Brilliant, Mary Anne! Thank you.

A marginal comment, in the great rabbinic tradition:

The Jews rebelled against Roman authority, eventually, and suffered a political blow from which they never recovered.

Maybe yes, maybe no... Politics and Religion (capitalized on purpose) merge into a single category under these conditions, taken from the Exquisite Corpse essay to which I linked in my other post on this thread:

Perhaps the most important meaning of "religion" is its use to divide humanity into arbitrary ethnic subdivisions-- Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu and the rest, along with great numbers of schismatic subsets.

Certainly, the result of the Bar Kochba Revolt - the destruction of the Second Temple - was a serious blow. And it did take just under 1900 years for another civil government consisting of Jews to rule (some of) Judaea. True, antagonism within the Diaspora synagogues (in Asia Minor, especially) against their members becoming Christians did lay part of the foundation of another 1900 years of official anti-Jewish preaching and policy.

"On the other hand," as Tevye says, the dissolution of the Temple cult and its hierarchy left the religion in the best hands: those of the faithful. The politics of "the Jewish Question" survived because Jewry did. Considering the alternative... we could have done worse.

Best regards,

Fox