Beneath the soil of Rome, in the soft tuff lining the ancient roadways, unfolds a funerary labyrinth where, alongside Christians, the Jewish community of the City buried its dead between the first and fourth centuries of our era. The "tomb plaque with Jewish symbols" constitutes the most eloquent material witness to this presence: a slab of marble or terracotta, sealing a niche hollowed into the wall — the loculus — engraved with an epitaph and marked with immediately recognizable emblems, foremost among them the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum. These objects, many of which come from the catacombs of the Vigna Randanini on the via Appia, are not mere tombstones: they are documents. <cite index="0-3">The stone epitaphs of the Roman Jews served three important functions: to provide information about the deceased individual, to inform about the society and culture from which they came, and to enable an understanding of the ancient past.</cite>
This work seeks to retrace the trajectory of these plaques: their manufacture, their ritual function, the repertoire of signs they bear, the language of their inscriptions, and the fate that befell them from their rediscovery in the nineteenth century to their present status as heritage objects. Through them, an entire stretch of the ancient Jewish diaspora — the oldest Jewish community of Western Europe — still speaks.
The Jewish community of Rome is attested from the second century BCE and took lasting root following the deportations that came in the wake of the capture of Jerusalem. To bury its dead according to the practice of inhumation — rather than the cremation then widespread among the Romans — it adopted, like the early Christians, the funerary mode of the catacomb: a network of underground galleries hewn into the tufa, where the bodies were laid in superimposed niches.
Several of these Jewish necropoleis have been identified around Rome. <cite index="0-0">These include the Jewish catacombs of the Vigna Randanini (1859), those of the Villa Torlonia (1859), of the Vigna Cimarra (1866), of the Via Labicana (1882), and of the Via Appia Pignatelli (1885).</cite> Scholarly knowledge of these complexes is relatively recent. <cite index="0-1">The discovery of the Jewish catacombs came to light only in relatively modern times.</cite>
The catacomb of the Vigna Randanini, opening onto the Via Appia Antica, remains the most famous and the best documented as regards the inscribed plaques. It is from this site, as well as from the Villa Torlonia and the former catacomb of Monteverde (now destroyed), that the majority of the Roman Jewish epigraphic corpus comes. Inhumation there was carried out mainly in loculi — horizontal niches sealed by a slab — but one also finds arcosolia (vaulted niches) and a few more richly decorated chambers reserved for families. The dating generally accepted by scholarship places the funerary use of these galleries between the end of the first or the second century and the fourth century CE [synthesis of the work of H. J. Leon, The Jews of Ancient Rome].
The funerary plaque first answers a technical necessity: to seal the loculus after the body had been laid to rest. For this purpose, depending on the means of the families, one used either a marble slab — often reused from earlier materials, the epitaph being engraved on the free face —, or, more modestly, terracotta plaques or a mortar into which the text was inscribed before hardening, sometimes by embedding symbolic objects.
The marble slab constituted the most durable and most prestigious support. Its surface was chiselled, in relief sunk into the stone, by a stonecutter whose skill varied considerably: alongside careful and regular lettering, one encounters clumsy inscriptions with irregular lines, attesting to modest workshops or hasty execution. The symbols — and notably the menorah — were incised in outline, sometimes enhanced with colour, or more rarely painted directly onto the plaster. <cite index="0-4">The engraved symbol of a menorah or an open Holy Ark, accompanied by the inscription concerning the deceased, constitutes an ancient document that must be read and understood in the light of the era in which it was inscribed.</cite>
Standardisation is weak: no rigid norm governed the form, format or arrangement of these plaques. This material diversity reflects a socially contrasted community, ranging from humble artisans to notables of means. The plaque, in this sense, is not only a ritual object: it is a social marker and an act of family memory.
What immediately distinguishes the Jewish plaque from its Christian or pagan neighbour is its iconographic repertoire. The menorah — the seven-branched candelabrum of the Temple of Jerusalem — largely dominates this vocabulary. Having become, after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70, the emblem par excellence of Jewish identity, it appears on the slabs as an affirmation of belonging, a confessional seal as much as a sign of hope.
Around it gravitates a coherent set of liturgical objects: the lulav (palm bouquet of the festival of Sukkot), the etrog (citron), the shofar (ram's horn sounded on the great solemnities), and the Holy Ark (Aron ha-Kodesh) depicted open or closed, sheltering the scrolls of the Torah. <cite index="0-4">The open Holy Ark figures among the symbols carved on the stones alongside the menorah.</cite> One also encounters the amphora, the dove, or plant motifs. These signs are never purely decorative: they condense the memory of the vanished Temple, the calendar of festivals, and the messianic expectation.
