Jews and Greeks in ancient Cyrene

1. The Circumstances of Settlement

The earliest known find of Jewish significance in Cyrenaica is the seal bearing the archaic Hebrew inscription:

לעבדיו

בן ישב

(of ‘Avadyu son of Yashav).

It was found, apparently, at Cyrene itself.[779] As Diringer could not date the seal more closely, it can only be placed within the broad period to which seals of this type belong, namely, between the 10th and 4th centuries B.C.

Isolated Jews may have found their way to Cyrene before the hellenistic period. One apparently Semitic name, at any rate, is known to us from a Cyrenean inscription of the end of the 4th century; this is a list of soldiers, set up in the Temple of Zeus,[780] among its names being Baraibis son of Moiristheneus (Βάραφις Μαρισθενεύς). Baraibis seems to be a transliteration of Bar-Hibbas.[781] Furthermore, it will be noted (p. 131) that the Jewish population of the Syrtic region was very ancient, and it is hard to know whether it reached the Gulf from Africa or from Cyrene. An archaic Hebrew inscription has been found at Zliten,[782] also a seal with the name of the owner, Elyashiv.[783] A number of 3rd-century B.C. amphorae discovered at Busetta bore inscriptions, one of which was in Hebrew.[784] As previously stated, the Cyrenean frontier reached Purgos Euphrantas (Gasr Zifrin), under Ptolemy Lagos, and only subsequently resumed its former position further eastward, hence it is possible that Jewish settlement on the Gulf began in the same period, since the arrival of Jews in Cyrenaica itself is connected by Josephus with the first Ptolemy. The question, however, must remain without a definite answer for the time being, as the seal from Zliten may well indicate an earlier arrival. In this connection may be mentioned the Jewish settlement at Boreion (Bu-Grada)[785] on the south-western Cyrenaican coast, i.e. on the east shore of the Syrtic Gulf. In the Byzantine period the Jews of this place claimed that their ancestors had reached the place in the days of Solomon,[786] and even if the tradition is far-fetched, it is doubtless evidence that the settlement was very old. In short, the chief value of the remains of early Jewish settlement on the Gulf lies in this, that if there were Jews there as early as the 3rd century B.C., they can hardly have been absent from Cyrenaica in the same century.

Flavius Josephus attributes Jewish settlement in Cyrene to the time of Ptolemy Lagos, and in the light of historical reality we must connect the establishment of a Jewish population in the country with the growth of the hellenistic Jewish community of Egypt. Josephus writes that Ptolemy entrusted fortresses to Jews in Egypt, and desiring to strengthen his hold over Cyrene and the other cities of Libya, sent part (μέρος) of the Jews to inhabit them.[787] Elsewhere[788] he says that since Cyrene and Egypt had been placed under united rule, Cyrene had supported numerous organized groups (συντάγματα) of Jews, which flourished and continued to practise their Jewish laws. This information follows immediately after Josephus’ reference to a Jewish political disturbance (στάσις) at Cyrene in the time of Sulla, hence it is to be assumed that it relates to the period after the unification of Cyrene and Egypt under the rule of Euergetes II, in 145 B.C. Josephus further relates that Ptolemy Lagos settled Jewish prisoners from Judaea in Egypt and distributed them among his garrisons, while other Jews emigrated to the country voluntarily.[789] In the same book he writes that Ptolemy II freed 120,000 Jewish prisoners in Egypt.[790] This report, and that on the formation of Jewich garrisons, are repeated shortly afterwards in the same work.[791] The liberation of Jewish prisoners is confirmed by the Aristeas Letter,[792] which says that Ptolemy brought a number of Jews from Syria, some of them prisoners of war, to settle in Egypt, placing 30,000 of them in his fortresses.

Three salient facts can be distinguished among these quotations:

1) that the Jewish colonization in Libya was connected in Josephus’ view with their settlement in Egypt, and took place in similar conditions;

2) that with regard to Cyrene, Josephus speaks of two periods or stages of Jewish immigration, namely of the first settlement and subsequently of the situation created by the union of Egypt and Cyrenaica in the second half of the 2nd century B.C.;

3) Josephus’ writings produce the clear impression that the first Jewish settlement in Egypt and Libya was of a decidedly military character. His account of the despatch of Jews to Cyrene and the country’s other cities, does not indeed state explicitly that they were sent as garrisons or to discharge military duties. Only the fact that his report comes immediately after the description of the Jewish settlement in garrisons (φρούρια) in Egypt, leads us to this assumption. But his words clearly mean that the Jews were sent to be a loyal element among the population and supporters of the Ptolemaic regime. Very interesting, moreover, is the term applied by Josephus when he reports the “organized groups”, (συντάγματα) of Libyan Jews, as the word is derived first and foremost from the sphere of military organization.

We therefore face two questions: What was the character of this first settlement — military, agricultural or other; and when did it take place?

Some scholars have seen in the first clause of the Ptolemaic constitution of Cyrene a loophole for the introduction of newcomers, including Jews, into the ranks of the citizens of Cyrene; the reference is to the clause which permits Ptolemy to grant Cyrenean citizenship to anyone he chooses.[793] But it is very improbable that Ptolemy would at this stage have intruded a non-Greek group into a citizen-body whose affairs he was endeavouring to compose by compromise, with the object of restoring stability and healing rifts after a stormy period. On the other hand the evidence from Egypt and perhaps from the Syrtis confirms that Jews were brought in at this period as a colonizing factor, hence there are two possibilities: either that Jews figured among the Ptolemaic garrisons of Cyrene and the remaining Libyan cities, or that Jews were included among the new military settlers planted by Ptolemy on the soil of the conquered country. If we could be certain that the clauses of the constitution disqualifying for citizenship those joining “Ptolemy’s colonies” was rightly read by Oliverio (Fraser was unable to find the words on the inscription), this would be good proof of contemporary cleruchic settlement. Unfortunately, we cannot be sure if the proof exists. As to the first possibility, there is no evidence for Jews serving in garrisons in Cyrenaica; the information of Ptolemy’s constitution is simply that his garrison was stationed at Cyrene.[794] We therefore have no alternative but to examine the question of the form and date of the first Jewish settlement by the method of analogy, that is, in the light of the contemporary situation in Egypt and elsewhere.

There were Jewish troops in Alexandria, on archaeological evidence, as early as in the 3rd century. This is shown by the tombs of al-Ibramiyeh.[795] We also know of Jewish garrisons in the Egyptian Delta, indicated by the names Castra Iudaeorum[796] and Στρατόπεδον Ἰουδαίων (the Jewish camp);[797] a third is recorded at Pelusium.[798] Unfortunately the records belong to the 1st century B.C. or later, and we do not know when they originated. A “phyle” (φυλή) of Jewish “Macedonians” existed in Alexandria in the 1st century A.D.,[799] and it seems highly probable that Tcherikover was right in interpreting the designation “Macedonians” as a “pseudo-ethnic” indicating merely the type of unit to which they belonged,[800] “phyle” being thus, not a tribe of the polis but a military formation. The date when this body originated is equally unknown, and it may well have been formed during the 2nd century B.C. when Jewish prestige as a military factor was high for both external and internal political reasons, and the independent Jewish katoikia of Onias was set up at Leontopolis for a body of Jewish katoikoi.[801] The Egyptian analogy, then, does not help us to answer the question, whether the Jews composed garrisons in early Ptolemaic Libya.

On the other hand the question of whether the first Cyrenean Jews were military cultivators (cleruchs, katoikoi), invites two other considerations. Firstly, the word κατοίκῆσαν (“in order to settle there”) is used by Josephus when he reports the despatch of Jews to the cities of Cyrenaica. Possibly he was influenced to use this word by the conditions of a period later than the event he was describing, since the word κάτοικος replaced that of κληρούχος in Egypt only in the 2nd century B.C.[802] in application to a soldier settler who received his plot in return for military service. But the term κάτοικος for such a settler appears in the 3rd century B.C. in Asia,[803] and the Jews of Hierapolis (Phrygia) not only called themselves κατοικοῦντες, a broad term without specific meaning (cf. the Latin word consistentes) but their communal organization was known as a κατοικία, and we have reliable testimony from Josephus that Jews were settled in the cities and countryside of Phrygia in organized military colonies under Antiochus III in the years 223-197 B.C.[804] Accordingly it is possible that Josephus himself, at least, believed that the Jews of Cyrene had been sent from Egypt as an organized body of military settlers.

Antiochus III’s settlement of Jews in Asia may indeed assist our study, since its circumstances were decidedly parallel to those in which the Cyrenean Jews were originally settled, to judge by Josephus’ account. Two thousand Jewish families were then sent from Babylonia to Phrygia and Lydia to prop Seleucid rule after serious risings had occurred in those countries. In Antiochus’ instructions to his governor Zeuxis, preserved in Josephus’ text, the King directs his deputy to settle the immigrants in “garrisons (or fortresses) and at the most vital points (εἰς τὰ φρούρια καὶ τοὐς ἀναγκαιοτάτους τόπους), the orders being explicit to allot them plots of land and plantations.[805] Recently Sardis has yielded epi-graphical confirmation of the background of the colonization, in the form of a fragmentary inscription discovered in the city’s synagogue, and containing parts of the orders of Antiochus to Zeuxis, the destruction of the city in the course of disorders being referred to, and instructions issued to repair the damage.[806] If analogy is here permissible, we shall understand the Jewish colonization in Cyrenaica described by Josephus as the settlement of these newcomers in organized bodies, some in the town and some outside it, but all with plots of land assigned from tracts in royal possession. Here again, Asia Minor offers us an instructive analogy. Sources consistently refer to the Jews of Cyrenaica as “the Jews about Cyrene” (see further p. 196) e.g. οἱ κατὰ Κυρήνην Ἰουδαῖοι. A not dissimilar phrase was used in 281 B.C. to designate the Macedonian military katoikoi settled round Thyateira (Phrygia) in the hellenistic period.[807] This being the case, there can be little doubt that the Jewish settlers of the period did not obtain citizenship in the cities concerned, and it may be stated that as noncitizens did not normally enjoy the right to acquire landed property (γῆς ἔγκτησις) within the territory of a Greek city,[808] the new immigrants of the period must have been mostly absorbed, in so far as they took up agriculture, by royal lands. This inference is important, and apt to influence our estimate of events in a subsequent period.

We have little information on the behaviour of the Ptolemies towards the landed property of the older free Greek states which they controlled, but an instance from Thera, Cyrene’s own mother-city, throws some light on what may have occurred in Cyrene. Thera became a Ptolemaic naval base between 296 and 146 B.C., and in 164-160 B.C. Ptolemy III is known to have awarded the income of four local farms, which had been confiscated for reasons unknown, to support the gymnasium used by his garrison there.[809] These troops, it is true, were not cleruchs, but the action shows that the Ptolemaic kings regarded it as within their power to exploit the land of a free Greek city in the interests of their own military forces. Another instance may be cited. Some hellenistic king whose name has not come down to us appropriated the lands ot the Temple of Zeus at Aezani (Phrygia) for distribution among cleruchs, as is proved by an inscription.[810] Here, however, part of the rent paid by the military settlers was returned to the city concerned.

Evidence of cleruchic settlement is absent in Egypt until 275 B.C.[811] although it is generally thought to have begun earlier.[812] From 259 B.C. we hear of Jews settled on the land, always as individuals among non-Jews, among them cleruchs, men of the epigone, and simple peasants (λαοί)[813]. We further learn of “prisoners from Asia” settled on the soil in 224,[814] partly on crown land, but it is not clear if they included Jews. On the other hand we know from Hecataeus of a group of Jews who came from Judaea to settle in Egypt at this time, and appear to have obtained a distinct charter from Ptolemy Lagos;[815] the conclusion is therefore natural that this was organized colonization in defined conditions. Egyptian epigraphy and papyrology show the existence of Jewish villages as early as the 3rd century B.C.; such were Athribis,[816] Psenyris,[817] Schedia,[818] Alexandrounesos,[819] and an unidentified place in Lower Egypt.[820] All these had synagogues, hence probably also organized corporations with their own internal regulations (πολιτεύματα).

An analysis of the status of all these Jewish settlers during the 3rd century and later shows, that whether or not they included prisoners settled as λαοί, or leasing land from cleruchs, others were simple peasants on crown land (βασιλικοί λαοί), cleruchs, or their second generation (τῆς ἐπιγονής). In sum, the evidence in Egypt for the period under discussion shows plainly that the Jews settled as peasants, or cleruchs, and that by the middle of the 3rd century were already living in concentrated villages or were organized in village communities. But none of this material confirms the literary testimony concerning Jewish garrisons in the same early period. Yet the Egyptian evidence, if it does not strengthen the literary evidence concerning Cyrene, does not contradict it. And it is proper to note an important difference between the position in Egypt and that in Cyrenaica in this period. No rebellions broke out in Egypt against the Ptolemies in the 4th and 3rd centuries, whereas in Cyrenaica the Lagid conquest was marked by civil war at home and resistance to the conqueror from without for a period of twenty years. It is with this difference in mind that we must gauge the degree of truth in Josephus’ report on the character of the first Jewish colonization in the Libyan cities.

Can the date of the Jewish settlement in Cyrene by Ptolemy Lagos be dated more closely? Ptolemy captured Cyrene in 322; in 313 a rebellion of the city was suppressed, but this was carried out by his general Agis, and Ptolemy himself did not visit the country. In 308 he reestablished his control of the city after the death of Ophelias and seems to have been there personally. If there was a fourth reconquest in 301, this was led by Magas, his son. An appreciable Jewish settlement is unlikely to have taken place before a considerable number of Jews had reached Egypt, and this could only have been the result of a campaign of conquest in Judaea itself, which had led to the transfer of numerous inhabitants as prisoners or refugees. Ptolemy invaded Judaea in the years 320, 312, 302 and 301. In one of these campaigns, according to Agatharchides,[821] he captured Jerusalem, and Appian[822] also mentions this event, adding that Ptolemy then took many prisoners to Egypt and sold them into slavery. Hecataeus relates that after much fighting in 312, Ptolemy was accompanied back to Egypt by many of the inhabitants, including the high priest Hezeqiah and his followers.[823] As Tcherikover has shown,[824] there is no evidence that Ptolemy took Jerusalem in 320 or 312, but the conditions for the taking of the city by storm and the transporting of prisoners-of-war to Egypt existed in 302.[825] It is however evident that Ptolemy would hardly have settled a hostile group just uprooted from its own homeland for sedition, in a country that had recently risen against him, with the object of using them to strengthen his domination. The year 302, then, is unlikely to have been the year of the Cyrenaican colonization; and a better choice would be 312,[826] when Hezeqiah and his people went down to Egypt voluntarily out of friendship for Ptolemy and perhaps because they were hostile to Antigonus. In that year, indeed, according to Diodorus[827] Ptolemy settled 8000 prisoners of war in Egypt. We possess moreover, as stated, evidence that Hezeqiah’s group were settled by a written agreement, and this could have been part of a general movement which enabled the settlement of a larger Jewish group as far afield as Cyrenaica.

