August 19, 2025 • 48 mins
Three times in ancient history, the Jewish people revolted against the Roman Empire – the end result being genocide, enslavement, exile, and religious oppression. Barry Strauss, the Hoover Institution’s Corliss Page Dean senior fellow and author of the newly released book Jews Vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest People, discusses what triggered the various uprisings (taxation, free will) and the lessons they offer in current world politics – specifically, how Israel’s friends and foes view the Jewish state. Also discussed: how the American and Roman empires/republics are similar yet different and, on a lighter note, why the entertainment world insists upon an ancient Rome full of mild British accents and good dental hygiene.
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(00:00):
[MUSIC]
>> Bill Whalen (00:05):
Its Friday August 15, 2025 and welcome back to Matters of Policy and
Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast.
I'm Bill Whalen.
I'm the Virginia Hobbs CarpenterDistinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism
here at the Hoover Institution, but I amone of several fellows who are podcasting.
I recommend you go to our website,which is hoover.org podcast, and
check out what we offer to you.
We cover the waterfront of issues.
(00:26):
It's great stuff.
If you like to listen to pods when youwork out or travel or drive in your car,
whatever, you definitelycheck out the Hoover podcast.
Today we're going to dosomething a little different.
We're going to go back in time and
then back to the present to talk aboutsome elements that they have in common.
This would be talk about empires,the health of republics, and
the condition of the Jewish people.
And joining me today to talkabout this is Barry Strauss.
(00:49):
Barry is the Hoover Institution'sCorliss Page Dean Senior Fellow,
as well as the Bryson Edith M.
Boehmer professor of Humanistic StudiesEmeritus at Cornell University.
He's also a military naval historian witha focus on ancient Greece and Rome and
their lessons.
For Barry Strauss is a winner of the 2025Bradley Prize in honor of his dedication
to the study andteaching of Western civilization and
(01:10):
classical military history.
That passion is evident if you read hislatest book, which is hot off the presses.
It's titled Jews vs Rome,
Two Centuries of Rebellion againstthe World's Mightiest People.
Barry, thanks for coming on the podcast.
>> Barry Strauss (01:23):
Thank you, Bill.
Pleasure to be here.
>> Bill Whalen (01:25):
So, since I referenced your Cornell roots,
let me now get you in trouble with yourfriends back in Ithaca, be honest.
It's about 75 degrees outside herein Northern California today not
a cloud in the sky.
Tell me this is a betterplace to live than Ithaca.
>> Barry Strauss (01:41):
Yeah, the weather is a bit of an upgrade here.
I love Ithaca.
It's very beautiful, but the weather.
California wins in the weather department.
Without question.
>> Bill Whalen (01:49):
Okay, now make the case for Ithaca.
What's better about upper stateNew York than Northern California?
>> Barry Strauss (01:54):
Living is easy.
No traffic,daily life absolutely hassle free living.
And, andI have a lot of friends there, so.
>> Bill Whalen (02:04):
Okay, let's.
Let's talk a couple minutes about whatbrought you into this profession, Barry.
Why the attraction to history?
Why the attraction to ancient history,military history, naval history?
>> Barry Strauss (02:16):
Golly.
I felt that history was in my.
History is in my blood, my dad and
his father were both combatveterans of the US army.
My grandfather in World War I in France,my father World War II in Italy.
And I grew up with this book onthe shelf called the Road to Rome,
showing American soldiers headingtowards the eternal City.
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And I guess I was just fascinated by it.
And, you know, my grandfather alwayswanted to tell the story of his
immigration from Russian Polandto the us Becoming a US citizen,
then going off to France and fighting.
Somehow he never got around toit before his untimely demise.
(03:02):
But it was always in the back of my mind,always something that.
That interested me.
I think also the fact that I come froma large family, many relatives from my
grandparents generation, they all hadcome from Europe and I just thought there
was quite fascinating and where all thiscame from, so I always wanted to know.
>> Bill Whalen (03:22):
Interesting dichotomy of World War II is if you look at the great
European capitals, London obviouslygets blitzed, Berlin gets decimated, but
Paris gets off pretty easy.
And Rome gets off pretty easy, too.
>> Barry Strauss (03:34):
Yeah, relatively easy.
Yes, they do, absolutely.
>> Bill Whalen (03:37):
All right, let's play a little pop culture here for
a minute before we get into the moreserious academic side of things.
So, yeah, I'm curious, Barry,
into this ongoing fascination thatwe have with Rome in our society.
And I'm.
I'm old enough to remember, Barry,back in the 1970s when PBS devoted
considerable time, energy andtreasure to I, Claudius.
I remember in the 1980s whenthe very sordid Bob Guccione of
(04:01):
Penthouse Magazine Fame poureda lot of money into this really,
really kind of bad movie called Caligula,just showing Roman its most decadent.
>> Barry Strauss (04:11):
Yes.
>> Bill Whalen (04:12):
I don't know if you did, but I certainly did.
I saw.
I saw Gladiator in the theaters and.
And absolutely Crow gets an Oscar for it.
I don't think the sequelreally was as good, but
it's hard to match the original sometimes.
And I really enjoyed the Rome,Barry, which chronicled the lives of
some soldiers and just the politicsof Rome and society there.
>> Barry Strauss (04:33):
Yes. >> Bill Whalen
curious about, Barry.
I watched something like Rome andI noticed two things.
These Romans have kind ofvague British accents.
They all seem to have good dental plans.
And I don't think ancient Rome,especially on the dental side of things,
I don't think that was the case.
No, the dental.
The dental plans.
Not.
(04:53):
Not the case of ancient Rome.
As far as the British accent, though,there's something to be said for it,
because the Romans werethe imperial people.
And as Americans, we in particular,
we look at the Brits asthe imperial people par excellence.
We still think of empire asspeaking with a British accent.
Certainly was the casein American history.
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So also, Romans stand for
culture with a capital C,and for the study of.
Of Latin,which also recalls British roots and
a more European style of education thanwe're used to in the United States.
So the British accent is.
(05:36):
There's something not inauthenticabout it, if I might say.
It's pretty appropriate.
>> Bill Whalen (05:41):
If you watch the series Rome, everything is very cunning,
everything is very strategic.
Life is just one, a constant calculation,
was life in ancient Romereally that complicated.
>> Barry Strauss (05:51):
For the elite, yes, it definitely was like that.
I mean, if we read Cicero's letters,which are just these wonderful documents,
many of which were nevermeant to be published,
we just get this behind the sceneslook of what Roman society was like.
And indeed, constant calculation,personal relationships were everything.
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Who knows who, who's zooming who.
As the, as the song says, that'sabsolutely essential for Roman society.
So there's a degree ofaccuracy in that picture.
Yes, indeed.
>> Bill Whalen (06:27):
And it's also a series about upward mobility and opportunity.
And so these two fellas end up inall sorts of odd situations, right?
Caesar and Cleopatra andAugustus, so forth,
was upward mobility reallypart of the Roman experience?
>> Barry Strauss (06:43):
It was, I mean, nothing like the modern Western or
American experience.
Nothing like that.
But, yes,upward mobility was a possibility,
particularly in the goodyears of the Pax Romana.
So, say, from Augustus on for the next 200years, there was a lot of upward mobility.
And even afterwards,there was a lot of upward mobility.
(07:06):
I mean, after the first emperors,
the emperors almost never come fromthe Roman elite, let alone from Italy.
They're coming from all over the empire.
And Rome is a society in which ultimatelythe immigrants rise to the top and
the old Romans fade away.
So, yeah, I mean, there wasn'tas much mobility, mass mobility,
(07:30):
as there is in modern society.
The ancient economy simplywouldn't permit that.
And also, let's not forget,this is a slave society, so
there's enormous number ofpeople on at the bottom.
Although the opportunity to buy your wayout of slavery existed in antiquity in
a way that it hasn't inmodern slave systems.
But so a degree of social mobility,indeed.
>> Bill Whalen (07:51):
Mary, Yesterday I had the chance to sit down and speak for
the better part of an hour with VictorDavis Hansen, an interview for a podcast.
The occasion was the 100th issue ofa publication of Hoover called Strategika-
>> Barry Strauss (08:02):
Right.
>> Bill Whalen (08:02):
It's very clever.
It takes current warfare,current problems.
It goes back in time to,to draw parallels and so forth.
Here is Victor Davis Hansen,like yourself, a historian.
He's a classicist.
He is giving a lecture atHillsdale College in October 2023, Barry,
the title of which is,Will America suffer the same fate as Rome?
Here's a publication,the Conversation, July 31st.
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Roman Empire and the fall ofNero offer possible lessons for
Trump about the cost of self isolation.
Here's the Times of Israel Barry,August the 3rd, All roads lead to Rome.
How Trump's administration wouldlead us to a similar fate?
Finally, here's the great Neil Ferguson,Hoover historian par Excellence.
Free Press, June 17.
America is in a late republic state dash,like Rome.
(08:48):
Bill, your thoughts, are you onboard with this line of thought?
>> Barry Strauss (08:53):
Well, these are all great people and great ideas, and
I'm on board with the ideaof using Rome as an analogy.
Rome is very good to think with, but
I actually think America is notin a late republic situation.
I think America has a remarkableability to reinvent itself.
(09:13):
I think it's in the American DNA.
So I'm not going to sell short,I'm not going to sell America short.
I don't think we're about to give upthe republic and to move into the empire.
Certainly we're, we're in a period ofgrowing pains that there is no doubt.
But I, I'm, I'm pretty,I'm bullish on America.
>> Bill Whalen (09:32):
What is the cautionary tale that Rome offers?
>> Barry Strauss (09:34):
Well, the cautionary tale of Rome offers is that everything
changes, nothing stays the same, andyou have to, you have to learn how to
roll with the punches anddecide what kind of change you want.
To me, the, the, the motto that Ialways think is important comes
not from Romeo, it does come from Italy.
(09:56):
It comes from this novel,the Leopard, Il Gatto Pardo,
a Sicilian novel from the 1950s, in whicha wise and cynical young character says,
if we want things to stay the same,everything has to change.
And I think that's worth keeping in mind.
(10:17):
You have to accept some changes inorder to preserve what's essential.
And the Romans were very good about that.
That's one of the reasons fortheir success.
It's one of the reasons why St.Augustine, a Christian,
obviously, is still reading Cicero,a pagan.
It's why the Roman Empire canmove to Constantinople and,
(10:40):
and yet keep Roman law and essential Romanvalues, Roman discipline, Roman order.
