The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions of the Bosporus Kingdom (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 507-520 Review Essay E. L. Gibson, The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions of the Bosporus Kingdom . Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. Pp. 201. Irina Levinskaya, St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Arts and Sciences There is no doubt about the importance of the theme discussed in this book. The unique collection of manumission inscriptions connected with Jewish communities from the Bosporan Kingdom has not received as much attention from scholars as it deserves. This is true both of Russian historians and of their colleagues from Western countries. The former, for obvious political reasons, had very limited access to materials outside the territory of the then Soviet Union, and thus were doomed to concentrate on the antiquities from the Black Sea region. They did this, and quite successfully . But in a totalitarian state which in addition to other pleasant features was deeply antisemitic, Jewish studies were not encouraged. Western scholars , for the same political reasons, had very little access to primary materials from the Crimea region, and thought it unnecessary to learn the Russian language in which the overwhelming majority of publications on the Bosporan Kingdom was written. Fortunately, over the last decade the situation has started to change, and Jewish-related materials from the Bosporan Kingdom are gradually becoming the focus of attention in scholarly discussions —as witness the increasing number of publications by Russian scholars both in Russian and in Western languages, as well as the Black Sea Project, on which American and Ukrainian archaeologists work together. Gibson's book should be viewed as a contribution to this new and commendable development. The task the author has set for herself is rather ambitious: "to contexualize the Jewish manumission inscriptions from the Bosporus as fully as possible and to use them as a springboard for better understanding the Jewish communities of the north coast of the Black Sea" (p. 5). In keeping with this goal, the book consists of two parts: "The Context" (82 pages with a special chapter on the history of the Bosporan Kingdom) and "The Bosporan Manumissions" (63 pages). There is also a short introduction in which Gibson discusses an important methodological issue about the identification of Jewish inscriptions, and an appendix in which she reprints the texts of the manumission inscriptions (mostly from my book, The Book ofActs in ¡ts Diaspora Setting), though without any kind of commentary. 508THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW In the introduction Gibson admits rather apologetically that she has not entirely fulfilled many aspects of her challenging task, because she was unable to read the vast secondary literature written in languages unknown to her, first of all in Russian and Polish. I wonder why learning Russian and/ or Polish, not necessarily well enough to read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or Mickiewicz, but in order to read linguistically humble scholarly literature on a certain topic, is such an insurmountable difficulty. In any case, I consider such a scholarly lacuna to be of major, not minor, significance. Gibson's lack of relevant Slavic languages is a serious drawback, and it tells in the short historical section on the Bosporan Kingdom (pp. 15-17), which is dated, superficial, and sometimes incorrect. In a summary treatment like this, one must be very careful to select the points that matter, especially given the author's ambitions to "trace the Bosporus's role in ancient history." Not only does Gibson fail to mention the Goth and Hun invasions—the most important historical events that shaped later Bosporan history and influenced Bosporus' relations with Rome, but she states that "by the third century CE, the Roman emperors' financial support had waned" although according to modern research the position of Rome in this region in the 3rd century and the beginning of the 4th was even stronger than before (thus in the 1st century ce 2% of the names on the inscriptions are Roman while in the 3rd century 17% are), and there are serious grounds to suppose that Rome stopped supporting the Bosporus Kingdom financially not earlier than in the mid-4th century. I regret another feature of the book: Gibson seems to...