Hebrew inscriptions of the Byzantine empire Nicholas de Lange A project of publication In 2003 Colette Sirat invited me to prepare a corpus of medieval Hebrew inscriptions from the terri- tories of the Byzantine empire, and I readily agreed. Although the actual numbers of inscriptions involved is small, this is a large and demanding project which will take some time to bring to completion; in the interim I am happy to dedicate these frstfruits to a dear teacher, colleague and friend. 1 The task facing the epigraphist working on Byzantine Jewish inscriptions is enormous. The Hebrew inscriptions of the Byzantine empire have never been brought together and studied systematically in their historical context. A few have been published, generally in relatively inaccessible publications; some unpublished stones have been referred to in print, and some of these now seem to be lost. The number of stones stored in museums in various countries or reused in churches, mosques and other structures can only be guessed at. The defnition of the scope of the project was largely determined by the scheme of the larger project of which it is a part: a series of volumes devoted to the Hebrew inscriptions of the medieval world. 2 The frst constraint is one of date. Being focused strictly on medieval inscriptions, the project excluded in principle ancient inscriptions, or those made after 1500. From 1492 the formerly Byzantine territories experienced the arrival of large numbers of Jewish immigrants from Spain, who introduced real changes in the social and cultural life of the Jewish communities of the region. In large centres like Salonica and Constantinople Sephardic burials began almost at once. 3 By contrast, the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 marks less of a rupture culturally, as older customs were maintained for several generations by Byzantine or Romaniot Jews. Although the forcible transfer of the entire Jewish population of several towns to the capital in the 1450s certainly caused considerable upheaval, this did 1. I should like to thank Judith Olszowy-Schlanger for giving me the opportunity to talk about the project in a series of guest seminars at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Section des sciences historiques et philologiques) in May 2005. An earlier version of this paper was read at the Ninth Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies at Ravenna, June 2010. Some of the research was conducted when, on the proposal of Colette Sirat, I was an Associate Member of the Hebrew Section of the IRHT, from January 2004 to December 2005, and when I was engaged on the research project ‘Mapping the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire’, funded by the European Research Council, from April 2010 to March 2013 (see the website mjcb.eu). 2. These volumes are to be published in a subsection of the series Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi, Series Hebraica (published by Brepols). The frst volume, Las inscripciones funerarias hebraicas medievales de España by Jordi Casanovas Miró, was published in 2004. 3. M. MOLhO, “El cementerio judío de Salónica, verdadero museo epigráfco, histórico y arqueológico” (offprint from Sefarad 9 (1949), pp. 4–5; IdeM, “La necropole juive de Thessalonique”, in In Memoriam, 2nd ed.,Thessaloniki, 1988, pp. 379–392, mentions that the oldest stone he found was dated 1493; unfortunately he lost the notebook in which he recorded the inscription when he fed the German occupiers in 1943, and was never able to rediscover the stone.