The Arch of Titus: what the menorah relief actually shows

The Arch of Titus: what the menorah relief actually shows

The most important Jewish object in Rome is not in the ghetto and not in a museum. It is carved into the inside wall of a marble arch at the top of the Via Sacra, about fifty metres from the Colosseum, and most people walk underneath it without looking up.

What the panel actually shows

The Arch of Titus has two large reliefs facing each other inside the passage. The one that matters is on the south wall: the triumphal procession of 71 CE, moving to the right, carrying the objects taken from the Temple in Jerusalem the year before.

Once you know what you are looking for, you can pick out four things:

• the menorah, the seven-branched lampstand, carried on a platform by men whose shoulders visibly take the weight
• the table of the showbread, the golden table from the Sanctuary
• two trumpets, the silver chatzotzrot, laid diagonally across that table
• the placards carried on poles, which in a Roman triumph named the cities taken and the peoples defeated

The north panel, opposite, shows Titus himself in a four-horse chariot, crowned by a winged Victory. The two are a single scene, split in half across a corridor you have to walk through to see either side of it.

Titus did not build it

The arch went up after his death. Titus died in 81 CE, and the inscription on the east face reads SENATVS POPVLVSQVE ROMANVS DIVO TITO — to the deified Titus. That word divo is the giveaway: it is a title for an emperor already dead and already made a god. His brother Domitian finished the monument.

So this is not a victory arch raised in the heat of the triumph. It is a memorial, put up roughly a decade later, at the point where the destruction of Jerusalem had stopped being a recent war and become the founding story of a dynasty.

The problem with the base

Here is the part a guide who has read the sources will tell you, and one who has not will not.

The menorah on the arch has curved, semicircular arms and stands on a two-tiered octagonal pedestal decorated with what look like sea-monsters. Neither detail matches the Jewish tradition. Maimonides, writing in Egypt a thousand years later, described and sketched the arms as straight and diagonal, not curved — and the base of the Sanctuary menorah is understood as tripod, not a panelled octagon carrying pagan creatures.

Scholars have argued about this for two centuries and have not finished. One position: the sculptor saw the actual object as it was paraded through Rome, and the pedestal was a later addition made in Jerusalem, in the Herodian period, for carrying it. The other: he never saw it, worked from description, and gave the object the kind of base a Roman would give any cult object.

You do not have to resolve it. You do have to know it, because it changes what you are looking at: not a photograph of the Temple menorah, but a Roman sculptor’s version of it.

It was painted yellow

In 2012 a team led by Steven Fine of Yeshiva University examined the panel with ultraviolet-visible spectrometry and found traces of yellow ochre on the menorah.

The arch we look at is bleached marble. The arch a Roman looked at was painted — and the lampstand was yellow, standing in for gold. It is a small finding that changes the picture entirely, because it means the relief was not a sober historical record. It was colour, staged, meant to be read from below by a crowd.

The arch Roman Jews would not walk under

For centuries the Jews of Rome did not pass beneath it. Walking through that passage meant walking through the procession carved on its wall, in the same direction, as part of it.

The community recounts that the custom broke in May 1948, on the day the State of Israel was proclaimed: they walked through the arch deliberately, in the opposite direction to the procession. It is the kind of detail that tells you the monument was never only archaeology to the people who lived a mile from it.

The Colosseum is part of the same sentence

Fifty metres away stands the Colosseum, and in 1995 the epigrapher Géza Alföldy reconstructed its lost dedicatory inscription from the holes left in the stone by the bronze letters. The reading accepted by most epigraphers records that the amphitheatre was built ex manubiis — out of the spoils of war.

For a building dedicated in 80 CE, that war is the Jewish War. The arch and the amphitheatre are two halves of one statement: the money and, in large part, the labour that raised the most famous building in the world came out of Judea. This is why we do not treat the Colosseum as a separate stop. It is the same story, told in a different material.

Seeing it properly

The arch stands at the eastern edge of the Roman Forum, inside the Colosseum–Forum–Palatine archaeological area. One ticket covers all three, entry is timed, and it has to be booked in advance — there is no walking up on the day in season.

Two practical things. The reliefs are on the inner walls, so you have to pass through the arch rather than photograph it from the outside, which is what most visitors do. And the passage is narrow: early morning, before the groups arrive from the Colosseum, is the only time you can stand in front of the menorah panel long enough to actually read it.

We cover the arch inside the Colosseum, Roman Forum and Arch of Titus tour, with a guide certified by the Jewish Community of Rome. If you want the rest of the two-thousand-year story, it continues in the former ghetto and the Great Synagogue, underground in the Jewish catacombs of Vigna Randanini, and in the full guide to Jewish Rome.