The houses were repaired, the furnishings slowly made good. Not that there was much to replace, given how poor the Jews of Rome already were.
Uri recalled almost nothing about being dragged away for the first time — only the smell of chicken droppings, his father placing him on his shoulders and carrying him long distances, which felt so good that he would dream about it even now, at the age of seventeen. In his dream, he wished he would wake up to see his father standing above him, saying, “Come on, my boy, hop on my shoulders again.”
All that had remained of the temporary exile was that his mother, Sarah, would still cry out from time to time at the memory of an elegant utensil she had once owned. It had been tucked away and not returned by the non-Jewish freemen, also clients of their patron. She would moan on and on about that. The truth is that several of them had been honest enough to hand back the valuables that had been deposited with them, and to this day the family still ate out of such vessels, as the father would sometimes note, though that did not hinder Sarah in her lamentations.
These days, his father no longer looked up, but dourly spooned in his food. If he ever looked at his wife, at the repulsive sight of her kerchief-covered head, profound disgust shot from his eyes: it was not the thieves he hated, but her. And he held his tongue. Divorce was difficult for a Jew in Rome: there were so few of them. Divorce was easy in Judaea, and that was not just hearsay but written law: If anyone found another woman more beautiful than his wife, that was, in itself, sufficient grounds for divorce. A man could divorce, and he could even drive his wife away if she undressed, which was not prohibited between a married couple on certain occasions. But then, Judaea was not a border castle for Jewry but the body of the nation, and all sorts of things were possible there. In Rome, Jews could marry their cousins, unlike the Latini, because their numbers were scant. In Judaea and Galilee it counted as incest and was forbidden. On the other hand, a Roman widow was under no obligation to marry her dead husband’s brother, which was still compulsory in Palestine.
Uri’s father never spoke about that half year of privation. The story went around that the whole exile was caused by four vile, thieving Jews who, by some means, were able to win over Fulvia, wife of Saturninus, the senator, and to wheedle cash from her to purchase costly carpets for the Temple in Jerusalem. They absconded with the money, of course, and an incensed Fulvia reported this to the emperor, and Tiberius in turn flew into a rage.
From other variations that Uri heard, however, he suspected it was only a pretext for expelling the Jews from Rome, on account of Germanicus.
Germanicus, the famous general, was a nephew and adopted son of the emperor’s, but Tiberius took offense at him and packed him off to the Eastern provinces. Germanicus had made the mistake of setting off from Syria to Alexandria, even though Egypt was a no-go area for all Romans of any rank, seeing that Egypt, as every street urchin in Rome knew, was Rome’s bread basket; it was the source of the free grain, of which Jews who had been granted citizenship also partook. Anyone who disturbed Egypt would bring serious famine down on Rome. Anthony had been the last to try it, but his navy was defeated at Actium by Octavian, who became the Emperor Augustus. He then prohibited Roman senators and legionnaires from visiting Egypt. Tiberius must have presumed that Germanicus, passing through Judaea, had cut a deal with the Jews living there that they would stand by him if a war were to break out with Egypt. Indeed, it is quite certain that this was his thinking. Otherwise, why not expel Egyptians, who lived separately from the Jews in Transtiberim, along with the Jews? Germanicus, subsequently, was fatally poisoned. The rumor was that the emperor had dismissed the previous governor of Judaea, Valerius Gratus, for meeting with Germanicus, although it would have been difficult for him not to meet with the emperor’s adopted son when he was wandering around Judaea. The matter was of little importance, one governor being much the same as another viewed from Rome. But this particular event did become noteworthy because the emperor waited seven years before relieving Gratus, which was not a sign of forgetfulness but rather, according to political analysts, precisely the opposite: he never forgot and sooner or later would take vengeance for sure. It was unusual, by the way, for Emperor Tiberius to replace procurators and prefects, choosing rather to leave them in place on the principle that “a well-fed tick sucks less blood than a hungry one.”
It may well be, though, that the previous prefect got mixed up somehow in the Sejanus affair.
Agrippina the Elder is another oft-cited example. She was Germanicus’s very popular widow who, fourteen years after her husband died, was starved to death by Tiberius. It wasn’t like that, interjects another political commentator: banished to the island of Pandataria, Agrippina went on a hunger strike, a centurion poked out one of her eyes, then she was force-fed, on Tiberius’s orders, but incompetently, and that’s what caused her death. What does it matter? She was murdered. The Jews are just as up on Roman gossip as any other nation, and they have just as many worthy political commentators.
Uri was interested in history; all tales with twists and turns interested him, and he read countless works of Greek and Latin authors in his little alcove. There he was left alone and could spend the whole day musing and piecing things together. The images he saw in his waking dreams were sharp and bright, almost palpable. Imagination is a great thing, if someone has it.
He could read Greek, because their neighbors in the Jewish quarter had Greek as their mother tongue, and most Jewish boys in Rome answered to a Greek name. They brought it from Palestine, where Hellenization had proved most successful in the area of language, and they had passed it on to their successors in Rome. Cultured Latini spoke more polished Greek, but this was also Greek; Jews spoke the same Greek as the Greeks themselves, it was impossible to tell them apart from their pronunciation.
Joseph and his family were exceptional in that they also spoke Aramaic at home, which was related to Hebrew, the original but by then extinct language of the Holy Scriptures. There was a somewhat calculated dimension to this: Joseph had the view that as long as it was necessary to do business with commercial agents who spoke only Aramaic, his children should learn it too.
Rome’s Jews had, for some time, spoken neither Aramaic nor Hebrew, and the Hebrew texts had been translated into Greek for the congregation in the house of prayer. A Greek translation of the Old Testament was already in existence: the Septuagint, which seventy-two scholars translated in seventy-two days on the island of Pharos in Alexandria about two centuries before. At home, left to themselves, everyone would read aloud from this Greek Torah. It was not permitted to recite the Holy Scriptures by heart, lest one commit the grave error of misremembering a text and saying something other than what was written; that might have unforeseen consequences for the whole of Creation. In the house of prayer, on the other hand, Hebrew texts were translated impromptu in front of the assembled community, and of course a person was not forbidden to learn by heart that day’s reading from the Septuagint, provided he pretend to understand the Hebrew and translate from that.
It did not occur to Uri as a child that his mother’s knowledge of Aramaic was somehow unusual, and that other mothers spoke better Greek than she did. It was only as an adolescent that he reflected on the fact that his mother was called Sarah, which was a name, as he was well aware by then, often bestowed on proselytized women who had converted to the Jewish faith. By that time, however, he was not on good terms with his father, so he did not ask if Sarah was Jewish by birth, and there was no way he was going to ask his mother, with whom he had never had a good relationship. She took such care to abide strictly by the religion of her husband and son.