Sephardic Identity: Essays on a Vanishing Jewish Culture Book

This is a very impressive history of the Jewish people, but it has one major flaw: it covers very little of the career of Bar Kochba, only 4 pages out of 216 pages. I found a great deal more information about Bar Kochba ten years before this book was published when I was researching for a book I was writing I also saw that many authors seem to think that Judea fell in A.D. 70 when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple.

However, Judea survived the fall of Jerusalem, and, though the Temple was never rebuilt, the nation actually did recover. Sixty years later, Judea became strong enough to once again revolt against Roman occupation. Bar Kochba unified the Judeans, defeated two Roman armies, and established the First Jewish Commonwealth, a fully independent nation. The present Israeli government, incidentally, is the Second Jewish Commonwealth.

Bar Kochba almost passed from history because there was nobody like Josephus to write about him like Josephus wrote about the earlier Jewish wars. Most eyewitness accounts, if they ever existed, no longer exist. Only sketchy myths and legends have survived. Recent archaeological discoveries by Yigael Yadin in "Bar Kochba: the Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt Against Imperial Rome" and others have shed much new light on Bar Kochba and some of the people close to Bar Kochba.

I'm disappointed that "The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity: From Alexander to Bar Kochba" didn't contain more information about Bar Kochba. However, Hayes and Mandell's coverage of earlier portions of Jewish history is very good.