Statement of the problem: identifying difference (and different identities) in the

Writing of his time spent living abroad but still in the cultural orbit of the western hemisphere, the American essayist Adam Gopnik compared his experience with life

8 _{Original publications include: Avi-Yonah 1981b; Avigad 1971; 1976a; Beyer and Lietzmann 1930; Cumont}

1916; de Rossi 1867; Fasola 1976; Garrucci 1862; Goodenough 1953b; Herzog 1861; Leon 1960; Müller 1912. The sarcophagi from Rome were discovered in various places at different times. For a fuller account of their history (including the history of publication of individual sarcophagi) see Konikoff 1986. Subsequent research on Jewish patrons and their sarcophagi has been undertaken either as short articles, or as a smaller part of a larger project. See especially: Aviam 2016; Fischer 1998; Foerster 2012; Huskinson 1996; Koch 2002; Levine 2013.

back home and discovered that daily life was more or less the same. Still, he observed that “The differences are tiny and real. Cultures don’t really encode things. They include things, and leave things out.”9 _{This observation is telling, and applies equally well to the}

ancient world. The Jewish community of Beth She'arim was a modest, provincial one in a rural setting. The community at Rome was part of a thriving and cosmopolitan urban environment with extensive cultural and economic ties that spanned the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, just as citizens in the United States and France consider themselves part of the same “Western” culture, broadly defined, the Jewish communities of Beth She’arim and Rome shared at least in broad strokes in the same cultural orbit of the Roman Empire. While this dominant culture was always and everywhere locally inflected, much remained the same, especially in the rhythms of daily life. Jews in both Beth She’arim and Rome were confronted with the same basic question: how and to what extent to engage the cultural koine of the Roman world while maintaining and even fortifying their sense of Jewishness.

This question was probably not at the fore of every cultural encounter or in every mundane event of daily life, rather it probably surfaced most explicitly in those moments outside of the mundane. The occasion of death was one such event

representing a departure from the quotidian rhythms of life, and for this reason burial remains of all kinds have long figured prominently in the reconstruction of social history

and cultural identities.10 _{Indeed, funerary rituals, including those surrounding}

sarcophagi, are widely understood as reflective of culture and social structure at large.11

Neither was this question unique to the Jewish communities. Across the Roman Empire, local communities confronted the same basic question of whether and how to maintain their cultural, ethnic and religious traditions in the context of cultural contact and change brought about by incorporation in the Roman world. Ultimately, the answer was composed of the same basic building blocks: choices made by individuals, often conditioned by communal traditions, to “include things, or leave things out.” These choices most often amounted to small, even ‘tiny’ differences, and since they consist mainly of adoptions and rejections—the presence or absence of aspects of ‘Roman’ culture—they are often difficult to locate. Yet, it is in these choices, these small

10 _{Part of the reason for this, as Hall (1997, 111) points out, is practical. Burials present a special class of}

archaeological contexts that usually represent a single event horizon, and are generally free from intrusive material from other periods. As such, they sometimes present a simpler and straightforward picture of the past. See Hall 1997. However, while this is undoubtedly the case for many burial sites, those encountered here in Rome and in Beth She’arim were large communal burial plots, used over generations, and

subsequently the site of repeated incursions and looting by later visitors. Even individual sarcophagi were sometimes used for multiple burials, and/or changed hands between multiple owners in the ancient world.

11 _{Hall 1997, 112; Hope 2011, xi; Morris 1992, 1ff.. In this way, Morris, who compiled one of the foremost}

accounts of funerary rituals in the classical world, opened his study with the claim that “the analysis of burial is the analysis of symbolic action.” See Morris 1992, 1. Perhaps for this reason—that they are highly symbolic actions—funerary rituals are not always reflective of social structure in ways that are

straightforward and easy to interpret. Elaborate or lavish graves or grave goods can be markers of striving to achieve social status, rather than of social status itself. Parker Pearson’s study (1982) of social status in mortuary practices demonstrates the need for caution in reconstructing socio-cultural history from burial data. He found that ‘social advertisement in death’ in the form of grave goods and funerary monuments was in many ways inversely related to real social locations of individuals and groups in the local social

hierarchy. Groups in adverse social locations expressed ideal conceptions of social structure by lavish outputs in funerary expense. Leach, in a study of Victorian funerary practices, put it “there is no general correlation between grandeur in graves and grave goods and wealth and high status among the living” (as quoted in Hall 1997, 126).

