Soldiers loot holy relics and religious treasures because it's fun and demoralizes the enemy, at least in the moment. Long-term, the looting backfires. The Vikings and Crusaders had a grand old time looting Catholic monasteries and Byzantine churches. But looters always become losers.
Growing up we weren't taught Jewish history in school, apart from the Holocaust, which we now know was a scandalous hoax. And it wasn't a subject that I was interested in. I liked reading about conquerors. Men like Napoleon, George Washington, Julius Caesar, Frederick the Great, not particular races and religions. Plus, I never read the Bible or any Abrahamic literature, so Judaism was and still is foreign territory.
But I want to understand why the Jews are the way they are. What made them so race centric and so warlike? Why are they always angry? Why do they divide the world between Jew and Gentile? Why label non-Jews Goyim? Why pull off something like 9/11 and specifically warn Jews to not enter those buildings on that day? Why are Jews so special?
And when did this religious madness begin?
The Roman-Jewish Wars seem like a good place to start.
I've been listening to Joseph Atwill's interviews on this subject. The way he tells it, Christianity was Rome's official answer to messianic Judaism, not a grassroots religion that developed from the teachings of a man named Jesus.
Rome had a big problem on their hands when it came to the rebellious Jews. In the 1st century B.C. the Jewish religion was becoming extremely violent and unpredictable. They did not take Roman conquests lying down. Other cults and peoples found a way to assimilate to the Roman empire and pay lip service to the Caesars. But not them.
Not only would the most extremist Jews not do that, they also started periodic rebellions that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens in the empire.
Rome had to find a way to keep the peace. They had wars to fight. They figured if violence couldn't do the trick then maybe religion could. So they invented a peaceful rebel who espoused the tenets of Judaism but would also turn the other cheek when the Emperor demanded taxes and obedience.
With Christianity the goal was to declaw Judaism and turn it into just another cult without all the military baggage and messianic fervour.
This makes a lot of sense to me because if we take Christianity for just another astrotheocratic religious system and mystery cult then why did it appear at this point in time---at the height of the Roman-Jewish wars?
Its emergence couldn't have been a spontaneous event but the result of a political decision by Rome to respond to the Jewish rebellions with something other than brute force, something that would endure, and permanently alter the nature of the relationship.
At this time Rome planned on staying around for a thousand years. All empires look ahead into the distant future. The idea of fighting rebellious Jews inside the empire every fifty years just wasn't economically or militarily feasible. Empires can fight other empires for generations without feeling the political cost, but suppressing rebellion after rebellion is another matter. That chips away at authority and makes ruling a large empire impossible.
The Roman-Jewish conflict wasn't a story of small and good underdogs vs. the big bad wolves. It was a story of a vast empire with many diverse religions and cults trying to co-exist with a small but powerful religion that could not tolerate the politco-religious symbols of a foreign ruler on its ancient, ancestral lands.
And that's totally understandable. I'm sure that if Trump built a tower with his name on it on the ruins of the Kaaba millions of Muslims would be fighting America for the next century. There's some things you just don't do, even if you're the most powerful man in the world. The Roman Caesars did not understand that. They were too arrogant. They were too vain.
Imagine how history would have unfolded if they just let that stupid temple stand and allowed the Jews to practice their religion in peace.
II.
An excerpt from, "Responding to Comments Part 1 with Joseph Atwill" Source: Neo-Imperial Cult, July 25, 2026, [from the 33: 26 mark in the video]:
Joseph Atwill: I don't think that the Gospels were ever really intended for Zealots. I think that the messianic Zealots, many of whom were brought to Rome following the war, it would have been impossible to convert them. They were steadfast in their religion. They had been defeated militarily but they weren't open to any kind of Roman changing of their scripture.
I think that just to recognize the zealotry of the Jews, look at the Kitos rebellion. This would have been like fifteen years after the Gospels were written, and I think this was what they were trying to head off with the Gospels. At least not with the Gospels, but with the story of Jesus Christ that they would have brought out. It would have been verbal. They were trying to stop the political spread of messianic Judaism. And Josephus records this, so it's not like I'm conjecturing this. This was the political purpose of the Gospels. It wasn't to convert Zealots. They didn't think they could do that. It would have just stopped the Zealots from getting at the Diaspora Jews and setting off little rebellions all through the empire.
So they brought out the story of Jesus. It would have been told in the Imperial Cults. And it would have contested any missionaries from the militaristic side of Judaism so that they could have an easier time. However, it was a total flop, because the Kitos rebellion, which is a rebellion of Diaspora Jews, it was the most bloodthirsty thing imaginable. And the Jews got control of Cyprus and they killed all of the Gentiles, 250,000 Gentiles. They rounded them up and slaughtered everyone. This was what Rome was basically trying to effect, that racial hatred. It was warfare. It was warfare between Jews and Gentiles. And religions were just big parts of it.
Wikipedia:
In 115 CE, a wave of large-scale Jewish uprisings, known as the "Diaspora Revolt", erupted almost simultaneously across several provinces in the Eastern Mediterranean. The uprisings took place while Emperor Trajan was waging a military campaign against the Parthian Empire further east. The revolts appear to have been influenced by long-standing ethnic tensions, the destruction of the Second Temple and revolutionary ideas spread by insurgents from Judaea. Additional factors fueling the unrest included the humiliating Jewish Tax imposed by Rome and widespread messianic expectations of divine redemption. Scholars believe that the rebels may have aimed at a return to Judaea, the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty, and the rebuilding of the Temple.
