London, My Life! or The Sedentary Jew

Yes, that is a problem. I’ve been in love with the same person for about fifteen hundred years and it never gets any better, but I’ll tell you about that when the time comes. Would I have liked to have seen more of the world? Probably. But it’s not my reason for wanting to travel. That, too, I’ll tell you about. For now, let’s just say I’m settled, if not totally content.

Not that I always feel so reconciled. I’m not as rich as you’d think I could be. I’ve lost as many fortunes as I’ve made. I’ve had my feckless moments, that I’m not particularly proud of. Luckily, because I was rarely of an Orthodox disposition, I also had plenty of guiltless fun. When you’re being punished for eternity under the weight of a serious (and basically unjust) curse laid on you, you’ve already paid a high price, so what’s to feel guilty? To say I’ve paid my debt to Jesus is to put it mildly. Not that it was actually Jesus who laid the curse on me in the first place. I hold no grudges, believe me. God was just paying back a debt to this guy, Joseph of Arimathea, who turned up in the settlement of Londinium with his spear and his cup and his followers. Admittedly, I could have been nicer to him, but frankly I found his claims a bit thin.

In those days the Romans were in charge of Britain as well as Palestine where I’d been born. You might not know much, but you’ll have heard of the Roman Empire and doubtless, since you’re actually able to read, you have a rough idea of the dates. By then I’d settled in the far West, near what’s modern Tunis, and was a Carthaginian trader, practising my calling with reasonable success. I was planning a Mediterranean winter at home on the profits of our voyage, when this boat came beating up the Thames, striped sail swelling in the rainy wind, and deposited a bunch of sorry-looking men and women east of the wooden bridge, where most travellers came ashore. They clearly weren’t used to the weather.

I was holding the fort, finishing off some business and waiting for my own ship to return from a side trip to Market Zion, Cornwall, to offload some woad and pick up some tin. Although the Romans were already building a city to rival the Empire’s capital, with a huge forum, temples, law courts and villas, that bridge over to Southwark, along with a growing system of straight roads, they didn’t really get down to the western end of the island much and were perfectly agreeable to us doing what trading we could with our traditional contacts, mostly hard-working tin-miners who wanted our various dyes and cotton, especially since we always gave them a decent deal on the tin.

When Joseph and his entourage came ashore on what in those days was already a very presentable wharf they looked as if they’d had a rough time of it. They were clearly from the same part of the world as me. They wore some nice quality robes—tight weaving, well co-ordinated colours, wool or cotton or a mixture of both. Gold bracelets and chains, rings with precious stones, nice silver circlets holding their hoods on. Their travelling chests also showed that they weren’t peasants. Solid cedar, big brass fittings, names on the sides in Hebrew. Worth a bit, as I said to Joseph, recommending the safest inn. He’d heard that the settlement was as crime free as far as anywhere on the island was crime free at that time. Big Roman presence. They were a thieving, sweet-talking lot those Brits, and weren’t above murdering you in your bed if they could get away with it. London was a new town then, based on a place called Lud’s Dun, after one of their gods supposed to inhabit the hill above the river. Not much of a hill, really. But the Roman engineers had fortified it, given it some pretty good amenities and settled a bunch of their legionnaires there. It wasn’t bad farming land, thanks to the Thames’s tendency to flood. It would be a while before anyone started building serious artificial banks to improve the navigation and save the somewhat vulnerable real estate as it improved in value.

“You’re a long way from home,” I said, once I’d established they spoke Hebrew, “what brings you to this Godforsaken neck of the woods?”

“We’re on a mission,” confided the woman who introduced herself as the bearded oldster’s wife (she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five). “We’re from Jerusalem. You know, where He was crucified and rose from the dead.”

Nutters, I thought. Not many people now know that in Europe and North Africa Britain was considered to be the America of its day. The Far West, the frontier of the Empire, where you were free to make something of yourself. Anyone who’d been persecuted for their religion (and frankly there were a lot fewer persecutions at that time, the Romans being by and large a practical lot, as are most pantheists) tended to set off for Albion with plans to found a colony. The Romans had trouble getting anyone else to settle there and it was part of their usual method to encourage trade and industry wherever they could. You needed people to secure an Empire. Of course, there was the usual official Temple of the Imperial Cult and a temple to Diana on part of Ludgate Hill, but other religions were encouraged, because every able-bodied man could be called up for the army, if necessary. They needed people to help build roads. People to tax. The native Britons by and large weren’t strong on that sort of forward-looking work, still being excited about farming, especially growing corn, which they were pretty good at. It hadn’t taken most of them long to see the advantages of accepting the Romans, though I understood there were still a few tribes up north who were more warlike and regarded us Mediterranean types as interlopers, but this was more to do with propaganda being fed them by their rulers. Once they saw the reality, they tended to come in out of the cold and their rulers had no choice but to comply, if they wanted to have people they could still rule, at least nominally.