Inscribing devotion and death : : archaeological evidence for Jewish populations of North Africa / / by Karen B. Stern.

• Superior document: Religions in the Graeco-Roman world, v. 161
• Author: Stern, Karen B.
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Religions in the Graeco-Roman world ; v. 161.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (360 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Reliance on essentialist or syncretistic models of cultural dynamics has limited past evaluations of ancient Jewish populations. This reexamination of evidence for Jews of North Africa offers an alternative approach. Drawing from methods developed in cultural studies and historical linguistics, this book replaces traditional categories used to examine evidence for early Jewish populations and demonstrates how direct comparison of Jewish material evidence with that of its neighbors allows for a reassessment of what the category of “Jewish” might have meant in different North African locations and periods and, by extension, elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The result is a transformed analysis of Jewish cultural identity that both emphasizes its indebtedness to larger regional contexts and allows for a more informed and complex understanding of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.

Table of Contents

Toward a cultural history of Jewish populations in Roman North Africa -- Locating Jews in a North African world -- Naming like the neighbors: Jewish onomastic practices in Roman North Africa -- Inscribing the dead to describe the living: reading Jewish identity through funerary language -- Questioning "Jewishnesss" in the North African synagogue: Hammam Lif as a case study -- North African Jewish responses to death: choosing appropriate gods, neighbors, and houses in the afterlife.