The Ptolemaic colonization of Jews in Cyrene may therefore be regarded as finding confirmation in contemporary circumstances, and Josephus’ account of it may be accepted in a broad sense. We may further believe that the newcomers were settled chiefly as cleruchs, i.e. as soldiers and cultivators who received their plots in return for their readiness to serve when required. It may on the whole be assumed, that the Jewish population of Cyrene at this period did not differ in its composition from that of contemporary Egypt, i.e. that it included cultivators, soldiers, military settlers, craftsmen and, in course of time, traders and perhaps even government officials.[828]

2. The Second Jewish immigration

Besides the literary evidence just discussed, we have at present no reliable archaeological evidence for the existence in Cyrene of a Jewish population in the time of the first Ptolemies. Slouschz saw the name “Adam” inscribed in Hebrew near the city of Cyrene[829] It may reflect the initial period of settlement when the newcomers still spoke their own language. On the other hand the Greek name “Adamas” appears in Egypt in company with two Cyreneans in a 3rd-century B.C. inscription at Hiera Sykaminos (Maharaka).[830]

A more reliable testimony of early Jewish settlement in the territory is the Hebrew village name Kappharodos (“New village”) recorded by Synesius (see p. 197); such a name could only have originated with Jewish immigrants who had come directly from an unhellenized Judaea.

Our information on the Jews of the country begins to assume a more substantial character in the 2nd century B.C. when Jewish immigration to Cyrenaica appears to have increased, according to the report of Strabo, (as reproduced by Josephus)[831] which we have quoted above (p. 132), and is to be related to a time shortly after 145 B.C.; by 140/39 B.C. the Jewish community of the country was important enough to earn a mention in the Roman Senate’s circular letter to various states and cities containing Jewish populations.[832] The new migration would seem to have inaugurated the golden age of Cyrenaican Jewry. In the same decade the first Hasmoneans broke through to the coast of Judaea by capturing Jaffa (142 B.C.) and other maritime cities, and the reputation of the Jews as a fighting nation was established. The national war, as well as the accompanying social and political struggle between hellenists and nationalists among the Jews of Judaea itself, caused the departure from the country of not a few Jews who settled in Egypt and in other neighbouring lands. Hence the general situation led to an increase of Jewish traders, slaves, soldiers and colonists throughout the eastern Mediterranean area, and Cyrene was doubtless one of the beneficiaries of this outflow.

The influence of the Maccabees and of the Jewish national movement in Judaea on the Jews of Cyrenaica is known to us only from one source, namely, from the composition of the Second Book of the Maccabees, the original version of which was written by Jason of Cyrene. Had we possessed the full original version, we might perhaps have been able to gather from it further information on Cyrenean Jewry, but fate has decreed otherwise.[833] The book, at any rate, reveals the links of that Jewish community with its homeland and also the contemporary level of Greek culture among Libyan Jews of the period. The contents of the existing epitome proves, in the view of some scholars, that the author had been an eyewitness of the events he described,[834] and if this is correct, it shows that individual volunteers or groups reached Judaea from Libya to take part in the Jewish war against the Seleucids.

There may be indirect evidence for such participation. In the ist century A.D. we know the name of a Jew who discharged a prominent function in the life of the city of Cyrene, serving in the important post of nomophylax in the civic authority, — Eleazar son of Jason (see below, pp. 186sq.). The Second Book of Maccabees[835] relates that Judah the Maccabee sent to Rome a diplomatic mission consisting of Eupolemos son of Johanan and Jason son of Eleazar. Tcherikover has noted that the author of II Maccabees, Jason of Cyrene, mentions Eupolemos in a way that shows him to have been his contemporary and personal acquaintance. Jason son of Eleazar may therefore also have been a Cyrenean and an ancestor of Eleazar son of Jason, nomophylax of the city under Nero.[836]

Epigraphy may have given us yet another echo of the events of the Maccabean wars against the Seleucids and the Jewish hel-lenizers.

In 1960 the writer republished four inscriptions inscribed on the north wall of the town of Teucheira, the names in which suggested that they were of Jews who had migrated to Cyrene from Judaea as a result of the Maccabean struggle against the Seleucids.[837] He there voiced the opinion that they may have become military settlers, but it subsequently became clear that the inscriptions are those of ephebes, or pupils of the city’s gymnasium who appear in couples, evidently as lovers.[838] The fourth inscription undoubtedly includes Jewish names,

Τελ[χι]ναῖος Δα[- - Δο]σίθεο[ς] /[839] Αἰνέας Θεοξή / νω

The three other inscriptions in their revised form, are:

1) Ἰσχος ὁ Αιδυ<μ>αῖ<ος> Ἀρχίβιος Χυλδαῖος Τιμοκράτη(ς)[840]

2) Μένι[α]ς- - V Ἀριβαῖ[ος] (ἔτους) ί Φιλ - - (ἔτους) ιδ’ Ἀριστέας[841]

3) Ἀλέξων ψυχὴ Ἀδδι(δ)α <ῖος>[842]

My first conjecture was that the names Huldaios, Aribaios and Addidaios were the places of origin of the men concerned, referring to the three ancient Judaean villages of Huldah, Hadid[843] (the Arabic Haditah) and Harib (the Arabic Kefar Harrubbah),[844] all of which are situated in the same region of south Judaea, in the vicinity of Lydda. Two of these, Harib and Hadid, were preponderantly Jewish in the Second Temple period and subsequently,[845] while Huldah has yielded remains of a Jewish building, probably for ritual immersion, containing mosaic floors adorned with Jewish symbols and Greek inscriptions of Jewish content.[846] The names at Teucheira, however, must now be regarded as personal, and the names Archibios and Huldaios seem to have been written by two different people. Yet even if this be accepted, we are bound to ask, how can we explain the proximity of two Jewish names (Dositheos, Theoxenos), to those of three other people, the name of each of whom takes the form of that of an ancient village in Judaea, each situated in the same region of that country? Even the assumption that the Libyan language contained Semitic elements (the place name Harrubbah occurs in Cyrenaica; it simply means a “carob tree”) is hardly a convincing explanation in the present circumstances, and the question must be left unanswered, but it does furnish evidence that among the pupils of the gymnasium in the hellenistic period were several young Jews, among them perhaps sons of emigres from Judaea, and if these were emigres, it is difficult not to connect their presence with the events of the Hasmonean revolt. It should nevertheless be noted that the name Haled today occurs three kilometres east of Teucheira, that of Harrubbah 28 kilometres east of the town. Further, Addida could conceivably represent the Aramaic form of Kephar Haddash (cf. above, p. 139).

The national struggle in Judaea not only resulted in the dispersal of refugees and Emigres over the neighbouring countries, but also strengthened the position of the Jewish community outside Judaea for a certain period. In Egypt a conjunction of political circumstances at home and abroad in the second half of the 2nd century B.C. led to a growth in the military importance of the Jewish community and to the establishment of several defined districts in which Jewish troops were concentrated as settlers, perhaps also to the stationing of a Jewish unit at Alexandria as part of the garrison. In the same period several Jews gained prominence as commanders in the Ptolemaic forces.[847] We do not know how these developments influenced the standing of the Jews of Cyrenaica; at this time the leaders of Egyptian Jewry supported Ptolemy VI Philometor and Cleopatra in their struggle against Euergetes II, then ruling Cyrene, and in 145 the latter invaded Egypt to win power.[848] His attack ended in a compromise with Cleopatra, but archaeological evidence suggests that the fortifications of the Jewish temple at Leontopolis, in the military district of Onias, were then taken by storm;[849] hence, in all probability, the story of Euergetes’ persecution of Egyptian Jewry.[850] This ended not (as Josephus relates) with a divine miracle or thanks to the prayers of Irene, mistress of the king, but owing to his reconciliation with Cleopatra, whom he duly wedded.[851] Nor do we know whether Euergetes’ wrath against the Jews of Egypt, due to their stand in the conflict, was extended to the Jews of Cyrene after the union of Egypt and Cyrene under his rule; it may however be noted, that previously in 162, Euergetes had been faced with a revolt of the Cyrenean Greeks and of the Libyans, nor was the territory without social ferment in the later years of his reign.[852] Euergetes may therefore have taken care not to attack the Jewish element in Cyrenaica; in Egypt he is known to have come to terms with the Jewish community after the crisis and behaved to them favourably: this at least, is what the inscriptions would imply.[853]

In Euergetes’ later years, indeed, the Jewish community of Cyrene grew stronger, and probably when Judaea gained access to the sea an influential commercial element began to develop amongst its members. This is perhaps reflected in the coins of Cyrene between the years 140-96 B.C., since Robinson noted[854] that in that period mutual influence between the Cyrenean coins and those of Judaea is discernible, which affects particularly the coins of the later Hasmonaeans and Herod.[855] This influence is chiefly detectable in technical characteristics, — roughness of execution and the clipping of the edges; on the other hand the only figured type common to both countries is that of the double cornucopia struck on contemporary Cyrenean coins[856] and also on Hasmonaean issues from John Hyrcanus to Matthias Antigonus, then on those of Herod.[857] However, the double cornucopia is also to be seen on coins of Ptolemy III at Cyrene.

The drawing closer of ties between Cyrenean Jewry and Judaea is nevertheless not in doubt, particularly in the first century B.C. The “Tyrians of Akko”, alone among the Levantine coastal towns, had received a consignment of grain from Cyrene, during the dearth of Alexander’s time, albeit the smallest on the list (1000 medimni);[858] later, apparently in the 2nd century A.D., Cyrenean Jews and even Libyan proselytes were resident at Jaffa.[859]

3. The Jews of Teucheira

The increased immigration of the 2nd and especially of the 1st century B.C., is shown most strikingly by the cemetery of Teucheira to which allusion has already been made. Of some 440 tomb inscriptions published in learned periodicals,[860] and located in the quarries to east and west of the city, 109 can be identified as Jewish by reason of the Jewish, Aramaic or theophoric names among them, but there are some 144 identifiable as Jewish because of their location in tombs in which other identifiable Jews were buried. With two exceptions, all these are in the eastern cemetery, since only a few of those to west of the town have been read or published.[861] The proportion of Jewish names is roughly 30 percent, of the total known, but other Jews are certainly unidentifiable because of their Greek or Latin names, since such are known in tombs in which undoubted Jews were interred. If therefore we cannot know the percentage of Jews in the total population, and not all the known burials have been published, there is nevertheless proof that the Jews composed a considerable section of it. As stated, most of the recorded epitaphs are in the quarries to the east of the city, those inscriptions published to the west of it being graffiti cut on the stones of the city-wall or the wall of the gymnasium.[862]

The period of the interments is not easy to determine. Some tombs are of the 1st century A.D., but the regnal and other dates figuring in the associated epitaphs make it more likely that they began twenty to thirty years earlier. (See below). Most of the epitaphs to east of the town open with a record of the year, but it is not always clear which era is used. In some cases it is difficult to decide if the figures indicate the era of Actium, the era of the province or the regnal years of a ruler. Some with high figures may be assumed to reckon by the era of Actium and their figures generally coincide with the regnal years of Augustus.[863] One inscription demonstrates explicitly the use of the regnal year, as it mentions Domitian.[864] The use of the era of Actium is proven for certain inscriptions in Cyrene, eg. SEG IX, 128,[865] while the use of the era of the province has not been proved with certainty, to the best of my knowledge, though it may be conjectured in one or two cases.[866]

In the discussion of this problem, it were well to utilize the archaeological evidence of the finds made in excavations carried.

In the discussion of this problem, it were well to utilize the archaeological evidence of the finds made in excavations carried out by Webster in the east cemetery.[867] The following epitaphs associated with the group of tombs dug by him and published by Gray and Wright,[868] may be noted:

According to the finds made in the tombs, these burials were all of the same period, and their pottery was thought to date them approximately to A.D. 100. It therefore becomes clear that two eras were used side by side, nor is there any relationship between the high and the low figures. The higher represent a “political” era (of a city or regime), and the lower, the regnal years of a ruler or rulers. Accordingly the figures of the Era of Actium are more appropriate to the archaeological finds. As regards the regnal dates, these probably belong to Flavian emperors, in which case the third (13 years) can only be that of Domitian (A.D. 81-96). Thus Wright’s dating of the pottery was correct, but only for the latest deposited in the tomb. We must therefore assume the Era of Actium in regard to a number of tombs at Teucheira, but it is hard to know whether some of the low figures do not indicate regnal years of the Ptolemaic dynasty. However, if we assume the Era of Actium for the high figures, then the tombs so dated extend from 5 B.C. to A.D. 94.[869]

There may be one burial under Commodus, to judge by the name of the dead man recorded in the epitaph.[870] A number of epitaphs are dated in the Roman period by their names.[871] In four of these only the nomen and praenomen occur, and are therefore evidently to be dated down to or in the reign of Tiberius. One family among the bearers of the tria nomina received citizenship under Claudius or Nero.

The problem of date must also be considered from the point of view of the letter-style of the inscriptions. This did not alter much in the period when the tombs were used, and in contrast to the position at Cyrene, the forms C and W are common at Teucheira (as in the other coastal towns and in Egypt) before the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D., apparently owing to the influence of Egypt, where these forms appear in half-cursive inscriptions as early as the 3rd century B.C.,[872] also on painted steles[873] and on Jewish tomb-monuments at El-Ibramiyeh.[874] On the other hand the open sigma (Σ) is completely absent at Teucheira, likewise the irregularly sized letters characteristic of the 3rd century BC in hellenistic inscriptions; this would suggest that the epitaphs begin later. Nor are there parallels to the inscriptions dated to the 2nd century B.C. at Cyrene, with letters of irregular height, adorned with cerifs. In addition, the shape of the frames enclosing the epitaphs must be considered. Many of them resemble those of the epitaphs of Tel el-Yehudiyeh (Leontopolis — The land of Honio or Onias)[875] and of other Egyptian sites. The resemblance is particularly close to the stones at Tel el-Yehudiyeh, with their apicidal gable tops; these begin in the 2nd century B.C. On the other hand there is a striking absence at Teucheira of such formulae as “Farewell, no one is immortal”, or “I am not and I don’t care”, so common on Egyptian epitaphs. Egyptian influence at Teucheira will be discussed presently.

