Marginal Notes To Tal Ilans Lexicon of L

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Marginal Notes to Tal Ilan’s Lexicon of Late Antique

Jewish Names from the Western Diaspora
Ephraim Nissan
Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity. Part III: The Western Diaspora 330
BCE–650 CE. (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 126.) In collaboration with
Thomas Ziem. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. xxvi, 770 pages.
I. Introduction
This bulky volume is chronologically the second to appear in a multi-volume project. Vol. 1
appeared in 2002, and is devoted to Jewish names from Palestine (or Syria) from the beginning of
the Hellenistic era to 200 C.E. In contrast, Vol. 3, under review here, arrives up to the Muslim
conquest, and “collect[s] the names of Jews who originate in the Western Diaspora I define the
Western Diaspora linguistically, i.e. the lands in which Jews spoke primarily Greek and Latin.
These included practically the entire Mediterranean Basin, as well as some inroads into Western
and Eastern Europe, as far as the northern coast of the Black Sea in the east and Wales in the west.
Coinciding with this Diaspora, and east of it was a vast Jewish dispersion that spoke primarily
Aramaic, and later also Arabic. The Jewish names from these regions will be collected in Part IV”
(1). “Every person who has been in the past identified as Jewish by somebody [in scholarship over
the past four centuries] has been recorded in this study” (2), yielding 5649 persons, but “for the
actual statistics I have used very strict criteria” (2), and only 2531 persons were included.
In Vol. 1, “women constituted only 11.2% of the population” (2), whereas in Vol. 3 they are
“21.8% (of the valid population”) (2). “This is probably due to the fact that this volume is
comprised primarily of documentary texts (inscriptions and papyri), many of them funerary
inscriptions, in which women are, as a rule, documented more than in literary sources” (2). With
respect to Vol. 1, in Vol. 3 the rubrics in the prosopography within the entries include one more
rubric: “Provenance. Under this rubric it is stated from which Diaspora country the person hails”
(2).
II. On some biblical names
“While it was noted that in Palestine the name Abraham was never used, in the Diaspora,
especially in Egypt, it was quite common and popular” (4). Ilan counted 24 occurrences in Vol. 3.
“Of these, 20 are from Egypt” (4). “Of the 60 Isaacs [in Vol. 3] 44 are from Egypt. Of the 74
Jacobs 50 are from Egypt” (4). The name Joseph is the most popular name in Vol. 3, with 116
occurrences; “Judah 90 — second, according to frequency among the valid male Jews, fifth
among the entire recorded population” (4).
“Another name that was not used in Palestine at all, but that seems to have had a different fate in
the Diaspora was Moses” (4), even though, Ilan concedes, the occurrences are not unproblematic.
See T. Derda, “Did the Jews Use the Name of Moses in Antiquity?”, Zeitschrift für Papyriologie
und Epigraphik, 115 (1997), pp. 257–260. Ilan also cites (in fn. 4 on p. 4) “Williams, ZPE 118
(1997)”, but that other bibliographical entry is missing from p. xxvi, where other entries by
Williams do appear.
Whereas in Vol. 1, “[p]ersons bearing biblical names outnumbered all the others by more than
double” (3), in Vol. 3 “[b]oth Greek and Latin names were more popular in Greek- and Latin-
speaking countries than were biblical names” (3). Whereas Hebrew names suggest Jewishness
more strongly than other names (in the absence of other evidence), Christianisation implied that
some biblical names were also borne by non-Jews.
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III. Shab[be]tai (m.) and Shab[be]tit (f.), and the modern Sabato and Sabatino
“A more acute problem is the biblical name Shabtai” — borne by a Levite who was among the
returnees from the Babylonian Exile who were led by Ezra (Ezra 10:15, Nehemiah 8:7, 11:16) —
“(and its feminine derivative — Shabtit). Although the name was rarely used by Jews in Palestine
[…], it is recorded 155 times in this corpus in various forms, most of them in Greek, making it the
most popular name […] However, it is now widely known that this name eventually became a
non-Jewish name in Egypt […] And indeed in this corpus, of the 155 attested cases, only 36 are
beyond doubt Jews” (3). There even is a Philosabbatius mentioned by Epiphanius as an anti-logos
philosopher (392).
There is a modern analogue. Actually this section in the review is one of the two that are the
longest in this review article, as I propose here a modern prosopography. The names Sabato
(stressed on the antepenult) and Sabatino occur among Italian Jews, but they sometimes also
occur among non-Jewish Italians. In particular, we are going to see a striking example of this:
Sabato was the first name of one of the promoters of modern anti-Jewish racism, and that first
name occurs among non-Jews in his native province of Salerno.
Let us begin with a few prominent Jewish bearers of those names. I am reminded of Sabato
Morais (1823–1897), a Jewish religious leader in Philadelphia1 who was originally from Livorno,
and who while in London, met the insurrectionist republican leader Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–
1872), as Sabato’s own father, Samuele Morais, was a Mazzinian. Leaving London, Sabato
Morais went on to become the religious leader of the Jewish community of Philadelphia. In
Sabato Morais’ case, he merged with his own Judaism such ethical statements of Mazzini that
were amenable to such an exercise.2 While in London, where he had arrived in 1846, when the job
as a synagogue cantor he hoped for did not materialise, he worked five years as a teacher at a
London Jewish orphanage. What matters for onomastics, is that when he about to leave Europe for
the United States, gave Mazzini his passport for Giuseppe Mazzini to use on the Continent. 3
(Eventually, Mazzini died in Pisa at the home of a secular Jewish family and was attended at his
1
Sabato Morais (an ordained rabbi who chose not to use that title) was Isaac Leeser’s successor as religious
leader at Mikveh Israel, Philadelphia’s earliest Jewish congregation, established in 1740. Following
Leeser’s death, Morais became the leading traditional rabbi in the United States (even though, as mentioned
earlier, Morais was not using the title “rabbi”). Morais was the founder in 1886, and the first president, of
the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (when it opened in New York in 1887, it had eight students).
Isaac Leeser (1806–1868) was not an ordained rabbi; he was the lay officiant at Mikveh Israel synagogue;
he also was the editor of The Occident, the first successful American Jewish newspaper. Taken together,
Leeser and Morais set the tone for the intellectual traits typifying the leadership of the Philadelphia Jewish
community.
2
Liana Funaro remarks (infra, p. 283) that for Morais, “i concetti di dovere, di sacrificio per una causa, di
impegno nella vita e nell’attività politica e sociale, che in lui si fusero con i pricipi dell’ebraismo, molto
devono alla lettura e alla frequentazione del Genovase” (“the concepts of duty, of sacrifice for a cause, of
engagement in life and in political and social activity, were merged in him [Morais] with the principles of
Judaism, but they owe much to his reading of, and encounters with, the Genoan [i.e., Mazzini]”).
See Liana Elda Funaro, “‘Home and friends’. Ritratti di ebrei italiani dell’Ottocento nelle pagine di Sabato
Morais”, in L’Ottocento ebraico in Italia fra tradizione e innovazione: la figura e l’opera di Marco
Mortara: atti del XXIII Convegno Internazionale dell’AISG, Ravenna 14–16 settembre 2009. Thematic
section in Materia giudaica: Rivista dell’associazione italiana per lo studio del giudaismo, 15/16, Florence:
Casa Editrice Giuntina, 2010–2011 [2012], pp. 281–305.
In fn. 13 on p. 283, Funaro claims that Morais may have easily endorsed one of the most famous statements
made by Mazzini (it appears in his Dei Doveri dell’Uomo [About the Duties of Man], of 1860), namely:
“Gli uomini sono tutti figli d’un solo Dio, chiamati ad eseguire una sola legge su questa terra; ognuno
chiamato a vivere non per se stesso, ma per gli altri. Lo scopo dell’esistenza non è esser più o meno felici,
ma render gli altri a sé stessi più virtuosi” (“Human beings are all children of an only God, and are called to
carry out one and only law on earth; everybody is called to live to for himself, but for the others. The
purpose of existence is not to be more or less happy, but to make others and oneself more virtuous”.
3
Mazzini established the Giovine Italia (Young Italy) movement for a united republican Italy, but he also
envisaged similar movements for other European countries, and founded the Giovine Europa movement for
that purpose.
deathbed by a priest.4 But his assumed identity while there was that of a Doctor Brown, English
and Jewish.)
Another Italian Jew was Sabatino Lopez: The playwright (a dramatist and, especially, a
comediographer, as well as a stage critic)5 Sabatino Lopez was born, a second-born child, in the
Tuscan port city of Livorno (Leghorn) — the seat of a centuries-old mainly Sephardic Jewish
community — in 1867, and died in Milan in 1951. He was of mixed Sephardi–Ashkenazi ancestry:
his mother was Elvira Tedeschi (the Jewish Italian family name Tedeschi literally means
‘Germans’; the family is of Ashkenazi background, albeit Hamburg and Altona in northern
Germany had mainly Sephardi communities). Sabatino Lopez was “Nino” in his parents’ home.
His father, Isach (Isacco) Lopes Nunes, came from a family who before openly reverting to
Judaism because of the freedom afforded to the Jews of Tuscany in the early modern period, had
been crypto-Jewish in the Iberian peninsula; it was based in Livorno from the late 16th century.
Sabatino Lopez also stood out as a Zionist.
Sabatino Lopez was the father of the historian Roberto Sabatino Lopez (Genoa, 1910 – New
Haven, Connecticut, 1986), who moved to the United States in 1939 because of the racial laws of
1938 in Italy. He already had a Laurea from the University of Milan, of 1932. He earned a Ph.D.
from the University of Wisonsin in Madison, in 1942, and from 1946 was Professor of History at
Yale University. He researched especially the economical history of the Mediterranean during the
Middle Ages, especially of Genoa and her colonies, and of Venice and her trade. Interestingly,
Roberto S. Lopez (as he was known, with a middle initial, in the United States) gave the same
middle name to his own son, Michael Sabatino Lopez, born to Claude Kirschen, whom Roberto
wed in 1946; interestingly, their other child, Lawrence Claude, was bestowed the mother’s first
name as her middle name. In Jewish culture, it is unusual for a child to be given his or her parent’s
or grandparent’s first name if that person is still alive.
Sabatino Moscati (Rome, 1922–1997) was famous in Italy as an archaeologist and Semitologist.
His research also encompassed the medieval Arab world, but he is especially remembered for his
attention to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the ancient Mediterranean world. He was Jewish,
the son of Giuseppe Moscati and Lida Sadun. Because of the anti-Jewish racial laws of 1938, he
was unable to study at a state university in Italy, so he studied at the Pontificio Istituto Biblico of
the Vatican instead. Moscati was visible to the wide public because of his works of popularisation,
also as a broadcaster. His public service to scholarship included the prestigious posts of vice
president and then president of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
I have mentioned those Jewish Italian bearers of the names Sabato or Sabatino, so we can now
turn to somebody else in stark contrast to Jewish identity. The physiologist and nutritionist Sabato
Visco was definitely not Jewish. He was born in Torchiara, in the province of Salerno, in 1888,
and died in Rome in 1971. In Salerno, a city on the coast south of Naples, a street is named after
Sabato Visco. He promoted racist ideology, and along with Nicola Pende he was a pillar of Fascist
racism in Italy. He conceived of his research as an attempt to ameliorate the Italian “race”. He still
worked in academia in the postwar period, as reminisced by Giorgio Israel, a scholar6 born in
1945 who was the son of parents both of whom had been assistants of Visco, the father “inherited”
from Giulio Fano, a physiologist and senator born in Mantua in 1856 (the son of Benedetto Fano
and Angelica Viterbi: both surnames are Jewish, and he was Jewish indeed), cordial, cultured and
4
God is central to Mazzini’s political doctrine, but in a non-parochial manner that therefore appeals to all
faiths, even though Mazzini’s views were an abomination to the Church. For the benefit of Italian Catholics
in London, Mazzini promoted there the building of a Catholic church for Italian congregants.
5
The activity of Sabatino Lopez as a comediographer spanned nearly fifty years.
6
Giorgio Israel and Pietro Nastasi authored a book about the relation between science and Fascism in Italy:
Scienza e razza nell’Italia fascista, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998. Cf. Giorgio Israel, Il fascismo e la razza. La
scienza italiana e le politiche razziali del regime, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010. Giorgio Israel is a historian of
mathematics and of science, and over the years, he has published reminiscences of his father and of himself
in the Turin-based media watch Informazione Corretta. Once can find an English-language account he gave
of Visco, in an article about Fascist intellectuals whose reputation was “laundered” after WW2; see Giorgio
Israel, “Redeemed Intellectuals and Italian Jews”, Telos, 139 (summer 2007), pp. 85–108. Among the other
things, he relates an anecdote that was confirmed to him by a famous scientist: once during a lecture, Visco
claimed that methemoglobin (metemoglobina) is “half of the haemoglobin” (metà dell’emoglobina).
a valiant scholar (unlike his successor at his Roman chair); Fano died near Mantua in 1930.
Giorgio Israel’s father, Saul (born in Salonica to a Sephardi family), who had been Fano’s chief
assistant, left academia (he then worked as a physician), fed up with Visco’s constant racial taunts
uttered while whirling a set of keys.7 Apart from his professor chair, Visco was “head of the
Office for the Study and Propaganda of the Race, a section of the Ministry of Popular Culture
(Minculpop), which he held from February 1939 to May 1941, and to the numerous related
editorial undertakings that all of this involved. Visco was also a member of the Higher Council on
Demography and the Race, vice-president of the Steering Committee and of the Museum of the
Race under the aegis of the Universal Exhibition E42, and was a candidate for the editorship of
the review La difesa della razza [The Defense of the Race]”.8 The goal of debasing the Jews was
central to that periodical.
The following two examples are, likewise, instances of the name Sabato borne by a non-Jew. In
Italy, from July 2012 to April 2013, the magistrate Sabato Malinconico (born in Castellammare di
Stabia, in the Campania region like Naples and Salerno) has been undersecretary at Italy’s
Ministry of Justice. Sabato Martelli Castaldi (born in Cava de’ Tirreni, in the province of Salerno,
in 1896, and who died in Rome on 24 March 1944 in the Nazi massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine)
was a general in Italy’s Air Force until he was sacked supposedly owing to his incapacity in terms
of misjudgement, because he had denounced financial irregularities in the running of the Air
Force. After the German occupation of Italy (which took place on 8 September 1943, on the part
of military units already in Italy), Sabato Martelli Castaldi became active in the Resistance. On 17
January 1944 he went to the headquarters and prison of the Gestapo in Via Tasso in Rome, in
order to exonerate somebody who was accused of being a partisan and who had been his boss in
civil life. He was imprisoned and tortured, and finally executed. It is interesting that we have
come across three non-Jewish Italian men of some fame bearing the name Sabato, and all three of
them were or are from the province of Salerno.
Non-Jewish Italians whose first name was Sabatino include the industrialist and politician
Sabatino Aracu (born in 1953 at L’Aquila in the Apennines), as well as the Jesuit Sabatino de
7
“For a number of years, Fano had entrusted my father completely with the direction of the Institute of
Physiology, since he himself suffered from a cardiac condition. The untimely death of Fano prevented the
implementation of the competitive procedures meant to designate a successor, and Sabato Visco was called
on to occupy the now vacant chair. This individual’s arrival in Rome placed my father in an impossible
position, all the more so on account of the drumbeat of anti-Semitism that punctuated his speeches, and my
father was forced to resign from the University. I had heard tell, at length, in my family of the abysmal
ignorance of Sabato Visco. The first meeting between my father and my mother can be ascribed to these
very circumstances. My mother [Anita Contini], a young assistant to the famous chemist Nicola Parravano
(himself a professor at the University of Rome, and a fervent Fascist), had been dispatched by Parravano to
become an assistant to Visco. She had a violent altercation with Visco over what she felt were the entirely
inappropriate conditions under which laboratory experiments were being conducted. This, of course, was to
create a harmonious understanding with my father, since he too did not appreciate the scientific qualities of
the new boss, who had promptly dismantled the investigative programs set up by Fano, so as to orient the
research more toward what suited his own interests: food science, understood as a fundamental instrument
for the improvement of the Italic race” (Israel in his article in Telos, pp. 95–96). A left-wing well-known
academic, asked by a young Giorgio Israel why Visco was let stay in academia, was told, appreciatively of
Visco, that he was clever at attracting funds.
8
Israel in Telos, p. 97. The brackets are of Kenneth Lloyd-Jones, the translator of Giorgio Israel’s paper for
Telos. The point of departure of Israel’s article is Mirella Serri’s book I Redenti (Milan: Corbaccio, 2005)
about intellectuals “recycled” from their Fascist past, a book some found unwelcome, unsurprisingly so.
Giorgio Israel pointed out in that article how such former fascist intellectuals who had embraced (and been
embraced by) Communism found it convenient to continue their campaign against the Jews by disguising it
as progressive anti-Zionism: “What could be more convenient then to take shelter under the umbrella of an
ideology according to which it was possible to reiterate the same things that had been said while wearing
Fascist garb — such as the vehement condemnation of Zionism — with the incomparable satisfaction of
seeing them now justified and dignified in the guise of democratic and progressive sentiments? If one
considers that someone as capable of loathsome displays of anti-Semitism as the philosopher Galvano Della
Volpe (well-documented in Serri’s book) was one of the great ‘maîtres à penser’ of Italian Communism up
until the 1970s, it is easy to understand the importance and the gravity of such a phenomenon” (ibid., p. 94).
Ursis, born in Lecce in Apulia in 1575, and who died in Macao in 1620. He was an engineer and
astronomer active with other Jesuits in China. He wrote in Chinese a book on hydraulics, co-
authored with the more famous Matteo Ricci an atlas of China, and collaborated in translating
Euclid into Chinese. He predicted correctly an eclipse, which occurred on 15 December 1610 and
which Chinese astronomers had predicted wrongly. This gave the Jesuits authority in matters of
the calendar in China. Nevertheless, he and his colleague Diego de Pantoja had to desist from their
project of reforming the Chinese calendar, because of opposition they faced from Chinese
astronomers.
IV. The temptation to figure out a Hebrew name behind a Greek name.
In Vol. 3, the first entry in the chapter “Greek Names — Male” (197) is ’Αβάσκαντος
(Abascantus), and its prosopography consists of just one person, documented on an ostracon from
Egypt; the texts inscribed on that clay shard is dated, and the year is 88 C.E. It is known that the
man involved paid the Jewish tax, and that the name of his father was Aeschylus. However, the
actual name of the man bearing this instance of Abascantus is ’Αβάσκων.
Concerning that name variant, Ilan remarks: “On this sort of form see Introduction 2.3” (197).
And there in §2.3, but before §2.3.1, Ilan points out that W. Pape’s Wörterbuch der griechischen
Eigennamen (Braunschweig, 1911), cited as WGE, was only aware of a number of variations of
given Greek names but since its publication many new forms have been discovered in previously
unpublished documents (12–13). “In this volume, because Greek names are the most common, I
have systematically distinguished between similar forms”, — thus giving them separate entries —
“but only in cases where either WGE identified it as thus or LGPN [i.e., any of the volumes of A
Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Oxford, 1987–2005)] recorded individuals with these names.
Otherwise, I have noted them as variations of Greek names that are recorded by either WGE or
LGPN” (13).
Just to make an example conducive to what is explained in the rest of this section: it would be
misguided (and Ilan does not incur in this) if we were to try to uncover a competing interpretation
of ’Αβάσκων such as detecting the Semitic ab ‘father’, in the sense that the name informs hearers
that the father of this person is one whose name begins by ’Α after which there is a consonant
cluster beginning by σ (as the father’s name is Aeschylus indeed). We are not supposed to be
enigmatists.
“Scholars have identified certain Greek names as unequivocally Jewish, either because they
translate a common Hebrew name (e.g. Eirene — ‫ )שלום‬or because they sound similar to a Hebrew
name (e.g. Simon — ‫;שמעון‬9 Aster — ‫)אסתר‬, but identifying a person as Jewish merely because he
bears such a name is a circular argument” (7). Indeed.
And indeed, in the entry for Popellia on p. 606, Ilan signals a Ποπελία aged 39 buried in Cyrene,
remarking: “The editor [of her source] admitted that there was no reason to suspect Jewishness,
but claimed that it appears in [a] tomb with names Jews used, e.g. Simon”, and she cites her own
reservations in §6.6.4 and §6.5.5 of the introduction. (Ilan is inclusive of all names of persons
considered as Jewish by somebody among earlier scholars, while expressing her own doubts, and
excluding the individuals concerned from her statistical analysis. Other examples of flimsy
identification as Jewish in earlier scholarship can be found in both entries Graecina (587) and
Pomponia (605): those two names are only borne, in the corpus of Vol. 3, by the wife of a Roman
governor of Britannia, mentioned by Tacitus because she was accused of alien superstition,
“which has been interpreted as Judaism, but could be otherwise”.)
On p. 273 in Vol. 3, of 2008, there is an entry for Εὐρήμον (Euremon); its prosopography is from
first-century Greece (the man was originally from Antioch, and his wife was a Samaritan), and in
a papyrus from Egypt, dated 171–174 C.E. Just suppose for a moment that this name occurred as
9
Simon may be a perfectly Greek name, rather than an adaptation of a Biblical Hebrew name, as pointed out
by Susanna Maria Ruozzi Sala, in her Italian-language booklet Lexicon nominum Semiticorum quae in
papyris Graecis in Aegypto repertis ab anno 323 a.Ch.n. usque ad annum 70 p.Ch.n. laudata reperiuntur
(Testi e Documenti per lo Studio dell’Antichità, 46), Milan: Cisalpino-Goliardica, distributed in Milan by
Hoepli, 1974.
transcribed into the Hebrew script as ‫’ אברמון‬BRMWN. We would have been misled into mistaking
this for a variant of the name Abraham. But even without any occurrence of the Greek name in the
Hebrew script, it may be tempting for somebody quite motivated to come up with results, to find
that particular Greek name an approximation of Abraham. That would be misguided, as such a
situation of a name being bestowed seems quite unlikely in the social circles involved, as one
examines Ilan’s entry for Εὐρήμον (Euremon). Of course, she made no such suggestion, either.
V. Quirks of Greek names through cultural contact (with Latin, or in Egypt)
Ilan states: “Because a large number of sources for this corpus [Vol. 3] originate in Egypt, I
discovered that a large number of names borne by Jews from that country could not be explained
in any other way than being Egyptian” (9), but she records as Egyptian also “names that are
probably derived from perfectly good Greek names, but [such] that the forms they acquire in
papyri in Egypt are recorded nowhere else. Thus, they can be viewed as unique Egyptian
manifestations” (9–10).
Ilan remarks as follows, concerning abbreviated names: “Sometimes, names in documents are
intentionally abbreviated. This is particularly true in Greek names written in Greek, but is also
found in cases of Greek names written in Latin. It is more common in official documents,
particularly ostraca, but also in papyri from Egypt” (13).
The interference from one alphabet into a different alphabet occurs sometimes: “Greek characters
often look like Latin ones, though they fulfil a completely different function. […] Sometimes we
find names transcribed in latin, with this letter functioning as its Latin equivalent, e.g. Aurhlius
(=Aurelius); Acella (Asella)” (19).
I can think of such present-day use in marketing, promotion, or semiserious contexts such as
political cartoons, in which something is written in the language and script of the intended
audience, but the letters are given shapes that remind of the script of the setting or culture referred
to, or, which is what is relevant here, with, say, a Cyrillic letter being used not with the phonetic
value it has when used in writing Russian, but rather with the phonetic value of a similarly shaped
letter of the Roman alphabet.
VI. Viator is in all likelihood a perfectly good name, and is not an error for Victor
On pp. 558–559, Ilan has an entry for Victor, with a prosopography. We are concerned here with
the last person enumerated in that entry. The name Viator (which Ilan considers to be an error for
Victor) occurs in an epitaph from Ras Salakta in North Africa. “The inscription is accompanied by
a menorah” (559), so the person commemorated can be assumed to have been Jewish. “The
inscription is not dated. Late antique date presumed” (559). Ilan found that name as no. 8 in Y. Le
Bohec, “Inscriptions juives et judaïsantes [not ‘Judaïantes’ (xviii)] de l’Afrique romaine”,
Antiquités Africaines, 17 (1981), pp. 165–207.
On p. 559, s.v. Victor, concerning no. 5 and note 11: in my opinion, by all means, the name in the
form Viator may be a good name distinct from Victor, not an error. As a common name, viator
denotes ‘traveller’, or ‘‘a magistrate’s envoy’). As a personal name, a metaphor is intended: one
who will journey throughout life.
Perhaps it is not superfluous to mention that there is a rather visible journal in the humanities
whose name is Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, published by Brepols in Turnhout,
Belgium for the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies of the University of California in Los
Angeles. The choice of a name is explained by the journal’s own blurb: “In keeping with its title,
‘traveler’, the journal gives special consideration to articles that cross frontiers, focus on meetings
between cultures, pursue an idea through the centuries, or employ methods of different disciplines
simultaneously”.
Viator is an inspiring name, because it is not merely taken to mean its literal sense. Concerning
the concept of homo viator, see Gerhart B. Ladner, “Homo Viator: Mediaeval ideas on Alienation
and Order”, Speculum, 42(2), 1967, pp. 233–259. That article (which originally was a dinner
address) begins as follows:
Homo Viator — man is a wayfarer. He is a wanderer between two worlds, but in

