Comments by "Sam Aronow" (@SamAronow) on "History Summarized: The Roman Empire" video.

  1. Quick note on the Jewish War: most of the Jews were already living outside of Judea at the time as a result of the Hellenistic period. Some of the defenders of Jerusalem were sent as slaves to Rome (and the Jews of Rome today can still trace their specific ancestry to them!), but most of the general population stayed. In fact, after the Kitos War, Hadrian had many of the Jews of the Diaspora repatriated to Judea, only to betray us again by building a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount. This led to the Bar Kochba revolt, the bloodiest of all the Roman-Jewish wars in which hundreds of thousands died. At this, the Romans forbade the Jews from entering Jerusalem and spitefully renamed the province Syria Palaestina after the ancient Philistines. That was it for a while, but the Sanhedrin kept operating out of Yavne and later Tiberias. In the last big revolt, the Jews with Persian assistance began building a Third Temple but were stopped short when the Byzantines retook Judea. By this point, the Jews of Judea were only a small minority of the Jewish population worldwide, but Judea remained majority-Jewish or nearly so until being almost wiped out in the First Crusade. A small but visible community called the Old Yishuv remained present until the Napoleonic Wars, when diaspora Jews began returning in larger numbers, leading to the Zionist movement in the late 19th century.
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