The period of the presidency of Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el may be divided into two periods from the historical point of view. Up to the year 136 CE events were catastrophic for the Jewish nation; from then onwards the situation improved, in no small measure because of the great effort towards national reconstruction that Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el and his colleagues made.
5:
Even though the Jews had been decisively defeated by the Romans in the year 70 CE and all their national institutions destroyed, the defeat did not serve to quell the general sense of national outrage. The nationalistic fervour that had caused the great revolt against the Romans had not abated, and the resentment and deep hatred that many people had for the Romans in general and for the Roman occupation in particular continued to fester in the decades that followed the débâcle of the year 70 CE. The Lion of Judah had been cowed but not subdued, and from the historical point of view we can receive the Roman claim that Judah had been "pacified" with a hollow laugh. Much more accurate was the caption on the series of special medallions that the Romans issued to celebrate their victory: Judaea Capta, Judah Defeated.
6:
The Lion of Judah was cowed, but the Jewish people in all their dispersions were truly outraged at what had happened. In the years 115 - 117 CE there was a belated reaction to the destruction of the Bet Mikdash some 45 years previously. The Jews rebelled against the Romans in Egypt, Cyrenaica and Cyprus. The revolt started in Cyrene which prompted unrest in Alexandria in Egypt. (With a population of some 150,000 Jews, Alexandria had the largest urban concentration of Jews in the world.) In 116 CE, the Jews organized themselves: the temples of gods like Nemesis, Hecate and Apollo were destroyed; the same fate befell the tomb of Pompey, the Roman general who had captured Jerusalem almost two centuries before. Meanwhile, the Cyrenaican Jews plundered the Egyptian countryside, reaching Thebes, six hundred kilometres upstream. Trajan, the Roman emperor, ordered the commander of his Mauritanian auxiliaries, Lusius Quietus, to clean the suspects out of these regions. Quietus organized a force and killed many Cypriot, Mesopotamian and Syrian Jews - in effect wiping them out; as a reward, he was appointed governor of Judaea. (He is one of the few black Africans known to have made a career in Roman service.) He was responsible for a forced policy of hellenization; in response, the sages banned the teaching of Greek. For more details concerning this period see Sotah 110. Trajan's successor Hadrian dismissed Lusius Quietus, who was killed in the Summer of 118 CE.
To be continued.