Discussion of the distribution of the tombs requires caution, since, as stated, Jews may be concealed among apparently gentile epitaphs. Nevertheless, several features can be indicated. Obvious Jewish names are absent in Courts I, II-VII, X, XIII, XVI and XX. II has only one identifiable Jewish name, although it contains a symbol interpretable as a sort of menorah, with three instead of seven branches. There are Roman citizens in V, VI, VII, VIII, XI, XIII, XV and XVIII. Of these, V, VII and XIII contain no identifiable Jewish names, XI only three, although other names here are suspect. But the large number of Jewish names in XV and perhaps XVIII, justifies the view that there were Jews among the Roman citizens whose names are incised there. The overwhelming majority of the tombs at present known to be of Jews are situated to east of the town, yet only one other was here adorned with a true menorah-symbol; it was found by Wright.[876]

Larger or smaller groups of Jewish graves can be identified in VIII, XI, XII, XIV, XV and XVIII. The largest is in XV, where no fewer than fifty names appear in Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Webster, Gray and Reynolds add 26 more. It is therefore evident that one court was overwhelmingly Jewish, but smaller concentrations are found in other courts, and in a number there are no identifiable Jewish graves, or only a few. On the assumption that not all the burials to the east of the town are Jewish — which is hard to prove or disprove — the situation corresponds to that prevailing in the hellenistic and early Roman periods between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria:[877] there two quarters were inhabited preponderantly, if not entirely, by Jews, but Jews lived dispersed also throughout the other quarters.[878]

The Jewish epitaphs of Teucheira can only be distinguished by the character of the names or because they are found in tombs together with obvious Jewish names. Even the few Hebrew words to be seen, for example, at the end of Jewish epitaphs in Rome, do not appear here, and the same applies to religious symbols (the menorah, etrog, lulav, shophar, etc.) with two exceptions. As stated, one such, a menorah, was rediscovered by Wright to west of the town.[879] The language of the known epitaphs is Greek, with one doubtful exception, Hebrew letters being perhaps incised over an inscription dated in A.D. 69.[880] The fewness of symbols, the apparent dispersal of burials among the Greeks, and the almost complete dominance of the Greek language at Teucheira, show a good deal of assimilation on the part of its Jews; the composition and character of their names point in the same direction.

Of the 144 names under discussion, only 39 are Hebrew. These are Sarah (2); David (Dados) (1); Simon (4); Musaeos (2); Jesus (3); Judas (6); Judais (2); Judion (1); Sepphoris (Tzipporah) (1); Sabbatis (1); Josippos (2); Isuphon (= Josipon) (1); Joses (1); Josecos (Isaac?) (1); Maria (2); Mara (1); Joannos or Joannes (5); Tubias (2); and apparently Simux (Heb. tzimuq — raisin).[881] Some of the names are probably Greek translations of Hebrew names; such are Irene (? Shulamit) and Pothetos (Shaul?). The Hebrew names constitute 31 percent, of the total known Jewish names at Teucheira; in Egypt they were about 25 percent.[882] There are also some Aramaic names, and it cannot be determined with certainty if they belong to Jews, although circumstances favour this. They are Abbias, Martha, Marin and Marinicos; Marin and Marinicos have perhaps been influenced by a similar Libyan name.[883] Beischa (Βεῖσχα)[884] and Nonna[885] are found on Jewish tombs elsewhere, and are paralleled on one epitaph at Jaffa; the second is common both in masculine and feminine forms. Nonos or Nonnas are found in various instances in Jewish or Semitic contexts.[886] Beischa is a Libyan name, to be compared with the district of Bassachis (Βασσαχέως Παρατόμη) in Marmarica, recorded in Papyrus Vatican ii,[887] also with the Bessachitae, a Libyan tribe mentioned in the same area by Ptolemy.[888]

Theophoric names are common, and most of them must be regarded as Jewish in this context. To this class belong Theodoria, Theodotos, Dositheos (9 cases), Dosithea, Theogiton, Theocles, Theoxenos, Theodoras, Theodora and Theologos. Didosas (Διδώσας) although not strictly theophoric, must be seen specifically as Jewish, a sort of pseudo-theophoric, or a translation of Nathan. Gray also noted that the name Ptolemy, found in three instances among the Jewish names, is probably an indication of the presence of the descendants of Jews who had come as military settlers.

A few words must be devoted to the name Arimmas (Ἄριμμας). This name is found at Teucheira in four cases among Jews and not less than ten times in non-Jewish inscriptions. We have already seen that it was associated with a wealthy and influential Cyrenean family, which can be traced from the 4th down to the 1st century B.C. (see p. 95, nn. 132, 133). We have already suggested that the name’s frequency among the settlers of Teucheira is to be explained by the possibility that a member of this family in the Ptolemaic period discharged the function of assigning land near Teucheira to katoikoi on behalf of the king, since cases are known in Egypt under Euergetes IT, in which cleruchs took the name of the official in charge of the allotment.[889] The period of these parallels is appropriate to the present case, and it therefore becomes possible that the evidence at Teucheira indicates that katoikoi or cleruchs formed the first nucleus of the settlers whose tombs survive near the town. Chronological considerations have shown that these do not precede the 2nd century B.C. Nevertheless the fact that only four of the 14 cases of the name Arimmas occur east of the town, among the known Jewish concentration, should mean that the colony of katoikoi was not limited to Jews.[890]

Besides the general hellenization manifested by the high proportion of Greek names among the Jews of Teucheira, certain names are such as to throw light on their outlook. Euterpe, daughter of Theodotos,[891] is called after one of the Muses, and no name can point more clearly to pretensions to hellenic culture. Yet we have a parallel at Beth She‛arim in Israel, in the 3rd or 4th century A.D., where a Jewess of Byblos, called after Calliope, the chief Muse, is buried.[892] Schwabe wrote of this name: “I have not found a Jewess with a name like this anywhere else, in Eretz Yisrael or outside it... but it is known that the Jews of Phoenicia were some of the most hellenized.” It may be noted that Calliope is called “matrona” in her epitaph, and was therefore a woman of rank, yet nevertheless was brought to be buried in Eretz Yisrael near the resting place of Rabbi Judah the Prince. Thus such names do not so much indicate complete assimilation as a synthesis between Greek culture and Judaism. It has already been suggested, indeed, that some young Jews were being educated in the gymnasium of Teucheira. But generally it must be admitted that the Jews here do not exhibit signs of a high level of hellenic culture. There is here no known example of a metrical epitaph of the sort so common among the Greeks of Cyrene and Ptolemais, and the like of which can be found among hellenized Jews at Leontopolis and even at Beth She‛arim in Eretz Yisrael. Two such[893] occur among the non-Jewish tombs of Teucheira. Nor do we find here the brief, almost cynical farewells so characteristic of Greeks and sometimes adopted by Jews. Such expressions are generally absent in the Teucheira cemetery. One inscription found by Wright[894] to west of the town, however, greets the deceased, the young “Adonis Hyacinthus”, who died at the age of seventeen, with the word “Be of stout heart (εὐψύχι) Hyacinthus, child.” Most of the line before the word εὐψύχι is uninterpretable. It is true that this tomb, although inscribed with the menorah symbol, is of pronounced hellenizing complexion, on the evidence of the names and the formula; but the greeting εὐψύχι is also common at Beth She‛arim, where it has been interpreted by scholars to relate to the future resurrection of the dead.[895]

Very instructive on the outlook of some of the Jews of Teucheira is the name Timocrates son of Theodotus.[896] Timocrates was born in A.D. 75, five years after the destruction of the Second Temple and two years after the disastrous rising of part of the Jewish population of Cyrene led by Jonathan the Weaver, yet Timocrates was given a pronouncedly non-Jewish name. There is no doubt as to his Jewish identity, for he was buried in the same tomb as four other people possessed of theophoric names, one Dositheos, another his son or daughter. We may further note three names of Jewish context,[897] all derived from the name of the god Apollo-Apollonius, Apollonidas and Apollodorus. This phenomenon is not restricted to Teucheira in the Jewish world of the period, and points to a measure of external assimilation.[898]

Although the evidence of names does not solve the problem of the geographical derivation of the Teucheira Jewish community, it does throw light on the question, and some conclusions may be drawn from it.

A comparison of 144 names with a list of Jewish names occurring in Egyptian papyri of the hellenistic and Roman periods,[899] gives the following picture: 31 names at Teucheira find parallels among Jewish names recorded in papyri, but 23 of them are so common among Jews of the period as a whole that the parallels permit no deductions. But eight names of Teucheiran Jews paralleled in the papyri are not very common, hence it is probably that part of the town’s Jewish community came from Egypt, and that it continued to maintain contacts with that country. A similarity between the tomb-tablets at Leontopolis and those at Teucheira has already been noted, and important from this point of view is the inscribed stele found by Webster in one of the tombs he investigated.[900] The inscription was not completely legible and in itself does not prove the Jewish character of the tomb, but steles of this type were found in the Jewish tombs of Tel el-Yehudiyeh.[901]

One detail may be important for an understanding of the character of the graves to east of the town. This is, that the Egyptian calendar is the accepted calendar of the eastern cemetery, and the recording of the ages of the deceased is the rule. Both features make the impression of belonging to a common tradition, and whatever the reason, this loyalty to the Egyptian calendar suggests either an Egyptian origin or a strong attachment to a political regime centered there, i.e. to the Ptolemaic dynasty. It would not be wise to decide on this evidence whether the majority, and not merely some of the burials to the east of Teucheira were Jewish. But it may be suggested with a greater degree of probability that this cemetery was that of people descended from katoikoi and soldiers settled in the town by the Ptolemies.

On the other hand it is an interesting fact that the place of origin of the deceased is inscribed in the eastern cemetery in one case only (661).[902] By contrast, people from Didyma, Thrace, Demetrias (Thessaly or Damascus), Aksine (Sicily?), Bithynia and Nysa (the town of Asia Minor, or perhaps Beth Shean) are recorded on graffiti on the city-wall or associated buildings in the west of the city.

As stated, two cases only are known in which menorah symbols are incised by the graves. Unfortunately we do not know what was the inscription associated with one of them and the inscription associated with that in the western cemetery included no date. But the accepted view is that the menorah symbol was not cut on funerary monuments prior to the destruction of the Second Temple.[903] Two such symbols do indeed appear in the Alfasi Street tomb in Jerusalem, not used after the reign of Tiberius,[904] and show that it could appear earlier, but there is little doubt that its wide popularity as a funerary and decorative figure began only after 70. We shall see later that there is reason to believe that its first centre of diffusion was Cyrenaica itself; the Teucheira evidence supports the view that its main diffusion took place after the Destruction, for the presence of no more than two examples is appropriate to a cemetery where the Jewish burials are not later than A.D. 115 and the datable majority are before 94/5.

Another symptom of a Jewish religious consciousness at Teucheira is indicated by the Hebrew and theophoric names of the members of the community.

A third symptom is the presence among them of proselytes. Libyan letters appear in some of the epitaphs, and, as we have seen, the name Beischa daughter of Theogeiton is Libyan; her father’s name, moreover, is perhaps to be translated as “proselyte”.[905] The name Sarah, which occurs twice, denotes proselytes or their daughters, and may do so here, as both the women so called had fathers with Greek names; a Cyrenean inscription, indeed, mentions “Sarah, a proselyte” (Σάῤῥα προσήλυτος) explicitly.[906] Libyan customs may also have influenced the Jews of Teucheira, for in one tomb Webster found a skull reposing in an amphora, one of several containing skeletons, and this form of burial is an ancient local form, while Nicolaus of Damascus knew of the Libyan custom of decapitating the dead.[907]

The lack of evidence for Greek culture among the Jews of Teucheira has been remarked upon, but evidence of this sort is scarce throughout the cemetery. It is not easy to decide how far the inscriptions reflect literacy in the community, but evidence exists that Jewish stonecutters worked in Cyrenaica,[908] and usually an illiterate stonecutter reveals illiteracy on the part of his employers. Thus, Δωσίθεος (637) appears side by side with Δοσίθεος, the name Εἰρήνα (680) together with Ἰρήνα (622). The forms Theukles and Theudoros, instead of Theokles and Theodoros, reflect Libyan influence, which regularly converted the omicron to an upsilon.[909] In some epitaphs barbarous letters appear which are undoubtedly Libyan. This should mean that we have here inscriptions cut by Libyan craftsmen, or that their employers were used to the Libyan alphabet, as these signs are not used, except in one or two instances, in their Libyan value.[910]

Several interesting sociological facts can be derived from the Teucheira inscriptions on the life of the town as a whole and on the Jewish community in particular. Firstly, the size of Jewish families. Their reconstruction, of course, involves some risk, as there is no certainty that all the epitaphs are known, and given families may have buried some of their children elsewhere. The reconstruction of fourteen Jewish families is based 011 the assumption that children with the same patronymic and interred in the same tomb or in adjacent tombs, belong to the same family. On this method, seven families have two children, five have three, one has four, and one five. These results, although limited, do not differ greatly from Tcherikover’s finding[911] concerning the Jewish community of Edfu (Apollonipolis) in Egypt, in the Roman period: “There is no trace of families burdened by numerous children, and in so far as the matter can be examined, there is no family the number of whose children exceeds three.”

To this information on the size of Jewish families can be added impressive evidence on the mortality of Jews and gentiles in ancient Teucheira. It is clear that caution must be exercized in regard to a statistical analysis, since the number of people — 163 — whose ages are preserved, is not large. One phenomenon nevertheless stands out; of 101 males and 63 females whose age of death is recorded, 44.5 percent, of the males and 34.9 percent, of the females died up to or at the age of twenty. As a number of children probably died immediately after birth and were not recorded at all, the real mortality must actually have been higher. The figures are:

Jews

0-20 years Total recorded Percentage

Males 28 60 46.6

Females 17 44 38.6

Not proven to be Jews

0-20 years Total recorded Percentage

Males 21 41 51.2

Females 5 19 26.3

B. E. Richardson, who analysed the average longevity of Greeks on epigraphical evidence,[912] reached similar conclusions to the above; she also found 42.3 percent, cases of death up and at the age of 20, the highest mortality being between 16 and 20. These findings are apt to alter on the one hand on account of the numerous old people whose ages were unknown at the time of death, and on the other due to the death of unrecorded infants; yet at Teucheira 13 deaths are recorded of people of 70 and over. Nor is it credible that any unknown figures would greatly alter the impression of the high death-rate up to age of 20.

It may be asked how the community perpetuated itself, with so high a mortality which included the ages of adolescence and marriage. There is indeed evidence for marriage at an early age among the Jews of Teucheira. According to no. 622, Mousaios son of Eu-phrosynos died in Year 1 at the age of 30, and his son Simon died in year 6, at the age of 20. Simon was therefore fourteen when his father died, and was born when his father was 16. Hence the latter’s marriage took place at latest at the age of fifteen, and it may be accepted that marriage at this age was a regular practice if the community was to overcome so high a mortality in its younger age-groups. Frey also found cases of marriage at the ages of 15-16[913] among the Jews of Rome. This high death rate among the Teucheira young also reflects the economic condition of the community, for there was certainly some connection between longevity and conditions of life. It is a logical conclusion that the high mortality among their younger generation was caused not only by the absence of medical aid, but also by a low standard of living and by gruelling physical labour which affected more especially the men.