In Libya, Jewish forces launched attacks against Greek and Roman populations under the leadership of either Andreas or Lukuas – possibly the same individual known by both names. In Egypt, the uprising reportedly began with clashes between Jewish communities and their Greek neighbors, which escalated when Lukuas and his followers arrived from Cyrenaica. They plundered the countryside and overcame local resistance. The Greeks, supported by Egyptian peasants and Romans, retaliated, massacring the Jews of Alexandria. In Cyprus, Jewish rebels under Artemion's leadership reportedly devastated the island and the city of Salamis.
The Roman response was severe. Marcius Turbo, initially deployed against the Parthians, was redirected to suppress the revolts in Egypt and Libya with a large military force. His campaigns were marked by extreme brutality, leading to the near-extermination of Jewish populations in Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Egypt. By late 117, the revolts had been largely quelled, though some disturbances in Egypt may have continued into early 118. In the aftermath, Jewish communities in the affected regions suffered immense losses, with archaeological evidence indicating severe destruction, particularly in Cyrene, which required reconstruction under Hadrian.
An excerpt from, "Revolt Against the Modern World" by Julius Evola, 1934, Chapter 29:
The failure of the attempt of the Chaldean hero Gilgamesh corresponds to the fall of Adam in the myth of another civilization within the Semitic cycle, the Hebrew civilization. Here we find a fundamental and characteristic motif: the transformation into sin of what in the Aryan version of the myth was regarded as a heroic, bold deed, often crowned by success, but that in Gilgamesh's myth had a negative outcome only because the hero was caught asleep. In the context of Hebrew Semitism, the one who attempts to take possession of the symbolic Tree is univocally transformed into a victim of woman’s seduction and a sinner. The curse he has to suffer and the punishment that has been meted out to him by a jealous, terrible, and omnipotent god, follow him; there is no better hope, in the end, than that for a “redeemer” who will provide a vicarious atonement.
In the ancient Hebrew tradition there are also elements of a different type. Moses himself, though he owed his life to a woman of the royal family (i.e., pharaoh’s daughter, Exod. 2:5), was conceived of as having been “rescued from the waters”; likewise, the events described in the book of Exodus are capable of esoteric interpretation. Besides Elijah and Enoch, Jacob too was a heroic type, because he fought an angel and won; in relation to this, even the name “Israel,” which the angel gave him, conveys the idea of a “victory over the deity” (Gen. 32:29).
These elements are still sporadic and reveal a curious oscillation, which is typical of the Jewish soul, between a sense of guilt, self-humiliation, deconsecration, and carnality and an almost Luciferian pride and rebelliousness. Maybe this could be explained by the fact that even the initiatory tradition, which is also found in Judaism (e.g., the Kabbalah) and which played an important role in the European Middle Ages, has some particularly involuted traits, which characterize it at times as an “accursed science.”
The Jews originally conceived the otherworld as the dark and mute Sheol, or as some kind of Hades without the counterpart of an “Island of Heroes”; not even sacred kings such as David could escape it. This is the theme of the “way of the ancestors” (pitŗ-yāna in Hinduism), which in this context has special relevance as the idea of an ever greater distance between man and God. Even on this plane, however, we find a double characteristic. On the one hand, according to the ancient Hebrews, Jehovah is the true king; thus, the Jews saw in the full and traditional understanding of regal dignity a disparagement of God is privilege (whether historical or not, Samuel is opposition to the establishment of a monarchy is very significant). On the other hand, the Jewish people considered themselves to be a “chosen people” and “God’s people,” who had been promised dominion over all the other peoples and possession of all the riches of the earth. They even derived from the Iranian tradition the theme of the hero Saoshyant, who in Judaism became the “Messiah,” retaining for some time the traits typical of a manifestation of the "Lord of Hosts."
Not without relation to all this, in ancient Judaism we find a very visible effort on the part of a priestly elite to dominate and coalesce a turbid, multiple, and turbulent ethnical substance by establishing the divine Law as the foundation of its “form,” and by making it the surrogate of what in other people was the unity of the common fatherland and the common origins. From this formative action, which was connected to sacred and ritualistic values and preserved from the first redactions of the ancient Torah to the elaboration of the Talmuds, the Jewish type arose as that of a spiritual rather than a physical race. But the original substratum was never totally eliminated, as ancient Jewish history shows in the form of the recurrent betrayals of God and his becoming reconciled with Israel. This dualism and the ensuing tension help to explain the negative forms that Judaism assumed in later times.
For Judaism, as in the case of other civilizations, the time frame between the seventh and the sixth century B.C. was characterized by upheaval. Once the military fortunes of Israel declined, defeat came to be understood as a punishment for “sins” committed, and thus an expectation developed that after a dutiful expiation Jehovah would once again assist his people and restore their power. This theme was dealt with in Jeremiah and in Isaiah. But since this did not happen, the prophetic expectations degenerated into an apocalyptic, messianic myth and in the fantastic eschatological vision of a Savior who will redeem Israel; this marked the beginning of a process of disintegration. What derived from the traditional component eventually turned into a ritualistic formalism and thus became increasingly abstract and separated from real life. To be aware of the role the Chaldean priestly sciences played in this cycle would allow one to connect to this source everything that was successively articulated in Judaism in the form of abstract thought and even of mathematical insights (up to and including Spinoza’s philosophy and the modern “formal” physics in which the Jewish component is very strong). Moreover, a connection was established with a human type, who in order to uphold values that he cannot realize and that thus appear to him increasingly abstract and utopian, eventually feels dissatisfied and frustrated before any existing positive order and any form of authority (especially when we find in him, though in an unconscious way, the old idea according to which the state of justice willed by God is only that in which Israel rules) so as to be a constant source of disorder and of revolution.
