Future Thinking in Roman Culture by Maggie L. Popkin Diana Y. Ng

Author:Maggie L. Popkin, Diana Y. Ng [Maggie L. Popkin, Diana Y. Ng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, General
ISBN: 9781003139027
Google: 7B6azgEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-12-15T02:49:58+00:00

Future memory and synagogue inscriptions

Discussions of synagogue inscriptions and future memory, however, require preliminary considerations of associated terms. Indeed, how might we know that certain inscriptions are associated with ancient Jews at all? And why might conceptions of memory—or future memory for that matter—offer useful frameworks for their analyses? Inscriptions evaluated later are associated with Jewish populations through their concurrent exhibition of several traits (Stern 2007: 20–56; Noy 1993: no. 9).9 These include but are not limited to: the locations of their deposits inside Jewish places of worship, such as synagogues; their recordings of locally distinctive onomastic patterns, including biblical or second names; their deployments of languages and scripts, such as Hebrew and Aramaic or even Greek, in places where such languages and scripts are less common; their inclusion of biblical or liturgical texts or vocabularies associated with Jewish life and institutions (by identifying named individuals as Ioudaios or Iudaeus or attributing to them honorific titles associated with synagogues), and their adjacency to symbols associated with Jewish institutions and practices.10 This abbreviated list of criteria demonstrates the challenges of associating inscriptions with Jewish creators, particularly when non-Jews, as well as Jews, sometimes visited synagogues and wrote texts inside them (Fine 2005; Daryaee 2010: 29–31). An inscription’s retention of multiple diagnostic features is therefore preferable for more solidly associating particular inscriptions with Jewish writers (Stern 2018: 27–29).

Assessments of memory and future memory, moreover, remain relevant for the discussion of synagogue inscriptions, because so many of them explicitly invoke associated terms, as detailed later. Yet these writings also reflect significant variabilities due to their diverse chronologies, places of origin, and spatial locations. These realities, in turn, predict several additional challenges for their evaluations. Considerable linguistic, geographic, and chronological divides separate many of the inscriptions considered here; this discrepancy predicts that notions of memory among their Jewish inscribers and commissioners likely varied in ways that corresponded with their vastly different social and cultural milieux.

As detailed elsewhere, there is likely no essentially “Jewish” conception of memory that defies regional or chronological variability (Stern 2019). Some synagogue inscriptions are carved and tessellated in Semitic languages of Aramaic or Hebrew, which include variants of the root dkyr/zkyr to designate “memory”; others appear in Greek or Latin with analogous terms (variants of mnesthe and memoria). Concepts such as “memory” might have retained similar meanings and associations for their Jewish inscribers throughout antiquity, yet an opposite conclusion, one that presumes fundamental dissimilarities in conceptions of memory among Jews of diverse times, places, and languages, might be equally plausible. Indeed, cognitive and neuroscientific literature only underscores the unstable and multifaceted nature of conceptions of memory, which remain as variable in modernity as in antiquity (Stern 2019: 2–17). As sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have cautioned, ontologies of memory—including modes of recollection of past events—invariably differ according to geography, chronology, local tradition and conception, personal proclivity, and even language (2002). Memory and future memory thus remain useful categories for evaluating commemorative inscriptions, even if associated concepts likely retained different associations for their Jewish authors and commissioners.

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