For thirty years, archaeologist and historian of religion Leonard Rutgers has been researching the Jewish catacombs in Rome. To round off his project, the professor of ancient culture at Utrecht University has not published a long scientific standard work. Instead, he has summarized his work in a public book, Israel on the Tiber, which was published earlier this year. “With this I reach a larger audience,” he gives as the main reason.
In clear language he makes it clear that the Jewish community in Rome was fully integrated for centuries in the capital of the Roman Empire.
In passing, he also shows how science works and indicates what researchers may or may not know. He also emphasizes that certain conclusions can be provisional until proven otherwise.
The book begins with a brief history of the investigation of the Jewish catacombs in Rome. In 1606, the first underground Jewish cemetery was discovered, in what is now the Monteverde neighborhood. Shortly afterwards the place fell into oblivion again, until a few centuries later the German professor of church history Nikolaus Müller rediscovered the catacomb. The First World War, in which Italy sided with the Allies, put an end to that research. These catacombs have been lost to science due to collapses and the construction of flats in Mussolini’s time. Meanwhile, a second Jewish catacomb had been found in 1859 at the vineyard (vigna) Randanini along the Via Appia and near the Christian catacombs Callixtus, Sebastianus and Praetextatus. Sixty years later, the catacombs of the Villa Torlonia were added.
Despite mostly flawed research, when Rutgers started his research there was a communis opinion about the Jewish community in Rome: a large group of Jews, possibly sixty thousand in number, lived cut off from the rest of Roman society; the custom of burying their dead in catacombs was not inherited by the Jews, but had been adopted from the Christians.
Suddenly the tank was empty, while I was deep in the catacombs
You are trained as a classical archaeologist. How did you get to the Jewish catacombs?
Rutgers: “My doctoral thesis was already about the archeology of the Jewish community in Rome. I then spent a year at the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. At that time, only the catacombs of Vigna Randanini were accessible. One of my teachers, Father Umberto Fasola, had done research in the catacombs himself. He gave me the keys and I rode there every day on my Amsterdam bicycle.”
Did you then, as you describe in your book, run out of light?
“Yes, I had a gas lamp, one of those with a bombola, a gas tank. Suddenly the tank was empty, while I was deep in the catacombs. Fortunately there was a cable on the floor, on all fours I crawled to the entrance. Later I always sent my students into the catacombs two by two, with electric lamps. Doing research in the catacombs is intense anyway: the air is bad, it’s dark and you’re enclosed by walls. In the beginning, students also dream intensely at night.”
It takes time to delve into all those topics, but in the end it pays off
From the very beginning, you have involved various disciplines in your research: archaeology, epigraphics, linguistics and later also natural sciences. Why?
“Many archaeologists specialize, for example in one material category. But by studying not only the sarcophagi, but also the lamps, wall paintings and inscriptions – and thus linguistic aspects – you get more context and therefore a better picture. And by also involving linguistics and natural sciences, there was even more interaction and an even broader embedding of the results. It takes time to delve into all those subjects, but it pays off in the end.”
The study of all cultural phenomena in the catacombs eventually led to the firm conclusion that the Jewish community was certain of its Jewish identity. The symbol for this was the image on walls and objects of the menorah, the seven-branched candlestick, which the Romans had taken as loot after plundering the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.
At the same time, the Jews were well integrated into Roman society. A sarcophagus with a menorah between a depiction of the four seasons, a typical Greco-Roman theme, indicates that Jews could easily enter a non-Jewish workshop to order a sarcophagus to their liking. Furthermore, they used the same Greek and Latin language, with the same word formation and sentence structure, as the rest of Rome. They also sometimes opted for Roman names.
Based on the number of graves (more than 7,000) and the duration of use, Rutgers also concludes that the Jewish community, divided over several synagogues, did not average more than a thousand people during the Imperial era.
Sometimes the archaeologists seem to speak Italian and the naturalists Chinese
In 2005 you also showed that the Jewish catacombs are older than the Christian ones. How did it go? And how did the Vatican react?
“Particles of charcoal were found in the slaked lime used to seal the graves. I had it dated using the C14 method. It showed that the earliest parts date from the middle of the first century, more than a century older than the oldest Christian catacombs. I waited with the announcement until I had built up a respected position. Because there was of course a strong headwind from the Vatican in the beginning. The wind has now died down again.”
You are now engaged in a large-scale interdisciplinary project on the migration of the Jews. To do this, you will work together with Harvard’s David Reich, a leading researcher in the field of so-called ‘ancient DNA’.
“We are fifty men; we really work together and do the online meetings with all disciplines together. For this we need to develop a common language, because each field has its own methods and conventions. Sometimes the archaeologists seem to speak Italian and the naturalists Chinese. That’s why I immerse myself in their methods, in turn I give them reading lists on cultural-historical subjects.
“Interdisciplinary research yields new data for different material groups due to the different research methods. All those data are a reflection of the same past, but how do you interpret them? When results go against popular beliefs, things get exciting. Then you have to start thinking about the question ‘how do we know what we know’. So very epistemological.”