Karen B. Stern | Brooklyn College of CUNY (original) (raw)
Books by Karen B. Stern
Stratigrafie del Paesaggio, 2022
Inside and around the burial caves and complexes of late ancient Sicily, archaeologists have disc... more Inside and around the burial caves and complexes of late ancient Sicily, archaeologists have discovered multiple carvings of graffiti that depict menorahs and other symbols typically associated with Jews. Despite the relative frequency of their appearances, however, these markings have attracted scarce attention from scholars. Yet these carvings constitute ideal artifacts for discussions of Jews and their activities within regional mortuary landscapes: they document ancient Jews’ strategies of drawing and writing inside and around the original spaces where they buried and commemorated their dead. This special issue, which considers landscape archaeology and Sicily, offers an important opportunity to rethink the significance of these carvings and graffiti associated with regional Jews. Indeed, drawing attention to the geometric and spatial locations of the menorah carvings within Sicilian mortuary complexes illuminates how locally and regionally diverse were Jewish practices of carving graffiti inside mortuary landscapes in late antiquity. Their discussion, moreover, offers valuable points of comparison for how Jews who lived in Sicily and around the Mediterranean, including Venosa and Rome, as well as Malta, Gammarth (North Africa), and the Levant, used distinctive strategies of carving to both identify and differentiate their mortuary spaces from those of their neighbors, and to interact with the landscapes of the dead through place and time. Building on the advances of previous scholarship of Jews in late ancient Sicily, this approach illuminates how some Jews, alongside their Christian neighbors, inflected local traditions of burial and commemoration to shape their natural and architectural landscapes for their own purposes, in both coastal and inland areas.
With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan, 2021
Saul Olyan’s research destabilizes the assumptions scholars often hold dear, by replacing seeming... more Saul Olyan’s research destabilizes the assumptions scholars often hold dear, by replacing seemingly obvious interpretations of biblical texts with novel insights about ancient peoples, their behaviors, and their relationships with one another. In his recent Friendship in the Hebrew Bible, for instance, Olyan uses anthropological theory to interrogate how biblical texts frame obligations that bind individuals linked by kinship as well as friendship, during life and after death. In much of this research, moreover, he simultaneously undermines conventional notions about gender practices and their implications. Inspired by these perspectives, I focus below on a set of inscribed mosaics originally discovered in the floor of a synagogue from late ancient Syria in the town of Apamea, once situated at the crossroads of Hellenistic, Roman, Mesopotamian, and Persian empires. To this point, the formulaic, repetitive, and limited nature of these Greek dedicatory inscriptions has appeared to curtail improved insights into the lives and priorities of their commissioners. I argue here, however, that renewed attention to overlooked features of these Greek texts, refracted through Olyan’s discussions of friendship, kinship, and gender in the Bible, reveals otherwise unnoticed information about one Syrian town and the bonds that local Jews forged with each other, inside their households, within their communities, and between the living and the dead.
Festschrift edited by T. M. Lemos, Jordan Rosenblum, Karen Stern, and Debra Ballentine. Atlanta:... more Festschrift edited by T. M. Lemos, Jordan Rosenblum, Karen Stern, and Debra Ballentine. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2021.
Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J.D. Cohen, 2018
Closer inspection of the seventy published examples of late ancient graffiti from the Greek islan... more Closer inspection of the seventy published examples of late ancient graffiti from the Greek island of Syros reveals that some of their inscribers included seafaring Jews as well as Christians.4 This heterogeneity of authorship flouts traditional expectations, informed by textual traditions, about the exclusivity of ancient Jewish or Christian prayer communities and activities around the Mediterranean. It also demonstrates, more broadly, how critical is the consideration of isolated inscriptions such as these toward improved insights into ranges of Jewish devotional behaviors in late antiquity.
