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"In this fascinating study, Stern documents ancient Jewish graffiti from around the Roman world, and explores the ways in which graffiti were used as a means of expression in contexts ranging from tombs and synagogues to public spaces such as theaters and hippodromes."
--Jodi Magness, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"Stern enables us to glimpse into the lives and concerns of ordinary Jews who were eager to leave their mark in public and private spaces, tagging their environment with personal messages and symbols. Her book is not only a great contribution to the study of ancient Jewish literacy and the relation between image and text but also exposes individual interactions with space, commemoration, and personal identity."
--Catherine Hezser, SOAS University of London"This beautifully written and well-researched book explores an almost uncharted world, that of the informal messages etched and painted by Jews of antiquity onto a variety of media. They constitute a wonderful contrast to the dry tomes of official historiography and the conventional formulae of monumental inscriptions, getting us closer to the everyday thoughts and feelings of their perpetrators."
--Robert G. Hoyland, New York University "In this illuminating book, Stern shows how the Jews of late antiquity engaged in the same kinds of markings of space for ritual, social, and individual reasons as did their non-Jewish contemporaries. At the same time, she discovers subtle ways Jewish practices set them off from their neighbors."
--Hayim Lapin, author of Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100-400 CE "Truly impressive. Stern's book will be of profound importance to all scholars of ancient Judaism."
--Rachel Neis, author of The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity
About the author
Karen B. Stern is assistant professor of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is the author of
Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa.
Summary
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
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"This thought-provoking book takes a new approach to the graffiti found in holy sites, tombs and sometimes civic structures, regarding them as words that do things rather than simply record a visit."---David Frankfurter, Journal of Roman Studies
