Dr. Aušra Pažėraitė

The discussion rages on on the social networks about the wisdom or folly of lighting large menorah displays in non-Jewish cities, whether or not to say the blessing, and how much authentically Jewish is really left in the holiday of Christmukkah, as images of square and overturned Christmas trees with branches forming menorahs are exchanged. In respect to all this, we could turn back again to the historical opposition between Greek and Jew and the Jewish victory. The more salient aspect today, though, having in mind the different possible interactions of a religious or ethnic minority with the dominant host culture, is the history of what happened “Post-Hanukkah.”

It’s ironic that, as researcher Erich Gruen points out, after the Hasmoneans won the independence of the state of Judea and established a royal dynasty, and after they established the Torah as the law of the land (or constitution), the Hellenization of the country only increased, and accelerated throughout the period of the kingdom. Martin Hengel also believes the Judaism of Judea in the period was highly Hellenized, although he tries to frame it within “the conflict between the Judaism of Palestine and the spirit of the age of Hellenism” and is forced to explain the crisis of the Maccabee era did lead to a reaction in Judea which put a halt to syncretism, channeled intellectual activities to Torah study and blocked any criticism of the cult and the law. As many authors note, the influence of Hellenism in Judea is obvious, while literature written in the Land of Israel clearly differs from that written in the Diaspora. There Hellenistic literature was neither completely assimilated, nor was it entirely rejected. (As an analogue one might think about contemporary Israel which includes a completely modern secularism differing in none of its essentials from that of the West, and also extremely segregated religious communities.)

Historian Louis H. Feldman presents different artifacts discovered by archaeologists in the Land of Israel from Hellenistic times. Among them are representations of different Greek gods and figures in synagogues, private homes and other locations. Feldman says, based on Rab Gamaliel (first century CE) in the mishnah tractate Avoda Zara, the rabbis of the period weren’t frightened of the pagan deities and didn’t believe they could somehow engage Jews in the pagan cults. Gamaliel says the bath h went to was not the ornament of Aphrodite, but on the contrary, Aphrodite was the ornament of the bath, a mere decoration. This view might have been the one prevailing among the sages of Judea at the time, namely, that the use of Greek gods and other Greek elements in daily life was a degradation of these gods, in modern terms perhaps their “commodification,” and in no way their worship. Feldman shows third-century rabbi Yohan was likewise unopposed to mosaics portraying Aphrodite.

The rabbis weren’t even concerned by the production and sale of graven images (see Avoda Zara 19b, 52a). “Earn for a living, making graven images, and don’t depend upon charity,” it says in another Talmud tractate (Bava Batra 110a). We can remember, on the other hand, the mishnah tractate Pirkei Avot as well: “The Torah is not a shovel by which you might earn bread.” The same rabbis were rather strict when it comes to discussions of social and religious segregation between Jew and non-Jew, and especially when it came to wine and food made or even touched by non-Jews. Taking into account all the facts, in effect we are talking about a differentiation between different aspects of Hellenistic culture, and about a series of models for relationships with a non-Jewish culture which are explicable through examination and analysis of the relationships between Hellenism and Jewishness in antiquity.

John J. Collins is one of the more notable researchers today who have attempted to explain questions about the interactions between Jewish religious reality and Hellenistic culture. He says there are two venues for the collision of Judaism and Hellenism: in the Land of Israel, where mostly Semitic languages were spoken, and in the diaspora. The largest and most significant community in diaspora was perhaps the Jewish community in Egypt, in and around Alexandria, the name of the city established near the mouth of the Nile after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. Judea, which he conquered, was annexed to Egypt as a province under the Ptolemaic rule and remained a province of Egypt until 200 BCE. The large Jewish community in and around Alexandria underwent rapid and successful Hellenization, attempting to maintain their Jewishness only as a religious identity while thoroughly adopting Greek culture. An abundant literature shows there was a great desire here to adopt Greek culture while maintaining a Judaic identity. The books of the Bible were translated to Greek here (the Septuagint) as were other books adopted in the Christian canon, and some were even composed in Greek, for example, the Wisdom of Solomon and Maccabees I and II. The books written in Greek display the obvious influence of Greek culture and the Greek ideal of arete (the perfection of beauty, excellence, virtue, harmony), to which the philosopher Aristotle devoted his life’s work (Nicomakhean Ethics, Doctrine of the Mean), exalting wisdom and the wise. In first-century CE Alexandria Jewish philosopher Philo wrote a plethora of treatises exploring the books of the Torah philosophically, laying the framework for Greek intellectual appreciation and exegesis of the Bible which were later useful for nascent Christianity, which also arose first in the Hellenistic matrix, with the Christian gospel first preached in the synagogues of the diasporas and most of the books of the New Testament composed in koine Greek [a hypothetical proto-Matthew in Aramaic has never been found]. Christianity could be considered the child of the Hellenistic Judaism which began to appear in the period of the Ptolemais.

