New Catacomb Studies and Conservation Concerns: 1930-1960

Early Explorations of the Maddalena Hill 163 Jewish catacombs in Italy incomplete.¹⁶⁶ The brief comments on the work in progress in a 1901 en-cyclopedia entry show that Müller was inclined to see the use of catacombs in Italy as Semitic in practice, though “Romanized” in construction.¹⁶⁷ The hybridity of language and culture preserved in the epitaphs also seemed to identify a Hellenic and “highly symbolic” form of Judaism that sur-vived until the first centuries of Christianity. Bits and pieces of Müller’s original project for Venosa at long last saw the light in 2018.¹⁶⁸ But in Müller’s own time, the catacomb continued to be de-scribed in the same general terms as before in reference works like the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Manuel d’archéologie chrétienne.¹⁶⁹ Fifty years of catacomb publications had left much of the ceme-tery undocumented though perilously exposed.

164 Jessica Dello Russo The following year, in 1936, new collection of the Venosa catacomb inscriptions was published in the first volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Judaicarum.¹⁷⁵ Its compiler, Fr. Jean-Baptiste Frey, Secretary of the Vatican Bible Institute, provided few details about the structure and its condition, which he had not seen in person.¹⁷⁶ The Jewish artifacts in Venosa were in a bit of a scholarly bind – spanning two different eras of history, ancient and medieval. Frey was a Biblicist and specialist on Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period: others, like Luzzatto and Umberto Cassuto, were in-terested in Jewish history of later times.¹⁷⁷ The material legacy of Post-Second Temple Judaism in the Palestine Mandate and other areas of the Middle East and Europe (above all, the site of Dura Europos) was still in the early stages of being revealed or finally given a proper Jewish identity. The Jews of Italy in the late Roman era were not well understood within the context of early Post-Second Temple Judaism. Venosa was an isolated example of a Jewish community suddenly emerg-ing – and disappearemerg-ing – almost independently from the historical narrative. Archaeology had not yet begun in Venosa to really clarify the ancient setting which had influenced the lives and for-tunes of this community. The comprehensive approach to Jews at Venosa was for the most part the undertaking of dedicated but hyper-local historians like Briscese.¹⁷⁸ International scholarship con-tinued to focus almost exclusively on the inscriptions in broader discussions of the language and li-terature of the ancient Jews.

One of the conditioning factors was that the 1935 showcasing of the Jewish catacombs at Ve-nosa coincided with a new era of oppression for Italian Jews. The Fascist regime was in turn fol-lowed by yet another period of foreign occupation of Venosa – this time, by the allied troops.¹⁷⁹ It was not until the early 1950’s that visitors could once again stumble up the rocky cliffs of La Mad-dalena. Our chief testimony is the American Classicist Harry J. Leon, who visited the catacombs in June of 1951. Leon already had published several articles on his doctoral research at Harvard thirty years before on the Jews of Ancient Rome. Now, with Italy finally free of a Fascist yoke, the Ameri-can Jew was able to return and make new discoveries.¹⁸⁰ Leon’s visit to Venosa happily coincided with the discovery of yet another funerary hypogeum on the lower slopes of the Terranera, of which he alone took note.¹⁸¹ But not every visitor had the formidable preparation of an American Classics professor to accept the challenging physical conditions of cave exploration, or the com-mon decency to refrain from vandalizing the site with modern graffiti. By that point, many of the plastered walls had already been defaced with scribbles, but even this irrelevant feature was disap-––––––––––––––

175 Frey 1936: principally, he relied on the manuscript copies of the 1850’s, supplemented by some information from de Rossi, Lenormant, and Muller.

176 Frey did not include the inscriptions from the Lauridia hypogeum, not yet published.

177 Lacerenza 2019: 302-303, note 29 gives example of Cassuto’s «scarce interest» in Venosa’s catacombs because they per-tained to an earlier era, for which most of the material evidence was in Greek and Latin rather than Hebrew.

178 Lacerenza 2019: 305, note 38, and Archivio privato Mons. Rocco Briscese, Archivio Storico Comunale nel Castello du-cale del Balzo, C-XII, 32: “Studi e documentazioni di Mons. Rocco Biscese sul popolo ebreo e le catacombe ebraiche di Venosa (1937-1943)”.

179 ASPCAS ASD/117, fasc. 5: Catacomba ebraica di Venosa (luglio 1948 - agosto 1982): In May of 1948, in course of assess-ing damage to the catacombs in wartime, PCAS secretary, Fr. Antonio Ferrua, SJ, contacted the Vicar General of Veno-sa, Fr. Vincenzo Briscese, for the state of the «unjustly obscure» catacomb: Ferrua would visit the site in person on 10 April 1952 and make recommendations for its protection and accessibility. The photographic archives of the PCAS, however, contain nothing on the site, though ample documentation for two Jewish catacombs in Rome:

http://www.archeologiasacra.net/pcas-web/fototeca (accessed 19 June 2019).

