>so it seems far-fetched to believe that educated people in 135 AD would have intimate knowledge of the Jews' relationship to them.

Hadrian did not have to know anything whatsoever about the Philistines to make the choices he did. A Greek speaking Emperor decided to rename a province using Greek names. He chose Greek names as close as he could get, which he could have gotten from multiple sources. Why didn't he name it the Latin equivalent of 'Hadrian-ville'? We'll never know.

There may have been a message in the new names, but Hadrian would not have to know anything about Judaism to make it: perhaps the choice of Greek was motivated by being aware of the Maccabean fight against the Greek Seleucid Empire, a method of telling the world the Jews lost in the long run and that the 'superiour' culture won. But I'm just wildly guessing, we'll probably never know.

>You are talking about Hadrian's decision to refound Jerusalem as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina. This occurred at least a decade before the revolt...

I note the chronology of this time is rather unclear. We aren't sure whether the Roman laws against Jewish practices started before the Bar Kochva revolt or after it. It has been argued that these laws preceded the Revolt and led to it, and were intensified after it.

>View it with Roman eyes. There are hundreds of peoples and religions in the empire. Most of them worship the Emperor and loves having statues of him around.

It's absurd to paint the Romans as ignorant. Rome conquered the entire Levant by 30BC. There was also the previous revolt, after which Josephus wrote to Roman elite. There were also Jewish communities outside the Levant, like the Iraqi one which dates to the end of the First Temple period. Rome had over a century of experience knowing exactly who they were dealing with.

Classicists have an image of Rome as tolerant, which is sometimes true, and sometimes brushes over all the times Rome was not tolerant. Romans were perfectly capable of crushing people and the local religion when they wanted to - just ask the Druids. Oh, we can't do that, because the Romans decided they should not exist anymore. It should not be a surprise that the Romans decided to fix their Jewish 'problem' also with violence and suppression.

>The Talmud actually describes the Bar Kokba revolt in great detail...

Actually, quite a bit we'd like to know is missing, for perfectly understandable reasons. Their viewpoint is religious and local, and not very interested in non-Jews.

It's like using the Bible alone as an historical source for the ancient East: leaving aside questions of reliability, it's very patchy regarding non-Jews. List of Egyptian kings? (Nope). What did the Egyptians really do with the pyramids? (Tombs not mentioned). How did the Egyptians called the land during all this period? (You won't find it there).

All these sources have their focus and care little about other things.

>Eusebius had a habit of characterizing all misfortunes that befell on the Jewish people as divine punishment... He also claimed that Aelia Capitolina was founded to punish the Jews for revolting..

So when Eusebius notes the renaming he sees it as a misfortune and punishment, but Hadrian doesn't see it as a punishment? Why should they assign a different meaning when they were members of the same culture?

Eusebius could have easily spun it had the Roman Empire meant well ('The great Emperor gave the Jews a gift and the ungrateful wretches reacted violently!'), and he had access to sources we do not have. It's much more likely Hadrian saw it the same way Eusebius did.