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CHAPTER 1
Carving Graffiti as Devotion
Deep in the heart of the Old City in Jerusalem, pilgrims travel daily to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — revered by many Christians as the site where Jesus was crucified and buried. During high pilgrimage seasons, pedestrian traffic slows to a shuffle inside the Church vestibule, where the faithful lie prostrate and rake their fingernails through oil lubricating the stone that marks the place of Jesus's crucifixion. Farther on, women clutching their headscarves strain to decipher paintings blackened by centuries of smoke; beyond, processionals snake toward the medieval Aedicule, which ensconces the reported site of Jesus's burial. Whispers, footsteps, and chanted prayers swell into a hum as light from dusty sunbeams and faltering candles flickers off icons and metallic threads of vestments. Smoky air, redolent of frankincense and candle-wax, filters slowly through the nostrils and lungs. Over the centuries, pilgrim accounts document their authors' departures from this environment as changed people; dramatic encounters with its relics, prayers, light, smells, colors, and tastes effected their profound physical and emotional transformations. And while the architecture of the Church has metamorphosed during its 1500-year history, the interior of the building feels timeless.
But during the past six hundred years, pilgrims have modified considerably this venerated space. Devotees have chiseled thousands of crosses, crests, and cryptograms, alongside lists of names and prayers in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Georgian, into the structure's exterior façade, portals, stairways, and altars. To many pilgrims, these markings might remain strangely invisible, despite their prominent locations. When prompted to recall their time in the Church, visitors rapidly recount their sensory experiences: the warmth of bodies pressed together during Vespers; the slipperiness of the oleaginous stone of the anointing; the taste of the particulate air, opaque with centuries of dust and burnt incense; and the overwhelming sensations of joy and wonder at having fulfilled lifelong dreams of visiting this place. Quite rarely do pilgrims equally remark on scribbles around the building, rendering names, prayers, and geometric shapes, carved and painted in seemingly random places.
But these paintings and carvings blanket the surfaces of the Church. And while Church officials rigorously control and maintain the surrounding areas, these types of markings document one of the only ways that visitors have individually modified surfaces of the architectural space. Visitors' graffiti, which render sacred symbols, requests for remembrance, personal signatures, and prayers in multiple languages, do not constitute marks of defacement. They serve, rather, as physical vestiges of pilgrims' devotions, permanently tattooed onto surfaces of one of the holiest sites in Christendom (figures 1.1 and 1.2).
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Why begin a consideration of ancient Jews by examining the workings of a Levantine pilgrimage church, so significant to Christians of various denominations? One might easily dismiss this as a poor decision. Comparisons between the devotional spaces and practices associated with modern and premodern Christians and those performed by ancient Jews could indeed reflect implicit and irresponsible collapses of time, space, place, belief, and custom, barely sustained by hierarchical and reductive understandings of religious experience. When reconfiguring discussions of ancient Jewish devotional practices, some might suggest that modern synagogues would offer better places to turn for inspiration.
But, for targeted reasons, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre can serve as a particularly useful tool when beginning to rethink ancient Jewish activities associated with prayer. The availability of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for visitation is critical in this regard. Visits to the modern Church remind us of what we wish we knew about ancient Jews' devotional spaces, even if we lack such information. Entering its expanse reminds us of how profoundly sensory information shapes supplicants' experiences in devotional environments, from associated sounds, smells, textures, tastes, and degrees of illumination. And watching Christians of all denominations and origins congregate in the same church remains equally instructive — it reminds us of how demographically diverse devotional spaces can be.
Such observations, in turn, can inspire new questions about the sensory, socially, and spatially circumscribed realities of Jews in their ancient devotional environments. For instance, we might ask whether Jews only prayed in designated places, such as synagogues, or whether they might have prayed in other types of environments more broadly conceived? How densely populated were such spaces at times of communal prayer? What did ancient synagogues smell like? What, if anything, could you see inside of them — were they brightly illuminated through second-story windows, or was the darkness inside them barely permeated by lit wicks of oil-lamps? What did people wear when they prayed? Did synagogue officials or rabbis don distinctive clothing, and did other Jews modify their attire (with particular vestments, head-coverings, or veils) when they entered synagogues? Did all Jews pray alongside similarly minded Jews, or also beside and with Jews of different backgrounds, theologies, and beliefs — or even beside non-Jews? Raising questions such as these highlights how woefully incomplete are our understandings of the sensory, spatial, and demographic dimensions of ancient synagogues (let alone of the alternative spaces in which ancient Jews might have prayed), without tangible evidence for associated sights, sounds, smells, and textures.
