This post is based on the second part of my conversation with Seth Schwartz about his book Imperialism and Jewish Society. The post was generated by AI but edited by a human.
How did Judaism survive the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE?
The familiar explanation is that the rabbis transformed Judaism from a religion centered on the Jerusalem Temple into one centered on Torah study, prayer, and synagogues.
Without the Temple, Jews developed new institutions and religious practices that allowed their traditions to survive in communities scattered across the Roman world.
There is truth in parts of that account.
But according to historian Seth Schwartz, the actual transformation was far more complicated—and took much longer than is often assumed.
In Part II of my conversation with Schwartz, professor of classical Jewish civilization at Columbia University and author of Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E., we explore how Jewish society changed under Greek and Roman imperial rule.
Our discussion begins with the expansion of the Hasmonean kingdom and its incorporation of regions such as Galilee and Idumea.
We then examine the unusual character of early Christianity within the Jewish world of the first century.
Finally, we turn to the destruction of the Second Temple, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, and the question of how Jewish religious institutions survived—or failed to survive—the upheavals of Roman rule.
Schwartz challenges several conventional assumptions.
The Bar Kokhba Revolt did not eliminate Jewish life throughout the land of Israel.
The rabbis did not immediately replace the Temple with a fully developed system of synagogue-centered Judaism.
And Jewish communities did not necessarily recover quickly from the devastating revolts against Rome.
Instead, Schwartz proposes a long period of institutional weakness followed by a significant revival of Jewish communal life during the fourth and early fifth centuries.
His interpretation raises an important question: was Judaism's survival primarily the achievement of rabbinic scholars, or did Jewish identity endure through social networks and communities that existed largely outside rabbinic institutions?
The Hasmonean Expansion and the Judaization of Galilee
Our conversation begins with the Hasmonean dynasty, which emerged from the Maccabean revolt against Seleucid rule in the second century BCE.
The Hasmoneans established an independent Jewish kingdom and subsequently expanded its territory.
That expansion brought new populations under the authority of Jerusalem.
Two regions are particularly important to our discussion: Galilee in the north and Idumea in the south.
The incorporation of these territories raises difficult questions about the relationship between political conquest, religious identity, and the adoption of Jewish practices.
Schwartz emphasizes that the historical evidence for Galilee is especially limited.
Josephus, our principal literary source for the Hasmonean period, does not explicitly provide a straightforward account of the conquest and Judaization of Galilee.
Historians have reconstructed the process from indirect evidence.
There may already have been people in Galilee who maintained some sense of Israelite identity.
There may also have been settlement by people from Judea.
Schwartz notes that limited archaeological evidence points toward Judean colonization at certain locations.
But the extent to which Galilee was transformed through conquest, settlement, conversion, or the development of existing traditions remains uncertain.
That uncertainty matters when we consider the region's later religious history.
Did Galilee's History Shape Early Christianity?
Christianity emerged from the Jewish world of the first century CE, and Jesus's ministry was closely associated with Galilee.
Could Galilee's relatively recent incorporation into the Hasmonean kingdom help explain the distinctive character of the early Christian movement?
This was one of the questions I put to Schwartz.
He considers the possibility worth exploring but warns that we lack sufficient evidence to establish a direct connection.
By the time of Jesus, Galilee had been associated with the Jewish political and religious world for roughly a century and a half.
Schwartz notes that Jesus and his followers nevertheless appear deeply connected to Jerusalem.
The Gospels repeatedly emphasize Jerusalem as the major religious center.
Following the crucifixion, the earliest Christian community also remained closely associated with Jerusalem.
Yet Schwartz identifies an important difference between early Christianity and other Jewish groups known from the period.
The Pharisees, Sadducees, and groups associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls disagreed over detailed interpretations of Jewish law.
Their disputes often concerned specific questions of purity, ritual observance, and legal interpretation.
Early Christians, by contrast, eventually debated whether entire categories of Jewish law remained binding.
That was a substantially different kind of argument.
How Was Christianity Different from Other Jewish Sects?
Schwartz draws attention to the nature of the disputes preserved in early Christian literature.
The New Testament portrays Jesus debating the Pharisees over issues such as tithing and religious observance.
But Jesus's responses are not always framed as alternative interpretations of the same narrow legal question.
Instead, some passages shift the discussion toward broader priorities.
Schwartz contrasts this with disputes among other Jewish groups, where disagreements might concern highly technical questions about ritual impurity or the application of particular commandments.
This distinction does not mean that all early Christians rejected Jewish law.
Schwartz specifically discusses James, the brother of Jesus, as a figure who could fit comfortably within the history of Jewish sectarianism.
James was associated with Torah observance while also believing that Jesus was the Messiah.
Other early Christians held different positions.
Schwartz suggests that the unusual character of these debates might have something to do with Christianity's Galilean origins.
