Today, walking through Florence, I passed one of the city’s magnificent churches. There, as in virtually every church in Italy, I knew there would be the central image of Christianity: Jesus nailed to the cross.
But standing there in Florence, I saw something different.
I saw a murdered Jew.
After all, 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 two thousand years, the image of his crucifixion would tragically become associated not only with Christianity but, at times, with accusations against the very people to whom Jesus had belonged.
The Jew on the cross became, in the hands of antisemites, an accusation against the Jews.
In Florence, I found myself seeing it in precisely the opposite way.
He 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 before him, had been executed by Rome for daring to stand proudly as. Jew against the tyranny of Rome.
The Roman prefect who authorized his crucifixion, Pontius Pilate, the Hitler if 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 be counted accurately, but is probably about a quarter of a million, as some claims have suggested.
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 seventy. 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 when the entire world Jewish community numbered at that time about double that.
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 sixty years later, the Jews revolted again under Bar Kokhba against Emperor Hadrian. Once again, Roman retaliation was devastating. Cassius Dio wrote that fifty Jewish fortresses and nearly a thousand villages were destroyed and that approximately five hundred and eighty thousand 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.
And suddenly, 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.
Jews burned at the stake in Spain and Portugal.
Jews killed by Cossacks, in pogroms, in blood libels.
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 Nazi 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 possessed neither an army nor a state capable of defending them.
That is why the churches and their crucifixes affected me so powerfully in Florence.
Christians look upon Jesus on the cross and see the suffering of what they called their Messiah.
I looked upon him and saw 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 Christians against the Jews, but Jesus as a Jew.
And the crucifix as a warning about what happens when human beings dehumanize Jews - or any people - and when political power becomes unaccountable to morality.
For two thousand years Jews 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.
He 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, non-existent in his time, but Judaism.
The God to whom he prayed was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Standing in Florence 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 what Rome could never have imagined:
The Jews survived.
The empire that destroyed Jerusalem disappeared.
The people whose Temple Rome burned returned to Jerusalem.
The people whom Hadrian sought to crush rebuilt sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.
The Jewish people live.
And that may ultimately be the most powerful message.
For me, the crucifixion ironically became a reminder of Jewish survival - and of the terrible price of Jewish powerlessness.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the international bestselling author of thirty-eight books, translated into more than twenty languages. He has been hailed as “the most famous rabbi in America" (The Washington Post, Newsweek), “arguably the most famous Orthodox Jew on earth" (The New York Observer), and named one of the fifty most influential Jews in the world (The Jerusalem Post). A fearless public intellectual and one of Israel and Jewry’s most eloquent defenders, Rabbi Boteach has appeared on virtually every major television network and media platform across the globe.Rabbi Boteach is the only rabbi ever to receive the London Times Preacher of the Year Award, and remains the competition’s record-holder. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Debbie, and family. Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley.