György Spiró - Captivity

The crowd, which until that point had egged him on enthusiastically, now fell silent. That was a bit too much, even for the Roman plebes. The executioner sensed the change in mood, swiftly wrapped his toga back in place, and raced off with his assistants.

Mutely, glumly, the crowd started to disperse. There was one beggar who even climbed the steps and started to abuse a headless corpse, as the remaining soldiers hastily threw the bodies into the Tiber.

Uri was drenched in sweat, shivering, his heart hammering, dizzy, the sweat stinging his eyes, his stomach heaving. He had wanted to avert his eyes throughout but found himself unable. There were cries of “Wait, they’re bringing Sejanus’s wife now. Let’s see her mourning,” but he took to his heels and ran as fast as he could. On his way he vomited onto his own legs. He could not remember which bridge he crossed, whether it was the Pons Aemilius or the Jewish bridge, because both led to the Jewish quarter. He huddled up in his alcove and did not budge from his place for weeks.

Nor indeed could he have shown himself, because the Elders prohibited it.

Somebody had seen him on the bridge, running home, filthy and panting, and reported it. The Elders assembled and called in his father. Joseph argued that Uri had reached the age of maturity, was unable to work, and could go wherever he pleased. The Elders, of whom there were seventy to faithfully mirror the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, gathered together very rarely, only on the most vital matters, its membership being made up of the heads of eminent families in the city’s various congregations. After protracted debate, they came to the conclusion that anyone who went around in places where reprisals were raging in these grave days and weeks was putting the entire Jewish community of Rome under threat.

“We must not get mixed up in it,” they declared. “That is a matter for the Latini, we have nothing to do with it, and we should never cross their minds. Your son put us all at risk, albeit unintentionally. He is not to leave your house until we send word.”

Joseph had no choice but to acquiesce.

Following this contretemps, he exchanged a few words with his son. He explained that while others went across the river, they had not been punished with house arrest; it was typical because, as he noted, “We are the indigenous ones here, not them, and we shall never be forgiven for that.”

He never asked what Uri had seen of the upheavals in Rome, the true one.

Uri held his peace. He had already been instructed as a young boy that many tensions were mounting in Rome’s Jewish community, that a fierce rivalry was going on between the first wave of settlers in the city, and those who came after.

The first settlers were descendant from those who had arrived in Rome with the earliest convoys of Jewish captives. They were hauled from Judaea in the year Pompeius Magnus seized Jerusalem. It was not Pompey who took them captive, however, but Aulus Gabinius, who massacred three thousand Jews who had been fighting alongside the Jewish prince, Alexander, while he took another three thousand captive. Though painful to admit, there were also Jewish soldiers who fought against the co-religionists, on the orders of Aristobulus, Alexander’s brother, who was on the side of the Roman mercenaries. Herod the Great’s subsequent rise to power occurred in much the same way, with Roman help, with Jews again butchering tens of thousands of fellow Jews.

Uri’s great-great-grandfather was one of the three thousand whom Gabinius had carried off.

Compared with them, the thirty thousand whom Cassius took prisoner not much later, when he marched into Judaea from Syria and took Taricheae, counted as mere novices in Rome, though just a fraction of them reached Rome, the great bulk of them having been sold off or died en route.

Even newer waves had arrived at Rome five, ten, twenty, and thirty years later, ever newer ones, as a result of Herod the Great’s carnage. Because the newcomers came to make up the majority, they had appropriated the leading posts of fledgling organization of Jewish life in Rome from the old hands. His father complained bitterly as if he had personally had an important position snatched from him, though it was from his great-grandfather and grandfather, who, slaves though they were, had fought for the right to their own prayer house, and the slave women by whom they produced offspring should convert to Judaism. Joseph had inherited neither wealth nor office from his forebears. Uri was tired of these laments, and even more so because these tensions, which had arisen three or four generations before him, showed no sign of burning out. He could not understand why the “old hands” were so proud to boast that they had spent more years in “Roman captivity”; to his way of thinking, his ancestors had been lucky that they had, only by chance, avoided the subsequent bloodshed in Palestine. If Gabinius had not taken prisoner his great-great-grandfather, he himself more than likely would never have been conceived.

Even now the “old hands” would provoke the “new boys” by calling them the spawns of robbers and thieves, which they would fervently dispute, often shedding blood on that account. Yet everyone knew that the thieves had been sold off abroad as slaves by Herod the Great, with most ending up in Rome due to the chronic shortage of slave labor. Until then it had been the law among the Jews that thieves could be kept in servitude no more than six years, and even then only domestically, serving Jews, and they were obliged to pay back four times the value of the stuff that had been misappropriated.

Apart from thieves, Herod the Great had also sold bandits off as slaves, and in truth it was next to impossible to puzzle out what crimes these late-arriving Jews had committed to get them shipped off to Rome.

The “old hands” would use the argument to this day that they were the progeny of Jewish freedom fighters, in contrast to the “new boys,” who were the offspring of common convicted criminals, Jewish scum. Uri had his doubts about that. Alexander had recruited warriors against his own brother; it was a Jewish civil war in which Rome had, of course, been keen to have a say, and the Jewish state had come off worst that time. It was not much to Uri’s liking to create freedom fighters from people who had happened to end up on the losing side, but he preferred not to advertise that; nor did he share with anyone his question that if the forebears of the “old hands” were indeed freedom fighters who struggled against Rome, why were they, the proud descendants, so pleased they were finally granted Roman civil rights? On the other hand, he was frankly amazed to discover that the entire Jewish colony living in Rome was considered traitors in the old country. What did those lunatics want? A new war of the Maccabees? Against Rome, even though Rome was doing the Jews no harm?

When he was five or six, Uri had thought long and hard about one particular story. A person is still a genius when just six; only later on did he become dull, he thought in his cubbyhole when he read about it.

When Pompey laid siege to Jerusalem, the city was reinforced mightily, with the Jews demolishing the bridge that connected the Temple courtyard to the town so that the Roman besiegers could not use it. Only there was no wall to the north, where a ravine ran, which the defenders believed could not be filled in. Pompey started work on filling it in all the same, with the Jews dismantling from above; whatever Pompey threw up, the Jews set alight, and so it went on for five days. But then the Sabbath came around, when it is forbidden to undertake any military maneuver unless to ward off a direct attack. There was no direct attack, Pompey was not stupid, so the Jews peacefully offered sacrifices for the Sabbath, all the Jewish defenders occupied themselves with the day of rest and did not tear down the ramparts that Pompey had erected. The Romans duly broke through on the next day. That was how Jerusalem fell.