So that, I think, is the lesson for
Americans Things are gonna changewhether we like them or not.
So we have to decide what kind ofchange we want and how we keep things,
what we keep, what's good about things,way things are now and how we keep them.
>> Bill Whalen (11:05):
Was the berry, was the Roman Republic, was it fatally flawed or
did just circumstances overtake it?
>> Barry Strauss (11:11):
I think that's a really good question.
But I guess I would say that it failed toadapt flexibly to change circumstances.
And so the only way for it to adapt wasviolently to these changed circumstances.
And the changed circumstances are all buta cliche.
And that is the institutions thatwere created to govern a city state
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were not created to govern an empire.
And it was one thing forRome to be governed by a small elite
holding annual office when Romewas a city state in Italy.
But when the Roman Empire stretches 3,000miles from Edinburgh to Damascus, then
you got a problem and you have to comeup with a different way of governing it.
(11:56):
It didn't have to be the way that theRomans chose with an imperial monarchy and
an increasingly repressiveimperial monarchy, but
it certainly had to be different than thegovernment that existed in the Republic.
And the Romans had a lotof trouble seeing this.
I think that is one problem thatevery society faces to understand
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the change that's coming andto prepare for it and to deal with it in,
in the best, in the best manner.
>> Bill Whalen (12:26):
Now, America's founding fathers, Barry,
come along about 17 centuries later andthey create a republic.
What did the foundingfathers do better than Rome?
>> Barry Strauss (12:34):
Well,
I think the founding Fathersbuilt size into the Republic.
I think they understood that it was goingto expand, they wanted it to expand.
And so they built in a system that hadboth a federal level and a state level.
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So it was, it was already a compromise.
And there wasn't an attempt to havea centralized government that ran
everything that has a built inflexibility that the Roman system lacked.
>> Bill Whalen (13:07):
Okay, let's talk about the book, the title again.
Jews Versus Two Centuries of Rebellionagainst the World's Mightiest People.
What prompted you to write this?
>> Barry Strauss (13:16):
Well, two things.
One, I'm an ancient historian,but I'm also an American Jew.
And although my specialty is Greece andRome, I'd long had in mind that I wanted
to write a book that broughtin Jewish history as well.
So it had been on my radar screen,and then around 2020 or
(13:36):
so, I got interested in this particulartopic and began reading up on it.
And I noticed something really curious,and that is that Israel and
ancient Israel andancient Iran were friends and allies.
In fact, Their relationship wascentral to the whole story.
(13:56):
So different, of course, than therelationship in 2020 between the state of
Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And I began to wonder, well, why?
Why is it the way it is today?
What does history haveto teach us about this?
And I also felt that althoughthere was excellent,
really excellent impressive scholarshipon the subject of the Jewish revolts,
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that the subject of the Iranianconnection had been.
Was understudied.
And I felt that there was a need for a newstudy that could say more about that.
So that was.
That was what got meinterested in the subject.
Those two things,both personal and intellectual.
>> Bill Whalen (14:35):
Right, now,
the book Barry outlines three rebellionsover the course of about two centuries.
I'll confess I knew one of the threerevolts, but I didn't know the other two.
But before we get the specifics ofwhat caused each of the revolts,
just in a larger question.
Why did the Jews rebel so often?
You would think maybe after the first andyou learned a lesson,
(14:55):
you wouldn't do it,certainly not after the second time.
But they did it three times.
Did they expect a differentoutcome each time?
Or again,was this just a product of circumstances?
>> Barry Strauss (15:05):
No, they expected a different outcome.
I mean, as you know, people are goodat saying, this time will be different.
And I think the Jews werevery much in that category.
They were very determined, they were verynationalistic, and they're very resilient.
They were also very inspired.
These centuries that I writeabout are great, great,
(15:28):
the golden era of apocalyptic andmessianic thought.
And there's always.
There are always people who are willingto inspire revolt and to say,
you know, we have the full force of.
Of God religion on our side.
So there's that.
(15:48):
There's also the geostrategic reality thatalthough we might look at the map and
think that ancient Israel,which is called Judea in this period,
we might think that Judea is at the ageEdge of the Roman Empire as it is,
it's actually in the center.
It's located between two empires,a Western empire, Rome and
an Eastern empire, Parthia,an Iranian Empire.
(16:12):
And there's a large Jewishdiaspora in the Roman Empire, but
there's also a large Jewishdiaspora in the Parthian Empire.
So if you're sitting in Jerusalem andyou're thinking,
how can I win my country's independenceback and how can I get rid of the Romans?
You will naturally look eastward to yourco-religionists in the Parthian Empire.
(16:34):
But also to the Parthian government inthinking these people hate the Romans,
which they did,they've gone to war with the Romans.
Might they not help us if werebel against the Romans?
So I think that is a factor as well.
The fact that they're not just religiousand nationalistic factors, but
geostrategic factors that mightencourage someone to rebel.
(16:57):
On top of that,the Romans do not play their cards right.
Instead of engaging ina policy of compromise and
balance of power, they do fora while and it works quite well.
Instead of doing that, they kind ofengage in a winner take all policy and
push they feel they can push aroundthe locals and get away with it.
(17:22):
Then after suppressing the revolt,they then proceed to
allow most of the Jews to survivein Judea and elsewhere, but
then to humiliate them by imposingattacks on them that nobody else
in the empire has to pay andabsolutely turning a deaf ear told to
Jewish demands to be able torebuild Jerusalem in the temple.
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In fact, when the Romans dodecide to rebuild Jerusalem,
they insult the locals bysaying we are rebuilding it but
as a pagan city with temples onlyto the pagan God in the city.
And we're going to give it a new name.
We're going to name it afterthe Emperor Hadrian and
the chief God of Rome, Jupiter.
(18:09):
So the city changes its name fromJerusalem to Alia Capitolina.
He's alias Hadrianus,that's the emperor, and
Jupiter Capitolinus,the chief God of Rome.
So this is the Hadrian Jupiter Cityis what essentially it means.
>> Bill Whalen (18:29):
Now you're telling me that the, the,
the best of the brightest in Romeunderstand they have the military might to
put down any uprising,any revolt, any rebellion.
But they're not thinking strategically and
understanding that at the same timethey're putting down the revolt,
they're also creating conditions forthe next revolt.
>> Barry Strauss (18:45):
That's right, yes.
They're not really,they're not thinking long term.
They don't have the right balance in mindas to how to deal with the provincials.
>> Bill Whalen (18:53):
Are there other historical parallels that come to mind when you,
when you look at this relationship?
I'm thinking empires anddealing with trouble, colonies and.
>> Barry Strauss (19:02):
Yeah, yeah, there's one that comes to mind.
You know, certainly the 13 colonies andgreat Britain, I mean King George and
his government thought that the way todeal with these ungrateful provincials and
the Romans I think would alsothink of the Jews as ungrateful
is to slap them around,use force and you're going to win.
(19:26):
But they underestimated the provincials.
I think the Romansunderestimated the Jews as well.
Although unlike the Americans,turned to their equivalent of Parthia,
which is to say France,and they succeeded.
The Jews were not successful ingetting Parthia to intervene.
And I think that is,that is the essential difference.
>> Bill Whalen (19:49):
All right, let's break down each of the three revolts that you
outlined in the book, Barry.
The first one is the onethat I'm familiar with.
It's a so called revolt.
This leads to the destructionof Jerusalem and the Temple and
also is the siege of Masada,which exactly.
Also was a very goodTV movie at one point.
So indeed explain howthe great Revolt came to.
>> Barry Strauss (20:08):
So you know, Rome conquered Judea in the year 63 BCE and
by hook or crook they managed tohold on to it for over a century.
They lose it 25 years after takingit to the Parthians who invaded,
conquered and put a Parthianking on the throne in Jerusalem.
(20:29):
And then the Romans haveto fight to get it back.
The fight is led by a man whois infamous in history, Herod,
Herod the Great, who becomes king andrules with an iron fist and then some.
He doesn't have a competent successor.
The Romans eventually fire him andturn Judea into a Roman province.
(20:50):
And there's constant turbulence.
There are revolts that are putdown before they can turn
into anything great or all that long term.
And the Romans more or less keep.
They keep order in Judeawith a very small force.
They don't even haveallegiance stationed there.
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The closest legion is in Syria.
They've got some auxiliary troops,
local carabinieri types whoare keeping order there.
But under the Emperor Nero,the Romans send
out a series of vicious,incompetent governors.
(21:33):
Even before then they had sent outvicious incompetent governors.
The most infamous ofcourse is Pontius Pilate,
that was under Tiberius andhe sets the pattern for what follows.
And finally, there's a governor whoseorders from Nero is basically to squeeze
the provincials until the pips squeak.
(21:53):
And the idea is to take moneyfrom the temple to favor the non
Jewish population in Judea.
There's a large Greek speakingpopulation there as well.
And when the natives protest,he sends in the troops to massacre them.
And there's a massacre ofcivilians in Jerusalem.
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That is the last straw forthe hotheads who manage
to come into power anddeclare a revolt against Rome.
The governor of Syria, an older guy,
maybe not on the top of his game,marches with an army to Jerusalem and
(22:34):
attempts to intimidate the localswho are not being intimidated.
And then tail between his legshe starts to march home again.
And the locals ambush the armyin a narrow valley leading
northwestward from Jerusalem.
And when it's over, they manage tomassacre the better part of a legion.
(22:58):
Now, this is a disaster for Rome.
It's not the sort of thing thatan imperial power can take lying down.
And so,Nero decides to send out one of his best
generals to the east toput down the rebellion.
>> Bill Whalen (23:14):
Is there any way that Masada could have had a different outcome?
>> Barry Strauss (23:18):
No, once.
>> Bill Whalen (23:20):
And maybe explained what happened at Masada.
>> Barry Strauss (23:22):
So what happened at Masada is,
Masada is kind of a stop onthe underground railroad.
It's where the lastrebels are holed up and
where sympathizes withthem flee to Masada.
It is a huge natural fortress in theJudean desert at the edge of the Dead Sea.
(23:44):
And they go from there to Egypt andother points outside of Judea.
There are about 950 people there,many of them women and children.
And the Romans are inthe mopping up operation.
After having destroyed Jerusalem,put down the revolt,
they want to get rid ofthe last bastions of rebellion.
(24:06):
So they surround Masada with a legion and
then some, andbasically say surrender or die.
The defenders of Masada don't have anychance of defeating this Roman legion.
The only question is, how are the Romansgoing to get to the top of the Masada?
