Jewish History: 18 Key Battles (Part 2/3: Classical & Medieval)

The Classical Era

Elasah (160 BCE) – The formidable Seleucid (Syrian-Greek) general Bacchides commanded 20,000 infantrymen and 2,000 cavalrymen mustered at Berea (B’eirot, modern al-Birah), south of Beit El. Nearby at Elasah, Hasmonean hero Judah Maccabee (“The Hammerer”) and 3,000 of his picked men beheld in dread the foreign invaders, whose daunting numbers unnerved many Maccabees. More than two-thirds of Judah’s fighters withdrew from what seemed a lost cause, leaving him with an army of only 800. Dispirited and faint, Judah regained his resolve and tried to rouse those who remained: “Let us get up and go against our enemies; we may have the strength to fight them.” His stalwarts, however, although used to being the few against the many, were unconvinced and tried to dissuade him; they suggested they return with their kindred to fight another day with better odds of winning. They had reason on their side, yet Judah was determined to stand his ground, come what may: “Far be it from me to do such a thing as to flee from them. If our time has come, let us die bravely for our kindred and leave no cause to question our honor.” Bacchides divided his cavalry into two companies, which flanked the Seleucid phalanx, ahead of which marched the slingers, archers, and chief warriors. Each side blasted their war trumpets and the ensuing battle raged from morning to evening. Bacchides and the strength of his forces were on the right wing, against which Judah and his most valiant partisans directed their assault. They crushed their enemies and chased them to Mount Azotus (perhaps Ba’al-Hatzor/Ramat Hatzor), but the Seleucid left wing pivoted, pursued the Maccabees, and cut off their retreat. The prolonged and intense battle became desperate; many were slain and wounded on both sides. In the thick of things as ever, Judah himself was felled, whereupon the rest of the Maccabees fled the battleground. Not only had Judea suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of imperial-colonial conquerors and occupiers, but the Judeans’ great champion—the savior of Israel—had sacrificed his life to defend his people. Judah was sorely lamented by the nation and buried by his surviving brothers at the familial tomb in Modi’in, but the Maccabean Rebellion (167–134 BCE) continued and succeeded, thereby bequeathing to Jewry 104 years (167–63 BCE) of freedom and independence under the Hasmonean dynasty.

“Maccabees”, by Wojciech Korneli Stattler (1830–1842). Wikimedia Commons.

Hasmonean Civil War (67–63 BCE) – Hasmonean prince Hyrkanos II had been named by his mother Queen Shlomtzion (Salome Alexandra) of Judea as her successor to the throne, but his brother Aristoboulos II rose in rebellion against him early in his reign and civil war plagued the kingdom. Hyrkanos’ soldiers defected to Aristoboulos in battle at Jericho; Hyrkanos retreated to Jerusalem but was compelled to surrender when Aristoboulos captured the Temple. Aristoboulos deprived Hyrkanos of the throne and high priesthood alike, but peace had been made, though it was short-lived. The wily Antipater II, a seditious Idumean and father of Herod the Great, convinced Hyrkanos to seek refuge in Petra with King Harith (Aretas) III of Nabatea, who was persuaded and bribed to also wage war against Aristoboulos. Harith defeated Aristoboulos in battle, and this time most Judeans defected to Hyrkanos, except for the Sadducees. Harith besieged Aristoboulos and his priestly loyalists in Jerusalem with an army of 50,000. During the siege, Hyrkanos’ Judean partisans were responsible for stoning to death the beloved thaumaturge Honi HaMe’agel, who refused to imprecate Aristoboulos and his party because they too were Judeans. Soon Pompey the Great’s proquaestor Marcus Aemilius Scaurus invaded Judea, where he was solicited by ambassadors from both Hasmonean brothers and offered bribes. But the Roman Republic was keen not on mediation, but on conquest and expansion. Pompey himself arrived on the scene and soon besieged Jerusalem: his forces slew 12,000 Judeans, and he personally entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple, thereby desecrating it. Jewish sovereignty and independence had been squandered, the Hasmonean kingdom had fallen, and the brutal Roman occupation of Judea had begun.

