Searching for Exile: Truth or Myth?

For centuries Jews have lamented the destruction of their holy city

of Jerusalem and their temple by the Romans, which they

believed was the beginning of their long 2,000 years of exile

Exile is not only a religious Jewish belief.

For millions of Jews and non Jews alike, it is a historical fact

So, that's one of the most dramatic points that you can really touch the

end of Jerusalem and not only the end of Jerusalem

but the end of the existence of ongoing life of Jews in this country.

But what has been considered as fact for centuries is now being

challenged by archaeological evidence unearthed across Israel.

Here, in the ancient town of Sepphoris,

just 70 miles from Jerusalem,

evidence points not to a people driven into exile but on the

contrary, to a population that not only survived but flourished.

So why has exile been seen as a reality for thousands of years

And if it did not take place exactly as told,

then what accounts for the millions of Jews who over the centuries

have settled around the world?

And perhaps the inevitable question - what happened to the

inhabitants of places like Sepphoris, who were never exiled?

Until 1948, a predominantly Muslim Palestinian village

stood on the ruins of Sepphoris

The village was destroyed and its inhabitants barred from returning.

Is it possible that some of the Palestinian

refugees are descendants of ancient Jews who were never exiled?

Every day thousands of tourists flock to Jerusalem to

experience the story of the exile of the Jews

and hear again the version of history they grew up on.

The Jewish rebellion against Rome,

which led to the destruction of the temple and the city.

The centre of an ancient Judaism.

We're just reaching now, one of the focal place for any Jew,

worldwide, at a time

when the temple still existing up on top of the mountain, here

The largest man-made complex on earth,

that could accommodate a quarter of a million people.

And the need to accommodate so many is

because three times a year Jews would gather here in the

high holidays at the most sacred place, the meeting place,

the place to say, "I am a Jew!

The story of exile begins in places like this visitor centre

where versions of the Jewish temple are recreated in all

their former glory.

The temple used to hold Judaism's most sacred objects.

Symbols of the nation's covenant with God.

The Ark of the Covenant

and the candle holder with its seven branches - the Menorah.

But the temple was not only a religious centre.

It was also an economic powerhouse,

with donations pouring in from the four corners of the empire

as well as income from hundreds of thousands of pilgrims.

The city was highly inflated, it was very overblown.

It had a huge population of people who

derived their livelihood from the temple and the pilgrimage trade

And it was also a city which was founded on Jewish piety.

Jewish piety was the currency,

was the cultural capital of the city.

We have to think of something like the Vatican City,

when we think about Jerusalem.

The Vatican City, you know, it's embedded in Rome

but it feels quite different from the city that it's embedded in

It has a distinctive internal culture.

And the things that are important in the Vatican City are often

not very important immediately beyond its boundaries.

And I think the same thing could be said for Jerusalem

in the first century.

We are looking at now, the nuclear, the beginning of the Jewish people.

Think about all those people..

Jerusalem was ruled by its religious authorities, the temple priests

An elite body that was far removed from the spiritual piety

they were supposed to represent

Under the houses of the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem,

there are remains of a whole neighbourhood - a quarter

of the priest class of Jerusalem from the time of the temple.

Here those priests, who served this temple, used to live.

And when you look around you can see those houses kept quite a high

standard of living.

With mosaic floors, and with murals on the walls,

beautiful furniture

and here we have the people who are supposed to be the spiritual leader,

living in beautiful houses, a good life,

while there was so much poverty around.

Jerusalem and the tiny region of Judea were only a small part

of a far larger territory, created by previous military expansion

Forcing the conquered population to convert to Judaism.

Jerusalem, despite today's common belief,

did not represent the entire Jewish nation.

So, the Jewish world has expanded tremendously.

There were more of them.

They were also in closer connection with each other. They were divided.

And they were divided...there were all these profound divisions.

So, you know, there's this complicated business that they're

all in some sense part of one group but by the same token,

they're often at each other's throats.

It is the main road of the city that was here.

This city that was then the pearl of the east,

if I'm quoting the Roman historian...

The complex causes of the rebellion have been simplified over

time into a single story.

A Jewish nation which refused to accept

the authority of a pagan Roman Caesar.

