György Spiró - Captivity

That is how a Jewish Diaspora took root in the capital of the empire.

Joseph considered it an injustice that he must live on foreign soil, as technically speaking everyone who did not live in the Holy Land was unclean, and that was a blemish no water could wash away. But, then, it was not the first time this had happened in Jewish history, he said, and he pointed out to Uri that the Roman Jews were much better off than those back home, as they well knew it; they acted rather like a sizable permanent legation in Rome, and if they traded shrewdly, and Rome and Jewry were bounded by ever more threads, as was predestined by necessity, they were only doing what the Creator had seemingly intended them to do.

The winding interior courtyard had originally been a single labyrinthine system. Fortification had arisen spontaneously in the open space — although the wealthiest, as is the custom wherever Mammon is master, were separated from the communal yard with high walls and indeed had special guards to protect them — may money be cursed eternally — especially now, because an ever increasing number of Rome’s Jews were rich, and an even greater number were getting poorer. There might have even been a connection of sorts between the two phenomena.

The original Far Side stood right in the center of the Jewish quarter, with new houses built around it, but in recent years rich entrepreneurs had started building multistory tenement blocks. Joseph feared that, one of these days, their own ramshackle shed would be cleared away, along with the small huts around it, and replaced by four- or five-story buildings. That is what had happened in the non-Jewish areas immediately next to Far Side, where Egyptians, Syrians, and Greeks from Asia Minor lived just as wretchedly as most Jews, and they went around the Jewish area just as comfortably as in their own.

The reason the yards had become a single, capricious, erratic space was because, on holy days, Jews were not allowed to wander more than two thousand cubits from their home. A cubit measured roughly forty-five centimeters, but it might be somewhat longer or shorter depending on the size of the forearm, since a cubit was the measure from the elbow to the fingertips. In other words, on holy days Jews were not supposed to go more than a meager half-mile from their home.

And the Jews had lots of holy days, starting with the four main festivals every year, each of which lasted for quite a few days. Then there was the Sabbath, each week from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Even then, people wanted to go more than two thousand cubits, which is only a few hundred paces. They wanted to visit neighbors, to chat and gossip, none of which is prohibited on a holy day as long as no work is being done. Chitchat is hardly working, as the Creator himself is well aware, and he no doubt jabbers with his archangels, since everyone knows he got his own work done in six days. So people joined their yards together, which meant that they were able to cover not two thousand but ten thousand cubits, festival or not, without leaving their own yard, or at least that was what they told their Creator, who had to accept the perfection of their reasoning. This is how the Law was outwitted by the Jews of Rome, much like the other approximately five million Jews in the world at the time; that is to say, they adhered to the Law because they respected it to the letter.

A special ordinance was laid down on this crafty sanction, a joint ruling, with various fine subclauses, one pertaining to Rome. It stipulated that the one-time Far Side counted as a single courtyard, and people were allowed to do within it anything they would do in their own home, even on the Sabbath or during festivals. There was fierce debate over whether the ruling also applied to new housing constructed outside the walls of Far Side, with some arguing that the whole of Jerusalem counted as one combined courtyard, and it was permitted to deliver certain things within it, even on the Sabbath, whereas others opposed, saying that Rome was not a Jewish city, nor was Transtiberim (or Traseteberin, as they generally pronounced it in those days, with the nasal before the “s” disappearing and the word clipped, the end result being the “Trastevere,” the name by which this district would still be known two thousand years later). The whole of Rome was unclean, Far Side too, according to those who sought a return to the basic principles of the faith, themselves being impure, just like every Jew in the Diaspora. But be that as it may, the inhabitants of the old Far Side continued to reap the benefit of the blessed ruling.

In this labyrinth of a yard that was Far Side, there was no need to resort to that pious deceit that almost every Jew in Judaea committed, before the holy day began, by setting out a meal two thousand cubits away to signal that this was the boundary of a household, so when the holy day was in force they were permitted to go a further two thousand cubits from those provisions. This way, too, they were adhering to the Law — whichever suited them. That trick could not be employed in Rome, because any food left out would have been instantly stolen. The outside world corrupts the inner; intensive Jewish society was wrecked by pantheistic (hence godless) Roman society, and lamentations could be wallowed in on that account. It was typical Latin stupidity that their first emperor was still under the misapprehension that Jews eat nothing on the Sabbath, as if it were a day of fasting! Even after decades this was still raising eyebrows among Rome’s Jews, who prayed on the Sabbath in their houses of prayer and listened to interpretations of the Torah and the scriptures of the prophets, but the essence was nevertheless the communal meal, the costs of which were covered by the communal tax. Festal food could not be skimpy; there had to be meat and wine on the menu, likewise vegetables and fruit, to say nothing of unleavened bread. Poor families would have very little to eat for the rest of the week, but on the Sabbath they could eat their fill, and for free, through the good offices of the community.

The rationale, therefore, for this singular form of architecture may have been primarily religious — to be more specific, an injunction against death by starvation — but neither was the fortified structure entirely irrational.

When the Emperor Tiberius decided, fifteen years before, that adherents to the cult of Isis and the Jewish faith should clear out of Rome, the Roman mob got wind of the news and tried to lay siege to this mysterious system of walls, but because they had no grasp of the whole, they were unable to force their way in. The Jews defended themselves by firing arrows and throwing javelins from the flat rooftops.

They had to leave their homes in Rome all the same, with Joseph fleeing with his wife and three-year-old Uri.

They withdrew to the hill village of Ariccia, twenty miles from Rome, to a stable with a leaky roof. Joseph cleaned out the manure and plowed, his wife strewed straw and litter, and Uri spent the whole day chasing poultry. But six months later, thanks to the kindly Roman notable who was their patron, the freed Joseph being a client, the father and family were able to return to their ransacked, wrecked home.

Apart from the four thousand unmarried Jewish men who were called up for military service and taken off to Sardinia, supposedly to ward off gangs of robbers — though the climate and homesickness finished more of them off — virtually all of the Jews with families drifted back, bit by bit; in total, a couple of hundred were killed by the robbers in the country, and the Emperor Tiberius was no longer issuing such strict edicts.

The houses were repaired, the furnishings slowly made good. Not that there was much to replace, given how poor the Jews of Rome already were.