Catacomb closing slab with Jewish symbols

Beneath the soil of Rome, in the loose tufa bordering ancient roads, a funerary labyrinth unfolds where, alongside Christians, the Jewish community of the City buried its dead between the 1st and 4th centuries of our era. The "gravestone plaque with Jewish symbols" constitutes the most eloquent material witness to this presence: a slab of marble or terracotta, sealing a niche carved into the wall — the loculus —, engraved with an epitaph and marked with emblems immediately recognizable, foremost among which the menorah, the seven-branched candlestick. These objects, many of which come from the catacombs of the Vigna Randanini on the via Appia, are not mere tombstones: they are documents. The stone epitaphs of Roman Jews served three important functions: to inform about the deceased individual, to convey information about the society and culture from which he came, and to enable us to understand the ancient past.

This work intends to restore 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 19th century to their present status as heritage objects. Through them, an entire facet of the ancient Jewish diaspora — the oldest Jewish community in Western Europe — still speaks. This Great Book now expands beyond Rome to embrace other necropolises of the diaspora, notably Beit Shearim in Galilee, whose new archaeological discoveries of the 2020s shed unprecedented light on the epigraphic and funerary practices common to Jewish communities of Late Antiquity.

The Jewish community of Rome is attested from the 2nd century BCE and took root permanently following the deportations that resulted from the fall of Jerusalem. To bury its dead according to the practice of inhumation — rather than cremation, which was widespread among Romans — the community adopted, like the early Christians, the funerary mode of the catacomb: a network of underground galleries cut into tufa, where bodies were placed in superimposed niches.

Six Jewish funerary complexes have been identified around Rome. These notably include the catacombs of the Vigna Randanini (identified in 1859 on the via Appia Antica), those of Villa Torlonia (on the via Nomentana, explored from 1867), of the Vigna Cimarra (1866), of the via Labicana (1882) and of the via Appia Pignatelli (1885), to which must be added the former catacomb of Monteverde, today collapsed and destroyed. In total, research conducted to date has uncovered some five hundred thirty-seven inscriptions scattered across these six necropolises; David Noy, in his systematic corpus published under the auspices of the International Academic Union, retained five hundred twenty-nine as indisputably Jewish [David Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, vol. II, Cambridge University Press, 1995 ; International Catacomb Society, Jewish Catacombs of Rome]. Scientific knowledge of these complexes is relatively recent, the discovery of the Jewish catacombs having come to light only at a relatively modern period.

The catacomb of the Vigna Randanini, opening onto the via Appia Antica, remains the most famous and best documented regarding inscribed plaques. It is from this site, as well as from Villa Torlonia and the former catacomb of Monteverde, that the majority of the Roman Jewish epigraphic corpus originates. Of these two necropolises, only the Vigna Randanini and Villa Torlonia remain accessible today, the others having been filled in, destroyed, or rendered inaccessible over time [International Catacomb Society, Jewish Catacombs of Rome]. Inhumation there was carried out chiefly in loculi — horizontal niches sealed by a slab — but arcosolia (vaulted niches) and some more richly decorated chambers reserved for families are also found there. The walls and ceilings of Villa Torlonia still preserve vivid paintings depicting menorahs and other Jewish symbols, as well as animals and geometric and floral motifs, testifying to a funerary art of genuine vitality. The dating generally accepted by scholarship places the funerary use of these galleries between the late 1st or 2nd century and the 4th century CE [H. J. Leon, The Jews of Ancient Rome, Jewish Publication Society, 1960].

The funerary plaque first responded to a technical necessity: sealing the loculus after the body was placed. To do this, families used, depending on their means, either a marble slab — often reused from earlier materials, with the epitaph engraved on the exposed face — or, more modestly, terracotta plaques or mortar in which the text was inscribed before hardening, sometimes with symbolic objects pressed into it.

The marble slab was the most durable and most prestigious support. Its surface was engraved with a chisel, in relief, by a stonecutter whose skill varied considerably: alongside carefully and regularly formed letters, one finds clumsy inscriptions, with irregular lines, testifying to modest workshops or hasty execution. Symbols — notably the menorah — were incised in line, sometimes enhanced with colour, or more rarely painted directly onto the plaster. The engraved symbol of a menorah or an open Holy Ark, accompanied by the inscription on the deceased, constitutes an ancient document that must be read and understood in light of the era in which it was inscribed.

Standardization was 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 with means. The plaque, in this sense, is not merely a ritual object: it is a social marker and an act of family memory. It should also be noted that the technique of the arcosolium — a vaulted niche cut into the wall, closed not by a simple flat slab but sometimes by painted or sculpted decoration — represents the pinnacle of this range, reserved for the most wealthy families, as one observes in the painted chambers of the Vigna Randanini or in the decorated galleries of the Villa Torlonia.

