Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

kindly Roman notable who was their patron, the freed Joseph being a client, the father and family were able to return to their ransacked, wrecked home. Apart from the four thousand unmarried Jewish men who were called up for military service and taken off to Sardinia, supposedly to ward off gangs of robbers—though the climate and homesickness finished more of them off— virtually all of the Jews with families drifted back, bit by bit; in total, a couple of hundred were killed by the robbers in the country , and the Emperor Tiberius was no longer issuing such strict edicts. The houses were repaired, the furnishings slowly made good. Not that there was much to replace, given how poor the Jews of Rome already were.

that adherents to the cult of Isis and the Jewish faith should clear out of Rome, the Roman mob got wind of the news and tried to lay siege to this mysterious system of walls, but because they had no grasp of the whole, they were unable to force their way in. The Jews defended themselves by firing arrows and throwing javelins from the flat rooftops. They had to leave their homes in Rome all the same, with Joseph fleeing with his wife and three-year-old Uri. They withdrew to the hill village of Ariccia, twenty miles from Rome, to a stable with a leaky roof. Joseph cleaned out the manure and plowed, his wife strewed straw and litter, and Uri spent the whole day chasing poultry. But six months later, thanks to the

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