But he also emphasizes that we do not know enough about the full range of first-century Jewish movements to be certain.
Other groups may have existed whose approaches to Jewish law resembled those of early Christians, even if they left little surviving evidence.
The connection between Galilee's Hasmonean history and Christianity therefore remains a hypothesis rather than an established explanation.
Tensions Between Judeans and Jews from Other Regions
Schwartz also discusses evidence that the incorporation of new territories into the Hasmonean kingdom did not eliminate regional tensions.
One example concerns Herod's reconquest of Jerusalem in 37 BCE.
Schwartz describes Herod's forces, including soldiers associated with regions incorporated into the Jewish kingdom, as displaying hostility toward Jerusalem's population.
He interprets the episode as a possible indication of lingering tensions between Judeans and populations whose incorporation into the Jewish political community was comparatively recent.
Yet those tensions coexisted with attachment to Jerusalem and its Temple.
Herod himself famously undertook an enormous reconstruction of the Temple complex.
Schwartz also discusses the participation of Idumean groups in the later Jewish revolt against Rome.
These examples suggest that Jewish identity did not erase regional divisions.
People could regard Jerusalem as their sacred center while remaining deeply hostile to particular groups or authorities within Judea.
That complexity provides a useful background for understanding the social world in which Christianity emerged.
Did the Bar Kokhba Revolt End Jewish Life in Israel?
The second major part of our conversation concerns the Jewish revolts against Rome.
The First Jewish Revolt culminated in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.
The Bar Kokhba Revolt ended in 135 or 136 CE and brought further devastation.
It is sometimes assumed that the defeat of Bar Kokhba effectively ended Jewish life throughout the land of Israel until modern times.
Schwartz strongly rejects that interpretation.
He distinguishes between Judea proper—the relatively small district around Jerusalem—and the much larger geographical area that included Galilee, coastal cities, and other regions.
The demographic consequences of the revolt were especially severe in Judea.
But substantial Jewish populations remained elsewhere.
Galilee, in particular, continued to have a large Jewish population throughout late antiquity.
Other areas also retained Jewish communities.
Schwartz notes that Jewish settlement eventually resumed in parts of Judea and that Jews were living in Jerusalem again in later centuries.
The important distinction is between the devastation of a particular region and the disappearance of an entire population from the broader land.
The Bar Kokhba Revolt was catastrophic.
But it did not erase Jewish life everywhere in Roman Palestine.
Why the Destruction of the Temple Was So Disruptive
To understand the religious consequences of the revolts, Schwartz argues that we must appreciate just how central the Temple was to ancient Judaism.
Modern readers sometimes think of sacrifice as one aspect of ancient Jewish religion that was eventually replaced by prayer.
But in the Torah, sacrifice occupies an enormous amount of legal and religious attention.
Many commandments concern the sacrificial system, ritual purity, priestly obligations, and the distribution of offerings.
Even festivals that are now celebrated primarily through home or synagogue rituals had important sacrificial dimensions.
The pilgrimage festivals required travel to the Jerusalem Temple.
The destruction of that institution was therefore not simply the loss of a building.
It removed the central location in which a substantial portion of the Torah's religious requirements could be performed.
Schwartz argues that historians should not underestimate the magnitude of this disruption.
Nor should they assume that Jews immediately regarded Temple-centered worship as a superseded stage of their religious history.
Did the Rabbis Replace the Temple?
One of the most provocative aspects of Schwartz's interpretation concerns rabbinic Judaism.
The standard narrative often presents the rabbis as the architects of a new religion that could function without the Temple.
Schwartz argues that this is misleading if it suggests an immediate and complete transformation.
He points to the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Palestinian Talmud.
These texts were compiled after the destruction of the Temple.
Yet enormous portions of their legal discussions remain devoted to sacrifices, priestly obligations, ritual purity, and other Temple-related subjects.
The rabbis continued to study and interpret laws that could no longer be practiced in the ordinary way.
Schwartz suggests that this may have helped preserve the Temple system through intellectual and religious engagement.
But it also demonstrates that the rabbis did not simply abandon the old religious framework and replace it with an entirely new one.
The Temple remained central to their understanding of the Torah.
The development of a Judaism in which Temple sacrifice no longer occupied the same practical or intellectual position was gradual.
Who Actually Ran Ancient Jewish Communities?
I asked Schwartz another question.
If the rabbis were primarily occupied with studying and interpreting Jewish law, who was responsible for the synagogues and local Jewish communities?
His answer challenges another modern assumption.
We often imagine that a synagogue community must have been led by a rabbi.
But Schwartz argues that ancient Jewish communities were generally governed by local elites rather than by rabbinic scholars.
The wealthiest and most influential members of the community often made the major decisions.
Other officials handled religious, administrative, and liturgical responsibilities.
