Naphtali Lewis (1911–2005)

The death of Naphtali Lewis (Toli to his family and friends) in September 2005 has removed the last direct and personal link with the papyrological scholarship of the pre-1939 era, prominent in which were the pioneers of the discipline. Lewis had worked with some of them, including Collart and Jouguet in the 1930s, and had met others, including Ulrich Wilcken, on the first occasion when he attended an International Congress of Papyrologists, in Florence in 1935. Fittingly, his last appearance at a Papyrology Congress was at Florence again in 1998 when—his mind and his memory as sharp as ever, even if the arthritis which afflicted him in his later life made him physically much slower than of yore—he much enjoyed reminiscing about earlier times and great figures in the presence of the younger generations of scholars.

Lewis was born in New York and after obtaining an undergraduate degree at City College and a master's at Columbia, he moved on to complete his doctoral work in France at the University of Paris, defending his dissertation in 1934. His training and interest in papyrology had begun during his master's program at Columbia, where he attended W. L.Westermann's seminars, in which his classmates were Meyer Reinhold and Moses Finley (then Finkelstein). His doctoral dissertation, an investigation of the use of papyrus as writing-material, rapidly became a standard work when it was published in French and remains so today, over thirty years after the appearance of a revised English edition under the title Papyrus in Classical Antiquity (1974). After various temporary posts and service as a translator in the War Department, although he might have seemed the obvious successor to Westermann at Columbia, he eventually obtained a permanent position at Brooklyn College, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. In his later working years he was also very active at the City University of New York's Graduate Center on Forty-second Street in Manhattan. Thereafter, he and his first wife Helen, a distinguished psychologist who died in 1987, lived in Connecticut, during which period he did also some teaching at Yale, and then in Cambridge, where his daughter Judith Lewis Herman and his son John also live. After Helen's death, which devastated him, he suffered a heart attack, but he eventually made a good recovery and in due course, he met and later married Ruth Markel. He and Ruth were both palpably delighted with their later-life union and enjoyed socializing and entertaining family and friends in Cambridge and at Toli's summer home in Croydon, New Hampshire, where they continued to spend summers, as he and Helen had done for many years. Toli was immensely proud of his family, as he also was of his newly adopted family. They also enjoyed winter visits to Santa Barbara, where he did some teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, into the 1990s. Ruth's death in November 2004 was a great blow, from which he admitted that he never recovered mentally even though he continued to keep up his interest in academic work, even to the extent of sending to Oxford transcripts of unpublished texts from the Oxyrhynchus collection a few months before he died.

Lewis excelled both as teacher and administrator and it was no small achievement that in addition to those duties he maintained a steady stream of distinguished publications for roughly half a century. If the popular conception is that there are two sorts of documentary papyrologists—those who edit texts and those who use published texts to write history—he made nonsense of the distinction, for he was able to do both to the highest standards. In textual editing, perhaps his crowning achievement was the edition of the Greek papyri from the Cave of Letters in the Judaean Desert (The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters, 1989). In his historical work, he focused particularly on law, government, and administration in Roman Egypt (as the title of his volume of collected articles published in 1995 emphasizes), making the topic of compulsory public services (leitourgiai) his...