1,300-year-old menorah pendant suggests Rome’s ban on Jews from Jerusalem was a failure |
For centuries after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE and then razed Jerusalem in 135 CE, renaming it Aelia Capitolina, Jews were banned from living in the city that had represented the beating heart of their national and religious identity for a millennium.
And yet, a new archaeological discovery suggests that some Jews in the final centuries of the Byzantine period may have returned to the city and visited, or even lived, in the shadow of the Temple Mount.
A cast-lead round pendant decorated with a seven-branched menorah on both sides, dating to approximately 1,300 years ago, was unearthed during an archaeological excavation at the Davidson Archaeological Park in Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced Monday.
“We excavated between two walls from the Umayyad period [638-750 CE], and we went through the fills left in a Byzantine building,” Esther Rakow-Mellet, an IAA archaeologist, told The Times of Israel, while showing this reporter the excavation site. “In the foundations, we found [the artifact].”
“According to historical sources, since the Roman period, Jews had been forbidden to enter Jerusalem, but this is a clearly Jewish symbol,” she added.
The location where the artifact was discovered could not be more striking. The site is located at the foot of the Temple Mount, in the area of Robinson’s Arch, which once supported the staircase leading up to the Temple, at the southern end of the Western Wall. Visitors touring the Davidson Archaeological Park can still walk on part of the first-century CE street.
The current excavation is situated between this area and the beginning of the so-called Pilgrimage Road to the Temple Mount, a 600-meter-long pathway (approximately one-third of a mile) that........