Ordinary community members could exercise influence, but leadership was not necessarily democratic in the modern sense.
Schwartz compares this arrangement to other ancient civic institutions in which local elites exercised authority while remaining sensitive to the wishes of the broader population.
He also distinguishes between a synagogue and the community of which it was a part.
In many traditional European settings, the relevant religious unit was the town rather than a particular congregation.
The town might have a rabbi, while the synagogue itself had separate officials responsible for its operation.
Schwartz argues that this distinction helps us understand ancient Jewish communal organization.
Synagogues were important institutions.
But their existence does not demonstrate that rabbis controlled local Jewish society.
Did the Rabbis and Synagogues Develop Separately?
Schwartz proposes that rabbinic scholarship and local communal organization followed partly independent historical trajectories.
The rabbis developed bodies of legal interpretation centered on the Torah.
Local Jewish communities, meanwhile, maintained their own institutions, officials, resources, and social structures.
Schwartz emphasizes that early rabbinic literature does not devote as much attention to the organization of local communities as we might expect.
It does not contain a comprehensive legal system governing synagogues and communal administration comparable to the detailed treatment of some other subjects.
This is significant because later Judaism brought these elements together.
The familiar model of a community guided by rabbis trained in Jewish law was not necessarily the dominant organizational pattern immediately after 70 CE.
Schwartz suggests that the fuller integration of rabbinic authority and local communal institutions occurred much later, especially in the early medieval period.
The development of Judaism was therefore not simply a matter of rabbis inventing the synagogue.
It involved the eventual convergence of institutions with different histories.
Did Jewish Communities Collapse After the Revolts?
Schwartz's interpretation becomes even more challenging when he turns to the second and third centuries CE.
Rather than assuming that Jewish communities rapidly recovered from the revolts, he proposes that organized Jewish communal life suffered a prolonged period of weakness.
Maintaining communal institutions required resources.
Communities needed funds, leadership, meeting places, and the ability to operate within the Roman political system.
These conditions became more difficult after the revolts.
The destruction of Jewish populations and institutions reduced the resources available to sustain communal life.
Roman authorities also increasingly favored the Greek city as a basic unit of administration in the eastern empire.
Schwartz argues that this political environment could disadvantage groups maintaining separate corporate identities.
He also notes that privileges previously claimed by Jewish communities were associated with their status as loyal subjects of Rome.
After several major rebellions, such claims may have become more difficult to defend.
The result, in Schwartz's reconstruction, was not the disappearance of Jewish people.
It was the weakening of Jewish communal institutions.
How Did Jewish Identity Survive Without Strong Institutions?
This led to one of the most interesting questions in our conversation.
If communal institutions weakened so dramatically, how did Jewish identity survive?
Schwartz argues that identity did not always depend on strong religious institutions.
In places such as Galilee, Jews lived in large concentrations.
Even if formal religious institutions were limited, the population could continue to understand itself as Jewish through shared ancestry, social relationships, local traditions, and everyday life.
Schwartz uses an analogy from Jewish life in the Soviet Union.
A community might lose its religious institutions and much of its religious practice while retaining a strong sense of collective identity.
The analogy is not intended to suggest that ancient Galilee and the Soviet Union were historically identical.
It illustrates a broader point: communal identity can survive even when the institutions that previously sustained it become weak or disappear.
Schwartz also points to evidence from Roman Asia Minor.
There, some Jews appear to have participated in civic and occupational organizations that were not specifically Jewish religious institutions.
Trade associations and other social networks may have helped preserve forms of Jewish identification.
At the same time, Schwartz acknowledges that some Jews probably assimilated into surrounding populations and ceased to maintain a distinct identity.
Survival was not automatic or universal.
The Surprising Role of Christian Roman Emperors
Perhaps the most unexpected argument in the interview concerns the Christianization of the Roman Empire.
It is tempting to assume that the rise of Christian imperial power could only have weakened Jewish communal life.
Schwartz argues that the early Christian imperial period was more complicated.
Beginning with Constantine in the early fourth century, Roman law increasingly recognized Jewish religious communities and certain forms of their internal authority.
Schwartz points to the legal recognition preserved in late Roman law codes.
Although Jews remained subject to imperial regulation, this recognition provided a framework in which communal institutions could operate.
He argues that the fourth and early fifth centuries were an important period of Jewish institutional revival.
This is also the period in which substantial archaeological evidence for synagogues becomes especially visible across parts of the Roman world.
Schwartz discusses synagogue construction in the land of Israel as well as in regions such as Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy.
He interprets this growth as evidence of renewed communal resources and organization.
The irony is striking.
In Schwartz's reconstruction, the early Christian Empire helped create conditions in which Jewish communal institutions could recover from an earlier period of weakness.
He does not suggest that Christian imperial policy was consistently favorable to Jews.
