György Spiró - Captivity

Apollonos shook his head in dissent:

“No, it isn’t, it hasn’t been for eighty-eight years or more, otherwise why would they store nine tenths of the library’s stock in flammable premises. Scholarship had no standing even then, because if it had, then the books have been kept in a marble palace and all the works that were lost would still exist today!”

At Shavuot Uri attended a service at the Basilica before proceeding with the crowds to the island of Pharos. They snaked first toward the palace because tradition had it that the seventy-two elders from Jerusalem were quartered at first in Acra, and it was only after this that, on the initiative of Demetrius of Phaleron, the librarian of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and the Library’s leadership in Alexandria at the time, they had moved to the peninsula, where they completed the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Torah or Pentateuch, in seventy-two days. Only now did it occur to Uri how close to the palace lay Delta, where the first Jews to arrive in Alexandria had settled: maybe they were afraid of the indigenous inhabitants and placed their trust in the palace guards coming swiftly to their aid in the event of an attack.

On the island a lot was said by many people, and they also took dips in the marvelously warm sea because it was ritually clean to do so, the very cleanest, so it was extraordinary to see nearly two hundred thousand Jews all together at once in the water, because only the elderly, toddlers and the sick stayed back at home. Uri recalled the mass washing during the feast in Jerusalem, the jostling of some one million shabbily dressed wretches in the filthy, half-dried-out riverbed. The Temple had not been sited well: it would have been better to build it here, in Alexandria. It would really have been better had Moses not felt the need to lead his people out of Egypt.

Uri recalled what Judaeophobic Greek historiographers had written about that exodus, having leafed through some of the ridiculous scribblings that were to be found in the Gymnasium’s library: that Pharaoh had banished lepers from the country, and their leader was Moses, a priest, on whom the historian Manetho — who was active during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter and, incidentally, also compiled a serviceable Greek translation of the chronology of dynastic Egypt — bestowed the name Osarseph. At the site of their expulsion in Heliopolis, this priest, himself a leper, is said to have been in league with the Ethiopians in their attacks on Egypt against the pharaoh Amenophis and was supposed to have been the leader of eighty thousand lepers. Later, when the Pharaoh made peace with the Ethiopians, Osarseph was forced to move on with the remaining lepers to Palestine. It is also possible, however, that they were not leprous but afflicted with the plague, the reason being that the same word was used for both diseases by Judaeophobic Greek historians, the more virulent of whom also asserted that Osarseph secretly sent sick people (Jews, that is to say) into Egyptian towns to infect the healthy inhabitants. When Uri questioned Philo about these writings, he dismissed them: there was no need to pay them any attention as no one read them anyway.

Uri copied with great fervor, even to the point of neglecting to bathe. He felt a tense physical dissatisfaction, his body asking his brain why was it wasting its time, to which the brain responded that it too wanted to gain its satisfaction. Uri therefore did the copying with pangs of conscience, reassuring himself that this slave-work, in which one could lose oneself so much, was also part of Alexandria, where in the great freedom that was to be had a person might also permit himself the liberty of not taking part in its turbulent life.

He was able to copy the whole summer through, with the Gymnasium having taken a break, the teachers retiring to their villas in the country, the Greek students going back home to their parents, and Alexandria nearly deserted during the vacation. In the evenings and at night one could still find a big throng of people strolling in the popular places: the taverns down at the harbor were crammed and the crowds who were kept amused by the antics of mime artists in the neighborhood of the Square Stoa meant that there was no fall-off in sales of food and drink from the mobile vendors, although the jostle did ease and there was less reason to fear pickpockets.

Uri copied and read, and he learned that many generations ago there had been a substantial Jewish population in Egypt, in the fortress town on the island of Elephantine; indeed, they had even had their own temple where they made sacrificial offerings of animals and produce. That temple had been demolished, but they had rebuilt it and stayed until they were finally driven out by the Egyptian Greeks, with powerful assistance from the high priests of Jerusalem. As a result it was not just the Samaritans who denied the precedence of the Temple in Jerusalem; moreover, there had also been a Jewish community in Rome at the time of Judah Maccabee, whom the Romans supported in his revolt against the Greeks in Syria, a hundred years before Pompey the Great’s conquests of Syria and Jerusalem, and they made sacrificial offerings on their domestic altars! So, it was not true to say that Jews had ended up in Rome for the first time in the wake of Pompey’s military expedition; evidence to the contrary could be found in the contemporary decrees of the praetor peregrinus , the magistrate charged with the administration of foreign residents, whereby he set limits on the worshipers of the Sabbath Jupiter or Jove — the Iuppiter Sabatinus — residing in Rome and later expelled them. If he expelled them, then they must have been there in the first place, and their faith must have made an impression on the Romans. Uri attempted to discuss these matters, but Philo had no interest in such trivialities: those historical curiosities were of no philosophical significance, he pronounced, and Uri got a strong sense that the Roman Jews counted for nothing because they were poor.

At the end of August on Roman reckoning, or the beginning of Elul on Jewish reckoning, the Greek students and teachers slowly started to filter back to Alexandria.

Officially, the Egyptian calendar was in force throughout Egypt, including Alexandria, but no one used it and Uri never learned it. Jews were particularly sedulous in adhering to the Roman calendar, being much more observant than the Greeks of the official imperial feast days, which were punctiliously honored throughout the province. In Alexandria, as Uri saw it, the Jews did everything possible to put on more splendid celebrations than the Greeks — perhaps fearing that any negligence on their part would be reported back to Rome.

There was just one official Roman feast day that the Jews of Alexandria ignored, maybe not officially but through the cautious protest of making themselves conspicuous in their absence: August 1. Whatever day this might fall on, Jews would always find urgent business to attend to in the country, and as long as it was not a Sabbath, they would actually travel out of the city. The Greeks did likewise: anyone who was able would travel out of the city because it marked the day, sixty-six years ago, on which Alexandria had surrendered to Augustus. It may not be propitious to celebrate a lost war, but Rome insisted nonetheless. Flaccus’s lifeguards would put on a ceremonial march in the morning of the said day, marching along the harbor before wheeling southward, at the Western canal, at the tip of the box-shaped harbor known as the Kibotos, and before the Gymnasium proceeding eastward along Arsinoë Avenue, then in the district of Makedones (Delta, in other words) turning north to return to the citadel-like palace of the Akra, their station. They would be accompanied by large numbers of musicians, and spectators would gawk — that was it. Uri watched from among the columns of the Gymnasium that faced the street: that day there was no copying, although the Serapeion was open, and sacrifices were offered within it to Rome and to the emperor just as they were, compulsorily, in all shrines to Greek and Egyptian divinities, large and small, of which there were many thousand in Alexandria. It was also celebrated in Jewish synagogues, of course, and somewhat more happily than by the Greeks; Uri got the feeling that Jews, being in the minority, were in their deepest hearts more loyal to the Roman Empire than the majority Greek population, who would praise their own loss of independence through gritted teeth. Naturally, Greek notables would feel obliged to have themselves represented at the celebrations by at least one family member, and the leaders of the Jewish guilds, the koinon s, would also make a reluctant appearance.