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captivity
or diacritical marks, so that his
shorthand was legible to no
one apart from himself, and
a few months later, not even
himself. He would write pure
Hebrew texts with the left
hand from right to left, Greek
and Latin with the right hand
from left to right, and he had
no idea why that was. He was
amazed when he discovered,
from a scroll, that systems of
Latin and Greek shorthand
already existed; others had
invented them just like him;
he happily learned those too.
Gaius Theodorus. When he
was small, he had first written
down his official name this
way, then as Uriel, which
means “the Lord is my light,”
was only used within the
family; no one else knew what
he was called at home.
Officially, his father was not
Joseph either, but Lucius
Ioses.
Gaius was the forename of
their patron, while Joseph
had adopted Lucius from the
patron’s father, who had freed
Joseph’s father. That was
the custom; the forenames
of Jewish freemen, which
was often the only name
they had, was the same as
their patron’s, as a result of
which the Jews of Rome had
primarily Latin and, second of
all, Greek names and virtually
none had a Semitic name. The
very fact that Joseph’s father
gave him a Semitic name is
significant; he found slavery
hard to endure and longed
to be in Palestine, though he
had never seen it, as he too
was a slave born in Rome, and
indeed his father before him.
The Jews of Rome, then, had
Latin and Greek names, but
they were still Jews; they did
not eat unkosher food, they
observed the Sabbath and
the festivals, and they prayed