more than one sense. He may have around himself an aura of divine being like the
long-suffering godlike Ulysses or Plato’s Eleatic Stranger or Prospero,
Shakespeare’s exiled island prince. Or he may be surrounded by an atmosphere of
demonic horror like the Medusa and Caliban, monstrous beings who have become,
or have always been, deeply estranged from gods and men. Indeed, Homo Viator can
be so sublime and so low that I was doubtful whether I should bring him to our
banquet tonight in either form. But already Plato has suggested on the occasion of an
even more famous Symposium that to the feast of the wise both the good and the less
good unbidden go — and so I hope that you will receive with good grace, and not
without concern for his ultimate fate, a stranger and wayfarer who may travel as a
pilgrim from and to an eternal order or may defy order as an alienated rebel or may
assume the guise of a fool or be a victim of delusion.
The concepts of via, viator, the related ones of peregrinus, peregrinatio, and of
alienus, alienatio on the one hand, and of ordo, ordinare on the other, are quite
essential ingredients of early Christian and mediaeval thought and life. Nobody will
expect me to sketch their entire history during the Middle Ages nor to trace fully
their relation to modern ideas, especially to the hypertrophy of alienation ideology in
our own time.
On p. 236 in his article on homo viator, Ladner pointed out something, in the history of
mentalities, which is relevant to the period to which the North African Jewish epitaph for Viator
belongs, and which is relevant also for Jews, not only for early Christians:
According to that great anonymous document of the mentality of the early Church
which is the Epistle to Diognetus, the terrestrial lot of Christians is eminently that of
strangers:
They reside in their own fatherlands, but as if they were non-citizens;

they take part in all things as if they were citizens and suffer all things
as if they were strangers; every foreign country is a fatherland to them
and every fatherland is to them a foreign country ... They dwell on earth,
but they are citizens in heaven…
This text anticipates the well-known Augustinian idea of the Civitas Dei peregrinans,
which so greatly influenced Christian thinking on man's historical destiny. The
metaphor, too, of the viator, the traveller, who seeks only temporary comfort in an
inn on the road is found in Augustine’s works, whence Gregory [p. 237:] the Great
may have taken it. The topoi of xeniteia and peregrinatio, of pilgrimage, of
homelessness, of strang[e]ness in this world, are among the most widespread in early
Christian ascetic literature, and not a few ascetics, monastic and otherwise, practiced
it by voluntary and migratory exile from their fatherland. The early Christian
personal names Peregrinus and Viator had in late Roman times occurred also among
pagans, derived perhaps from the social status of the peregrinus (a free man who is
not a Roman citizen) and from the office of the Viator (helper of old-Roman
magistrates or priests), but in Christian times these names may well have had the
spiritual connotations with which we are here concerned.
Pellegrino Di Segni, the father-in-law of an uncle of mine, was a small industrialist in the Milan
area,10 but his family background was in Rome’s Jewish community, and this was reflected in
both his first and last names. (His Lombard widow once referred to him affectionately as “Quel
romanaccio!”, i.e., “That nasty Roman!”) There is, or was, a parokhet, embroidered cloth,
covering the Ark at Milan’s Central Synagogue in Via Guastalla. That parokhet commemorates
10
In Rome in the 20th century there was a peddler bearing that same full name.
him, and bears, embroidered on the cloth, a double inscription, in Hebrew and Italian, in which he
is named as Pellegrino (in the Italian inscription) and ‫ גרשם‬or perhaps (with scriptio plena) ‫גרשום‬
Gershom (in the Hebrew inscription), the son of Sabato/ ‫( שבתי‬Shabbetai, or, as per the traditional
pronunciation of Italy’s Jews up to the early 20th century, Šabbedáy, because the phoneme /t/ is
between two vowels).
Moses is claimed by Scripture to have named his son Gershom because he had ended up, isolated,
in Midian, away from Egypt (from where he had to flee) and her enslaved Hebrew community.
Also the male given name Pellegrino ‘pilgrim’ is a reminder that a human being is a viator on
earth, living a transient this-worldly life.
What is more, traditionally the Jews of Rome in the modern period have been thinking of the
Colosseum as having been built by their forebears, as enslaved labour. (A corollary for some was
that after such mighty efforts, they were entitled to take it easy.) So there is a perceived parallel
with the condition of the Jews in Egypt before the Exodus.
In a version of the Passover Haggadah with a Judaeo-Arabic translation (Šarḥ) in use among Iraqi
Jews, and in a long article about it,11 I remarked among the other things that in the Haggadah, in
the passage about the King of Egypt having died, following which the Children of
Israel sighted and gave out a shout or imploration, we propose that u-nqáhrū (“and
sighed”) may embed an apologetic, polemic folk-etymology, possibly belonging in
the authorial intentions and possibly transparent to some modern recipients of the
Šarḥ. Knowledge is, and was, widespread about the Arabic name of Cairo, al-
Qáhira, meaning “the Victorious One”, a name which has long obviously subserved
the rhetoric of Caliphal, then Mameluk, then modern power. (In the European
rhetoric of the Church, the Ecclesia Triumphans having succeeded to the Ecclesia
Militans is also standard verbal imagery.) It may well be that the Šarḥ usages of the
same verbal root to express the sigh of sufference of the Children of Israel,
oppressed by tormentors old and new, reverses the dominant Other's rhetoric by
replacing it with a recrimination. The semantic shift is from “victory” (the
adversary’s victory: our own “having been vanquished” is taken on faith to be only
transient), to “they were oppressed”. Vae victis (for now). The imagery of the Son of
the Gevirah [the overlording Lady] (Isaac, Sarah’s son) being subjected to the Son of
the Handmaid was, after all, standard in Mediaeval Hebrew literature from Islamic
lands. Not by chance, in this contemporarizing reinterpretation too, after the mention
of the King of Egypt (“the Sultan of Egypt” in the Šarḥ one is to find the juxtaposed
mention of his accolites’ evil deeds. Cairo is so named, as though, not so much
because of some historical victory (al-Qáhira), but by an apt reminder of a meta-
historical relationship, and — if you pass the Hebrew-cum-Arabic coinage — the
hiqqāharūt of the Children of Israel: their enslavement and their sigh's ensuing rise
to supernal and eventually responsive heights of providential redemption. In
receptions of the Haggadah, the narrative of woes ancient is typically reinterpreted as
an imago of woes present.
As mentioned earlier in this section, the name Viator appears in the prosopography of the entry for
Victor, in the volume under review. I have a paper in press about the onomastics of the name type
Victor in the Middle Ages; in particular, on the form Bittore. See: E. Nissan, “Pisan Affairs in
Diplomatic Correspondence from Tunis, in 1227: On a Misunderstood Anthroponym and a
Misunderstood Toponym”, in: Oliviu and Daiana Felecan (eds.), Unconventional Anthroponyms:
Formation Patterns and Discursive Function, Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, to appear in 2014.
Let us conclude this section with a quotation (mentioning a negatively connotated viator) from the
fourth chapter (Caput quartum) in a Latin satire, the Hypercalypse by Ugo Foscolo (who after a
11
E. Nissan, “On the Treatment of Some Toponyms or Ethnics in a Sharḥ to the Haggadah”, Meḥ qere-Ḥ ag
[later renamed Moed (Kfar-Sava: Beit-Berl) 12 (2001), pp. 29–103.
preamble, impersonates in this satire Didymus, “Didimo Chierico”, who falls asleep on the banks
of the river Arno and has a dream).
Niccolò Ugo Foscolo (Zante, in the Ionian Sea, 1778 – London, 1827) is mainly remembered as
Italy’s pre-Romantic poet. Foscolo began writing his Ipercalisse (inspired by the Apocalypse of
John) in Milan in 1810, and having fled to Switzerland, had it published by Füssli in Zurich in
1816, by indicating it was printed in Pisa in 1815. He dedicated it to the British ambassador in
Bern. The butt is corruption in Milan under Napoleon’s rule. The satire is in Latin, but it is
published along with an Italian by G. Antonio Martinetti, since the Lobetti-Bodoni edition of 1884,
and is entitled
DIDYMI CLERICI PROPHETAE MINIMI Ipercalisse

