György Spiró - Captivity

If Sarah was not originally Jewish — as her religious overzealousness suggested, because fresh coverts were always that way — then she must have been born a slave and Joseph must have emancipated her. Given Joseph’s business acumen, he would have chosen a slave girl who spoke Aramaic, which meant she would have come from Syria or Babylon. Uri assumed that his father, who had been orphaned at a young age, could not have been prosperous enough to land a Jewish girl, for even if he had waived a dowry he would not have been much of a catch, and so he had been obliged to marry a slave girl. Under the laws of Palestine, this meant that he, Uri, as the son of a proselytized slave girl, would be of very lowly status over there in the Old Country, because his mother’s descent would apply to him too. He might not be a slave or new convert, and he would count as an Israelite, but one of the least esteemed. It was a stroke of luck to have been born a Jew in Rome, where only the paternal lineage was taken into account.

For Uri, learning Latin was not easy.

The young people of the Jewish quarter spoke only a broken Latin; they rarely crossed over to the other bank of the Tiber, where Rome itself lay. They contented themselves with the frenetic life of Far Side, and they could get by perfectly well with their native Greek any time they ventured over. Even the non-Jewish inhabitants of Far Side spoke Greek, or else they spoke a language that no else understood.

The Jews had a habit of writing Latin with Greek letters, which came readily to them. They learned the Hebrew alphabet as well, of course, which they called Assyrian lettering, so that they would at least be able to read the Sh’ma for themselves in their daily prayers and, when necessary, the psalms, if called upon in the house of prayer. Occasionally elements of all three alphabets would be mixed up in a single sentence, even a single word. Uri was fond of that sort of mixture, and he did not transpose Latin or Greek texts into Hebrew lettering out of negligence or ignorance or even just for fun. He devised abbreviations in all three languages for himself, to copy things more quickly if he was loaned a particularly interesting scroll for a few days. He would omit vowels or diacritical marks, so that his shorthand was legible to no one apart from himself, and a few months later, not even himself. He would write pure Hebrew texts with the left hand from right to left, Greek and Latin with the right hand from left to right, and he had no idea why that was. He was amazed when he discovered, from a scroll, that systems of Latin and Greek shorthand already existed; others had invented them just like him; he happily learned those too.

Gaius Theodorus. When he was small, he had first written down his official name this way, then as Uriel, which means “the Lord is my light,” was only used within the family; no one else knew what he was called at home.

Officially, his father was not Joseph either, but Lucius Ioses.

Gaius was the forename of their patron, while Joseph had adopted Lucius from the patron’s father, who had freed Joseph’s father. That was the custom; the forenames of Jewish freemen, which was often the only name they had, was the same as their patron’s, as a result of which the Jews of Rome had primarily Latin and, second of all, Greek names and virtually none had a Semitic name. The very fact that Joseph’s father gave him a Semitic name is significant; he found slavery hard to endure and longed to be in Palestine, though he had never seen it, as he too was a slave born in Rome, and indeed his father before him.

The Jews of Rome, then, had Latin and Greek names, but they were still Jews; they did not eat unkosher food, they observed the Sabbath and the festivals, and they prayed sedulously and in accordance with the rules.

If ever he was not reading or copying, by screwing up his unaided eyes Uri could see roughly as far as three doors along in the zigzagged, crisscross yard, and between his fingers up to six or seven doors along. He wanted to have keen eyesight, as his father’s remark had cut him to the quick and still rankled; there were times when, trying his eyes out in the morning, he may have seen more clearly, perhaps, but by evening he had to conclude that he was still not seeing well enough.

Not long before, he had fabricated a contraption for himself out of a wooden board that could rest on the ridge of the nose, so that he did not have to look through his fingers all the time: he bored two small holes to look through, and when he was wearing it on his nose and looking through the holes he did get a nice, if very restricted, view. The view was nice because everything was sharper and more stable, relatively speaking, than when he simply peeked through his forefinger and thumb; in fact, it was just as good as when he looked through the splayed fingers of both hands held in front of his eyes.

The plank had the extra advantage that it could be held in place with just one hand, but he dared not show himself outside his own hovel with the nose-board, because people would have laughed. Indeed, he did not even dare to stand close to the window, with the device on his nose or not, because it was known throughout the yard, just like everything was known, that he was in the habit of hanging around and gazing out; in fact he was mocked on that account, and even his father had told him to lay off: “Spying is despicable,” was what he said, so Uri would spend long periods of time loafing deep in his alcove, as far as he could get from the window, and he hoped no one outside could make him out in the gloom. There was a story told about a weak-eyed but rich Latini who was able to see everything clearly by skillfully holding a ground diamond before his eyes and looking through it. But Uri had never encountered anything of the kind; indeed, he had never seen a gemstone at all.

He feared going totally blind.

Blindness was not common in the labyrinthine yard, and anyone who went blind did not roam around outside, but people could sometimes be heard saying that this person or that had been struck down in that manner by the wrath of the Lord. Blind people, unless they were trachomatous, were not segregated; they were not regarded as unclean, merely unfortunate. Uri brooded for days and weeks and months on end about whether the Lord had marked him to be blind, or if it was simply a case of his having so much else to do that he was not paying attention, or maybe even Satan, or more likely Fate, intervening to cause this affliction. Uri held an assortment of Judeo-Latin-Greek notions about it because he had read a lot. What he really did not understand was why he had not been born blind from the outset, if that was his fate. Had the Lord changed his mind after he was already underway? What sort of considerations could be driving Him? he wondered. Uri raked through the memories of his childhood but could not identify a single transgression so massive that he would have to be inexorably blinded on its account; when he looked back, even with the best will in the world toward the Lord, he could find nothing in his actions.

The most obvious explanation was also the boldest: the Lord did not concern Himself with anyone, even His Chosen People; all that had been entrusted to Him was the task of the Creation and getting the stone tablets delivered by Moses to His people. That explanation was not something that came from any original thinking on Uri’s part; the Lord Almighty was cast in the same terms collectively by the Zadokite sect of Roman Jews, also called the Sadducees, who accepted only the five books of Moses and nothing else, nothing handed down in the oral tradition, and that was also the official position of the high priests in Jerusalem: the Creator had generously created the world, and mankind as part of it, that it should exist, but He had no further say thereafter; everyone was free to do with his life as he wished, within the bounds of the Law, though naturally anyone who broke the Law would be smitten down.