(24:27):
And they do this by building a ramp.
It's, it's an impressive engineering feat,
certainly not a herculeanengineering feat.
Difficult to do, butby no means impossible.
The Romans are great engineers andthey are, they are going to take Masada.
The defenders fight back to the degreethey can, but that's not very great.
(24:51):
And they decide that ratherthan surrender to the Romans,
rather than be tortured andsee their women and children enslaved,
they will engage in a mass killingexercise in which the men kill their,
the members, the other members of theirfamilies then kill each other and
(25:12):
then the final ones commit suicide.
So when the Romans go up to the topof Masada, they've reached the top,
they expect to fight their way in,but there's no one resisting them.
There are only a few people hidingwho've survived this massacre,
who tell the tale andeverybody else is dead.
(25:34):
So could the rebels havedefeated the Romans?
No.
They could have surrendered or they couldhave decided to fight to the last man and
there could have beena bloodbath that way.
Those are other possibilities.
But victory over the Romans in this case,no, not a possibility.
>> Bill Whalen (25:51):
Right, the second revolt buried the so called Diaspora revolt.
And here the issue oftaxation comes into play.
>> Barry Strauss (25:58):
Yes, it's not so.
The Romans, after the first revolt,
they punished the Jewseverywhere in the Roman Empire,
whether they were part of the revolt ornot, whether they lived in Judea or not.
And they make every Jewin the Roman Empire pay
a small annual tax tothe chief God of Rome.
It's kind of a parody and
(26:19):
an insult of the tax that Jews had beenpaying to the temple in Jerusalem.
Now it has to go to the chief God of Rome.
And this is highly insulting to the peoplewho live, to the Jews of the Empire.
It's also very clear thatthe Romans are never going to allow
(26:40):
them to rebuild the temple.
So they rise in rebellion.
But they do so at a very strategic moment.
It's when the Empirehas invaded Parthia and
the Empire is in the process ofconquering Iraq, ancient Mesopotamia.
Just at that time, the Jews of Egypt andLibya and Cyprus rise in rebellion.
(27:04):
Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia,there's a revolt against the Romans and
the local Jewish population is playinga prominent role in leading and
participating in thisrevolt against the Romans.
So it looks like this is a coordinatedrebellion east and west.
It's very threatening to Rome and
(27:26):
the Empire has to go to great effortsto put it down, which indeed it does.
>> Bill Whalen (27:33):
Right, now, Barry, there are no cell phones back then.
There are no zoom callslike we're doing now.
So, yeah, these are going on concurrently.
Is there any organization going on here oreach hand randomly?
And also on top of them, curious,what were the Jews fighting with?
Where did they get their weapons andhow did they fight them?
>> Barry Strauss (27:52):
Great question.
Well, in Egypt.
So to the first question,how do you coordinate something like this?
>> Bill Whalen (27:59):
You can't in theory, if you take the ancient war, but
at least give them the modern tool ofcommunications, you could talk all around
the Roman Empire to each other and reallyjust do a rather brilliant job of just how
to mount insurrections andcomplicate life for the Romans.
But yeah, you obviously can'tcommunicate in real time like that.
>> Barry Strauss (28:16):
No, you can't communicate in real time.
So you can't have a coordinated D day,zero hour, anything like that.
>> Bill Whalen (28:22):
Right.
>> Barry Strauss (28:23):
But there are ways to get messages back and forth.
There are people who can travel.
There are people who are expert atgetting messages over difficult terrain.
There's also fire signals,
which are an important way ofcommunication in the ancient world.
So, yeah,it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
And we know that the borderbetween the Parthian Empire and
(28:47):
the Roman Empire was porous.
There are people crossingover it all the time.
So it's not beyond the human ingenuityto get messages back and forth.
After all the Romans,how to get the message from the East, Gee,
there's a rebellion going on in the West.
We better send an army fromthe Mesopotamia to Egypt to put this down,
(29:09):
this rebellion.
So, yeah, there are lots of waysto get messages back and forth,
though we don't know any of the detailsas to how that right now, tools.
>> Bill Whalen (29:18):
And weapons of the Jews were tools- Tools and weapons.
>> Barry Strauss (29:20):
So in Egypt,
there are Jews serving as soldiers inthe Roman army of occupation as Egypt.
And many of them comefrom military families.
They've been serving as soldierseven earlier when Cleopatra and
the Ptolemies were governing Egypt,large Jewish population in Egypt.
So they would have had weapons that way.
(29:42):
In Libya, I don't think they'reserving as soldiers then, but
they had served as soldiers andso they'd have weapons in family,
weapons that have military traditions.
We know of lots of rebellions in theancient world where people made their own
weapons, as indeed inthe Third Jewish revolt.
They do.
(30:02):
So, yeah, I don't think it'sany problem to get weapons.
They can break into armories.
They can get weapons that way as well.
>> Bill Whalen (30:07):
Are they similarly armed, Barry, or is this the case of.
What is the cliche,bringing a knife to a gunfight?
>> Barry Strauss (30:13):
I think it's bringing a knife to a gunfight, but
remember that the Romans don't have guns.
And, yeah, if you have.
If you have a full legion that'sprepared and in battle order,
then the knife is not going towork in that particular gunfight.
But if you surprise the enemy and they'renot ready for you, they're sleeping.
(30:35):
Then you have a real chance.
>> Bill Whalen (30:38):
Right, and the Great Revolt barrier and the Diaspora revolt,
how long did each one last?
>> Barry Strauss (30:42):
So the Great Revolt lasted for four years, and
then the mopping up operationstake place a few years afterwards.
The Diaspora revolt basically lasts forabout a year.
>> Bill Whalen (30:52):
A year.
Okay, let's go to the third revolt, and
feel free to correct mehere if I get it wrong.
The Bar Kokba revolt, very close.
>> Barry Strauss (30:59):
Bar Kochba is how an Israeli would pronounce it.
I think an American would say Bar Kokhba,but, yeah, Bar Kokhba, very good.
>> Bill Whalen (31:06):
Okay, thank you.
And this succeeds in creatingan independent state for
a while, but the story here seems to bethat the third time is not the charm.
Rome seemed to have said, enough, enough.
And what results out of this,Barry, is ugly by modern standards.
We're talking genocide, we're talkingenslavement, we're talking depopulation.
In other words, Rome drops the hammer.
>> Barry Strauss (31:28):
Yeah, let's add ethnic cleansing to it as well.
>> Bill Whalen (31:30):
Yeah, so, I mean- So what was different about this revolt, Barry?
And then from the Roman side,why did they decide, okay, this is it?
>> Barry Strauss (31:39):
Okay, what's different about it is a couple of things.
First, the rebels are very ingenious.
They said, we've learned our lessons.
We're not going to take on the legions.
We're going to engage inirregular war warfare.
And they prepare both by makingtheir own weapons, by the way,
and also, as you very astutely asked,in terms.
(32:00):
Of the second revolt, but also bypreparing underground shelters, digging
tunnels, using caves, hiding themselves inplaces where the Romans wouldn't expect.
And they burst on the Romans like a storm.
The Romans are utterly unprepared forthis and
they inflict very heavycasualties on the Romans.
(32:20):
And the Romans are forced to scramble invarious ways and it takes them a couple of
years because before they can putthe revolt down, and the only way to put
it down is painstakingly,you know, rebel site by rebel site,
tunnel by tunnel, they have to take over,they have to put down the revolt.
The other thing that makes the Romans sotesty about this revolt
(32:44):
is that it takes place in the shadowof Rome's defeat in Parthia.
So Rome's attempt to invadethe Parthian Empire is an utter failure,
complete defeat.
The Emperor dies of probablya stroke during this and
his successor is basicallywants to pull all the troops
(33:05):
out of the Parthian Empire andpeace on the border.
But he knows that A,Rome has been humiliated in its attempt to
conquer Parthia and B,the Jews in both the Roman Empire and
the Parthian Empire have playedno small role in Rome's defeat.
(33:25):
So a, a rebellion in Judea of all places,
is now pushing every single buttonthat the Romans have when they see how
vulnerable they are inthe eastern frontier.
>> Bill Whalen (33:36):
And from the Roman standpoint,
why didn't Rome consider a final solution?
>> Barry Strauss (33:42):
It's not because the Romans are nice guys.
It's because it's actually kind ofdifficult to massacre every man,
woman and child of a population.
>> Bill Whalen (33:52):
Right? So now we're back in the modern times.
They don't have rail systems.
They can't cart thousands upon thousandsof people to concentration camps and
kill them, right?
>> Barry Strauss (33:59):
No, you have to kill people the old fashioned way, one by one.
Besides which, this is a societythat deals in human flesh.
It's a, it's a slave society, right?
Much better to sell people into slavery,exile them and
sell them into slavery thanto simply massacre them.
But the Romans did feel that they hadengaged in the equivalent of a final
(34:20):
solution.
They basically wiped out a largepart of the Jewish population.
And there are very few Jews livingin the heart of the Jewish homeland,
the area known as Judah or Judea,the area around Jerusalem.
Significant Jewish population survivein the north in Galilee and the Golan.
(34:44):
But the Romans also,to put the icing on the cake,
they changed the name of the provincefrom Judea to Syria Palestina,
so from Judea to Palestine, which isa signal that the Romans are no longer
going to deal with the Jewish populationof Judea as the local intermediaries.
(35:05):
Instead, they're going to deal with theGreek speaking population who thought of
the country as Palestine rather than Judeaor Israel, which would have been, I think,
the traditional name thatJews would have used.
So to that extent, the Romans are engagedin a, quote, unquote, final solution.
>> Bill Whalen (35:23):
And talk a bit, Barry,
about the mindset of the Jewsafter this rebellion is crushed.
They have physically crushed the Jews.
Have they spiritually crushed the Jews?
>> Barry Strauss (35:31):
No, they haven't spiritually crushed the Jews at all.
And admittedly it's dicey,it's dicey as to what's going to happen,
but I think we can say that what happensis that the rabbinic movement emerges.
It had already begun to emergeafter the first revolt, but
(35:54):
it comes into its own around the year200 with the compilation of the Mishnah,
which is a detailed religioustext that writes down
Jewish laws that previouslyhad only been oral law and
passed on from generation to generation.
(36:14):
They're now written down andthey give Jews a foundation for
those who want to, to continue theirreligion, but by different means.
They no longer havethe Temple in Jerusalem.
Instead they will engage indaily religious services to keep
the religion going andthey will follow the whole cycle
(36:34):
of holidays that they usedto follow in the Temple.
