Writing on the Wall

Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity

Karen B. Stern

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400890453
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and Josephus and the rabbinic texts of the Mishnah and Talmud. Commissioned art, architecture, and formal inscriptions displayed on tombs and synagogues equally reflect the sensibilities of their influential patrons. The perspectives and sentiments of nonelite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Focusing on these forgotten Jews of antiquity, Writing on the Wall takes an unprecedented look at the vernacular inscriptions and drawings they left behind and sheds new light on the richness of their quotidian lives.Just like their neighbors throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt, ancient Jews scribbled and drew graffiti everyplace--in and around markets, hippodromes, theaters, pagan temples, open cliffs, sanctuaries, and even inside burial caves and synagogues. Karen Stern reveals what these markings tell us about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Making compelling analogies with modern graffiti practices, she documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors, showing how popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement regularly crossed ethnic and religious boundaries.Illustrated throughout with examples of ancient graffiti, Writing on the Wall provides a tantalizingly intimate glimpse into the cultural worlds of forgotten populations living at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and earliest Islam.

CHAPTER ONE

Carving Graffiti as Devotion

Deep in the heart of the Old City in Jerusalem, pilgrims travel daily to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—revered by many Christians as the site where Jesus was crucified and buried. During high pilgrimage seasons, pedestrian traffic slows to a shuffle inside the Church vestibule, where the faithful lie prostrate and rake their fingernails through oil lubricating the stone that marks the place of Jesus’s crucifixion. Farther on, women clutching their headscarves strain to decipher paintings blackened by centuries of smoke; beyond, processionals snake toward the medieval Aedicule, which ensconces the reported site of Jesus’s burial. Whispers, footsteps, and chanted prayers swell into a hum as light from dusty sunbeams and faltering candles flickers off icons and metallic threads of vestments. Smoky air, redolent of frankincense and candle-wax, filters slowly through the nostrils and lungs. Over the centuries, pilgrim accounts document their authors’ departures from this environment as changed people; dramatic encounters with its relics, prayers, light, smells, colors, and tastes effected their profound physical and emotional transformations. And while the architecture of the Church has metamorphosed during its 1500-year history, the interior of the building feels timeless.

But during the past six hundred years, pilgrims have modified considerably this venerated space. Devotees have chiseled thousands of crosses, crests, and cryptograms, alongside lists of names and prayers in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Georgian, into the structure’s exterior façade, portals, stairways, and altars. To many pilgrims, these markings might remain strangely invisible, despite their prominent locations. When prompted to recall their time in the Church, visitors rapidly recount their sensory experiences: the warmth of bodies pressed together during Vespers; the slipperiness of the oleaginous stone of the anointing; the taste of the particulate air, opaque with centuries of dust and burnt incense; and the overwhelming sensations of joy and wonder at having fulfilled lifelong dreams of visiting this place. Quite rarely do pilgrims equally remark on scribbles around the building, rendering names, prayers, and geometric shapes, carved and painted in seemingly random places.1

But these paintings and carvings blanket the surfaces of the Church. And while Church officials rigorously control and maintain the surrounding areas, these types of markings document one of the only ways that visitors have individually modified surfaces of the architectural space. Visitors’ graffiti, which render sacred symbols, requests for remembrance, personal signatures, and prayers in multiple languages, do not constitute marks of defacement. They serve, rather, as physical vestiges of pilgrims’ devotions, permanently tattooed onto surfaces of one of the holiest sites in Christendom (figures 1.1 and 1.2).2

Why begin a consideration of ancient Jews by examining the workings of a Levantine pilgrimage church, so significant to Christians of various denominations? One might easily dismiss this as a poor decision. Comparisons between the devotional spaces and practices associated with modern and premodern Christians and those performed by ancient Jews could indeed reflect implicit and irresponsible collapses of time, space, place, belief, and custom, barely sustained by hierarchical and reductive understandings of religious experience. When reconfiguring discussions of ancient Jewish devotional practices, some might suggest that modern synagogues would offer better places to turn for inspiration.

But, for targeted reasons, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre can serve as a particularly useful tool when beginning to rethink ancient Jewish activities associated with prayer. The availability of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for visitation is critical in this regard. Visits to the modern Church remind us of what we wish we knew about ancient Jews’ devotional spaces, even if we lack such information. Entering its expanse reminds us of how profoundly sensory information shapes supplicants’ experiences in devotional environments, from associated sounds, smells, textures, tastes, and degrees of illumination.3 And watching Christians of all denominations and origins congregate in the same church remains equally instructive—it reminds us of how demographically diverse devotional spaces can be.

FIGURE 1.1. Memorial dipinti and graffiti in Latin and Arabic scripts upon columns of the external façade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Israel; December 2014. Photo by Ezra Gabbay.

FIGURE 1.2. Graffiti of crosses from the stairway to St. Vartan’s Chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; May 2013. Photo by Ezra Gabbay.

