The siege of Jerusalem by the Roman emperors Titus and Vespasian in ad 70, and the consequent destruction of the city and its Temple, was immortalised by the historian Josephus in The Jewish War. His work, both directly and obliquely experienced, was an imaginative inspiration to many later writers; in this study, Beatrice Groves analyses the use made of it in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's King John and Nashe's Christ's tears over Jerusalem. As she also remarks, versions of the narrative were culturally widespread in early modern England: ‘recounted by travel writers, pored over by scholars, expounded by poets, enjoyed by the semi-literate audiences of puppet shows and ballad-pedlars, preached from Paul's Cross in the heart of London and played out in the stages which peppered the suburbs’. As this implies, parallels between Jerusalem and London were easy to play up, especially where London appeared to deserve Christ's often-invoked lament: ‘Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee.’ The destruction of Jerusalem was a story that could be told from either side's perspective; it yielded many striking vignettes of the extreme suffering that its victims underwent -- for instance, the Jewish woman Miriam who was driven by hunger to kill and eat her own child -- and many exemplary Jewish figures, such as the itinerant prophet Jesus Ananias and the noble soldier Niger, who defiantly declares to God in Thomas Legge's Solymitana Clades that ‘our long progeny will sing Your praises’. This is only one example of how, in an age of pervasive anti-semitism, the story gave an unusual opportunity for nuanced and sympathetic depictions of Jews and their faith; in a satisfying conclusion, Groves sees this as contributing to a wider Protestant renegotiation of Christianity's relationship with Judaism.