Judean Civil War (40–37 BCE) – Mattathias Antigonus, younger son of Aristoboulos II, was the last Hasmonean to claim control over Judea. With his father, Mattathias was taken prisoner by the Roman general Pompey the Great and held in Rome until his escape and return to Judea. He recognized his uncle Hyrkanos II as a puppet of the governor of Idumea, Antipater II, and so initiated a series of futile rebellions against Roman rule during his father’s period as a hostage in Rome. With the murder of Antipater in 43, Mattathias made a last-ditch effort to wrest control of Judea, but was defeated in battle by Antipater’s younger son, the future Herod the Great. Down but not out, the opportunistic Mattathias allied himself with the Parthians, who were challenging Rome for sovereignty over the Near East. With a military detachment of 500 warriors, the Parthians conquered Jerusalem in 40, removed Hyrkanos from the high priesthood, took Herod’s older brother Phasael hostage, and installed Mattathias as nominal monarch over Judea. Herod fled and garnered the support of the Roman general Mark Antony, who defeated the Parthians, leaving a vulnerable Mattathias to be captured in Jerusalem by Herod in 37 then transferred to the Romans at Antioch, Syria, where he was decapitated—the first such instance of the Romans beheading a conquered king.

Jerusalem (70 CE) – Once more internecine conflict threatened Jerusalem, this time with Titus and his four imperial Roman legions—V Macedonica, X Fretensis, XII Fulminata, and XV Apollinaris—encamped outside its three city walls. Zealot leaders Shimon bar Giora, Yohanan of Gush Halav (John of Gischala), and Elazar ben Shimon struggled amongst themselves for supremacy, until Yohanan overcame Elazar’s party and the rivalrous Zealot factions were reduced to two. Despite the uneasy alliance forged between Shimon and Yohanan, the Romans soon breached the first two walls with relative ease. Titus employed Jewish priest and defector Joseph ben Mattityahu (Flavius Josephus) to call on the rebels to surrender, albeit in vain. Famine struck the city, and escapees suffered mass crucifixions. The legionaries encompassed the city with a wall to cut off supplies and intensify the famine. Deserters who escaped the capital were sliced open because of rumors that they had swallowed gold. The advancing Romans captured the Antonia Fortress (the key to Temple Mount and the rest of the city), the Temple sacrifices were halted, and starving rebels staggered from house to house in desperate search of food. Cannibalism was reported, tidings of which caused distraught listeners to tremble. Thereafter Titus convened a war council with his chief staff officers to determine the Temple’s fate: he reportedly decided to spare it, but was ignored by certain unruly legionaries. On Tisha B’Av, Herod’s Temple was set ablaze. The Lower City and the Upper City were then conquered and destroyed, and the city walls razed. In his account The Jewish War, Joseph reported that 1,100,000 persons—mostly Jews—perished during the siege and that 97,000 were taken prisoner throughout the Great Revolt (66–73 CE). The Zealot leaders had sought refuge in underground passages and caverns but eventually were compelled to emerge: Yohanan was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Shimon was executed in Rome. The X Fretensis legion lingered to garrison Jerusalem, which lay in utter ruin except for part of the city wall on its western side, to accommodate the Roman garrison, and the three towers—Phasael, Hippicus, and Mariamne—of the Herodian citadel, to attest to the city’s former grandeur. In Rome the exultant victors paraded then displayed the spoils of war, which were used to finance construction of a colossal oval amphitheater, the Colosseum, and erected the Arch of Titus monument to immortalize their triumph. Hunger, blood, and fire had brought the Second Temple era to a catastrophic close.

“The Conquest of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus”, by Nicolas Poussin (1638). Wikimedia Commons.

Beitar (135 CE) – Southwest of Jerusalem in the Judean Hills, on a steep and rocky spur naturally defended by deep valleys on three sides, strategically overlooking the Sorek Valley and dominating the important interregional road The Way to Beit Shemesh/The Way to Timnatah, large masses of Jews seeking refuge crowded within the Judean rebels’ headquarters, which became their last bastion during the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 CE). At Beitar the patriotic freedom fighter, commander-in-chief, and president (nasi) of Israel, Shimon bar Kosiba (Bar Kokhba)—who had been declared King Messiah by the leading sage Akiva ben Joseph—made his last stand. If in fact he had captured Jerusalem (which feat remains disputed), then Beitar was probably besieged after its recapture by the Romans (c. 134); in any event, the siege certainly intensified during the final phase of the war once one of Rome’s ablest generals, Julius Severus, commanded legionaries of V Macedonica and XI Claudia to construct a circumvallation wall and two rectangular siege camps to tighten the noose around the town and cut it off from the nearby natural spring that was its lifeline. Per Talmudic and midrashic sources (JT Ta’anit 4:5; Eikhah Rabbah 2:2), Beitar was doomed by Shimon himself, who in an outburst of rage kicked his uncle, the sage and priest Elazar of Modi’in, who was enfeebled from fasting and falsely suspected of conspiring with a Samaritan to surrender Beitar, and the force of the blow killed him. Despite the moat dug by the defenders on the southern side of the town, the legions were able to overcome its fortifications on Tisha B’Av, when the mighty champion Shimon was slain and his fellow inhabitants were slaughtered, reportedly until the Roman horses were submerged up to their nostrils in blood. Beitar was razed and never rebuilt. In all, 580,000 Jews had been killed in battle during the revolt, and thousands more succumbed to hunger and pestilence or were sold into slavery. The last gasp of Judean independence had come and gone. In the aftermath of the revolt, Emperor Hadrian of Rome changed the name of the country from Judea to Syria-Palestina as a national form of damnatio memoriae. In his report to the Roman Senate, Hadrian omitted the customary formula “I and the army are well” because of his serious battlefield losses, and he refused a triumph. The Hadrianic persecutions against the Jews ensued, lasting for the duration of the emperor’s reign until 138.

