Die Verfolgung der jüdischen Religion unter Hadrian: Zwischen Wirklichkeit und Martyrologie

Abstract

Most historians still accept the traditional position that in the years after the Bar Kokhba-revolt the Roman government prohibited most expressions of Jewish religious life, above all circumcision and Torah study, although some recent studies are much more cautious. Only the late Historia Augusta mentions a prohibition of circumcision in the context of the Bar Kokhba-revolt; but it is not clear whether this prohibition was the cause of the revolt or came after its suppression. All other texts used in the reconstruction of this persecution are rabbinic, becoming ever more detailed in later texts. No single early text explicitly connects such prohibitions with Hadrian. Jewish martyrology seems to have become a fashionable topic in later times. Without doubt, after the revolt the Romans reacted with repressive measures in Palestine, restricting the right of assembly which might have been understood as prohibition of public study of the Torah, and prohibiting the circumcision of non-Jews. In rabbinic memory this became an outright prohibition of Jewish religion; religious persecution soon became a topos of Jewish historiography, but only very little, if anything, can be based on historical sources.