Jewish Art in its Late Antique Context, edited by Uzi Leibner and Catherine Hezser, 2016
Discoveries of the Roman Syrian synagogue of Dura Europos and the Roman Palestinian necropolis of... more Discoveries of the Roman Syrian synagogue of Dura Europos and the Roman Palestinian necropolis of Bet Shearim instantly transformed scholarship of ancient Jewish history and art. Remarkable preservation of the polychromatic walls of the Dura synagogue, painted with narrative scenes from the Hebrew Bible, simultaneously attested to the existence of a robust Jewish community at the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire and required the revision of entrenched theories about ancient Jews and their aversion to figural decoration. Likewise, findings in Bet Shearim, which included monumental sarcophagi carved with so-called pagan imagery and epitaphs of rabbis, reinvigorated debates about the historical development of rabbinic culture in Palestine and beyond and stimulated new theories about Jewish history and cultural production in late antiquity. But despite the fame and indisputable importance of these structures, certain other of their features suffer ongoing analytical neglect. Whereas the monumental architecture, art, and inscriptions from the sites are sufficiently rich and complex to justify decades of scholarship, other forms of non-monumental decoration, also found nearby, were considered so amateurish or crude that scholars disregarded them. Yet these markings, which I describe here as pictorial graffiti, remain significant, both because of their pervasiveness and because of their potential to reform understandings of the original uses of the structures they once adorned. In this essay, I argue that overlooked graffiti drawings from the Dura synagogue and the Bet Shearim necropolis offer renewed perspectives on the lives and practices of Jews who built and used such spaces. Synthetic examination of their stylistic, spatial, and contextual features reveals otherwise-unknown ways that Jews used art in their everyday lives, in manners that resembled and differed from their neighbors, in spaces of devotion and commemoration in the late Roman East.
Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailin... more Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and Josephus and the rabbinic texts of the Mishnah and Talmud. Commissioned art, architecture, and formal inscriptions displayed on tombs and synagogues equally reflect the sensibilities of their influential patrons. The perspectives and sentiments of nonelite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Focusing on these forgotten Jews of antiquity, Writing on the Wall takes an unprecedented look at the vernacular inscriptions and drawings they left behind and sheds new light on the richness of their quotidian lives.
Just like their neighbors throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt, ancient Jews scribbled and drew graffiti everyplace--in and around markets, hippodromes, theaters, pagan temples, open cliffs, sanctuaries, and even inside burial caves and synagogues. Karen Stern reveals what these markings tell us about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Making compelling analogies with modern graffiti practices, she documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors, showing how popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement regularly crossed ethnic and religious boundaries.
Illustrated throughout with examples of ancient graffiti, Writing on the Wall provides a tantalizingly intimate glimpse into the cultural worlds of forgotten populations living at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and earliest Islam.
Imperium der Götter: Isis-Mithras-Christus--Kulte und Religionen im Römischen Reich, 2013
Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East, 2017
Discussions of corpse contact impurity in biblical, as well as Palestinian and Babylonian rabbini... more Discussions of corpse contact impurity in biblical, as well as Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic texts, have shaped scholarly assumptions that ancient Jews generally avoided spaces associated with the dead. While rabbinic writings repeatedly consider suitable responses to death, including procedures for corpse treatment, funerals, and mourning, few ancient texts discuss activities Jews once conducted at graveside to commemorate the dead through time. Even if rabbinic texts do not explicitly document the practice, however, analyses of neglected archaeological data from Levantine and European burial caves, including textual and pictorial graffiti, reveal that some ancient Jews did spend time close to the dead by performing multiple activities of mortuary commemoration around tombs. Hundreds of examples of graffiti discovered in Roman Palestine and in the catacombs of Rome, Malta, and North Africa, this paper suggests, offer rare and tangible evidence, in situ, for how some Jews and their neighbors systematically and diachronically visited and elaborated the interiors of cemeteries after the completion of activities surrounding burial and interment. While excavators and historians commonly use rabbinic texts as frameworks to interpret the contemporaneous archaeological record, this paper thus advocates an opposite approach – the independent and contextual evaluation of artifacts – to facilitate a rereading of ancient rabbinic writings concerning ancient Jewish mortuary practices.
