the rise of Emperor Julian, the last of the Constantinian dynasty, who, unlike his predecessors, defied Christianity. In 363, not long before Julian left Antioch to launch his campaign against Sassanian Persia, he ordered the Jewish Temple rebuilt in his effort to foster religions other than Christianity. The failure to rebuild the Temple has mostly been ascribed to the dramatic Galilee earthquake of 363, and traditionally also to the Jews' ambivalence about the project. Sabotage is a possibility, as is an accidental fire, though Christian historians of the time ascribed it to divine intervention. Julian's support of Judaism caused Jews to call him "Julian the Hellene". Julian's fatal wound in the Persian campaign put an end to Jewish aspirations, and Julian's successors embraced Christianity through the entirety of Byzantine rule of Jerusalem, preventing any Jewish claims. In 438 CE, when the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews' praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call "to the great and mighty people of the Jews" which began: "Know that the end of the exile of our people has come!" However the Christian population of the city saw this as a threat to their primacy, and a riot erupted which chased Jews from the city. During the 5th and the 6th centuries, a series of Samaritan revolts broke out across the Palaestina Prima province. Especially violent were the third and the fourth revolts, which resulted in near annihilation of the Samaritan community. It is likely that the Samaritan revolt of 556 was joined by the Jewish community, which had also suffered brutal suppression of their religion under Emperor Justinian. In the belief of restoration to come, in the early 7th century the Jews made an alliance with the Persians, joining the Persian invasion of Palaestina Prima in 614 to overwhelm the Byzantine garrison, and gaining autonomous rule over Jerusalem. However, their autonomy was brief: the Jewish leader was shortly assassinated during a Christian revolt and, though Jerusalem was reconquered by Persians and Jews within 3 weeks, it fell into anarchy. With the subsequent withdrawal of Persian forces, Jews surrendered to the Byzantines in 625 CE or 628 CE. Byzantine control of the region was finally lost to Muslim Arab armies in 637 CE, when Umar ibn al-Khattab completed the conquest of Akko. Legacy In Rabbinic Judaism The disastrous end of the revolt occasioned major