A Harvard Student's Journey through the Jewish Catacombs of Rome

In 1927, the Harvard classicist Harry Joshua Leon (1896-1967) successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, De Judaeorum Antiquorum Sepulcretis Romae Repertis Quaestiones Selectae, (naturally, for a Harvard Ph.D. at that time, written entirely in Latin), a collection of about 500 epitaphs from the Jewish catacombs of Rome, accompanied by a short introduction to scholarship on the subject later published in English as ���The Jewish Catacombs and Inscriptions of Rome: an account of their discovery and subsequent history,��� (Hebrew Union College Annual 5, 1928, pp. 299��-314). In no way can our short presentation do justice to Leon���s profound learning in Classical languages and literature, or comment at length on his observations ��� he himself would refrain from calling them ���conclusions��� ��� about the Jews in Ancient Rome. Instead, we discuss a number of Leon���s approaches that we have found most useful in our own work on Jewish catacombs, notably in the assessment of their location, present condition, excavation history, and current whereabouts of artifacts from these sites.
Lecture delivered on October 20th, 2011 at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, MA.