A Most Reliable Witness: Essays in Honor of Ross Shepard Kraemer
Reliance on essentialist or syncretistic models of cultural dynamics has limited past evaluations... more Reliance on essentialist or syncretistic models of cultural dynamics has limited past evaluations of ancient Jewish populations. This reexamination of evidence for Jews of North Africa offers an alternative approach. Drawing from methods developed in cultural studies and historical linguistics, this book replaces traditional categories used to examine evidence for early Jewish populations and demonstrates how direct comparison of Jewish material evidence with that of its neighbors allows for a reassessment of what the category of “Jewish” might have meant in different North African locations and periods and, by extension, elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The result is a transformed analysis of Jewish cultural identity that both emphasizes its indebtedness to larger regional contexts and allows for a more informed and complex understanding of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.
Papers by Karen B. Stern
Ajs Review-the Journal of The Association for Jewish Studies, Nov 1, 2020
BRILL eBooks, 2007
An investigation into the history of Jews of Roman North Africa reveals its three disparate featu... more An investigation into the history of Jews of Roman North Africa reveals its three disparate features. The first of these is the obscurity of the topic. A second trend is a focus on origins. One last tendency within scholarship of African Jews is found within studies related to North African Christian writings and legal codes. This book examines the accuracy of archaeological reports and museum catalogues and corpora that attest Jewish archaeological finds. By using analytical categories of practice to govern attention to ancient cultural identities, the book examines physical objects to question what "Jewish" might mean specifically among North African populations and within North African cultural contexts. This introductory chapter indicates that the book's framework facilitates the clearest possible evaluation of Jewish archaeological materials and of the practices they signify. Onomastic, linguistic, devotional, and burial practices integrate evaluations of artifacts from Jewish and non-Jewish North African populations. .Keywords:African culture; African Jew; Christian literature; Jewish burial architecture; Jewish devotional structure; onomastic practice; Roman North Africa
Ajs Review-the Journal of The Association for Jewish Studies, Oct 22, 2020
Journal of Late Antiquity
Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship c... more Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship commonly considers activities of prayer or scriptural recitation once conducted within synagogues and impacts of their architectural and visual programs on visitors. Yet, regardless of recent interest in embodied dimensions of ancient life, attention to Jews' sensory experiences inside these buildings remains rare. As inspired by Karaite critiques of Jewish practices of lighting lamps and incense in late ancient synagogues, this analysis addresses this lacuna by taking a distinctive approach. It reconsiders diverse artifacts discovered in excavations of synagogues and their surroundings in the Levant, North Africa, and Europe, including fragments of glass, stone, bronze, and ceramic lamps; preserved images in floor mosaics; and remains of bronze and ceramic censers. Read in tandem with rabbinic textual evidence from Roman Palestine, assessments of these texts and artifacts inspire considerations of how historical uses of lamps and incense burners implicate atmospheric elements of ancient synagogues, including experiential illumination and olfaction, which heretofore evaded notice. The ensuing discussion thus inspires new vantages on Jewish sensory and devotional landscapes in past time and challenges bifurcated notions of public versus private expressions of piety among Jews inside their synagogues, homes, and study halls.
The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends, 2020
A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism, 2020
Journal of Late Antiquity, 2023
Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship c... more Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship commonly considers activities of prayer or scriptural recitation once conducted within synagogues and impacts of their architectural and visual programs on visitors. Yet, regardless of recent interest in embodied dimensions of ancient life, attention to Jews' sensory experiences inside these buildings remains rare. As inspired by Karaite critiques of Jewish practices of lighting lamps and incense in late ancient synagogues, this analysis addresses this lacuna by taking a distinctive approach. It reconsiders diverse artifacts discovered in excavations of synagogues and their surroundings in the Levant, North Africa, and Europe, including fragments of glass, stone, bronze, and ceramic lamps; preserved images in floor mosaics; and remains of bronze and ceramic censers. Read in tandem with rabbinic textual evidence from Roman Palestine, assessments of these texts and artifacts inspire considerations of how historical uses of lamps and incense burners implicate atmospheric elements of ancient synagogues, including experiential illumination and olfaction, which heretofore evaded notice. The ensuing discussion thus inspires new vantages on Jewish sensory and devotional landscapes in past time and challenges bifurcated notions of public versus private expressions of piety among Jews inside their synagogues, homes, and study halls.