Although the information is slight and the evidence incomplete, the epitaphs can tell us something of the social position and economic function of part of the Jews of Teucheira. We have seen that some of the deceased were Roman citizens, and the existence of names demonstrating this in two courts where there were numerous Jewish names suggests that there were Jews among them. The name T. Flavius in epitaph no. 615 invites the interpretation that there were here freed slaves of the Flavian Caesars,[914] and manumission was doubtless one of the ways in which some Jews had obtained Roman citizenship. The evidence for slaves in the Jewish community of Teucheira is fairly clear, for no. 619 commemmorates Maker son of Irene (Μάκερ Ἰρήνας), and the recording of his parentage by his mother instead of his father points, in my opinion, to birth outside wedlock. The case is paralleled by no. 658, not certainly Jewish, but it is in Court XV, where most of the burials are those of Jews. Frey indeed explained the recording of some of the deceased by their mothers’ names in the Roman catacombs as evidence that their parents were divorced;[915] it is difficult to refute him, but a third inscription from Teucheira,[916] recording Epikles (born) to the slave-woman Antylla (Ἐπίκλ[η]ς ἐκ δούλης Ἀντύλλας) shows that the first explanation has something to go on, i.e. that this form alludes to a servile origin. There is no evidence whether these slaves were Jews or gentiles. Jewish slavery had virtually disappeared in Judaea at this time,[917] but not necessarily in the Diaspora. In Cyrenaica these may have been Jews redeemed by their brethren, but it is more probable that they were non-Jews who had been circumcised by their Jewish owners.

Various indications have already been noted suggesting that not a few of the Teucheira community were descended from military settlers settled by the Ptolemies. This and the cultural tradition of the eastern cemetery mean that the community included katoikoi or cleruchs holding crown land in the vicinity of the town. The evidence derivable from the name Arimmas points to the formation of the colony in the 2nd century B.C., probably under Euergetes II (163-116 B.C.),[918] and we may note the title “Macedonian” attached to an anonymous epitaph in the eastern cemetery; it is likely that the term is not ethnic but relates to membership of a military unit trained and armed in the Macedonian manner, like the Jewish “phyle” in the garrison of Alexandria, (p. 133).[919]

Both the character and topographical position of the town of Teucheira are such as to confirm that the Jews there worked in agriculture. The city appears to have possessed no harbour; there are traces of a fishing-quay or sea wall. The immediate vicinity was wooded in ancient times, and the remains of small ancient farmhouses can be seen on the coastal plain to south, east and west of Teucheira,[920] which, like most Greek towns, subsisted mainly on agriculture and to a lesser extent on crafts, eked out with fishing and perhaps a little coastwise trade. The town’s area seems to have altered little from the 4th century B.C. to the Byzantine epoch, and even larger cities contained a majority of cultivators who worked the land about them; Teucheira hardly differed in this respect. Most of those interred were probably humble tenants on royal estates or labourers on the city-land, a status appropriate to their low standard of living, revealed by their high mortality before the age of 20. After the rebellion of 115-117 the town of Hadrianopolis was founded in the coastal plain to west of Teucheira. This means that much of the area remained vacant for settlement, a fact which points to a large Jewish population in the same region before the rising.

We may now sum up the information on the Jews of Teucheira that has been derived from their tombs.

The Jews constituted a considerable part of the city’s inhabitants. One section of them evidently reached the town from Egypt, but possibly a group came as emigrants from Judaea in the 2nd century B.C., and appear to have become assimilated to Greek society. The community included Roman citizens and freed slaves, also military settlers or their descendants, and it may be deduced that a number were engaged in cultivation near the city. They possessed particular links, political and social, with the Ptolemaic regime. Their standard of living, at least in the 1st century A.D., was low, and their deathrate up to the age of 20 shocking, although in this respect their lot was probably no different from that of the gentiles. The sizes of their families did not exceed those usual in the times. A high percentage of the Jews possessed hellenized names, so that they are not recognizable as Jews by their names alone. A small group seems to have received a gymnasium education. On the other hand there is no evidence of a high level of Greek culture among most of them, and the suspicion of illiteracy attaches to some of them. Yet the names of one or two indicate an aspiration to hel-lenism on the part of their parents. The Jews of Teucheira probably had an organization, although their religious consciousness is hardly revealed before the destruction of the Temple, except by the Hebrew and theophoric names of some of them. They nevertheless included proselytes won over to Judaism by individual influence or by ownership of slaves. These included Libyans, and there was reciprocal influence, linguistic and perhaps not only linguistic, between them and the Jewish community.

Teucheira therefore furnishes the picture of a community which was certainly not wealthy, and was, in part, poor; which lived a life of hard manual labour as soldiers and cultivators, was influenced not a little both by its Greek environment and by its contact with the Libyan population, yet still preserved its adherence to Judaism.

4. Berenice

The discoveries at the city of Berenice, today Bengazi in the west of Cyrenaica, reveal a different picture. This city, one of the five towns of the Pentapolis,[921] formerly Euesperitae, was transferred, as we have stated, to the vicinity of the present port at the latest by the middle of the 3rd century B.C. It is to be assumed that from that time, if not earlier, a Jewish community existed in the city. It probably contained many poor members and people of humble means, but the three Jewish inscriptions found at Bengazi inform us of a comfortable and even wealthy stratum which constituted the leadership of the community.

The first inscription was found two centuries ago, but was not read rightly, being the most fragmentary and mutilated of the three documents. It has been restudied in recent years,[922] when its Jewish character was established, and its contents throw light on a number of points in the second inscription. It belongs to the years 8-6 B.C., being a resolution of the Jewish archontes (ἄρχοντες) and the politeuma (πολίτευμα) of the city — meaning, of the wardens of the organized community, and of the community itself — to express their thanks and esteem to one Decmus Valerius Dionysius for his services to the community, in so far as he had plastered and adorned the amphitheatre. The community resolves to set up a stele in the amphitheatre in his honour, to free him from liturgies and to crown him publicly at every monthly gathering.[923] The archons, to the extent that their names can be read, number seven, and it should be noted that the community imposed liturgies on its members (it may be assumed, on the richer families among them), i.e., the execution of projects on behalf of the community involving monetary expenditure.

The amphitheatre is mentioned also in the second inscription, which dates 30 years after the first, and in some measure clarifies the building’s character and identity. It shows that the building did not belong to the gentile city, but was a specifically Jewish structure, apparently designed for the community’s gatherings. This is made clear by the word used to describe the reconditioning of the edifice in the first inscription, viz. “a contribution to the politeuma” (ἐπίδομα τῶι πολιτεύματι).

The word ζωγράφειν used in the first inscription if of special interest, as it means “to paint”, more especially animal figures and even human beings; hence the building may have been adorned with wall-paintings and pictures like those to be seen at a later period in the synagogue of Dura-Europos. But the very existence of such a structure as an assembly hall of the Jewish community in a gentile city of the period is unique. We shall see presently, that there are two other contemporary Jewish buildings which perhaps belong to the same tradition.

The second Berenice inscription,[924] which is also the best-known, as it is complete, appears to have been incised in A.D. 24/25. It commemorates a resolution of the archons and politeuma of the Jews of Berenice, taken at the Festival of Tabernacles (Sukkot) the same year. The archontes now number nine, and the resolution honours the Roman official M. Tittius, who had been sent to Cyrene to look after “public affairs” (ἐπὶ τῶν δημοσίων πραγμάτων), for his courteous attitude both to the Greek citizens of the city and to the members of Jewish community. It is therefore resolved to set up a stele of white Parian marble in the amphitheatre in his honour, also to crown it and to praise the Roman publicly in the assemblies held on the sabbaths and at New Year.

The third inscription was executed in A.D. 56 under the Emperor Nero. It was discovered in the city in 1938 and subsequently lost, but its photograph has been preserved.[925] The slab was broken, and its lower part was missing, but what remained of its upper part was sufficient to show the contents and purpose of the text and to prove that the missing portion was not large. This too is a resolution of the community commemorating monetary donations made by its wardens and members for the repair of the synagogue. The photograph of the inscription, taken when it was in situ, shows stretches of wall each side of it, leaving no doubt that it was found in its original position within the synagogue building to which it refers. Thus the discovery gives us the site of the synagogue, which stood facing the sea, like the synagogues in several other Greek cities such as Miletus, Ephesus, and Caesarea Palaestinae. The slab differs in several features from the two former inscriptions, whose styles were similar, their language precise and their lettering elegant; the letters of the third inscription are less refined, and several errors are discernible in its drafting and grammar.[926]

The most important difference between this inscription and the earlier ones concerns the body adopting the resolution. While the two earlier resolutions were taken by the archons and the politeuma, the deciding body in this inscription is the synagogue (συναγωγή), here denoting the community, and subsequently the building. Secondly, the list of contributors, eighteen in number, begins with the archons, of whom there are now ten; they are not, as formerly, named before the community as a whole. The reason for the change in the name of the deciding body may have been that the archons were themselves among the contributors and could not therefore propose a vote of thanks to themselves; hence the thanks are expressed by the entire synagogue. But this explanation does not account for the absence of any reference to the politeuma. Whether this change implies a change in the constitution of the community between the years A.D. 25 and 56, must remain undecided.[927]

The increase of the number of archons from seven in the year 8/6 B.C. to ten under Nero, is also of interest. It is difficult to believe that this increase was without significance; probably it arose from the growth of the community. Naturally this fact itself is no proof of the election of the community wardens by democratic methods, but there does appear to have been a certain coordination between the size of the community and the number of its wardens, and therefore we should not be too positive concerning the non-democratic structure of the Jewish communities of the hellenistic and Roman world.[928]

The third inscription records thirty-five names in all (13 men and three women). Most of the names of these members of the community and their fathers are Greek; only two (Jonathas, Marion) are Hebrew. In the first inscription only one is Hebrew (Iosippos); in the second, in so far as the names of the archontes can be read, no Hebrew name is to be found except Simon, which is both a Hebrew and a Greek name. On the other hand the third inscription lists several Greek names which were particularly common among Jews in the hellenistic and Roman periods, such as Dositheos (twice), Jason, Isidorus (cf. Isidora in the same inscription, line 8), Alexandras and Theophilos. The name Zosimeter (Ζωσιμήτηρ), which occurs on this stele, must be a translation of “mother of all life”, in other words, Eve.[929] By contrast, no fewer than twelve names among those on the third inscription recur at Cyrene as those of non-Jews: in other words, these are normal and characteristic Cyrenean names.[930] Thus the composition of these names at Berenice reflects assimilation to the Cyrenean environment and to the peculiar onomasticon of Cyrenean personal names. It may also be remarked that four of the names on the third inscription recur on Jewish epitaphs at Apollonia and Teucheira.[931] Straton and Euphranor further appear in the second Berenice inscription. An innovation in the third document is the listing of women together with the men. This phenomenon is not without parallel in the Jewish world, and in the later Roman imperial period, at least, we encounter the names of Jewish women taking part in the paving of synagogue floors,[932] or honoured with the title of “mothers of the synagogue”. It is worthy of note that at the head of the list of donors and at the end of the list of archons, appears the name of a priest, Cartisthenes son of Archias, who occupies, it would seem, the first place of honour in the lists of simple congregants.

It is not evident whether the synagogue of Berenice was destroyed or damaged by enemies, or whether the inscription commemorates a repair of the building after damage by nature or the passing of time. However, the recorded contributions, which are not large, suggest simple repairs rather than reconstruction. The symbol /_ which appears before every sum stands for “drachmai”,[933] and the contributions, in so far as they are preserved, add up to 283 drachmas. This is a considerable sum, but not sufficient to erect a complete new structure.

What kind of building was the amphitheatre in which the Jewish community of Berenice assembled on the first day of the month, on festivals, and on sabbaths?

Scholars disagree whether it was Jewish, or a building of the Greek city, in which the Jews had received permission to set up their commemorative and honorary steles.[934] J. and G. Roux[935] reached no conclusion on this question; L. Robert expressed the view that the building was Jewish.[936] The writer’s opinion is that already expressed, to wit, that the words describing the work of Decmus Valerius Dionysius at the end of the first inscription, that he had plastered the floor (?) and the amphitheatre, and also adorned it with figure-paintings at his own expense, as a gift to the community (Tὸ ἔ[δ]αφος ἐκονίασεν καὶ τὸ ἀμφιθέατρον καὶ ἐζωγράφησεν τοῖς ῖδίοις δαπανήμασιν, ἐπίδομα τῶι πολιτεύματι), prove that it was Jewish property. Had the building belonged to the city rather than the Jews, the word “polis” would have taken the place of “politeuma”, and it is hardly to be imagined that the community (however assimilated to Greek habits) would have met to pray in a building contaminated by gentile idolatry.

The word “amphitheatre” was comparatively new when the said inscription was set up: such buildings begin to be built at Rome, still of timber, only in the time of Julius Caesar. The oldest known stonebuilt amphitheatre is that at Pompeii, erected in 70 approximately:[937] it was called “spectacula”.[938] The Greek term “amphitheatre” is first found in the writings of Strabo,[939] (64/3 B.C.-A.D. 21) and Flavius Josephus mentioned it in connexion with Herod’s building-activity about 25 B.C.[940] We learn from the inscriptions honoring Valerius Dionysius that the building at Berenice was already standing in 8/6 B.C., and its language means that the repairs were on a considerable scale, hence the amphitheatre had then existed some decades, and was probably built at approximately the same time as Herod’s amphitheatres at Jerusalem and Caesarea, not long after the first experiments at Rome. The Berenice inscription, to the best of my knowledge, is the first known that mentions an amphitheatre in Greek (the Latin word appears later, in Pliny). It must therefore be stressed that the word’s meaning was then elastic and fluid, nor was the building’s form necessarily like that of the crystallized amphitheatres known in Italy or the East. But the name obliges one of two assumptions: either that it was circular or elliptical, or that the seats of the audience were ranged on two sides opposite to one another (ἄμφω means “on both sides”). It is nevertheless difficult to suppose that the Jews derived the idea from a structure designed only for wild-beast hunts and gladiatorial contests, much less in Greek Berenice, the heads of whose community were deeply imbued with hellenistic culture.

