György Spiró - Captivity

“That’s on account of the pe’ah,” he said.

“But doesn’t the pe’ah consist of fallen heads that have been left?” Uri asked.

“No,” said the man. “They’ve just been accidentally dropped, but it is not permitted to reap the edge of a field on account of the poor.”

“The pe’ah is the sixtieth part,” said the man behind Uri. “But that’s not easy to work out…”

“We count on the master to make a decision if there is any dispute about the size of the pe’ah,” said the one in front. “It is not all the same if the grain is in one plot or two, because if it’s in two plots then a pe’ah only has to be left on one…”

“Not always,” said the one behind Uri, and he started to list exceptions.

Uri was unable to follow the debate upon which they went into a passionate discussion of the finer legal points of the pe’ah.

They were treading in each other’s footsteps between the plots. Uri kept a constant check that he did not place his feet on the stubbly patches. It was a good thing they were not going any faster; in Judaea everything was slower than in Italia. These people were not even walking at a stadium or a stadium and a half in an hour.

“Don’t you leave a pe’ah in Edom?” later asked a younger man who came up on Uri’s footsteps.

“As it just so happens,” said Uri, “we don’t leave one because we can’t; we don’t own any land.”

With that, the dispute over the riddles of the pe’ah ceased. There was a silence. Even some people who were walking farther away stopped talking.

“You have no land?” the one who was walking in front finally asked, having come to a halt and so forced Uri to do the same, whereupon the entire line that was behind came to a halt.

“No, we don’t.”

“That’s impossible!”

“We don’t own any land,” Uri persisted. “It’s not allowed.”

“A curse on ruddy Bozrah!” the man standing behind him exclaimed.

A few more also cursed. Uri was now thoroughly confused. Bozrah had been the capital city of Edom many, many centuries ago, but why ruddy? Perhaps Edom meant “red” in Semitic languages.

“If you have no land, what do you make a living from?”

Uri sighed.

“We trade,” he said. “We have artisans, craftsmen, builders, dockers, scribes…”

“Handicrafts, we’ve also got them,” said a gruff voice from behind. “Jerusalem is overflowing with master craftsmen, the best in the world! But one can’t live without land. Land is life itself!”

“What do you people eat anyway?” another voice asked.

“Whatever we buy, I suppose,” said Uri.

“You… you mean you buy your food?”

That piece of news went right down the line: those Edomites pay money to buy food for themselves, they pay money to buy food for themselves, they pay money to buy food for themselves!

Unbelievable.

“Where do you buy the food?”

“In shops, at the market…”

This was so peculiar that people began to laugh. In shops, at the market!

“And how much does a measure of wheat cost in ruddy Bozrah?”

Uri was stumped; he did not know. With his tessera he got the grain free of charge, enough for the whole family, but he felt that this was better left unsaid; people just would not understand. They would not understand the whole Roman system.

“Something like six sesterces,” he said uncertainly.

“How much is that in zuz?” could be heard simultaneously from several quarters.

Uri sighed. He tried to recall what those pleasant plunderers had said in prison and replied at random, “One zuz.”

There was a big gasp of consternation.

“One zuz! One zuz for a single ephah in Edom! One whole zuz for a single ephah in bloody Bozrah!”

“You’re out of your minds,” declared the gruff voice from behind. “You’re paying twenty times more than you ought to!”

Uri gave a growl of accordance and nodded; he did not consider it his duty to acquaint them with the mysteries of the retail trade, especially when he was not entirely clear himself.

“You don’t produce any grain?” someone asked.

“No, we don’t.”

That was too much for them; they could not understand it at all.

Somebody started guessing how grain might reach Edom. Uri just smiled.

“The grain comes from Egypt,” he said. “That’s what the whole of Rome eats.”

More gasps.

From Egypt? But they don’t pay any attention to how things are baled. You can be sure moisture gets in, and that makes it unclean! Uri went on the defensive; there were quite a lot of Jews living in Rome, and they kept to the rules of purity. They only ate kosher meat; they cooked with Jewish oil, and the forefathers had been very scrupulous in ruling what a Roman Jew could and could not eat. If they had decided generations back that wheat from Egypt was edible, then it could not be unclean.

The climate of opinion around Uri grew antagonistic. Everybody in the Diaspora was unclean — there was your proof! It had now turned out to be unequivocally true as far as Edom was concerned.

It would have been better to have said nothing at all, Uri reflected.

The peasants had not come out of Egypt all that long ago, but we Roman Jews did a very long time ago, he recognized.

He needed to invent something quickly.

“That is the case,” he said loudly so everyone could hear. “We Roman Jews eat wheat grown by Jews in Egypt, and it undergoes strict inspections…”

It did no harm to make that up, because the position was already rather embarrassing. As they began to digest the announcement, the anger subsided.

There were cries from the front asking what the matter was, why they had stopped. People at the back started to shove forward, and the line started to move again.

“Why don’t you all rise up in revolt?” someone asked. “It’s a shame you’re treated like that!”

A prolonged, highly detailed storm of abuse against Edom ensued. People forgot about Uri and the original topic of discussion, thanks be to the Eternal One.

The synagogue was located in the next village.

People also arrived from other villages, and they all stood around in front of the small, mud-brick, straw-thatched building, chatting in gratifying and leisurely fashion. There were many hundreds of people — men, women, and children; the young and the aged; the poor and the well-off. Not even a tiny fraction of that crowd would fit into the house of prayer.

Like that million-strong mass in Jerusalem.

In front of the synagogue stood long, crudely built tables on which food had been laid out, covered with white tablecloths, the Sabbath meal that every Jew who was a guest of the house of prayer was given for free. It was the same as in Rome, only there the members of the congregation would sit inside a building. Uri was curious about how they would go about praying in Judaea.

They went about it in such a way that the Torah scroll, which normally resided in the house of prayer, was brought outside, and the readings were made from it in the open air. No one went into the house, no particular group was favored, and everyone said an “amen” at the end of the verses. The prayer leader, a young man, did not give a priestly blessing, suggesting that there might also be a shortage of priests in the Judaean countryside. Perhaps that was why the masters were important, Uri guessed; something of the priestly vocation’s intermediary role was shifted onto them, though they were not allowed to recite the prayers reserved for priests, give blessings, or dress in white.

Children kicked up a racket and women chattered as the communal prayer went ahead, giving the service a refreshingly relaxed, vital character. The prayer leader read in Hebrew from the Torah the part prescribed for that week, and an elderly man translated every two or three sentences into Aramaic so that the whole congregation could understand. Uri strained to hear what the elderly man was saying in the hubbub, and he was not such a bad interpreter; he had no scroll in his hands, but he must have prepared for the entire week, because it sounded as if he were chanting a text he had memorized perfectly. All the same, the prayer leader also had no faith that the crowd was paying attention, and he had to flutter a kerchief to signal to the congregated throng when they had to say “amen.” The crowd watched for the kerchief, yet they themselves did not pray, only said the “amens.”