Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

impure diaspora. But after a few weeks or months they would get fed up with the climate in Rome and go back to Jerusalem; then either somebody else would be sent to replace them or not. In time, a few Levite families settled down and got rich, mostly through the ritually pure oil and wine that they imported from Judaea and Galilee. Rome’s non-Jews were not very interested, to tell the truth, in how the population on the right side of the Tiber lived. There were many small ethnic enclaves in Rome, and outsiders had no awareness into them, and the Jewish enclave was not among the larger and most important ones either: in a city of around one million, it accounted for

no more than thirty or forty thousand, the majority of them the gradually liberated progeny of the slaves who were sporadically carried off to Rome. They did have synagogues, however, twelve of them, one of which was on the Appian Way, where they also had an underground cemetery, a catacomb. Count ing on eventual resurrection as they did, they did not incinerate their dead like the foolish Latini. Seven of the prayer houses were along the road to Ostia alone, the thoroughfare by which goods delivered by sea reached Rome by land. The first of the temples, named for Marcus Agrippa, the Roman potentate who had given patronage to the Jews, was built almost a century before and was still standing. Although Uri’s family did not

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