The Decrees Against Jewish Practice After the Revolt

Roman sources and later rabbinic memory agree that Hadrian's response to the Bar Kokhba revolt went beyond the military suppression of the uprising itself and into a direct attack on Jewish religious observance. Circumcision, the marker of Jewish male identity since Genesis, was banned outright, a prohibition rabbinic tradition later named among the causes of the revolt itself as much as its aftermath. Public Torah study was forbidden, Sabbath observance was restricted, and the ordination of new rabbis, the mechanism by which rabbinic authority renewed itself from one generation to the next, was banned specifically to break the chain of religious leadership. Rabbinic literature preserves the memory of this period in the tradition of the Ten Martyrs, sages including Rabbi Akiva who were executed by Roman authorities for defying the ban on teaching Torah in public, a tradition still recited in the Yom Kippur liturgy centuries later as Eleh Ezkerah. The prohibitions were not permanent. Hadrian died in 138 CE, and his successor Antoninus Pius lifted most of the religious bans, allowing circumcision, Torah study and Sabbath observance to resume, though the political and geographic consequences of the suppression, unlike its religious prohibitions, were not reversed.