György Spiró - Captivity

Uri asked if the lands were redistributed every fifty years as the laws of Moses required. One of the guards that day was an old man who had lived for seventy years, and he said that there had been no redistribution yet, and he did not expect to see one either, even if he lived another seventy years.

None of Uri’s fellow guards owned any land; they were all peasants but landless. The well-off landowners did not need to watch crops by night.

Master Jehuda was also landless, he was informed, because he was a tenant, but he didn’t cultivate his land himself; he sublet it, which he was free to do. Master Jehuda was a good man — and a very learned man, because he was able to explain the laws. He railed nicely against usurers, and he was right to do so because usurers and tax collectors were the wickedest people on Earth, even if they were Jews.

Master Jehuda also lent out money, noted someone in the darkness, when a cloud just happened to be covering the moon.

Yes, he lent out money, that was true, came the answer, also in the dark, but only for low interest, and Master Jehuda himself had explained not long ago that this was allowed under the laws.

A protracted dispute started over whether Master Jehuda was aris , a tenant, or hokker , a landlord, since it made a big difference. An aris only rented the land for a year or two, and he passed on a portion of the crop, usually half, to the landlord. A hokker, on the other hand, rented the land under terms whereby he did not pay the landowner a certain fraction of the crop but rather a fixed amount of money that was stipulated in advance in the contract.

In the long run, someone said, it was all the same, because the good and the bad years canceled each other out, although it might matter in the short term.

Yes, but then Master Jehuda had been renting land for a long time.

Indeed, but there was no way of knowing from whom.

It turned out that in fact the night watchmen had no clue whose land they were working on for the bread and vinegar.

They did agree, though, that Master Jehuda could not be a sokker , who paid a money rental for a short tenancy.

Then, among the guards, some were sattels , who contracted for a season for half of the crop but also took on the job of night watchman because they would return to their big family after the spring sowing and do nothing until the next spring.

A sakkir , also to be found among the guards, lived on leasehold land in a small shack. He also received board through the goodwill of the supervisor and a sum of money when he left. The extremes of the contracts were one week and seven years, but normally it would be for three years, especially if the person was unmarried. Another guard had not married either, but he was older than thirty and would never have a family of his own. Uri took a look at him at dawn; he had no more than two teeth left in his mouth and ground his bread soaked in vinegar with his gums.

There was not one ikker , a farmer, among Uri’s companions, but all the more po’els , that is, journeymen, working for a day’s pay. The po’els did not tire of repeating to Uri that if he worked as a po’el, he would be obliged to receive the wage in advance, which was four or five leptons, or, if he could drive a hard bargain, as much as seven leptons a day, on top of which they were obliged to give him bread — one and a half slices.

One of their number was an older man, who had managed to find wives for his sons and husbands for all but one of his daughters. He had sold what property he owned — a decent-sized piece of land with four plots of barley and three of wheat — then leased it back from the new owner. There would have been no other way for him to find the dowry for his daughters and give some support to his sons in starting their new, independent lives; even his house was not his own.

“Whom does it belong to?” Uri asked.

“I don’t know,” said the old man. “The person who bought it from me sold it straightaway, but I’m still paying him and he’s paying the new owner. I asked who that was, but he wouldn’t say. Perhaps it’s a priest in Jerusalem who will later sell it to the Edomites.”

“Your sons will recover your land for you,” someone said in the dark. “They’ll drive out the foreigners and recover it!”

“If only they would!” the old man said gloomily. “It was my father’s land, Jewish land. If only they would recover it!”

Uri’s companions were in tattered rags and hungry, just like him.

There was no bread for the night’s work, nothing at all, and they would get only two leptons in the morning when the women relieved them. That had become a tradition, and that was what they said to Uri again and again each morning, as if this were the first time he’d heard it; the women could scream loudly if they were attacked by robbers, and it was easier to chase robbers by day.

Uri then asked how Master Jehuda made his livelihood.

The question received uncertain responses. Carpenter, yes, he had been that, but for a long time all the work had been done by his assistants, and he was rather tight-fisted about paying them, which was within his rights because he was the master. He was a well-to-do man as he rented land and employed people to cultivate it; he personally did not work, because he was the personification of the law. A good master he was too, because he was good at administering justice.

“Is the master really a judge?” Uri asked.

“Most certainly he is. What else would he be?”

“And there’s no priest out this way?”

Again they did not understand what he was asking at first, but eventually they caught on.

There was no priest within three days’ walking distance; the only priests were in Jerusalem, but there were many thousands of them.

There had been priests out in the country in the olden days, but then they had seen very little of their share of tithe paid for the priesthood, the sacrificial offering from the harvest, which was all collected in Jerusalem, so it was better for the priests to move closer, since the tithe was what they fed on, and the offspring of priestly families went up from the country to Jerusalem, and now only the odd token priest remained in the provinces.

But even when they were there, not all of them were in a good position. There were starving priests in Jerusalem too, because their share of the sacrificial offerings was decided by drawing lots, and that lottery was always open to dispute. The high priests, along with their favorites, took their cut, and everyone else got what was left; it was hard living on scraps.

This arrangement was not against the masters’ interest anyway; in the country it was the master craftsmen who passed judgment, and anyone who was literate could be a prayer leader. In the country it was the masters who led the people; the priests did so only in Jerusalem, and even there, to be sure, the big masters still have considerable prestige, because they were also to be found in the Great Council.

“Is Master Jehuda in the habit of leading the prayers?” Uri was curious. His companions could not recall ever having heard him leading the prayers, but then that was not his business. Let him explain the law and pass judgments in accordance with it. There were a great many lawsuits in Judaea; Master Jehuda had a difficult job keeping up, which was why he was so restless and roared all the time. Responsibility lay heavily on his shoulders; he had put on weight to bear it. That was why his sons had fled to far-off areas, all of them marrying in Transjordan. Master Jehuda’s sons had left him because they could not stand his temper tantrums.

It was good being able to spend the nights among the guards, wrapped up in warm blankets. Sweltering as it was by day, the nights were cool. The dew at dawn surprised Uri to the point that he would lick it from the bushes, he was so taken with the idea that the Everlasting Lord brought forth moisture even in such torrid weather.