Captivity, the newly translated novel by the Hungarian writer György Spiró, offers a good reminder not to judge a book by its cover. When I first saw this particular cover, with its black background, stark white typography, and surreally floating sculptured bust, the imagery—combined with the book’s Central European provenance, gloomy title, and Jewish focus—made me think that this would be a brooding modernist enigma of a book, perhaps along the lines of Imre Kertész’s Holocaust fictions. In fact, Captivity turns out to be just the opposite—a sprawling (more than 800 pages), picturesque, old-fashioned historical novel about the Roman Empire, in the showy tradition of Ben Hur and I, Claudius. In fact, both Jesus and Claudius, the main characters of those books, make cameo appearances in Captivity, as do other boldface names of the 1st century CE, including Caligula, Pontius Pilate, and Philo of Alexandria. What sets Captivity apart is that it makes the rare attempt to view all these historical phenomena—from the rise of Christianity to the flamboyant vices of the emperors—through a distinctively Jewish lens.
Considering how little we know about the ancient world in general, the first century CE is a surprisingly well-documented era. In creating his pageant of Jewish Rome, Spiró can draw on the Roman histories of Tacitus and Suetonius, the Jewish writings of Josephus and Philo, and the Christian New Testament—in addition to the Talmud, which preserves many features of Second Temple-era Jewish life. These sources tell us about three distinct Roman cultures, each focused on a different metropolis: the grand politics of imperial Rome, the religious fervor of Jerusalem, and the ethnic strife of commercial Alexandria. Accordingly, these are the cities in which Captivity is set, in the period roughly spanning the death of Jesus, in 33 CE, and the destruction of the Temple, in the year 70.