They will now do so by other means.
It doesn't take root overnight.
It takes centuries forthis to be developed.
But the basic idea isspiritual resistance.
The Jews will resist Rome spiritually,but physically they'll accept Roman rule.
(36:56):
They will be good citizensof the Roman Empire.
They will be humbled beforethe Emperor and his minions.
They will no longer rebel.
In fact, there still are some rebellions,but there are no major rebellions along
the lines of the ones,the three that I wrote about.
>> Bill Whalen (37:13):
Let's circle back, Barry, to ancient Iran and the other empire,
the Parthian Empire, which I believeruns from about 247 BC to 224 AD.
>> Barry Strauss (37:22):
Indeed.
>> Bill Whalen (37:23):
Vast stretch of land from the Euphrates to the Himalayas.
They control Silk Road.
Tell us a bit about what they'redoing in the midst of all of this.
Are they egging on the Jews?
Are they arming the Jews?
Are they kind of playingmischief maker here?
Or are they trying to havea very light involvement so
as to not get intoa direct fight with Rome?
Or all of the above?
>> Barry Strauss (37:43):
Yeah, all of the above in a sense.
But the bottom line is they are notgoing to get directly involved.
I mean, imagine that you're the king ofFrance and The American Revolution is
going on and the Americans don'twin the Battle of Saratoga.
They have some victories, but
it's not at all clear thatthey're going to pull this off.
So you probably wouldn't make an alliancewith the fledgling American republic.
(38:08):
I think the Parthiansare in a similar position.
They're unimpressed by whatthe Jewish rebels have done.
This is very nice, but let's seea real victory over the Romans, and
the rebels don't come upwith that real victory.
On top of which,they've got their own fish to fry.
Elsewhere, the Parthians have wona big victory over Rome in Armenia,
(38:32):
which is a larger country inantiquity than it is today.
They want to hold on to that.
They don't especially want toincite the Romans against them.
That being said, so the Parthian Empirehas a series of vassal kinglets within it.
And one of the more interesting onesfrom our point of view is the ancient
(38:53):
equivalent of Iraqi Kurdistan,place called Adiabin.
The royal dynasty there hasconverted to Judaism about 20,
25 years before the great revolt.
And they send their sons, orsome of them to Jerusalem to be educated.
And they are there atthe time of the revolt.
They support the revolt.
They fight for the rebels.
(39:14):
We know of a small number,
a handful of leading Parthians who are inJerusalem fighting for the rebels.
And we can only assume that thereare a lot more than this small number.
We're dependent forthe information on Josephus,
who is taking pain to downplayJewish connections to Parthia.
(39:36):
So I suspect there were more, but
not enough to turn the tideagainst Rome in the revolt.
>> Bill Whalen (39:45):
All right, let's move to a modern times now,Barry,
want you to talk about two things.
Number one, how all of this applies totoday's friends that Israel's have,
the United States and others,and conversely, Israel's enemies.
>> Barry Strauss (39:57):
Right.
So I mean,I think one lesson that both is.
Friends and enemies of Israelcan take from this is that
the Jews are very determined people,right?
The fact that they were crazy enoughto engage in these three revolts and
then they were able to turn around andsay, well, we didn't survive through
physical resistance, but we willsurvive through spiritual resistance,
(40:20):
tells us that these are people whoare willing to fight and people
who have a huge resource of resilience anddetermination to, to draw on.
That's something that we needto keep in mind today at,
Looking at today's struggles.
>> Bill Whalen (40:35):
So, Jesse, perhaps when you look at what's going on in the Middle
east right now, that Hamas,Iran made a big miscalculation.
>> Speaker 3 (40:43):
Definitely.
I think they made.
I think they made a huge miscalculation.
I think they thought it was going tobe relatively easy to topple Israel and
its people.
I think they underestimated the strengthand resilience of, or at least, or at.
>> Bill Whalen (40:59):
Least wear down Israel.
Have the Israeli public becometired of war and then have a.
Some sort of settlement after that.
I think that's the greatmiscalculation here.
I don't think they recognize that Israelwould go in as tough as they did in a Gaza
and would stay in as longas they've stayed in.
>> Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, they.
And I, I think that if they had lookedat history more, they would have,
they would have understood that.
>> Bill Whalen (41:21):
Okay, and the lesson here for America's friends, the same one,
just Israel is tough.
Yeah, Israel is tough.
>> Speaker 3 (41:28):
Israel isn't going anywhere.
You know, the Jews have a hugehistory to draw on, you know,
a huge fountain of experience.
And also for at least a significantpart of the Israeli population,
they have religious resourcesas well that give them strength.
So.So I think that's very important for
(41:51):
people to realize.
Also, just for the American audiencein particular, also some of the Western
audiences, seems to be this notion somehowthat Israel is a colonial settler state,
quote, unquote, that the Jews camefrom Poland, the cliche goes,
and they threw an arrow at the map andsomehow they ended on Palestine and
(42:13):
that's where they decided they would go,as if they had no connection to it.
But in fact,Jewish history in Israel or Palestine,
call it what you will,goes back at least 3,000 years,
just based on secular sources,to say nothing of the Bible.
And there has been a continuous Jewishpresence there, although a small one, for
(42:36):
many years, since ancient times.
And the Jewish religion has alwaysemphasized the land of Israel,
the desire to return to Israel,to rebuild Jerusalem in the temple.
So these aren't just any old Placewhere they decided to settle.
Israel is the place.
>> Bill Whalen (42:57):
Right now we have a challenge here in this country, Barry,
and it's one of Americans andtheir knowledge of history.
Yes, if you did pop quizzes, the averageAmerican on the roots of the revolution,
they would vastly fail.
I can tell you.
Years and years ago, I worked fora governor of California.
I was a speechwriter.
I ran a speechwriting office.
Every summer we'd have college kids comingin, interning, talking, very bright kids,
(43:19):
Barry, from, you know, great Californiacolleges and the jerk that I am, I would
give them a quiz on American history,morbidly curious about what they knew.
They knew nothing before Californiastatehood is the point here.
They knew nothing about whatcaused the American Revolution,
nothing about taxation withoutrepresentation, didn't understand
the nuances between republicandemocracy and so on and so forth.
(43:41):
Question to you, Barry, and I don'tknow how familiar you are with Israeli
education, but if I were to talk tokids in Israeli schools right now,
are they being educated on these revolts?
Do they understand that it's notjust Israel from 1947 to present,
that we're talking millenniaof hardship and struggle?
>> Barry Strauss (43:58):
Absolutely.
I mean, everybody in Israelhas heard of Bar Kochba.
I mean that question.
It's.
There's a holiday in the spring,
a religious holiday which Zionismhas also connected with Bar Kokhba.
And he celebrated kindergarten schools and
kindergarten studentssing songs about him.
(44:23):
I think everybody knows about Masada and
everybody knows about the fallof Jerusalem and the Temple.
The surviving foundationwall of the Temple,
the Western Wall, is,I would say, a national shrine.
So yes, I mean, huge education.
I mean in Israel,as in no less than in the.
(44:45):
No less in Israel than in the UnitedStates, kids scoff at history and
scoff at education, but certainly they'retold about it and I think probably
know much more about it than the UnitedAmericans doing about their history.
Let's not forget that in Israelthere's mandatory military service for
every Jewish man and women.
Certain ultra Orthodox have a carve out,but
(45:06):
that makes a huge difference when you knowthat you're going to go into the military.
And it makes people muchmore civic minded and
much more patriotic than theyare in the United States.
Also, the calendar,the weekly calendar in Israel is,
is a Jewish calendar withSaturday being the day of rest.
(45:26):
Sunday is a work day and even very secularpeople tend to have a Friday night dinner,
Shabbat dinner with the family in a waythat, say, American Jews often don't.
>> Bill Whalen (45:40):
All right, Barry, let's close with what we began with and
let's go back to the American republic.
And yes, that great man with the verybiblical name Benjamin Franklin.
And of course,you've heard the quote a million times.
Probably he's asked during the formationof the Constitution, well, doctor,
what have we got a republic of?
Democracy, Monarchy, A republic.
And what does Franklin say?
Quote, republic, if he can keep it.
(46:01):
So question Barry, are you bullish or
bearish right now on the chancesof the American republic?
>> Barry Strauss (46:08):
Bullish, because I think people realize that it's in danger and
they realize that our educationalsystem and our cultural system have
not been serving us well for the lastgeneration or two where they have gone.
And they realize that we need to changethem and change them in big ways.
(46:28):
It will not be the job of a day,
it will not be the job of oneadministration to change them.
It will take much longer than that.
But the wheels are turning andthe changes are starting to happen.
I see them with my own eyes andwhat's going on in higher education, and
all I can say is it's about time.
Thank heavens.
(46:49):
Now we need these changes in manydifferent spheres of society.
And I think Americans are veryenergetic people and they are educable.
So I think change is coming,change is happening and
it will make society better and stronger.
>> Bill Whalen (47:08):
Barry, I enjoyed the conversation and it's truly an honor and
a privilege to have you hereat the Hoover Institution.
I think one of the great stories of thisinstitution is over about the past ten
years or so.
We have created a marvelous,marvelous bench of historians.
I would argue, Barry,
that our top tier of historians matchesthat of any university in America.
When you're looking at the likes ofVictor Davis Hansen and Neil Ferguson and
(47:31):
Stephen Cochin and so forth, theseare just people who are just of the apex.
And it's an honor to have youas part of that delegation.
>> Barry Strauss (47:37):
Thank you. The honor is mine, I assure you.
>> Bill Whalen (47:39):
It's great you've been listening to matters of policy and
politics at Hoover Institution Podcast.
If you've been enjoying this podcast,please don't forget to rate, review and
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If you wouldn't mind,please spread the word.
Tell your friends about us.
The Hoover Institution has Facebook,Instagram and xp.
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That's spelled H double O V E R I N S T.
Barry Strauss, great man.
(48:01):
That he is.He's on X.
His x handle is @barry strauss.
It's spelled b a double r y s T R A U S S.
The book we've been discussing Its title,once again, is Jews versus
Rome Two Centuries of Rebellionagainst the World's Mightiest Empire.
You can buy it now.
I recommend that you do.
While you're at it, I recommend you goto our website, which is hoover.org and
(48:22):
sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, whichdelivers the best from Barry Strauss and
his Hoover colleagues.
Your inbox weekdays forthe Hoover Institution.
This is Bill Whalen.
