Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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

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