135 CE. The Aftermath: Rebuilding Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

135 CE.
The Aftermath: Rebuilding Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina

In 135 CE, following the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Emperor Hadrian transformed the ruins of Jerusalem into a Roman colonial city named Aelia Capitolina. Through the ancient founding ritual of the ‘sulcus primigenius’, pagan temples, a systematic ban on Jewish practice, and the renaming of the province itself, Hadrian enacted a comprehensive program to erase Jewish identity from the land with long lasting religious, political, and cultural dimensions for the Jewish people.

______

The year 135 CE marked one of the most decisive ruptures in Jewish history. After three years of brutal warfare, the forces of the Roman emperor Hadrian crushed the Bar Kochba Revolt. What followed was not merely a military occupation but a deliberate program of cultural and religious obliteration. Hadrian’s response to the revolt combined Roman colonial urbanism, imperial religious symbolism, and sweeping legal persecution into a systematic attempt to sever the Jewish people from their land, their sacred sites, and the very name of their country.

The centerpiece of Hadrian’s transformation was the refounding of Jerusalem as a Roman colonial city named Aelia Capitolina. The name was a charged double statement of imperial intent. “Aelius” was Hadrian’s own family name, inscribing his personal dynasty into the city’s identity. “Capitolina” evoked the Capitoline Triad of Rome, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, declaring that the holy city of Israel now belonged to the gods of Rome.

The foundation itself was performed through the sulcus primigenius, the ancient Roman ritual in which a magistrate or official, wearing the toga and with head covered, drove a yoked pair of cattle, conventionally a cow on the left and a bull on the right, in a counterclockwise circuit around the intended city boundary, turning a sacred furrow in the earth. The clods of soil thrown inward by the crooked plow formed the embryonic city wall. The furrow itself became the sacred ditch. The course was considered inviolable by Roman law.  When Hadrian’s officials plowed this boundary over the ruins of Jewish Jerusalem, they were not performing a bureaucratic act. They were performing a ritual extinction of the old city in its own soil, consecrating Roman sacred space directly atop the most sacred ground of Israel.

The architecture of the new colony expressed the same intention in stone. A grand temple to Jupiter Capitolinus rose on the Temple Mount, the site where the Holy of Holies had stood. Statues of Hadrian were erected on the Mount itself. A temple to Aphrodite was constructed on the site that would later become the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The city received the standard bones of Roman provincial urbanism: a north-south Cardo Maximus and intersecting east-west Decumani, forums, colonnaded streets, and public baths. The new colony was smaller than the Second Temple city and the deliberate displacement of its streets and axes from the topography of the old Jewish city was in part a means of physically erasing the memory of what had stood before.

Jews were banned from entering the new city under penalty of death, permitted only on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction to mourn at the ruins. Its population was replenished with a foreign settler community to replace the expelled Jews, rendering the city, in demographic terms, as Roman as any in the eastern provinces.

Alongside the physical transformation came legal terror. Hadrian issued edicts forbidding the core practices of Jewish life: Torah study, Sabbath observance, circumcision, the convening of Jewish courts, and assembly in synagogues. The persecutions fell with special force on the rabbinic leadership. Among those executed under these decrees was R. Akiva, the most influential sage of his generation, who had recognized Bar Kochba as the promised messiah. ‘

The final stroke of Hadrian’s program was the erasure of geography itself. He renamed the province, abolishing the name “Judaea”, the land of the Jews, and replacing it with “Syria Palaestina.” The choice was deliberately humiliating as Palaestina derived from “Philistines,” the ancient coastal enemies of biblical Israel, enemies long since vanished from history but preserved in memory as a symbol of everything alien and hostile to the Jewish people.

______

Selected Sources and Further Reading

Eck, Werner. “The Bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View.” Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999): 76–89.

Mor, Menahem. The Second Jewish Revolt: The Bar Kokhba War, 132–136 CE. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

Schäfer, Peter, ed. The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003.

Schäfer, Peter. The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World: The Jews of Palestine from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest. London: Routledge, 2003.

Weksler-Bdolah, Shlomit. Aelia Capitolina — Jerusalem in the Roman Period: In Light of Archaeological Research. Leiden: Brill, 2020.