Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

were much better off than those back home, as they well knew it; they acted rather like a sizable permanent legation in Rome, and if they traded shrewdly, and Rome and Jewry were bounded by ever more threads, as was predestined by necessity, they were only doing what the Creator had seemingly intended them to do. The winding inter i or courtyard had originally been a single labyrinthine system. Fortification had arisen spontaneously in the open space—although the wealthiest, as is the custom wherever Mammon is master, were separated from the communal yard with high walls and indeed had special guards to protect them—may money be cursed eternally— especially now, because an ever increasing number of

Rome’s Jews were rich, and an even greater number were getting poorer. There might have even been a connection of sorts between the two phenomena. The original Far Side stood right in the center of the Jewish quarter, with new houses built around it, but in recent years rich entrepreneurs had started building multistory tenement blocks. Joseph feared that, one of these days, their own ramshackle shed would be cleared away, along with the small huts around it, and replaced by four- or five- story buildings. That is what had happened in the non- Jewish areas immediately next to Far Side, where Egyptians, Syrians and Greeks from Asia Minor lived just as wretchedly as most Jews, and they went around the Jewish area just as comfortably as in their own.

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