Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 86

Alexandrian Jews left a remarkable literary legacy, unmatched in the rest of the diaspora, however, archaeological remains help to sketch the contours of Jewish life in other regions outside of the land. Burial inscriptions from Rome and other parts of the Italian peninsula paint an especially tantalizing portrait of the Jewish communities there.³⁵ Jews existed in substantial numbers in Rome and Italy, these Jews may well have been populations originally brought as prisoners by Pompey and later Vespasian (several individual inscriptions identify Jews as freed slaves). Leonard Rutgers cautions scholars from attributing the apparent spread of Jewish communities to proselytization, as has long been the norm, but instead to see migration and other factors at work. Inscriptional evidence tells us that Roman Jews supported synagogues across the city and region and felt obvious pride in communal involvement—however, details about Jewish life in Italy elude us. Communal cohesion is reinforced by the fact that Jews buried their dead together in exclusively Jewish catacombs, and by the fact that amidst decorative imagery indistinguishable from their pagan neighbors, Jewish burial sites show a proliferation of Jewish images, especially menorahs. That said, the language of the inscriptions was Greek and Latin, not Hebrew or Aramaic, and the names and naming conventions are distinctly local. On account of the lack of mentions of any afterlife in the funerary texts, Rutgers also surmises that Roman Jews were not of an apocalyptic or messianic bent but were contentedly ensconced in this world.³⁶ Nevertheless, Jewish culture was strange to most Romans (and perhaps for that reason attractive to some). We have evidence of periodic expulsions of Jews from the city under Tiberias, and again in the 40s CE by Emperor Claudius³⁷, related to unrest surrounding the nascent Jesus movement. Still, scant as the evidence is, we have a picture of a culturally embedded Jewish community.