Conrad Brennan – författare

In the summer of 66 CE, a young Temple official in Jerusalem persuaded the priests at the altar to stop performing a sacrifice on behalf of the Roman Emperor. That act of defiance — the withdrawal of the daily offering that had been the symbol of Jewish accommodation with Roman power — ignited one of the most catastrophic conflicts of the ancient world. The First Jewish–Roman War lasted seven years and consumed the province of Judaea, the city of Jerusalem, and the Second Temple itself, the most magnificent sanctuary in the ancient Mediterranean world.Drawing on the testimony of Flavius Josephus, the archaeological record of the siege sites, and two centuries of modern scholarship, Conrad Brennan reconstructs the war in full: the decades of fiscal extraction and administrative failure that made revolt inevitable; the ideological landscape of Zealots, Sicarii, and messianic prophets who gave the resistance its competing visions; the campaigns of Vespasian and Titus that methodically compressed the rebellion toward its catastrophic end; and the human cost paid by the hundreds of thousands who died or were enslaved in the war's aftermath.This is also the story of what the war made. The destruction of the Temple forced Judaism to reinvent itself as a portable, text-centred tradition capable of surviving two millennia of exile. It accelerated Christianity's separation from its Jewish matrix. And it left a wound in the landscape of Jerusalem that has never fully healed. The First Jewish–Roman War is not ancient history. It is the beginning of the world we still inhabit.

For nearly a century, the heartland of Palestine erupted in fire. Between 484 and 573 CE, the Samaritan people — the descendants of ancient Israel who had worshipped on Mount Gerizim since before the Jerusalem Temple was built — launched five successive revolts against the Byzantine Empire's systematic campaign to destroy them. They fought for their sacred mountain, occupied by an imperial garrison church. They fought against legislation that stripped them of inheritance rights, civic standing, and the freedom to worship. They fought, most spectacularly, under the messianic king Julianus ben Sabar, whose 529 CE uprising overran two provinces, burned the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, and brought the empire to the edge of catastrophe before being crushed by a Ghassanid Arab army at Justinian's command.The Broken Mountain reconstructs the full arc of this forgotten conflict — the five revolts, the theology of the mountain at their centre, the Justinianic legislation that provoked them, and the demographic catastrophe that ended them. It examines the archaeology of the emptied highland villages, the imperial church built over the Samaritan sacred precinct, the liturgical poetry through which a decimated community refused to disappear. And it follows the community from the Islamic conquest to the approximately 900 Samaritans alive today, still ascending Gerizim each spring for the Passover sacrifice.The history of the Samaritan revolts is the history of what happens when empire decides a people must cease to exist.

Between 1918 and 1921, a wave of mass violence swept through the Jewish communities of Ukraine that the world has largely forgotten. In 1,500 pogroms across more than 1,300 localities, somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews were killed — not as a by-product of revolution but as its recurring, systematic accompaniment. Every armed force fighting in the Ukrainian Civil War bore some responsibility: the Ukrainian Directory under Symon Petliura, whose forces committed the largest single share of the documented violence; the White Army under Denikin, whose Cossack cavalry brought the Judeo-Bolshevik myth to lethal operational form; the independent warlord bands who turned the chaos of the steppe into a hunting ground; and even, in limited instances, units of the Bolshevik Red Army.Drawing on the extraordinary archive assembled by historian Elias Tcherikower — thousands of survivor testimonies, administrative records, and photographs preserved at the YIVO Institute — Conrad Brennan reconstructs the full scope of a catastrophe that has lived in the shadow of the Holocaust it helped to make possible. From the organised massacre at Proskurov to the burning synagogue at Tetiev, from the ideology of Judeo-Bolshevism to the failure of international accountability, this is the definitive narrative history of a forgotten genocide — and a reckoning with what it cost the world to forget it.

In the spring of 6 CE, a Galilean teacher named Judas stood against the Roman census and declared that God alone was master of Israel — that paying tribute to Caesar was not merely a political inconvenience but a betrayal of the covenant that gave Jewish existence its meaning. His declaration sparked a movement that would burn for a hundred and thirty years, consuming everything it touched and transforming a people in ways that are still visible in the world today.No Master But God traces the full arc of Jewish resistance against Rome, from the consolidation of Herod the Great's client kingdom through the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE. It follows the dynasty of resistance fighters that Judas of Galilee founded — through his crucified sons, his messianic grandson, and the kinsman who organized mass suicide at Masada rather than submit to Roman capture. It reconstructs the siege of Jerusalem, the burning of the Temple, and the systematic Roman attempt to erase Jewish identity from the landscape of Judaea itself.Drawing on Josephus, rabbinic literature, Roman administrative records, and the extraordinary letters of Bar Kokhba discovered in the Judaean desert caves, Conrad Brennan delivers a narrative of faith, resistance, and catastrophe that speaks directly to what it costs to believe something completely — and what survives when belief outlasts the world that produced it.