So, it was a way to say, "We're unique, we're independent ..

"You can rule us but still we are independent."

And that would be hard for an Emperor to tolerate.

There is one man who single handedly succeeded in shaping

the narrative of the rebellion

His name was Josephus Flavius, a son of Jerusalem's priestly elite.

His book, The Jewish War,

is the important historical record of the time and has, for centuries,

shaped the perception of the rebellion as a national uprising.

The family of which I'm derived is not an ignoble one

but has descended, all along, from the priests.

So, with us, to be of the sacerdotal dignity is

an indication of the splendour of the family.

For Josephus, the rebellion was the uprising of the ethnos

of the nation of the Jews against the Romans.

Josephus reflects this Jerusalemite perspective,

he sees things from that angle

He thinks that Jerusalemites are in control of the entire country.

You know, that the priesthood is in control of the entire country

and that everyone is equally loyal to the priesthood and the temple.

And that any time a Jerusalemite shows up

anywhere in the countryside, people will automatically fall at his feet.

Josephus began his career as a military commander, sent by the

rebel leadership, in Jerusalem to the north,

to bring the Galilee into the fold of the rebellion.

Josephus failed to recruit the Galilee's biggest

cities to the rebellion.

Jerusalem nationalist aspiration suffered their

first set back in Sepphoris.

But the inhabitants of this city,

having determined to continue their allegiance to the Romans

sent to the Roman Governor and desired him to come to them

immediately and take possession of their city.

Sepphoris' decision not to join the rebellion intrigued Israeli

archaeologist, Zeev Weiss.

His findings shed new light on new light on why Sepphoris

and much of the Galilee chose not to rebel.

Zeev's findings span a period of hundreds of years.

They help us imagine a society which Josephus barely mentioned

and chose not to focus on.

Zeev's discovery of the existence of a pagan temple,

from a later period, dating to the time when Sepphoris became

a Jewish theological centre, was nothing short of sensational.

Around the time of the rebellion, Sepphoris also had a Roman theatre.

In later periods it had bath houses

and mosaic floors depicting human figures.

All forbidden and unheard of in the religion practised in Jerusalem

and tiny Judea.

Sepphoris and Jerusalem seemed to symbolise a deep cultural

and political divide, rather than the unity of a national uprising.

Josephus had come to the Galilee alone,

expecting to recruit locals to his troops.

Rejected by Sepphoris and forced to camp outside the city,

he watched helplessly as his army disbanded.

The sense that you get is that Josephus is desperate to

impose his authority but it's dawning on him,

not very gradually, that he doesn't have any authority to impose.

And he's left with small groups of people who follow him,

largely because he's paid them

Jerusalem had intended to mobilise for a national war.

Yet, the majority of the Galilee didn't seem to have any

interest in a fight.

Josephus found himself holed up with a small

group of followers in one of the few towns

and villages that did end up fighting the Romans, Jotapata.

Archaeologist, Moti Aviam has found evidence of the rebellion there

We know that that Josephus likes to really write up these episodes

which is quite interesting.

It plays into the rest of his account that this is,

you know, this was a heroic rebellion.

When push came to shove, the Jewish nation offered heroic

resistance to the Romans, as is shown by the siege of Jotapata

Jotapata fell on July the 20th 7AD, after 47 days of siege.

Its inhabitants slaughtered.

The Romans went on for three years,

brutally erasing every rebellious community around the country.

Towns and villages that did not rebel were spared

and in the Galilee, they were the majority.

But Josephus did not die with the people of Jotapata.

His life was spared by General Vespasian.

Josephus became the general's personal slave,

taking as Roman custom dictates Vespasian's last name, Flavius

Vespasian now embraces Josephus frees him from chains,

makes him part of his entourage

Eventually brings him to Rome, settles him in a house

and has Josephus write these accounts of the Jewish

rebellion against the Romans.

Suddenly Josephus' version of the reality gained an unexpected ally.

Having come to power by force and aspiring to establish his own

dynasty, Vespasian was a new Emperor, in search of legitimacy.

The only key to legitimacy in this sort of environment,

if you don't have it through descent, is...you know,

it's called in Latin, the 'Ius Gladii', the law of the sword.

