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For nearly 200 years, the Jews of Judea wouldn’t let Roman occupiers rule in peace.

Who were the most determined insurgents against the ancient Romans? If it were an exam question, good marks might go to the student who answers that it had to be the Germani, who destroyed no fewer than three of Augustus’ legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, or the Gauls, who put up a brave resistance until Vercingetorix’s surrender and ceremonial strangulation in 46 B.C.

The Carthaginians put up a stout opposition in three Punic wars between 264 and 146 B.C., and as an Englishman I must mention the British chieftains who gave the Romans so much trouble between Julius Caesar’s invasion of 55 B.C. and Boadicea’s death in A.D. 61.

For Barry Strauss, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of numerous books about the ancient world, the correct answer is the Jews. Mr. Strauss’s “Jews vs. Rome” chronicles the two centuries from 63 B.C., when the Roman conquest of Judea began, to A.D. 136, when the Bar Kokhba Revolt was finally crushed. If the Americans, who also revolted against the world’s most powerful empire, had been forced to surrender after the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, they would have had to fight on until 1974 to equal the history of revolt and rebellion of the Jews against Rome.

“It is my hope,” Mr. Strauss writes, “that the history of this period, these people and these struggles, will offer context for the clash of civilizations we are witnessing today and forge a deeper understanding of the forces that propel them.” Certainly, his story of vicious massacres and massive reprisals in Judea has powerful resonances in the contemporary Middle East for anyone wanting to look for them.

Rome always considered Judea as its “near abroad” and so sent much larger forces to crush revolts there than to invade Britain or other areas it considered peripheral. Its policy was always to send ever-larger armies to annihilate rebellions in the Middle East, responding to one such revolt with what Mr. Strauss calls “a savagery not seen since the destruction of Carthage two centuries earlier.” Eventually the Jews had to recognize that there was no sane alternative to accepting Roman rule.

The Great Jewish Revolt (or Jewish War) of A.D. 66 to 74, the Diaspora Revolt of A.D. 116 and the Bar Kokhba Revolt of A.D. 132 to 136 were, Mr. Strauss argues persuasively, only the most visible moments of rebellion by a people who always wanted their freedom. Those three great uprisings were interspersed with dozens of smaller less coordinated outbreaks of resistance that he believes testify to the human spirit and its desire for liberty and self-determination.

The book is not starry-eyed about the terror tactics that the Jewish rebels routinely employed against the occupying power, incapable as they were of fighting a conventional war against the Roman legions, which were always overwhelmingly likely to win any pitched battle. Many Jews were what we might call freedom fighters, but some among them simply did not believe that autonomy was worth the sheer pain the Jews would have to undergo to win it. Many others recognized the material benefits that the Roman Empire undoubtedly did bestow (the “what have the Romans ever done for us?” scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” isn’t entirely inaccurate).

Thousands of pro-Roman Jews therefore helped the Romans suppress the Jewish Revolt, with local elites and property-owners often siding with Rome in the hope of a peaceful life. When one reads of “men flogged until their flesh had been torn to ribbons” and the mix of slaughter and enslavement visited upon the inhabitants of Jotapata, who held out for 47 days against Vespasian in A.D. 67, it’s hard not to sympathize with those early quislings. As Mr. Strauss freely admits: “For the Jewish people in particular, these centuries were cataclysmic.”

The record of some Jews plundering others makes it clear that the war cannot be seen through the simplified prism of evil imperialist versus heroic resister but instead bears all the complexities of modern occupations, such as the French response to the German occupation of 1940-44.

Mr. Strauss is excellent at using modern archaeology to extract information from ancient battlefields. In the case of Jotapata—the scene of a bloody Roman siege in northern Israel —excavators have found evidence of the assault ramp the Romans built to storm the city from its northwestern side, including arrowheads, ballista stones, hobnails from boots, arrowheads and several layers of soil and mortar.

The siege of Jotapata highlights a major problem Mr. Strauss deals with head on. By far the most important source for the Great Jewish Revolt is one book: Josephus’ “The Jewish War,” written about 75 A.D. Yet Josephus reports that 40,000 people died at Jotapata, a figure he inflated 20 times from the correct one of around 2,000. How can one write a book based very largely on such an unreliable central narrative?

Mr. Strauss constantly reminds the reader that Josephus is untrustworthy, and especially in “the parts that make Josephus look good.” Fact-checking is hard at a distance of two millennia, which is why the reader has to trust Mr. Strauss’s judgment in examining those moments in which Josephus is “not shy about taking license with the facts.” On occasion, modern archeological work has borne out some of Josephus’ claims, and Mr. Strauss puts into proper context the ancient historian’s personal treachery against the Jewish cause.

“Josephus, the former priest,” Mr. Strauss writes, “never doubted that God is just. . . . No one could serve as a harsher rod of divine justice than the Romans in all their awful brutality. No doubt Josephus hoped that his Jewish readers would learn the lesson never to repeat their mistake of rebelling against the empire to which God Himself had transferred His favor.” In fact they did rebel again, not once but twice.

As well as the nuanced figure of Josephus, Mr. Strauss’s narrative is populated by huge characters such as Pompey the Great, Queen Helena of Adiabene, the emperors Tiberius and Nero, and Herod the Great and his great-granddaughter Queen Berenice. Mr. Strauss is a judicious sifter of the historical and archaeological evidence, but he can also tell a story. “Jews vs. Rome” is packed with tales of assassins, mobs, agents provocateurs, zealots and traitors. As a Jew himself, however, Mr. Strauss never loses sight of the central fact that for his people these were two centuries of tragedy and disaster, intermixed with very occasional moments of short-lived triumph.

The greatest figures in the book are the Jewish rebel leaders John of Giscala, Simon Son of Giora and Simon Bar Kokhba, whom Mr. Strauss believes to be the most determined insurgent against Rome, and about whom he makes sensible assessments on often tantalizingly small amounts of evidence. Without the Jews and their indomitable determination to resist Rome, this book argues powerfully, modern Judaism would look very different—and less heroically noble—than it does today.