Origins: First Glass

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In museum vitrines all over the world, we see beautiful objects labeled “Roman Glass.” This is misleading, for it is unlikely that any ancient Roman became a glassmaker.

Nor were the Greeks more knowledgeable about the art of glassmaking. In 426 B.C.E. the playwright Aristophanes reported the astonishment of Greek ambassadors to the Persian court who were served in bowls made of a strange translucent material for which they had no name. Yet the art of glassmaking was already 2,000 years old.

Glassmaking was born in ancient Mesopotamia as an amalgamation of two independent technologies, the invention of glazes and of reverberatory furnaces (which produce high temperatures by radiating heat from the furnace’s roof). The Sumerians had discovered the formula for glazing, a process of vitrification in which a thin film of glass forms on another surface. But they could not produce glass in bulk, because their pottery furnaces could not sustain the necessary temperature of over 2000 degrees. In the mountains of northern Mesopotamia, however, Aramite and Hurrian smiths invented such high-temperature furnaces to smelt iron. When northern Mesopotamia and Sumer were conquered by the Aramite Sargon I around the 24th century B.C.E., the two technologies married and the art of glassmaking was born.

Glassmaking was invented only once in human history. Its secrets traveled from Akkadia to Canaan, following the path of the biblical Abraham. For over 2,000 years, the art languished in the Near East until Judaic practitioners brought it to Europe following the Roman conquest.

Two Roman emperors identified the glassmakers of their times as Jews. In writing to his consul Servianus, Hadrian (117–138 C.E.) reported that the Jews of Alexandria were “blowers of glass.” In 301 C.E., the emperor Diocletian issued an edict fixing the prices of goods throughout the empire. Only two classes of glassware were listed: vitri Alexandrini (which, as Hadrian had reported a century and a half earlier, were made by Jews) and vitri Iudaici. The name “Judea” had been expunged by Hadrian in 137 C.E. following the Bar Kochba rebellion, but the term vitri Iudaici was so ingrained in the Roman vernacular that it persisted for centuries as a generic term for glassware.

Indeed, there is an extraordinary linkage of Jews and glassmaking throughout the Roman Empire. In Anatolia, no 007examples of glassmaking predate the arrival of Jewish communities, but such examples do appear wherever Jews settled, such as at Apameia, Acmoneia and Synnada. For another example, glass cullet (shards of manufactured glass used to catalyze the glassmaking process) and other evidence of glassworking were recovered from a Judaic shop nestled against the wall of Sardis’s late-fourth-century C.E. synagogue.

Wealthy Romans had a hankering for vessels made of precious stone from the Near East, which prompted Near Eastern glass-workers to produce glass replicas. The Palestinian Talmud describes how riotously colored glass can be created by rolling together molten glass of various hues. It also describes how cameo effects are obtained by sculpting out upper layers of glass, creating an image that appears against the background of the lower layer. Diatreta glass (above), also described in the Palestinian Talmud, was an even greater tour-de-force: Its top layer was undercut and separated from the lower layer, producing a cage-like effect. Eastern glassmakers also wrought murrhine vessels (below), made of glass tesserae, whose brilliant color outshone mosaics made of natural stones.

The Latin word for glass, vitreum, first appears in an oration by Cicero in 54 B.C.E. in reference to an import. When the emperor Augustus added Egypt to the empire a little more than 20 years later, he demanded glassware as part of his tribute. Glassmakers from Alexandria—a city where Jews constituted 40 percent of the population—founded furnaces on the coast between Cumae and Liternum in 14 C.E. and at Porta Cassena in Rome. Pliny the Elder (c. 24–79 C.E.) mentions that glassmakers from Syria (the Romans tended to call Jews “Syrians,” “Orientals” and “Palestinians”) settled in the region of Campania, near the Volturnus River (Natural History 36:194).

It was probably in the Trastevere (across the Tiber) quarter that the production of glassware got underway in Rome itself, along with such other sooty and malodorous “Jewish” industries as smithing, unguent manufacturing and leather tanning. Trastevere was a dreary slum with crooked streets, dingy workshops and Rome’s oldest synagogue. With the influx of some 20,000 to 40,000 free Jews to Rome by 50 C.E., the city took on a decidedly eastern flavor.

According to the renowned glass historian Axel von Saldern, Jewish glassmakers followed the Roman legions into the heart of Europe. “Although Syria-Palestine remains the cradle of ‘modern’ glass-making and Alexandria continued to produce fine luxury ware, Naples, Rome and northern Italy, southeastern France, Cologne and other cities along the Rhine could also claim an efficient industry established mainly by Jewish glassmakers emigrated from Palestine in the 1st century.”¹ To choose just one of many examples, the oldest Judaic settlement in Germany was in Trier, and the first glasshouses of the Rhineland were founded there.

With the Christianization of the empire and burgeoning hostility against Jews, the art of glassmaking suffered. The church father St. Jerome (348–420 C. E.) penned a bitter treatise on the humiliating hold “Semitic” artisans had on the Roman world with their unique skills. He complained that these artisans, mosaicists and sculptors were everywhere, and that glassmaking was one of the trades “by which the Semites [Jews] captured the Roman world.”²

The church launched a campaign to convert or displace the “stiff-necked Orientals” from manual trades by placing artisans’ guilds under the patronage of Christian saints. The production of glass and glassware, however, presented a problem. “In Cologne … where the guilds succeeded in ultimately barring Jews from almost all industrial occupations, [Jews were] still allowed to become glaziers, probably because no other qualified personnel was available.”³

The vitric arts, however, continued to flourish in the Near East. When Jewish sages compiled the Midrash from the rabbinic through the medieval periods (c. 300–1100 C.E.), they likened God’s blowing the breath of life into Adam to the art of the glassblower. Throughout the Upper and Lower Galilee and in Judaea, men continued to blow soul into hot glass.

In museum vitrines all over the world, we see beautiful objects labeled “Roman Glass.” This is misleading, for it is unlikely that any ancient Roman became a glassmaker.