Book review: György Spiró’s “Captivity”

Hungarian novelist György Spiró’s monumental “Captivity” (Restless Books, 860 pages, $29.99) begins in Rome’s Jewish enclave during the reign of Tiberius (A.D. 14-37). This oversized book has an undersized hero: Gaius “Uri” Theodorus, a moody, reedy 19-year-old dreamer. His prospects seem inauspicious at best until his father pulls some strings to have him included in a delegation bringing tithes to Jerusalem in time for the Passover celebration.

What follows is a case of mistaken identity. His fellow delegates, baffled by the presence of such an unimpressive figure, assume Uri is an agent and courier for Agrippa, the free-spending friend of Tiberius who is openly angling to be named King of Judaea. (Known to history as Herod Agrippa, he really did gain control of the kingdom in A.D. 41.) “Captivity” takes us from Rome to Jerusalem, Alexandria and back again during an especially fragile and eventful period of the Pax Romana.

In Jerusalem, the Zelig-like Uri dines with Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate (“I’ve always had a partiality for Jews,” Pilate confides). He lives in luxury in Alexandria at the behest of the philosopher Philo and his brother Alexander, the richest Jew in the empire. When he’s tossed in prison on suspicion of espionage, he meets with a Galilean rabble-rouser—“an older, heavier man” with an unkempt gray beard, in this telling—who was arrested for overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the temple.

This sounds very “Ben Hur” or “I, Claudius,” but Mr. Spiró’s interest is less in political maneuvering or dashing adventure than in providing a mosaic-like picture of Jewish life throughout the Roman world. We also follow Uri during his short tenure as an apprentice cabinet-maker in rural Judaea, on his travels with a group of the ascetic Essenes (the creators of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and in his dealings with a fervent splinter group called the Nazarenes who, to his horror, worship the very man with whom he once shared a cell in Jerusalem.

The level of detail is stunning; Mr. Spiró seems to know absolutely everything about the first-century Mediterranean world and revels in Herodotean digressions about the intricacies of purity laws (Uri learns how a Jewish brothel proprietor manages to run his business without violating God’s commandments), the rituals surrounding grain harvesting, even the nuances of tax collection in an empire swamped by an absurd mixture of currencies. The last is one of the many parts of the story played for comic relief: “Three ma’ahs, one tropik, two tresiths, twelve issars, two aspers, four pondions, one hundred and twelve prutahs . . . Do you think that’s about seven drachmas?”

Mr. Spiró’s encyclopedic tendencies do not hobble “Captivity,” which never loses steam. In Tim Wilkinson’s forceful translation, we are transported to a world of political corruption and messianic hopes. Uri, whose maturation gives the story its psychological heft, exemplifies the enigmas and tensions of Diaspora Jewry across history. Readers will find particularly strong resonance in the scenes of the Alexandria riots of A.D. 38, pointedly depicted as the first pogrom in history. “Horrors are on the way,” Uri predicts. “Alexandria is a model: it will become fashionable wherever a significant Jewish minority is living, be it in Africa or Asia, anywhere, it is going to be expedited in just the same way.”

You can read it as a parable of the Jewish condition amid the modern empires of Europe, or you can simply lose yourself in the ancient setting it so comprehensively describes.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/zelig-in-jerusalem-1448490313