Were there Jewish gladiators in ancient Rome?

Part II

(JTA) - In 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted in southern Italy, burying the nearby Roman city of Pompeii in scalding stone and ash. The catastrophe famously entombed, and preserved, the city's villas, workshops, and a gladiator barracks known as the Caserma dei Gladiatori.

Excavators first unearthed the barracks in the late 1700s. Among the ruins they found a bronze helmet, with a circular brim, a griffin rising from its crest, and on its forehead, a palm tree - then a symbol tied to Jews in the Roman province of Judea.

But was the helmet worn by a Jewish gladiator? Did Jewish gladiators even exist? 

The helmet found in Pompeii's gladiator training grounds, now housed in a Naples archaeological museum, features a seven-frond palm tree weighted down with dates above its wide brim and metal gratings that protected the fighter's eyes. The two-horned griffin on the helmet's crest appears to screech down at the tree.

Samuele Rocca, an Israeli-Italian researcher at Ariel University in the West Bank, has argued that the palm tree relief was specific to Jewish culture at the time and was likely worn by a Jewish combatant. Similar images appear on coins made in Judea at the time, for example.

Israeli academic Haggai Olshanetsky argued that the evidence for Jewish gladiators was "inconclusive" in a 2023 paper in the archaeological journal Atiqot. 

"If there were such Jewish gladiators, they were very few," he wrote, adding that if Jews were combatants in the games, they would have been more inclined to battle beasts than other men.

In the original "Gladiator" film, Crowe plays Maximus, a Roman general who is enslaved, made a gladiator, and rises to fame in the Roman Colosseum. Olshanetsky distinguishes between slaves and prisoners sentenced to death in the arena, and professional gladiators, who were well-funded athletes, similar to professional NFL players. (Today, football can be complicated for some Jews who view the game's play as dangerous and akin to the senseless violence that the ancient rabbis prohibited.) 

Hard evidence for Jews in the arena is "limited to those sentenced to death," Olshanetsky wrote, mainly those sentenced after Jewish revolts against Roman rule. The Jews in these cases fought animals, or each other, to the death, he wrote, citing Josephus. 

Schiffman pointed out that there were Jewish warriors who were captured by the Romans and brought to Rome as slaves, "so there could have been more trained warrior types" of Jews in the Eternal City.

For the Pompeii helmet, Olshanetsky argues the palm frond was linked to other cultures including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Christians, while the griffin was a pagan symbol, according to some Jews at the time. The palm frond was also a symbol of victory and is found on other artifacts, such as gladiator's graves.

Besides the helmet, there are other suggestions of Jewish gladiators. A first-century book describes "a man of the Jewish race who was of greater stature than the tallest German" in a procession ahead of Roman games, but does not state unequivocally that the man was a gladiator.

Reish Lakish, a famous rabbi in Judea in the third century CE, may have been a gladiator before turning to Torah. The Babylonian Talmud says he sold himself to the "ludim," a term some scholars have associated with gladiators, but Olshanetsky argues the translation is unclear, and that other mentions of Reish Lakish refer to him as a brigand before he became religious. 

Spielman said graffiti that shows a "crude drawing of gladiators" from a tomb for Jewish man named Germanos, son of Isaac, in the catacombs of Beit She'arim, a Jewish archaeological site in today's northern Israel, may suggest a Jewish gladiator was buried there, but the link is also inconclusive. He also noted that "the Colosseum itself was funded largely by the spoils from the Jewish Revolt."

Olshanetsky argues the best evidence of a Jewish gladiator is the story of a Roman senator named Glabrio who lived in the first century CE. A text from more than a hundred years later says Glabrio and others were charged with atheism, "a charge on which many others who drifted into the Jewish ways were condemned." Glabrio was sentenced to battle a lion as a gladiator and "dispatched the lion with the most accurate aim." Olshanetsky says Glabrio likely practiced some aspects of Judaism, or converted, but says the account is made murky by the conversion and conflicting textual evidence.

Hidary said the Talmud discusses people selling themselves to become gladiators, and whether the community should raise money to rescue them. As with many debates preserved in the Talmud, the very discussion indicates that the question, at least, was real.

"They wanted to discourage people from doing it but if they did, they would end up raising money to get them out of there. But we do see this was one path that people took when they were pressed for money, they would become a gladiator," he said.

Schiffman said the evidence was "scanty."

"It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that there were some. But having said that, there is no evidence that there ever was one," he said.

For the director of "Gladiator II," no evidence to the contrary is justification enough to introduce characters and scenarios to the arena. Asked about whether the $200 million production was historically accurate, Scott reportedly said, "The short answer to that is, were you there?" Consider that an invitation to look for a Jewish gladiator in "Gladiator III" - which is already in the works.