Far-right streamer Nick Fuentes is selling a shirt on his official merchandise site reproducing one of the most loaded images in Jewish history: the interior relief of Rome's Arch of Titus, the monument built to immortalize the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple nearly two thousand years ago.
The "Arch of Titus Tee" is listed on fuentes.store for 39.99 dollars and sits alongside dozens of other items on Fuentes' storefront branded with America First and Groyper imagery.
The design draws directly on the arch's south inner panel, among the most reproduced monuments of Roman antiquity. The relief depicts Roman soldiers parading through the streets of Rome carrying treasures looted from Herod's Temple after the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, most conspicuously the seven-branched golden Menorah, along with the Table of the Showbread and the Temple's silver trumpets. The Arch of Titus itself was commissioned around 81 CE by the emperor Domitian to glorify his late brother Titus, whose armies had crushed the Jewish revolt and razed the Temple, ending any hope of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem for nearly two millennia.
For centuries, the arch was treated by Rome's Jewish community as a monument of humiliation rather than mere history. Popes once forced Jewish elders to gather at the arch to swear submission with each new papal procession, a practice that continued until 1846.
Rome's rabbinate maintained a formal ban on Jews walking beneath the arch, reflecting the belief that doing so honored Titus and the conquest itself. That ban held for the better part of two thousand years and was only lifted with the founding of the State of Israel, first informally in 1948, when Holocaust survivors preparing to make aliyah walked backward beneath the arch in a deliberate reversal of the Roman triumphal march, and then formally in a public ceremony on the eve of Hanukkah in 1997, attended by Italy's prime minister and Rome's chief rabbi.
The Menorah carved into the arch's stone later became the direct model for the emblem adopted by the State of Israel, a symbol Israel's founders chose in part to reclaim the image from the monument that had mocked it.
In an X post, he said, "This is subtle. This is when we took their Menorah. never let them forget. The Romans destroyed their Temple and we looted it. We crushed their Temple. We crushed their rebellion, kicked them out of Jerusalem. They hate to be reminded of it. They think their Menorah is in the Vatican and I hope it is. You're not getting it back --- it's ours."
Whether or not Fuentes intended it as a statement, the symbolism is not subtle. This is not a shirt referencing ancient history in the abstract. It is a screen-printed reproduction of the exact image Jewish communities spent nearly two thousand years refusing to walk beneath, sold for 39.99 dollars by a man who has called himself a Hitler admirer and built an online following on the premise that Jewish influence is America's core problem.
But Rome eventually fell. The Jewish people did not.
Nick would do well to remember that.