The Greek world had known for centuries assembly halls in which the seats were ranged around three or four sides of the buildings, beginning with the third telesterion (τελεστήριον) built at Eleusis by Pisistratos. The Greeks also knew a circular assembly hall in at least one city, the Tholos (θόλος) in the Athenian Agora, where the prytaneis met.[941] This however was designed for only fifty people, whereas Berenice must have possessed some hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews. From the fact that Dionysius plastered the floor — if the restoration ἔ[δ]αφος is correct — scholars have deduced that the hall was roofed,[942] This is is not inevitable, as is demonstrated by the plaster floors found in the theatres of Caesarea and Lepcis Magna, yet it is altogether probable that the Berenice building was covered, since the Jews met in it throughout the year. There are two possibilities: either it was of limited area, as the roof was supported internally by columns or piers, or the building was open to the sky. The first possibility is unlikely, for though the Roman world possessed small roofed theatres, called odeia, which were used as council-houses in various cities (one at Ptolemais of Cyrenaica),[943] no instance of a circular roofed amphitheatre is known. We are therefore bound to conclude that the Jewish amphitheatre of Berenice was square or rectangular in plan, like the archaic bouleuterion at Athens (6th century B.C.), or various later assembly halls at Megalopolis, Priene and elsewhere.

New excavations have disclosed two buildings in Eretz Yisrael which are undoubtedly Jewish, and constitute a chronological link with the Greek assembly-halls and the Jewish amphitheatre of Berenice. These are the halls of assembly and prayer found in the excavations at Masada (1964) and Herodeion (1962-3). At the time of its occupation by the Zealots the Masada hall took the form of a chamber surrounded by seats ranged along the interior walls, the ceiling being supported by internal columns.[944] But when Masada was fortified by Herod in 37-31 B.C.,[945] the prayer hall then had the form of a basilica; only during the Sicarian occupation did it become a hypostyle hall with seats around the walls, and it may be supposed that this plan was more appropriate to the democratic notions of the insurgents. The same initial plan and a similar replanning by the Sicarii were revealed by the excavations of the Herodian stronghold of Herodeion.[946] The plan of the two halls thus shows that this system of constructing an assembly hall was known to the Jews in the same period and was copied from the Greek and hellenistic hypostyle halls, such as those built at Delos and Notion (Asia Minor) in the 3rd and 2nd centuries before the common era.[947]

If the assembly hall of the Berenice Jews was a square or oblong structure, with a roof supported by internal columns, and the seats ranged along the walls, why was it called an amphitheatre? This will be understood if we imagine the building’s plan as similar to that of the Ekklesterion (ἐκκληστήριον) of Priene (Asia Minor), built about 200.B.C.[948] to hold some 700 people. The seats are ranged to a depth of nine rows on the east and west, and of fifteen on the north, being absent only on the south. If we assume that at Berenice there were also a few rows on the fourth side a plan is obtained to which the term “amphitheatre” may fitly be applied.

5. Ptolemais

Although Ptolemais was larger and more important than Eues-peritae-Berenice, its prosperity belonged only to the hellenistic and the early Roman periods. Ancient Jewish remains in and round the city are not numerous; most of them are tomb-inscriptions, among which four are known to be Jewish and one is doubtfully so,[949] We also know of one Jewess born at Ptolemais, who was buried in the Valley of Qidron near Jerusalem in the 1st century B.C.[950] Two other inscriptions are important for determining the status of Cyrenean Jews vis-a-vis the Greek cities: the first is a stele of the ephebes, or senior pupils of the gymnasium, found at Ptolemais, and recording a list of pupils,[951] which includes the name Itthalammon son of Apellas (Ἰτθάλαμμον τοῦ Ἀπέλλα). The same man’s name is also recorded on another dedication at

Lanuvium in Italy;[952] this is a bilingual inscription in honour of Aulus Terentius Varro Murena, their patron, by Itthalammon son of Apellas and Simon son of Simon on behalf of the Ptolemaei Cyrenens(es). The letter-style indicates that the inscription is not a “local product”, but was cut by a Cyrenean mason, while the presence of the name Itthalammon among the ephebes of Ptolemais shows that the deputation had come to Terentius from a Cyrenean city. The stele of the ephebes, of whom Itthalammon was one, opens with the date Γκη’, and its style belongs to the first century B.C. According to the Era of Actium, this would be 3/2 B.C., and as Itthalammon was a pupil of eighteen in that year, the Lanuvium dedication must have been set up several decades later, when he had attained an age at which he could participate in the public affairs of his city.

Who were these two emissaries who went to Italy to represent the affairs of their city to a Roman patron and were successful in their mission? Itthalammon looks at first sight like a Libyan name:[953] it appears also at Cyrene, in one case in an ephebe list which includes some Jewish names,[954] and the name of the father of Itthalammon of Ptolemais, — Apellas, — like that of his colleague, Simon son of Simon, arouses suspicion of a Jewish derivation; moreover a small plaque found at Naples bore the name “Yitshalom” in Hebrew.[955] The name of Itthalammon’s father, indeed, was regarded by the poet Horace as sufficiently characteristic of Jews to be a synonym for any Jew.[956]

The question therefore arises, why did the Greek city of Ptolemais send two Jews to represent its interests to people of influence in Rome in one of the years of the first half-century of the common era?

The Lanuvium inscription does not refer to the city of Ptolemais specifically, either in Latin or in Greek. It refers neither to the polis nor to the civitas Ptolemensium; all that appears is Ptolemaei Cyrenens(es). Now the form of the first of these two words is unusual as the title of the citizens of Ptolemais; it actually means “the people of Ptolemy”.[957] Frank,[958] indeed, accepts this interpretation, and understands the term as referring to the settlers of the past lands of the Ptolemaic kings, the Roman agri publici, the ούσιάι or βασιλικὴ γῆ of the former hellenistic rulers. Several features support this assumption. Firstly the letter-style of the inscription honoring Terentius is characteristic of the rural inscriptions of Cyrenaica; secondly, Itthalammon’s name, which reflects assimilation to a Libyan environment. There can of course be no doubt that Itthalammon was a citizen of Ptolemais, for which reason he was selected as a representative of the public, whether this was the urban public or the rural tenants of the state domain.

There are difficulties as to the identity of Terentius. Two scholars[959] have thought him to be the consul of 23 B.C., put to death the same year by Augustus on a charge of conspiring against his life.[960] This identification is possible only if we agree to date the year of the ephebe list in which Itthalammon figures, according to the era of the establishment of the province of Cyrene (alleged to have begun in 74 B.C.), in which case Itthalammon would then have been eighteen in 46 B.C. and have travelled to Italy well before Terentius’ death in 23 B.C. There is, indeed, no information of a later Terentius Varro who lived in the first half of the 1st century A.D., hence no final decision is possible on the problem of his identity. All that we can say is, that no use of the provincial era on Cyrenean inscriptions has been proved. It is moreover difficult to see the two emissaries, Simon son of Simon and Itthalammon son of Apellas, as emissaries of the city of Ptolemais, and as no simple decision is possible on this question either, we are obliged to reexamine the connection of the Jews of Cyrenaica with the agri Apionis, the Ptolemaic royal lands of the hellenistic period.

In 25 B.C. the Jews of Berenice expressed their gratitude to M. Tittius for his assistance; this official had been sent to deal with “public affairs” (ἐπὶ δημοσίων πραγμάτων) in Cyrenaica. We may state at once that he was not the governor of the province, who was of praetorian rank and this would have been mentioned on the complementary inscription had it been directed to him. The document’s language, which states that M. Tittius had “arrived” (παραγενηθείς) in the country on public affairs, precludes the rank of governor. He had come to the province on some special administrative duty, probably involving finance, hence Paribeni was perhaps right in tentatively connecting his business with the property of the Roman state, i.e. the agri publici,[961] But the expression δημόσια πράγματα can be more broadly interpreted, to mean simply “on affairs of government administration”. Only if we are prepared to assume the existence of a strong Egyptian influence on Cyrenean administrative terminology, are we bound to accept Paribeni’s interpretation.[962] The discussion that follows may help us to a solution of the problem.

6. ‛Ein Targhuna

On the Cyrenean plateau, 27 kilometres west of the city of Cyrene and six kilometres west of the ancient village of Messa, is to be found a Graeco-Roman site called ‛Ein or Gasr Targhuna or Targhuniyeh.[963] The site is also known to the local Libyan inhabitants as Hirbet al-Yahud. The representation of a menorah, cut deeply in the ancient rockcut road a short distance south of the site, is proof that the name reflects historical reality,[964] and ancient rockcut tombs here have been described as Jewish.[965] The character of the settlement can be demonstrated by the discovery near the menorah of a Roman boundary-stone (ciftftus),[966] recording the restoration of public land (ager publicus) to the Roman state by the legate Acilius Strabo, who was active in the years A.D. 55-56 under the Emperor Nero. It cannot be determined if the settlement originally stood within the limits of the ager publicus or near them, but a consideration of its position may give reason to favour the belief that the former was the case.

The geographical situation of ‛Ein Targhuna is instructive from every point of view. It lies on the line of the main Roman road linking Cyrene with Ptolemais,[967] and at the western end of a natural pass through the wooded area west of Cyrene. It also occupies the extreme western point of a spur of the Jebel which looks out over the middle terrace (the Lusaita) to the sea on the 500 metre contour above sea-level. ‛Ein Targhuna, moreover, is situated a short distance north-east of the entrance to Wadi al-Kuf, a wild and rocky region traversed by a narrow gorge which constituted a grave danger because it served as a concealed approach through which the desert tribes could penetrate to the heart of the plateau from the south-west. The area as a whole was nevertheless a natural barrier between the eastern and western parts of the Jebel. The security problem in the region is graphically emphasized by the presence of Gasr ibn Igdem, six kilometres south-west of ‛Ein Targhuna, one of the largest hellenistic forts in the country;[968] its task was to watch the pass, the many caves in which could furnish ready shelter to robbers and outlaws.

The topographical position of ‛Ein Targhuna stands out even more clearly when defined in relation to the areas of settlement, as determined by the distribution of springs and wells. The site lies in the extreme north-west angle of the area of springs, defined by the lines Targhuna-Cyrene-Apollonia-Derna-al-Fayyidieh-Slonta.[969] To west, there are no wells or springs till al-Gharib is reached, but to east the land is fertile. This is in brief, first and foremost a frontier position placed on a salient, — an ideal point for a unit of military settlers.

As to the name ‛Ein Targhuna, ancient Greek rural placenames have survived here and there on the Cyrenean Plateau down to the present day.[970] The name Targhuna recalls the Aramaic form of the Greek name (Τράχων) applied to the el-Lejja region of Hauran;[971] the Tar gum Jonathan has the form Targuna[972] (טרגוּנא). That this was not merely a corruption of the text, is to be seen from Greek-Hebrew parallels in which the patah and resh change places.[973] Later Arabic parallels also occur of the addition of the suffix iyeh to names previously without it.[974] The meaning of the name Tar-ghuniyeh is therefore likely to be “the people of Targhuna”, and it is probable that the name Targhuna originated from the Greek τράχων, “the rocky place”, from which the Greek name for al-Lejja was derived — Trachonitis.[975] Near this latter area Herod settled a unit of Jewish mounted archers probably in 7-6 B.C., under the command of one Zamaris,[976] who had come to Syria from Babylonia in 10 B.C.[977] The aim of this settlement in so difficult an area was, of course, to hold in check its cave-dwellers, who were plundering the neighbouring villages.[978] The area had been first annexed by M. Terentius Varro, governor of Syria, in the year 23 B.C. He was a brother of Aulus Terentius Varro and a relative of the Terentius Varro whose name appears on the Lanu-vium inscription discussed above. It may be added that at the end of the 4th century A.D., according to Synesius,[979] a unit of mounted archers (ἰπποτόξοται) recruited or stationed at Balagrae (Zawia Beida), 13 kilometres east of Targhuna, was stationed in the Jebel. Although they were called Balagritae, their permanent station is unknown, but their existence teaches that there was a tradition of mounted archery in the district, and it would seem that the Roman command of the 4th century, wishing to beat the Libyan tribes with their own tactics, raised a unit of mounted archers among the local natives to protect the district.[980]

With these facts in mind, we may infer that the Jewish settlement of ‛Ein Targhuna, in view of its clear paramilitary function, was included within the area of the Roman ager publicus, the previous Ptolemaic royal lands, where plots had doubtless been allotted by the government to the settlers; this inference agrees with the view already expressed, that Jews and other immigrants of the hellenistic period who entered agriculture, could only settle on the royal land, i.e. on the king’s personal estates (οὐσίαι) or on crown domain (βασιλικὴ γῆ).

The precise date of the establishment of the Jewish settlement at ‛Ein Targhuna cannot be determined. The menorah symbol merely furnishes an approximate terminus post quem for the existence of occupation after 70, but does not establish its commencement. A Jewish military colony hardly suits conditions much after the beginning of Roman rule, and is more apposite to the policy of the hellenistic monarchs. The close parallel between the conditions of the colonization of ‛Ein Targhuna and those of the Babylonian-Jewish settlement in Bashan, as well as the identity of geographical names, encourages the conjecture that the ‛Ein Targhuna Jews were also brought to Libya at that time, in the last decades of the ist century B.C., and this is more probable since the form of the placename is Aramaic.[981] This date, indeed, cannot be proved, but two additional remarks can be made: a) a transfer of Roman forces from Syria to Cyrenaica is known in the period of Augustus; b) not a few instances are known in the Ptolemaic kingdom and in Roman Egypt, in which the names of foreign communities or of their former settlements, whether of soldiers or of civilians, were transferred to their new places of colonization. The stationing of Syrian units in Cyrenaica under Augustus is proved by inscriptions at Ajadabia south of Bengazi,[982] and at Zawiat-Mesus on the desert fringe in the south-west of the country.[983] These garrisons included troops from Apameia, and their presence was apparently connected with the great Roman campaign against the Garamantes, the Marmaritae and the Gaetuli between 20 and 2 B.C. approximately.[984] Examples of the transfer of the names of immigrants or of their villages are Samareia, Magdola, Chana’anain and Sandalion in Egypt, all of migrants from Syria;[985] a similar instance is to be found in eastern Cyrenaica itself, namely, Magdalis in the Martuba region,[986] and very probably the name Targhuna was likewise transferred in this way from the Trachon of Auranitis.