That is, substantial military victory can make you

a legitimate ruler.

What this means, is that it was in Vespasian's interests to have

this war portrayed exactly as Josephus wanted to portray it.

A great all-out war between two mighty nations.

Three years after he was captured,

Josephus returned to Jerusalem not as a Jewish militant fighting

Rome but as a chronicler, embedded in the Roman army,

invited to witness the fall of his home town.

This city was completely destroyed and disappeared

and part of these very dramatic last moments of the city could be traced,

over here, when the Jerusalemites tried to escape and save their life,

when the Romans slaughtered everybody.

Here we are...

And you can see the hole here and many other holes all along

Those holes were dug by the Romans themselves,

the Roman soldiers on the very last day of Jerusalem, when people

tried to use the underground drainage canal here to escape out.

This was seen by the Roman. How do we know about that?

Josephus Flavius speaks about it.

Everybody one by one was pulled out and had been killed

To celebrate his victory over the Jews, Emperor Vespasian

and his son, Titus, held a victory parade, exhibiting what was

probably the most cherished loot of the war, the Jewish Menorah

A proud symbol of a monotheistic religion, he thought was vanquished.

The very centre of the Roman Empire, is the Roman Forum,

the Capitoline Hill on one end and the Coliseum on anther end

is altered, in order to celebrate the Flavian victory over the Jews.

And I think that it makes a lot of sense to see

Josephus' Jewish War as part of that.

Among the forum's monuments, there is this triumphal Arch of Titus

celebrating the destruction of Jerusalem.

Its stone carvings depict Roman soldiers carrying the temple's

loot and the sacred Menorah.

Josephus' desire,

retrospectively to have the Jews unify as a single group,

as a mighty nation and rise up and fight the Romans,

which was essentially a kind of Jewish national aspiration,

which never happened, resonated perfectly with the Flavian dynasty's

need to have experienced a great victory over a great nation.

But what happened after the destruction of Jerusalem?

Nowhere in his writings does Josephus mention the forced

expulsion of the Jews from either Jerusalem or

the rest of the Roman province

So, why is it that exile has been historically perceived as a fact

and the destruction of Jerusalem as the evidence?

The destruction of Jerusalem did not bring about the exile of the Jews.

In reality, not only did the Jewish community survive,

it instigated a second rebellion 62 years later.

Where does the population supply come from for the second revolt

if we lost so many of the population to the first revolt

Well, first of all, two generations passed, 60 years and more. OK...OK.

That gave enough time to regain more and more people

and I would say that it was much more of a rural population

revolt than the urban one of Jerusalem and the cities around

Demographically speaking, it's by far the end of everything over here.

So, what we'll do now is leaving the cultivated green area towards

the desert, reaching the area where the people escaped to.

In 1961, an archaeological expedition

led by Professor Yigael Yadin,

set out on these desert roads to look for the remains

of Bar Kochba, the legendary messianic rebel leader

and his fighters and for evidence for what he believed was

the last sign of independent Jewish life in the country.

Yigael Yadin, who led the excavation,

was no ordinary archaeologist.

He was famous in Israel for serving as the army's

chief of staff during the crucial War of Independence in 1948.

Today's programme is a conversation with Yigael Yadin

Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University...

Funded by the army and the government,

Yadin's was no ordinary expedition.

It was an attempt to find the archaeological evidence that

would confirm the legitimacy of the Israeli state.

You see, this search for the Bar Kochba documents which you

refer to, was one of the most fascinating, I would say,

expedition I had the privilege to take part.

Yadin, who was a great archaeologist, was very much involved,

even emotionally with the finds here,

as was all of this generation of the big archaeologists.

At the time that was just a continuation of establishing

the state and search for roots and coming back to the country

and epos like the one of Bar Kochba or Masada were very, very strong.

It was here that Yadin hoped to find evidence of the last

stand of Bar Kochba's men.

So, here we are just above this huge canyon of Nahal Hever,

running to the Dead Sea,

it has huge sheer cliffs going all the way down

and just to have some scale, if you look over there,

you see the opening of the cave where the refugees found shelter.

The distance from the top of the cliff to the cave is 350 feet.

