The Roman Destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem: An Intercultural Conflict between Pietas and Politics

Intercultural encounters in modern and ancient times carry the potential for conflict and it can be assumed that the mechanisms that lead to hostilities between different ethnic or cultural groups follow similar patterns. In the long history of ancient Rome conflicts based on religious differences were, in contrast to current times, the exception. It seems that one of those cases was the Jewish rebellion in 66-73 CE which resulted among others in the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the diaspora of Jews across the Mediterranean. The available sources on the conflict are contradictory. On one side they suggest that the Romans respected the religious feelings and traditions of the Jews but on the other side, after the defeat of the rebels, the temple and the city walls were razed. In the triumphal procession to celebrate the successful campaign, sacred objects of the Jews were presented as spoils of war. The present article aims to explore which of both perspectives is more representative of the ancient reality and what constituted the underlying patterns of the conflict. In order to analyse the available information, insights from the psychology of cross-cultural encounters are applied. It is being argued that the combination of the interpretatio Romana, the translation of foreign deities to the pantheon of Roman gods and goddesses, with the concept of pietas, the dutiful devotion to those gods, was a foundation that prevented for the most part conflicts based on religious differences in the ethnically and culturally heterogeneous Roman Empire. However, Roman and Jewish society and culture can be understood as antithetical concepts with almost no cultural links. In this fundamental state of opposition small and rather irrelevant events can contribute to the occurrence of conflicts that may be, due to the lack of commonalities between both groups, difficult to solve.