The Persians take Jerusalem: three years of hope and their end
Jews rose with the Persian army and were given the city. Three years later the Persians handed it back to the Christians, and Heraclius barred Jews from Jerusalem.
In 614 the army of Khosrow II came before Jerusalem. Jewish detachments under Nehemiah ben Hushiel joined the Persians; the city was taken and Byzantine rule collapsed. Christian sources—above all the Capture of Jerusalem by Antiochus Strategos—speak of massacre and tens of thousands dead; historians have long doubted those numbers, but no one disputes the Jewish part in the campaign or the transfer of the city into Jewish hands.
For three years a Jewish governor held Jerusalem, and there is evidence of an attempt to renew the sacrifices on the Temple Mount. Then the Persians reversed themselves: they returned the city's government to the Christians and, according to Jewish sources, executed Nehemiah. The messianic expectations these years had raised broke off.
In 630 the emperor Heraclius retook Jerusalem, carried the Cross back in procession—and forbade Jews to live in the city or even come within three miles of it; the ban was accompanied by killings in the Galilee.
The victory cost the empire everything. Eight years later, worn out by the war, Byzantium lost Jerusalem and the whole East—this time for good.
Sources
Documents of the period
- Antiochus Strategos, The Capture of Jerusalem by the Persians, c. 620 — a Christian eyewitness on the fall of the city and the Jewish part in it
Scholarship
- Theophanes the Confessor, Chronographia, on the ban of Heraclius — the ban on Jews approaching Jerusalem after 630
Basis: documents and evidence.