It must be stressed that this repertoire was not exclusively Jewish in its making: the Roman workshops employed shared formulas and motifs, and certain plaques juxtapose Jewish emblems with Greco-Roman funerary conventions, a sign of a community fully integrated into the material culture of the City while asserting its religious singularity [synthesis based on J.-B. Frey, Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum, vol. I].
The text engraved on the plaque follows recurring formulas. The dominant language of the Jewish funerary corpus of Rome is Greek, the common language (koinè) of the Eastern Mediterranean from which a large part of the community originated; Latin is a minority presence but attested, and Hebrew most often appears only in brief formulas, such as shalom ("peace") or shalom al Israël, sometimes inscribed in Hebrew characters in the margin of a Greek or Latin text.
The epitaphs name the deceased, indicate their age, sometimes their role within the community, and frequently close with funerary wishes: "in peace his sleep," "may their memory be for a blessing." They reveal the organization of the Roman synagogues, designated by proper names, and the titles of their dignitaries: archisynagogos (head of synagogue), gerousiarches, archon, grammateus (secretary), pater and mater synagogae. <cite index="0-5">These inscriptions notably bear witness to the leadership roles held by Jewish women, beloved and respected within the community.</cite>
It is precisely this prosopographical dimension that makes the plaques a historical source of the first order. <cite index="0-3">The epitaph informs us about the deceased individual, about the society and culture from which they came, and helps us understand the ancient past.</cite> Through these names, ages, and titles, the historian reconstructs the demography, the institutional structure, and the spiritual life of the oldest Jewish diaspora in the West.
The Jewish catacombs remained forgotten for centuries, their entrances filled in or lost. <cite index="0-1">Knowledge of them resurfaced only in relatively modern times.</cite> Their exploration in the nineteenth century — the Vigna Randanini was brought to light in 1859 — belongs to the great movement of Christian and Roman archaeology of the period, driven among other things by research into the early Christian catacombs.
This rediscovery had a lasting consequence for the plaques: many of them were detached from their original loculus and transferred to collections. The loss of the precise archaeological context — which slab sealed which niche — constitutes one of the major difficulties of modern study. Many of these inscriptions are today preserved in the Jewish epigraphic collections of the Vatican Museums (the Lapidario ebraico) and in other Roman institutions, while the Monteverde catacomb, which collapsed and was destroyed at the beginning of the twentieth century, is now known only through earlier surveys.
It is here that communal tradition and scholarly archive answer one another: the Jewish memory of an immemorial presence in Rome finds itself confirmed and made precise by the epigraphic documentation, which fixes its names, its institutions, and its dates. The most decisive work of inventory remains the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum of Jean-Baptiste Frey (1936), which systematically gathered and numbered these testimonies, founding the scientific study of ancient Roman Judaism [J.-B. Frey, Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum].
Having become a museum object, the tomb plaque bearing Jewish symbols has changed in nature without losing its charge. Wrested from the darkness of the gallery where it sealed a deceased, it is today looked upon, photographed, catalogued. Yet it continues to fulfill, in its own way, the function for which it was engraved: to keep the memory of a name and a belonging.
For the contemporary Jewish community, these slabs embody a continuity of nearly two millennia. The menorah depicted upon them, an emblem that became the symbol of the modern State of Israel, links the ancient necropolis of the via Appia to the long history of the Jewish people. For the historian, each plaque remains a voice: <cite index="0-4">an ancient document that must be read and understood in light of the era in which it was inscribed.</cite>
The conservation of these objects ultimately raises sensitive questions, at the crossroads of archaeology and the respect owed to graves. Jewish tradition attaches particular importance to the integrity of the rest of the dead; the displacement of the slabs and their museum display thus inscribe themselves within a tension, never entirely resolved, between the scientific imperative of study and the duty of memory. The tomb plaque, in this, is not an inert relic: it remains a living point of contact between the archive and transmission.
The Jewish-symbol tombstone of the Roman catacombs condenses, in a few centimeters of marble or terracotta, a dense history: that of an ancient community, both Hellenistic and Roman, faithful to its festivals and to the memory of the Temple, organized into synagogues endowed with male and female dignitaries, and intent on burying its dead with a sign that would mark them for eternity. The menorah, the lulav, the shofar, and the Holy Ark are not mere ornaments: they are an engraved profession of faith.
From the Vigna Randanini to the display cases of the Lapidario ebraico, these slabs have crossed the centuries first in oblivion, then under the gaze of nineteenth-century scholars, and finally in the status of heritage objects. They remain, to take up the very function that research recognizes in them, documents that inform us both about the departed individual and about the society in which they lived. In this sense, the Jewish funerary plaque of Rome is one of the most precious material witnesses of the ancient diaspora — a bridge of stone between a forgotten name and the memory of a people.
