The Roman Jewish Gold Glasses

In the third and fourth centuries CE, glassworkers in Rome perfected a technique now known as gold glass: a design cut or painted in gold leaf, fixed between two fused layers of glass so the image would never tarnish, flake or fade. Most of what survives is Christian - roundels showing saints, biblical scenes, family portraits with pious inscriptions. A smaller, distinct group carries unmistakably Jewish imagery instead: the menorah, the Torah shrine, the shofar, the lulav and etrog, sometimes an amphora or a scroll cabinet. These are the Jewish gold glasses, and they are among the clearest physical evidence that Rome's Jewish community, by the later imperial period, was wealthy, settled and entirely unembarrassed about being seen.

Most of the surviving pieces are fragments: roundels a few centimetres across, cut from the bottoms of drinking vessels or bowls and set into the plaster walls of catacombs, where they served as identifying markers on sealed burial niches. The rest of the vessel is gone. What remains is the base, the gold image, and whatever the plaster preserved when the glass was pressed in wet mortar centuries ago. A handful of complete or near-complete pieces also survive, recovered from graves and collections rather than catacomb walls.

What the images show

The repertoire is consistent and instantly recognisable to anyone who knows a synagogue today. A menorah, usually seven-branched, stands at the centre or alongside a gabled or arched cabinet representing the Torah shrine, its doors sometimes shown open to reveal scrolls stacked on shelves. Around these core images cluster the other ritual objects of the festival calendar: the shofar, the lulav bundle and etrog used at Sukkot, and occasionally an incense shovel. Some roundels add Greek or Latin inscriptions - words of blessing or good wishes - fitting the general Roman convention for gold glass, where inscriptions of peace, life or favour were common regardless of the religion of the person depicted.

What the images do not show is any human figure engaged in worship, and no attempt at narrative scene-setting. The Jewish gold glasses are emblematic rather than illustrative: they assemble the recognisable furniture of Jewish practice - the shrine, the lamp, the festival objects - into a compact visual shorthand for identity, the way a flag or a crest works rather than the way a painting of an event works. That choice tells its own story about how this community wanted to be seen and remembered.

Where they were found

The great majority of the corpus comes from the Jewish catacombs of Rome, principally the Vigna Randanini and Villa Torlonia catacombs, excavated from the nineteenth century onward. These were underground burial complexes used by Rome's Jewish community across several centuries, distinguished from the neighbouring Christian catacombs by their inscriptions - many in Greek, some in Latin, a smaller number carrying Hebrew words - and by exactly this kind of imagery, menorahs incised or painted directly onto tomb walls as well as set in glass. A gold glass roundel pressed into the mortar beside a sealed niche functioned as a marker: a way of identifying a grave, and perhaps of declaring who lay within it, in a durable material that would not fade the way paint or ink would.

The pieces now in museum collections around the world were mostly removed from the catacombs during earlier centuries of excavation and collecting, well before modern archaeological recording standards existed, so a good number no longer carry a documented original find-spot within the catacomb complex. That loss of context is itself part of the evidence's story: it is a reminder that some of what we know about Roman Jewish material culture survives despite, not because of, the way it was first recovered.