What immediately distinguishes the Jewish plaque from its Christian or pagan neighbor 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 preeminent emblem of Jewish identity, it appears on the slabs as an assertion of belonging, a confessional seal as much as a sign of hope.

Around it gravitate a coherent ensemble of liturgical objects: the lulav (palm frond bouquet of the Sukkot festival), the etrog (citron), the shofar (ram's horn sounded at major solemnities), and the Holy Ark (Aron ha-Kodesh) depicted open or closed, sheltering the Torah scrolls. The open Holy Ark figures among the recurring symbols on the stones alongside the menorah. One also encounters the amphora, the dove, or vegetal motifs. These signs are never purely decorative: they condense the memory of the vanished Temple, the calendar of festivals, and messianic expectation.

It must be emphasized that this repertoire was not exclusively Jewish in its execution: Roman workshops employed shared formulas and motifs, and certain plaques juxtapose Jewish emblems and Greco-Roman funerary conventions, a sign of a community fully integrated into the material culture of the City while claiming its religious singularity. L. V. Rutgers has moreover noted that, among all the chambers of the Vigna Randanini, only one can be considered "explicitly Jewish" in the strict iconographic sense, the one that Erwin R. Goodenough had designated as "room IV," where a menorah is painted above an arcosolium — which shows how porous the boundary between common decor and confessional affirmation was and how variable the use of symbols was according to families and workshops [J.-B. Frey, Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum, vol. I, Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1936 ; L. V. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome, Brill, 1995].

The text engraved on the plaque obeys recurring formulas. The dominant language of the Jewish funerary corpus in Rome is Greek, the common language (koinè) of the Eastern Mediterranean from which a large part of the community originated; Latin is minority but present, and Hebrew appears most often 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. This triple linguistic reality — Greek, Latin, Hebrew — is found in a striking manner in other necropolises of the ancient diaspora, beginning with Beit Shearim, whose inscriptions are written in Hebrew, Greek and, in a few cases, in Aramaic or Palmyrene, attesting to the geographical scope of the communities that had their dead transported there.

The epitaphs name the deceased, indicate their age, sometimes their function within the community, and frequently close with funerary wishes: "in peace his sleep", "may his 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. These inscriptions notably testify to the leadership roles held by Jewish women, loved and respected within the community.

It is precisely this prosopographical dimension that makes the plaques a historical source of the first order. The epitaph informs us about the deceased individual, about the society and culture from which they came, and helps us understand the ancient past. Through these names, ages and titles, the historian reconstructs the demography, institutional structure and spiritual life of the oldest Jewish diaspora in the West. A comparison with Beit Shearim is illuminating here: the inscription of a proselyte named Jacob, discovered in the newly numbered catacombs 35 and 36 of this Galilean necropolis, shows that Greek still served as the common epigraphic language for converts integrated into the Jewish community in the IIIrd-Vth centuries — a phenomenon perfectly parallel to what is observed in Rome ["Newly Found Burial Catacombs and Inscriptions from the Necropolis at Beth She'arim", Journal for the Study of Judaism, vol. 55, no. 3, Brill, 2024].

The Jewish catacombs remained forgotten for centuries, their entrances filled in or lost. Knowledge of them resurfaced only in a relatively modern era. Their exploration in the nineteenth century — the Vigna Randanini was brought to light in 1859 — was part of the great movement of Christian and Roman archaeology of the time, driven among others by research into 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 precise archaeological context — which slab closed 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, collapsed and destroyed in the early twentieth century, is now known only through earlier records.

It is here that community tradition and scholarly archive answer one another: Jewish memory of an immemorial presence in Rome is confirmed and refined by epigraphic documentation, which fixes its names, institutions and dates. The most decisive work of cataloguing remains Jean-Baptiste Frey's Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum (1936), which systematically gathered and numbered these testimonies, founding the scientific study of ancient Roman Judaism. This pioneering work was subsequently completed and partially corrected by David Noy, whose 1995 corpus now constitutes the updated reference [David Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, vol. II, 1995].

The dynamic of rediscovery is not limited to Rome. At Beit Shearim, in Lower Galilee, systematic excavations from the 1930s onward brought to light a necropolis of comparable scale, revealing dozens of catacombs and several hundred inscriptions. Until 2021, these discoveries seemed to have reached a threshold; this is why the discovery of two new catacombs, numbered 35 and 36 — the first new inscription at Beit Shearim in sixty-five years — constitutes a major scientific event, showing that ancient necropolises still hold unpublished sections of Jewish memory from late Antiquity [« Newly Found Burial Catacombs », Journal for the Study of Judaism, vol. 55, no. 3, Brill, 2024].