The Gallus Revolt (351–352 CE) – With imperial Rome rived by civil war, Jews in the Land of Israel seized the opportunity to take up arms in the hope of finally overthrowing the yoke of foreign occupation. This desperate attempt was provoked by several anti-Jewish edicts and repressive policies of Emperor Constantius II of the Byzantine Empire, a Christian like his father Constantine the Great before him, who permitted his fellow Christians to persecute and proselytize Jews and pagans within his realm, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire. Centuries earlier the Jews had lost their sovereignty and independence to the Romans, and they were loath to lose their religious freedom as well. The spirit of resistance among Jewry had been aroused, as had the expectation of assistance from the Sassanid Persians, some of whose recent attacks against the Byzantine Romans had proved successful.

When the embattled emperor—preoccupied with confronting the Roman general and usurper Magnus Magnentius—appointed his half cousin and brother-in-law Constantius Gallus as Caesar (by this time, a subordinate title/rank equivalent to deputy emperor) of the Byzantine Empire (351), to be based in the regional capital of Antioch, Syria, Gallus (noted for his soft blond hair and good looks) showed himself a tyrant. Either just before or soon after Gallus’ arrival in Antioch, Jewish rebel leaders Isaac of Sepphoris and Natrona (Patricius) launched their premeditated insurrection from Tzipori (Sepphoris/Diocaesarea) in Galilee, which commenced with a night assault upon the local Roman garrison; the hapless legionaries were whelmed, and the freedom fighters thereby obtained the necessary weaponry to implement their plans. They soon recaptured neighboring locales in Galilee such as nearby Tiberias, as well as Lod (Lydda/Diospolis) in Judea. Alarmed, Gallus Caesar dispatched the Roman general Ursicinus, a native of Antioch and an experienced military commander, to quash the uprising. A decisive battle occurred near Akko, and thereafter Tzipori was razed to the ground, while Tiberias, Beit She’arim, and Lod were devastated (a hoard of 94 silver and bronze coins buried for safekeeping in the foundations of a public building destroyed in Lod was unearthed by archaeologists in 2024). The merciless Ursicinus ordered his forces to slay many thousands of Jewish rebels and civilians alike and inflicted hardships—including burning Torah scrolls and compelling Galilean Jews to bake bread for his legionaries on the Sabbath—upon the native populace as part of his suppression of the insurrection. Natrona, a messianic claimant, is believed to have fallen in battle. Shortly after the revolt was quelled, Tzipori, Tiberias, and Lod were rebuilt and the patriarch/president (nasi) and the Great Sanhedrin resumed their normal judicial and regulatory activities. Gallus Caesar soon fell into disfavor with his kinsman the emperor, who had received unfavorable reports of Gallus’ violent and corrupt character and so, in 354, stripped him of his powers, had him executed, and subsequently replaced him with his (philo-Semitic) younger half-brother, Julian.

The Medieval Era

Medieval ruins of the Jewish oasis city of Khaybar, Arabia. Wikimedia Commons.