Most known ancient synagogues are preserved only as stone foundations and tiles, broken and empty shells, largely devoid of their original fabrics, paint, or upper stories (whose presence might indicate modes of illumination through window locations). Yet these absent features were likely critical in shaping the experiences of Jewish devotees for associated activities of communal gathering, reciting and translating biblical scripture, and repeating liturgical prose and poetry. Regard for "living" examples of devotional spaces, including that of the Holy Sepulchre, may encourage us to use our imaginations to ask new questions about ancient structures, their experiential features, and their collective impact on activities of prayer — whether conducted by Jews, Christians, or pagans within them.
Yet a second feature of the Church — its ubiquitous graffiti — offers another useful prompt to imagine potential ranges of Jewish devotional practices in antiquity. Closer evaluation suggests that the locations and contents of the Church graffiti are less random than they might initially appear. Patterns emerge: signature graffiti and written requests for blessings and remembrance proliferate particularly around the portals (figure 1.1), while christograms and abstract figural graffiti dominate stairwells leading to specific shrines (figure 1.2). Locations and lexical contents of these writings, moreover, often exhibit surprising similarities to thousands of comparably neglected examples, scratched by ancient peoples from the same region, including Jews, as well as pagans, Christians, and the earliest followers of Muhammad.
Jews and their neighbors once carved graffiti, such as these, nearly everywhere, including interiors of ancient synagogues, pagan sanctuaries, and shrines, in Syria and Judaea/Palaestina and throughout the deserts of Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, and Arabia. These markings, just like those in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, are often patterned, as inscribers positioned similar types of messages and pictures in consistent portions of buildings and landscapes. They recorded their names and, occasionally, those of family members, their offerings of thanksgiving or divine blessing, and their solicitations of remembrance and favor for themselves and for their families. And these markings, associated with ancient Jews and their neighbors throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Mespotamia, and northwest Arabia, beg for attention as much as do their early modern Christian counterparts.
In this chapter, I argue that certain acts of graffiti writing, such as these, should be properly classified as modes of prayer conducted by Jews and their neighbors alike. Associated behaviors, including physical and sensual acts of carving, painting, and smudging, indeed, were intimately connected to the spatial and temporal contexts in which people performed them. The ensuing analysis of graffiti writing ultimately reveals another point, equally obscured in Jewish historiography: that ancient Jews prayed in a variety of built and natural environments. They sometimes did so only beside other Jews, and, at other times, alongside their pagan, Zoroastrian, and Christian neighbors. Contributions of these observations are manifold, as they challenge and expand conventional understandings of devotional experience, activity, sanctity, exclusivity, sociality, and spatiality among Jews and their neighbors in antiquity.
DENATURING PRAYER
This analysis requires the preliminary denaturing of common assumptions that govern studies of ancient Jewish prayer. Prayer is often understood as a specifically verbal act — a vocalized or internal production or repetition of words or sentiments to communicate with the divine and, perhaps, with other worshippers. As Uri Erlich and Rachel Neis have recently argued, however, ancient Jewish prayer also entailed bodily and visual components. Closer attention to graffiti suggests that, in antiquity, acts of scratching texts into stone or plaster, or of painting images onto a wall, equally constituted acts of prayer. My working definition of prayer, then, accommodates this possibility by imagining it as a general type of communication — directed by humans toward the divine — which may be planned or spontaneous, individuated or rote, singular or repetitive. This communication might be verbal or written, silent, spoken, or gestural. Its expressions might include divine praise and thanksgiving; requests of favors or blessings for supplicants, their families, or their communities; express appeals to the divine, and/or allude to sacred events or history. Prayer(s) might be proffered in isolation or communally. Such conceptions of prayer expand, still further, toward the end of this chapter, after consideration of graffiti nuances current approaches to ancient devotion — and particularly among ancient Jews.
