Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

györgy spiró

they were permitted to go a further two thousand cubits from those provisions. This way, too, they were adhering to the Law—whichever suited them. That trick could not be employed in Rome, because any food left out would have been instantly stolen. The outside world corrupts the inner; intensive Jewish society was wrecked by pantheistic (hence godless) Roman society, and lamentations could be wallowed in on that account. It was typical Latin stupidity that their first emperor was still under the misapprehension that Jews eat nothing on the Sabbath, as if it were a day of fasting! Even after decades this was still raising eyebrows among Rome’s Jews, who prayed on the Sabbath in their houses of prayer and listened to interpretations of the Torah

and the scriptures of the prophets, but the essence was nevertheless the communal meal, the costs of which were covered by the communal tax. Festal food could not be skimpy; there had to be meat and wine on the menu, likewise vegetables and fruit, to say nothing of unleavened bread. Poor families would have very little to eat for the rest of the week, but on the Sabbath they could eat their fill, and for free, through the goodoffices of the community. The rationale, therefore, for this singular form of architecture may have been primarily religious—to be more specific, an injunction against death by starvation— but neither was the fortified structure entirely irrational. When the Emperor Tiberius decided, fifteen years before,

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