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 criterion
for 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 lamella
are made of copper or a flexible copper alloy, but there are only four copper examples
among the more than 100 Greek lamellae, with the same ratio between the
extant handbook recipes for amulets in the Jewish and Greek handbooks. Two of
the four copper lamellae inscribed in Greek have long been recognized as Jewish
because of their content, and the other two seem to have been created by non-Jews
in a manner that suggests or reflects an outsider's understanding that copper was
an appropriate medium for Hebrew words or symbols.