The Not-So-Brief Jewish Moment
By the late 500s, Jerusalem had been under Christian Byzantine rule for over two centuries. Since Constantine in the 4th century, the city had been transformed into a monumental Christian sacred center. It was the city of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the heart of Christian pilgrimage networks, and a landscape of monasteries and clerical institutions.
The Byzantine state understood Jerusalem as the city of Christ, not a shared sacred space. The old Jewish temple site had been deliberately left without Jewish restoration. By the late 6th century, Jerusalem’s identity as a Christian city was complete, this meant Jews were prohibited from residing in Jerusalem. The policy went back to Roman times (especially after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135), but Byzantine Christian rulers maintained and reinforced it. Jews could approach the city for limited religious purposes, sometimes annually, but they were not permitted civic presence or authority there.
After the long Byzantine–Persian war of 572–591, the Persian general Bahram Chobin rebelled against Shah Khosrow II and seized power. Khosrow II was forced to flee Persia and went to the Byzantine emperor Maurice, his former enemy, and asked for help to regain the throne. This was not unusual in ancient geopolitics; rivals often supported claimants in each other’s empires to gain influence.
In 602, Emperor Maurice himself was overthrown by a military revolt led by the officer Phocas. Maurice and his sons were executed. Khosrow II, who had been restored to power by then and owed his throne in part to Maurice, declared war ostensibly to avenge him. Khosrow II sent Persian armies west into Byzantine territory. Over the next decade Persian forces conquered Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia regions, Egypt and Palestine.
In 614, Persian forces led by Shahrbaraz being supported by Jewish auxiliaries surrounded the city and eventually breached its defenses. Contemporary Christian sources describe heavy destruction once the city fell. Churches were burned or damaged, monastic complexes devastated, and large numbers of inhabitants killed or taken captive. The most symbolically catastrophic act was the seizure of the relic of the True Cross from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Persians removed it from Jerusalem and carried it east.
What followed was short-lived reconfiguration of the city’s religious and political order. For the first time in centuries, the Christian monopoly that had defined Byzantine Jerusalem collapsed. Persian authorities allowed Jews to enter Jerusalem openly and participate in the city’s administration under Persian supervision. Jewish groups who had supported the Persian advance were granted presence and influence in the city, and Jewish worship appears to have resumed in the Temple Mount area.
But this arrangement soon proved politically fragile. Christians still formed the vast majority of the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the surrounding regions, and Persian control depended less on rewarding minority allies than on preventing unrest among the dominant population. Instead of maintaining a Jewish-centered administrative structure, Persian officials began restoring elements of the existing Christian civic and ecclesiastical order under imperial supervision. Christian local elites and clergy, who had governed municipal life under Byzantium, were gradually reinserted into administrative roles. Churches that had been damaged during the siege resumed limited function, and Christian pilgrimage and liturgical activity, though diminished, reappeared.
Jewish communities in Galilee, Tiberias, and other parts of the region continued their communal life much as they had before, now under Persian rather than Byzantine rule. In Jerusalem itself, however, Jewish presence between the later 610s and 629 appears to have been limited or absent.
Heraclius’s campaigns in the 620s moved through Armenia and northern Mesopotamia, striking deep into Persian territory. He defeated major field armies and shattered the strategic position of Shah Khosrow II. In 627, with the Byzantine victory near Nineveh, internal revolt in Persia overthrew Khosrow, and the new Persian leadership sought peace. Among the conditions of settlement was the restoration of the territories seized since 602 and the return of the Cross taken from Jerusalem.
When Byzantine forces re-entered Palestine and Jerusalem (629–630), the Christian population, deeply traumatized by the sack of 614 and aware of Jewish collaboration with the Persians, pressed the emperor for retribution. Late Byzantine and early medieval sources, especially Syriac and later Armenian traditions, report massacres of Jews in multiple locations. Some sources also describe forced baptisms imposed on Jewish communities within the empire in the 630s.
Heraclius’s triumph and the ceremonial restoration of the Cross to Jerusalem around 629–630 looked, at the time, like the full recovery of the Christian Roman world after its greatest eastern crisis. The empire had survived annihilation, Persia had collapsed into internal turmoil, and Jerusalem was once again a Christian imperial city. But this restoration lasted barely a decade before a new power emerged from Arabia.
Jerusalem Under Islam
Within a few years of Heraclius’s victory, Arab armies unified under Islam began expanding northward out of Arabia. What had initially appeared to Byzantium as frontier raiding turned into sustained conquest. The same provinces that Persia had taken were struck again, this time by forces that neither Byzantium nor Persia had previously encountered. By the mid-630s, Byzantine defenses were collapsing,
