A recently announced archaeological discovery near Jerusalem’s Temple Mount should force a reconsideration of one of the most persistent assumptions in modern discussions of Jewish history.

Unearthed beneath layers dating to the Byzantine and early Islamic periods, the find is a small lead medallion—worn on the body and stamped on both sides with the seven-branched menorah of the Jerusalem Temple. It is roughly 1,300 years old. And it dates to precisely the era when Jews are most often assumed to have vanished from the city altogether.

That assumption—that Jewish presence in Jerusalem effectively ended after the Roman suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt and did not meaningfully resume until modern Zionism—is deeply ingrained. It underlies the way Jerusalem is often described as an “international” city, untethered from any one people, and the way Jewish attachment to it is sometimes treated as symbolic, theological, or retroactively constructed.

TOI’s reporting on the find points to a conclusion many people would rather skip: Jews were still there.

I have written before about how Jewish history in the Land of Israel is not a story of disappearance and sudden modern “return,” but of continuity through displacement, relocation, and changing regimes. Specifically, Jews maintained substantial communities in multiple regions, including the Galilee, the Golan, and the Negev. (Gaza too.)

What this new discovery adds is that even in Jerusalem—where Rome purported to prohibit Jews from living, at least for a time—Jews continued to maintain a physical presence. Whether or not Jews continued to live permanently in Jerusalem throughout Rome’s Jewish ban, it is clear that, at the very least, Jews continued to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

If you want a framework for why that matters, you could do worse than the one now routinely invoked in contemporary politics: indigeneity. The United Nations’ working understanding of indigenous peoples does not define indigeneity as uninterrupted statehood. It emphasizes historical continuity with pre-colonial societies, distinct cultural practices and social institutions tied to a particular territory, and self-identification maintained over time—often in the face of displacement, marginalization, or prohibition. In other words: a people can lose power, lose majority status, and even lose access, and still remain indigenous if the relationship to place is continuous in culture, memory, and practice.

Crucially, the menorah medallion does not stand alone. It matches what contemporaneous observers—often non-Jews—tell us about Jewish worship and presence in Jerusalem in the centuries between Bar Kokhba and the Crusades.

Consider the fourth-century Christian travel account known as the Pilgrim of Bordeaux. Writing about a Jerusalem that was now officially a Christian city built atop Roman foundations, the pilgrim nonetheless reports Jews coming to the Temple Mount—physically approaching the place, mourning there, lamenting the destruction: “And in that building where the Temple was, which Solomon built . . . is a pierced stone to [which] the Jews come[] every year and they anoint it and they lament with a groan and they tear their garments and then they withdraw.”

Likewise, the Church Father Jerome, writing around the same period, confirms the same phenomenon. His purpose is theological and polemical; he is not trying to validate Jewish claims. But that is precisely why his testimony has weight. Jerome describes Jews coming to Jerusalem to grieve at the ruins of the Temple—a reminder that Jewish worship in relation to the Temple Mount continued as a lived practice, not a myth preserved only in texts.

By the early seventh century, Jewish presence is even harder to wave away. The Armenian chronicle attributed to Sebeos describes Jews as active participants in the Persian capture of Jerusalem in 614 CE and as seeking to restore—or rebuild—a sanctuary there. The same chronicler suggests that Jews succeeded in building a place of worship there a quarter century later.

Taken together, these witnesses make the modern “gap story” impossible to sustain.

Jews did not disappear from the Biblical Heartland after Bar Kokhba. They relocated within it. They returned to Jerusalem when and how they could. They remained oriented toward it in practice and ritual, not merely in prayerbooks. And now archaeology has added a quiet but stubborn piece of corroboration: a Temple symbol worn on a body in Jerusalem roughly 1,300 years ago.

The medallion does not argue. It does not editorialize. It simply exists—buried in Jerusalem’s soil, precisely where it should not be if the familiar story were true. And that is why it matters.

David Charles Pollack is a former staff writer for the Jewish Daily Forward. He is currently a lawyer in Manhattan and lives on Long Island.