Jews against Rome, forever

Bibi: “We lost that one, we have to win the next one.”

In a recent short video, we see Benjamin Netanyahu being asked what book he is reading now, and answering with a satisfied look that he is reading Jews vs. Rome by Barry Strauss. Asked why he picked it up, he says: “Well we lost that one, I think we have to win the next one.”

This video has circulated widely (as it was meant to), because it is telling of the way Israel relates to ancient history. This is not the first time Netanyahu shows that he views the history of modern Israel through the lens of ancient history. He does this for the benefit of Israelis (for example when referring to the Palestinians of Gaza as Amalek in October 2023) as well as Gentiles (for example when comparing Trump to Cyrus for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in March 2018). Zionists like Netanyahu are genuinely obsessed by what they think happened to ancient Israel two or three thousand years ago in their struggles with various empires. This obsession is shared virtually by all Zionists since David Ben-Gurion, who had changed his name Grün to that of a Jewish general fighting the Romans. Dan Kurzman writes in his biography Prophet of Fire: “Ben-Gurion was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah.” In his view, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 “paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt.” Ben-Gurion was not religious at all, yet he was thoroughly biblical.

The wars between Jews and Rome that Barry Strauss covers in the book cited by Netanyahu (the Jewish War from 66 to 74 CE, the Diaspora Revolt from 116 to 117, and the Bar Kokhba Revolt from 132 to 136), happened after biblical times, but they carry the same weight in Zionists’ mind. The Zionist movement was inspired by Heinrich Graetz’s multi-volume History of the Jews published in German between 1853 and 1891, with the fourth volume, on the period following the destruction of Jerusalem, published first. Zionism is rooted in history, or, more properly, in memory, which fluctuates somewhere between history and mythology (the wailing wall, for example, belongs to memory but not to history, being part of the Antonia Fortress and not of Herod’s Temple). “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people,” wrote Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982). By “Israel”, he meant not only Israelis, but Jews worldwide.

Jewish Memory is the essence of Jewishness, and the ultimate source of Jewish Power. We tend to think that the main divide within the Jewish world is between religious Jews and secular Jews, but that is not the most important criterion. The span of their national memory is the fundamental difference between Jews. For shallow or peripheral Jews (people who do not consider their Jewishness as the most essential part of their identity), the Holocaust is the main point of reference. To the question “What’s essential to being Jewish?” 73 percent of Jewish Americans gave as first choice “Remembering the Holocaust” in a 2013 Pew Research poll. But deeper Jews have deeper roots, reaching back more than two thousand years. They feel the trauma of 70 CE as if they had been there. These are the leading Jews, who occupy the center and pull the community together by their memory field. It makes little difference whether they present themselves as secular or religious Jews, whether they think of God or the Jewish mind as the driving force behind world history—many probably think that God and the Jewish mind are one and the same. Netanyahu is supposedly a secular Jew, but his thinking is not very different from Ben-Gvir’s: it is a matter of nuance. Whether religious or secular, Jews in general are rooted in the memory of their nation. The longer their memory, the more intense their Jewishness.

All peoples are rooted in their collective memory, you may say. True, but Israel operates with a totally different time scale from other nations. Israel defines itself by a panoramic vision that scans millennia into the past. It holds on to a vivid memory of its beginnings 3000 years ago, and it looks with anticipation to the fulfillment of its prophetic destiny at the end of times. Jewish Memory is incommensurable with any other national memory, in terms of both focus and depth. Only the Chinese can perhaps compete. The key difference, though, is that no one cares for Chinese history but the Chinese, whereas the Jews have made their self-crafted miraculous history the world best-seller.

Contractual theology

In the ancient world, when two nations were at war, they thought their national gods were at war. Therefore, the victor’s god was believed to be the more powerful—a concept known as the “theology of victory”. Christian historians of the first six centuries still thought like this. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine adopted Christianity because Christ gave him victory against Maxentius. According to Gregory of Tour, Clovis converted because Christ put the Alamanni to flight. At first, when his wife Clotilde had urged him to believe in the Son of God, Clovis “merely replied that his gods were more powerful.” But in the middle of a decisive battle, he prayed in desperation to Jesus Christ: “If you deign to grant me victory over these enemies, ... I will believe in you.” And so it happened (History of the Frankish Kings II,1).