Despite all the Hellenizing influences, the desire remained to preserve a Jewish identity or at least self-image which was a continual source of friction between Jews and non-Jews. Relations took a dramatic turn in the period of the Roman Empire. Tension spilled over in Alexandria in the first century CE. In 38 CE a pogrom was carried out (during Caligula’s reign). In 66 there was a riot. From 115 to 118 CE there was a Jewish revolt, resulting in the banishment of Jews from Alexandria. The anti-Jewish propaganda largely responsible for all this reached its nadir in the mid-first century CE in the work of pagan author Apion, to which Jewish historian Josephus responded in Greek in his Contra Apionem.

The Jews in diaspora didn’t feel alienated by Hellenistic culture and on the contrary considered themselves its heirs, repeating in many texts that the essential difference was the idea of monotheism, but that this idea was dear or at least respected by the Greek elite, the philosophers, meaning Jews were not inferior to Greeks for adhering to a belief which the Greek elite held but the Greek masses did not. For the Jews in diaspora koine Greek was their mother tongue. Hellenistic Judaism was simply a form of Judaism prevalent in the Greek-speaking cultural environment.

Another important area for researchers is the attempt to define different models for the relationship with the non-Jewish culture. John Barclay in his Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora from Alexander to Trajan differentiates three such models, assimilation, acculturation and accommodation:

Assimilation: this is a matter of the degree of integration in a different social environment, i.e., the extent to which Jews in diaspora integrated in the social environment of the country or the degree to which they remained apart.

Acculturation: concerns matters such as language, values and intellectual traditions. To what extent was the language of the country acquired, for what was it used, to what extent or degree were foreign values adopted (becoming “their own”)? How were intellectual traditions used: were they adopted wholesale and to such a degree that the individual’s connection with native traditions was lost, and if so, in what manner and to what degree?

Accommodation: this means “the deployment of acculturation.” In every case it can be asked whether elements of the other culture, for example, of Hellenistic, Christian or Islamic culture, were used exclusively for one’s own cultural and religious needs, with polarization and values-based and ideological differences maintained, and to what level or degree cultural traditions converged and merged.

Speaking more specifically, all Jewish literature written in Greek displays a lesser or greater level of acculturation (as does today’s literature in different world languages). Every instance when a different language is used, however, does not necessarily mean the complete adoption of that culture. In some instances a different language, as was the case in koine Greek back then, can be used for purposes of irony or subversion, or simply for the explication of one’s own traditions, i.e., for one’s own purposes and one’s own traditions. This i swhat happened, for example, with Aramaic, in which the Talmud explains the Torah to the people of that period, who no longer knew Hebrew.

There is another side to this as well, though. It remains an unanswered question whether, for example, Philo of Alexandria, for whom Greek culture was completely familiar and his own, but at the same time was used for accommodation, didn’t translate Judaism into Greek in such a way that it was unrecognizably altered in translation.

Collins proposes the idea of “cultural negotiators,” which means looking for a way for Hellenism and Jewishness to live together without the unconditional rejection of the achievements of Hellenistic culture and without renunciation of Jewishness and the ideals of the Torah. The “negotiations” include a continuous self-transformation… Hellenistic culture was also a power factor which any hegemony wields. One can imagine, having in mind the current period, when modernist secular cultural norms accepted universally as self-evident, exist in such hegemony, when, for example, it is universally acceptable to erect menorahs during Hanukkah or at Christmas time in town squares and to decorate Christmas trees everywhere, to give gifts and to celebrate, while the religious significances are often completely forgotten. There is a different possible relationship, however, which Collins discusses, where the use of certain forms of Greek discourse might have touched upon a “hidden transcript,” i.e., a kind of “rewriting” of Jewish traditions and cultural forms into “Greek forms,” in order to “subvert the dominant culture, or even ridicule it…” (I see a contemporary and even profound a subtle form of this in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas). In the wake of the hegemony of Hellenistic culture there remained resentments among the people, even if the political and social ties were relatively peaceful.

Using the analysis of Shaye Cohen in his book The Beginnings of Jewishness we could say Jews wanted to be different and at the same the same as everyone else. This is a recurring theme in the history of Jewish thought. Collins says Jews in antiquity merely sought to distinguish culture from religion, a difficult intellectual proposition in those times but one which we take for granted now. Collins says Jews then didn’t claim religion has nothing to do with culture, only that their religion was the true fulfillment of Hellenic culture, but that this was not only unacceptable to the Greeks, it was anathema.

Jewish authors writing in Greek attempted to justify their practices not by appealing to the commandment of God, but to philosophy, i.e., affirming Judaism could be understood rationally so that others using their intellect and good will could confirm it. Collins says the true audience of texts such as the Letter of Aristeas (aka Letter to Philocrates) was the Jews, to whom it was told monotheism and the rejection of idols was not opposed by Hellenism, but actually represented the highest form of Hellenistic theology, and was approved by such famous pagan philosophers as Aristotle and others. Monotheism was not just the epiphany of the religion of their forefathers, in this view. It was a school of philosophy, completely rational and coherent. Followers of Judaism who had adopted Hellenistic culture merely needed the coherency of understanding themselves. This story repeats and continues as history itself “after the miracle.” It is especially visible at the beginning of the modern period as new forms of Judaism arose known by the names Reform, Masorti and others, some of which outsiders don’t even consider any form of Judaism, and merely hold them to be cultural movements. It’s clear the challenges after the miracle of Hanukkah remain the same.