180 Dello Russo 2011, for Leon’s work from that era while on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1950-1951.

181 Leon 1953-54: 284, describes the new hypogeum shown to him by Nino Briscese in 1950-1951 as containing four arco-solia constructed in the manner of the Jewish catacombs, though only two had multiple parallel troughs.

Early Explorations of the Maddalena Hill 165 pearing in new attempts to open and rob the tombs.¹⁸² At the insistence of the local tourism board at Potenza, which bore the brunt of visitor frustration over a lack of signage and the need to bush-whack one’s way in, the regional superintendent for Apulia, Franco Schettini, ordered the Lauridia to increase the catacomb’s visibility with an independent access from the road.¹⁸³

Reports of more landslides brought the musicologist Leo Levi and artist Lisetta Carmi to Veno-sa in 1960.¹⁸⁴ In his report to the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane (UCEI), Levi described the

«urgent» need for the study and conservation of the Jewish artifacts in Venosa.¹⁸⁵ What he believed to be an entirely new area of the catacomb had been show to him by the custodian (likely Emanu-ele Lauridia) at a short distance from the “official” Jewish site, though this turned out to be the catacomb already seen by Luzzatto in 1932.¹⁸⁶ The “historic” catacomb, on the other hand, was not only wide open but also an alleged source of macabre souvenirs of human remains.¹⁸⁷ As a course of action, Levi and other UCEI colleagues lobbied Italian parlamentarians to fund necessary repairs and site security.¹⁸⁸ But negotiations to free up funds from investment programs in the South of Italy (the Cassa del Mezzogiorno) came to a halt because of restrictions on government spending on private property.¹⁸⁹ The Jewish cemetery remained, as before, as a collection of «holes in the hillside» continually broken into and vandalized for ossified «lucky charms», inexistent treasure, and sheer «acrobatics».¹⁹⁰ Even to some of Levi’s own colleagues in the UCEI, it was a «lost cause».¹⁹¹

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182 Lacerenza 2019, for locations of the grave robbers’ holes.

183 Access to the catacombs during the immediate post war period through the 1960’s was by personal application to the Lauridia family, the site’s “Honorary Inspectors”: Lavorano 2015: 202-204. But D. Colombo noted a lack of signage and limited possibility to visit the site: Colombo 1960, 446-447. New studies of the inscriptions verified in situ by Bognetti 1954: 193-202; Ferrua in ASPCAS ASD 117, fasc. 5 (10 April 1952); and Colorni 1964: 18-22 (seen). Lifshitz 1962: 367-371, and Goodenough 1952-1953: 53-54, relied on Frey’s copies.

184 The press had reported landslides in front of the catacomb in 1962, and Levi made a number of visits that year. For Carmi’s photographs in 1960: Calvenzi 2012: 10-11.

185 Levi, “Sopralluogo completo alle catacombe ebraiche di Venosa”, dated April 17, 1962, made in the company of hono-rary inspector of antiquities Emanuele Lauridia. Also in the UCEI archives is Levi’s catalogue of Jewish tomb inscrip-tions in Italy, 1969-1970, quoted in Saban unpublished, 1 and in a geological report by S. Lazzari (ASPCAS).

186 Levi 1962: 146-151. The Lauridia Hypogeum would soon be covered up again and is not currently accessible.

187 Levi 1962: 146, defines this site a disaster area, with bones taken away by visitors as lucky charms. At its discovery in the early 1850’s, the catacomb contained many bone fragments: Hirschfeld 1867: 150.

188 Lavorano 2015: 204-207. The Vatican’s catacomb commission, the Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra (PCAS), had been informed of the condition of these catacombs at various points; shortly after the war in 1948 and again in the 1960’s, following Levi’s inspection, but beyond site visits took no active role in their conservation until the 1970’s, when PCAS secretary Fr. U.M. Fasola wrote to UCEI President P. Blayer on 19 December 1976 that the PCAS had at-tempted to intervene in the situation at Venosa in 1975, without reaching an unspecified agreement with the local au-thorities at Potenza: ASPCAS: ASD/15, 23 November 1965 and 17 May 1968 and ASD/117, fasc. 1. Saban notes that in 1970, Italian Parlamentarian G. Arian Levi made inquiries into funding supposedly allocated to work in the catacombs, which does not seem to have been carried out: Saban unpublished, 1.

189 Lavorano 2015: 202-204, and Saban unpublished, 1, citing a letter of inquiry by Parlamentarian G. Arian Levi in 1968 to Italy’s Education Ministry asking for evidence of government involvement in the preservation of artifacts in the cata-combs of Venosa.

190 Lacerenza 2019: 282-283, on practice of drilling «test holes» into the wall plaster to see if any tombs lay behind, a prac-tice also evident in the catacombs of Rome. In his 2019 article, Lacerenza finds much of this was carried out in the twentieth century, before Colafemmina’s surveys began around 1970.

191 Carletti 1979: 3.

166 Jessica Dello Russo