Jews are different. They have been defeated again and again, but they emerged each time more convinced that their god is the strongest and will soon wipe out their enemies. After the Israelites were crushed and scattered to the winds by the Assyrians, Yahweh was still bragging that his victory was only postponed:

Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, “Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assur in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains. Then his yoke will slip off them, his burden will slip from their shoulders. This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?” (Isaiah 14:24-27).

That stubbornness—that madness—is the strength of the Jewish people: no matter how many times they lose, they get more determined to “win the next one.” Listen to Yahweh throwing a tantrum after his defeat by Marduk: “By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear” (Isaiah 45:23). There is something childish there, but let’s admit it: there also something heroic. Leo Strauss, the neocons’ mentor, said that Judaism is a “heroic delusion”.[1]

The essence of that delusion is, of course, the Jews’ belief that the “god of Israel” is none other than God Himself, who by definition, is stronger than all the gods. He is the jealous God, which means that other gods don’t matter or don’t exist. In the Jews’ holy book, God did two important things: He created the Universe, and he made a deal with the Jews.

Jews have a covenant theology, which means they think they have contract with God, a contract binding to God himself. Their history is a contractual claim. The point is well made by substacker Brado. The Torah, he writes, must be understood primarily “as a means to fabricate a claim to inheritance, to primacy and precedence, assembled to leverage position under Macedonian and Roman arbitration.” This is according to the hypothesis that the final redaction of the Torah is from the Hellenistic period, “when the Macedonians and Romans began arbitrating property disputes in Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and the Torah was quite intentionally designed to secure advantages for this purpose.” But even if we attribute the Torah to the Babylonian school of Ezra, the aim was the same: “It is not concerned with communicating insight, truth or understanding. It is about staking claims to precedence or primacy. It is evidence to be presented in a courtroom. It is history as a grievance or inheritance to be arbitrated before God. This is not God the Almighty, but God the Assessor, the Arbitrator, the Justiciar. The settler of accounts.”

For Jews like Netanyahu, settling accounts means taking revenge, as it had been for the great Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), whose biblical exegeses are filled with the expectation of God’s vengeance against Esau (a code name for Rome): “at the precise moment the Lord takes vengeance on the nations, Israel will then go from darkness to light and out of bondage,” and “nothing will survive of the house of Esau.” “Indeed, any deliverance promised Israel is associated with the fall of Edom.”[2] The reason I quote Abravanel is that Netanyahu’s father was a great admirer of him and the author of his laudatory biography.

Biblical history is either heavily biased or completely fabricated. After two centuries of digging, archaeologists have come to the conclusion that Solomon’s kingdom, the basis for the Greater Israel claim, has less reality than Arthur’s Camelot.[3] At the supposed time of Solomon, Jerusalem was a big village. The Exodus—so central to Zionist mythology that a film on the founding of Israel was named Exodus—is just as fake. There is no archeological trace of a massive exodus from Egypt through Sinai to Canaan, and the evidence is that the twelve tribes were indigenous (only their religion was not). The best that Richard Friedman can come up with in The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters (HarperOne, 2017) is the theory that a few thousand aggressive Habiru (nomadic raiders), escaped from forced labor in Egypt, invaded the land of Canaan and imposed on some local tribes the cult of their jealous god and the obligation to pay tribute to them (read my review here).

Biblical history is not only self-aggrandizing mythology, it is framed into a fraudulent contract penned under the name of God. It is the most daring forgery imaginable. In comparison, the false Donation of Constantine, by which the popes claimed to have been given the empire by Constantine, is an innocent prank.

Western man has been fooled by that forgery. For two thousand years we have swallowed the Jews’ fake history hook, line and sinker. This is why Christianity is an integral part of the Jewish Question. Jewish Memory is the ultimate source of Jewish Power, and Christianity has converted Roman civilization to Jewish Memory. In our Holy Book, Israel is the hero and the innocent victim of one evil empire after another, no matter how much they steal, destroy, rape, slaughter, and commit genocide.

