judaism beyond the rabbis 299
‘in the name of crown gold’. Evidently by 429 state backing for the
patriarchs as a unifying force for Judaism within the Roman world had
come to an end. But by that time the state’s initiative had at least en -
abled the leaders of Palestinian Jewry to ensure that their form of Judaism
was brought to the attention of the Greek- speaking diaspora.^15
The rabbis in Palestine in the fourth and fifth centuries knew Greek,
as we have seen not least from the evidence of numerous Palestinian
Greek inscriptions. But their religious discourse was in Hebrew and
Aramaic, and it is plausible to connect the gradual spread of Hebrew
into the western Mediterranean world from the fifth century ce with
the growing influence of rabbis in these Greek- speaking communities. If
so, the process of influence was gradual, as can be seen in the case of the
family of a certain Faustinus in Venosa in Italy. One inscription painted
in red proclaims in Greek, ‘Tomb of Faustinus the father’, with ‘Peace to
Israel. Amen’ appended in Hebrew; a sign, on the left side of the gallery
where the grave was found, notes in Latin: ‘The niche where Faustinus
the father rests.’ Hebrew letters are found in funerary inscriptions in
Venosa from the fifth century in far greater amounts than in the isolated
use of shalom characteristic of the Jewish catacombs of Rome. Some-
times the Hebrew letters express Greek in transliteration, but in other
cases they spell out Hebrew words, using biblical phrases, sometimes in
conjunction with a Latin (rather than a Greek) translation.^16
The spread of Hebrew may have been slow, but it was inexorable,
and by the end of the first millennium the religious life of those who
remained faithful to Judaism in the western Mediterranean was rarely
expressed in Greek. Thus by the ninth century Jewish inscriptions from
a separate cemetery discovered in Venosa are entirely in Hebrew. The
reasons for the disappearance of Greek Judaism in places such as Rome
where the Greek language had been such a clear cultural marker are not
evident. The diminution in evidence for Greek- speaking Jews in many
regions of western Europe coincides with a diminution in evidence for
the lives of Jews in these regions as a whole in the eighth to tenth cen-
turies. The number and size of Jewish communities may well have shrunk
during this period in part because of the attraction or threat of conver-
sion to Christianity (see Chapter 9).
In any case, by the time these communities became again visible in
the evidence at the end of the first millennium, their religious language
was Hebrew rather than Greek and their outlook essentially rabbinic.
Thus in southern Italy in the mid- tenth century, the anonymous author,
known to later Jewish tradition as Yosippon, of a narrative in Hebrew