Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

At times like that, Uri was happy that, through chance, thanks to a grandfather he had never seen, he was able to help his family. His father had also never seen his father, because Joseph was just a few months old when Thaddeus died at the age of twenty- five—five years earlier than the average life span for a slave (those long years of hard labor he had sweat out to pay his redemption bond cannot have done his health any good). If a Jew was scheduled to receive his monthly grain ratio on a Saturday, or a Jewish feast day, he was allowed, under one of the still-active decrees of Augustus Caesar, of blessed memory, to go pick it up on a Monday, or whenever the holiday ended; the decree had not been repealed by Tiberius, even after he had expelled the Jews. There

were Jews with a tessera who had kept a low profile in the vicinity of Rome during those months, but brazenly stole back into the City. The municipal administrators, long faced, had to dispense their allocation, because without an order of exclusion they were obliged to do so. There were some banished Jews, it was said, who threatened to bring a lawsuit against the reluctant official, and in the end the official had given way, even though he could have called out the sentinels to arrest the hectoring Jew. The world was crazy; it always had been, and it would remain so until the coming of the Messiah. In truth, Joseph could have been a Roman citizen himself, because three children of his had been born there, and Augustus’s decree that the parents of three children should be awarded citizenship

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