differences, that most Jews—in common with other local peoples of the Roman Empire—found ways to be Jewish and Roman at the same time.

As we will see, it is exceedingly difficult to pin down where this difference lay with regards to the sarcophagi of Jewish patrons. In most cases, the sarcophagi of Jewish patrons in the ancient world were more or less indistinguishable from those of non-Jews. Regarding the difficulties inherent in identifying different groups of people who used similar sets of objects, Gardner pointed out that the problem is not only “how do we tell them apart? More importantly, how did they tell each other apart?”12 _{The Jewish}

communities of late ancient Rome and Palestine by and large used many or most of the same objects, including sarcophagi, as their non-Jewish neighbors and it is rare to find ‘distinctive’ material culture.

Of course, they may have invested these objects and the images on them with different meanings or used them in different ways, but such alternative meanings and uses are obscured in the archaeological record. Sarcophagi belonging to Jewish patrons were often sculpted in similar styles, and with similar motifs, themes and programs as those belonging to non-Jewish contemporaries. Furthermore, although we encounter differences in the level of execution on many sarcophagi belonging to Jewish patrons, most of the sarcophagi from both communities were probably sculpted by artisans working out of workshops that served Jews, Christians and pagans alike.13

12 Gardner 2007, 16.

Another difficulty that confronts us is the chasm of time and culture that separates us from our subject. We lack the visual literacy with which ancient viewers would have regarded the sculptural programs of sarcophagi. Visual culture, like all cultural forms and resources from language to objects, does not arise in a vacuum. Every image comes with a genealogy of culturally embedded meanings and layered with historical

associations in the forms, symbols and very colors it uses (or avoids). These have been called ‘imbricated meanings,’ previous associations and meanings that are an

irrevocable part of the foundation of any new meaning arising out of any instance of visual culture; in every image the old is partly deconstructed, partly constructive.14

These ‘imbricated’ meanings are difficult to recover over a gap of millennia; they rely on implicit knowledge of the cultural traditions out of which art and artifacts emerged. Along these lines, Hodder has pointed out that:

“In the construction of the cultural world, all dimensions (the height or colour of pottery for example) already have meaningful associations. An individual in the past is situated within this historical frame, and interprets the cultural order from within its perspective. The archaeologist seeks also to get 'inside' the historical context, but the jump is often a considerable one.”15

What’s more, the adoption of certain Roman forms of burial culture by Jews in the Roman diaspora, from gold glass to sarcophagi, did not necessarily signify an

unambiguous adoption of the Roman functions and meanings attached to these burial artifacts. Indeed, as Meyers has noted in discussing the adoption of Hellenistic material

14 Rolling 2007, 9.

culture in Palestine, Hellenism (and, by extension, Romanization) could “serve as a framework for preserving and promoting local Semitic culture.”16 _{Nowhere is this}

notion more true than in the funerary culture of the Jewish Roman diaspora.

Ultimately, the difficulties inherent in identifying difference (and different identities) in the past through material and visual culture may lead us to ask whether difference is even a meaningful preoccupation in the first place. To Gardner’s question “How did they tell each other apart?” we might ask in reply “Did they?” We often find what it is we set out to look for, so perhaps, rather than assume difference and search for it, we should begin more neutrally and allow ourselves the possibility that perhaps by focusing on difference, we might see difference where none really existed. We might accept that our subject—wealthy Jewish sarcophagus patrons—defined themselves as much or more by shared culture, held in common with their neighbors, as by

differences.