The winner gets to write history, but the reverse is also true: the one who writes history and imposes his narrative will be the winner in the end. The Jews are the people of the Book, and with the Book, they conquered our minds. Ancient history from Noah to Cyrus the Great has been written for us by the Jews. That’s why the baddies are the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians—not to mention the Amalekites or the Midianites, who obviously deserved to be eradicated.

Netanyahu has some good reasons to be confident that the Jews will “win the next one.” Jews don’t win on the battlefield, but they are the undisputed masters of information war, and they can ruin an empire from within, with good coordination and enough time. We are Rome, now. So if Netanyahu studies the history of “Jews vs. Rome” with the premise that the war is not over, then we should too.

Israel against Rome

The Romans were notoriously welcoming to foreign gods. Evocatio deorum is an ancient Roman ritual that involved calling the enemy’s gods out of cities besieged by Roman forces with the promise of a new temple and better worship in Rome.[4] But the Romans understood that the god of Israel is unlike any other national god. His hatred of other gods made him unassimilable. That’s why his sacred objects were treated as mere booty in 70 CE. “The treatment of the Jewish god,” wrote Emily Schmidt, “can be seen as an inversion of the typical Roman treatment of or attitude towards foreign gods, perhaps as an anti-evocatio.”[5] Since Jews throughout the world used to pay two drachmas (silver coins) a year for their temple, Vespasian now compelled them to pay that tax to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill (the fiscus Iudaicus). That was appropriate since the Jews hypocritically pretended that they were worshipping the supreme god.

Later on, Trajan, whose father had commanded the Tenth Legion during the Jewish War under Vespasian, had to put down Jewish insurrections throughout the Diaspora, and especially in Egypt (115-117). The insurrection coincided with Trajan’s war against Parthia, in which many Babylonian Jews were fighting on the Parthians’ side, so there was certainly some coordination there. According to Arrian, a soldier-politician-historian who wrote about Trajan’s wars, “Trajan was determined above all, if it were possible, to destroy the [Jewish] nation utterly, but if not, at least to crush it and stop its presumptuous wickedness.”[6]

His successor Hadrian faced a new messianic uprising in Jerusalem, led by self-proclaimed messiah Shimon Bar Kochba, who managed to establish an independent state for three years (132-135). The Roman military campaign left 580,000 dead according to Cassius Dio, who adds: “At Jerusalem, Hadrian founded a city in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter.” Jews were banned from the city. The name of Israel was erased and the new province was renamed Syria Palæstina (in remembrance of the long gone Philistines, of Greek descent). Circumcision was again declared illegal. As Martin Goodman comments in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations: “In the eyes of Rome and at the behest of Hadrian, the Jews had ceased to exist as a nation in their own land.”[7]

These wars are the subject of Barry Strauss’s book Jews vs. Rome. It is a pretty good book for basic information, but it is purely narrative, and Strauss writes the story as he finds it in his sources, without much critical perspective. The almost unique source for the Jewish War of 66-74 is Flavius Josephus, who was a Jew writing for the glory of his nation. Strauss has a similar pro-Jewish viewpoint. Here are a couple of paragraphs from his introduction, to show you why Netanyahu likes it:

For Jewish history, the rebellions against Rome mark a major turning point. They cost hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives and sent many of the survivors into slavery and exile. They reduced the Jewish people to secondary status in their own homeland. Indeed, the revolts put the future of Jewish survival there in question, although they did not end it. It’s a common misconception to think that the Romans finished the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. They did not, but they did do an enormous amount of damage. Rome destroyed the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, and its crowning glory, the Temple. Rome ended the daily sacrifices that marked the heart of Judaism and ruined the priesthood who carried them out. Rome decimated the largest and most prestigious Jewish Diaspora community in the Roman Empire, the Jews of Egypt. As if to add insult to injury, the Romans changed the name of the country from Judea (“land of the Jews”) to Syria Palaestina, or simply Palestine (“land of the Philistines”). In no other case did the Romans punish a rebellious province by changing its name. Then again, no people had rebelled as often as the Jews.