Writing on the Wall
<p>This chapter examines graffiti associated with the public lives of Jews from Tyre and As... more <p>This chapter examines graffiti associated with the public lives of Jews from Tyre and Asia Minor, showing that they serve as evidence of Jewish participation in public entertainments in the Greco-Roman world. When Jews and their neighbors inscribed graffiti in structures such as theaters and hippodromes, they activated their participation in public spectacles and public life. Numerous examples of public graffiti can be found in theaters and in the ancient city of Aphrodisias, while commercial graffiti exist in the reused Sebasteion and the so-called South Agora, also in Aphrodisias. These markings, the chapter argues, reveal that during periods of burgeoning anti-Jewish legislation and religious polemic, Jews reserved seats for themselves as spectators of public entertainments and drew menorahs where they sold their wares in public markets. They even attest to the presence of Jewish women in commercial settings.</p>
advances in model based software testing, 2015
Stratigrafie del Paesaggio, 2022
Inside and around the burial caves and complexes of late ancient Sicily, archaeologists have disc... more Inside and around the burial caves and complexes of late ancient Sicily, archaeologists have discovered multiple carvings of graffiti that depict menorahs and other symbols typically associated with Jews. Despite the relative frequency of their appearances, however, these markings have attracted scarce attention from scholars. Yet these carvings constitute ideal artifacts for discussions of Jews and their activities within regional mortuary landscapes: they document ancient Jews’ strategies of drawing and writing inside and around the original spaces where they buried and commemorated their dead. This special issue, which considers landscape archaeology and Sicily, offers an important opportunity to rethink the significance of these carvings and graffiti associated with regional Jews. Indeed, drawing attention to the geometric and spatial locations of the menorah carvings within Sicilian mortuary complexes illuminates how locally and regionally diverse were Jewish practices of carving graffiti inside mortuary landscapes in late antiquity. Their discussion, moreover, offers valuable points of comparison for how Jews who lived in Sicily and around the Mediterranean, including Venosa and Rome, as well as Malta, Gammarth (North Africa), and the Levant, used distinctive strategies of carving to both identify and differentiate their mortuary spaces from those of their neighbors, and to interact with the landscapes of the dead through place and time. Building on the advances of previous scholarship of Jews in late ancient Sicily, this approach illuminates how some Jews, alongside their Christian neighbors, inflected local traditions of burial and commemoration to shape their natural and architectural landscapes for their own purposes, in both coastal and inland areas.
With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan, 2021
Saul Olyan’s research destabilizes the assumptions scholars often hold dear, by replacing seeming... more Saul Olyan’s research destabilizes the assumptions scholars often hold dear, by replacing seemingly obvious interpretations of biblical texts with novel insights about ancient peoples, their behaviors, and their relationships with one another. In his recent Friendship in the Hebrew Bible, for instance, Olyan uses anthropological theory to interrogate how biblical texts frame obligations that bind individuals linked by kinship as well as friendship, during life and after death. In much of this research, moreover, he simultaneously undermines conventional notions about gender practices and their implications. Inspired by these perspectives, I focus below on a set of inscribed mosaics originally discovered in the floor of a synagogue from late ancient Syria in the town of Apamea, once situated at the crossroads of Hellenistic, Roman, Mesopotamian, and Persian empires. To this point, the formulaic, repetitive, and limited nature of these Greek dedicatory inscriptions has appeared to curtail improved insights into the lives and priorities of their commissioners. I argue here, however, that renewed attention to overlooked features of these Greek texts, refracted through Olyan’s discussions of friendship, kinship, and gender in the Bible, reveals otherwise unnoticed information about one Syrian town and the bonds that local Jews forged with each other, inside their households, within their communities, and between the living and the dead.
