In the Roman city of Aquincum (now Budapest) around the year 200 CE, a centurion named Aelius Silvanus died at the venerable age of 86, having served a remarkable 61 years in his legion, and was buried beside his daughter, Aelia.
According to the epitaph on his tomb, he was a native of Syria Palaestina, Colonia Aelia Capitolina – in other words, Roman-ruled Jerusalem.
But how did this Jerusalemite end up 2,200 kilometers away in Budapest?
After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jerusalem was occupied by Rome’s Legio X Fretensis.
A few decades later, in 106, the Emperor Trajan made Aquincum the capital of a Roman province called Pannonia Inferior. (Pannonia Superior was further west, with Vienna as its capital.) Publius Aelius Hadrianus – who became the Emperor Hadrian in 117 – was the first proconsul to live in the Roman palace at Aquincum.
In 129, it was Hadrian’s decision to establish a Roman colony at Jerusalem that sparked the Bar Kochba revolt.
Aelius Silvanus – the long-lived Budapest centurion – would have been about 15 at the time. Was he a Jew? The reference on his tomb to his being a “native” of Syria Palaestina – or Judea, as it was known at his birth – suggests that he was.
Was he the son of a Roman soldier, perhaps with a Jewish mother?
Did he side with Bar Kochba’s rebels or with the Romans?
We’ll probably never know.
In any case, by about 139 – three years after Hadrian put down the revolt and founded Aelia Capitolina (a pagan city forbidden to Jews, with a grand Temple of Jupiter on the Temple Mount), Aelius Silvanus was a Roman soldier. Whatever his birth name may have been, he now shared the name “Aelius” with the emperor.
He may have come to Aquincum as a slave – one of thousands captured in the Bar Kochba revolt – and then later earned his freedom and enlisted. But even before the Judean captives arrived, Hungary may have had a Jewish community as early as 100 CE, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia.
I “met” Aelius Silvanus at the Aquincum Museum, before embarking on a Danube River cruise on the Riverside Mozart. The Mozart is a double-wide river boat that can accommodate up to 162 guests in its spacious suites, all with water views.
Riverside Luxury Cruises was recognized by CruiseCritic for three consecutive years for the best dining on a river cruise. It also received Travel + Leisure’s award for Best River Cruise Dining and was named by Forbes as one of the Best European River Cruises for Foodies.
Riverside Luxury Cruises offers many great amenities, a renowned restaurant, and spa treatments
Riverside’s chefs have a budget to shop at local markets, and meals are served with local wines. A typical dinner menu might include Veal Pate Terrine, Roasted Pumpkin Soup, and Tournedos Rossini with foie gras and truffle-potato mousseline. Kosher meals aren’t available, but there are vegetarian and vegan options.
Other amenities on board include bars, a pool and a jacuzzi, a spa with steam and sauna, a gym, a salon, a small but well-curated library, and a smoking lounge.
The top level of the ship is a huge deck where barbecue lunches are served, with lounges and beanbag chairs and a tiny bar that sinks into the deck when the Mozart passes under a low bridge. There’s even a roof garden, complete with gnomes.
The Mozart offers a variety of small-group excursions at every port, from market tours and tastings to e-bike expeditions. In Budapest, I joined a tour of the Neo-Gothic Hungarian Parliament Building, opened in 1902. (Generally, tours need to be booked two to three months ahead during summer.)
We ran into Hungary’s new prime minister, Péter Magyar, giving his own tour to the visiting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin.
Another highlight was seeing the Crown of St. Stephen, Hungary’s most revered relic, dating from the year 1000.
The crown ended up in the hands of the US Army at the end of World War II and was stored at Fort Knox for decades before being returned to the Hungarian people by President Jimmy Carter in 1978.
The guided tour includes Holocaust memorials and other excursions
After the Parliament, our guide led us to one of Budapest’s several Holocaust Memorials, the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation.
The Occupation Memorial, erected in 2014 under the nationalist regime of Viktor Orbán, is controversial, with critics claiming that by focusing on German atrocities it absolves the Hungarian state and people of complicity in crimes against Jews.
An informal, grassroots counter-memorial, including photographs of Holocaust victims and artifacts such as shoes and suitcases, is maintained in front of the official memorial.
We finished up with strudel at a café that offers a dozen different varieties. Sour cherry is the current favorite, according to a digital leaderboard.
The next day, I took the ship’s sleek tender boat up the river to Szentendre, known for its baroque architecture, cobbled pedestrian streets, museums, galleries, and artist’s colony.
The town is home to what might be the smallest synagogue in the world. At 12 square meters, the single-room Szanto Memorial and Prayer House can just barely fit a minyan. The synagogue – and museum – serving about 60 members, opened in 1998, and prayers follow the rites of liberal Neolog Judaism.
Out of around 250 Jews deported from the town to the Bergen-Belsen camp in June 1944, only 15 survived. In October 2024, plaques were unveiled at the synagogue commemorating the victims of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and May Naim, who was murdered by Hamas at the Supernova music festival.
The site is a popular tourist attraction (a large group of Israelis was there) but is only open on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Nearby, Herend Porcelain sells exquisite (and expensive) Judaica, including Seder plates, mezuzot, and kiddush cups.
The Mozart headed up the Danube to Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia and formerly the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary.
The 18th-century Old Town is quaint but rather touristy; overlooking it is the reconstructed Bratislava Castle.
The city is known for its quirky statues. One, in front of the French Embassy, commemorates an injured French soldier in Napoleon’s army who is said to have fallen in love with a local girl who nursed him back to health, then opened a winery that still exists.
Nearby, one of the French army’s cannonballs remains embedded in a tower next to the window. Another bronze statue shows a worker emerging from a sewer.
Bratislava, then known as Pressburg, had a Jewish community dating from 1251.
Around 1803, Rabbi Moses Sofer (Schreiber) established the Pressburg Yeshiva, which became one of the largest and most influential in central Europe. He wrote his own account of Napoleon’s 42-day siege of the city in 1806, during which the Jewish community was miraculously spared. The rabbi’s grave has become a pilgrimage site.
About 13,000 of the city’s 15,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Rabbi Sofer’s great-grandson fled Hungary in 1938 and establish the Pressburg Yeshiva of Jerusalem in 1950, where it remains in the Givat Shaul neighborhood.
There’s a small Jewish museum in Bratislava’s one surviving active Orthodox synagogue.
The cruise concluded in Vienna, a city rich in Jewish history where I just had time to see the Klimts at the Belvedere Museum and visit the two branches of the Jewish Museum.
The Museum Dorotheergasse focuses on the more recent history of Jewish Vienna, while the Judenplatz branch, next to the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, focuses on Vienna’s Jews during the Middle Ages and includes the underground ruins of a medieval synagogue.
A five-day, four-night cruise on the Danube from Budapest to Vienna on the Riverside ‘Mozart’ starts at about €2,400 per person. riverside-cruises.com.