History has always needed a face for evil. For the early Christians, it was Nero. For modern Jews, it became Hitler. Two different ages, two different tyrannies, and yet the same number whispered like a curse: 666.
In the Book of Revelation, the “beast” marked with 666 was not an abstract idea. For the first readers, it was code. The Greek letters of “Neron Caesar” add up to the number. Nero was the emperor who burned Rome and blamed the Christians. He became the template for Antichrist: power drunk on fire, cruelty dressed in imperial robes.
Centuries later, Jews in Europe reached for the same language when they faced the machinery of Hitler’s extermination. He wasn’t just another despot — he was something darker, outside the normal register of politics.
In Yiddish diaries and whispered prayers of the ghettos, Hitler appears not merely as an enemy but as a cosmic adversary. Many named him Amalek reborn — the eternal foe of Israel. In Jewish memory, Amalek is not a vanished tribe but a recurring force of hatred without reason, striking the stragglers, the weak, the defenseless. Rabbis taught that Amalek wages war not for land or power but for destruction itself. The parallel with the Christian figure of the Antichrist was difficult to overlook.
Both designations, Nero and Hitler, show the same human reflex: when horror overwhelms the categories of politics, theology steps in. We need a name for absolute evil. “Antichrist” becomes shorthand for the unspeakable.
But the danger is that by placing all evil on one man, we let the rest of humanity off the hook. Nero had his Praetorians, Hitler had his bureaucrats, guards, and neighbors who looked away. The beast is never one man alone.
So the link is there: the Christians’ Nero, the Jews’ Hitler — both clothed in apocalyptic language. They become symbols more than men.
What they remind us is unsettling: the Antichrist is not a myth, but a recurring possibility in human history.