PhD Project Ophelia Norris

Jews in the Late Ancient Community of Rome: the Catacombs, Civic Life, and Post-Mortem Beliefs

Subject: Jewish Studies/Ancient History
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Loren Stuckenbruck (LMU), Prof. Dr. Franz-Alto Bauer (LMU)

This thesis examines the self-representation of the Jewish community of Rome as evidenced by
the materials of the catacombs. There were 40–60 catacombs, or subterranean cemeteries, in the city of Rome, including Jewish, Christian, and pagan burials. They contained thousands of inscriptions and around 500,000 burials, making them some of the most significant archaeological sites from the Roman Empire for several reasons. Significant not only in size, the catacombs, dating to c. 200 CE – c. 400 CE, were witness to changing funerary practices with the movement from cremation to inhumation to open-air cemeteries. Secondly, in various religious traditions, the catacombs were resting places for tens of popes and hundreds of martyrs, placing these sites at the centre of the early Christian cult of saints, and as such, many catacombs continue to be active sites of worship. The catacombs identified as Jewish, however, suffer from a lack of maintenance, materials going missing, and damage to the evidence held there. Furthermore, there are no sources undisputedly written by Jews in Rome in the period, nor any texts describing them, apart from Patristic Adversus Iudaeos literature, widely accepted to be depicting hermeneutical Jews, rather than the Church Fathers’ real Jewish contemporaries. The catacombs identified as Jewish, therefore, are of fundamental significance for understanding the interactions between groups in the period, as well as how these groups were organised, and what they believed.

This project brings the catacombs identified as predominantly Jewish into conversation with those of their non-Jewish contemporaries in the city of Rome, and with their Jewish contemporaries across the Mediterranean, especially in the catacombs of Beth She’arim in Lower Galilee, Syria Palaestina. In Rome, those catacombs identified as Jewish in particular are the catacombs of Vigna Randanini, Villa Torlonia, Monteverde, Vigna Cimarra, and Via Casilina. These catacombs held thousands of burials and have netted around 550 inscriptions, hundreds of lamps (5 remaining), some sarcophagi (provenance unclear), and several wall paintings. The material has been edited and published.

Regarding research question, this thesis aims to address four key areas of research, with two areas focused on the materials themselves and two on the insights gained from the materials through the transmission of terms and ideas. This is to address the following issues, all of which require various philological approaches. For working on the materials themselves, firstly, there has been no synthesis of the work undertaken on dating the catacombs, currently dated to the third or fourth centuries, with Jewish materials slightly earlier, but broadly contemporary. More recent research, both from philologists working on onomastics and on brick stamps, and from archaeologists whose work involves radiocarbon dating, show that the catacombs are from a later date, in a period where there are no sources referring to Jews in the city of Rome, and suggests an influence of Jewish funerary architecture on their Christian contemporaries, rather than the previously assumed reverse. Secondly, there has been no systematic method for identifying materials as Christian, Jewish, or pagan for the materials in Rome. This is significant because despite the current scholarly consensus that there was a change from cremation to inhumation by the third century CE in all social and religious groups in the city of Rome, the automatic assumption is that all materials from the catacombs are Christian, unless significantly indicating otherwise. Therefore, this part of the project creates a typology, to which future researchers can contribute and refer when working on ambiguous materials created in multi-faith environments.

Regarding the insights from the catacombs, two key areas are the focus of this thesis. Firstly, gaps remain on the thematic treatment of the evidence from the Jewish catacombs, regarding civic life. This part requires consideration of form, because while from one perspective, the catacombs contain extremely repetitive materials when considering visual motifs and linguistic formulae on epitaphs, from another, the catacombs contain an extraordinary diversity when considering form. This suggests a great diversity in socio-economic status of individuals interred in the catacombs and applies not just to the predominately Christian or Jewish catacombs, but all. Second and finally, there has been no recent scholarship on the question of afterlife, post-mortem existence, and belief about resurrection as possibly reflected in these materials. The predominant understanding in changing burial practices tends to focus on the idea that pagans were cremated, while early Christians believed in a bodily, fleshly resurrection and therefore are buried as a reason to explain this change in cremation to inhumation by the third century CE. This part calls for attention to the transmission of terms and ideas across media, such as the word “κοίμησις”, “sleep”.

This thesis therefore engages with materials and texts, especially of the Jewish community of Rome, but also with their non-Jewish contemporaries in Rome and their Jewish contemporaries in the East, in order to contribute to scholarship on civic life and community and beliefs about death and afterlife, using an understanding of and methods from Philology.