Constantine I allowed Jews to mourn their defeat and humiliation once a year on Tisha B'Av at the Western Wall. Jews remained scattered for close to two millennia; their numbers in the region fluctuated with time.

Modern historians have come to view the Bar-Kokhba Revolt as being of decisive historic importance. The massive destruction and loss of life occasioned by the revolt has led some scholars to date the beginning of the Jewish diaspora from this date. They note that, unlike the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War chronicled by Josephus, the majority of the Jewish population of Judea was either killed, exiled, or sold into slavery after the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, and Jewish religious and political authority was suppressed far more brutally. After the revolt the Jewish religious center shifted to the Babylonian Jewish community and its scholars. Judea would not be a center of Jewish religious, cultural, or political life again until the modern era, though Jews continued to live there and important religious developments still occurred there. In Galilee, the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the 2nd–4th centuries. Eventually, Safed became known as a center of Jewish learning, especially Kabbalah in the 15th century.

Historian Shmuel Katz writes that even after the disaster of the revolt: "Jewish life remained active and productive. Banished from Jerusalem, it now centred on Galilee. Refugees returned; Jews who had been sold into slavery were redeemed. In the centuries after Bar Kochba and Hadrian, some of the most significant creations of the Jewish spirit were produced in Palestine. It was there that the Mishnah was completed and the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and the bulk of the community farmed the land."

The Galilee in late antiquity.

He lists the communities left in Palestine: "43 Jewish communities in Palestine in the sixth century: 12 on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and 31 villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley". ^[8]

The disastrous end of the revolt also occasioned major changes in Jewish religious thought. Messianism was abstracted and spiritualized, and rabbinical political thought became deeply cautious and conservative. The Talmud, for instance, refers to Bar-Kokhba as "Ben-Kusiba", a derogatory term used to indicate that he was a false Messiah. The deeply ambivalent rabbinical position regarding Messianism, as expressed most famously in the Rambam's (also known as Maimonides) "Epistle to Yemen", would seem to have its origins in the attempt to deal with the trauma of a failed Messianic uprising.

In the post-rabbinical era, however, the Bar-Kokhba Revolt became a symbol of valiant national resistance. The Zionist youth movement Betar took its name from Bar-Kokhba's traditional last stronghold, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, took his Hebrew last name from one of Bar-Kokhba's generals.

A popular children's song, included in the curriculum of Israeli kindergartens, has the refrain "Bar Kokhba was a Hero/He fought for Liberty" and its words describe Bar Kokhba as being captured, thrown into a lion's den but managing to escape riding on the lion's back - a story not attested in any historical source.

In recent decades, however, the Bar Kokhba myth - like other aspects of Israeli nationalism - has become controversial. For example, Yehoshafat Harkabi, prominent columnist and former chief of Israeli military intelligence, marked his transition from uncompromising hardliner to supporter of peace with a Palestinian state with a 1978 open letter to then Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in which he termed Bar Kokhva "an irresponsible adventurer who brought disaster upon the Jewish People" (and drawing an explicit contemporary parallel to Israel's holding on to the Occupied Territories, which in Harkabi's view might cause a new such disaster ^[9].

Further revolts against the Roman Empire

In the year 351, the Jews launched yet another revolt, provoking heavy retribution. ^[8]

In 438, when the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews' praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call "to the great and mighty people of    Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  the Jews" which began: "Know that the end of the exile of our people has come"! ^{[10] [8]}

In the belief of restoration to come, the Jews made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614, fought at their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and for five years governed the city.

See also    Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

• Bar Kochba Revolt coinage

Sources

The best recognized sources are Cassius Dio, Roman History (book 69) and Aelius Spartianus, Life of Hadrian (in the Augustan History). The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls has exposed some new historical data.