Hadrian‘s Jerusalem

S. Weksler-Bdolah has provided a sweeping and authoritative study of Hadrian’s Jerusalem. Continuously inhabited for over 5000 years, Jerusalem, a city sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, has been the subject of intensive archaeological exploration since the 19th c. Although many excavations have been limited in scale due to the need to work around the modern infrastructure, there is general consensus about Jerusalem’s extent and layout throughout most periods of its history but not for Roman Jerusalem. Around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt (the second Jewish revolt against the Romans) in 132-135/136,1 Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina after himself (Publius Aelius Hadrianus) and Jupiter Capitolinus, who replaced the God of Israel as the city’s new patron deity. A relatively isolated and impoverished mountain town, Jerusalem did not hold the religious significance for the Romans that it had for the Jews and, later, for Christians. Therefore, Aelia Capitolina, from which Jews were banned, was much smaller in size and population than the late Second Temple period (pre-A.D. 70) city that preceded it or the Byzantine Christian city that followed.2 Many of the Roman remains were obliterated as a result of the explosion in population and building activity following Constantine’s legalization of Christianity. A paucity of historical sources contributes to the difficulty of understanding Roman Jerusalem. Josephus ends with the fall of Masada in 73/74 and Christian pilgrim accounts begin only in the 4th c. For the 2nd and 3rd c., we are dependent on brief, scattered references by contemporary Roman writers (e.g., Cassius Dio) and snippets of information preserved in Rabbinic literature and Christian sources such as the Chronicon Paschale. Finally, Roman Jerusalem has been relatively neglected by modern scholars, who have been more interested in periods when the city was Israelite, Jewish or Christian.