Copper as a Jewish Medium for Inscribed Amulets and Curses in Late Antiquity

This article argues that the use of copper as a medium is a neglected criterionfor identifying the author or owner of an inscribed lamella amulet as Jewish.A survey of the corpora shows that roughly 40 percent of the known Jewish lamellaare made of copper or a flexible copper alloy, but there are only four copper examplesamong the more than 100 Greek lamellae, with the same ratio between theextant handbook recipes for amulets in the Jewish and Greek handbooks. Two ofthe four copper lamellae inscribed in Greek have long been recognized as Jewishbecause of their content, and the other two seem to have been created by non-Jewsin a manner that suggests or reflects an outsiders understanding that copper wasan appropriate medium for Hebrew words or symbols.