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So go and get some books. Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I'm Lee Chung-Grechko, and this week, we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're speaking with Stephen Fine.
Fine is the Hurgen Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University and Director of the YU Center for Israel Studies. His book is The Arch of Titus from Jerusalem to Rome and back. Stephen, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. I'm so happy to be with you today, Le.
So to get started, what does this phrase, searching for butterflies under the arch of Titus Mean? And how has its meaning changed over the years? You know, anybody who's been to the arch of Titus knows there's all sorts of birds and other things flying around this public monument, but there's a poem written in the 19th century that talked about the beauty and excitement of Rome and its artifacts and rejuvenation of the Italian nation under the Italian Republic. And one of his reframes was like butterflies under the arch of Titus, right?
If our fellow did, Aco de Tito as the Italian goes, this became a catch word, a kind of flighty fun way of describing sort of silly things and culturally significant at the same time. And it stayed that way until it was picked up by Benito Mussolini, who turned it sort of dark and treated his opponents as other kinds of, well, vermin onto the arch of Titus. And so it took on this real sort of politically dark sense under fascism for those who went against the positions of the dictator. In recent decades, it's become fun again.
It's a novel that came out in Rome called, again, The Butterflies of the Arch of Titus and on the cover of it. There's an image of the arch of Titus against the city background with these little noodles, which are also called butterflies, farfelle, flying under the arch from somebody's kitchen. It's one of those interesting places that you can see a culture taking a historic site and the contemporary sort of vision of coming to a site and seeing little animals and living with it over 100 years. And what it said about it, that's what it means.
And so that's a really interesting parallel, it seems, to the arch itself. The arch's meaning has changed so much over several centuries. Well, that's why I liked it so much. That's why I liked the poem.
It was a lightweight to start out this collected essay book, which is the final statement of our arch of Titus project at the University that started out by doing something that not everybody believed was possible when we did it. And that was we went to the arch as a team, led by Bernie Fisher of Indiana and Peter shirts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, looking to see if we could discover evidence of color under the arch of Titus. Now the arch itself, of course, the triumphal monument created a decade after the destruction of Jerusalem by the emperor then general Titus. It was built right after his death by his brother, Domitian, around 82.
Now this arch has imagery within it that for the Flavian emperors who had just taken over after a kind of coup was used to legitimize their new dynasty, meaning imagery of the triumphal parade given to Titus as a reward for having taken Jerusalem in 70, which for Romans in the first century was, I guess a great thing. But for the Jews who visited there over the last 2000 years was a point of sadness and despair and yearning. After all, they've been sent into physical exile, many of them into slavery across the Roman Empire into such works as building the Colosseum, which was built with funds taken from Jerusalem. A small population within the Roman Empire that didn't sit well with being ruled by the Roman Empire over a 2000 years period, Jewish visitors looked at the arch and said something like what one of the medieval early modern visitors said.
And that was, the reason they built this is because they knew that the Jews are really a strong people. And if they didn't have such difficulty defeating us, then they wouldn't have needed to put such a great big arch up, which is quite a statement for our little tiny people persecuted in Italy all the way through the Middle Ages and until the end of the 19th century. So this arch became a point of odd pride to the point that at the point of emancipation, which began in the 18th century, Jews looked at this arch and said, see that we've been in Europe for a long time. We're really not a foreign element in European culture.
We've been here for a long time. And a little bit later, after the disappointments of that emancipation, others Jews looked at it and said, well, we were brought here, time to go home, which is the sense of from Rome to Jerusalem and back. But remember that we have Christians looking at this arch also as proof of the prophecy of Jesus that Jerusalem would be destroyed. And as proof that the church was the inheritor of the Roman Empire, which is why when Napoleon left Rome in the first decade of the 19th century, the Pope triumphant came back and rebuilt the arch in his own image.
In other words, the church is the true inheritor. The subjugation of the Jewish population that existed before the emancipation was reinstated and the Jewish community was sent back to the ghetto, which is an awful thing. And we had this piece of stone, which had been in ruins all the way through the Middle Ages, again, magnificent, but now for the triumph of the papacy, and ultimately for the triumph of Napoleon, who rebuilt it in much larger form as the art to triumph in Paris. And then of Hitler, who wanted to build a great big one in Berlin, but never did.
