On May 11, 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, members of his cabinet, and scores of other distinguished personalities gathered in a desolate corner of the Judaean desert for a solemn ceremony at which the remains of Jews who had perished eighteen centuries earlier were laid to rest.
Those long-dead Jews had participated in the Bar Kokhba Rebellion against the Romans (A.D. 131-35), as indicated by the fact that papyri letters written on behalf of the Jewish general Bar Kokhba to his commanders were discovered by Israeli archaeologists in a nearby cave with the remains.
However, it was not archaeology but politics that brought Begin and party to the Judaean desert. For, in the eyes of don't-give-back-an-inch right-wingers, Bar Kokhba is a symbol of Jewish determination and valor in the face of great adversity. In the eyes of Peace Now left-wingers, he is, on the contrary, symbolic of the disastrous results of a pigheaded refusal to come to terms with political reality. Thus attitudes of Israelis toward the dilemmas of almost two thousand years ago are linked with their attitudes toward the startlingly similar dilemmas to today.
When Bar Kokhba came on the scene, the Romans had ruled Judaea for some two centuries, in the course of which they had put down a series of uprisings, including that of A.D. 67-70, which resulted in the destruction of Jewish Jerusalem (including the Holy Temple on Mount Moriah). They had also suppressed revolts by Diaspora Jews in Cyrenaica, Egypt, and Cyprus. But these events did not deter Bar Kokhba, who, together with his followers, spent several years carefully preparing for a large and ultimately unsuccessful rebellion against Roman rule.
At its conclusion, the Romans systematically eradicated Jewish life in Judaea, sparing only Jewish Galilee, which, for the most part, did not join the revolt. An estimated five hundred thousand Jews were killed or died of starvation, while untold thousands more were sold into slavery. Moreover, the Roman Emperor Hadrian, in reprisal, changed the country's name from Judaea to Syria Palestina and destroyed what remained of Jerusalem to make way for the pagan city of Aelia Capitolina. As a result of these events and others that followed, Jews did not reestablish themselves in the ravaged areas of Judaea until modern times.
To the extent that Bar Kokhba was mentioned in Jewish writings after his defeat, which was seldom, it was almost always in derogatory terms. In addition, while the successful Maccabean revolt in the second century B.C. is still celebrated every Hanukkah and the failed revolt against the Romans in the first century A.D. is mourned every Tishah b'Ab, until the nineteenth century, Bar Kokhba's Rebellion had virtually no place in Jewish consciousness.
Bar Kokhba's press improved when the famous Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) described the rebellion Bar Kokhba led in positive terms and later, with the onset of large-scale Zionist settlement, his rehabilitation was complete. Bar Kokhba became a national hero, as reflected in the fact that Israeli kindergarteners are taught this song written by Levin Kipnes:
A man was in Israel whose name was Bar Kokhba,
A man young and tall
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