Aftermath of Boudica rebellion vs Great Jewish Rebellion

Factual Questions
1

From my (albeit totally unqualified) point of view, the ancient Britons fared alot better than the Ancient Judeans after there respective rebeillions were defeated by the Romans. While Boudica’s followers were brutally put down, the Britons as a whole were allowed to survive and prosper, whereas the Jewish state was systematically destroyed by the Romans.

Is this purely a matter of winners writing the history (the Roman campaign against the Briton was just as brutal but there were no literate britons around to tell there side of the story), Geography (Isreal was at the centre of a huge number of trade routes which allowed the Jewish diaspora a means of escape that the ancient britons didn’t have). or was the rebellion in Briton less widespread so dealt with less serverely. Or is there some difference ?

2

All of your suggestions are true, I think.

A few minor differences in the two groups, bearing in mind that I know a bit about the Ancient Britons but almost nothing about the Ancient Jews.

Our sources of information on Boudicca are few and biased (despite what you may hear from certain recent television documentaries). What we know:

Boudicca’s rebellion was not conducted on behalf of Britons, Celts, pre-English, or anything like. It was on behalf of herself and her tribe, and other groups were free to join her, the Romans, or neither side as they saw fit. Many Britons probably were unaware of it until it was long over, if they heard of it at all.

The Romans had only recently conquered southern Britain. I suspect a sensible Roman army would have expected a backlash, and not seen it as an organized revolt. There were other tribes who were evidently quite happy to have a relationship with Rome.

Large chunks of the story may be fictional. “Boudicca” is a perfectly acceptable British word, but how ironic that it means “Victory” ? I suspect the irony was not lost on the historian.

3

The difference is that there were two Jewish Revolts. The first one, in the 70’s, may have ended with the destruction of the Temple and the sack of Jeruslem, but left the popluation mostly intact. It was the second revolt some 70 years later - the Bar Kochva Revolt, one of the toughest rebellions the Empire fought - that led to the utter destruction of the land, in a display of retribution unusually brutal even by Roman standards. If the British had rebelled a second time, perhaps they would have experienced a similar response.

I suppose that the religious nature of the Judean conflicts also made reconcilliation much harder.

4

I’m not sure that the response was less severe, but it was certain that the revolt was much smaller. There may have simply been far fewer captives to parade through Rome and there were certainly far fewer nobles who survived the war to be made examples.

The Iceni were pretty much on their own up in Norfolk and were joined only by the Trinovantes and portions of other tribes. Most of the tribes remained neutral and a few offered tepid support to the Romans. It was not a general uprising of Britain, however, much Victorian poets might have wished it to be. (The claims by Dio Cassius that the Romans ultimately faced 230,000 warriors may be true or may be a claim intended to show overwhelming odds, but at that point, it would have been a spontaneous collection of loose bands of warriors, not a carefully crafted coalition of tribes and armies.)

In contrast, Judaea was a long-recognized kingdom (as opposed to a “barbarian tribe”) that put up a six-year long war, calling attention to Rome’s perceived impotence throughout the Mediterranean and among the lands outside the Empire, while the Boudica revolt lasted only a few months and was suppressed after a couple of medium Roman defeats followed by an overwhelming Roman victory.

5

[QUOTE=griffin1977]
While Boudica’s followers were brutally put down, the Britons as a whole were allowed to survive and prosper, whereas the Jewish state was systematically destroyed by the Romans.
[/QUOTE]

Well, not really. Following the British revolt, the Roman commander and provincial governor (Paulinus) was pissed. Pissed in a “hand over everyone remotely associated with the revolt or I’ll kill the whole island” kind of way. His reprisals were so thorough that supposedly a substantial percentage of the remaining British population was dead by sword or starvation in the year or so that followed Bodica’s failed revolt. An Imperial delegation had to remove him from his post lest he exterminate the British altogether.

So the aftermath was quite bloody, and there was at least one subsequent revolt by another tribe, the name of which escapes me.

Looking beyond the actual revolts, I’d speculate that the key difference between the British and Judean occupations lay in the way Rome regarded their religions. The Britons were druidic, and druids were illegal. The whole religion was banned. Rome’s policy regarding the druids was to kill 'em all and knock down every stone ring they could find, and then drag the rocks to opposite horizons. Bodica’s initial strike was such a success in part because the 14th Legion, which would go on to defeat her, was off in Wales dismantling yet another druidic stronghold. It was an ongoing and systematic effort to destroy an entire religious belief system. The British, like many other “Celtic” groups, could assimilate or not, but either way they weren’t going to be druidic when the Empire was done with them.

Judaism was treated differently. It was tolerated even if not particularly well-liked by the Empire. Conflicts with Judea were largely treated as political problems, and since no real effort was ever made to wipe out the religion, it continued to serve as a conduit of subversive thought and action. It wasn’t until the Third (or Second) Jewish Revolt that the Romans went absolutely beserk and decided to target Judaism in Judea directly, which for some people marks the beginning of the Diaspora. Even then, I don’t think being Jewish in other parts of the Empire was illegal or anything.

In other words, the Jews kept their religion but assimilated more slowly (or not at all), whereas the British lost theirs in the first or second round, and assimilated easier once initial resistance was pacified. If things were more peaceful among post-conquest Britons than in Judea, it could have been because the Britons had one less major thing to fight about.

That’s my take on it, anyway.