The catacombs of Beit Shearim, situated on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Lower Galilee, constitute the eastern and terrestrial counterpart to what the Roman catacombs represent for the western Mediterranean. Hewn into rocky limestone rather than the volcanic tuff of Rome, they nonetheless gather a repertoire of funerary and epigraphic practices closely related to those of Rome: vaulted arcosolia, inscriptions in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, and representations of menorahs carved or painted.

The reason for this convergence is historical: after the death of Rabbi Yehouda ha-Nassi — the Patriarch who had established the residence of the Sanhedrin at Beit Shearim and presided over the redaction of the Mishna — the necropolis acquired an unequaled prestige. Rabbinic tradition and excavations conducted since the 1930s have made it possible to identify catacomb number 14 as that of the patriarchal family, thanks to bilingual Hebrew-Greek inscriptions mentioning his sons Rabbi Gamliel and Rabbi Shimon. After this illustrious burial, the city became famous, and many distinguished personalities, rabbis and wealthy families from throughout the diaspora — from Babylonia, Phoenicia, Arabia, Palmyra — requested to be buried there, in order to be interred in the Land of Israel near the great Patriarch [BibleWalks, Catacombs in Beit Shearim ; interbible.org, Beth Shearim, la nécropole juive de Galilée, 2020].

It is within this context of an interdiasporic necropolis that the recent discovery of catacombs 35 and 36 is situated. In spring 2021, Jonathan Orlin, of the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority, identified these two previously unknown complexes on the western slope of the necropolis. The Israeli Antiquities Authority subsequently surveyed and sealed them. Organized around arcosolium chambers, the two catacombs total around forty burials distributed in corridor-shaped rooms whose walls are hollowed out with vaulted niches. From a stratigraphic point of view, catacomb 36 is later than catacomb 35, as it was hewn at a higher level while deliberately adapting to the contour of the first; the arcosolium of the 36 that encroaches on the 35 remained unused, its benches never having been carved out. These catacombs bear Greek inscriptions, including that of a proselyte named Jacob — the first new inscription at Beit Shearim in sixty-five years — confirming the use of this site by the Jewish community of Galilee in the late Roman period, between the 3rd and 5th centuries. The scientific study of these discoveries was published in 2024 in the Journal for the Study of Judaism (vol. 55, no. 3, Brill) [« Newly Found Burial Catacombs and Inscriptions from the Necropolis at Beth She'arim »].

The presence of a proselyte named Jacob within these catacombs is particularly significant. It recalls that ancient Jewish necropolises — whether in Rome or Galilee — welcomed not only Jews by birth, but also converts integrated into the community, sometimes for several generations. The Greek inscription of this Jacob constitutes a document of great value: it attests both to the vitality of Jewish proselytism in the late period, the continuity of Greek as the common epigraphic language of the diaspora, and the capacity of a prestigious necropolis to absorb individuals of diverse origins under the unity of the Jewish funerary sign.

Transformed into a museum object, the tombstone bearing Jewish symbols has changed in nature without losing its charge. Torn from the obscurity of the gallery where it sealed a dead person, it is today looked at, photographed, catalogued. Yet it continues to accomplish, in its own way, the function for which it was engraved: to bear witness to a name and an belonging.

For the contemporary Jewish community, these slabs embody a continuity of nearly two millennia. The menorah depicted on 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: an ancient document that must be read and understood in the light of the era in which it was inscribed.

The conservation of these objects finally raises sensitive questions, at the intersection of archaeology and the respect due to burials. Jewish tradition accords particular importance to the integrity of the rest of the dead; the displacement of the slabs and museum exhibition thus inscribe themselves in a tension, never entirely resolved, between the scientific imperative of study and the duty of memory. This tension is moreover at the heart of the decision to seal the catacombs 35 and 36 of Beit Shearim after their documentation by the Israel Antiquities Authority: the scientific documentation is preserved, but the burials are not open to the public, in a balance that testifies to a contemporary sensitivity distinct from that of nineteenth-century Rome.

In Rome, the situation is partially inverse: the catacombs of the Villa Torlonia and of the Vigna Randanini are accessible to visitors, while the most precious plaques are exhibited in museums. This public exhibition prolongs, in an unexpected sense, the original function of the slabs: to show, to designate, to assert. The tombstone, in this respect, is not an inert vestige — it remains a living point of contact between the archive and transmission, between the ancient necropolis and the contemporary gaze.

