Karen Stern opens a window onto the life of ordinary Jews in the late antique Mediterranean world using an abundant and neglected corpus: graffiti written in Jewish dialects or accompanied by Jewish symbols. Stern demonstrates how Jews participated in graffiti making in a variety of regions, in an array of public and private places that will dazzle those scholars used to literary sources, which are abstracted from the grittiness of daily life. Stern highlights that surviving legal writings tend to reify differences between Jews, Christians, and others, while graffiti shows Jews sharing worship practices, sporting fandom, and other ritual behavior with inhabitants all over the Mediterranean world. At the same time, as Stern often acknowledges, analyzing the abundance of extant ancient graffiti is rendered difficult by the brevity of graffiti themselves and the fact that ancient sources rarely comment on graffiti.
Stern organizes her research thematically into three chapters: the graffiti of devotional spaces, mortuary graffiti, and graffiti in civic spaces. Each of her chapters lays out the evidence with minimal speculation on her part, forcing the reader to try and make sense of the data on their own before she offers her measured and limited hypotheses about the meaning of the extant graffiti at the end of each chapter.
In her introduction, Stern guides readers to relinquish their modern understanding of graffiti as a deviant practice, noting that for the ancients it was considered “desirable, even normal” to inscribe one's name on the wall of a synagogue, for example (1). She acknowledges that graffiti is not an emic term but defines graffiti as “always of unofficial character” (quoting Angelos Chaniotis) and finds the capaciousness of this category useful for the many kinds of evidence it amasses for the study of ancient Jewish life (15). Stern places her work in the intellectual trajectory of French theorist Michel de Certeau and German microhistorians. Her intervention is to challenge the “the hegemony of rabbinical texts” for the interpretation of Jewish life; she upholds an approach that centers the archaeological evidence of graffiti in situ “and uses local and regional analogues (often produced by non-Jews) to interpret them—outside of literary texts and outside of twenty-first-century expectations” (8). Rather than reading the rabbis into graffiti, she argues that the data of graffiti have something important to teach us about the rabbis themselves as well as about nonrabbinic Jews.
Her first chapter, “Carving Devotion,” examines graffiti as a mode of prayer in synagogues, in sacred spaces of other religious communities, at pilgrimage sites, and in open outdoor shrines. As she points out, graffiti reveals “that ancient Jews prayed in a variety of built and natural environments,” sometimes alongside other Jews and sometimes alongside others (39). Often the graffiti of devotion, as she terms it, consists only of “I am” and people's names or other very brief statements. She suggests, following Joseph Naveh, that these signature graffiti are “a type of petition, permanently documented in plaster or stone” (51). Literate people encountering this graffiti would read it aloud, reviving the petition, somewhat in the way that we cannot help but read signs or graffiti we encounter as we walk through the world. The relationship between composers of graffiti and later reciters brings to my mind the statement attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai: “When a student quotes his teacher in this world his lips move in the grave” (B. Yevamot 97a). If the sages were rabbinizing a common idea, it would bear out Stern's assertion that nonrabbinic evidence can illuminate rabbinic texts.
In the chapter on mortuary graffiti, Stern revisits the cemetery of Beth-Sheʿarim. This chapter primarily focuses on a couple of short graffiti texts and the many images found inscribed on the walls there. Many graffiti images are challenging to make sense of: ships, representations of human figures, human figures with weapons, abecedaries, animals and quadrupeds, nets, etc. In drawing ships, Stern points out, Jews reproduced the most commonly drawn graffito in the ancient world (within and outside cemeteries). In analyzing the mortuary graffiti, Stern is right to reference parallels in the ritual evidence and could be more confident in asserting that nontextual graffiti are the language of the illiterate. Thus, she could have pointed to the example of incantation bowls written in pseudoscript, which suggest that a performative aspect satisfied the needs of the client or practitioner. As Jonathan Z. Smith famously said, ritual is a mode of paying attention. Inscribing a symbol on a wall in itself was the ritual moment, sufficient onto itself, even without an additional dimension of meaning that we cannot reconstruct.
In the third chapter, Stern examines graffiti “carved boldly into civic buildings in Asia Minor and along the Syrian littoral” (142). In this case, as she points out, graffiti allows us to see Jews as active participants in late Roman and Christian milieux. And indeed, there is something delightful about reading about Jews devoted to a certain horse-racing faction (the blues!) in Aphrodisias and Miletos. It is also in this chapter that Stern, as promised in her introduction, examines the graffiti practices of Jewish women, specifically through the example of one Jewish woman named Matrona the purple-seller, who announced her presence in a stall in a Tyrian hippodrome and advertised her Jewish identity with a menorah. Stern emphasizes that the assertive self-identification of Jews in shared civic spaces shows Jews, at least in certain places, exhibiting a level of confidence that one would not expect from reading Byzantine legal codes that persecute and delimit Jewish conduct.
Stern does the field a service in referring to much unpublished and obscure material from the ancient Mediterranean. Although she does not present a comprehensive survey of all graffiti associated with Jews, she promises an online database of Jewish graffiti in the future, similar to Ancient Graffiti Project. When it is complete, the database of Jewish graffiti will be a boon to scholars of Jewish studies. Stern's book will persuade you to check the writing on the wall even now, whatever you're working on or wherever you live.
