Visotzky - Aphrodite and the rabbis: how the Jews adapted Roman culture to create Judaism as we know it

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For Asher:

a book with pictures

Beneath the streets of Rome, below even the subterranean layer of buildings still awaiting the kiss of the archeologists spade, lies a silent city of the dead. Its web extends in a collection of catacombs that served as Christian and Jewish burial grounds in the late second through fourth centuries. The Christian catacombs are the more famous; they have long been open to visitors who are willing to travel a bit beyond the walls of the ancient city to the sites on the famous Appian Way. Church authorities supported the cleansing of their catacombs, removal of corpses, ventilation of the tunnels, lighting, buttressing, and other safety measures that make a trip there as tourist friendly as a visit to an underground tomb can be.

Alas, this is not the case with the Jewish catacombs, which are generally closed to the public. I visited the Jewish catacomb of Villa Torlonia by special arrangement in 2007. A fistful of euros having changed hands, I am led through the catacomb, its entrance curiously located on the grounds of a villa once inhabited by Mussolini. My tour guide for the day is the city electrician who checks monthly on the exposed wiring, left over from earlier failed attempts to improve the site. We wear miners caps, beams of light wobbling before us. In one hand we each carry a lantern. Our other hands alternately follow the wire or gently mark a path along the porous tufa walls. The soft stone made it easy for the ancients to dig the tunnels and rooms that made up the warren of catacombs. But it is moist to the touch and leaves the humid air with a taste of rot that does not improve my sense of otherworldly claustrophobia. Nor, to be frank, do the bones and skeletons that still lie dormant upon their shallow platform graves dug into the walls.

Furtively, I summon my courage and touch, ever so gently, the remains of the dead. I am more than startled when the bone yields to my finger, spongy rather than ossified. Deep breathing ensues on my part, but the fetid air does not exactly help matters. I finally calm myself by reading, which almost always positively affects my emotions. What am I reading in the murky confines of the catacombs? Beside nearly every body, either grafittied onto the tufa stone or mounted as a marble inscription, are the epitaphs of the departed. Not surprisingly, given that we are in Rome, the names of the Jewish dead are recorded mostly in Latin, sometimes in Greek. But unlike on the headstones we might find in Europe or even in an American Jewish cemetery, there is nary a word of Hebrew. The only way we know that we are in a Jewish catacomb is that some of the names are biblical, and the frescoes that decorate the Villa Torlonia catacombs are replete with Jewish symbols, including ubiquitous menorahsthe seven - branched candelabrum of the Jerusalem Temple destroyed in 70 CE. I read a name aloud and walk to the next set of bones, where I pause and read again. Slowly it comes to me that I am making a cemetery pilgrimage to Jews who perhaps have not had such a visit in 1,700 years. As I turn to the next skeleton with a name beside it, from some place deep in my soul burble up the words to the Jewish memorial prayer, El Malei Rahamim, God full of mercy.

God, I pray in Hebrew, give proper rest to the soul of Simonides beneath the wings of your divine Presence. May he rest in the Garden of Eden. May his soul be bound up in the bundle of eternal life. And let us say, Amen. I have been blessed with a pleasant baritone singing voice, so as I walk I gain confidence, offering prayers of condolence for the long, long departed. Soon I realize that the moisture on my cheeks is not just the humidity of the catacombs, but the steady welling of tears from my eyes as I mourn for those so long unvisited by loved ones. Eventually, I notice that the electrician, too, has tears in his eyes, although I am sure he does not understand a word of Hebrew. I knew at that moment, even as I know now, that the inspiration to recite the memorial prayer would count as one of the few truly religious experiences of my life.

They say that Jews have been in the city of Rome since the century before Christianity. Even so, they took their time arriving. The Jewish Diaspora, the dispersion of the Israelite peoples from their land, took place first in the eighth century BCE (Before the Common Era, what Christians call BC) and again in 586 BCE. Both the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests sent the Israelites into exile eastward. It wasnt until the Greek era, during the fourth to third centuries BCE, that Jews migrated west and settled around the Mediterranean basin. By the time Jews came to Rome, there were Jewish communities in North Africa and Asia Minor, as well. The Five Books of Moses were translated from Hebrew into Greek by the third century BCE for the community in Alexandria, Egypt. Of course, there were Jews who much earlier had returned from exile to their ancestral homeland in what was then called Roman Palestine. Those Jews spoke Hebrew and also Aramaic (the language of their Assyrian captors of centuries earlier). But the Jews of the western exile spoke the local languages of Hellenism, which is how I came to be reading Latin and Greek grave inscriptions beneath the modern city of Rome.

As I look back years later, I still feel a connection with those who were buried in the catacombs so many centuries ago. But I do wonder about them. Would they have understood my pious gesture? Might there have been a chancedespite the absence of the language among all of the inscriptionsthat they could have understood the Hebrew I intoned? Would they even have approved of the sentiment? Did Roman Jews share the outlook of the rabbis of the Land of Israel that the soul would eternally survive? It was, after all, an idea that pagan Greek philosophers shared.

As a scholar, I know that by the time the Jews in that catacomb were buried, the Judaism of the rabbis, Judaism as we still know it today, already had begun to develop. And yet, aside from pictorial fealty to the menorah, would their Roman Judaism have been recognizable to me? And what might they have thought of my Judaism, visitor from a distant future as I was? Is then like now? Were those cosmopolitan urban Jews of Rome comparable to the Jewish community today, say, in New York City? Can asking questions like these about them teach anything about us now? Or is this just so much nave wishful thinking? I will return to this question a bit later, but for now, allow me to pay homage to the dead.

The Jews buried in the catacombs were Romans who spoke mostly Latin. Those whose families hailed from the Eastern Mediterranean probably spoke Greek. By culture, those Jews would be described as Greco - Roman Hellenists. That is, they were part of a millennium that started with Alexander the Great, who was born about 350 BCE, and ended at the fall of the Roman Empire, approximately 650 CE. That adds up to a thousand years of Hellenistic/ Greco - Roman culture.