Such observations, in turn, can inspire new questions about the sensory, socially, and spatially circumscribed realities of Jews in their ancient devotional environments. For instance, we might ask whether Jews only prayed in designated places, such as synagogues, or whether they might have prayed in other types of environments more broadly conceived? How densely populated were such spaces at times of communal prayer? What did ancient synagogues smell like? What, if anything, could you see inside of them—were they brightly illuminated through second-story windows, or was the darkness inside them barely permeated by lit wicks of oil-lamps?4 What did people wear when they prayed? Did synagogue officials or rabbis don distinctive clothing, and did other Jews modify their attire (with particular vestments, head-coverings, or veils) when they entered synagogues? Did all Jews pray alongside similarly minded Jews, or also beside and with Jews of different backgrounds, theologies, and beliefs—or even beside non-Jews? Raising questions such as these highlights how woefully incomplete are our understandings of the sensory, spatial, and demographic dimensions of ancient synagogues (let alone of the alternative spaces in which ancient Jews might have prayed), without tangible evidence for associated sights, sounds, smells, and textures.

Most known ancient synagogues are preserved only as stone foundations and tiles, broken and empty shells, largely devoid of their original fabrics, paint, or upper stories (whose presence might indicate modes of illumination through window locations). Yet these absent features were likely critical in shaping the experiences of Jewish devotees for associated activities of communal gathering, reciting and translating biblical scripture, and repeating liturgical prose and poetry.5 Regard for “living” examples of devotional spaces, including that of the Holy Sepulchre, may encourage us to use our imaginations to ask new questions about ancient structures, their experiential features, and their collective impact on activities of prayer—whether conducted by Jews, Christians, or pagans within them.

Yet a second feature of the Church—its ubiquitous graffiti—offers another useful prompt to imagine potential ranges of Jewish devotional practices in antiquity. Closer evaluation suggests that the locations and contents of the Church graffiti are less random than they might initially appear. Patterns emerge: signature graffiti and written requests for blessings and remembrance proliferate particularly around the portals (figure 1.1), while christograms and abstract figural graffiti dominate stairwells leading to specific shrines (figure 1.2). Locations and lexical contents of these writings, moreover, often exhibit surprising similarities to thousands of comparably neglected examples, scratched by ancient peoples from the same region, including Jews, as well as pagans, Christians, and the earliest followers of Muḥammad.

Jews and their neighbors once carved graffiti, such as these, nearly everywhere, including interiors of ancient synagogues, pagan sanctuaries, and shrines, in Syria and Judaea/Palaestina and throughout the deserts of Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, and Arabia. These markings, just like those in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, are often patterned, as inscribers positioned similar types of messages and pictures in consistent portions of buildings and landscapes. They recorded their names and, occasionally, those of family members, their offerings of thanksgiving or divine blessing, and their solicitations of remembrance and favor for themselves and for their families. And these markings, associated with ancient Jews and their neighbors throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Mespotamia, and northwest Arabia, beg for attention as much as do their early modern Christian counterparts.

In this chapter, I argue that certain acts of graffiti writing, such as these, should be properly classified as modes of prayer conducted by Jews and their neighbors alike. Associated behaviors, including physical and sensual acts of carving, painting, and smudging, indeed, were intimately connected to the spatial and temporal contexts in which people performed them. The ensuing analysis of graffiti writing ultimately reveals another point, equally obscured in Jewish historiography: that ancient Jews prayed in a variety of built and natural environments. They sometimes did so only beside other Jews, and, at other times, alongside their pagan, Zoroastrian, and Christian neighbors. Contributions of these observations are manifold, as they challenge and expand conventional understandings of devotional experience, activity, sanctity, exclusivity, sociality, and spatiality among Jews and their neighbors in antiquity.

DENATURING PRAYER

This analysis requires the preliminary denaturing of common assumptions that govern studies of ancient Jewish prayer. Prayer is often understood as a specifically verbal act—a vocalized or internal production or repetition of words or sentiments to communicate with the divine and, perhaps, with other worshippers.6 As Uri Erlich and Rachel Neis have recently argued, however, ancient Jewish prayer also entailed bodily and visual components.7 Closer attention to graffiti suggests that, in antiquity, acts of scratching texts into stone or plaster, or of painting images onto a wall, equally constituted acts of prayer. My working definition of prayer, then, accommodates this possibility by imagining it as a general type of communication—directed by humans toward the divine—which may be planned or spontaneous, individuated or rote, singular or repetitive. This communication might be verbal or written, silent, spoken, or gestural. Its expressions might include divine praise and thanksgiving; requests of favors or blessings for supplicants, their families, or their communities; express appeals to the divine, and/or allude to sacred events or history.8 Prayer(s) might be proffered in isolation or communally. Such conceptions of prayer expand, still further, toward the end of this chapter, after consideration of graffiti nuances current approaches to ancient devotion—and particularly among ancient Jews.

Attention to the spatial, physical, and local dimensions of prayer remains critical to this approach. Ancient and modern sources frequently discuss Jewish prayer as an activity substantively disembodied from its surroundings. This understanding is not accidental, but, as some suggest, reflects a deliberately crafted rabbinic response to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Biblical texts often describe the Jerusalem Temple as God’s one dwelling place on earth, where Israelites, Judahites, Judeans, and Jews diachronically offered their prayers (and sacrifices) to the divine.9 For this reason, some rabbis advocated visualizing scenes from the Temple during prayer, regardless of their actual surroundings (b. Yoma 54a–b)...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION Graffiti, Ancient and Modern
• CHAPTER 1 Carving Graffiti as Devotion
• CHAPTER 2 Mortuary Graffiti in the Roman East
• CHAPTER 3 Making One's Mark in a Pagan and Christian World
• CHAPTER 4 Rethinking Modern Graffiti through Ancient
• Notes
• References
• Index