The loss of statehood

The Hellenization of Judea (which from a language point of view meant adding Greek to the Jewish sociolinguistic ecology after the conquest of Alexander the Great) bled almost unnoticeably into the period of Roman rule, which, as noted earlier, did not mean a substantive addition of Latin except in government use and on official inscriptions. This period marks the beginning of Jewish trilingualism (or perhaps even triglossia), which we will find, with occasional exceptions, to be the dominant model at least until the eighteenth century, when western European emancipation started to weaken the role of Jewish varieties. A first question is where to start our chapter, and how to label the period it describes.

Without doubt, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE was a major turning point, when centralized Temple rituals were replaced by synagogue worship and priestly leadership gave way to rabbinic. But was this a major linguistic transition? Synagogue worship was already under way and Diaspora communities were already in existence before 70 CE. Indeed, by 100 CE there were 5 million Jews in the Diaspora, five times the estimated 1 million who remained in Palestine. Perhaps one should, rather, select as a starting point the Bar Kokhba revolt in 136 CE, one of the last attempts to restore Jewish sovereignty; its failure marked the beginning of nearly 2,000 years of dispersion. But there were other revolts later, up to the Arab conquest. Or should we label it a Hellenistic-Roman period, which in Palestinian archeological terms included Byzantine rule until the Arab conquest?