HYPERCALYPSEOS Libro singolare di Didimo Chierico
LIBER SINGULARIS profeta minimo
I quote in both Foscolo’s Latin, and equivalent Italian, to which I add my own English translation:
1. Posthac exorsus est iterum clangor cornu viri militaris, et audivi vocem illius:
stabat enim ad ostium praesepis.
2. Verumtamen melior est somnus quam fraus: melior est mors vitae quam malum
nomen et ignominia: optimum autem manducare panem opera manuum tuarum et
vigilare in labore bono.
3. Expergiscere, Didyme, expergiscere: convertere oculos ad lumina coeli, et ad
Dominum qui creavit coelum et terram, et hominem ut desiderio coeli operaretur
terram.
4. Scriptum est: Paululum dormies, paululum dormitabis, paululum conseres manus
tuas ut dormias: et veniet ad te quasi viator egestas, et vituperium quasi vir armatus.
1. Dopo questo si fe’ ancora sentire il rimbombo del corno dell’uomo militare, e udii
la voce di lui: perché stava su l’uscio della capanna.
2. Veramente è meglio il sonno che la frode: meglio è la morte della vita che il mal
nome e l’ignominia: ma ottimo il mangiare il pane con l’opera delle proprie mani e
vigilare in fatica onesta.
3. Destati, Didimo, destati: volgi gli occhi a; lumi del cielo, e al Signore che creò il
cielo e la terra, e l’uomo affinché per desiderio del cielo lavorasse la terra.
4. È scritto: Un poco dormirai, un poco sonnecchierai, un poco giungerai le mani tue
per prender sonno: e verrà a te quasi malandrino l’indigenza, e il vituperio quasi
uomo armato.
My English translation follows:
1. Afterwards, the military man’s horn resounded again, and I heard his voice: as he
was standing at the door of the hut.
2. Truly sleep is better than fraud: death ending life is preferable to a bad name and
ignominy: but it is excellent to eat bread with the work of thy hands and to be alert in
honest labour.
3. Wake up, Didymus, wake up: turn thy eyes to heaven’s luminaries, and to the
Lord who created heaven and earth, and man, in order that by desiring heaven he
would work the earth.
4. It is written: thou shalt sleep a little bit, though shalt doze a little bit, thou shalt
join the palms of thy hands a little bit so that shalt fall asleep: and indigence shall
come to thee like a highwayman [viator / malandrino], and vituperation like an
armed man.
That Foscolo used viator in a sense he translated into Italian as malandrino (for a criminal)
is an instance of a negatively connotated sense of viator.
VII. Aretas
On p. 691, the name Aretas is indeed related to the Nabatean12 name ‫ חרתת‬ḤRTT (possibly for
Ḥ aritat or Ḥ aritah) but the latter is perhaps semantically motivated in Arabic in the sense
‘plougher’. If that etymological hypothesis is correct, then such a name would have originated as a
given name, in a society of farmers, rather than of herders. And indeed, bear in mind that
Transjordan was historically fluctuating between a prevalence of farming, and herders being more
prominent. In the Middle Ages, the pressure on farmers on the part of raiding herders was such in
Transjordan, that there was a phenomenon of farmers becoming herders.
There may be an insidious couple of factors conducive to our considering farming to have been
prominent among Nabateans. One favtor is that the Arabic adjective nabātī denotes both
‘Nabatean’ and ‘pertaining to plants’. The other factor is the medieval Arabic treatise the
Nabatean Agriculture which may have contributed to the development of medieval Andalusian
agronomy 13 (as Salo Baron pointed out, 14 Maimonides relied upon that treatise and upon the
supposedly Indian book Tomtom, when developing his conception of Sabean or Sabian idolatry).
Among modern scholars, already Étienne-Marc Quatremère concerned himself with the book
Nabatean Agriculture (al-Filaḥā al-Nabāṭiyya) in an article entitled “Mémoire sur les Nabatéens”
and published in 1835 in three parts in the Journal asiatique. Ernest Renan discussed the book
Nabatean Agriculture in two lectures, given on 20 January and 10 February 1860, and in two
articles (Renan 1860, 1861, the former being translated into English as Renan 1862) and similar to
each other, but the 1861 paper is more polished and in somewhat further depth; also the
12
See on the Nabateans in the context of the Roman frontier, D.F. Graf, Rome and the Arabian Frontier:
From the Nabataeans to the Saracens, Aldershot (now Farnham, Surrey, England): Ashgate, 1997.
13
See P. Travaglia, « Il Libro della Agricoltura Nabatea nella tradizione agronomica andalusa”, Al-Qantara,
30(2), 2009, pp. 529–533 ; M. El-Faïz, “Contribution du livre de l’Agriculture Nabatéenne à la formation de
l’agronomie andalouse médiévale” In E. García Sánchez (Ed.), Ciencias de la naturaleza en al-Andalus.
Textos y Estudios, Granada: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1990, Vol. 1, pp. 163–178.
Concerning the Nabatean Agriculture, also see Id., L’agronomie de la Mésopotamie antique: Analyse du
‘Livre de l’Agriculture Nabatéenne’ de Qutama, Leiden: Brill, 1995; A. Alves Carrara, “Geoponica and
Nabatean Agriculture: A New Approach into Their Sources and Authorship”, Arabic Sciences and
Philosophy, 16 (2006), pp. 103–132; Tawfiq Fahd, “Données religieuses de l’Agriculture Nabatéenne”,
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Suppl. 3(1) [Deutscher Orientalistentag, Freiburg
1975], Wiesbaden: Steiner, pp. 362–366; Id. (ed.), Al-Filaḥ ā al-Nabāṭiyya: Al tárjama al-manḥūla ila Ibn
Waḥ shiyya, Abū Bakr Aḥ mad ibn ‘Alī ibn Qays al-Kasdānī [a critical edition of the Nabatean Agriculture],
3rd edition, Damascus: Institut Français de Damas (Al-Ma‘had al-‘Ilmī al-Faransī lil-Dirāsāt al-‘Arabiyya),
1993–1998; Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, “Ibn Waḥshiyya and Magic”, Anaquel des Estudios Árabes, 10 (1999),
pp. 39–48; Id., “The Nabatean Agriculture: Authenticity, Textual History and Analysis”, Zeitschrift für die
Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 15 (2002–2003), pp. 249–280; Id., The Last Pagans
of Iraq: Ibn Wahshiyya and his Nabatean Agriculture (Islamic History and Civilization series), Leiden:
Brill, 2006; R.H. Rodgers, Hail, Frost, and Pests in the Vineyard: Anatolius of Berytus as a Source for the
Nabataean Agriculture”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 100 (1980), pp. 1–11; G. Salinger,
“Neoplatonic Passages in the Nabatean Agriculture, Work of the Tenth Century Ascribed to b. Waḥshīya”,
in D. Sinor (ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Congress of Orientalists (Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 13th–19th August 1967), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1971, pp. 233–234.
Already Ernest Renan had in his name publications about the Nabatean Agriculture; see “Mémoire sur le
traité de l’agriculture nabatéenne”, Mémoire Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres, 4e année (1860), pp. 47–59; Id., “Mémoire sur l’âge du livre intitulé Agriculture nabatéenne”,
Mémoires de l’Institut national de France [whose name at the time was Mémoires de l’Institut Impérial de
France], 24(1), 1861, pp. 139–190, reprinted in F. Sezgin (ed.), Agriculture: Texts and Studies, Vol. 3
(Natural Sciences in Islam, 22), Frankfurt: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften.
This also exists in English: Ernest Renan, An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean [sic]
Agriculture [Extracted from the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 24, and
translated by S. Symonds, afterwards Dunn] To Which Is Added an Inaugural Lecture on The Position of the
Shemitic [sic] Nations in the History of Civilization, London: Trübner & Co., 1862.
14
On p. 17 in Salo Baron, “The Historical Outlook of Maimonides”, Proceedings of the American Academy
for Jewish Research, 6 (1934–1935), pp. 5–113.
typesetting is much better. Renan improved on previous positions (such as Chwolson’s)

concerning the circumstances of origination of Nabatean Agriculture, and so did Kunik. Renan
considered the book Nabatean Agriculture a reflection of what he described as the latest phase of
Babylonian culture, from Hellenistic times until the Islamic conquest. Of course, their views
reflect the situation of Western scholarship in their age, which was before archaeological findings
enabled a good understanding of ancient Mesopotamia.
The Nabatean Agriculture (Kitāb al-Filāḥ a al-Nabāṭ iyya) was authored ca. 904 by Abū
Bakr Aḥmad bin ‘Alī, better known as Ibn Waḥshiyyah the Nabataean (al-
Nábaṭ i). He was born at Qusayn near Kufa in Iraq, and who was active in the ninth and tenth
centuries. A toxicologist, author on agriculture and what passed itself for ethnography, he was
also concerned with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs by relying upon Coptic. He also developed
cipher alphabets. Besides, Ibn Waḥshiyyah co-authored works on alchemy with Abū Ṭālib al-
Zalyāt. The Nabatean Agriculture connects agriculture to astrolatry (star-worship), but it also
observes agricultural practice keenly.
VIII. Šab‘am (?) and Śar‘am (?)
On p. 679, the name ‫ שבעם‬ŠB‘M of Obadiah’s son in a papyrus from Edfu of the third century C.E.
can perhaps be interpreted as a compound name, from the optative sentence ‫ שָׁ ב עַם‬Šab ‘am “(If
only / Let) the people return”, “Let there be an ingathering of the exiles”. If that interp0retation is
correct, this informs us about the ideological and religious attitude of the father, Obadiah. Not as
like, another interpretation would be an unattested given name ŚVb‘am, derived from the verb for
‘to be sated’, and is a wish for the newborn child that he would never go hungry.
On p. 680, the name ‫ שרעם‬ŠR‘M — which Ilan transcribes as Sharam — is maybe formed as a
genitival nominal compound, Śar‘am ‘leader of people’ or ‘noble above the rest’. This may
express the family’s social aspirations, and perhaps also an already comfortable economical status
which may warrant entertaining aspiration for further social mobility.
IX. The North African Agag and Moses buried next to each other
Curiously, on p. 74 one comes across an entry for the name Agag. The instance in the
prosopography is from a fourth-century C.E. epitaph from Tripolis in North Africa, of somebody
buried “next to a man named Moses”. Ilan is inclined, for good reason, to think this was a
Christian (“The name of Agag, the king of the despised Amalekites, was never used by Jews”).
Could this be a case of sheer homographs, the North African Agag being a Berber name? Could
this be a Berber name? Or perhaps, could this be a Berber adaptation of the name Acacius?
Remember the hapless clerk Akakii Akakievich from Gogol’s short story “The Coat”. If we are
faced with a North African adaptation of Acacius, then it is still unclear whether the person
bearing it was a Christian or a Jew, but the former is more likely for more than one reason.
Going back to the statement “The name of Agag, the king of the despised Amalekites, was never
used by Jews” (74), I am reminded of names such as Beulah or Mahlon being borne by Protestants,
apparently blissfully unaware that the first means ‘non-virgin’ (but the Italian surname Boella is
unrelated, even though it can be segmented to mean something quite nasty in Hebrew), and that
the character Mahlon in the Book of Ruth was given a name motivated by ‘illness’, like his
brother whose name, Kilion, was motivated by his being ‘extinguished’, because they died
prematurely without issue.
As for an enemy king, which the biblical Agag was, I can think of more than one Jewish woman
bearing the name Adriana. And yet, the Emperor Hadrian is abhorred, in Jewish memory (he
inflicted on the Jews such extensive loss of life that was not matched until the Holocaust, whereas
Agag was attacked and killed, even though before killing him, Samuel mentioned that he had
caused with his or his soldiers’ sword the death of Israelites).
X. Names from a religious tradition other than Judaism, borne by Jews
It not just a matter of whether a Jewish person would be bearing a name unmistakably associated
with an enemy king. There is a bigger phenomenon of Jews bearing names that would suggest
religious affiliation with a denomination other than Judaism. This happens sporadically in modern
times, but it was widespread, Ilan shows, in late antiquity.
There used to be a Christine in Baghdad who was Jewish-born and bred, and was nevertheless
given that clearly Christian name at birth (in the late 1920s). The local Jewish day schools for girls
had a competitor in a school run by nuns. It is likely that the name Christine was bestowed
disregarding the implication for denominational identity. The parents may have liked the sound of
that European name, or liked a person bearing that name.
Two persons in Vol. 3 bear the name Fortuna (585),15 but one of them may be a Fortunius, or
Fortunis, as Ilan remarks. As long as Rome was prevalently pagan, Fortuna could be promptly
interpreted as a name given after the namesake Roman goddess, even though it is also a common
name denoting an abstract concept.
In the scholarly literature, the place to go, concerning the Roman goddess Fortuna, is a treatise in
two volumes by Jacqueline Champeaux, Fortuna. Recherches sur le culte de la Fortune à Rome et
dans le monde romain des origines à la mort de César. I: Fortuna dans la religion archaïque; II:
Les transformations de Fortuna sous la République (Collection de l’École française de Rome,
64/1 and 64/2), Rome: École Française de Rome.16
On the fourth mile of the Via Latina, there was the shrine of Fortuna Muliebris, a version of
Fortuna overtly appealing to women in particular (Champeaux, Vol. 2, p. 33). “Auparavant, dans
l’épopée des guerres volsques, Fortuna Muliebris avait, par l’intermédiaire des matrones,
provoqué la retraite de Coriolan. Dans un passé plus lointain encore, Fortuna, amante et
véritablement femme, avait choisi Servius Tullius et l’avait élevé au trône. Au IIIe siècle, c’en est
fini de cette féminité et de ces passions humaines: Fortuna, comme Victoria et avec elle, devient la
puissance abstraite qui accorde aux généraux romains la Chance et la victoire qui en découle, et
c’est sous ces traits, froids et impersonnels, qu’elle pénètre réellement dans la vie politique de la
Rome républicaine” (ibid., p. 74).
In later times, the Roman Fortuna became merged with the Tychē of the Hellenistic world. “La
notion et le culte du Gad syrien sont-ils susceptibles d’éclairer les origines de la Tyché des villes,
si liée à l’Asie, au demeurant? On peut en tout cas penser, devant la syncrèse des croyances
helléniques et sémitiques dont elles offrent un nouvel exemple, que l’interférence de ces deux
conceptions religieuses, communes aux Grecs et aux barbares, fut l’un des facteurs qui
contribuèrent à diffuser aussi puissamment le culte des Τύχαι πόλεων à travers la monarchie
séleucide” (ibid., p. 53). Champeaux traces earlier trajectories (ibid., p. 128):
Mais, dès que le premier rapprochement s’est opéré entre les deux déesses, tout se
passe comme si Fortuna avait hâte de regagner les siècles perdus. C’est au IVe siècle
que Tyché conquiert réellement sa place dans la religion grecque. Dès le IVe siècle
finissant, elle est adoptée par les Romains. Sans doute leur fallut-il plus de temps
pour accepter le concept de la Tyché des villes, qui tient déjà tant de place chez les
orateurs attiques et qui, dès avant 350, s’incarne dans la numismatique grecque sous
les traits d’une femme parée de la couronne tourelée. Mais, si l’on considère le rôle
que joua, pour populariser cette notion, la Fortune d’Antioche, dont Eutychidès
exécuta la statue pour la ville fondée en 300 seulement, le fait que Rome ait attendu
les années 204-194 pour adapter ce culte à son usage n’apparaît plus comme de la
lenteur, mais simplement comme un délai raisonnable, nécessaire à l'accueil et à la
romanisation d’une idée qui, pour la Ville, était encore si neuve. Si bien que, à la
limite, replacée dans son temps et dans ses conditions particulières, qui ne sont pas
celles du reste de la religion romaine, l’hellénisation de Fortuna, tardive dans son
15
Fortuna is a name that also occurs in modern times among Jewish women.
16
Both are freely accessible at http://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/efr_0000-0000_1982_ths_64_1_2674.pdf
and http://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/efr_0000-0000_1982_ths_64_2_2675.pdf
commencement, finira par nous apparaître rapide et même relativement «précoce»