And almost every city in the world, where a arch model on the arch of Titus was built, whether it be Washington Park in New York or the Soldier and Zaliz Monument in Brooklyn. There's also one in Mumbai, there's another one in Janyang. There are these huge triumphal arches and ultimately the arch of Titus is the model for all of them. So that's so interesting though, that this arch was built as a symbol of subjugating the Jews, but then in a way it becomes evidence that the Jews have been in Italy for so long.
And so in their attempt to sort of other them, Rome and later the Italians end up showing that the Jews have been part of Italian culture for centuries. Or European culture for millennia, but that's only how some people read it. It's not about other things, about celebrating a military victory and celebrating a triumph, just like Colin O'Treyjin or the column of Marcus Aurelius or the Arch of Constantine. This is about the triumphant empire.
It's not about Jews. Jews are the vehicle that showed the greatness of the empire. It's unfortunate though, that unlike most of the other peoples defeated by Rome, Jews still exist. And so you won't find Phoenician talking back, right?
You won't find it back the end fighting back. You won't find it all fighting back. But here are these Jews who continued in Europe and across the Mediterranean world, across the Islamic world over 2,000 years, yearly commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem, daily mentioning return to Jerusalem in their prayers, sometimes three, four, five, six, times a day, which created a sense of anticipation. And this arch provided a physical manifestation of that, once Jews outside of Rome heard about it, because it took photography to spread the news that this arch insisted there.
While people may have known about it, it's Constantinople, Istanbul, is really far away really when you can't fly, right? Even Florence is far away when you have to walk. And so while in Rome they knew about the arch of the seven branch candlestick, in the big world, it slowly spread as a visual icon among Jews, beginning slowly in the 18th century with images in printed books, but then with photography. And photography created the arch of Titus for the virtual community, which is the Jewish world, spread across the empires that we live with today.
So obviously there's so much interest in this, but you write that rabbis have little interest in the arch of first. Can you tell me why that changed? Well, they hadn't seen it. It's that simple, it hadn't been seen.
Now, there's another piece, and that is that the image of the seven branch menorah, the candelabra, the menorah, of the arch of Titus has a very strange base, which I described elsewhere in terms of Roman art of the period. But the important piece is it doesn't fit with what medieval rabbis thought the base ought to look like. Now, for sort of simple people, to find an artifact that doesn't exactly fit one for one with what the ancient rabbis said ought to have existed was a faithbreaker, not understanding how knowledge spreads and how people imagine and all of those things. And so they were afraid at a very fragile moment that this image of the arch of Titus would somehow undermine the faith of the simple, who said, look, that's the menorah and the Romans made it, and it's wrong.
Now, what's the real reason people didn't pay a lot of attention to it? They never saw it. It's really that simple as that. It took that technology and transmission of images.
Just as the arch of Titus has become so much more important than the digital age, because in an age where everybody thinks visually, Jews who didn't always have the large number of icons to draw on have looked to the arch of Titus. And so I can tell you that every year around Hanukkah time and every year around the 9th of the Bed of the Destruction of Jerusalem in the summer, the arch of Titus pops back. So in the fall, I get all the calls about the menorah in Hanukkah. And in the spring and the summer, I get all the calls about the destruction of Jerusalem, all surrounding this same place and the same icon, which becomes all the stronger because it was chosen as the centerpiece of the national emblem of Israel.
And so it has that reverberation through Israeli civil religion into sort of traditional religion and people putting those things together and embracing a stone in Rome, which is probably the only country to have its national symbol in another country. And that is so fascinating that it is a symbol of displacement and everything. And it makes sense that people gravitate toward the arch because as you sort of briefly mentioned, Judaism doesn't have this vast iconography that other religions, especially in the name of Catholicism has. As a Catholic, I've seen so many images of saints and you have the Pieta and just thousands of different symbols that you can pull from.
It doesn't seem that way in Judaism. It doesn't seem that you have many different motifs. Judaism is an anidolic religion. It's not that it's an iconic.
It has lots of images. It has all that stuff from the biblical tabernacle and lots and lots of other stuff, including lots of images of people in biblical scenes and a whole range of materials. But it doesn't hit the point where these images are any more than decorations, as opposed to the Christian religions or ancient Roman religion, where they could become more than decorations. And so growing up in a Roman Catholic home, you would see a vast number of images, some of them with people piously venerating them.
You'll never find that in a Jewish or a Muslim context. What will you find? You'll find Jews and Muslims venerating holy texts. And so it's a different model of where imagery is drawn from and a different valuation of imagery in both of those groups, as opposed to the Christian and the ancient Roman, which is what's so interesting in sending these things side by side.