7. Cyrene

By surveying the remains relating to the Jews of Teucheira, Berenice, Ptolemais and ‛Ein Targhuna, we have been able to arrive at a certain appreciation of the economic and social position of the Jews of Cyrenaica. The literary and epigraphical evidence suggests that no small part of the Jews of Libya were soldiers and cultivators, but there are some indications that from the 2nd century B.C. a commercial element existed amongst them. Concerning the presence of Jewish craftsmen we can only conjecture. The very restricted archaeological evidence points to stonemasons,[987] potters,[988] perhaps a painter,[989] and mint-workers,[990] weavers,[991] and sailors.[992] We also know of a Jewish slavewoman at Ptolemais,[993] and, of the female slave of publicani at Apollonia.[994] We hear of 3,000 well-to-do Jews at Cyrene in A.D. 73 (εὐπορίᾳ χρημάτων διαφέροντες),[995] and, by contrast, contemporarily, of 2,000 Jews without means (ἄποροι).[996]

Bound up with any estimate of the social and economic position of the Jewish community of the country, is the question of its citizen status. We are forced to assume that the Jewish cultivators, by reason of the circumstances of the settlement of most of them at the beginning of the hellenistic period and in the 2nd century B.C., were concentrated on the crown land and royal estates of the Ptolemies, and did not therefore qualify for citizenship in the Greek towns. The constitutions of the latter, indeed, prohibited non-citizens from acquiring land in their territories.[997] Hence opportunities of obtaining citizenship in the Cyrenean cities would have been open only to those Jews who settled in the cities themselves and got their livelihoods in other branches, i.e. by trade and the handicrafts, but the constitution of Cyrene under Ptolemy Lagos was strongly prejudiced against those engaged in trade and the crafts (pp. 51-2), nor is there reason to think that this situation changed until the Roman period. It is clear, then, that the Jews of the Pentapolis had little prospect of penetrating the ranks of the Greek citizens, and the question whether the Cyrenaican Jews possessed civic rights in the Greek poleis can be answered in advance: if any did possess them, they were not numerous. But this reply is not sufficient, for there are sources that make certain statements on the question; these are both literary and epigraphical.

Flavius Josephus writes that the Jews of Cyrene enjoyed equal rights before the law (ισονομία) with the inhabitants of their city — and had received this privilege “from the ancient kings”.[998] He further reports[999] that Augustus reconfirmed to them the privilege of ίσοτελεία (equality in payment of taxes). Strabo[1000] had stated that the Jews constituted one of the four classes into which Cyrene was divided, namely, the Cyreneans, the aliens of Greek origin (μέτοικοι), the peasants and the Jews. Josephus’ statement was made in relation to events under Augustus (circa 31-13 B.C.), but he says that their status was granted to the Jews by the “ancient kings”. Strabo’s grouping belongs to the period of transition from Ptolemaic to Roman provincial rule, that is, between 96 and 74 B.C., and in relation to the happenings of the year 88/6 B.C., when Lucullus arrived at Cyrene. The two writers’ statements appear to conflict, since Strabo’s classification puts the Jews, to all appearance, outside the ranks of the citizens, and the question is whether the status of Cyrenean Jewry changed between the Ptolemaic period and the imposition of Roman rule, or whether one of the two statements is erroneous.

The very fact that the Jews belonged, according to Strabo, neither to the metics nor to the peasants suggests that they held a special position. Rostovtzeff rightly observed[1001] that Strabo’s fourfold division corresponded to that of the population of hellenistic Egypt, namely, the citizens of Greek cities, Greeks who were not citizens of such, aliens organized in their own organizations (πολιτεύματα), and native Egyptians. The question is, of course, how far the Egyptian analogy may be applied to Cyrene. As for Josephus, scholarly criticism suspects him of inaccuracy, and sometimes of distortion of the truth, since his statements were made in the heat of controversy concerning Jewish status in the Empire as a whole and in Greek society in particular, and with an apologetic motive.

Cyrenean inscriptions, nevertheless, contain evidence, of which part has been already cited, which shows that there were Jews among the citizens of Ptolemais, such as Itthalammon son of Apellas, and very probably his fellow delegate Simon son of Simon. The ephebe stele of 3-2 B.C. records, as we may note, several other theophoric names, especially Timotheus son of Onasion, which perhaps belonged to Jews. In 1961 an ephebe stele from Cyrene was published[1002] figuring several names whose Jewish identity is indisputable. They begin in the year A.D. 3-4, and among 88 names appear five obvious Jews: Bar Tubas son of Bar Tub[r]as, Bar Tubas son of Bar Tubas (a second time), Ela(s)zaros son of Elazaros, Agathocles son of Elazaros, and Julius son of Jesus. Simion (Σιμίων) son of Pothion may also be Jewish, as the second iota of his name must indicate a transliteration of the Hebrew letter ‛ayin. The list may include other Jews whose identity is concealed from us by their purely Greek names.[1003] Additional lists for the years 20, 23, 24, 27 and 28 were incised on the left and right sides of the same stele in inferior and irregular letters; the years are numbered by the era of Actium. They include the names Cheirias son of Jesus and Itthalammon son of Itthalammon. Finally the city of Cyrene has yielded a list of high ranking magistrates, the nomophylakes (νομοφύλακες) for the years A.D. 60 and 61, among them being recorded the name Elazaros son of Jason.[1004] We shall speak of this man and of the Jewish ephebes, at a later stage; in the meantime the evidence suffices to show that some Jews had penetrated the gymnasium of the city of Ptolemais at the end of the 1st century B.C., and were citizens of their polis;[1005] by the beginning of the 1st century of the present era a group of young Jews were pupils in the gymnasium of Cyrene, so that it may be assumed that they were prospective citizens as well, as is demonstrated by the election of Elazaros son of Jason to the responsible office of nomophylax under Nero.

But in order to clarify how large a section of the Jewish inhabitants achieved citizenship in their cities, and when this process began, a broader discussion of the whole problem is desirable.

It may be said at once that in discussing the question of Jewish rights in the hellenistic and Roman towns of the eastern Mediterranean, scholars have generally paid far too much attention to the problem as reflected in Alexandria, and tended to assume that any conclusion drawn from the material affecting the Egyptian capital must apply also to other Greek towns. For all that, it is necessary to begin by examining what Josephus has to say on this and other cities, and to determine how his statements are to be interpreted.

He refers to Jewish status in Alexandria five times. In Antiquities XII, 8, he says that the Jews of the capital were made citizens with rights equal (ἰσοπολίτας) to the Macedonians by Alexander the Great, after he had recruited them to the garrison. This is supplemented by the information (Against Apion, II, 35), that a phyte of Jewish “Macedonians” still existed in his own day. In Antiquities XIV, 188 he alludes to the stele set up in the town by Julius Caesar (he probably meant Augustus) recording Jewish rights, which included their citizenship of the city. He repeats this information in Against Apion (II, 37-8). A third passage (Ant.. XIX, 281 sq.) cites what has been held to be the famous letter of the Emperor Claudius to Alexandria,[1006] written in A.D. 41, to settle the dispute that had led to riots between the Jews and Greeks there under his predecessor Gaius. Another view however, holds that the citation relates to an earlier rescript of the Emperor. Here he writes: “As we have long known that the Jews of Alexandria who are called Alexandrians have lived from the earliest times together with the Alexandrians and obtained equal citizen rights (ἴσης πολιτείας) from the kings, as is made clear by letters which they possess and also by orders etc.” Finally Josephus writes in the Jewish War (II, 487) that Alexander had granted the Jews the right of residence in the city and equal status (ἰσομοιρίας) with the Greeks, including the permission to call themselves “Macedonians”.

There is no point in discussing here the question of whether Jewish troops served under Alexander the Great in Egypt,[1007] but the information on their membership of the garrison and their title “Macedonians” is open to more than one interpretation; Tcherikover[1008] considered that it meant simply that the Jews who bore the title “Macedonians” were troops of a “pseudo-ethnic” unit trained and armed to fight after the Macedonian manner, their phyle being, not a division of the citizen body, but a military formation. Whether or not this had nothing to do with citizen rights, however, is open to argument, for one of these Jewish “Macedonians”, recorded in the early Roman period, held land in the Alexandrian city-territory, and was therefore almost certainly a citizen.[1009] Josephus’ alleged version of Claudius’ rescript, on the other hand, although based on a genuine document sent by the Emperor to Alexandria to settle several issues, including that of Jewish status, faces the fact of the discovery of another, perhaps later papyrus version of a similar letter,[1010] which states in clear language that “I order the Jews not to aspire to more than they already have had till now in a city not theirs.”[1011] Thus, even if we argue that the papyrus document was preceded by another, that cited by Josephus, which said something different, i.e. that two distinct pronouncements by the Emperor are involved, this would not resolve the difficulties created by the differences between the two.[1012] It is in any case difficult to trust the accuracy of Josephus’ report on the Alexandrian stele which allegedly recorded Jewish rights in the city: it may, indeed, have recorded the internal rights enjoyed by the Jewish communal organization (politeuma) in the city, but these do not bear on the problem of citizen status.[1013]

On the other hand, some individual Jews did hold Alexandrian citizenship. Philo Judaeus certainly possessed it (Ant. XVIII, 159, 259; XIX, 276; XX 100; cf. Philo, quod omnis probus liber, 6), as did the father of the Jewish petitioner Helenos in the early Roman period.[1014] The Jewish “Macedonians” were probably citizens, and others may have obtained the status in the Ptolemaic period by medium of a gymnasium education (Cf. CPJ, I, p. 23, n. 58). But there is no evidence that their number was ever large.

What then are we to make of Josephus’ various other seemingly unequivocal statements concerning the ἰσονομία, ἰσοτιμία and ἰσομοιρία, of the Jews of Alexandria, of the ισονομία and ίσοτελεία of the Jews of Cyrene — or of his attribution to the Jews of the status of πολῖται and ἰσότιμοι in the cities of Asia Minor and in Antioch (Ant. XII, 119-121), where they enjoyed an “equal share” of the city (ἐξ ἰσοῦ... της πόλεως μετέχειν) with the Greeks?

Before we seek a solution for this problem, we must consider the evidence of Philo Judaeus, who, as an Alexandrian and leader of the city’s Jewish community, was directly concerned with Jewish status when it was under critical attack. Philo does not use the terms ἰσοπολιτεία, ἴσης μοίρᾶς or ἴσης τιμῆς with regard to Jewish status in the two works in which he deals directly with the problem, the Legatio and the In Flaccum. Only once, in de Vita Mosis, does he use the expression ἰσοτιμία in relation to metics aspiring to the status of ἀστοί (I, 34-6). For him πολιτεία denotes the rights enjoyed by Jews within their organized community, which he also calls a πολιτεία. These rights he terms δίκαια; in one place (Flacc., 53) he calls them τὰ πολιτικὰ δίκαια. But he consistently refers to the Jews as Ἀλεξανδρεῖς, and appears to use the expression in a purely general geographical sense. For him, it had no strictly juridical meaning with reference to citizen status.

Let us now revert to the terms used by Josephus. If we scrutinize them, we shall discover that only ἰσοπολιτεία and ἰσοτελεία are terms of status susceptible to precise legal definition. Ἰσοτιμία means “equality of privilege”,[1015] ἰσομοιρία an equal share in wealth and power;[1016] ισονομία denoted in classical times “equality among peers”; later the ideal of a community in which the citizens had their equal share.[1017] These are, then, general expressions describing not a legal status, but a situation. We are left with ίσοτελεία and ἰσοπολιτεία. Ἰσοτελεία was the privilege sometimes bestowed by a Greek city on metics releasing them from payment of the μετοίκιον — a tax to which they were otherwise subject.[1018] Ἰσοπολιτεία was the potential citizenship granted by a Greek city to citizens of another city. It was part of a reciprocal agreement called συμπολιτεία, whereby the citizenship granted to the partner’s citizens became effective in the event of their settling in the granting city, and vice versa.[1019] We shall presently see that ίσοτελεία, as applied to the Jews of Cyrene, was a genuine grant which can be historically demonstrated.

As to ἰσοπολιτεία, some scholars have seen in it an indication, where the Jews of Alexandria are concerned, that they held potential citizenship in the Greek polis, and this became actual if they chose to participate in the pagan rites involved in entry into the ranks of the citizens of Alexandria.[1020] But this interpretation is very doubtful, for two reasons. Firstly, all known agreements involving ἰσοπολιτεία were concluded between two Greek cities, and none is known between a Greek city and a non-Greek corporation. Secondly, it is inherently unlikely that an agreement existed between the Jewish politeuma and the Greek polis, providing that any Jew prepared to desert his faith should be admitted to Alexandrian citizenship. Whatever Josephus’ term ἰσοπολιτεία meant, it was not that.

Now an examination of the relevant documents, including both literary sources (Josephus, Philo) and Jewish inscriptions of the Roman period in various Jewish centres, shows that the term πολῖται was applied to the members of Jewish politeumata existing in gentile cities or elsewhere. We have seen that Philo called the Jewish communal organization a πολιτεία; its constitution was a πολιτεία, its laws were τὸ πολιτικὸν δίκαιον; its members πολῖται. The Jews of Sardes are termed by a Roman document (Ant., XIV, 235) οἱ Ἰουδαίοι πολῖται ὑμέτεροι; the city of Sardes refers to them officially as οἱ κατοικοῦντες ἐν τῇπόλει Ἴουδαίοι πολῖται (ib., 259). The president of the Leontopolis Jewish community in Egypt, was entitled a πολιτάρχης and had held the same office in another unidentified Egyptian Jewish community (CPJ., III, no. 1530). Josephus (Ant., XII, 123-4) speaks of the communal rights of the Antioch community as τὰ δίκαιὰ τα τῆς πολιτείας.

It therefore appears that nearly all Josephus’ statements regarding Jewish citizen status in Alexandria and other Greek cities can be understood to refer to their status as members of their own organized communities. It is, indeed, highly improbable that many Jews in the Roman period (in relation to the hellenistic epoch we have little information on this question) were interested in obtaining citizenship in the Greek polis of Alexandria, which stood in a relation of almost continual conflict with the Jewish population. The problem may have interested a small group of Jewish hellenizers who already held that status, or were impelled to seek it to escape the situation created by Roman policy in Egypt, which chose to class the Jews with the despised native Egyptian population. The real conflict in the Egyptian capital and in other Greek cities possessing Jewish populations, however, was created by the claim of the Jewish politeumata to equal status with the Greek citizen communities, and the endeavours of the latter to liquidate the power and existence of the Jewish organizations. If then Josephus’ use of the term ἰσοπολιτεία was in any sense meaningful, it meant to him the claim to equality of status between these two bodies. This indeed perhaps emerges from his use of the word in the context of the conflict between the Jews and Greeks in Caesarea Maritima in the years before the great revolt (Ant., XX, 173).[1021]

Bearing this solution in mind, we may now return to the situation in Cyrenaica. One important document here furnishes evidence that the Jews of a Greek city were not as a body citizens of the polis. This is the resolution of the Jewish politeuma of Berenice, in honour of M. Tittius (A.D. 24/25).[1022] which reads “not only did he manifest himself as accommodating in these matters, but behaved in like manner both towards the citizens whom he encountered privately, and also (ἐτὶ δὲ καὶ) towards the Jews of our politeuma in matters public and private.” The expression ἐτὶ δὲ καὶ in this text distinguishes clearly between the citizens of Berenice and the members of the Jewish community; there is no doubt that the two groups were regarded as two separate bodies.[1023]

It is another question whether a Jew who obtained Greek citizenship remained a member of his politeuma. But in Egypt, at least, a native Egyptian could only be a Roman citizen if he was also a citizen of Alexandria.[1024] The politeuma of Berenice certainly had some Roman citizens amongst it,[1025] and we may note that Augustus’ edict[1026] compelled Cyreneans possessing Roman citizenship to assume or maintain their civic responsibilities in the Greek polis. It seems very likely therefore, that on the same principle Jews who held civitas either became citizens of the Greek city, or were obliged to continue to bear the responsibilities involved in membership of their politeuma.