dans ses réalisations, si nous entendons par là qu’elle a suivi fidèlement et à un faible
intervalle l’épanouissement de Tyché dans la religion grecque.
In the volume under review, on p. 579 there is an entry for Diana. It occurs in an epitaph of a
woman in Porto, and Ilan is, for good reason (other than the pagan name), inclined to dismiss the
claim made by the editors of the inscription that it is a Jewish inscription for a Jewish woman.
Their argument was quite flimsy indeed, the way it is reported by Ilan. She points out that the
inscription is dedicated to Dionysus. That this particular person was included at all in the corpus,
is an example of application of Ilan’s rule to include everybody that anybody ever considered to
be Jewish, while excluding dubious cases from the statistical analyses.
Another Roman goddess whose name is borne by a woman in Vol. 3 is Flora (585); Flora is both
a gentilicium, and a Roman goddess’s name. (Flora is a female personal name in the Jewish world
in modern times.) In modern times in Italy, the occurrence of a Jewish person bearing the name
Diana or Dianella would be less problematic than in ancient times, because the name is just a relic
of paganism, in a present when nobody believes in the goddess Diana. (There is in Jewish law a
category, “avodah zarah she-‘azavuha ‘ovdeiha”, i.e., “idolatry relinquished by its worshippers”,
affording not as strongly keeping askance.) It is unsurprising to find men from the former Soviet
Union identifying themselves as ethnically (or even religiously) Jewish, and bearing the Russian
name Dimitri, even though etymologically the name type Demetrius originated from devotion to
the goddess Demeter.
It is interesting that historically, at different cultural levels in Italian society, bestowing the name
Diana may occur, but rural dialect-speakers would be afraid of ianas, witches, the singular iana
being derived from the name Diana, a female supernatural being you were supposed to run some
risk of encountering in the wild. More educated persons would have known about the myth of
Acteon, turned into a stag upon seeing Diana and being seen by her, so that his hounds devoured
him.17
17
Cf. mentions of Actaeon, e.g., in 18th-century London, concerning the publication, 25 March 1786, of
Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes, resulting in a quarrel, and being “the occasion for a second dramatic appearance of
Johnson’s ghost in another popular satire by John Wolcot, attacking ‘the cock biographer’ and the ‘hen’, as
Horace Walpole was then referring to Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi. Wolcot’s Bozzy and Piozzi: or the British
Biographers, A Town Eclogue (25 April 1786) is a mock sessions-poem in which Sir John Hawkins,
Johnson’s official biographer, presides over a contest between Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi, who recite
anecdotes drawn from the most trivial in their books, in order to decide who will bear ‘the Palm of anecdote
away’ (Brownell, infra, p. 8). “Horace Walpole’s comment on Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes identified the
inconsistency in all these early biographies that shocked Johnson’s friends and delighted his enemies: ‘Her
panegyric is loud in praise of her hero — and almost every fact she relates disgraces him’, a thought he puts
acerbically in a couplet recorded in his Visitor’s Book: ‘In Johnson’s fate Acteon’s re-occurs, / Each
piecemeal torn by his own pack of curs’” (ibid., p. 340). See M.R. Brownell, “Dr. Johnson’s Ghost”:
Genesis of a Satirical Engraving. Huntington Library Quarterly, 50(4), 1987, pp. 339–357.
In book 17, chapter 3 — entitled “The arrival of Mr. Western, with some matters concerning his paternal
authority” — of the novel Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1707–1754), a novel he completed in late 1748
and first published in 1749, the comic character Mr. Western (a hunting enthusiast, a squire who hates the
nobility, and who in the end will become the father-in-law of Tom Jones, but who for the time being is at
odds with his sister concerning whom his daughter is to marry or not to marry) relates about people he had
met and he did not like to meet:
“You surprise me much, my good friend”, said Allworthy. “Why, zounds! I am surprised
myself”, answered the squire; “I went to zee sister Western last night according to her own
appointment, and there I was a-had into a whole roomful of women. There was my lady
cousin Bellaston and my Lady Betty and my Lady Catharine and my Lady I-don’t-know-who;
d—n [= darn] me if you ever catch me among such a kennel of hoop-petticoat b—s [= bitches].
D—n me, I’d rather be run by my own dogs, as one Acton was, that the story-book says was
turned into a hare, and his own dogs killed un and eat un. Od rabbit it, no mortal was ever run
in such a manner: if I dodged one way, one had me; if I offered to clap back, another slapped
me. ‘Oh, certainly one of the greatest matches in England’, says one cousin” (here he
On the same page (579) as Diana, in the volume under review, there is an entry for Damnata,
Orestorius’ mother; the sarcophagus is in a Jewish catacomb in Rome. It defies belief that the
given name of a woman was Damnata (‘condemned’ or ‘damned’), and yet, Ilan is able to point
out that Damnatus is a Latin cognomen.18
An Aphroditus occurs on p. 231, and even though he bears “a greek [sic] theophoric name derived
from the goddess Aphrodite”, he is listed in a document in Jewish characters from Egypt.
“However, this is a list of names, none of them strictly Jewish” (231), and perhaps he was not a
Jew.
Again from Egypt, two men bear the name Apollos (221), obviously suggesting Apollo, and one
of them is described in Acts 18:24 as a Jew who converted to Christianity, whereas the other is
mentioned in a papyrus dated 541 C.E. and by far most of his relatives bear biblical names,
“which suggests a Jewish family, but this is the Christian era, and they could be Christian” (221).
The prosopography of the entry for Demetria (412) — “a Greek theophoric name derived from the
goddess Demeter” — comprises two persons, one from Cyrenaica and whose Jewishness is quite
dubious, and the other recorded as Salome’s mother on an amulet in Jewish characters, from
Anatolia.
Ilan states in the introduction to Vol. 3: “As has already been shown in vol. 1, Jews were not
aver[se] to bestowing pagan (Greek) theophoric names on their children. If this was true for
Palestine, it was equally, or even more, true for the Diaspora” (6); Ilan enumerates such names
from the corpus of Vol. 3 in twelve lines on pp. 6–7, with a number of occurrences for each name,
and “the figures given are only for persons who are certainly Jews” (6). This gives a total of “140
persons with Greek pagan theophoric (or clearly mythical) names, constituting 5.5% of all the
Jews identified indubitably as such” (7).
XI. Neilos (Nilus)
There presumably exist at present Jews bearing the Anglo-Saxon name Neil. This has no relation
to the following. Concerning the name Neilos (638), the name for the river Nile, often occurring
as a personal name in pre-Islamic Egypt, note the Calabrian (Byzantine) monk known in Italy as
San Nilo (b. Rossano Calabro, ca. 910, d. Grottaferrata [in the monastery he founded], 1004): his
relevance for Jews is perhaps mainly for his statement that for a Christian to be punished as a
murderer for killing a Jew, he ought to have killed at least six of them. An earlier St. Nilus is Saint
Nilus (Neilos) the Elder of Sinai, or Nilus of Sinai, or Nilus the Ascetic, or Nilus of Ancyra
[(Ankara) in Galatia, but he was originally from Constantinople), who died in 430 or 451. This
Nilus was a disciple of John Chrysostom. In the 390s or early 400s, he and his wife decided to
attempted to mimic them. “‘A very advantageous offer indeed’, cries another cousin (for you
must know they be all my cousins, thof I never zeed [= seen] half o’ um [= of them] before).
‘Surely’, says that fat a—se b— [= bitch], my Lady Bellaston, ‘cousin, you must be out of
your wits to think of refusing such an offer’”.
“Now I begin to understand, says Allworthy; “some person hath made proposals to Miss
Western, which the ladies of the family approve but is not to your liking”.
Consider in particular the words “I’d rather be run by my own dogs, as one Acton was, that the story-book
says was turned into a hare, and his own dogs killed un and eat un”. The huntsman Western, being
uncultivated, thinks of the mythological huntsman Actaeon as some English huntsman, bearing an English
name, Acton (which is also the name of a London suburb where a relative of Fielding dwelt, and where he
later lived himself). Western likens the “bitches” he disliked meeting, to “Acton”’s hounds.
18
An unpleasant association of ideas I have is that sometime in the 1970s, I bought as a present for cousins
in Milan a book of Walt Disney comics. Whereas Italy was prominent in producing on licence rather good
Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse stories, that volume was clearly translated from a U.S. story. Donald is
driving through a desert, hits his head, and is turned into a Quixote. At the time, I was appalled by the
racism of a scene, in which Donald reaches a motel run by a burly Hispanic man, assisted by an ugly-
looking Native American woman only saying “Ugh!” and a Black woman who, when Donald (the Quixote
he has become) mistakes her for Dulcinea del Toboso, corrects him by saying she is Dannata Zucchero
(Damned Sugar) from Santa Fe. In the anthroponomastics of Damnata, that other instance deserves going
down in infamy among names of literary characters.
part and each pursue the monastic life; she went to Egypt with their daughter, and he went to
Mount Sinai with their son. His vita claims that around 410, Saracen raiders captures Theodulos,
Nilus’ son who had been living at the same monastery as he did, and sold this son as a slave, who
was acquired by the bishop of Elusa (Ḥaluṣa) in the Negev desert (now in southern Israel).
Theodulos became a door-keeper of a church. Nilus, who was looking for him, found him there.
The bishop ordained them both priests, and father and son dwelt in a cave for forty years — a
familiar motif in Jewish tradition, which has it that Rabbi Shim‘on bar Yochai (during a repressive
period under the Antonine dynasty) his in a cavern, either alone or with his son, and they
remained there thirteen years. One version claims that R. Shim‘on bar Yochai’s cavern was near
Gadara (in northern Transjordan, east of the Sea of Galilee).
Consider The Story of Nilus. “A vivid description of pre-Islamic bedouin is contained in a
Christian novel from the fifth century CE, The Story of Nilus, now finally available in a critical
edition: Nilus of Ancyra, Narratio, edited by Fabricius Conca (Leipzig, 1983). These barbarians,
the text says, delight in sacrificing boys to the morning star; […]”.19 The reference is to Nilus
Ancyranus, Narratio, edited by Fabricius [= Fabrizio] Conca, Leipzig: Teubner, 1983 [in Greek,
edited in German]. In my opinion, it would be naïve to view the human sacrifice detail in that
account as ethnography; rather, I suspect it is nothing more than the motif from Hellenistic novels,
especially ones set in Egypt or Nubia, of ascribing to Barbarians atrocities20 such as anthropo-
phagy.21 See Jack [= John Joseph] Winkler, “Lollianos and the Desperadoes”, The Journal of
Hellenic Studies, 100 (1980), pp. 155–181.
Ilan (543) records two men (whose Jewishness is uncertain) bearing the name Saturninus, one of
them from North Africa, the other one from Ionia. Something not occurring in the book under
review is the name Satornilus (this is how he is known now in the English-language scholarly
literature)22 borne by a Christian Gnostic active in Antioch, whose floruit was around 120, and
who was attacked by Irenaeus of Lyons (Adversus haereses, I, 24, 2); prima facie, thar name
appears to be a variant of the diminutive Saturnillus (with no relation to the anthroponym Nilus).
Actually Latin sources call him Saturninus, whereas in Greek he is known as Satorneilos.
In Italian, the female name Nilla may result from clipping Petronilla. In Italian pop music from
the 1940s and 1950s, the singer Nilla Pizzi was prominent. Her ephemera include a postal card
(cartolina) portraying her and named cartonilla.
XII. Philistios
The name Philistion from Egypt has long tantalised me, as being borne by Philistion, a pagan
priest at Crocodylopolis. It is interesting that he was included by Susanna Maria Ruozzi Sala, in
her Italian-language booklet Lexicon nominum Semiticorum quae in papyris Graecis in Aegypto
repertis ab anno 323 a.Ch.n. usque ad annum 70 p.Ch.n. laudata reperiuntur (Testi e Documenti
per lo Studio dell’Antichità, 46), Milan: Cisalpino-Goliardica, distributed in Milan by Hoepli,
1974. This must be because the Biblical Hebrew ethnic Pelištī ‘Philistine’ is a derivative of Pelešet
19
Quoted from p. 6823 in: Walter Burkert, “Omophagia”, in: Lindsay Jones (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion,
Second Edition. Detroit, Michigan: Macmillan reference USA (Thomson/Gale), Vol. 10, pp. 6821–6824.
“OMOPHAGIA is an ancient Greek term (ōmophagia, ‘eating raw [flesh]’) for a ritual in the ecstatic worship
of Dionysos” (ibid., p. 6821).
20
Burkert, “Omophagia”, quotes at some length, from the Story of Nilus, a passage about a camel being cut
to pieces and devoured raw during a pagan sacrifice. Burkert offers these words of caution: “It is not to be
forgotten, however, that this is a novel, and that horror stories belong to the genre; this fact seriously
impairs the authenticity of the report”. Nevertheless, right after, based upon a report of 1926 from Morocco,
he relates: “The Aissaoua form a kind of secret society consisting of several clans, each of which is named