Festschrift edited by T. M. Lemos, Jordan Rosenblum, Karen Stern, and Debra Ballentine. Atlanta:... more Festschrift edited by T. M. Lemos, Jordan Rosenblum, Karen Stern, and Debra Ballentine. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2021.
Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J.D. Cohen, 2018
Closer inspection of the seventy published examples of late ancient graffiti from the Greek islan... more Closer inspection of the seventy published examples of late ancient graffiti from the Greek island of Syros reveals that some of their inscribers included seafaring Jews as well as Christians.4 This heterogeneity of authorship flouts traditional expectations, informed by textual traditions, about the exclusivity of ancient Jewish or Christian prayer communities and activities around the Mediterranean. It also demonstrates, more broadly, how critical is the consideration of isolated inscriptions such as these toward improved insights into ranges of Jewish devotional behaviors in late antiquity.
Jewish Art in its Late Antique Context, edited by Uzi Leibner and Catherine Hezser, 2016
Discoveries of the Roman Syrian synagogue of Dura Europos and the Roman Palestinian necropolis of... more Discoveries of the Roman Syrian synagogue of Dura Europos and the Roman Palestinian necropolis of Bet Shearim instantly transformed scholarship of ancient Jewish history and art. Remarkable preservation of the polychromatic walls of the Dura synagogue, painted with narrative scenes from the Hebrew Bible, simultaneously attested to the existence of a robust Jewish community at the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire and required the revision of entrenched theories about ancient Jews and their aversion to figural decoration. Likewise, findings in Bet Shearim, which included monumental sarcophagi carved with so-called pagan imagery and epitaphs of rabbis, reinvigorated debates about the historical development of rabbinic culture in Palestine and beyond and stimulated new theories about Jewish history and cultural production in late antiquity. But despite the fame and indisputable importance of these structures, certain other of their features suffer ongoing analytical neglect. Whereas the monumental architecture, art, and inscriptions from the sites are sufficiently rich and complex to justify decades of scholarship, other forms of non-monumental decoration, also found nearby, were considered so amateurish or crude that scholars disregarded them. Yet these markings, which I describe here as pictorial graffiti, remain significant, both because of their pervasiveness and because of their potential to reform understandings of the original uses of the structures they once adorned. In this essay, I argue that overlooked graffiti drawings from the Dura synagogue and the Bet Shearim necropolis offer renewed perspectives on the lives and practices of Jews who built and used such spaces. Synthetic examination of their stylistic, spatial, and contextual features reveals otherwise-unknown ways that Jews used art in their everyday lives, in manners that resembled and differed from their neighbors, in spaces of devotion and commemoration in the late Roman East.
Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailin... more Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and Josephus and the rabbinic texts of the Mishnah and Talmud. Commissioned art, architecture, and formal inscriptions displayed on tombs and synagogues equally reflect the sensibilities of their influential patrons. The perspectives and sentiments of nonelite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Focusing on these forgotten Jews of antiquity, Writing on the Wall takes an unprecedented look at the vernacular inscriptions and drawings they left behind and sheds new light on the richness of their quotidian lives.
Just like their neighbors throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt, ancient Jews scribbled and drew graffiti everyplace--in and around markets, hippodromes, theaters, pagan temples, open cliffs, sanctuaries, and even inside burial caves and synagogues. Karen Stern reveals what these markings tell us about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Making compelling analogies with modern graffiti practices, she documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors, showing how popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement regularly crossed ethnic and religious boundaries.
Illustrated throughout with examples of ancient graffiti, Writing on the Wall provides a tantalizingly intimate glimpse into the cultural worlds of forgotten populations living at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and earliest Islam.