The caves are right in the middle of the canyon, some 300 feet

from the top and 900 feet from the bottom in a steep slope.

The people who found shelter there could not leave the place

The Romans made sure that nobody would be able to escape

And then only we came into the cave where we saw for the first time

the first green sight of the last moment

of this desperate war, a heroic war,

of Bar Kochva against the Romans.

The findings were indeed extraordinary.

Rich evidence of daily life

of refugees who had hidden in the caves.

Skeletons, personal documents

and even letters signed by Bar Kochva himself.

Yadin believed he had found what he was looking for.

The archaeological evidence of the last moments of the Jewish nation.

This was really, I would say, the last phase

of the struggle against the Romans there.

And that was the last time really that the Jews... In Jewish history,

that there was a revolt that attempted to reconstitute... Yes.

This is the last revolt, we call it the second revolt

and actually 1,800 years have passed

since the Jewish state was established here.

Yadin was articulating the official Israeli line.

Exile had indeed begun with the final loss of Jewish independence.

22 years after his discoveries

Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin

flew with a group of politicians and dignitaries to the canyon.

The skeletal remains unearthed by Yadin

were given a full military state funeral.

MAN SPEAKS IN NATIVE TONGUE

GUNSHOT

Both rebellions were used at different times

to mark the beginning of the Jewish exile.

Yet these claims cannot be supported

by the archaeological evidence at places like Sepphoris.

So when, and how was the idea

of an universal exile of the Jews from their homeland born?

For answers, we need to go back to the Galilee

in the decades after Bar Kochva's rebellion.

Sepphoris flourished.

But without Jerusalem,

the centre of Jewish worship and religious ritual,

rabbis looked for ways to fill the gap

left by the destruction of their temple.

SINGING

A family sits down to celebrate the Seder,

the traditional Passover meal.

Before the destruction of the temple,

Jews were required to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem

to offer sacrifices in the temple.

But this emerging Jewish tradition was being challenged

by another group of people

who also sat around the table on Passover Eve.

Today, they would be called Christians

but they thought of themselves as Jews who followed Jesus.

They, too, were trying to rethink their theology

after the destruction of the temple.

But while Jews tried to emphasise continuity of doctrine

after the fall of Jerusalem,

for Jesus' followers,

the destruction was a divine signal.

And it seems that from this belief grew the story of exile.

Now, in these circumstances, the defeat of the revolt

and the destruction of the temple begins to be seen as a divine sign.

A divine sign that God has pronounced

a judgment against Israel.

In fact, long before the destruction,

the majority of the Jewish people were already living in the Diaspora.

The number of Jews who lived in Judea and Galilee

is really a minority

of the total population of Judaism in the Roman world.

We know for instance that in the city of Alexandria,

where we have some reasonable demographic information,

that there may have been as many as a million,

that may be an exaggeration,

but there may have been a million Jews living in Alexandria and Egypt.

Now, that's a huge number

and way more than the number of Jews who lived in Judea and Galilee

CHANTING IN BACKGROUND

Observant Roman Jews lamenting

like any other Jewish community worldwide,

the destruction of Jerusalem and of their exile.

Despite the fact that Jews lived here

long before the destruction of Jerusalem.

Over centuries, Jews have spread throughout the world.

But why if exile began as a Christian theological concept

did Roman Jewry embrace it too

like Jews around the world, as the central tenet of their religion?

According to the Bible,

the Jews migrated to Egypt as one family and returned a nation.

The Torah and Jewish laws were handed down in the desert,

not in the Holy Land.

That land, according to the Bible, had to be conquered

in a cruel and violent campaign

TAPE WHIRRS

SILENT MOVIE PIANO MUSIC

The Wandering Jew, an early 20th century silent film, depicting

a centuries-old myth of Jews condemned to roam the earth forever.

This is how a Christian theological concept about exile

as a punishment was transformed

after the Christianisation of Europe, into an anti-Semitic myth.

CROWD CHANTS

CONTINUED CHANTING

HORN SOUNDS REPEATEDLY

HORN BLARES ONE CONTINUOUS NOTE

BIRDS SQUAWK

Centuries of persecution and later genocide,

all associated with the punishment of exile,

transformed the messianic dream of returning to a political project.