after an animal, and the members, in their initiation rites, are made to imitate their emblem. Clans of jackals,
cats, dogs, leopards, and lions specialize in tearing apart animals and devouring them raw on the spot”.
21
I have written about a particular category within anthropophagy lore, in E. Nissan “A Sketch of the
Pragmatics of the Devouring Mob”, La Ricerca Folklorica, 66 (2012), pp. 97–132.
22
See on him Roelof van den Broek, “Satonilus, ca. 120”, in Wouter J. Hanegraaff with Antoine Faivre,
Roelof van den Broek, and Jean-Pierre Brach (eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, Leiden:
Brill, pp. 1037–1038.
/Plišt/ ‘Philistia’, itself a collective noun, which in an etymologically transparent manner, denotes
the ethnic, territorial, and political outcome of the “Invasion” (verb pālaš) on the part of the Sea
Peoples. (It is somewhat like the Danelaw was to Anglo-Saxon England.)
In the volume under review here, Ilan includes the name Philistion. That name is borne (390) by
Philistion, a thief, as well as by Philistion, the son of Neon (638, s.v. Neon).
Does the name Philistion bear any relation to the name of the Philistines? Let us consider for
comparison the case of a toponym from ancient Northern Syria, a place name that has recently
caused some excitement among scholars, but with others an alternative reading finds more favour.
The names Philistines and Palestine are notoriously connected: after Hadrian’s extremely
truculent repression of the Jewish revolt, he renamed the country so as to obfuscate its Jewish
connection. In this, he had an innocent antecedent in the name Syria Palaestina, which had
sporadically emerged in Hellenistic erudition. Aancient Greek and Latin translations from the
Hebrew Bible have Φ / Ph for the initial Hebrew phoneme /p/ in the names Pelištī ‘Philistine’ and
Pelešet /Plišt/ ‘Philistia’, because in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, [φ] rather than [p] was the
relevant allophone of the Hebrew phoneme /p/. We find initial [p] in Hadrian’s imposed name
Palaestina instead, as in Aristotle’s Greek compound that gave rise to Latin Syria Palaestina.
Aristotle was motivated by an antiquarian interest to select the Philistines for the name, unlike
Hadrian being motivated by his goal of dispossessing the Jews (which in turn was because of his
hatred for their sticking to a religion not compatible with the Graeco-Roman religious belief
system).
Hebrew /p/ vs. Greek at different historical periods.23
What is much less known is that in northern Syria, after the collapse of the Hittite Empire, the
kingdoms of Karkamish and Palistin emerged.24 Aleppo was the capital of the kingdom of Palistin.
23
I have used this figure in Sec. 5 of Ephraim Nissan and Mario Alinei, “The Pizza and the Pitta: The Thing
and its Names, Antecedents, and Relatives, Ushering into Globalisation”, in: Oliviu Felecan and Alina
Bugheşiu (eds.), Onomastics in the Contemporary Public Space, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2013, pp. 328–339.
24
See T.P. Harrison, “Neo-Hittites in the Land of ‘Palistin’. Renewed Investigations at Tell Ta‘yinat on the
Plain of Antioch”, Near Eastern Archaeology, 72(4), 2009, pp. 174–189; M. Weeden, “After the Hittites:
The name Palistin or Padastini was possibly etymologically associated with the Philistines (and
the Sea Peoples). Mark Weeden explains:25
One of the most recent steps in the continuing decipherment of Hieroglyphic Luwian
has been the recognition that two signs previously transliterated into the roman
alphabet as TA4 and TA5, primarily because of the fact that they appeared in the word
for ‘place’, which was thought to contain a dental consonant as it did in the Hittite
word (peda-), are in fact clearly liquid or flapped consonants in every other word in
which they occur. They originally expressed the phonetic values ali and ala
respectively, although as time went by the second vowel-sound started to be used
indiscriminately and the initial vowel was lost: la/i.
One immediate effect of this step in decipherment was the recognition that the place-
name previously read as Padasatini or Wadasatini on various inscriptions from
northern Syria, and recognized as the Luwian term for the Amuq region, now needed
to be read as or Palis(a)tini or Walis(a)tini. The further recognition on the basis of
independent evidence that the sign used to write the sibilant (sà) is particularly used
before stops, when the vowel is not to be indicated in the reading of the syllabic sign,
leaves us with a place-name Palistin or Walistin. It is possible that the initial
consonant, rendered alternately by a /p/ or by a /w/ in the Anatolian Hieroglyphic
script, corresponded to the sound /f/, or started out as /p/, as in one older inscription,
and was later lenited to /f/.
It immediately becomes clear that this name fits well with the group of people
supposed to have settled, by whatever means, in southern Palestine, who are supposed
eventually to have become the Philistines, and with the enemies of Egypt mentioned
in the inscriptions of Ramesses III from Medinet Habu and the Papyrus Harris I.
Furthermore, it is also difficult to exclude from consideration an association with the
spread of Mycenaean-style pottery in the Amuq region, particularly locally made Late
Helladic IIIC-style ceramics, in the early twelfth century BC, as well as some of the
numerous city-destructions that occurred around that time and other factors
associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with ‘sea-people’ activity. Reaction to this
suggestion has ranged from enthusiastic to lukewarm. It is clear that the assessment
of the evidence, especially of the ceramics and the typology of the city-destructions
from the region (violent or non-violent, hostile or not), has a long way to go before
the matter can be discussed in concrete terms. Furthermore, it is completely unclear
how this kingdom is related to the Philistines of the southern Levant.
XIII. Musaeus, Moses, and Moso
In a Jewish catacomb in Rome, at Monteverde, there is an apitaph for “Museo” (525). “The
variation intended is Museus”. Ilan’s entry for this is Museius, a “Latin gentilium” (525). I wonder
whether the identification, on the part of some pagans (see below), with echoes in the patristic
literature, of Moses with Musaeus was at work here. It does not mean that Jews were necessarily
aware of such lore in detail; it may simply be the case that they perceived the two names as
equivalent, with Musaeus appropriate in the context of the non-Jewish environment. (Cf. a few
generations ago, the idea among some Jews, that a boy called Israel by his Jewish name would be
addressed or referred to as Isi, and in full as Isidore. Isidore Epstein was the editor of the Soncino
English translation of the Babylonian Talmud, first published by The Soncino Press in London in
35 volumes in 1935–1948.)
Curiously, in the entry for the female name Μωσώ (Moso) on p. 437 in the volume under review,
we find “a Hebrew woman by birth” according to the fist-century B.C.E. Alexander Polyhistor;
she was described as having been the author of a book on Jewish law. Was Polyhistor confused
The Kingdoms of Karkamish and Palistin in Northern Syria”, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
[of the University of London], 56(2), pp. 1–20.
25
Weeden, “After the Hittites”, p. 11.
(or a source of his was), and conflated her with the Moses of the Pentateuch? Ilan remarks:
“Polyhistor wrote about her in his book on Rome, but it is doubtful whether there were Jews in
Rome so early on” (437).
Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Preparation for the Gospel, IX.17–39, transmitted the fragments that
the Greek compilator Alexander Polyhistor had traded down in his summaries from the works of
the Hellenistic Jewish author Artapanus. George H. van Kooten, “Moses/Musaeus/Mochos and
his God… Seen from a Graeco-Roman Perspective”, in The Revelation of the Name… to Moses:
Perspectives from Judaism, the Pagan Graeco-Roman World, and Early Christianity (Themes in
Biblical Narrative: Jewish and Christian Traditions, 9), Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 107–138, took
issue on p. 112 with the fact that “most scholarly attention seems to have been drawn to the
Jewish author Artapanus himself, rather than his later Greek compilator Alexander Polyhistor, as
if the latter were only the uninteresting vessel in which the literary remains of Artapanus were
stored”. According to van Kooten, it is instructive to consider what it was that Alexander
Polyhistor was especially interested in “It is highly remarkable, however, that Alexander made
such extensive use of Artapanus’ views on Moses, as we shall see presently, and included them in
his encyclopaedic material” (ibid.). Van Kooten explains, among the other things (ibid., pp.112–
113; “(. . .)” is his ellipsis):
These views on Moses included the idea that Moses, when grown up, was called
Musaeus by the Greeks (Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel IX.27.3). Among the
Greeks, Musaeus was known as a mythical singer with a descriptive name which
pointed at his affiliation to the Muses. The second-century ad Greek philosopher
Numenius, too, identified Moses with Musaeus (frg. 9; […]). Alexander Polyhistor,
however, also took over Artapanus’ view that Moses became the teacher of Orpheus
(Eusebius IX.27.4). Whereas in Greek sources Musaeus is in fact viewed as the
disciple of Orpheus, according to Artapanus’ identification of Musaeus with Moses,
followed by Alexander Polyhistor, this relationship is inverted and Orpheus is
represented as the disciple of Moses, alias Musaeus. This representation could be due
to a corruption of Alexander Polyhistor’s text in Eusebius, who preserved
Alexander’s summaries of Artapanus, but it seems likely that Alexander found
Artapanus’ identification of Moses with Musaeus and his reversal of the relationship
between Musaeus and Orpheus unproblematic. As Holladay has pointed out, this is in
fact only a modification of the Greek view in Hecataeus of Abdera (FGrH 264, frg.
25 = Diodorus Siculus 1.96.2) that ‘Orpheus transmits to the Greeks the sacred
wisdom gained in his Egyptian travels (. . .). It is altered by Artapanus so that Moses,
not the Egyptian priests, becomes the ultimate source of Greek wisdom’. In this way
Moses was interwoven into Greek history in an encyclopaedic work of a respected
scholar in first-century BC Rome. Moses is even described as the first inventor of
philosophy (IX.27.4). This philosophical characterization of Moses runs parallel to
his depiction, as discussed above, by Hecataeus of Abdera.
Moses was identified with Musaeus also by Numenius of Apamea (van Kooten, ibid., p. 120, my
ellipsis):
Not far from Byblos in Phoenicia, other references to Moses are found in the
surviving fragments of writings by the Platonist philosopher Numenius of Apamea in
Syria, a near-contemporary of Philo of Byblos. Like Alexander Polyhistor before him,
Numenius identifies Moses with Musaeus (frg. 9; […]). Whereas his fellow-Platonist
Celsus ‘rejects Moses from the list of wise men’, which comprises, among others,
Musaeus and Orpheus (Origen, Against Celsus 1.16; […]), Numenius shows a very
different assessment of Moses, and even poses the rhetorical question: ‘What is Plato
but Moses speaking Attic?’ (frg. 8; […]).
XIV. Itkoumios, Marios, Harpalos, and Canis in Egypt
Ilan’s entry for the male name Itkoumios on p. 636 lists three bearers, all of them in Egypt, and of
whom one is mentioned (in the second century B.C.E.) as ’Ιτκούμιο, and the other two (in the
third century B.C.E.) in the Hebrew script as ‫( יתקום‬YTQWM). It is interesting that it somewhat
matches Hebrew morphology, and vaguely suggests a Hebrew verbal form (yitqōmēm?
yi[n]qom?). Perhaps that “Hebrew feel” motivated how in Ptolemaic Egypt the name was
transcribed in the Hebrew script.
The entry Marios is given as Egyptian on pp. 636–637, and occurs for two bearers (in the form
Μαρίου) in the second century B.C.E., one of them the father of Shabtit (a female). Ilan remarks:
“Marius is obviously a Latin gentili[c]ium […] However, it is unlikely that a Jew (or a non-Jew)
in the second century BCE in Egypt would have borne a Latin name”.
A Harpalos is mentioned in a dated papyrus from Egypt from 171–174 C.E., as the son of Canis
and Shabtit. The entry for Harpalos is on p. 634. Thew father is Ilan’s first and only Canis in the
prosopography of Canis (630), and the mother is the 25th Shabtit. I wonder whether in Roman
Egypt, Canis (even though it was an Egyptian name) may have been felt by local Jews to translate
the biblical Caleb, but this is unlikely. (Arabic Kalb is found among names for Arabian early
medieval tribes, even though kalb ‘dog’ is an insult.) What is more, Canis is how Ilan reconstructs
an Egyptian name from Graeco-Roman Egypt, but the name in the papyrus is Κάνιος. In the entry
Canis, Ilan remarks about the interchange of the ις and ιος affix (Introduction §2.6 and §2.3.3.7),
but she points out that it is the form Κᾶνις that often appears in papyri.
XV. Ursacius and his daughter Ursacia, Max Nordau and his daughter Maxa
Moving to Rome, note the occurrence of a daughter’s name being patterned after her
father’s on p. 619 in the entry for Ursacia, a name borne by the daughter of Ursacius. This
was not unusual in ancient Rome. It is quite unusual in the modern West. And yet,
interestingly, the influential positivist thinker Max Nordau (turned early Zionist leader) had
a daughter called Maxa. In his case, his overt aim of linking onomastically his daughter to
himself contrast with his distancing himself from his own father, when he changed his
surname into Nordau from Südfeld.
XVI. Celerina: an instance of both scribal hypercorrection, and

