A murdered Jew became a symbol used to murder Jews.

The greatest irony of the crucifix may be that a Jewish victim became the pretext for centuries of Jewish persecution.

photo: Mateus Campos Felipe/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Shmuley Boteach, a rabbi and author.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Today, walking through Florence, I entered one of the city’s magnificent churches.

There, as in virtually every church in Italy, I encountered the central image of Christianity: Jesus nailed to the cross.

But standing there, I saw something different. I saw a murdered Jew.

Jesus was born a Jew. He lived as a Jew. He prayed as a Jew. His disciples were Jews. He quoted the Hebrew Bible. He celebrated Jewish holidays. And when he died, the charge placed above his head identified him as “King of the Jews.” He had rebelled against the self-proclaimed god, the Emperor Tiberius, declared himself “King of Jews,” and was meted out the cruelest of all Roman political punishments: crucifixion.

Yet for nearly 2,000 years, the image of his crucifixion would tragically become associated not only with Christian faith but, at times, with accusations against the very people to whom Jesus belonged. The Jew on the cross became, in the hands of antisemites, an accusation against the Jews.

Standing before that crucifix in Florence, I found myself seeing it in precisely the opposite way: Jesus was not the symbol of Jewish guilt. He was a symbol of Jewish suffering.

He was a Jew who, like hundreds of thousands of his brethren who had preceded him, was executed by Rome for daring to stand proudly as. He was a Jew against the tyranny of Rome.

The Roman prefect who authorized his crucifixion, Pontius Pilate — the Hitler of the ancient world, who murdered some quarter of a million Jews — was no humanitarian reluctantly dragged into an execution by bloodthirsty Jews. Ancient sources portray Pilate’s administration as brutal and provocative. Philo of Alexandria accused him of corruption, violence, executions without trial, and “ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty.” Josephus likewise records violent confrontations between Pilate and the Jewish population.

The precise number of Jews killed under Pilate cannot responsibly be placed, but the larger historical truth is indisputable: Jesus lived under an occupying Roman regime that could answer Jewish resistance with overwhelming violence. And the worst was still to come.

Approximately four decades after Jesus’ death, Judea exploded in revolt against Rome. The Roman response was catastrophic. Vespasian and his son Titus crushed the Great Jewish Revolt. Jerusalem was conquered in the year 70. The Second Temple (the spiritual center of the Jewish People) was destroyed. Josephus famously claimed that more than a million people died during the siege, an extraordinary figure considering that the entire Jewish population of the world at the time numbered only several million.

Whatever the precise figure, the destruction was immense. Jews were slaughtered, enslaved, and dispersed. Jerusalem burned. The Temple was reduced to ruins. Rome then celebrated. To this very day, anyone walking through Rome can see the Arch of Titus depicting Roman soldiers carrying away the menorah and sacred vessels of the Jewish Temple.

Think about that. The destruction of the Jewish People became public art. Jewish humiliation became an imperial monument. And still Rome was not finished.

Roughly 60 years later, the Jews revolted again under their leader Bar Kokhba against Emperor Hadrian. Once again, Roman retaliation was devastating. Cassius Dio wrote that 50 Jewish fortresses, nearly a thousand villages were destroyed, and that approximately 580,000 Jews were killed in battle, with countless others dying from hunger and disease.

Ancient demographic figures must always be approached cautiously, but there can be no serious dispute about the scale of the catastrophe. Judea was devastated. Jews were barred from Jerusalem. Rome even attempted to erase the Jewish identity of the land by renaming Judea to “Syria Palaestina” (hence today’s name Palestine), rebuilding Jerusalem as the Roman city Aelia Capitolina, and replacing Jewish sacred space with pagan Roman institutions.

And suddenly, standing before Jesus on the cross in Florence, I saw an unbroken historical image: a Jew killed by Rome, a Jewish nation crushed by Rome, a Temple destroyed by Rome, Jewish rebels slaughtered by Rome and then, many centuries later, six million Jews murdered in Europe.

The methods changed. The hatred changed its language. The empires changed their names. But Jewish bodies continued to pile up.

The Holocaust was unique in its industrial organization, ideological fanaticism, and determination to murder every Jew — man, woman, and child — within the Nazis’ reach. Nothing should diminish that uniqueness. But Auschwitz did not emerge from a historical vacuum. For centuries Jews had learned the terrible lesson of powerlessness: When governments decided that Jewish life was expendable, Jews often possessed neither an army nor a state capable of defending them.

That is why the crucifix affected me so powerfully today. Christians look upon Jesus on the cross and see the suffering of the Messiah. I looked upon him and saw, additionally, something intensely Jewish. I saw another Jewish victim of an empire.

And perhaps this is one image that Jews and Christians ought finally to be able to look at together. Not Jesus against the Jews, but Jesus as a Jew. Not the crucifix as an indictment of the Jewish People, but the crucifix as a warning about what happens when human beings dehumanize Jews, and when political power becomes unaccountable to morality.

For 2,000 years, Jews have sometimes recoiled from the cross because it was used against us. Pogromists marched beneath crosses. Jews were accused of being “Christ-killers.” Forced conversions and persecutions were justified in the name of the Jewish man hanging upon that very cross. What a grotesque historical irony. A murdered Jew was transformed into a justification for murdering Jews.

Perhaps it is time to reclaim the image. Jesus belonged to the Jewish People. His mother was Jewish. His disciples were Jewish. The Bible he studied was Jewish. The prayers he uttered were Jewish. The religion practice was not Christianity, utterly unknown in his time, but Judaism. The God to whom he prayed was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And the empire that executed him would, within generations, unleash catastrophic violence against his people.

Standing in Florence today, I could not look at the crucifix merely as Christian iconography. I saw Jewish history. I saw Jerusalem burning. I saw the menorah carried triumphantly to Rome. I saw the Jewish dead of the Bar Kokhba revolt. And inevitably, I saw the trains, ghettos, killing fields, and gas chambers of Europe.

But I also saw something Rome could never have imagined: The Jews survived, the empire that destroyed Jerusalem disappeared, the people whose Temple that Rome burned returned to Jerusalem, the people whom Hadrian sought to crush rebuilt sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, and the Jewish People live.

That may ultimately be the most powerful message I took from the crucifix in Florence. Jesus on the cross is not merely an image of death. For me, today, he became a reminder of the terrible price of Jewish powerlessness — and, also, of Jewish survival.

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