We'll be back soon with a new installmentof Matters of Policy and Politics.
Until next time, take care andthanks for joining us today.
>> Speaker 3 (48:38):
This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution,
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[MUSIC]
>> Bill Whalen (00:05):
Its Friday August 15, 2025 and welcome back to Matters of Policy and
Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast.
I'm Bill Whalen.
I'm the Virginia Hobbs CarpenterDistinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism
here at the Hoover Institution, but I amone of several fellows who are podcasting.
I recommend you go to our website,which is hoover.org podcast, and
check out what we offer to you.
We cover the waterfront of issues.
(00:26):
It's great stuff.
If you like to listen to pods when youwork out or travel or drive in your car,
whatever, you definitelycheck out the Hoover podcast.
Today we're going to dosomething a little different.
We're going to go back in time and
then back to the present to talk aboutsome elements that they have in common.
This would be talk about empires,the health of republics, and
the condition of the Jewish people.
And joining me today to talkabout this is Barry Strauss.
(00:49):
Barry is the Hoover Institution'sCorliss Page Dean Senior Fellow,
as well as the Bryson Edith M.
Boehmer professor of Humanistic StudiesEmeritus at Cornell University.
He's also a military naval historian witha focus on ancient Greece and Rome and
their lessons.
For Barry Strauss is a winner of the 2025Bradley Prize in honor of his dedication
to the study andteaching of Western civilization and
(01:10):
classical military history.
That passion is evident if you read hislatest book, which is hot off the presses.
It's titled Jews vs Rome,
Two Centuries of Rebellion againstthe World's Mightiest People.
Barry, thanks for coming on the podcast.
>> Barry Strauss (01:23):
Thank you, Bill.
Pleasure to be here.
>> Bill Whalen (01:25):
So, since I referenced your Cornell roots,
let me now get you in trouble with yourfriends back in Ithaca, be honest.
It's about 75 degrees outside herein Northern California today not
a cloud in the sky.
Tell me this is a betterplace to live than Ithaca.
>> Barry Strauss (01:41):
Yeah, the weather is a bit of an upgrade here.
I love Ithaca.
It's very beautiful, but the weather.
California wins in the weather department.
Without question.
>> Bill Whalen (01:49):
Okay, now make the case for Ithaca.
What's better about upper stateNew York than Northern California?
>> Barry Strauss (01:54):
Living is easy.
No traffic,daily life absolutely hassle free living.
And, andI have a lot of friends there, so.
>> Bill Whalen (02:04):
Okay, let's.
Let's talk a couple minutes about whatbrought you into this profession, Barry.
Why the attraction to history?
Why the attraction to ancient history,military history, naval history?
>> Barry Strauss (02:16):
Golly.
I felt that history was in my.
History is in my blood, my dad and
his father were both combatveterans of the US army.
My grandfather in World War I in France,my father World War II in Italy.
And I grew up with this book onthe shelf called the Road to Rome,
showing American soldiers headingtowards the eternal City.
(02:39):
And I guess I was just fascinated by it.
And, you know, my grandfather alwayswanted to tell the story of his
immigration from Russian Polandto the us Becoming a US citizen,
then going off to France and fighting.
Somehow he never got around toit before his untimely demise.
(03:02):
But it was always in the back of my mind,always something that.
That interested me.
I think also the fact that I come froma large family, many relatives from my
grandparents generation, they all hadcome from Europe and I just thought there
was quite fascinating and where all thiscame from, so I always wanted to know.
>> Bill Whalen (03:22):
Interesting dichotomy of World War II is if you look at the great
European capitals, London obviouslygets blitzed, Berlin gets decimated, but
Paris gets off pretty easy.
And Rome gets off pretty easy, too.
>> Barry Strauss (03:34):
Yeah, relatively easy.
Yes, they do, absolutely.
>> Bill Whalen (03:37):
All right, let's play a little pop culture here for
a minute before we get into the moreserious academic side of things.
So, yeah, I'm curious, Barry,
into this ongoing fascination thatwe have with Rome in our society.
And I'm.
I'm old enough to remember, Barry,back in the 1970s when PBS devoted
considerable time, energy andtreasure to I, Claudius.
I remember in the 1980s whenthe very sordid Bob Guccione of
(04:01):
Penthouse Magazine Fame poureda lot of money into this really,
really kind of bad movie called Caligula,just showing Roman its most decadent.
>> Barry Strauss (04:11):
Yes.
>> Bill Whalen (04:12):
I don't know if you did, but I certainly did.
I saw.
I saw Gladiator in the theaters and.
And absolutely Crow gets an Oscar for it.
I don't think the sequelreally was as good, but
it's hard to match the original sometimes.
And I really enjoyed the Rome,Barry, which chronicled the lives of
some soldiers and just the politicsof Rome and society there.
>> Barry Strauss (04:33):
Yes. >> Bill Whalen
curious about, Barry.
I watched something like Rome andI noticed two things.
These Romans have kind ofvague British accents.
They all seem to have good dental plans.
And I don't think ancient Rome,especially on the dental side of things,
I don't think that was the case.
No, the dental.
The dental plans.
Not.
(04:53):
Not the case of ancient Rome.
As far as the British accent, though,there's something to be said for it,
because the Romans werethe imperial people.
And as Americans, we in particular,
we look at the Brits asthe imperial people par excellence.
We still think of empire asspeaking with a British accent.
Certainly was the casein American history.
(05:15):
So also, Romans stand for
culture with a capital C,and for the study of.
Of Latin,which also recalls British roots and
a more European style of education thanwe're used to in the United States.
So the British accent is.
(05:36):
There's something not inauthenticabout it, if I might say.
It's pretty appropriate.
>> Bill Whalen (05:41):
If you watch the series Rome, everything is very cunning,
everything is very strategic.
Life is just one, a constant calculation,
was life in ancient Romereally that complicated.
>> Barry Strauss (05:51):
For the elite, yes, it definitely was like that.
I mean, if we read Cicero's letters,which are just these wonderful documents,
many of which were nevermeant to be published,
we just get this behind the sceneslook of what Roman society was like.
And indeed, constant calculation,personal relationships were everything.
(06:13):
Who knows who, who's zooming who.
As the, as the song says, that'sabsolutely essential for Roman society.
So there's a degree ofaccuracy in that picture.
Yes, indeed.
>> Bill Whalen (06:27):
And it's also a series about upward mobility and opportunity.
And so these two fellas end up inall sorts of odd situations, right?
Caesar and Cleopatra andAugustus, so forth,
was upward mobility reallypart of the Roman experience?
>> Barry Strauss (06:43):
It was, I mean, nothing like the modern Western or
American experience.
Nothing like that.
But, yes,upward mobility was a possibility,
particularly in the goodyears of the Pax Romana.
So, say, from Augustus on for the next 200years, there was a lot of upward mobility.
And even afterwards,there was a lot of upward mobility.
(07:06):
I mean, after the first emperors,
the emperors almost never come fromthe Roman elite, let alone from Italy.
They're coming from all over the empire.
And Rome is a society in which ultimatelythe immigrants rise to the top and
the old Romans fade away.
So, yeah, I mean, there wasn'tas much mobility, mass mobility,
(07:30):
as there is in modern society.
The ancient economy simplywouldn't permit that.
And also, let's not forget,this is a slave society, so
there's enormous number ofpeople on at the bottom.
Although the opportunity to buy your wayout of slavery existed in antiquity in
a way that it hasn't inmodern slave systems.
But so a degree of social mobility,indeed.
>> Bill Whalen (07:51):
Mary, Yesterday I had the chance to sit down and speak for
the better part of an hour with VictorDavis Hansen, an interview for a podcast.
The occasion was the 100th issue ofa publication of Hoover called Strategika-
>> Barry Strauss (08:02):
Right.
>> Bill Whalen (08:02):
It's very clever.
It takes current warfare,current problems.
It goes back in time to,to draw parallels and so forth.
Here is Victor Davis Hansen,like yourself, a historian.
He's a classicist.
He is giving a lecture atHillsdale College in October 2023, Barry,
the title of which is,Will America suffer the same fate as Rome?
Here's a publication,the Conversation, July 31st.
(08:26):
Roman Empire and the fall ofNero offer possible lessons for
Trump about the cost of self isolation.
Here's the Times of Israel Barry,August the 3rd, All roads lead to Rome.
How Trump's administration wouldlead us to a similar fate?
Finally, here's the great Neil Ferguson,Hoover historian par Excellence.
Free Press, June 17.
America is in a late republic state dash,like Rome.
(08:48):
Bill, your thoughts, are you onboard with this line of thought?
>> Barry Strauss (08:53):
Well, these are all great people and great ideas, and
I'm on board with the ideaof using Rome as an analogy.
Rome is very good to think with, but
I actually think America is notin a late republic situation.
I think America has a remarkableability to reinvent itself.
(09:13):
I think it's in the American DNA.
So I'm not going to sell short,I'm not going to sell America short.
I don't think we're about to give upthe republic and to move into the empire.
Certainly we're, we're in a period ofgrowing pains that there is no doubt.
But I, I'm, I'm pretty,I'm bullish on America.
>> Bill Whalen (09:32):
What is the cautionary tale that Rome offers?
>> Barry Strauss (09:34):
Well, the cautionary tale of Rome offers is that everything
changes, nothing stays the same, andyou have to, you have to learn how to
roll with the punches anddecide what kind of change you want.
To me, the, the, the motto that Ialways think is important comes
not from Romeo, it does come from Italy.
(09:56):
It comes from this novel,the Leopard, Il Gatto Pardo,
a Sicilian novel from the 1950s, in whicha wise and cynical young character says,
if we want things to stay the same,everything has to change.
And I think that's worth keeping in mind.
(10:17):
You have to accept some changes inorder to preserve what's essential.
And the Romans were very good about that.
That's one of the reasons fortheir success.
It's one of the reasons why St.Augustine, a Christian,
obviously, is still reading Cicero,a pagan.
It's why the Roman Empire canmove to Constantinople and,
(10:40):
and yet keep Roman law and essential Romanvalues, Roman discipline, Roman order.
So that, I think, is the lesson for
Americans Things are gonna changewhether we like them or not.
So we have to decide what kind ofchange we want and how we keep things,
what we keep, what's good about things,way things are now and how we keep them.
>> Bill Whalen (11:05):
Was the berry, was the Roman Republic, was it fatally flawed or
did just circumstances overtake it?
>> Barry Strauss (11:11):
I think that's a really good question.
But I guess I would say that it failed toadapt flexibly to change circumstances.
