This book completes the work of the Jewish Inscriptions Project in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, following Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt and Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe i. The Project has been funded by the British Academy, with an additional grant from the Bethune Baker Fund. The work was finished after I joined the Classics Department of St David's University College, Lampeter.

The book aims to collect all Jewish inscriptions from the city of Rome which can be dated before A.D.700, updating and replacing the relevant part of J.B. Frey's Corpus Inscriptionum Judaicarum (1936). Some of Frey's omissions and errors were corrected by his reviewers, and by Leon (1960) and Lifshitz in his revised edition of 1975. Other inscriptions have been published more recently.

The same criteria have been used for determining an inscription's ‘Jewishness’ as in JIWE i. In most cases this means provenance from a Jewish catacomb. The problem of possibly pagan inscriptions being reused in the catacombs is discussed in the introductions to individual sections and in App.2. Inscriptions from outside the catacombs are treated as Jewish if they use Hebrew or Aramaic, or if they contain specifically Jewish terminology, formulae, names or symbols.

The entry for each inscription is arranged as in JIWE i. For the inscriptions published in CIJ and by Leon, the ‘Text follows’ section notes if there are significant differences between the version given here and their versions.