There is a holy fire, burning in the hearts of warriors, that leads to glory or oblivion. For two centuries it burned in the hearts of the nation that is the subject of this book, the Jewish people. Messiahs added to the conflagration. Even priests, resistant at first, grew dazzled by the white-hot light. Sober men saw the fire’s destructiveness and tried to douse the flames. None succeeded. It was left to the Romans to drown the blaze in rivers of blood. Only then did a new generation of rabbis emerge from the ruins and turn the fire into light. At the same time, another offshoot from the Jewish experience of this turbulent era also began to grow: Christianity. The Jewish people survived, learning how to become a religion without a state. Then, twenty centuries later, they created a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland, Israel. The survival of the Jews is one of history’s great cases of resilience.

“It is my hope,” Strauss writes, “that the history of this period, these people and these struggles, will offer context for the clash of civilizations we are witnessing today and forge a deeper understanding of the forces that propel them.”[8] The book does that, at least for readers like Netanyahu. Strauss’s underlying premise is that the story is all about Israel’s struggle for its national independence from an oppressive imperial power.

The Romans certainly made mistakes in their dealing with the Jews. They thought they could solve their Judean problem as they had solved their Carthaginian problem three centuries earlier, but they failed to understand that, precisely, their Carthaginian problem had only morphed into a more complex Judean problem (read Ron Unz’s take on the Punic hypothesis). On the other hand, from the Romans’ perspective, their rule over Judea was generous. It was not incorporated into the empire, but became a semi-autonomous kingdom, while enjoying all the benefits of Roman civilization. What the Romans did for the Jews is as notorious as the Jews ungratefulness for it (and the subject of a good Monty Python sketch). Herod the Great, the choice of both Octavian and Anthony, was the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean mother, therefore not an ethnic Jew, but he tried to be as Jewish as Roman, and he built for the Jews the most magnificent temple they could dream of. He was a great king by the standards of the time.

But Jewish Memory is not objective history, it is an eternal present of Jewish victimhood. From the Jewish point of view, all empires that ruled over Judea at one point or another are just more of the same: either obstacles or instruments on the way to the ultimate rule of Israel over all nations, as promised by God to his people, when the kings of the world “will fall prostrate before you [the Israelites], faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet” (Isaiah 49:23). In the Book of Daniel, written in the 2nd century BCE but set four centuries earlier, the four evil kingdoms that Daniel foresees in his interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream were the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks. But later the traditional interpretation was that Rome was the fourth beast with ten horns, “devouring and crushing with its iron teeth and bronze claws, and trampling with its feet what was left” (7:19-20).

Israel inside Rome

What about us, non-Jews, whose side are we on in this fight? Are we on the side of the Jews, or on the side of Rome? That should be an easy choice: we are Rome. We are the heirs of Roman civilization, the Western version of Hellenistic civilization. We are also the heirs of the Roman Church, who has breastfed us from our medieval infancy. Thomas Hobbes famously said that the papacy was “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof” (Leviathan, chapter 47). In the High Middle Ages, the pope was the verus imperator (in the words of Gervase of Tilbury); he could make and unmake kings, and treated them as vassals. For the Netanyahus of this world, Christian Rome is still Rome, and so is Western civilization today.

But here is where it gets complicated: the Church is also the new Israel. And the holy story of Israel is the biggest part of the Christian Bible. The Book of Revelation that closes it is an apocalyptic text in the filiation of the Book of Daniel. Rome is designated there as “Babylon the Great, the mother of all the prostitutes,” “riding a scarlet beast which had seven heads and ten horns and had blasphemous titles written all over it” (17:3-5); “within a single day, the plagues will fall on her: disease and mourning and famine. She will be burnt right up” (18:2-8). This is followed by a vision of the rebirth of “Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down from God out of heaven” (21:10).

