History and Provenance

When Titus took Jerusalem in 70 CE and the Temple burned, its sacred vessels were seized as the spoils of war. Josephus, who had gone over to the Romans and witnessed the aftermath, describes the triumphal procession in Rome the following year, in which the golden table of the shewbread and the golden lampstand were borne through the city before the crowds. Soon afterward the Arch of Titus was raised in the Forum, and its southern inner relief shows the menorah carried aloft on the shoulders of soldiers, the image that has fixed the object in the visual imagination ever since and that lies behind the emblem of the modern State of Israel.

The spoils were housed in the Temple of Peace, completed by Vespasian in 75 CE. The last apparent notice of the menorah is a rabbinic report that Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai saw it in Rome in the 2nd century. The Temple of Peace was gutted by fire around 192 CE; whether the menorah survived that blaze is unknown, and after it no reliable source mentions the object again. Later chroniclers and legends carry it to Vandal Carthage in 455 and thence to Byzantine Constantinople under Belisarius in 534, but these accounts are late and cannot be tied securely to the original Temple menorah rather than to other ritual objects.