Jews have been making minorities since the second century BCE and they look more or less the same over that whole long period, which is an astonishing thing, whether they're in Yemen or whether they're in North Africa or whether they're in Greenland, if there were Jews in Greenland, right? No matter where they went, the 7th and 7th branchmen had this very local internal meaning. By the same token, it was reinforced in the 19th century and the 20th century when Christians realized that this was a symbol for Judaism. And so it got put very often right next to crosses.
Or since both are, they're both vertical symbols with horizontal cross pieces near the top, but for Christians, the cross in many communities is a object of veneration. For Jews, a minora is a memory tool. It's probably the best visual symbol since McDonald's, right? Because it's so unique that even when it's broken into a little piece of stone that's dug up somewhere, you can still recognize it if you only have a piece of it.
And so as a branding object for Judaism and of Jews, it became really, really popular. And particularly in the 19th and 20th century, when Christians noticed that it represents Jews as well, and everybody needed an icon. So going back to the arch itself, you talk about the German philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn's approach to the archmenorah. Talk about what his take reflected.
Well, first of all, no German would have called Moses Mendelssohn a German because he was a Jewish philosopher who did not have rights in Germany in his own lifetime. The emancipation had not yet come. But he was considered like the model Jew because he had developed relationships with the philosophical class, I guess, in Berlin and wrote a number of texts. Some of these were directed at his German fellow travelers.
Some of these are directed internally to the Jewish community. He's the first one to recognize the possible inherent problem of his age for Jews as the deal was, you can be considered equal, just convert to Christianity, and you'll be equal. And so any kind of advancement in the system required conversions of Christianity, and much to their advantage or disadvantage, even though they weren't highly literate in German literature sometimes, they were a highly literate population because of their studies of Jewish text. Unlike other minority groups, those who came to America as well, Jews came to America as the ultimate outside vilified group, but they could read.
And so their advancement in either culture could be rather swift once allowed in, but the price was Christianization. And he was committed at all costs to finding a way to live within Prussian culture without becoming Christian. Now, that's quite a difficult thing within that world. The price that his community had to pay to stay Jewish then was high.
He wrote a commentary on the Torah, which is the best known Jewish book, right? The job it was to begin a process of Germanization. We're by, he translated the Torah into German, but in Hebrew letters, remember folks were used to using Yiddish, which was a medieval German dialect. He wanted to use the modern German dialect.
He translated the Torah into German so that they would learn to read standard German, and then could take that and transfer it to Latin scripts. Then he wrote a commentary on the entire Torah, which is really very conservative. And it's, goal was to tell these people where they are, like their neighbors and where they are different. Okay?
One of the places where he went to war, the only place I could find where he went to war against a monument, it was against the arch of types. Because as far as he was concerned, this object was a transfer. All these Jews thought, see, this is our key to Western culture. We were here a long time ago, and he said, wait a minute, that arch that you see there, that manor that you see on it, that is not what the original one looked like.
Our rabbis described the original one, and it had a tri-pod base, and this one has this thing that looks like a wedding cake. I just, even colloquial. That can't possibly be the original. But he couldn't say that it was faked.
Because if he said it was faked, he would incite his neighbors to think he's some sort of primitive. So what did he do? He said that the Roman artist made his menorah, but by the time he made it, he didn't really see the original, and he made a mistake. And so the Romans made a mistake, our rabbis got it right.
And so you shouldn't trust everything you see in German culture as being manifestly better than what Jewish tradition says. This was an apologetic, this was an attempt to keep his community together at a moment when many parts of it were beginning to loosen up and Christianizing and eventually converting to Christianity. And so you see there how this arch of Titus thing became a tool, a gold, a problem, for a modernizing traditionalist. So your conclusion to this book, looks at the arch of Titus in the age of COVID.
What meanings do the arch take on during this time of protest? And do you think there's any merit to the argument that confederate statues in the United States, it should be taken down? I don't take down monuments. I might move them, but I don't take them down.
In other words, you don't like Theodore Roosevelt in front of the Natural History Museum in New York. You may move him, but you don't destroy it, because it's an important historical artifact, which is exactly the decision. The museum made, you know, in Hungary, after the fall of communism, they created a statue park in Budapest where they collected all these bizarre communist statues and they put them in one place, it's a very cool thing. On the other hand, no one thought of doing that after the fall of Nazism.