Imperium der Götter: Isis-Mithras-Christus--Kulte und Religionen im Römischen Reich, 2013
Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East, 2017
Discussions of corpse contact impurity in biblical, as well as Palestinian and Babylonian rabbini... more Discussions of corpse contact impurity in biblical, as well as Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic texts, have shaped scholarly assumptions that ancient Jews generally avoided spaces associated with the dead. While rabbinic writings repeatedly consider suitable responses to death, including procedures for corpse treatment, funerals, and mourning, few ancient texts discuss activities Jews once conducted at graveside to commemorate the dead through time. Even if rabbinic texts do not explicitly document the practice, however, analyses of neglected archaeological data from Levantine and European burial caves, including textual and pictorial graffiti, reveal that some ancient Jews did spend time close to the dead by performing multiple activities of mortuary commemoration around tombs. Hundreds of examples of graffiti discovered in Roman Palestine and in the catacombs of Rome, Malta, and North Africa, this paper suggests, offer rare and tangible evidence, in situ, for how some Jews and their neighbors systematically and diachronically visited and elaborated the interiors of cemeteries after the completion of activities surrounding burial and interment. While excavators and historians commonly use rabbinic texts as frameworks to interpret the contemporaneous archaeological record, this paper thus advocates an opposite approach – the independent and contextual evaluation of artifacts – to facilitate a rereading of ancient rabbinic writings concerning ancient Jewish mortuary practices.
A Most Reliable Witness: Essays in Honor of Ross Shepard Kraemer
Reliance on essentialist or syncretistic models of cultural dynamics has limited past evaluations... more Reliance on essentialist or syncretistic models of cultural dynamics has limited past evaluations of ancient Jewish populations. This reexamination of evidence for Jews of North Africa offers an alternative approach. Drawing from methods developed in cultural studies and historical linguistics, this book replaces traditional categories used to examine evidence for early Jewish populations and demonstrates how direct comparison of Jewish material evidence with that of its neighbors allows for a reassessment of what the category of “Jewish” might have meant in different North African locations and periods and, by extension, elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The result is a transformed analysis of Jewish cultural identity that both emphasizes its indebtedness to larger regional contexts and allows for a more informed and complex understanding of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.
Ajs Review-the Journal of The Association for Jewish Studies, Nov 1, 2020
BRILL eBooks, 2007
An investigation into the history of Jews of Roman North Africa reveals its three disparate featu... more An investigation into the history of Jews of Roman North Africa reveals its three disparate features. The first of these is the obscurity of the topic. A second trend is a focus on origins. One last tendency within scholarship of African Jews is found within studies related to North African Christian writings and legal codes. This book examines the accuracy of archaeological reports and museum catalogues and corpora that attest Jewish archaeological finds. By using analytical categories of practice to govern attention to ancient cultural identities, the book examines physical objects to question what "Jewish" might mean specifically among North African populations and within North African cultural contexts. This introductory chapter indicates that the book's framework facilitates the clearest possible evaluation of Jewish archaeological materials and of the practices they signify. Onomastic, linguistic, devotional, and burial practices integrate evaluations of artifacts from Jewish and non-Jewish North African populations. .Keywords:African culture; African Jew; Christian literature; Jewish burial architecture; Jewish devotional structure; onomastic practice; Roman North Africa
Ajs Review-the Journal of The Association for Jewish Studies, Oct 22, 2020
Journal of Late Antiquity
Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship c... more Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship commonly considers activities of prayer or scriptural recitation once conducted within synagogues and impacts of their architectural and visual programs on visitors. Yet, regardless of recent interest in embodied dimensions of ancient life, attention to Jews' sensory experiences inside these buildings remains rare. As inspired by Karaite critiques of Jewish practices of lighting lamps and incense in late ancient synagogues, this analysis addresses this lacuna by taking a distinctive approach. It reconsiders diverse artifacts discovered in excavations of synagogues and their surroundings in the Levant, North Africa, and Europe, including fragments of glass, stone, bronze, and ceramic lamps; preserved images in floor mosaics; and remains of bronze and ceramic censers. Read in tandem with rabbinic textual evidence from Roman Palestine, assessments of these texts and artifacts inspire considerations of how historical uses of lamps and incense burners implicate atmospheric elements of ancient synagogues, including experiential illumination and olfaction, which heretofore evaded notice. The ensuing discussion thus inspires new vantages on Jewish sensory and devotional landscapes in past time and challenges bifurcated notions of public versus private expressions of piety among Jews inside their synagogues, homes, and study halls.