And so the only way for it to adapt wasviolently to these changed circumstances.
And the changed circumstances are all buta cliche.
And that is the institutions thatwere created to govern a city state
(11:33):
were not created to govern an empire.
And it was one thing forRome to be governed by a small elite
holding annual office when Romewas a city state in Italy.
But when the Roman Empire stretches 3,000miles from Edinburgh to Damascus, then
you got a problem and you have to comeup with a different way of governing it.
(11:56):
It didn't have to be the way that theRomans chose with an imperial monarchy and
an increasingly repressiveimperial monarchy, but
it certainly had to be different than thegovernment that existed in the Republic.
And the Romans had a lotof trouble seeing this.
I think that is one problem thatevery society faces to understand
(12:18):
the change that's coming andto prepare for it and to deal with it in,
in the best, in the best manner.
>> Bill Whalen (12:26):
Now, America's founding fathers, Barry,
come along about 17 centuries later andthey create a republic.
What did the foundingfathers do better than Rome?
>> Barry Strauss (12:34):
Well,
I think the founding Fathersbuilt size into the Republic.
I think they understood that it was goingto expand, they wanted it to expand.
And so they built in a system that hadboth a federal level and a state level.
(12:55):
So it was, it was already a compromise.
And there wasn't an attempt to havea centralized government that ran
everything that has a built inflexibility that the Roman system lacked.
>> Bill Whalen (13:07):
Okay, let's talk about the book, the title again.
Jews Versus Two Centuries of Rebellionagainst the World's Mightiest People.
What prompted you to write this?
>> Barry Strauss (13:16):
Well, two things.
One, I'm an ancient historian,but I'm also an American Jew.
And although my specialty is Greece andRome, I'd long had in mind that I wanted
to write a book that broughtin Jewish history as well.
So it had been on my radar screen,and then around 2020 or
(13:36):
so, I got interested in this particulartopic and began reading up on it.
And I noticed something really curious,and that is that Israel and
ancient Israel andancient Iran were friends and allies.
In fact, Their relationship wascentral to the whole story.
(13:56):
So different, of course, than therelationship in 2020 between the state of
Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And I began to wonder, well, why?
Why is it the way it is today?
What does history haveto teach us about this?
And I also felt that althoughthere was excellent,
really excellent impressive scholarshipon the subject of the Jewish revolts,
(14:19):
that the subject of the Iranianconnection had been.
Was understudied.
And I felt that there was a need for a newstudy that could say more about that.
So that was.
That was what got meinterested in the subject.
Those two things,both personal and intellectual.
>> Bill Whalen (14:35):
Right, now,
the book Barry outlines three rebellionsover the course of about two centuries.
I'll confess I knew one of the threerevolts, but I didn't know the other two.
But before we get the specifics ofwhat caused each of the revolts,
just in a larger question.
Why did the Jews rebel so often?
You would think maybe after the first andyou learned a lesson,
(14:55):
you wouldn't do it,certainly not after the second time.
But they did it three times.
Did they expect a differentoutcome each time?
Or again,was this just a product of circumstances?
>> Barry Strauss (15:05):
No, they expected a different outcome.
I mean, as you know, people are goodat saying, this time will be different.
And I think the Jews werevery much in that category.
They were very determined, they were verynationalistic, and they're very resilient.
They were also very inspired.
These centuries that I writeabout are great, great,
(15:28):
the golden era of apocalyptic andmessianic thought.
And there's always.
There are always people who are willingto inspire revolt and to say,
you know, we have the full force of.
Of God religion on our side.
So there's that.
(15:48):
There's also the geostrategic reality thatalthough we might look at the map and
think that ancient Israel,which is called Judea in this period,
we might think that Judea is at the ageEdge of the Roman Empire as it is,
it's actually in the center.
It's located between two empires,a Western empire, Rome and
an Eastern empire, Parthia,an Iranian Empire.
(16:12):
And there's a large Jewishdiaspora in the Roman Empire, but
there's also a large Jewishdiaspora in the Parthian Empire.
So if you're sitting in Jerusalem andyou're thinking,
how can I win my country's independenceback and how can I get rid of the Romans?
You will naturally look eastward to yourco-religionists in the Parthian Empire.
(16:34):
But also to the Parthian government inthinking these people hate the Romans,
which they did,they've gone to war with the Romans.
Might they not help us if werebel against the Romans?
So I think that is a factor as well.
The fact that they're not just religiousand nationalistic factors, but
geostrategic factors that mightencourage someone to rebel.
(16:57):
On top of that,the Romans do not play their cards right.
Instead of engaging ina policy of compromise and
balance of power, they do fora while and it works quite well.
Instead of doing that, they kind ofengage in a winner take all policy and
push they feel they can push aroundthe locals and get away with it.
(17:22):
Then after suppressing the revolt,they then proceed to
allow most of the Jews to survivein Judea and elsewhere, but
then to humiliate them by imposingattacks on them that nobody else
in the empire has to pay andabsolutely turning a deaf ear told to
Jewish demands to be able torebuild Jerusalem in the temple.
(17:47):
In fact, when the Romans dodecide to rebuild Jerusalem,
they insult the locals bysaying we are rebuilding it but
as a pagan city with temples onlyto the pagan God in the city.
And we're going to give it a new name.
We're going to name it afterthe Emperor Hadrian and
the chief God of Rome, Jupiter.
(18:09):
So the city changes its name fromJerusalem to Alia Capitolina.
He's alias Hadrianus,that's the emperor, and
Jupiter Capitolinus,the chief God of Rome.
So this is the Hadrian Jupiter Cityis what essentially it means.
>> Bill Whalen (18:29):
Now you're telling me that the, the,
the best of the brightest in Romeunderstand they have the military might to
put down any uprising,any revolt, any rebellion.
But they're not thinking strategically and
understanding that at the same timethey're putting down the revolt,
they're also creating conditions forthe next revolt.
>> Barry Strauss (18:45):
That's right, yes.
They're not really,they're not thinking long term.
They don't have the right balance in mindas to how to deal with the provincials.
>> Bill Whalen (18:53):
Are there other historical parallels that come to mind when you,
when you look at this relationship?
I'm thinking empires anddealing with trouble, colonies and.
>> Barry Strauss (19:02):
Yeah, yeah, there's one that comes to mind.
You know, certainly the 13 colonies andgreat Britain, I mean King George and
his government thought that the way todeal with these ungrateful provincials and
the Romans I think would alsothink of the Jews as ungrateful
is to slap them around,use force and you're going to win.
(19:26):
But they underestimated the provincials.
I think the Romansunderestimated the Jews as well.
Although unlike the Americans,turned to their equivalent of Parthia,
which is to say France,and they succeeded.
The Jews were not successful ingetting Parthia to intervene.
And I think that is,that is the essential difference.
>> Bill Whalen (19:49):
All right, let's break down each of the three revolts that you
outlined in the book, Barry.
The first one is the onethat I'm familiar with.
It's a so called revolt.
This leads to the destructionof Jerusalem and the Temple and
also is the siege of Masada,which exactly.
Also was a very goodTV movie at one point.
So indeed explain howthe great Revolt came to.
>> Barry Strauss (20:08):
So you know, Rome conquered Judea in the year 63 BCE and
by hook or crook they managed tohold on to it for over a century.
They lose it 25 years after takingit to the Parthians who invaded,
conquered and put a Parthianking on the throne in Jerusalem.
(20:29):
And then the Romans haveto fight to get it back.
The fight is led by a man whois infamous in history, Herod,
Herod the Great, who becomes king andrules with an iron fist and then some.
He doesn't have a competent successor.
The Romans eventually fire him andturn Judea into a Roman province.
(20:50):
And there's constant turbulence.
There are revolts that are putdown before they can turn
into anything great or all that long term.
And the Romans more or less keep.
They keep order in Judeawith a very small force.
They don't even haveallegiance stationed there.
(21:10):
The closest legion is in Syria.
They've got some auxiliary troops,
local carabinieri types whoare keeping order there.
But under the Emperor Nero,the Romans send
out a series of vicious,incompetent governors.
(21:33):
Even before then they had sent outvicious incompetent governors.
The most infamous ofcourse is Pontius Pilate,
that was under Tiberius andhe sets the pattern for what follows.
And finally, there's a governor whoseorders from Nero is basically to squeeze
the provincials until the pips squeak.
(21:53):
And the idea is to take moneyfrom the temple to favor the non
Jewish population in Judea.
There's a large Greek speakingpopulation there as well.
And when the natives protest,he sends in the troops to massacre them.
And there's a massacre ofcivilians in Jerusalem.
(22:14):
That is the last straw forthe hotheads who manage
to come into power anddeclare a revolt against Rome.
The governor of Syria, an older guy,
maybe not on the top of his game,marches with an army to Jerusalem and
(22:34):
attempts to intimidate the localswho are not being intimidated.
And then tail between his legshe starts to march home again.
And the locals ambush the armyin a narrow valley leading
northwestward from Jerusalem.
And when it's over, they manage tomassacre the better part of a legion.
(22:58):
Now, this is a disaster for Rome.
It's not the sort of thing thatan imperial power can take lying down.
And so,Nero decides to send out one of his best
generals to the east toput down the rebellion.
>> Bill Whalen (23:14):
Is there any way that Masada could have had a different outcome?
>> Barry Strauss (23:18):
No, once.
>> Bill Whalen (23:20):
And maybe explained what happened at Masada.
>> Barry Strauss (23:22):
So what happened at Masada is,
Masada is kind of a stop onthe underground railroad.
It's where the lastrebels are holed up and
where sympathizes withthem flee to Masada.
It is a huge natural fortress in theJudean desert at the edge of the Dead Sea.
(23:44):
And they go from there to Egypt andother points outside of Judea.
There are about 950 people there,many of them women and children.
And the Romans are inthe mopping up operation.
After having destroyed Jerusalem,put down the revolt,
they want to get rid ofthe last bastions of rebellion.
(24:06):
So they surround Masada with a legion and
then some, andbasically say surrender or die.
The defenders of Masada don't have anychance of defeating this Roman legion.
The only question is, how are the Romansgoing to get to the top of the Masada?
(24:27):
And they do this by building a ramp.
It's, it's an impressive engineering feat,
certainly not a herculeanengineering feat.
Difficult to do, butby no means impossible.
The Romans are great engineers andthey are, they are going to take Masada.
The defenders fight back to the degreethey can, but that's not very great.
