Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgo en Jews of Antiquity by Karen B. Stern

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgo en Jews of Antiquity by Karen B. Stern Benjamin D. Gordon Karen B. Stern. Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgo en Jews of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. 312, 55 b&w illus., 4 maps. Hardcover $35, paper $24.95, ebook. ISBN 9780691161334, 9780691210704, 9781400890453. In this absorbing book, Karen Stern tries to recover the voices of the "forgo en" Jews of antiquity who left graffiti on the walls of public spaces throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Many of these Jews were leaving messages behind, calling upon passersby to remember them or their loved ones for good, precisely because they feared oblivion. Yet they have been overlooked nonetheless, claims Stern, not because of some form of subjugation or erasure in antiquity but because of a certain modern scholarly bias [End Page 266] working against them. Historians of ancient Jewish life, overly reliant on classic Jewish texts, can give too li le a ention to ancient Jews who lived comfortably outside of rabbinic culture. Archaeologists can neglect experiential elements of Jewish life when they a end too closely to descriptive typological analysis. And epigraphists can favor monumental inscriptions while shying away from markings that are non-textual. The book has three main chapters, one each for graffiti from devotional, mortuary, and public contexts, respectively. It does not aspire to be an exhaustive catalog, but in its modeling of how a contextually aware analysis of graffiti ought to be carried out, it offers a timely companion to the newly published volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae and the online Ancient Graffiti Project. When taken seriously as a source of primary data, as Stern does in this book, graffiti can be a vital tool for scholars interested in the production of social space. It can speak to the human experience in a way that official modes of writing as reflected in classical texts or monumental inscriptions cannot. Chapter 1 looks at examples of graffiti from the synagogue at Dura Europos in Syria, the sacred complex to Pan at El Kanais in Egypt, and Elijah's Cave on Mount Carmel in Israel. Most interesting in this chapter is the claim that remembrance requests were wri en on the walls of holy spaces in hopes that others would say the name when they worshipped at the space, memorializing the deceased. The act of writing graffiti thus becomes a devotional or prayerful act, as does the act of reading it aloud, with worshippers becoming agents working on behalf of the graffiti writers. This expands our sense of what Jewish prayer consisted of in antiquity. Chapter 2 considers the mortuary graffiti at the Jewish necropolis of Beit Shearim in the Galilee. The numerous catacombs of the site are covered in markings that name the dead, picture the dead, curse those who disturb the dead, and signal the special sanctity of the tombs of the dead. In contrast to the tendency of the rabbis to limit interactions with corpses, the huge collection of Beit Shearim graffiti—some of which are published here for the first time—suggest to Stern that ancient Jews actually spent a lot of time communing with the deceased. They may have left simple lines or X and V symbols to mark visits to the graves, for example, like placing pebbles on a headstone. The penchant for etching images of ships over burials might reflect the belief that the dead were traveling to the underworld as if on a journey. This belief was commonly held in the Egyptian and Greco-Roman spheres. Chapter 3 discusses graffiti in public spaces of primarily Asia Minor. The chapter is the most complete expression in the book of a tendency to downplay ancient Jewish particularity, not to mention outright hostility between Jews and non-Jews, and to emphasize how Jews of the eastern Mediterranean were embedded culturally in the Greco-Roman milieu. The copious menorahs etched into public spaces in Asia Minor signal as much; as do the Jewish symbols on an informally scratched sign noting the presence by the Tyre hippodrome of a purple-dye business run by a woman named Matrona. [End Page...