Khaybar (628 CE) – In the Arabian Peninsula northwest of Yathrib (Medina) lay the fertile oasis of Khaybar, comprising three districts (Natat, Shikk, and Katiba) featuring hilltop fortresses that included abodes, storehouses, and stables and that were environed by date orchards and cultivated fields. The oasis constituted the largest Jewish community in Arabia in the early Middle Ages. The Jews of Khaybar—believed to descend from the Keinite clan leader and nomadic herder Yehonadav (Yonadav) ben Reikhav, and to have settled in the oasis after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple—possessed numerous fortresses (seven to 13, according to varying accounts), each of which had tunnels and passages that enabled the besieged to access water sources beyond the fortresses; the mightiest of these citadels, the Kamus/Qamos Fortress, rose atop the summit of the Mountain of the Jews. Together these strongholds defended the Jews from predatory Bedouin Arab marauders attracted to the oasis by its agricultural and pastoral plenitude. Khaybar’s Jews cultivated dates, grapes, grain, and vegetables, and raised sheep, cattle, donkeys, dromedaries, and stallions. They were also skillful artisans and merchants, and engaged in spinning, weaving, and silk clothing production, and prospered from the robust caravan trade conducted between Arabia, Syria, and Iraq. They additionally manufactured metal implements for laborers and armaments such as battering rams and catapults.

During Muhammad ibn Abdallah’s military conquest of the Hejaz (western Arabia), the Jewish tribe Banu Nadir fled Yathrib, sought refuge in Khaybar with its coreligionists, and warned them of the imminent Muslim threat. Sure enough, the Arab apostle and warlord soon led on the march some 1,400–1,800 foot soldiers and up to 200 cavalrymen in an invasion of the oasis at dawn, which caught its Jewish inhabitants by surprise and prompted them to withdraw to their fortresses, which were besieged. The Jews, led by Marhab ibn al-Harith (perhaps of the Himyarite Jews from Yemen) and Kinana ibn Rabi (treasurer of the Banu Nadir), valorously defended themselves. Yet Khaybar’s ability to resist its attackers was crippled by the absence of any central authority, which precluded coordinated defensive measures, and squabbles between different families engendered disorganization. Muhammad initially dispatched to the homes of the Banu Nadir leaders Muslims disguised as guests, who deceived then murdered their hosts. Thereafter the fortresses fell one by one with relative ease, partly due to their distance from each other. Both the Jews and the Muslims were short on provisions, and on one occasion famished Muslims resorted to cooking then eating a score of captured donkeys due to the scarcity of food. The defenders of the Kamus fortress offered the staunchest resistance and withstood the Muslims for two months; at last its garrison fell to an attack led by Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad. Reportedly, Ali slew Marhab in single combat after striking his head with a mortal blow (another account claims Marhab was slain in a duel with Muhammad ibn Maslama).

When the oasis finally surrendered, its Jews were permitted to remain on their estates (although ownership of their land was expropriated by the Muslims, who also seized the Jews’ wealth) provided that they render extortionate tribute payments—half of their annual produce—to the Muslim victors, which served as a precedent for exacting poll tax (jizya) payments from non-Muslim subjects dwelling under Islamic rule (dhimmis). Previously, Muhammad had captured and murdered Huyayy ibn Akhtab, leader of the Banu Nadir, in Yathrib, and also had assassinated his successor Abu al-Rafi ibn Abu al-Huqayq as well as the last-named’s nephew Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf. Now with the fall of Khaybar, Muhammad ordered his slain enemy Huyayy’s son-in-law (Kinana) to be executed in Khaybar: after the cruel torture, murder, and beheading of her husband Kinana, the youthful and beautiful Jewess Safiyya bint Huyayy (whose previous husband, rabbi and poet Sallam ibn Mishkam, had been killed in the battle) was enslaved then compelled by her dire circumstances to marry Muhammad, thereby becoming his 10^th wife. In total, the Battle of Khaybar resulted in 93 Jews and about 18 Muslims killed, with another 50 wounded between both sides. Around 642, Caliph Omar violated the treaty, inscribed on leather, between Muhammad and the Khaybar Jews: he expelled most Jews from the oasis under the pretense that, prior to his decease, Muhammad had decreed that two religions could not coexist in the Hejaz. Most Jewish refugees driven from Khaybar resettled in the Land of Israel in Jericho; some went to Tiberias, or the Sanur Valley in northern Samaria, or the Levitical and Kohanic city of Yutah in the southern Hebron Hills, while others remained in Arabia at the oases of Wadi al-Qura and Teima. To this day, Muslim terrorists and their fanatical supporters chant the rallying slogan “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud! Jaish Muhammad soufa yaʿoud!” (“Khaybar, Khaybar, Oh Jews! The army of Muhammad will return!”) as part of their standard propaganda and psychological warfare.

Medieval ruins of the Jews’ Kamus Fortress on a hilltop overlooking the oasis of Khaybar, Arabia. Wikimedia Commons.