Attention to the spatial, physical, and local dimensions of prayer remains critical to this approach. Ancient and modern sources frequently discuss Jewish prayer as an activity substantively disembodied from its surroundings. This understanding is not accidental, but, as some suggest, reflects a deliberately crafted rabbinic response to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Biblical texts often describe the Jerusalem Temple as God's one dwelling place on earth, where Israelites, Judahites, Judeans, and Jews diachronically offered their prayers (and sacrifices) to the divine. For this reason, some rabbis advocated visualizing scenes from the Temple during prayer, regardless of their actual surroundings (b. Yoma 54a–b). As long as Jews did not pray beneath or beside idols, in fact, they could pray (whether for the Sabbath or on weekdays) in multiple environments (t. Šabb. 18:1; b. Šabb. 149a; Exod. Rab. 12:5). But as the remains of elaborately decorated synagogues demonstrate, the contours of Jewish prayer environments mattered a great deal to their constituents. Whether Jews offered prayers in built spaces or in natural ones (those which humans did not wholly construct using tools), their devotional acts, just like those of their neighbors, were inextricably related to the particular environments in which they conducted them; their precise locations within places or sites (and with varying degrees of precision) remain as critical to their interpretation as are their lexical contents.
Some questions, largely unanswerable, but inspired by conversations in spatial discourse and landscape theory, thus remain useful here to reimagine acts of ancient Jewish devotion. How did devotees, for example, position themselves to pray inside their chosen spaces? Did they offer prayers in obscure corners of buildings, or in central locations alongside other people, where their presence was apparent and their recited prayers were more audible to passersby? And, of equal importance, how do modes of devotion associated with Jews and identifiably Jewish contexts compare to analogues among neighboring populations? Did Jews deliberately pray differently (with respect to location, posture, comportment, or semantic contents) than their neighbors did, or not? These sorts of questions situate verbal and written devotional activities as points along a continuum and facilitate their improved evaluation as vestiges of actions once conducted in specific times, spaces, places, and landscapes.
This analysis relies on a simple and practical fact: that graffiti, unlike countless verbal prayers once offered by Jews and their neighbors throughout antiquity, are documented archaeologically. Their texts and drawings often appear crude, but when available, remain etched into the same stone and plaster into which they were originally applied. And they specifically qualify here as potentially "devotional" graffiti for reasons of context and/or content. Some graffiti are found in places in which other types of devotional activities took place, including those of communal gathering, liturgical recitation, storage and recitation of holy texts, the conduct of sacrifice, or maintenance of relics (whether in synagogues, pagan sanctuaries, shrines, or the like). Other markings include diagnostic content (they explicitly name a divine audience, offer thanks, request blessings, favors, etc.). All of these types of graffiti merit collective and integrated consideration here.
Finally, we know that certain graffiti were minimally acceptable as forms of expression in devotional environments, because other users of the same spaces did not efface them, even if they did not necessarily laud their application. If the presence of a graffito had been intolerable to patrons or visitors to a building or sanctuary, for example, others might have scratched or painted over them. While some graffiti might have disappeared through deliberate erasure, known examples of graffiti associated with Jewish populations (unlike some of their monumental and decorative counterparts), found in sanctuaries, temples, and desert cliffs, bear no overt signs of subsequent defacement. Extant graffiti thus represent acts of physical engagement with communal spaces, whose survival reflects their sufficient acceptability to other inscribers and viewers.
Contexts and settings vary considerably among known graffiti of these types. Some proliferate in distinctly Jewish devotional contexts, such as the seventy documented examples of textual and figural graffiti found inside the synagogue of Roman Dura-Europos in Syria. Devotional carvings, in the forms of written signatures and liturgical symbols associated with Jews, also appear inside spaces designed for cultic use by pagans, Christians, and others, whether a late Hellenistic sanctuary of Pan in the eastern Egyptian desert or a pagan shrine subsequently dedicated to the prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel in modern Haifa. Ongoing excavations throughout the Sinai Peninsula and archaeological surveys along Nabataean trade routes in modern Saudi Arabia, moreover, continue to reveal additional and comparable examples. These graffiti, which have never been reviewed collectively, conform to at least three subcategories of devotional activity. Serial and synthetic analyses of these genres of graffiti ultimately help to forge a narrative, quite different from that preserved in rabbinic texts or dedicatory inscriptions, about the variety and capaciousness of Jewish prayer in antiquity.
JEWS PRAYING IN THEIR OWN SPACES
Jews wrote graffiti in devotional environments throughout the Mediterranean. Many surviving examples of them, however, remain particularly difficult to interpret. Isolated texts and pictures have been found inside and upon ancient synagogues and other buildings in modern Macedonia, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Israel: these include renderings of solitary menorahs or other appurtenances from the destroyed Jerusalem Temple, and, more occasionally, individual letters or words. The proportional rarity of these graffiti, particularly when compared to more abundant examples of monumental decoration and dedicatory inscriptions preserved from the same sites, remains striking.
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Excerpted from "Writing on the Wall"
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