retention of a Latin declension suffix in a Greek context
Sometimes on can infer the way of thinking of a scribe, in the form given to a name. Celerinus is a
given cognomen, and Ilan has an entry for Celerina (575). It occurs in the form Καιλερειναι and
Ilan remarks: “The αι at the beginning of the name is a scribal error, see Introduction 2.8.4”, and
“perhaps the scribe thought the Latin was Caelerina)”. That is indeed how the error is likely to
have come into being. It was by a process of hypercorrection, i.e., of incurring in an error because
of mistakenly making a supposed correction.
What is more, the scribe was using a latin suffix in a Greek context: “Although written in Greek,
this is a Latin declension, see Introduction 2.4.2.2.1” (575).
XVII. Silano
One comes across an occurrence from a bilingual epitaph from Taranto, a port city in southern
Italy, dated to the seventh or eighth century, for Samuel, the son of Silano (548). Note the ninth-
century poet (hymnographer) and prankster Silano in the early medieval Hebrew book, Chronicle
of Ahimaatz, also from southern Italy (this is not mentioned by Ilan). Though itself in Apulsia,
Taranto is close to the region known as Lucania or Basilicata. The poet Silano was from Venosa
(Venusia), in Basilicata. The Chronicle of Ahimaatz is a partly fabulous account of a family in
Oria, a town in Apulia, in the early Middle Ages. There is a passage that relates an anecdote abiut
a practical joke which Rabbi Silano allegedly played on a rabbinic emissary (and fund-raiser)
from the Land of Israel.
Silano had to act as an interpreter, but while translating — from Hebrew or Aramaic into the local
dialect spoken by Venosa’s Jewish community26 (late-first-millennium Venosan? Or some Greek
vernacular?) — what the emissary had said, Silano interpolated some humour of his own, with a
facetious reference of a local row of men and women (perhaps with a salacious innuendo, too).
The guest, who may have understood what was going on by seeing that the audience was laughing,
at any rate was so offended, that Silano was excommunicated, and the ban against him was only
lifted years later, because of the intercession of Rabbi Ahimaatz who had arrived in town. Robert
[= Roberto] Bonfil, in History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle: The Family
Chronicle of Aḥ ima‘az ben Paltiel (Studies in Jewish History and Culture, 22), Leiden: Brill,
2009, translated from Hebrew the episode as follows (ibid., pp. 256 and 258):
And by the mercy of Him who created the earth with His power, He who forgives
crime and pardons sin, I shall rehearse and recollect the incident which took place in
Venosa. A man came from the Land of Israel, learned and knowledgeable in the Law
of God, well versed in the enchanting pedagogue. And he remained there for days
and weeks, and would deliver a homily every Sabbath, addressing the people of God
in the synagogue — the scholar would lecture and R. Silano would translate. One
day the men came in wagons from the villages into the town; then the men stirred up
a fight between them and the women came out of their houses, and with long staves
used for scraping the oven and charred by fire, with these the men and women did
beat each another. Then R. Silano erred and made a mistake, he searched his soul and
committed a fault. He took the midrash on the week’s portion of the Law which the
scholar was to expound on the subsequent Sabbath and erased two lines from the
letters which were inscribed there and in their place he wrote about the incident
recorded above. And such was the text, that R. Silano set down: The men came in a
carriage, and the women came out of their ovens, and they struck the men with their
forks. When on the Sabbath the scholar came to these words, he held his tongue and
uttered not a word; he stared at the letters, trying to comprehend and understand, and
perused them time and again, then innocently read them out, expounding the matter
as he found it written. Then R. Silano by laughing and mocking, all those assembled
he addressed mirthfully: “Hear what the rabbi expounds to you concerning the fight
that was stirred up yesterday among you, when the women struck the men with the
oven staves and chased them away in all directions”. When the scholar saw and
understood what had happened, his face fell and he turned pale. He went to the
scholars engaged in study in the academy and told them of the unfortunate event
which befell him, and what had occurred. Then they were all deeply saddened,
painfully distressed and depressed, and placed a ban on the astute R. Silano.
XVIII. Instances where evidence would suggest Jewishness,