The period of relative recognition was limited, and later developments brought additional restrictions.
Nevertheless, he argues that the early Christian imperial period played a significant role in the recovery of organized Jewish life.
The Long Transformation from Temple Judaism to Community Judaism
The central argument emerging from this conversation is that Judaism did not undergo a single, immediate transformation in 70 CE.
The destruction of the Temple was a catastrophic rupture.
But the religious, social, and institutional consequences unfolded over centuries.
The rabbis continued to study a Torah deeply concerned with sacrifice and Temple worship.
Local Jewish communities developed their own leadership and institutions.
Jewish identity persisted through social networks, shared ancestry, and regional concentrations even when formal communal structures were weak.
The fourth and early fifth centuries brought new opportunities for institutional recovery.
And only later did rabbinic authority and local communal organization become more fully integrated.
This longer chronology changes how we understand the survival of Judaism.
It was not simply the story of one group of religious scholars successfully replacing the Temple.
It was a complex historical process involving imperial politics, local elites, religious texts, communal resources, and the persistence of Jewish identity.
Judaism After the Second Temple: Frequently Asked Questions
1. How did Judaism survive the destruction of the Second Temple?
Jewish identity survived through a combination of religious traditions, social networks, regional populations, and communal institutions. Seth Schwartz argues that the transformation into the familiar rabbinic and synagogue-centered form of Judaism took centuries rather than occurring immediately after 70 CE.
2. Did the rabbis replace the Temple after 70 CE?
Not immediately. Early rabbinic texts continued to devote extensive attention to sacrifices, ritual purity, and Temple-related law. Schwartz argues that rabbinic scholarship and local communal institutions developed along partly separate historical paths.
3. What happened to Judaism after the Bar Kokhba Revolt?
The revolt devastated Judea, particularly the region around Jerusalem. Jewish communities nevertheless survived elsewhere, especially in Galilee. Schwartz argues that Jewish institutional life suffered prolonged disruption before recovering more visibly in late antiquity.
4. Did the Bar Kokhba Revolt expel all Jews from Israel?
No. The demographic destruction was particularly severe in Judea, but substantial Jewish populations remained in Galilee and other regions. Jewish settlement also resumed in parts of Judea in later centuries.
5. When did the Bar Kokhba Revolt end?
The revolt is generally dated to 132–135 or 136 CE. It was suppressed by Roman forces during the reign of Emperor Hadrian.
6. What was the Hasmonean expansion?
The Hasmonean dynasty expanded the Jewish kingdom beyond Judea into territories including Galilee and Idumea. This brought additional populations into the Jewish political and religious sphere.
7. Were the Galileans forcibly converted to Judaism?
The evidence is uncertain. Schwartz emphasizes that Josephus does not explicitly describe the conquest and Judaization of Galilee. Existing Israelite identity, Judean settlement, and political incorporation may all have contributed.
8. Did Galilee's history influence the origins of Christianity?
Schwartz considers the possibility that Galilee's history shaped early Christianity's relationship to Jewish law. However, the evidence is insufficient to demonstrate a direct causal connection.
9. How was early Christianity different from other Jewish sects?
Schwartz observes that known Jewish sectarian disputes often focused on specific interpretations of religious law, while early Christians debated whether broad categories of Jewish law remained obligatory. Not all early Christians held the same position.
10. Why was the Second Temple so important to ancient Judaism?
The Torah devotes extensive attention to sacrifices, priestly duties, ritual purity, and festivals centered on the Temple. Its destruction made many prescribed religious practices impossible to perform.
11. Who led ancient Jewish synagogues?
Schwartz argues that local Jewish communities were commonly led by wealthy and influential members, alongside officials responsible for specific religious and administrative functions. Rabbis did not necessarily govern synagogues.
12. Did the rabbis control Jewish communities in late antiquity?
Not necessarily. Schwartz distinguishes rabbinic legal scholarship from local communal administration and suggests that their fuller institutional integration occurred much later.
13. Did Jewish communities decline under Roman rule?
Schwartz argues that the revolts against Rome, demographic losses, financial pressures, and imperial administrative policies contributed to a prolonged weakening of Jewish communal institutions during the second and third centuries.
14. Did Christian Roman emperors help Jewish communities recover?
Schwartz argues that the early Christian imperial period provided forms of legal recognition that supported Jewish communal revival. This interpretation does not imply that Christian imperial policies were consistently favorable toward Jews.
15. When did synagogues become widespread?
Synagogues existed before the destruction of the Second Temple, but substantial archaeological evidence for synagogue construction becomes particularly prominent in late antiquity, especially from the fourth century onward.
16. How did Jewish identity survive without strong religious institutions?
Schwartz emphasizes the importance of shared ancestry, social relationships, regional population concentrations, and cultural networks. Jewish identity could persist even when formal communal institutions were weak.