The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends, 2020
A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism, 2020
Journal of Late Antiquity, 2023
Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship c... more Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship commonly considers activities of prayer or scriptural recitation once conducted within synagogues and impacts of their architectural and visual programs on visitors. Yet, regardless of recent interest in embodied dimensions of ancient life, attention to Jews' sensory experiences inside these buildings remains rare. As inspired by Karaite critiques of Jewish practices of lighting lamps and incense in late ancient synagogues, this analysis addresses this lacuna by taking a distinctive approach. It reconsiders diverse artifacts discovered in excavations of synagogues and their surroundings in the Levant, North Africa, and Europe, including fragments of glass, stone, bronze, and ceramic lamps; preserved images in floor mosaics; and remains of bronze and ceramic censers. Read in tandem with rabbinic textual evidence from Roman Palestine, assessments of these texts and artifacts inspire considerations of how historical uses of lamps and incense burners implicate atmospheric elements of ancient synagogues, including experiential illumination and olfaction, which heretofore evaded notice. The ensuing discussion thus inspires new vantages on Jewish sensory and devotional landscapes in past time and challenges bifurcated notions of public versus private expressions of piety among Jews inside their synagogues, homes, and study halls.
Writing on the Wall
<p>This chapter examines graffiti associated with the public lives of Jews from Tyre and As... more <p>This chapter examines graffiti associated with the public lives of Jews from Tyre and Asia Minor, showing that they serve as evidence of Jewish participation in public entertainments in the Greco-Roman world. When Jews and their neighbors inscribed graffiti in structures such as theaters and hippodromes, they activated their participation in public spectacles and public life. Numerous examples of public graffiti can be found in theaters and in the ancient city of Aphrodisias, while commercial graffiti exist in the reused Sebasteion and the so-called South Agora, also in Aphrodisias. These markings, the chapter argues, reveal that during periods of burgeoning anti-Jewish legislation and religious polemic, Jews reserved seats for themselves as spectators of public entertainments and drew menorahs where they sold their wares in public markets. They even attest to the presence of Jewish women in commercial settings.</p>
advances in model based software testing, 2015
<p>Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. ... more <p>Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and Josephus and the rabbinic texts of the Mishnah and Talmud. Commissioned art, architecture, and formal inscriptions displayed on tombs and synagogues equally reflect the sensibilities of their influential patrons. The perspectives and sentiments of nonelite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Focusing on these forgotten Jews of antiquity, this book takes an unprecedented look at the vernacular inscriptions and drawings they left behind and sheds new light on the richness of their quotidian lives. Just like their neighbors throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt, ancient Jews scribbled and drew graffiti everyplace. This book reveals what these markings tell us about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Making compelling analogies with modern graffiti practices, the book documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors, showing how popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement regularly crossed ethnic and religious boundaries. Illustrated throughout with examples of ancient graffiti, the book provides a tantalizingly intimate glimpse into the cultural worlds of forgotten populations living at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and earliest Islam.</p>
Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2012
Tagging sacred space in the Dura-Europos synagogue Karen B. Stern One day in the middle of the 3r... more Tagging sacred space in the Dura-Europos synagogue Karen B. Stern One day in the middle of the 3rd c.1 a visitor scratched two simple words, “I (am) H � iya”, into a doorpost of the synagogue in Roman Dura-Europos. The Aramaic letters of the text are carved irregularly and largely enough to have been visible from the building’s elaborately decorated assembly hall. But unlike other elegantly painted inscriptions from the synagogue that clearly announce the names and donations of esteemed benefactors, the presence of this terse graffito, limited to a pronoun and a personal name, initially appears inexplicable. How, if at all, can we make sense of this crudely carved text, placed so ostentatiously in this sacred setting?