which is nevertheless dubious for good reason
The entry for Mapius (516) records the name Μαπα from a synagogue graffito from Sardis, dated
to the fourth century C.E. “This is a synagogue inscription, see Introduction 6.4.1.1.1. But because
it is graffito,27 it could have been inscribed by non-Jews at the site” (516).
It is interesting that an epitaph from Cyprus in the fourth century B.C.E. in the Phoenician script
(676) names a man called ‫ מתנעשתרת‬Mattan ‘Ashtoret (‘given by Astarte’), even though his father
was an Azariah, so probably a Jew. The person is described as having been a head of scribes. Did
Azariah actually intend to thank Astarte? Or perhaps it was Azariah who, perhaps not a Jew by
birth or religious belief or practice, was nevertheless bearing a Jewish theophoric name? In this
case, analogising with recent generations may be misleading. I have already mentioned how
Isidore Epstein was the editor of the first complete English translation of the Babylonian Talmud,
26
From imperial Roman times, the town of Venusia, later Venosa, used to have a Jewish community. There
are important archaeological remains of that Jewish community.
27
If graffito here is used as an Italian past participle, the omission of the article is correct.
and we can be certain his parents were not associated with an Isiac cult, for the simple reason that
isis no longer has believer, and have not had them for many centuries. But perhaps in Cyprus in
the fourth century B.C.E., an ambitious man would try to integrate in the surrounding society and
have a career by either relinquishing Judaism, or by somehow camouflaging himself (or by having
been camouflaged by his parents) by means of a Phoenician theophoric name? Or perhaps Jews in
Cyprus at that time were nonchalant about adopting a pagan theophoric name, just as Ilan has
observed (7) for Greek names borne by many persons who were indubitably Jews? See in Sec. X
above.
XIX. Abundantio and Abandanes
Ilan places as the first entry, Abandanes (623), in the chapter “Persian Names — male”, two
persons: Abundantio, the deceased 19-year-old brother of Judah Cocotia, documented in an
epitaph from Vigna Rondanini in Rome, from the third of fourth century; and a rabbi, Benus’
father, whose name is documented in an epitaph from fifth or sixth century Naples, recorded in the
form Abundanti.
In my opinion, there is a good Latin name, derived from abundantia ‘abundance’. I feel this is
unlikely to be the Persian name Abandanes. I do not explude that in earlier times, there may have
been some immigrant to Italy bearing that Persian name, but we have no evidence for that, and
there is no need to look for a name far away, when clearly bearers and those interacting with them
would have certainly perceived a transparent semantic motivation from Latin abundantia.
Abundius (in Italian Sant’Abbondio) is the patron saint of the city of Como, on Lake Como in
Lombardy, in northern Italy.Saint Abundius, born iessalonica (Salonika), became the fourth
bishopof Como around 448, succeeding Amantius. He died in 469. He is called Abundius or
Abondius or Abundias in Latin.
XX. ‫ שיב‬ŠYB
Concerning the male name ‫ שיב‬read by Ilan as Shib (679), borne by an elder (rabba in Aramaic),
from an ostracon from Edfu in Egypt, Ilan signals such names among Nabateans, Arabs, and
Palmyrans, and indeed the semantic motivation in Arabic is ‘old age’. Obviously, like with the
Arabic name Mu‘ammar (‘aged’), a baby would be so named as a wish for a long life.
Nevertheless, perhaps ‫ שיב‬Shib is a clipped variant of the Hebrew deverbal name *Yashib,
expressing the wish that the Diaspora be ingathered (‘He will make [the exiles] return’, ‘Let Him
make [the exiles] return’). I signal this just in case.
XXI. A Germanic name in Rome: Sigismundus
It is interesting that the Germanic name Sigismundus is borne, in Rome sometime in the fourth to
the sixth century, by a man whose Jewishness is indicated in his epitaph by a Jewish candelabrum
and by the Hebrew word be-shalom ‘in peace’ (701–701).
Ask anybody to name a Jew bearing the name Sigmund, and it is likely to be Sigmund Freud. It is
a name likely to be perceived to have been borne by Jews in Germanic lands in the age of
emancipation. Whether there are local antecedents before the 19th century, I do not know.
At any rate, clearly the Sigismundus from Rome is an important contribution to our understanding
diachronically the distribution of that name type among Jews.
XXI. Sacacus
There is on p. 701 an entry for Sacacus (Σακακος). This is a name borne by a man mentioned on
an ostracon from Edfu in Egypt from 80 C.E., and whose daughter’s freedman paid the Jewish tax.
Ilan states this formula (which occurs also elsewhere in Vol. 3): “I found no word or name which
is associated with this form or root. I assume it must be a scribal error or a wrong reading of the
text”.
However, I find the lexical form suggesting a Semitic noun pattern applied to a reduplicative root,
which if from Northwest Semitic would need to rather be šqq rather than škk, which would be on
the face of allowable as a candidate if the root is from Arabic. This is because (unlike Arabic)
Hebrew and Aramaic have spirantisation, which is why Hellenistic of Roman-age transcriptions
from Hebrew would render the Hebrew letter kaf with χ instead of κ.
Therefore, rather than trying to seek semantic motivation from the Hebrew roots skk and škk (see
below), which both, had they been feasible, would have had some suitable semantic potential, one
would have to seek a Semitic root *sqq or šqq.
If the latter is a candidate to consider, namely, a root šqq, then Arabic with the sense ‘to tear up’
of the verb šáqqaqa would be semantically unsuitable for plausibly motivating an anthroponym
(other than a derogatory nickname). As for Hebrew, the growling of a bear (dob šōqēq in Proverbs
28:15) is likewise unsuitable.
We find a suitable sense, ‘desire’, for one of the lexemes of the Hebrew root šwq, in a
reduplicative conjugation: šōqēq ‘who desires’. One may think of the similarly semantically
motivated name of the Longobard king Desiderius. This was the last Longobard king. He was the
father-in-law of Charlemagne, and in the year 772 he occupied Rome, where Pope Adrian urged
Charlemagne to intervene. (The Franks were Catholic, whereas the Longobards were Arian
Christians.) Charlemagne repudiated his wife, and besieged Desiderius in Pavia to surrender in
774, and Desiderius died shortly afterwards, in that same year, in a monastery.
I think Σακακος could be tentatively interpreted in relation to Hebrew šōqēq ‘who desires’. It is a
very tentatively proposal of interpretation of the given name, but it is better said than not said.
By the way, semantic motivation from ‘desire’, indeed ‘greed’, is behind the Latin cognomen
Avidus. The name Avidus occurs on p. 472 in Vol. 3, where it is borne by Avidus Gadia (perhaps a
Jew, owing to his second name, which is Semitic), in a list of Roman soldiers from a papyrus,
dated 205 C.E., found in Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
Had it been feasible (which as explained, it is not), in order to interpret the name Σακακος from
Edfu, to consider as an etymological candidate the Hebrew root skk, then semantic motivation
would have rather been from the sense ‘to cover protectively’, than from the sense associated with
the Arabic verb sákkaka ‘to gnash/grind’ one’s teeth. Incidentally, ‘railway’ is al-sikāk [al-
ḥ adīdiyya] or al-sikāk [al-ḥ adīd] in standard Modern Arabic, but colloquially sə́kkī. Moreover,
whereas in Hebrew the plural of sakkīn ‘knife’ is sakkīnīm, in Arabic the plural of sakkin ‘knife’ is
sakākī́n.
Also consider the Hebrew root škk (which is not feasible for the same reason that were that the
root, then transcription would have rendered the Hebrew kaf with χ instead of κ). Semantically,
the root škk would supply an adequate motivation, as it is associated with the calming down of
anger or of the sea.
And we find indeed such a semantic motivation (ultimately from Latin pax ‘peace’) for
Pacatianus (included in the volume under review), or then for the name Pacifico (borne especially
by Rome’s modern Jews, but occurring also among Italian non-Jews), as well as for the Italian
name Tranquillo, borne by Tranquillo Cremona (Pavia, 1837 – Milan, 1878), a painter; he
apparently died of intoxication by the colours he used to spread on his arms skin.
Pacatianus occurs in Vol. 3 on p. 528, as a variant of the Roman gentilicium Pacatinius. It was
borne by a boy who died aged two years and five months, according to a third-century epitaph
from Lucania in Italy.
XXII. Urbib and Arbib
The same formula suggesting an error — “I found no word or name which is associated with this
form or root. I assume it must be a scribal error or a wrong reading of the text” — is given by Ilan
on p. 702 s.v. Urbib. This is the name of an Alexandrian wealthy Jew who is claimed to have
converted to Christianity, possibly during the reign of the Emperor Zenon (471–491).
I wonder whether the name Urbib may be an early instance of the Jewish family name Arbib,
stressed on the last syllable, and found in modern times among North African Jews. The surname
occurs among the Jews of Libya and Tunisia.
For example, from 2005, Alfonso Arbib is chief rabbi of Milan. His Hebrew name is Pedatzur. He
was born in Tripoli in 1958. The Jews who were forced to leave Libya in the late 1960s moved to
Italy. Or then, take Eric Arbib: the father of the Australian politician Mark Arbib, he was a
property developer, Italian-speaking, and of Libyan heritage.
The surname Arbib also occurs in the form Rebibo (unlikely to be related to the name, Rebibbia,
of a suburb and an eponymous prison in Rome). The accepted etymology is from North African
colloquial Arabic rbibo, denoting a ‘son-in-law’.
If that word is originally Arabic, rather than a loanword from a substratum, it is not too surprising
to find it in pre-Islamic Egypt. Not only the Nabateans, as well as Arabs in the Sinai Peninsula,
were not far away, but importantly, medieval Arab chroniclers were able to point out communities
in pre-Islamic Alexandria and Syria, of Arabs belonging to particular tribes from Arabia, tribes
which those chroniclers were able to name.
XXIII. A few typos
I noticed sporadic typos: on p. 689, s.v. Acetas, “Aramiac” should be “Aramaic”. On p. 7,