As we have seen, some Jewish pupils were already training in the gymnasium of Cyrene in the reign of Augustus; this means they were being accepted as citizens, and the first known Jewish graduates recorded for the year A.D. 2/3 must have begun their education in 7-8 B.C.

The fourfold division of the Cyrenean population reported by Strabo belongs to the first half of the 1st century B.C., and shows that at that time the Jews were not, as a body, Greek citizens. This is also indicated by the reason given by the city for withholding permission from its Jews to despatch the half-shequel payment to the Temple of Jerusalem.[1027] This was, that the Jews had defaulted in the payment of certain taxes (τέλη).[1028] which indicates that the community paid them as a body, and not as individuals. This is clearly not a reference to tributa, which were collected and forwarded by the city: in no case outside Judaea do we hear of Jews paying tributa as a separate body, but here collective responsibility is inferred, hence city-taxes must be meant. Josephus describing this or a similar previous incident[1029] says that the impounding of the half-sheqel was an act of “the cities”, but even so, M. Agrippa’s letter cited by the historian in connection with the affair is addressed to Cyrene in particular. According to Josephus, the Jews complained to Agrippa that the money had been stopped as the result of the act of informers (συκοφάνται); this may be taken to mean that certain citizens had risen in the council or assembly of Cyrene, and claiming that the Jews had defaulted in their tax-payments, had proposed taking measures against them by delaying the despatch of the Temple dues. The normal translation of the words τελὴ μὴ ὀφειλόμενα is “taxes not owed” because they had already been paid. But if the Jewish community really owed taxes, why were informers needed to tell the city so? Informers do not deal with complete communities, but with individuals, and it is improbable that even an anti-Semitic polis would have stopped the despatch of the sheqel merely on account of a few individual defaulters. For one thing, the Jews believed in the justice of their cause, otherwise they would not have appealed to higher authority; for another, the city had reason to think that their charge had substance. What then was the subject of dispute?

If the city was so certain of its case as to impose sanctions for non-payment, the meaning of Josephus’ τελὴ μὴ ὀφειλόμενα should be, not “taxes not owed because they had already been paid”, but “taxes not owed because they were being demanded (in the Jewish view) illegally.” As this was a tax for the discharge of which the Jews were responsible as a group, yet saw themselves as exempt from it, there are two possible alternatives: either this was an exceptional imposition to which the Jews had not agreed, or it was a regular tax whose payment was now refused by the community. Generally both citizens and non-citizens of Greek cities were liable to pay the same taxes, but alien residents (μέτοικοι, κάτοικοι) paid a special impost (the μετοίκιον), and this only can have been the tax concerned in the present dispute. In other words, the subject of the conflict was the status of the Jews as citizens or noncitizens. Their position, indeed, was sufficiently ambiguous to expose them to attack; as we have seen, Strabo’s information tells us that they were neither citizens nor metics. This being the case, the function of the σικοφάνται was to cast doubt on the validity of their status and of their privileges. This analysis, indeed, can be confirmed by Josephus’ own account, which relates that Augustus, reasserting the Jewish right to transmit the half-sheqel, granted them τὴν αὐτήν ἰσοτελείαν (Ant. XVI, 161), indicating that he confirmed an existent status that had been challenged by the city of Cyrene. Ἰσοτελεία, as stated, was exemption of metics from the μετοίκιον. The Jews, though not citizens, were exempt from this tax; they were in fact especially privileged aliens, and the Greeks of Cyrene saw no reason why, if they annually sent large sums of money out of the state, they should enjoy such exemption, which gave them a status superior to that of the Greek metics. We do not know whether as a result of Augustus’ confirmation the opportunity was also given to certain Cyrenean Jews to obtain full citizen status. But there are some hints that such was the case.

In the first half of the century, on Strabo’s evidence, the Jews did not possess citizenship in Cyrene. The year when Agrippa confirmed this right to send the half-sheqel, is not known; in Juster’s opinion[1030] it was between 23 and 13 B.C., when Agrippa was in charge of the Near East, and issued a similar order on the halfsheqel to the city of Ephesus. He died in 13 B.C. Agrippa himself refers in his letter to a previous instruction on the matter sent by Augustus to Flavius, governor of Crete and Cyrene;[1031] probably, then, his second instruction was given nearer to the year 13. At Ptolemais we find Jews as ephebes as early as 3/2 B.C., hence they had begun their education in the gymnasium in 13 B.C. approximately. In Cyrene Jews had begun to obtain the same education by 7/6 B.C.

On this evidence, Agrippa’s letter was sent to the Cyrene authorities not long before his death, and it would seem that in this or another order issued in connection with the same problem Augustus (probably with Agrippa’s advice) decided that a number of Jews of Cyrene, Ptolemais, and perhaps of the other Pentapolis towns, could acquire Greek citizenship. Such an order would indeed have been appropriate to Augustus’ general eastern policy in those years, for between 2 B.C. and A.D. 2 he reconfirmed by a general declaration the internal rights of the Jewish organizations throughout the Empire.[1032] Josephus reports this confirmation immediately after mentioning for the first time the attempts of the cities of Cyrene and Asia to prevent the transfer of the Temple dues.

Further light is thrown on the status of the Jews of Cyrene in the 1st century A.D. by an inscription of the nomophylakes of Cyrene, published in 1961.[1033] This is a dedication by the nomophylakes of the city to some deity (the stone is broken below and its lower part has been severely damaged). It belongs to the years 60 and 61 of the current era, opening with a date and the names of the priest of Apollo who is completing his term of office, and of his successor. There follow the names of ten or eleven and perhaps additional nomophylakes. As the inscription records these posts for two years, and other known dedications of this class do not mention more than nine and generally fewer persons, it may be deduced that the names here represent two successive colleges of magistrates, each of which functioned for a year. In this case Eleazar son of Jason, who is listed second on the list of nomophylakes, served in the year 60.

To the best of my knowledge this is, with one possible exception,[1034] the first Jew serving as a senior magistrate in a Greek polis who can be identified as a Jew. It may be supposed that he had not renounced his faith, since he did not follow a common fashion of changing his name to a Greek one, as did many Cyrenean Jews — including some active in their communities — who, as we have seen, bore purely Greek names. It is probably right to suppose that Eleazar belonged to the local Jewish aristocracy, and that his ancestors had reached Cyrene in the hellenistic period.[1035]

The complete dedications of the Cyrenean nomophylakes[1036] known hitherto were dedicated respectively to Apollo Nomios, Homonoia and Aphrodite (two), and all belonged to the period of Augustus. Four of them were found in a hall situated to south of the Agora, separated from it by a small building through which the hall was entered. On the floor of the latter were discovered 4,000 stamped pyramidal clay seals (cretulae), of the sort made to be attached to documents and certificates.[1037] This was, therefore, the city’s registry, which was administered, as the inscriptions showed, by the nomophylakes. The hall communicated southeastward with a building of no great size possessing a two-storeyed colonnade on its north front, repaired in the reign of Domitian.[1038] North of it an alley-way led into the nomophylakeion by a side door, but the nomophylakeion itself was much older, and was apparently built before the hellenistic period. The interior of its hall elicited clear signs of burning, the result of a conflagration at an unknown date.[1039]

The college of nomophylakes at Cyrene varied from six to nine members, and they were aided if necessary by three scribes (γραμματεῖς), whom Ghislanzoni[1040] considered as belonging to the college. These magistrates are first heard of in the constitution of Ptolemy Lagos, at the end of the 4th century B.C., when their number was fixed at nine.[1041] They were then appointed from the electorate of ten thousand, and signed the constitution together with the priest of Apollo, six strategoi, the five ephors and the four nomothetae; one of the last officials was also a nomophylax. This fact and the dedication to Apollo Nomios make it clear that the functions of the nomophylakes included the recording of the city’s laws, and probably their drafting. Their post may indeed have been created earlier, if Pernier was right in identifying ten names incised on the lintel of the Temple of Artemis in the mid-4th century B.C., as belonging to the same magistrates.[1042]

Everything then known of these magistrates was assembled in 1925 by Ghislanzoni.[1043] In the classical and hellenistic periods their duties varied: in late 4th-century Athens, in the period of antidemocratic reaction, they wielded a right of vetoing the acts of the magistrates and popular assembly; at Sparta they were responsible for the state records; at Elis, where they were called “Thes-mothetae”, they administered to the bearers of office the oath of loyalty to the alliance with Athens; at Corcyra in the 2nd century B.C. they were in charge of sacred and public funds, as they appear to have been at Thespiae in about 200 B.C.; at Chios they assigned new citizens to their tribes and trittyes. They recorded the decisions of the government at Abdera, also appointing ambassadors and reimbursing them for their expenses. At Pergamum in the hellenistic period they supervised the magistrates and were authorized to fine them for neglect of duty or abuse of powers; they also recorded legislation. In these functions they correspond to the accounts of Xenophon[1044] and Cicero,[1045] who define their duties as supervision of the proper implementation of the laws. Aristotle[1046] characterizes the nomophylakes as typical of oligarchies, in which they exercized a “pro-bouleutic” function, and elsewhere[1047] states that they are appropriate to aristocratic regimes. The post continued to exist in the Roman period, especially in the cities of Asia Minor, where it retained a measure of importance and much the same character.[1048]

To sum up, the duties of the nomphylakes were connected with registration and recording, with finance and with supervision over the proper administration of the laws. Their connection with the records and registration is proved at Cyrene equally by archaeological and epigraphical evidence. Accordingly a man elected to this post must be imagined to have been a capable administrator, knowledgeable in the law and of sufficient moral courage to impose observance of the law when it was abused by the magistrates. The members of this college discharged in some measure the modern tasks of town clerk and state comptroller.

We know little of the constitution of Cyrene in the Roman period; whether or not changes were introduced into the Ptolemaic constitution in the time of Demophanes and Ecdalus,[1049] it may be supposed that no radical democratization took place, while after the counter-revolution of Aretaphila the regime was pronouncedly aristocratic, headed, apparently, by the High Priest of Apollo. It is difficult to imagine that Lucullus altered these fundamentals, or that the rights of the common people were enlarged with the inauguration of Roman rule; Rome generally confirmed the political status quo, and if she intervened in the class-struggle which raged in the Greek cities, threw her weight onto the scales on the side of the well-to-do.[1050] In view of this, when Agrippa addressed his letter (according to Josephus) to “the magistrates, council and people of Cyrene” (Κυρηναίων ἄρχουσιν βουλῇ δήμῳ),[1051] the greeting can be regarded as no more than a convention; more decisive is the complete silence of Cyrenean inscriptions of the imperial period as to any democratic institution in the city. Nor can the formula used in the dedication to Germanicus at Ptolemais in the year A.D. 19, δῆμος Πτολεμαιέων,[1052] furnish a different conclusion. It may safely be assumed that the power in the Cyrenean cities in the ist centuries B.C. and A.D. remained in the hands of the wealthy, even if the skeletons of the ancient institutions were preserved. It follows, that in general lines the timocratic basis of government continued to hold good, hence it is improbable that more than a minority of well-to-do Jews was admitted to citizenship at the end of the 1st century before the common era.

Of the Jews in this period, then, we know three things; they took an active part in political life, since round about 88 B.C. they were involved in some internal conflict (στάσις), of whose nature we are ignorant;[1053] about the same time they held a position intermediate between metics and citizens in the city;[1054] and they were forced to defend this status in the last decades of the century.[1055] At this time, when the importance of the nomophylakes had increased in the city, evidently as a result of the aristocratic trend in government and the special association of these magistrates with such regimes, as noted by Aristotle, the Jews were in conflict with the polis. But in the course of several decades the position had changed somewhat; the Greek and Jewish aristocracies had reached an accommodation, expressed in the admission to citizenship of the latter, and in the subsequent appointment of Eleazar son of Jason to a highly responsible government board, for whose work men of knowledge commanding the public confidence were required.

Josephus, in his account of the events of the year A.D. 73, states that there were then 3,000 well-to do Jews in the city (εὔποροι).[1056] Even among the Cyrenean civic body, which was of considerable size as fixed by Ptolemy Lagos, and numbered 10,000 members, — but was probably smaller in the Roman period — the Jewish element may have carried considerable weight. Josephus’ figures are seldom reliable, and in this case his 3,000 Jews may have included the Jewish upper class of the entire Pentapolis, yet even this supposition would do little to alter the position, for one can hardly attribute to Cyrene less than a third of Josephus’ 3,000 well-to-do members. If we add the Jews of lesser status, who were certainly numerous — for they survived to create the revolt of 115 — we shall begin to understand the reason for the tension prevailing at Cyrene in the 1st century A.D., which ultimately produced the great explosion under Trajan.

8. The Organization of the Communities

Having learned something of the civic status of the Jews of Cyrenaica, we must sketch what is known of their internal organization. The right to an internal organization which enabled the Jews to maintain their ancestral customs and commandments, was recognized throughout the diaspora of the hellenistic and Roman periods. In the Greek cities of the hellenistic monarchies the Jews received such recognition because the variegated and cosmopolitan composition of these towns influenced both their rulers and the city authorities to accept voluntary organizations of aliens, soldiers, craftsmen, followers of various cults and other types of association within their general frameworks. The Roman Empire permitted the existence of such bodies, but took care that they should not possess any political content. The Jewish bodies, indeed, went beyond the functional terms of reference of most of the other politeumata of the hellenistic monarchies and the Greek cities, since besides the functions of welfare, cult or simple social enjoyment performed by the other societies, the Jewish bodies performed two more: they administered a system of justice based on Jewish law, and exercized the right of sending the contributions of their members to the Temple of Jerusalem. These functions also involved the recognition on the part of the government of certain tacit privileges, namely, the right not to worship the deities of the city or the monarchy (or, under Rome, the Capitoline triad and the Genius of the Emperor), and the right not to appear in court on Sabbaths or festivals.[1057] These privileges gave rise to broader practical corollaries beyond the religious and social spheres, such as the ineligibility of observant Jews to serve in the municipalities of their cities. The internal autonomy of the Jews of the Diaspora in the period concerned found practical expression in the erection of buildings (prayer-houses, assembly places, hostels and the like), in the maintenance of of burial places, in the exercise of internal jurisdiction, the collection of money, in welfare work, and in the maintenance of registries and the administrative machinery required by all the above functions. The evidence of such activities in Cyrenaica is not abundant, nor does it illustrate them all.

