Renaming Judea and Jerusalem, and What Followed

Two of Hadrian's measures outlasted the religious prohibitions by centuries. The province previously called Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina, a name change explicitly intended, in the judgment of later historians, to erase the territory's association with the Jewish people rather than merely to redraw an administrative boundary, and the Roman name Palaestina is the direct ancestor of the later English word Palestine. Jerusalem itself was rebuilt as a Roman colony under the name Aelia Capitolina, with a temple to Jupiter raised on the site of the destroyed Jewish Temple, and Jews were barred from entering the city at all except, in later practice, on the single day of Tisha B'Av to mourn its destruction. With Judea closed to Jewish religious and communal life, the center of Jewish population and scholarship shifted north to the Galilee, where the rabbinic movement regrouped and eventually produced the Mishnah under Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi within a few generations of the revolt's suppression. The shift proved permanent rather than temporary: Galilee, not Judea, remained the demographic and institutional center of Jewish life in the land through the following centuries, a redistribution of Jewish population that traces directly back to Hadrian's suppression rather than to the military defeat of the revolt on its own.