“Algiera” should be “Algeria”. On p. 6, “avert” should be “averse”. On p. 702, read “are” for “is”,
in “but there is no grounds for”. In the bibliography on p. xviii, in the entry for Le Bohec, read
“judaïsantes”, not “Judaïantes”. On p. 14, “spiritus hasper” should be “spiritus asper” (it is the
denotatum that is an aspiration, but the word asper has none). On p. 231, s.v. Aphroditus, “greek”
should be “Greek”.
XXIV. Envoi
There is almost no end to how much this reader would delve into the volumes of the Lexicon of
Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, for both its onomastics and prosopography. This is a lasting
contribution for which Tal Ilan is to be admired and congratulated.

Marginal Notes To Tal Ilans Lexicon of L

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Tsur 2013. Nissan – Review article on Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names, Vol. 3 p.

Marginal Notes to Tal Ilan’s Lexicon of Late Antique

II. On some biblical names

V. Quirks of Greek names through cultural contact (with Latin, or in Egypt)

Homo Viator — man is a wayfarer. He is a wanderer between two worlds, but in

They reside in their own fatherlands, but as if they were non-citizens;

DIDYMI CLERICI PROPHETAE MINIMI Ipercalisse

My English translation follows:

typesetting is much better. Renan improved on previous positions (such as Chwolson’s)

VIII. Šab‘am (?) and Śar‘am (?)

X. Names from a religious tradition other than Judaism, borne by Jews

commencement, finira par nous apparaître rapide et même relativement «précoce»

XI. Neilos (Nilus)

Hebrew /p/ vs. Greek at different historical periods.23

XIII. Musaeus, Moses, and Moso

XIV. Itkoumios, Marios, Harpalos, and Canis in Egypt

XVI. Celerina: an instance of both scribal hypercorrection, and

XVIII. Instances where evidence would suggest Jewishness,

XIX. Abundantio and Abandanes

XXI. A Germanic name in Rome: Sigismundus

XXII. Urbib and Arbib

XXIII. A few typos

I noticed sporadic typos: on p. 689, s.v. Acetas, “Aramiac” should be “Aramaic”. On p. 7,

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