György Spiró’s novel Captivity, recently translated into English, tells the story of a 1st-century CE Roman Jew named Uri who embarks on epic and life-transforming travels to Judea and Alexandria. Much of the book’s strength, writes Adam Kirsch, lies in its vivid and thoroughly researched depictions of ancient life, but it also has a powerful modern resonance:
When Uri himself makes it to Judea, he experiences a very Jewish kind of ambivalence. Exiled, due to a complicated and not very important series of intrigues, to a small village, he witnesses one of the Jews’ triennial pilgrimages to the Temple. He is equally impressed and alienated by their religious enthusiasm: “Could this be my people?” he wonders, seeing the poor villagers with “their skin … ulcerated, their bodies scrawny.” During his time in the village, Uri experiences—and Spiró carefully describes—the incredible hardship of rural life in the Roman empire and indeed for most human beings throughout most of history. Uri proves unable to do any kind of farm work, just as the modern reader would, since he is used to a sedentary and bookish life.
By contrast, when he makes it to Alexandria, Uri feels truly at home in a kind of ancient version of New York City, full of ethnic diversity, commercial activity, and tall buildings. For a moment, it seems as if Alexandria is going to be the answer to Uri’s, and Spiró’s, Jewish question. If Rome is Europe, where the Jews are a despised minority, and Judea is Israel, where they are a pious but parochial majority, then Egypt seems like America, where Greek and Jew live in prosperous harmony. But any reader of Philo knows that this idyll is too good to last, and Uri is present to witness the pogrom against the city’s Jews that Philo chillingly describes in his work Against Flaccus. . . .
There is a deep pessimism or fatalism in this novel of ancient Judaism, as perhaps there has to be, which casts a shadow across Spiró’s exuberant recreations of the Roman empire. Captivity draws you in with its pageant of the classical world, but by the end it also turns out to be a profound meditation on what Judaism meant, and means.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/195166/ben-hur-but-bigger-and-better