The end of Rome and the new beginning of Jerusalem are key prophetic themes in early Christianity. Justin Martyr, who died in Rome in 165, believed that after the imminent end of the world and the resurrection : “for me and for Christians whose doctrine is pure on all points, … we will spend a thousand years in Jerusalem rebuilt, embellished, enlarged, as Isaiah, Ezekiel, and other prophets acknowledge” (Dialog with Trypho lxx,4).

Rome, then, didn’t like people like Justin, which is how he got his posthumous nickname. The problem was not that Christians were casting spells on the eternal city, for they did this cryptically. The problem was that they ostentatiously refused to participate in the basic formality of the imperial cult. According to Candida Moss, Christians were not persecuted, but prosecuted; “the traditional history of Christian martyrdom is mistaken. Christians were not constantly persecuted, hounded, or targeted by the Romans. Very few Christians died, and when they did, they were often executed for what we in the modern world would call political reasons.”[9] The sources, concurs Bart D. Ehrman, show that “magistrates were not out for blood. They wanted to keep the peace and much preferred for Christians to come to their senses and perform simple cultic acts.”[10] Refusal to pay homage to the genius of the emperor was a political act, comparable to burning the national flag today.[11]

How can we explain, then, that under Constantine and his successors, Rome converted to Christianity, a religion hostile to the gods of Rome, whose programmatic prophecy was the revenge of Jerusalem over Rome, in the spirit of Jewish apocalypses? This is a great paradox and a great mystery. Some Romans did smell a Jewish conspiracy there, and warned that Christianity was leading Rome to its downfall. One of them was Ammianus Marcellinus, the last non-Christian Roman historian. In the 380s, he traced the decline in civic virtues back to the court of the first Christian emperors, and blamed the senatorial landowners who had converted to Christianity out of opportunism, such as Petronius Probus, whom he portrays as a vain and rapacious man, a pernicious schemer, servile to those more powerful than him and pitiless to those weaker, who craved office and exercised enormous influence through his wealth (xxvii,11). After the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, Augustine wrote the first book of The City of God in response to similar accusations that Christians had brought a curse on Rome, by ruining the patriotic spirit. He didn’t deny that Christians couldn’t care less for the earthly city of Rome, being devoted exclusively to their eternal city in heaven. But he wanted the Romans to know that whatever they suffered during the bloody sack of their city—loss of property or loved ones—was for their good, since it brought them closer to God.

This idea would not be lost on the Christian West. If wrecking your cities is good for your soul, then “we’ll save the shit out of you!”

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[1] Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews: Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green, State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 311-356, online here. An audio recording is accessible here.

[2] Jean-Christophe Attias, Isaac Abravanel, la mémoire et l’espérance, Cerf, 1992, pp. 140, 111, 269, 276.

[3] Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, S&S International, 2007.

[4] Jodi Magness, “The Arch of Titus and the Fate of the God of Israel,” Journal of Jewish Studies, 2008, vol. 59, n°2, pp. 201-217.

[5] Emily A. Schmidt, “The Flavian Triumph and the Arch of Titus: The Jewish God in Flavian Rome,” on escholarship.org; also Jodi Magness, “The Arch of Titus and the Fate of the God of Israel,” Journal of Jewish Studies, 2008, vol. 59, n°2, pp. 201-217.

[6] Barry Strauss, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World Mightiest Empire, Simon & Schuster, 2025, p. 234. Arrian’s book is lost, and there is no certainty that the “nation” mentioned in this preserved line is the Jewish nation, but that is the opinion of Menahem Stern in Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, vol. 2, 1976, pp. 152-155.

[7] Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, Penguin, 2007, p. 494.

[8] Strauss, Jews vs. Rome, op. cit., pp. 1, 3.

[9] Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, HarperOne, 2013, pp. 14-15.

[10] Bart D. Ehrman concurs in The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 130, 161.

[11] The targeting of Christians in Rome under Nero in 64, as told by Tacitus 50 years later, probably never happened, as Christians were then indistinguishable from Jews, but if some people were burned alive then, that was because the penalty for arson was to be burnt alive.