Critical analysis of the study and documentation of a Imperial Era necropolis developed as a cemetery for Jews in the Late Roman Era in the southwestern slope of the Monteverde Vecchio quarter in Rome. The pioneering 19th century Talmudic scholar and historian, Abraham Berliner, wrote that he had “traveled the entire Roma Pagana... and Roma Christiana” to follow the history of the Jews in Rome. In the face of the loss of so much physical evidence from the Monteverde cemetery, the same approach must now be taken to write a history of the Jewish catacombs in Rome, for similar, even shared, paths were laid for the Christian and Jewish catacombs’s origins, development, abandonment, and partial preservation. Just as recent work on Jewish artifacts has argued against an “isolated” existence for Rome’s Jewish community in Late Antiquity, so, too, a study of the Jewish catacombs, particularly those on the Monteverde, considered for generations by many, if not all, an “isolated” site among the network of Christian burial places on both sides of the Tiber, requires deep immersion into centuries of scholarship on the Christian catacombs of Rome. So vulnerable to the political and theological issues that permeated the pages of scholarship, this Jewish catacomb—by virtue of its early discovery, extent, and, above all, destruction—should be seen, in a manner of speaking, as the “barometer” to measure the highs and lows of catacomb research, and any one generation’s focus on issues that are in many cases still unresolved today.5 Even in our own time, the Jewish catacombs risk “isolation” once again from our continued preoccupation with their “Jewishness”—on the administrative as well as scholarly level—and need to be examined in a more critical light for their structure, contents and “storia” as it were, the history of modern studies on these funerary sites.

2010 Roma Subterranea Judaica 4, Publications of the International Catacomb Society