Jerusalem. The Biography

without an heir, his empress announced that he had adopted a son on his deathbed: the new emperor was Hadrian, who devised a solution to end the Jewish problem once and for all. He was a remarkable emperor, one of the makers of Jerusalem and one of the supreme monsters of Jewish history. 2
    HADRIAN: THE JERUSALEM SOLUTION
     
    In 130, the emperor visited Jerusalem, accompanied by his young lover Antinous, and decided to abolish the city, even down to its very name. He ordered a new city to be built on the site of the old one, to be named Aelia Capitolina, after his own family and Jupiter Capitolinus (the god most associated with the empire), and he banned circumcision, the sign of God’s covenant with the Jews, on pain of death. The Jews, realizing that this meant the Temple would never be rebuilt, smarted under these blows, while the oblivious emperor travelled on to Egypt.
    Hadrian, now aged fifty-four, born in Spain to a family rich from the production of olive oil, was a man seemingly designed to rule the empire. Blessed with a photographic memory, he could dictate, listen and consult simultaneously; he designed his own architecture and composed his own poetry and music. He existed in perpetual movement, restlessly travelling the provinces to reorganize and consolidate the empire. He was criticized for withdrawing from Trajan’s hard-won conquests in Dacia and Iraq. Instead he envisaged a stable empire, united by Greek culture, a taste so marked that he was nicknamed the Greekling. (His Greek beard and hairstyle were groomed with curling irons by specially trained slaves.) In 123, on one of his tours in Asia Minor, he met the love of his life, the Greek boy Antinous, who became almost his consort. * Yet this perfect emperor was also an unpredictable control-freak. In a rage, he once stabbed a slave in the eye with a pen; and he opened and closed his reign with blood purges.
    Now in Jerusalem, on the wreckage of the Jewish city, he planned a classic Roman town, built around the worship of Roman, Greekand Egyptian gods. A splendid three-gated entrance, the Neapolis (today’s Damascus) Gate, built with Herodian stones, opened into a circular space, decorated with a column, whence the two main streets, the Cardines – axes – led down to two forums, one close to the demolished Antonia Fortress and the other south of today’s Holy Sepulchre. There Hadrian built his Temple of Jupiter with a statue of Aphrodite outside it, on the very rock where Jesus had been crucified, possibly a deliberate decision to deny the shrine to the Jewish Christians. Worse, Hadrian planned a shrine on the Temple Mount, marked by a grandiose equestrianstatue of himself. * Hadrian was deliberately eradicating Jerusalem’s Jewishness. Indeed he had studied that other Philhellenic showman, Antiochus Epiphanes, reviving his plan to build an Olympian temple in Athens.
    On 24 October, the festival in which the Egyptians celebrated the death of their god Osiris, Hadrian’s lover Antinous mysteriously drowned in the Nile. Did he kill himself? Did Hadrian or the Egyptians sacrifice him? Was it an accident? The usually inscrutable Hadrian was heartbroken, deifying the boy as Osiris, founding a town Antinopolis and an Antinous cult, spreading statues of his graceful face and magnificent physique all over the Mediterranean.
    On his way home from Egypt, Hadrian passed through Jerusalem, where he probably ploughed the furrow around the city-limits of Aelia Capitolina. Outraged by the repression, the paganization of Jerusalem and the obligatory nudes of the boy Antinous, the Jews stashed weapons and prepared underground complexes in the Judaean hills.
    Once Hadrian was safely on his way, a mysterious leader known as the Prince of Israel launched the most terrible of the Jewish wars. 3
    SIMON BAR KOCHBA: THE SON OF THE STAR
     
    ‘At first the Romans took no account of the Jews,’ but this time the Jews were well prepared under one capable commander, Simon bar Kochba, self-declared Prince of Israel and Son of the Star, the same mystical sign of kingship that marked the birth of Jesus, prophesied in Numbers: ‘There shall come forth a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel and shall smite Moab.’ Many hailed him as the new David. ‘This is the King Messiah,’ insisted the respected rabbi Akiba (in the fourth-centuryTalmud), but not everyone agreed. ‘Grass will sprout on your chin, Akiba,’ answered another rabbi, ‘and the