki. by 1495 (3 years after the 1492 Spanish expulsion) Jews were living in Vilna, Grodno and Kovno totalling 10,000.
Poland had Jews living there since the 9th century. They were thought to have come there from Germany or Bohemia or from the kingdom of Kiev or the Byzantine Empire and reinforced by some from Khazaria.
Ukraine's Jews are thought to have come from Khazaria in waves, the Caliphate and Byzantium between the 9th and 12th centuries, from Central Europe in the 14th-15th centuries, and from Poland in the 16th to 17th centuries. It's always been an anti-Semitic center.
Latvia had Jews from the 16th century. 2,000 lived there in 1795 when it was annexed to Russia. In 1835 Courland and Livland were excluded from the Pale of Settlement where Jews were allowed to live as they couldn't live in Russia proper according to Catherine II"s law.
Belarus or Belorussia was called White Russia. Jews moved there from Poland and were living in Grodno in the 12th century at Brest-Litovsk in the 14th century and Pinsk from 1506; capital is Minsk.
Crimea had Jewish settlement from the 1st century BCE. From the 7th century to 1117, eastern Crimea was controlled by the Khazars. Karaites ived there from the 12th century centered at Kaffa. Many of those Jews converted to Islam under Tatar rule.
Russia had Jews since since classical times. In 986 Jews lived there, but Catherine II put a stop to that in 1791 and the law remained till WWI.
By the 16th century, Jews populated communities going from the Loire in the West to the Dnieper in the East, and from Rome in the South to the Danish border in the North.
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| My great aunt, Jenny Criss nee Jermulowske, spoke Yiddish and English |
Jews could tell by listening to someone where they had come from. There was Western Yiddish, now almost extinct, and Eastern Yiddish, subdivided into a northern dialect centered in Lithuania and a southern dialect extending from Poland to the Ukraine. and Romania. In the USA, the southern dialect dominated on the stage and the northern dialect on the lecture platform. My father only spoke Yiddish until he started 1st grade, where he had to start learning English. His mother never did learn English, so her children always spoke Yiddish with her. I learned such phrases as "kiss mere tuchus!" and "Oy Gevalt!" and "Potch'n tuchus!"
In the 9th and 10th centuries, Judaism became the most widespread religious influence upon the Khazars.
Jews from Khazaria's royal house had converted to Judaism. The state of Khazaria became independent in the 630's and 640's. I note that Muhammad had died in 630 as well and Islam spread quickly from then on. Some Khazars became Muslims from about 690 to the late 10th century. The Khazars became the dominant power in southern Russia and they displaced other ethnic groups, most notably, the Bulgars who were a mixture of Hunnic, Turkic and Iranian groups mixed together. Jews from eastern Europe facing anti-Semitism could find refuge in Khazaria as the royal family had chosen to convert to Judaism and allowed their people to choose whatever religion they wanted for themselves. So Khazaria was a vast land with many large Jewish settlements. The Khazars had 100 cities or clans. Settlements were located in the Don and Volga river valleys, on the Crimean peninsula, in today's Ukraine and north of the Caucasian mountain range. However, archaeological evidence indicates that Jews have lived in the Balkans, in the Caucasus including Georgia, along the northern shores of the Black Sea, and in other areas of eastern Europe since Roman times.
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| Yasmin Levy, Sephardic singer and song writer from Jerusalem with fans even in Pakistan |
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| Some of those Jews led to extermination camps |
There were about 8 million Ashkenazi Jews just prior to the outbreak of World War II of 1941. 6 million were slaughtered during the war.
650,000 Jews were living in Palestine in 1948.
Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, about 6 million in the USA, and 2 million in the Diaspora.
Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, about 6 million in the USA, and 2 million in the Diaspora.
Resource: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Romans.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
The Jews of Khazaria 2nd edition, Kevin Alan Brook
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0007_0_07174.html- Genetic Ancestry, Jewish
https://www.google.com/search?q=Sephardi+Jews,+pictures&biw=1024&bih=677&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDYQ7AlqFQoTCL3W3rPn8cYCFc1biAodOZ0PrA#imgrc=sWBiEDr6U7q7MM%3A
Labels: Arabs, Ashkenazi, bar Kokhba, Damascus, Egypt, Herod, Jerusalem, Judh, King Hyrcanua II, Rome, Sephardi, Syria, Syro-Phoenicians, Yiddish
Comments:
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Great post, but please check the grammar. You wrote the opposite of what you intended about the Romans wanting Jerusalem to rise again.
I find generalized sweeps of Jewish history to be less helpful than individual community histories.
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I find generalized sweeps of Jewish history to be less helpful than individual community histories.
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