Hadrian had a gift for transformation. He built walls across provinces to fix Rome's edge; he rebuilt Athens into a model of the world he admired; he carried Greek culture with him wherever he travelled. But in Judaea in 135 CE, after the devastating three-year revolt led by Shimon bar Kokhba had finally been crushed, he did something more pointed. He decided to erase a name. The city the world knew as Jerusalem - Yerushalayim in the mouths of its people, Hierosolyma in Latin - was replanned as a standard Roman colonial grid and given a new designation: Aelia Capitolina. Aelia for the emperor's own family name, the gens Aelia. Capitolina for the Capitoline triad - Jupiter, Juno, Minerva - whose temple was to crown the hill where the Temple had stood. Rome was not merely suppressing a revolt. It was attempting a topographical act of memory, removing a name from the landscape entirely.
The name did not take. Not everywhere, not for long. Jews continued to call the city Jerusalem in prayer, in law, in mourning. The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, still uses the name as if no decree had cancelled it. The Talmudic discussions that follow assume the city's identity without hesitation. Rome could rename streets and build new gates; it could not rename the longing that oriented Jewish prayer three times daily toward a particular hill in a particular city in the territory Rome now called Syria Palaestina. The geography of the heart is harder to administer than the geography of the province.
The record
After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 CE), Emperor Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina - a colonia with a standard street grid centred on a cardo maximus running south from the Damascus Gate, traces of which survive beneath the Old City's bazaars today. The province itself was renamed Syria Palaestina (formerly Judaea). A temple to Jupiter Capitolinus was erected on or near the Temple Mount. Cassius Dio (Roman History, 69.12-14, written c. early 3rd century CE) records the refoundation and the renaming of Judaea as Syria Palaestina. Later Christian writers, especially Jerome, say Jews were forbidden from entering the city on pain of death, with a limited exception permitting entry once a year to mourn on the anniversary of the Temple's destruction. The Hadrianic street plan of Aelia Capitolina is documented archaeologically: the Roman cardo beneath the Jewish Quarter was excavated between 1969 and 1982 under the direction of Nahman Avigad, and its remains are displayed in situ at the Cardo Museum, Jerusalem. (See Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem, Thomas Nelson, 1983.)
The one permitted day is worth dwelling on. Once a year - on the ninth of Av, the anniversary of both Temples' destruction - Jews were allowed to cross the threshold of Aelia Capitolina and mourn at the ruins. Jerome, writing in the late fourth century from his cell in Bethlehem, describes what he saw and heard: crowds of weeping old men and women gathering at the ruins of the Temple, paying Roman soldiers for the right to stand and grieve. It is a scene of considerable legal humiliation, and Jerome intends it as such. But read from the other direction, it is also a scene of extraordinary stubbornness. The empire had spent sixty years trying to close the chapter on Jerusalem. The people who called themselves its mourners were still coming back on the appointed day, year after year, keeping an appointment with a city the empire had officially renamed and a Temple whose stones had officially been cleared and built over. The grief was the claim. The annual return was the argument. Mourning, in this context, was not weakness. It was presence maintained by other means.
The record
Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), writing c. 390-400 CE in his Commentary on Zephaniah and in letters from Bethlehem, describes Jews paying Roman soldiers to be permitted to weep among the ruins of Jerusalem on the anniversary of the Temple's destruction - the ninth of Av. Jerome's description is one of the most vivid contemporary accounts of this practice and is cited extensively in Yaron Eliav, God's Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Place, and Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), which analyses how the ruined Temple Mount functioned as a site of active Jewish memory under Roman and then Byzantine administration. The Mishnah tractate Ta'anit (4:6) independently records the ninth of Av as a day of collective mourning for the Temple's destruction - evidence that the mourning practice was formalised in Jewish law regardless of Roman permission or prohibition.
The ban did not last for ever. By the time of Constantine in the fourth century, Jews were settling back into what the Roman world still mostly called Jerusalem in practice, if not always in official documents. The Christianisation of the empire brought its own complications - the Temple Mount was left deliberately desolate as theological statement, and Jewish access remained restricted and contested - but the name Aelia Capitolina gradually faded from common use. By the Byzantine period the city was Jerusalem again in every document that mattered. The Roman rebranding had lasted barely two centuries. The Jewish name for it had been in use for a thousand years before Hadrian arrived and has been in use for two thousand years since. There is a lesson in that arithmetic about which kind of power endures.
The record
The Roman name Aelia Capitolina appears on coins minted for the colony from the reign of Hadrian through the mid-third century CE; these coins are held in collections including the British Museum (Department of Coins and Medals) and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. By the fourth century, imperial documents and Christian writers increasingly revert to the name Hierosolyma/Jerusalem. The legal and demographic recovery of a Jewish presence in the city is traced in Lee I. Levine, Jerusalem: Portrait of the City in the Second Temple Period (Jewish Publication Society, 2002) and in the archaeological survey of late Roman and Byzantine Jerusalem conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Madaba Map mosaic (c. 560 CE, St George's Church, Madaba, Jordan) labels the city Hierosolyma in Greek - demonstrating that within four centuries of Hadrian's renaming, even Byzantine cartography had returned to the older name.
What Hadrian understood as an act of closure, the tribe understood as a temporary interruption. Empires rename; communities remember. The hill was always Jerusalem, the mourners kept the calendar, and the name Hadrian chose for his colony is now known mainly to historians. The name he tried to erase is known to everyone.