SIREN WAILS IN BACKGROUND

In November 1947,

buoyed up by the United Nations vote to establish a Jewish state,

some Roman Jews chose to celebrate the event in front of Titus Gate.

An enduring symbol of the destruction of Jerusalem

and the beginning of exile.

A Jewish national dream had been reawakened.

It was first defeated in Jerusalem in 70 AD,

and in the Bar Kokhba rebellion

A dream that was first articulated by Josephus

and was picked up 1800 years later by Jewish nationalists.

But to understand what happened when the dream met reality,

we have to go back to the Galilee.

MURMURED CONVERSATION

Suleiman Abu Ali is returning to his village.

He was 14 years old when he left it, 63 years ago.

CAR DOOR SLAMS

Suleiman is accompanied by a young relative whose family

was born in the village.

Suleiman's village, Safuri, does not exist any more.

It was destroyed in the war of 948.

Safuri, the Palestinian village

was built on the ruins of the ancient Jewish Safuris.

This picture was taken by the archaeological team

that came here in the summer of 1931.

Three years before Suleiman's birth.

Leroy Waterman, a professor from the University of Michigan

led the first archaeological expedition to unearth the ancient Jewish city.

Like so many archaeologists who came before him,

Leroy was a devout Christian.

He felt he was a traveller in a biblical landscape.

He imagined Safuri as the city on the hill from Jesus' sermons

For him, Safuri was barely visible.

VILLAGERS CHATTER IN BACKGROUND

HORSES HOOVES CLIP-CLOP

DOGS BARK

METAL TOOLS CLANK

The ancient Jewish town of Safuris that Leroy Waterman began to unearth

had evolved since the 7th Century into a bustling,

primarily Muslim village

with a population of more than 5,000 people.

Slowly the ancient city was coming to life.

And soon it would devour the present-day Safuri.

LOUD BANGS

SOUND OF GUNFIRE

EXPLOSIVE BANG

The village was occupied on July 16th 1948,

as part of the last phase of what Israel calls

its War of Independence.

The Palestinian villagers fled

Their village was destroyed and they were barred from returning.

The ruins are now part of a national park.

The village's history

and its Muslim past

are barely mentioned in the Park's Museum

formerly one of Safuri's schools,

on whose yard LeRoy Waterman began his dig.

This village cemetery escaped destruction

only after a long, legal battle

To Muslims it has historical significance as the resting place

of some of the descendants of the Prophet Mohammed.

There are many missing pieces in the story of this village

of both Jewish and Arab heritage.

But the only clear evidence of an actual exile

is that of Suleiman and the 5,0 0 other Palestinians in 1948.

Is it possible that some of these refugees are distant descendants

of the Jewish population of Sepphoris who were never exiled

Evidence of the multiethnic history of the region can be found

everywhere in the Galilee.

In a town only a few kilometres from Sepphoris a local

journalist takes visitors to an ancient grave of a Jewish rabbi

who has been revered for over a millennia by the mostly

Muslim population.

Local women still hang these rags seeking a blessing from the rabbi.

For centuries the peasants of Safuri preserved this grave

believed by some to be that of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi,

Sepphoris' most important scholar.

The rabbi helped transform Sepphoris into one of the most

important spiritual centres of Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem.

The job of historians

isn't to crush memory,

it's not to destroy it.

It's actually to hold it up

and pull it apart without necessarily standing in the way

of those people who want to put it back together afterwards.

I think that it's the job of historians to remind people

what's at stake in their shared memories.

That is what the effects of those shared memories are

and what use they can be put to

But I think that there is actually, you know, some moral urgency,

seriously, in what historians do

in taking these things

and analysing them

and showing how far they can be from ascertainable,

er... historical realities of the past.

You know, go on believing your myths,

but at least understand what you re doing by doing that.

What is being unearthed in the ruins of Sepphoris

and Safuri is a message of hope

and a warning.

The promise of hope from a town that survived for hundreds of years

because of its capacity to embrace many cultures and traditions.

DOG BARKS, STREET SOUNDS

And a warning written in the destruction

brought about by adopting a single narrative of history

at the expense of others.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Limited.