Inscribing Devotion and Death, 2008
Drawing upon scholarship of cultural identity, anthropology and historical linguistics, this book... more Drawing upon scholarship of cultural identity, anthropology and historical linguistics, this book offers a novel and contextual approach to the interpretation of archaeological evidence for Jewish populations in North Africa and elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean.
Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East, 2017
This chapter examines how graffiti was inscribed and painted by ancient Jews to communicate with ... more This chapter examines how graffiti was inscribed and painted by ancient Jews to communicate with and about the divine. It begins with a discussion of paintings and carvings that cover the surfaces of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—revered by many Christians as the site where Jesus was crucified and buried—and serve as physical vestiges of pilgrims' devotions, rather than marks of defacement. It then considers common assumptions that govern studies of ancient Jewish prayer before analyzing Aramaic and Greek signature and remembrance graffiti in the Dura-Europos synagogue and elsewhere in Dura, as well as devotional graffiti written by Jews in shrines shared by pagans and Christians, such as Elijah's Cave. The chapter suggests that certain acts of graffiti writing are in reality modes of prayer conducted by Jews and their neighbors alike, and that ancient Jews prayed in a variety of built and natural environments.
Journal of Early Christian Studies , 2019
Within the past decade, works of Paula Fredriksen, Brent Shaw, Ann Marie Yasin, Anna Leone, J. Pa... more Within the past decade, works of Paula Fredriksen, Brent Shaw, Ann Marie Yasin, Anna Leone, J. Patout Burns and Robin Jensen, Robin Whelan, Gareth Sears, and now Shira Lander, have collectively transformed the study of late Roman, Christian, and Vandal North Africa by challenging and inflecting received arguments about the litigiousness of its social, cultural, and religious landscapes. This surge in English-language scholarship, combined with the results of ongoing (if limited) studies in the field, has reinvigorated research of the history and cultural dynamics of pre-Islamic North Africa.
Shira Lander's Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries in Late Roman North Africa stands out among these publications in three principle ways. First, the monograph foregrounds the role of space, spatiality, and spatial supersessionism ("the rhetoric of spatial contestation") in Christian discourse in North Africa; second, it integrates multiple genres of data (textual, epigraphic, and architectural) into associated reconsiderations of regional evidence. Third, Lander uses the archaeological record to read against the grain of the literary one, thereby flouting scholarly conventions that prioritize textual evidence. These features collectively produce something unusual and exciting: a historiography of space, place, and contest, among and between Christians and their neighbors in late ancient North Africa.
American Journal of Archaeology, 2020
“A dream of ages has come true: Masada has been excavated and reconstructed.” So wrote Yigael Yad... more “A dream of ages has come true: Masada has been excavated and reconstructed.” So wrote Yigael Yadin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in a tourist pamphlet about Masada published in November 1965. Yadin extolled remarkable finds, including “tens of miles of walls; 4000 coins,” and more than 700 inscribed ostraka, which he and his team recovered from the Herodian palace-fortress of Masada during 11 months of excavations between 1963 and 1965. To some scholars in the 21st century, however, the exultant tone of Yadin’s expression (in both the pamphlet and his popular book, Masada: Herod’s Fortress and the Zealots’ Last Stand, Random House 1966) betrayed a political agenda that complicated both his professional legacy and that of the site. In Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth, however, Jodi Magness reclaims both the remains of Masada and the work of its famed excavator Yadin by reframing, and thus transforming, the narratives about each. Rather than merely summarizing the results of excavations or associated scholarship, Magness’ treatment does something novel: it constitutes a multidimensional work that uses Masada as “a lens through which to explore the history of Judea” (3) from the middle of the second century BCE through the first century CE.