Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

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. If Sarah was not originally Jewish—as her religious overzealousness suggested, because fresh coverts were always that way—then she must have been born a slave and Joseph must have emancipated her. Given Joseph’s business acumen, he would have chosen a slave girl who spoke Aramaic, which meant she would have come from Syria or Babylon. Uri assumed that his father, who had been orphaned at a young age, could not have been prosperous enough to land a Jewish girl, for even if he had waived a dowry he would not have been much of a catch, and so he had been obliged to marry a slave girl. Under the laws of Palestine, this meant that he, Uri, as the son of a proselytized slave girl, would be of very lowly

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