(24:51):
And they decide that ratherthan surrender to the Romans,
rather than be tortured andsee their women and children enslaved,
they will engage in a mass killingexercise in which the men kill their,
the members, the other members of theirfamilies then kill each other and
(25:12):
then the final ones commit suicide.
So when the Romans go up to the topof Masada, they've reached the top,
they expect to fight their way in,but there's no one resisting them.
There are only a few people hidingwho've survived this massacre,
who tell the tale andeverybody else is dead.
(25:34):
So could the rebels havedefeated the Romans?
No.
They could have surrendered or they couldhave decided to fight to the last man and
there could have beena bloodbath that way.
Those are other possibilities.
But victory over the Romans in this case,no, not a possibility.
>> Bill Whalen (25:51):
Right, the second revolt buried the so called Diaspora revolt.
And here the issue oftaxation comes into play.
>> Barry Strauss (25:58):
Yes, it's not so.
The Romans, after the first revolt,
they punished the Jewseverywhere in the Roman Empire,
whether they were part of the revolt ornot, whether they lived in Judea or not.
And they make every Jewin the Roman Empire pay
a small annual tax tothe chief God of Rome.
It's kind of a parody and
(26:19):
an insult of the tax that Jews had beenpaying to the temple in Jerusalem.
Now it has to go to the chief God of Rome.
And this is highly insulting to the peoplewho live, to the Jews of the Empire.
It's also very clear thatthe Romans are never going to allow
(26:40):
them to rebuild the temple.
So they rise in rebellion.
But they do so at a very strategic moment.
It's when the Empirehas invaded Parthia and
the Empire is in the process ofconquering Iraq, ancient Mesopotamia.
Just at that time, the Jews of Egypt andLibya and Cyprus rise in rebellion.
(27:04):
Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia,there's a revolt against the Romans and
the local Jewish population is playinga prominent role in leading and
participating in thisrevolt against the Romans.
So it looks like this is a coordinatedrebellion east and west.
It's very threatening to Rome and
(27:26):
the Empire has to go to great effortsto put it down, which indeed it does.
>> Bill Whalen (27:33):
Right, now, Barry, there are no cell phones back then.
There are no zoom callslike we're doing now.
So, yeah, these are going on concurrently.
Is there any organization going on here oreach hand randomly?
And also on top of them, curious,what were the Jews fighting with?
Where did they get their weapons andhow did they fight them?
>> Barry Strauss (27:52):
Great question.
Well, in Egypt.
So to the first question,how do you coordinate something like this?
>> Bill Whalen (27:59):
You can't in theory, if you take the ancient war, but
at least give them the modern tool ofcommunications, you could talk all around
the Roman Empire to each other and reallyjust do a rather brilliant job of just how
to mount insurrections andcomplicate life for the Romans.
But yeah, you obviously can'tcommunicate in real time like that.
>> Barry Strauss (28:16):
No, you can't communicate in real time.
So you can't have a coordinated D day,zero hour, anything like that.
>> Bill Whalen (28:22):
Right.
>> Barry Strauss (28:23):
But there are ways to get messages back and forth.
There are people who can travel.
There are people who are expert atgetting messages over difficult terrain.
There's also fire signals,
which are an important way ofcommunication in the ancient world.
So, yeah,it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
And we know that the borderbetween the Parthian Empire and
(28:47):
the Roman Empire was porous.
There are people crossingover it all the time.
So it's not beyond the human ingenuityto get messages back and forth.
After all the Romans,how to get the message from the East, Gee,
there's a rebellion going on in the West.
We better send an army fromthe Mesopotamia to Egypt to put this down,
(29:09):
this rebellion.
So, yeah, there are lots of waysto get messages back and forth,
though we don't know any of the detailsas to how that right now, tools.
>> Bill Whalen (29:18):
And weapons of the Jews were tools- Tools and weapons.
>> Barry Strauss (29:20):
So in Egypt,
there are Jews serving as soldiers inthe Roman army of occupation as Egypt.
And many of them comefrom military families.
They've been serving as soldierseven earlier when Cleopatra and
the Ptolemies were governing Egypt,large Jewish population in Egypt.
So they would have had weapons that way.
(29:42):
In Libya, I don't think they'reserving as soldiers then, but
they had served as soldiers andso they'd have weapons in family,
weapons that have military traditions.
We know of lots of rebellions in theancient world where people made their own
weapons, as indeed inthe Third Jewish revolt.
They do.
(30:02):
So, yeah, I don't think it'sany problem to get weapons.
They can break into armories.
They can get weapons that way as well.
>> Bill Whalen (30:07):
Are they similarly armed, Barry, or is this the case of.
What is the cliche,bringing a knife to a gunfight?
>> Barry Strauss (30:13):
I think it's bringing a knife to a gunfight, but
remember that the Romans don't have guns.
And, yeah, if you have.
If you have a full legion that'sprepared and in battle order,
then the knife is not going towork in that particular gunfight.
But if you surprise the enemy and they'renot ready for you, they're sleeping.
(30:35):
Then you have a real chance.
>> Bill Whalen (30:38):
Right, and the Great Revolt barrier and the Diaspora revolt,
how long did each one last?
>> Barry Strauss (30:42):
So the Great Revolt lasted for four years, and
then the mopping up operationstake place a few years afterwards.
The Diaspora revolt basically lasts forabout a year.
>> Bill Whalen (30:52):
A year.
Okay, let's go to the third revolt, and
feel free to correct mehere if I get it wrong.
The Bar Kokba revolt, very close.
>> Barry Strauss (30:59):
Bar Kochba is how an Israeli would pronounce it.
I think an American would say Bar Kokhba,but, yeah, Bar Kokhba, very good.
>> Bill Whalen (31:06):
Okay, thank you.
And this succeeds in creatingan independent state for
a while, but the story here seems to bethat the third time is not the charm.
Rome seemed to have said, enough, enough.
And what results out of this,Barry, is ugly by modern standards.
We're talking genocide, we're talkingenslavement, we're talking depopulation.
In other words, Rome drops the hammer.
>> Barry Strauss (31:28):
Yeah, let's add ethnic cleansing to it as well.
>> Bill Whalen (31:30):
Yeah, so, I mean- So what was different about this revolt, Barry?
And then from the Roman side,why did they decide, okay, this is it?
>> Barry Strauss (31:39):
Okay, what's different about it is a couple of things.
First, the rebels are very ingenious.
They said, we've learned our lessons.
We're not going to take on the legions.
We're going to engage inirregular war warfare.
And they prepare both by makingtheir own weapons, by the way,
and also, as you very astutely asked,in terms.
(32:00):
Of the second revolt, but also bypreparing underground shelters, digging
tunnels, using caves, hiding themselves inplaces where the Romans wouldn't expect.
And they burst on the Romans like a storm.
The Romans are utterly unprepared forthis and
they inflict very heavycasualties on the Romans.
(32:20):
And the Romans are forced to scramble invarious ways and it takes them a couple of
years because before they can putthe revolt down, and the only way to put
it down is painstakingly,you know, rebel site by rebel site,
tunnel by tunnel, they have to take over,they have to put down the revolt.
The other thing that makes the Romans sotesty about this revolt
(32:44):
is that it takes place in the shadowof Rome's defeat in Parthia.
So Rome's attempt to invadethe Parthian Empire is an utter failure,
complete defeat.
The Emperor dies of probablya stroke during this and
his successor is basicallywants to pull all the troops
(33:05):
out of the Parthian Empire andpeace on the border.
But he knows that A,Rome has been humiliated in its attempt to
conquer Parthia and B,the Jews in both the Roman Empire and
the Parthian Empire have playedno small role in Rome's defeat.
(33:25):
So a, a rebellion in Judea of all places,
is now pushing every single buttonthat the Romans have when they see how
vulnerable they are inthe eastern frontier.
>> Bill Whalen (33:36):
And from the Roman standpoint,
why didn't Rome consider a final solution?
>> Barry Strauss (33:42):
It's not because the Romans are nice guys.
It's because it's actually kind ofdifficult to massacre every man,
woman and child of a population.
>> Bill Whalen (33:52):
Right? So now we're back in the modern times.
They don't have rail systems.
They can't cart thousands upon thousandsof people to concentration camps and
kill them, right?
>> Barry Strauss (33:59):
No, you have to kill people the old fashioned way, one by one.
Besides which, this is a societythat deals in human flesh.
It's a, it's a slave society, right?
Much better to sell people into slavery,exile them and
sell them into slavery thanto simply massacre them.
But the Romans did feel that they hadengaged in the equivalent of a final
(34:20):
solution.
They basically wiped out a largepart of the Jewish population.
And there are very few Jews livingin the heart of the Jewish homeland,
the area known as Judah or Judea,the area around Jerusalem.
Significant Jewish population survivein the north in Galilee and the Golan.
(34:44):
But the Romans also,to put the icing on the cake,
they changed the name of the provincefrom Judea to Syria Palestina,
so from Judea to Palestine, which isa signal that the Romans are no longer
going to deal with the Jewish populationof Judea as the local intermediaries.
(35:05):
Instead, they're going to deal with theGreek speaking population who thought of
the country as Palestine rather than Judeaor Israel, which would have been, I think,
the traditional name thatJews would have used.
So to that extent, the Romans are engagedin a, quote, unquote, final solution.
>> Bill Whalen (35:23):
And talk a bit, Barry,
about the mindset of the Jewsafter this rebellion is crushed.
They have physically crushed the Jews.
Have they spiritually crushed the Jews?
>> Barry Strauss (35:31):
No, they haven't spiritually crushed the Jews at all.
And admittedly it's dicey,it's dicey as to what's going to happen,
but I think we can say that what happensis that the rabbinic movement emerges.
It had already begun to emergeafter the first revolt, but
(35:54):
it comes into its own around the year200 with the compilation of the Mishnah,
which is a detailed religioustext that writes down
Jewish laws that previouslyhad only been oral law and
passed on from generation to generation.
(36:14):
They're now written down andthey give Jews a foundation for
those who want to, to continue theirreligion, but by different means.
They no longer havethe Temple in Jerusalem.
Instead they will engage indaily religious services to keep
the religion going andthey will follow the whole cycle
(36:34):
of holidays that they usedto follow in the Temple.
They will now do so by other means.
It doesn't take root overnight.
It takes centuries forthis to be developed.
But the basic idea isspiritual resistance.
The Jews will resist Rome spiritually,but physically they'll accept Roman rule.
(36:56):
They will be good citizensof the Roman Empire.
They will be humbled beforethe Emperor and his minions.