Communal Institutions. Specific evidence on the details of organization is to be found only at Berenice, where the organized body is called a πολίτευμα in the years 8 B.C.[1058] and A.D. 24/5;[1059] in A.D. 56, it is called συναγωγή.[1060]

The interference with the despatch of the Temple moneys under Augustus is ascribed by Josephus to “the cities” of Cyrenaica.[1061] This ascription suffices to indicate what could have been assumed — that organized Jewish communities existed in each of the chief cities of the country (Cyrene, Berenice, Ptolemais, Apollonia, Teucheira and perhaps Barka). This may be confirmed by the words of the same account,[1062] “and if the sacred money of any of the cities has been seized” (καὶ εἰ τινῶν ἱερὰ χρῄματα ἀφήρηνται τῶν πόλεων); this is clearly a corrupt text, but the Latin translation reads, instead of civitatium, civium, showing that the original had read πολιτών instead of πόλεων — and, as we have seen, the members of Jewish politeumata were also known as πολῖται (see p. 182).

In Book XIV of the Antiquities,[1063] Josephus calls the Jewish communities of Egypt and Libya συντάγματα. This is an interesting term, normally used for military formations, and certainly points to the strongly organized character of the Jewish groups in Cyrenaica.[1064] The Jewish tombs of Teucheira may legitimately be understood to mean that there was an organized Jewish community in the city.

Procopius’ report[1065] of a Jewish “temple” at Boreion (Βόρειον), the modern Bu-Grada on the shore of the Syrtis between Augila and Ajedabia,[1066] can be interpreted to mean that corporate Jewish communities existed at other points in Cyrenaica beside the five towns. Moreover the Berenice Jewish inscription of A.D. 56 calls the congregation ἡ σνναγωγὴ τῶν ἐν Βερνικίδι Ἰουδαίων; this form of the city’s name applied not only to the city, but also to its territory (χώρα), i.e. to its rural area.[1067] It may therefore be inferred that Jews who lived in the country area round the city also belonged to the latter’s politeuma, and the same principle may be applied equally to the other more important settlements of the country.

Only the Berenice inscriptions furnish any information on the officers of the Jewish corporations of the country. These show that the communal leaders here were the archons, whose number grew from seven in the period of 7-8 B.C., to nine in A.D. 24/5, and to ten in A.D. 56. The names of these magistrates, who formed a board possessed of both initiative and executive powers, headed the recorded decisions taken by the general meeting of the community (the politeuma), and in A.D. 56 by the synagogue. The names of the archons head the list of contributors, followed by a priest and concluding with the names of several female congregants. The community meets on sabbaths, on the first day of each month, and on festivals. The politeuma further imposes liturgies and confers honours upon both Jewish and gentile benefactors. The second Berenice inscription and the incidents affecting the halfsheqel show, that the wardens conducted negotiations with Roman officials and sent complaints to the authorities. The politeuma seems also to have borne responsibility for the defrayment of certain taxes to the city.

Places of Prayer. The Jewish place of worship in Berenice in A.D. 56 was known as the synagogue, and this word contemporarily denoted both the community and the building. A fragment of a marble stele found at Cyrene and published in 1963 bore a Greek inscription including the two words [τ]ὴν συναγωγ[ήν]; its letter-style dated it to the ist century B.C. while the appearance of the Roman name Dekmos shows that the inscription was incised after the beginning of Roman rule.[1068] The fragment preserved belonged to the righthand side of the top of the stele, comprising four lines of private names, while the fifth mentioned the synagogue. The upper edge of the stone was rounded off by a moulding, over which were remains of a curved plant-tendril or stalk, and a leaf; it is evident that the head of the stele took the form of a pediment. The legible names are Dekmos, Sosandros, Teimarchos and Leonides, and the accusative form of the word συναγωγή implies that we have here the commemoration of people who had aided in the repair or building of the edifice. We cannot be completely certain that the dedicators were Jews, but the form of the stele, which resembles two of the Berenice resolutions, is in favour of a Jewish identity.

On the other hand P. M. Fraser has published another fragmentary inscription found at Cyrene,[1069] dedicated to Ptolemy Euergetes II and referring to the erection of an unidentified building and its συ[νκύροντα] or annexes, a word used in Egypt in this period for the outbuildings of a Jewish prayerhouse;[1070] accordingly he proposed that the Cyrenean dedication was probably that of a Jewish synagogue.[1071] Unfortunately the places where the two above inscriptions were found have not been recorded, and the building south of the Wadi Belgadir, opposite the Agora, which this writer tentatively suggested might be a synagogue, has turned out on excavation to be an early temenos devoted to Demeter.[1072] It is nevertheless still possible that the Jewish quarter of the city ought to be looked for to south of the Agora, as here was found the fragmentary Jewish lamp to be described below (pp. 234sq.), and another of similar type has since been recovered in the Agora itself.[1073]

It is natural to assume that the ancient “temple” referred to by Procopius at Boreion in the south of the country, where the Jewish inhabitants were forced to adopt Christianity by Justinian, was a synagogue. The building became a church. This community possessed a tradition that their “temple” was established in the time of King Solomon.[1074]

Halls of Council and Assembly. As we have seen, the Berenice community possessed in the 1st century B.C. a place of assembly called an amphitheatre. We do not know if it was identical with the prayerhouse or near it, but it is natural to suppose from what was normal in the hellenistic world — and the Berenice Jews were profoundly assimilated to Greek culture, to judge by their inscriptions, their procedures and the amphitheatre itself — that the building stood in the vicinity of the place of prayer, and was even connected with it.[1075]

9. The Jews of Cyrenaica in the Rural Areas

As most of the evidence is indirect, it may be well to sum up the grounds for supposing that a considerable section of the Jews of Cyrenaica were settled on the land outside the cities in the hellenistic and early Roman periods. Attention has already been drawn[1076] to the close connection seen by Josephus between the Jewish settlement in the country and their settlement in Egypt, nor does papyrology leave room for doubt that a considerable portion of Egyptian Jewry lived on the countryside in the Ptolemaic and earlier Roman periods, engaged in agriculture and made a valuable contribution both to the armed forces of Egypt and to its military cultivators.[1077] It has further been noted that the juridical situation in the Greek polis was such as to oblige immigrants who took up agriculture to settle on land outside the city territories, since the right of acquiring city-land was rarely granted to noncitizens. The Cyrenean prejudice against trade and the crafts throughout the hellenistic period, on the other hand, would have ensured that those Jews who acquired citizenship at the beginning of the Roman period would have been owners of land.

Additional evidence of the residence of Jews in the rural areas of the country is furnished by the Greek expressions used in a number of sources to describe the Jewish community; for example, in the Acts: “the Jews who live in the districts of Libya about Cyrene” (καὶ τὰ μέρη τῆς Λιβύης τῆς κατὰ Κυρήνην).[1078] This phrase is translated into Latin as “Libyae quae est circa Cyrenen”, and is also found in Eusebius — καὶ προσέτι κατὰ Κυρήνην οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι.[1079] We find a parallel expression in Josephus: καὶ δσους (sc. Ἰουδαίους)ἡ πρὸς Κυρήνην Λιβύη κατέσχεν,[1080] This form clearly refers to the Jews outside the city of Cyrene, and that this was so is testified by the following examples, drawn from ancient literature and epigraphy and applying to Cyrenaica: Augustus calls the province of Cyrene in his edicts τῆι κατὰ τὴν Κυρήνη ἐπαρχήαι;[1081] the Ptolemaic governor in charge of the Libyan tribal regions is described as ό Λιβυάρχης τῶν κατὰ Κυρήνην τόπων;[1082] the inhabitants of the port of Apollonia term themselves Ἀπολλωνιᾶται κατὰ Κυρήνην;[1083] and the Libyan tribes outside the territory of Cyrene are referred to in an inscription of the 1st century B.C. as τὰ κατὰ τὰν χώραν ἔθνεα.[1084] A similar conclusion may be drawn from the appearance of the form Βερνικίς in the inscription of the Jewish community of that city in A.D. 56, since this form possesses a suffix which denotes the entire city-land. An isolated confirmation of the evidence relating to Cyrene comes from Severus of Ashmunein’s Coptic Lives of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, which reports that the parents of the evangelist Mark were Jewish peasants from the neighbourhood of Cyrene.[1085]

Our detailed examination of the remains of the Jewish community of Teucheira, dated between the 2nd century B.C. and the 2nd century A.D. (Ch. IV) concluded that the main nucleus of this group was composed of cleruchs or katoikoi settled here by the Ptolemies; their residence about the city is made probable by the information that the entire coastal plain between Teucheira and Bengazi lay waste and in need of resettlement after the revolt of 115-117. Elsewhere (p. 170) we have assembled evidence concerning ‛Ein Targhuna, and concluded that this was a settlement of Jewish military agricultural settlers. Greek epitaphs including Jewish names are also known at al-Bagga, on the coast east of Ptolemais,[1086] At the other end of the country, in the Martuba area, is a second point, whose exact locality has not been identified, called Topos Magdalis (Τόπος Μαγδαλίς), recorded in a survey of lands and property of the late 2nd century A.D.[1087] Papyrology provides evidence that settlements with similar names in Egypt were inhabited by immigrants from Syria, including Jews, in the Ptolemaic period and even earlier.[1088] Several other indications confirm the impression that a Jewish village-population existed in eastern Cyrenaica. A Jewish gnostic cameo found at Regensburg bears several names, including the word Ἴαβοχ,[1089] which appears to be the Ἰοββαχ recorded by Papyrus Vatican II (the property survey already mentioned) in the Martuba region,[1090] and here was also located the Βασσαχέιως Παρατόμη,[1091] which must be reflected in the name of the Jewish woman Βεῖσχα buried at Teucheira.[1092]

The memory of another Jewish settlement of the Cyrenean countryside reaches us from an unexpected quarter. Its name, which is Semitic, tells us that it was in a rural area: this is the Καπφάροδος or Καπφάροδις referred to by Synesius at the end of the 4th century A.D.;[1093] the name appears to conceal the Hebrew words “kefar hadash” (ככּר חדש) or “new village”.

Reports or unauthenticated information are to hand of other rural sites where Jewish finds have been made, and there is no point in listing them here.[1094] But it were well to refer to the Jewish settlement of Iscina Locus Augusti Iudaeorum near Medinat es-Sultan, west of Cyrenaica on the coast of the Syrtis; this place will be discussed later, but it is relevant to mention, that considerable signs of ancient field-boundaries[1095] are to be seen there, and it can hardly be doubted that this remote settlement supported itself on agriculture.

Of some significance for our subject is the Jewish influence alleged to have existed among the Libyan tribes mainly in the Byzantine period and at the beginning of the Arab conquest. This influence began long before the Byzantine epoch, and was not one-sided, as appears from the evidence of the Teucheira tombs; nor would it have been possible if Jews had not been dispersed over the country’s rural areas. It is therefore relevant to reiterate that the evidence at Teucheira is in any case in favour of the association of Jews with agricultural settlement. The indications of close contact between Jews and Libyans are also traceable in the Barka plain, in the view of some scholars; the earliest trace may be the conversion of the Libyan name Aladdeir (Ἀλάδδεφ), king at Barka in the time of Arkesilaos III,[1096] (his descendants being resident in the city in the 3rd century B.C.),[1097] — to Eleazar (Ἐλεάζαρ) in the writings of the hellenistic writer Lobon.[1098]

The French scholar Gautier noted[1099] that the Berber tribes of the 7th century were divided into the Bernes and the Botr, the latter being the Zenata, who lived in the Aurez mountains, and were attached, according to Ibn Khaldoun,[1100] to Judaism. The Jerwa and their renowned Queen Dihiyah al-Cahina,[1101] belonged to the same group. The Botr had two sub-divisions, the Luata and the Nafusah,[1102] whose descendants still inhabit the caves of Jebel a-Nefusah on the Syrtic coast.[1103] The Luata on the other hand, were derived from the Barka region,[1104] and Gautier[1105] is of the opinion that the tribal federation of the Zenata (i.e. the Botr) and their attachment to Judaism, were formed in the time of Trajan. But we shall see later that the Judaism of the Botr tribes has been subjected to sharp and negative criticism.

Finally, any consideration of the evidence for Jewish rural settlement in Roman Cyrenaica, must take into account the Arab tradition of Jewish occupation at a number of country-sites now virtually abandoned. Traditions of this sort are associated with ‛Ein-Shahat (Cyrene), Lamluda, Messa, Negharnes, al-Gubba and Gasr ibn-Igdem, all known to be ancient settlements.[1106] The name Hirbet al-Yahud is also found at several rural sites: such are ‛Ein Targhuna, Siret al-Dahar al-Ahmar on the Tocra pass; Al-Asgafa (east of Bengazi), and Lamluda. The name al-Yahudiyeh survives near Sauro north of Barka,[1107] while between here and the sea the names Ras e-Sabbat and Kaf e-Sabbat occur.

That these traditions preserve a historical nucleus is demonstrated by examples outside Cyrenaica: one is Hirbet al-Yahud, ascribed by the Arabs to the fortress of Bethar in Judaea;[1108] others are Tell al-Yehudiyeh in Egypt, attached to the fortified temple of Onias (Leontopolis)[1109] and Gasr bint al- Yehudi, associated with the Egyptian fortress of Tahpanhes, where Jews lived at the time of the Prophet Jeremiah.[1110] The degree of truth in the name-tradition is demonstrated in Cyrenaica itself at ‛Ein Targhuna. Such traditions, however, may reflect more than one period, and some may have grown up after the hellenistic and Roman periods. Such a possibility applies, for example, to the local Jewish tradition which holds that al-Fayyidiyeh, south of Cyrene, was the Rephidim of the Book of Exodus (XI, 1); here an ancient Hebrew tombstone has been found, to be dated, it would seem, after the Byzantine epoch.[1111] A similar tradition identifies ‛Ein Mara in the eastern Jebel (the ancient village of Hydrax), with the place of the same name that occurs in Genesis XV, 23, and Messa with the Masah of Genesis, XVII, 7.[1112] Even if the resemblance of later names with those of the Bible caused the identification, — and we are bound to ask why such Semitic names should be present there in the first place — the al-Fayyidiyeh tombstone shows that they reflect, in given cases, actual Jewish occupation at some period or other.