About the Talk

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 non-elite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Yet 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. In this talk, Prof. Stern reveals how these markings can tell us more than we might expect about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Drawing analogies with modern graffiti practices, she documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors to shed new light on the richness of their quotidian lives and on how commonly popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement crossed ethnic and religious boundaries.

About the Speaker