They will no longer rebel.
In fact, there still are some rebellions,but there are no major rebellions along
the lines of the ones,the three that I wrote about.
>> Bill Whalen (37:13):
Let's circle back, Barry, to ancient Iran and the other empire,
the Parthian Empire, which I believeruns from about 247 BC to 224 AD.
>> Barry Strauss (37:22):
Indeed.
>> Bill Whalen (37:23):
Vast stretch of land from the Euphrates to the Himalayas.
They control Silk Road.
Tell us a bit about what they'redoing in the midst of all of this.
Are they egging on the Jews?
Are they arming the Jews?
Are they kind of playingmischief maker here?
Or are they trying to havea very light involvement so
as to not get intoa direct fight with Rome?
Or all of the above?
>> Barry Strauss (37:43):
Yeah, all of the above in a sense.
But the bottom line is they are notgoing to get directly involved.
I mean, imagine that you're the king ofFrance and The American Revolution is
going on and the Americans don'twin the Battle of Saratoga.
They have some victories, but
it's not at all clear thatthey're going to pull this off.
So you probably wouldn't make an alliancewith the fledgling American republic.
(38:08):
I think the Parthiansare in a similar position.
They're unimpressed by whatthe Jewish rebels have done.
This is very nice, but let's seea real victory over the Romans, and
the rebels don't come upwith that real victory.
On top of which,they've got their own fish to fry.
Elsewhere, the Parthians have wona big victory over Rome in Armenia,
(38:32):
which is a larger country inantiquity than it is today.
They want to hold on to that.
They don't especially want toincite the Romans against them.
That being said, so the Parthian Empirehas a series of vassal kinglets within it.
And one of the more interesting onesfrom our point of view is the ancient
(38:53):
equivalent of Iraqi Kurdistan,place called Adiabin.
The royal dynasty there hasconverted to Judaism about 20,
25 years before the great revolt.
And they send their sons, orsome of them to Jerusalem to be educated.
And they are there atthe time of the revolt.
They support the revolt.
They fight for the rebels.
(39:14):
We know of a small number,
a handful of leading Parthians who are inJerusalem fighting for the rebels.
And we can only assume that thereare a lot more than this small number.
We're dependent forthe information on Josephus,
who is taking pain to downplayJewish connections to Parthia.
(39:36):
So I suspect there were more, but
not enough to turn the tideagainst Rome in the revolt.
>> Bill Whalen (39:45):
All right, let's move to a modern times now,Barry,
want you to talk about two things.
Number one, how all of this applies totoday's friends that Israel's have,
the United States and others,and conversely, Israel's enemies.
>> Barry Strauss (39:57):
Right.
So I mean,I think one lesson that both is.
Friends and enemies of Israelcan take from this is that
the Jews are very determined people,right?
The fact that they were crazy enoughto engage in these three revolts and
then they were able to turn around andsay, well, we didn't survive through
physical resistance, but we willsurvive through spiritual resistance,
(40:20):
tells us that these are people whoare willing to fight and people
who have a huge resource of resilience anddetermination to, to draw on.
That's something that we needto keep in mind today at,
Looking at today's struggles.
>> Bill Whalen (40:35):
So, Jesse, perhaps when you look at what's going on in the Middle
east right now, that Hamas,Iran made a big miscalculation.
>> Speaker 3 (40:43):
Definitely.
I think they made.
I think they made a huge miscalculation.
I think they thought it was going tobe relatively easy to topple Israel and
its people.
I think they underestimated the strengthand resilience of, or at least, or at.
>> Bill Whalen (40:59):
Least wear down Israel.
Have the Israeli public becometired of war and then have a.
Some sort of settlement after that.
I think that's the greatmiscalculation here.
I don't think they recognize that Israelwould go in as tough as they did in a Gaza
and would stay in as longas they've stayed in.
>> Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, they.
And I, I think that if they had lookedat history more, they would have,
they would have understood that.
>> Bill Whalen (41:21):
Okay, and the lesson here for America's friends, the same one,
just Israel is tough.
Yeah, Israel is tough.
>> Speaker 3 (41:28):
Israel isn't going anywhere.
You know, the Jews have a hugehistory to draw on, you know,
a huge fountain of experience.
And also for at least a significantpart of the Israeli population,
they have religious resourcesas well that give them strength.
So.So I think that's very important for
(41:51):
people to realize.
Also, just for the American audiencein particular, also some of the Western
audiences, seems to be this notion somehowthat Israel is a colonial settler state,
quote, unquote, that the Jews camefrom Poland, the cliche goes,
and they threw an arrow at the map andsomehow they ended on Palestine and
(42:13):
that's where they decided they would go,as if they had no connection to it.
But in fact,Jewish history in Israel or Palestine,
call it what you will,goes back at least 3,000 years,
just based on secular sources,to say nothing of the Bible.
And there has been a continuous Jewishpresence there, although a small one, for
(42:36):
many years, since ancient times.
And the Jewish religion has alwaysemphasized the land of Israel,
the desire to return to Israel,to rebuild Jerusalem in the temple.
So these aren't just any old Placewhere they decided to settle.
Israel is the place.
>> Bill Whalen (42:57):
Right now we have a challenge here in this country, Barry,
and it's one of Americans andtheir knowledge of history.
Yes, if you did pop quizzes, the averageAmerican on the roots of the revolution,
they would vastly fail.
I can tell you.
Years and years ago, I worked fora governor of California.
I was a speechwriter.
I ran a speechwriting office.
Every summer we'd have college kids comingin, interning, talking, very bright kids,
(43:19):
Barry, from, you know, great Californiacolleges and the jerk that I am, I would
give them a quiz on American history,morbidly curious about what they knew.
They knew nothing before Californiastatehood is the point here.
They knew nothing about whatcaused the American Revolution,
nothing about taxation withoutrepresentation, didn't understand
the nuances between republicandemocracy and so on and so forth.
(43:41):
Question to you, Barry, and I don'tknow how familiar you are with Israeli
education, but if I were to talk tokids in Israeli schools right now,
are they being educated on these revolts?
Do they understand that it's notjust Israel from 1947 to present,
that we're talking millenniaof hardship and struggle?
>> Barry Strauss (43:58):
Absolutely.
I mean, everybody in Israelhas heard of Bar Kochba.
I mean that question.
It's.
There's a holiday in the spring,
a religious holiday which Zionismhas also connected with Bar Kokhba.
And he celebrated kindergarten schools and
kindergarten studentssing songs about him.
(44:23):
I think everybody knows about Masada and
everybody knows about the fallof Jerusalem and the Temple.
The surviving foundationwall of the Temple,
the Western Wall, is,I would say, a national shrine.
So yes, I mean, huge education.
I mean in Israel,as in no less than in the.
(44:45):
No less in Israel than in the UnitedStates, kids scoff at history and
scoff at education, but certainly they'retold about it and I think probably
know much more about it than the UnitedAmericans doing about their history.
Let's not forget that in Israelthere's mandatory military service for
every Jewish man and women.
Certain ultra Orthodox have a carve out,but
(45:06):
that makes a huge difference when you knowthat you're going to go into the military.
And it makes people muchmore civic minded and
much more patriotic than theyare in the United States.
Also, the calendar,the weekly calendar in Israel is,
is a Jewish calendar withSaturday being the day of rest.
(45:26):
Sunday is a work day and even very secularpeople tend to have a Friday night dinner,
Shabbat dinner with the family in a waythat, say, American Jews often don't.
>> Bill Whalen (45:40):
All right, Barry, let's close with what we began with and
let's go back to the American republic.
And yes, that great man with the verybiblical name Benjamin Franklin.
And of course,you've heard the quote a million times.
Probably he's asked during the formationof the Constitution, well, doctor,
what have we got a republic of?
Democracy, Monarchy, A republic.
And what does Franklin say?
Quote, republic, if he can keep it.
(46:01):
So question Barry, are you bullish or
bearish right now on the chancesof the American republic?
>> Barry Strauss (46:08):
Bullish, because I think people realize that it's in danger and
they realize that our educationalsystem and our cultural system have
not been serving us well for the lastgeneration or two where they have gone.
And they realize that we need to changethem and change them in big ways.
(46:28):
It will not be the job of a day,
it will not be the job of oneadministration to change them.
It will take much longer than that.
But the wheels are turning andthe changes are starting to happen.
I see them with my own eyes andwhat's going on in higher education, and
all I can say is it's about time.
Thank heavens.
(46:49):
Now we need these changes in manydifferent spheres of society.
And I think Americans are veryenergetic people and they are educable.
So I think change is coming,change is happening and
it will make society better and stronger.
>> Bill Whalen (47:08):
Barry, I enjoyed the conversation and it's truly an honor and
a privilege to have you hereat the Hoover Institution.
I think one of the great stories of thisinstitution is over about the past ten
years or so.
We have created a marvelous,marvelous bench of historians.
I would argue, Barry,
that our top tier of historians matchesthat of any university in America.
When you're looking at the likes ofVictor Davis Hansen and Neil Ferguson and
(47:31):
Stephen Cochin and so forth, theseare just people who are just of the apex.
And it's an honor to have youas part of that delegation.
>> Barry Strauss (47:37):
Thank you. The honor is mine, I assure you.
>> Bill Whalen (47:39):
It's great you've been listening to matters of policy and
politics at Hoover Institution Podcast.
If you've been enjoying this podcast,please don't forget to rate, review and
subscribe to our show.
If you wouldn't mind,please spread the word.
Tell your friends about us.
The Hoover Institution has Facebook,Instagram and xp.
Our hex handle happensto be at Hoover Hints.
That's spelled H double O V E R I N S T.
Barry Strauss, great man.
(48:01):
That he is.He's on X.
His x handle is @barry strauss.
It's spelled b a double r y s T R A U S S.
The book we've been discussing Its title,once again, is Jews versus
Rome Two Centuries of Rebellionagainst the World's Mightiest Empire.
You can buy it now.
I recommend that you do.
While you're at it, I recommend you goto our website, which is hoover.org and
(48:22):
sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, whichdelivers the best from Barry Strauss and
his Hoover colleagues.
Your inbox weekdays forthe Hoover Institution.
This is Bill Whalen.
We'll be back soon with a new installmentof Matters of Policy and Politics.
Until next time, take care andthanks for joining us today.
>> Speaker 3 (48:38):
This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution,
where we generate andpromote ideas, advancing freedom.
For more information about our work,to hear more of our podcasts, or
view our video content,please visit hoover.org.
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