A Rare Jewish Seal

245, Lot: 530. Estimate $150. Sold for $1300. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

ROMAN. 2nd-4th centuries AD. PB Conical Seal (13mm, 2.92 g). Perhaps Alexandrian. Menorah of seven branches, flanked by a shofar and lulav. See Dattari (Savio) p. 327, no. 3 for a very similar seal. Fine.

Although Alexandria is known as the academic capital of the Hellenistic and Roman world, the city was also remarkably cosmopolitan. The Jewish population there represented one of the largest ethnic groups and inhabited as many as two of the five boroughs of the city. Although a notoriously insular society, the Jews began to open up to Greek culture as scholars such as Philo attempted to reconcile and incorporate the classical philosophers into Jewish thought. Yet the Greeks of the city reviled them. Violent persecutions and riots frequently rocked Alexandria, culminating in wholesale slaughter in AD 38. When the prefect Flaccus turned a blind eye, the local Jewish council sent Philo as the head of an embassy to emperor Gaius. In Rome, they pleaded for the emperor to cease the persecutions and to allow the Jews to practice their ancestral religion in peace.