Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

györgy spiró

status over there in the Old Country, because his mother’s descent would apply to him too. He might not be a slave or new convert, and he would count as an Israelite, but one of least esteemed. It was a stroke of luck to have been born a Jew in Rome, where only the paternal lineage was taken into account. For Uri, learning Latin was not easy. The young people of the Jewish quarter spoke only a broken Latin; they rarely crossed over to the other bank of the Tiber, where Rome itself lay. They contented themselves with the frenetic life of Far Side, and they could get by perfectly well with their native Greek any time they ventured over. Even the non-Jewish inhabitants of Far Side spoke Greek, or else they spoke a language that no else

understood. The Jews had a habit of writing Latin with Greek letters, which came readily to them. They learned the Hebrew alphabet as well, of course, which they called Assyrian lettering, so that they would at least be able to read the Sh’ma for themselves in their daily prayers and, when necessary, the psalms, if called upon in the house of prayer. Occasionally elements of all three alphabets would be mixed up in a single sentence, even a single word. Uri was fond of that sort of mixture, and he did not transpose Latin or Greek texts into Hebrew lettering out of negligence or ignorance or even just for fun. He devised abbreviations in all three languages for himself, to copy things more quickly if he was loaned a particularly interesting scroll for a few days. He would omit vowels

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