In 70 A.D., after a war lasting four years, three roman legions led by the future emperor Titus surround, siege and eventually pillage the city of Jerusalem. Sixty years later, the destruction of the city is complete. Giovanni Brizzi recounts and explains this titanic battle, the radical hostility between the Romans and the Jews, and how the first generation of Christians distanced themselves from their Jewish origins and become increasingly hostile. In this book, military history and the history of religions come together in one great representation. A cruel and brutal war that bordered on genocide. A clash between two ‘religions’ that after a long series of wars climaxes in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem did not suffer a different or worse fate from the one that previously fell upon Carthage or Corinth or Athens. Confronted with this evidence, it is even legitimate to wonder whether the fate of Judaea strikes us moderns more than it affected those living at the time of the events, who were used to a behaviour of extreme brutality on the part of the winners; perhaps even more so than it surprised the Jews themselves (who, after all, were not themselves renowned for their tolerance as hegemons). Rome obeyed its own logic inflexibly but consistently; a logic that everyone knew well, including the Jewish rebels. Unfortunately, however, there was – and here lies the horrible tragedy of this war and the ones that followed – the most complete failure to communicate between the two different world views.
The fall of Jerusalem, after draining months of siege and skirmishes, carries the marks of a clash without quarter or concessions, a funeral march with dark echoes that continued to reverberate for a long time in the West.