Studies in Early Jewish Epigraphy.

AuthorPrice, Jonathan J.

It is rare that a collection of conference papers produces a uniformly good volume, but such is the case with the book under review, which contains nine papers given at Utrecht University in 1992. The topic is important. "Jewish" inscriptions constitute a source of central importance for the history of Jews in antiquity (the papers here cover the Hellenistic through the Byzantine periods), as they provide more direct, less mediated access to the lives of Jews of different social standing and intellectual background than do the standard literary sources (including, in most cases, the rabbinic sources). One turns to inscriptions to investigate, for example, the character of the many varieties of Jewish practice and Jewish expression, the history of the synagogue and the internal organization of Jewish communities, communication between Jews of Eretz-Israel and those of different regions of the Diaspora, Jews' economic activities and the status of Jewish women, patterns of Jewish settlement, and Jewish relations, formal and informal, with Gentiles and Christians. Above all, inscriptions bear on one of the most discussed - and bedeviled - questions in ancient Jewish history, Jewish cultural assimilation and particularity. But methodological problems lurk for the incautious or tendentious researcher, not least that of ascertaining which texts are "Jewish." It is ironic, for example, that an epitaph set up in a non-Jewish context and written by a Jew who did not bother to define himself as a Jew could constitute important evidence on the question of Jewish cultural life; but, by definition, such an inscription will not be noticed.

Another problem which has interfered with the use of Jewish inscriptions has been the lack of a reliable corpus. The standard work is J.-P. Frey, Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum, I-II (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1936-1952), but this was notoriously defective even when it came out (despite the delay of sixteen years, volume two showed no improvement over the first). Thankfully, this problem will soon be completely remedied. The Egyptian and European material has been re-edited by two contributors to the present volume (W. Horbury and D. Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992]; D. Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993]), the North African material has been competently reworked by Y. Le Bohec ("Inscriptions...

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