Judaea Capta Black Menorah (2023) Digital Arts by J.A. Quattro (Qu4ttroStudio)

This image was taken from a photograph of the tattoo circumventing my torso, with the complete, present-day walls and gates of Jerusalem, and features the Arch of Titus relief, depicting captive Jews carrying the golden menorah of the razed Jerusalem Temple into Rome, for Emperor Vespasian Titus's Triumph, after the the defeat of Judea, in 70 CE.

The Arch Of Titus, in Rome, stands in front of the Colosseum and commemorates the victory of Vespasian over Judea, which is when and where he was declared emperor, and depicts captive Jews carrying the golden Menorah (lamp stand/ candelabra) of the Jerusalem Temple, during his Triumph. The Menorah was placed in the Temple Of Peace, until the invasion of the Vandals, after which it went missing. It is believed by some that the Menorah was returned to Jerusalem and once kept within the Nea church, as Christian restitution to the G*d of Israel.

The captive Jews brought with them the skills that they employed in the building of the Colosseum itself, the greatest structure of Roman engineering, and they were soon able to buy their freedom and contribute to Roman society as citizens, making up between six and 10% of the total population of Rome. There were 11 synagogue communities within the city of Rome, some from as early as 200 BCE. The Jewish Roman community is the longest standing synagogue community in the world, at 2,200 consecutive years. An average of 45-70% of Roman era Italian DNA is found in Ashkenasy (Eastern European Jewish) DNA.

It was Roman Emperor Hadrian who named Judea “Palestine”, in 135 CE, after defeating the final but temporarily successful Bar Kochba messianic Jewish uprising that liberated Judea, but not Jerusalem, for three years. “Palestine” was a European term referring only to Judea under imperial occupation, not a nation, state, country or people, and not a term officially used recognized by any Arab or Muslim imperial occupiers who always ruled from their foreign capitals in Syria and Anatolia, just as Rome or any other imperial power never established its capital in Jerusalem. The Quran and the Imperial Islamic occupations referred to Judea and Jews, a nation and its people, as “Israel”, and used the menorah as the symbol on the coins minted in Islamic-occupied Israel. European maps of “Palestine” always described the area as “the holy land, Israel & Judea”, (under imperial occupation) which was also the only loosely connected Arabic use of the word “Falastin”, which never referred to a people, only the Israelite-Jewish holy land under imperial occupation.

The fall of Rome marked the end of the official imperial use of the term “Palestine” by any rulers of the region, until the 1922 League of Nations Mandate, administered by the British, for the restoration of the Jewish national homeland, which was intrinsically Zionist, meaning, “legal, internationally recognized, Jewish independence”, which includes Judea and Samaria, as well as Perea (trans-Jordan) according to the United Nations Charter, by virtue of adopting the League of Nations mandate principles that were based on previous, historic provincial borders, and because partition was rejected by the Arab and Muslim population, 70% of whom arrived illegally during the mandate era, while the British illegally banned Jewish immigration, so that they were sent to the concentration camps that the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem helped to devise. Arab ethno-states were first established by these same mandates for local independence, after the Western defeat of the Ottoman Empire, as were Muslim states partitioned based on religious majorities, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh being partitioned from what was only ever previously India.

Related themes

JerusalemRomeJudea CapturedSpoils Of WarJewish War Against Rome