György Spiró - Captivity

In truth, Joseph could have been a Roman citizen himself, because three children of his had been born there, and Augustus’s decree that the parents of three children should be awarded citizenship was still in effect. Uri had tried to persuade his father to apply for citizenship, on account of his children; he would no doubt be granted it with his patron’s intervention, which would mean that he too could have a tessera.

Joseph, however, was unwilling to do that.

Things are fine the way they are, Joseph said. Uri kept nagging until his father finally said he would rather work for the money, because some very big issue might come up one day, some really important business, and he would call for Gaius Lucius’s assistance on that, but until that happened he did not want to pester him, lest they resent him for asking unnecessary favors.

Uri saw that it was no use arguing and never brought the matter up again. He wondered what the very big business might be. Did his father fear another expulsion?

Often Uri would take a stroll on his own over to the far bank of the Tiber to Rome, the “true Rome,” and gaze around. He made his way there from beyond the river. For some strange reason, the Jews always lived beyond some river or other; their very names — the Hebrew, one from beyond the river — said as much. In Babylon they had also lived on the far bank of the Euphrates, before they were allowed to head home, to the West.

He sauntered around and stared out with nothing to do, being unfit for physical labor. People finally gave up on him when the congregation’s members persuaded Joseph to try him out as a roofer: that was easy work. Uri was acrophobic, though, with no head for heights, and on the very first day of work he fell off and broke his right arm. The arm healed, and in any case his left arm was fortunately the nimbler one; he already wrote Hebrew and Aramaic with the left hand, and now he took the opportunity to learn to write Greek and Latin with it, as well. Ever since that accident, his father was left in peace.

Then Joseph came up with limeburning, also a good profession, but Uri rebelled and started yelling: not only would he not be a limeburner, he would never be a glassblower either, he would rather die. That shook Joseph, who had himself started out as a glassblower, or rather as a goldsmith, because Jews were the only ones in the Roman Empire who were able to blow glass around figures of filigree gold thread, and without another word he left his son to rant on for a few minutes longer, jumping up and down and even threatening to sign on as a longshoreman.

He was not serious about that; with his aching legs and lousy back he would not have lasted a day lugging those loads. Aside from tanning, that was the lowliest work a Jew would undertake. The pay was bad, but if you had a tessera it was possible to sustain a family with several children on the handouts and the extra income from dock work. That was to say nothing about pilfering a bit of the cargo when the supervisor was not watching, and he would not be looking, so long as he also got a share of the swag.

In principle, a Jewish worker was not supposed, on religious grounds, to steal from a Jewish consignment, but a non-Jewish one was fair game. It might be hard to tell, though, what came from Jews in Judaea or Alexandria and what had not. Anyway, goods were no longer Jewish if they were not destined for a Jew; the destination would taint them. Wages were low, families were big, and necessity teaches a man to steal; the Lord Almighty does not support those things, but they were deaf to the Word of the Lord; to harm those who deny Him can be construed as a divine action. The Jewish longshoreman, therefore, filched as much as the rest, as much as they were able. Besides, how many had already filched from a consignment while it was en route! And that was nothing compared to those who deviously pushed up the prices. No shortage of them, to be sure!

All the same, even among Jews, to be a docker was a lowly profession. Because they also had to unload impure goods, even the priests got a taste to expedite purification, although no one got around the dues for ritual bathing, which did not exist in Palestine, and even in Rome there was not a mikveh, a ritual bath, in every house of prayer.

The goods were taken up the Tiber from Ostia by skiffs and flat-bottomed lighters, bringing goods day and night, colliding as if they were wrestling one another, with a small trade war raging for landing spots. On both banks of the Tiber, as the loading and unloading went on day and night, inns and brothels prospered. Everyone was drunk on shore and on the boats, Jews and non-Jews alike, and there was no way of knowing who was what, because they all yelled and swore in Greek. It is true that block and tackle devices had been introduced on the docks, but the bulk of freight handling nevertheless proceeded by hand. Bales were unloaded and lugged to be swallowed by the enormous city without a trace and then discharged into the sewers, which likewise flowed into the Tiber. No wonder the Jews took care not to drink from it, and, as for washing, they never washed in it, and during epidemics the dockers were segregated.

Infectious diseases were diagnosed in Palestine according to a well-known formula: if on three successive days three corpses out of a community of five hundred were carried off three separate times, then it was the plague. If fewer, then it was not the plague and there was no need to impose quarantine. At times like that, the poor in some congregations would deny they had corpses, so that breadwinners could keep working, and only later would they report a death. The archisynagogoses took a strong stance against this, as did Levites, who were well-paid experts at burial. An uproar would arise over this every other day or so, as would be expected anywhere that persons lived surrounded by other persons, bound together.

Joseph made one last try to obtain a man’s work for his son.

The post of grammateus had fallen vacant in their community.

The grammateus was a scribe, a notary and secretary, the archisynagogos’s right-hand man, a man of influence, because he was in a position to whisper or suggest anything to a community leader at any time; he could be of some use and also do a great deal of harm. Fortunatus, the previous grammateus, had been ill and forgetful when he died, but nevertheless many members of the congregation had accompanied his body to the catacomb, located on the Appian Way. Joseph and Uri too had been present at the burial ceremony at the terraced entrance to the cemetery, which resembled a tiny, semicircular amphitheater.

A Jewish assembly like this was not large by Roman standards, and if one of its number should die, the five or six hundred menfolk, a small town’s worth, would be there at his burial, and it was also permitted for women and children to attend, because in Rome women were of virtually equal rank to men, unlike in Palestine, where women were of no account.

The route was a long one, not because of the distance, for there could have been no more than three or four stadia, a mile or so, between Far Side and the cemetery, which lay just beyond the city gate, but because it was necessary to stop seven times on the way, first at the Jewish bridge, the Pons Cestius, as the section on the near side of the island was officially known, or the Pons Fabricius, farther away; at each stop, someone, each time a different person, seven times over, would expound at length on the virtues of the deceased.

Not that the burial was notable for this, but in the congregation that day there also happened to be a priest from Jerusalem by the name of Philippos. He was spending Passover in Rome, and he was staying until Shavuot, or Pentecost, and since he was there, he thought he would bless the people on the occasion of the burial. A priestly blessing was a big deal, because that blessing could only be said by a priest; Uri too would get a chill every time it was recited at some big feast by a suitable person, a descendant of Aaron. Philippos was not permitted anywhere near the body. Not only was he forbidden to see the tumbrel that carried the corpse; it was not even supposed to cast its shadow on him because it would have made him unclean. Philippos blessed the mourners in the crescent entryway to the cemetery, likewise speaking highly of the deceased, expressing hope that a general resurrection was not far away, so that the living and the dead would not be deprived of each other’s company for long. He read out the prayer, those present wept and said amen, then they shepherded the priest away and only pulled the tumbril into the cemetery once Philippos was long gone. The body, wrapped in white shroud, was carried through the gate by the Levite attendants, who had been gazing off and leaning listlessly on their spades during the speech. Members of the family rent their garments as they entered the gate to see into the niche where the body was placed, onto which vault or rectangular hollow scooped into the stone of the catacomb wall they should place the thin marble plate they had brought along with them, on which stood just the name, Fortunatus, and that he had lived sixty-four years and been a grammateus. Fortunatus’s eldest son went down with the Torah scroll, tucking his head into his shoulders to pass under the low entrance, the other family members held a lit torch and oil lamps so they could see anything in the underground passages.