They were very happy to get rid of the Hitler statues, which is really good, except for people who studied the history of the Third Reich, being able to get close to and see some of those original Hitler statues in some warehouse somewhere, would be a very useful thing. So I'm against destroying historical artifacts. The question is how you contextualize where you put them, how you deal with them. And every generation has to deal with that question.
So destroying the arch of Titus would be the best one of the most important artifacts from the ancient world. That's probably a bad idea. Similarly, what we see through our book is that the arch of Titus takes on different meetings for different people as a place of memory and a place of new memory over a 2000 year period. And the focal point for different communities to think about themselves, who they are, what they're going to be, whether it be the Jewish Jews who lost, but eventually came back.
Or whether it be Christians who at first saw it as their continuity with ancient Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem and now often use it for a commendable purposes on a good day. Whether it be people in Moldava who took a fun at the Menorah model and the arch of Titus and destroyed it because the Jews had the audacity to put it in the town square, whatever. The arch of Titus and all monuments are teaching moments and teaching opportunities and teaching locations. Not to be missed because I think that they weaken the fabric of our experience and more than that weaken our possibility to reimagine the future as anything but ourselves.
What the study of the past does is give us the tools to understand that people before us thought about the things that we think about and reached very different conclusions. And while we may or may not gain from their conclusions and often we gain from them, they provide resources for the present and we wipe away the past. We are in fact making the future far less bright and far less resource filled for figuring itself out. So no destroying a place like the arch of Titus would pour it for any historical document because in this moment we don't like it.
It's probably a bad idea. After all the French Revolution destroyed great cathedrals that you can go to now and only see the shells up. Wouldn't it be nice if they had simply put a sign up in front that said museum? Right?
That we could at least keep it and use it. And you know, as with the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, leaving the politics aside, it was turned into a museum during the secularization period in Turkey and during its current dictatorship has been turned back into a mosque. Whatever you think about that, we all have opinions. That is interesting how this building continues to live and to be formulate and become different from period to period.
Now in Israel, there's been some really interesting stuff during the arch of Titus period because the arch of Titus and his menorah are in Israeli culture and Jewish culture. Sort of a cipher for Jewish exile and Jewish marching and Jewish returns to the land of Israel. And so in newspaper cartoons, it's taken as wildly, wild significance. There was an exhibition in the Israel cartoon character of the New York Artune Museum, I think it was called, a number of years ago called Lo Vaksena, not just a symbol where the symbol of the state of Israel is shown to have been used by newspaper cartoonists since the British mandate period to express whatever the culture is feeling about itself.
Now in this period, there are two really interesting cartoons that came out, one that came out in the Irish newspaper and one that came out in Markore, which is a really designed newspaper. And they both respond to a protest against the previous Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, where there was a march on the Knesset in the spring just before the festival of the destructive festival, the commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem on Tishaba Av. And in the course of this, a young social worker student jumped on top of a statue of the menorah holding a rose and took off her shirt. Now that was in direct response to the new woman, the new woman in the Portland demonstration, the Portland Athena, it was like a day or two afterwards.
And she was doing something similar in Jerusalem, except new in Portland is not the same as new in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a very conservative city. So it struck the nerve of nerves. And the Israeli right spoke of the desecration of the national symbol, the Israeli left sort of sat in the shuttles, but this woman became holding her rose, a symbol for this protest movement and for the COVID moment.
And so there were two cartoons. The one of my aurets showed a, so the people on the archer Titus marching toward the house of the prime minister with this woman on top of the menorah demanding his resignation. And the one in the national religious paper, which was sort of cute, showed her on top of the menorah. They were a bit more discreet about showing her torso because it was a religious newspaper, but she's holding her rose and she's on top of the menorah.
And there are these guys who are really struggling to carry her down below. If you look at the archer Titus, the Romans are carrying the menorah are really straining to carry it as part of the way that the artists showed that the archer Titus menorah was very, very heavy, making it even harder to carry. And one of them looks up at her and says, in Hebrew, maybe you might come down from there, this is getting very heavy. Now, the thing to know is that each of the guys carrying the menorah wearing their COVID mask.
And so it's a double entendre to political controversy and to the traumas of the beginning of the COVID era. And so the menorah and the archer Titus and that cartoon become the kind of statement of political protest, but as well as the anguish of the losses associated with COVID-19. So thanks. Well, I look forward to doing that and unpacking more symbolism associated with this and all of the news that I'm sure will come out of this.
Stephen Fine, he is the editor of the archer of Titus from Jerusalem to Rome and back. Stephen, thanks again. Thanks, Link. Thanks so much.
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