from pagan rome to islam and medieval christendom 231
Jewish population itself did not disappear. In 132 ce the Jews of Judaea
erupted into a second revolt against Rome under the leadership of
Simon bar Kosiba, a charismatic and ruthless rebel commander known
in some of the later traditions as Bar Kokhba, ‘son of a star’. After the
bloody failure of the revolt, Jews were banned from living in the area of
Jerusalem. Jewish settlement was concentrated primarily in the Galilee, a
region sufficiently obscure in Roman eyes for the Jewish village popula-
tion to be left to its own devices. In Byzantine Palestine of the fourth to
sixth centuries, when imperial wealth was pumped into the Christian
Holy Land, a number of Jewish settlements in Upper Galilee fell into dis-
use, but elsewhere fine mosaic floors attest to the number, wealth and
religious concentration of Jews in Lower Galilee and further south, both
on the Mediterranean coast and by the Dead Sea in places like Ein Gedi.
Economic prosperity did not encourage love of a Byzantine state that
treated Jews, like all those it considered religious deviants, as second-
class citizens, and when Sasanian Persia attacked the Byzantine state in
the early seventh century, the Persians were seen by Jews as potential
harbingers of a messianic age. After Persian forces had conquered Jeru-
salem from the Byzantines in May 614 they handed over control of the
city to the Jews; within three years such local Jewish autonomy was
brought to an end by the Persians themselves, and in 627 a revived
Byzantine army under the emperor Heraclius regained control of Pales-
tine, entering Jerusalem on 21 March 629 in magnificent procession.
Under pressure from the local Christian clergy, the Jews were expelled
again from Jerusalem and its vicinity. Many converted to Christianity,
or fled to other countries.^3
Byzantine rule over Palestine gave way within ten years, in 637 or
638, to Arab invaders inspired by the new faith of Muhammad, who
died in 632. According to early Islamic traditions, Muhammad had
much sympathy with Judaism at the start of his mission in Arabia. The
city of Medina, to which he migrated from his home in Mecca, was
itself home to a number of Jewish tribes. Muhammad made agreements
with these local Jews, but, according to the later Muslim traditions, he
turned violently against them when they failed to accept his call, mas-
sacring some and expelling others from the peninsula as his power grew,
leaving in the Koran and his sayings a complex legacy which could sup-
port both tolerance and intolerance of the ‘People of the Book’.
Jews from southern Palestine are said in Islamic sources to have
negotiated with Muhammad himself, and Arab conquest certainly
brought relief from Byzantine persecution. But the Jewish population of