Rabbi Yehouda ha-Nassi (c. 135–c. 217 CE) — Also known as "Rabbi" par excellence, or Yehuda Hanasi (יהודה הנשיא, "Judah the Prince"), he was the Patriarch of the Jewish community in Palestine under Roman rule. Residing in Beit Shearim and later in Sepphoris, he presided over the redaction and definitive shaping of the Mishna, the first great corpus of Jewish oral law. His burial in the necropolis of Beit Shearim — identified by the inscriptions in catacomb 14 mentioning his sons Rabbi Gamliel and Rabbi Shimon — conferred upon the site a prestige that attracted for several centuries the burials of Jews from throughout the diaspora. His name is inseparable from the rise of Beit Shearim as a major inter-diasporic necropolis.

Jean-Baptiste Frey (1878–1939) — French priest and archaeologist, member of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, Frey devoted a large part of his career in Rome to cataloguing ancient Jewish inscriptions. His Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum (1936, volume I for Europe; volume II posthumous for Asia and Africa), published by the Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, constituted the first systematic scientific synthesis of the Jewish epigraphic corpus from Antiquity. Despite lacunae and errors noted by his successors, this work remains the foundation of all study on the funerary plaques of the Jewish catacombs of Rome and elsewhere.

Harry Joshua Leon (1896–1967) — American classical philologist, professor at the University of Texas, Leon published in 1960 The Jews of Ancient Rome (Jewish Publication Society), a synthesis that remained the standard reference work on the ancient Roman Jewish community for several decades. Drawing from catacomb inscriptions, he analyzed Roman synagogues, their names, their dignitaries and their organization, delivering a nuanced picture of a Hellenized community yet attached to its practices. His work is at the foundation of all contemporary reflection on the epitaphs of the Vigna Randanini and the Villa Torlonia.

David Noy (born 1957) — British epigrapher, professor at the University of Wales, Noy directed the publication of the corpus Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1993–1995), of which volume II (1995) is devoted to the city of Rome. This corpus updates and corrects Frey's data, incorporates discoveries subsequent to 1936, and provides revised readings and translations of the five hundred twenty-nine inscriptions identified as Jewish. It is now the indispensable working tool for the study of Roman funerary plaques.

Jonathan Orlin (dates unknown) — Officer of the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority, Orlin is the person to whom we owe the recognition, in spring 2021, of two hitherto unknown catacombs numbered 35 and 36 on the western slope of the Beit Shearim necropolis. His field discovery, followed by the survey and sealing conducted by the Israeli Antiquities Authority, opened a new chapter in the knowledge of this necropolis, documented in 2024 in the Journal for the Study of Judaism. He embodies the decisive role played by field observers in the production of archaeological knowledge.

Jacob the Proselyte (dates unknown, probably active 3rd–4th century CE) — Convert to Judaism buried in catacomb 35 or 36 of Beit Shearim, Jacob is known through a Greek inscription discovered during the 2021 excavations and published in 2024. This inscription — the first new epigraph identified at Beit Shearim in sixty-five years — constitutes rare testimony to Jewish proselytism in the late Roman period. The fact that a convert could be entombed in the most prestigious necropolis of the ancient Jewish world attests to the integration of proselytes in the community and its vitality far beyond Jews of birth alone.

The tombstone with Jewish symbols from 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 in synagogues with male and female dignitaries, and concerned with burying its dead with a sign that would designate them for eternity. The menorah, the lulav, the shofar and the Holy Ark are not mere ornaments: they are a profession of faith carved in stone.

From the Vigna Randanini to the vitrines of the Lapidario ebraico, these slabs have crossed the centuries first in oblivion, then under the gaze of nineteenth-century scholars, finally in the status of heritage object. They remain, to reprise the very function that research acknowledges in them, documents that inform us both about the deceased individual and about the society that saw him live.

This Great Book sought to broaden this reading in the direction of Beit Shearim, a Galilean necropolis where the ancient Jewish diaspora came to seek a prestigious rest near the tomb of the Patriarch. The new catacombs 35 and 36, identified in 2021 and published in 2024, recall that the earth still holds unpublished voices. The inscription of the proselyte Jacob — the first new epigraph at Beit Shearim in sixty-five years — is exemplary in this regard: a converted man, of Greek name, buried in the most illustrious Jewish necropolis of the ancient world, attests to an open, living and plural community, whose tombstones are the most immediate archive.

In this sense, the Jewish funeral plaque — whether carved from the tufa of Rome or the limestone of Galilee — is one of the most precious material witnesses of the ancient diaspora: a stone bridge between a forgotten name and the memory of a people.