Hadrian: The man behind the wallI'm not sure why monotheism is brought up as an issue here. The Romans actually had a policy of tolerance toward Jewish monotheism (although not toward the Christian Jesus cult). The issue in the Bar Kokhba revolt was political independence, not monotheism.
His conquests were spectacular, his genius for PR unrivalled. But his contradictions were legion. Who was the real Hadrian? As the British Museum prepares for a major exhibition on the life of the Roman leader, Boyd Tonkin looks for answers in the ruins of his imperial retreat
Thursday, 10 July 2008
Aprudent but brooding second-in-command, he had to endure a long, anxious wait before he finally took charge. He began his reign, AD 117, with a controversial withdrawal from Iraq: too soft, said the imperial hardliners. A bloody insurgency, and the persistent threat of a rival power with deep roots in the Middle East, prompted him to cut Roman losses and redeploy the occupying legions. Peace with the Parthians still left him in charge of a 60-million-strong swathe of Europe, western Asia and north Africa.
His writ ran (to use their modern names) from Newcastle to Cairo; from Lisbon to Jerusalem; from Algiers to Brussels. From the border security system in remote Britannia that he supervised in 122, and which makes his name at least familiar to all, to the forests of Turkey and the waters of the Nile, this soldier- son of a Spanish-Roman clan spent half his time in office visiting the distant outposts of the empire. For 15 years, his slick PR machine celebrated peace and order across these realms in stone, coin and scroll. Then he unleashed a punitive campaign of massacre and expulsion against his Jewish subjects after a revolt in 132. Pretty often, he made it across to Greece: his cultural inspiration, his spiritual home, and the source of his trademark intellectual's beard.
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At the other boundary of his power, Hadrian the tolerant multiculturalist provoked the Jews by building a pagan shrine above the ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem – destroyed after the earlier revolt, AD 70. In the 130s, his merciless suppression of the popular rebellion led by the messianic guerrilla chief Simon bar Kochba – "son of the star" – left more than half a million dead. In the aftermath, he wiped the name of Judaea off the map, Ahmadinejad-style. Henceforth, the land would be "Syria Palestina".
Does the modern notion of racial "anti-Semitism" have any relevance here? It's "certainly not correct", says Opper: the salient point is that "the Jews, like the Christians, could not accommodate the cult of the emperor". So the usual Roman tolerance of local deities abruptly ceased. For Anthony Everitt, "there was little in imperial Rome analogous to contemporary racism". Hadrian's near-extermination of Judaea "was the fate Rome invariably meted out to those who refused to march under its yoke". The refusal of Jewish monotheism to compromise with pagan norms, Speller underlines, meant that Roman "carrot and stick" business as usual would not work. Whatever the motives, the Jewish people had no deadlier enemy until the Third Reich. Still, almost 1,900 years later, the words of the Talmud curse Hadrian.
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Background on the exhibition here.