For a long time the Bible was known only in its Greek translation, and its very name comes from the Greek term meaning book (biblos). Yet, curiously, Greeks and Jews seem long to have ignored one another. There are indeed, in the biblical texts predating the Hellenistic period, a few rare allusions to the “Ionians.” But the term Ioudaioi does not appear in Greek texts before Hecataeus of Abdera, a contemporary of Alexander. As Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century of our era, observes, it was because the Jews did not inhabit a maritime country and took no pleasure in commerce that the Greeks — who from the second millennium frequented the Palestinian ports — took no interest in this small people composed of artisans and peasants. Archaeology has shown, however, that the Greeks were not entirely unaware of the populations of the interior. But they subsumed them under the common designation of “Syrians.”
It was the conquest of Alexander that would alter the situation. Late accounts evoke the conqueror’s presence at Jerusalem, but they are rejected by most commentators. Alexander was concerned above all with seizing the ports through which the reinforcements awaited from Greece would reach him, and it is known that he devoted several months to the siege of Tyre. It was therefore after his death, when the partition of his empire was carried out among his generals, that the Jews found themselves for the first time in contact with Hellenism. On the eve of Alexander’s conquest, Judaea formed a state of a particular type within the Persian empire, ever since the Temple had been restored by Cyrus, who had also authorized the return of the exiles. The successors of Cyrus had shown towards the Jews and their religion the same tolerance as towards the other peoples of the Empire, confining themselves to levying a tribute on the population. When Judaea fell into the hands of the Macedonians, the Jews merely changed masters, without any infringement of their freedom to practise their cult. Indeed, in the course of the wars that pitted the masters of Egypt (the Ptolemies) against the masters of Asia (the Seleucids) for possession of “Coele-Syria,” the Jews furnished soldiers to the former, who remained masters of the country throughout the third century. It was in the course of this same century that numerous Jews emigrated to the new city created by Alexander during his stay in Egypt, and which was to become the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean world: Alexandria.
Alexandria was at once the capital of the Lagid kingdom of Egypt and a Greek city. The Jews there occupied a position comparable to that of the Athenian metics (resident foreigners) of the classical period. They were not citizens of Alexandria, but they resided there and no doubt formed what was then called a politeuma, a grouping that enjoyed its own laws. It is easy to understand that Greek very quickly became the second, if not the first, language of these Alexandrian Jews. And the Jewish tradition reported by Josephus attributed to King Ptolemy II Philadelphus the initiative of having gathered seventy-two Sages come from Judaea to oversee the translation into Greek of the Pentateuch, the sacred law of the Jews. Some modern commentators tend to bring this translation down to a later date. It is no less real for that, and bears witness to the rapid Hellenization of the Alexandrian Jews. A Hellenization expressed not only in the use of the language, but also in the adoption of Greek names or of Hellenized Hebrew names, as numerous inscriptions attest. The papyri have revealed in particular the presence of Jewish soldiers in the service of the Ptolemies and endowed with allotments of land in the interior of Egypt. However, despite this Hellenization of the Jews of Egypt, relations remained close with Judaea, where Hellenization was likewise making progress, singularly in priestly circles and among the great landowners, such as the famous Tobiads. But in Judaea the situation was to change when the country fell, at the end of the third century, into the hands of the Seleucids. Not that the latter modified the status of the Temple or of what the Greek texts call the ethnos of the Jews — the term ethnos then designating those communities not organized into cities on the Greek model. Indeed, Josephus has preserved the text of a rescript of King Antiochus III granting the Jews advantages of a fiscal order, while at the same time their right to be administered according to their ancestral laws was recognized. The reasons for such generosity on the part of the Seleucid king are plain to see: to secure the goodwill of the Jews at a moment when he was doubly threatened — by the Ptolemies on the one hand, and by Rome, the new power in the eastern Mediterranean, on the other. And it was perhaps the defeat suffered by Antiochus III in 188 and the heavy conditions imposed by the Romans upon the conclusion of the Peace of Apamea in 187 that were to precipitate the rupture. The new Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, short of money, had recourse to the traditional expedient, which consisted in particular in seizing the riches accumulated in the sanctuaries. The image transmitted by Jewish tradition of Epiphanes, presented as the enemy of the Jewish people, is well known. Things were certainly not so simple. The king needed to lay hands on the treasures of the Temple. But that did not necessarily imply, at least at first, consecrating it to Olympian Zeus and infringing upon Jewish traditions.
It may be that the transformation of Jerusalem into a city of the Greek type initially answered to the initiative of Jewish Hellenizers. And the revolt of the Maccabees, popular in character, was aimed at least as much at the Hellenized Jews as at the Seleucid king. These Hellenized Jews had certainly not abandoned the Torah, the Jewish Law. But their way of life, the Greek names they had adopted, made them appear in the eyes of the common Judaean people as “renegades.” There can be no question here of entering into the detail of the events reported by the Books of the Maccabees (Livres des Maccabées), composed long after the Hasmoneans had become the masters of Jerusalem. Judas Maccabeus seized the city in 165/4 and purified the Temple. But it was only his brother Jonathan who concluded peace with the successor of Antiochus IV, Demetrius I. Jonathan was recognized as High Priest and the traditional institutions were restored (160). In fact, the victory of the Maccabees was to bring about the constitution of a Jewish state of a new type, closer to the Hellenistic monarchy than to the theocracy exercised by the High Priests of the Temple. The transformation was definitively accomplished when Alexander Jannaeus, having become High Priest in 103, took the royal title. To be sure, this restoration of kingship was to be presented as a return to the traditional kingship of David and Solomon. But the very name of the king, and the silver coins he had struck bearing the legend basileus Alexandros (King Alexander), say plainly enough that one was now far indeed from biblical kingship. And the Hasmonean dynasty was moreover to experience, in the years preceding the conquest of Judaea by Pompey in 63, internal conflicts that have nothing to envy of those then convulsing the Lagid kingdom before it too fell under the control of Rome. This brief recall of the circumstances that governed relations between Jews and Greeks, or Greco-Macedonians, leads us to pose the problem in terms of a confrontation between two cultures. To what extent were the Jews “Hellenized” during the three centuries that separate the death of Alexander (323) from Rome’s definitive seizure of the Hellenistic world (31)? And what were the nature and the limits of this “Hellenization”? We have evoked above the use of the Greek language, which had become the language of administration, of law, of commercial exchange, and which all those who participated in any way in political life were obliged to know. It is obviously no accident that it is the Greek version of contemporary Jewish texts that has been transmitted to us. But the use of a language also implies the use of the concepts it conveys. This is particularly evident in a famous text such as the Letter of Aristeas (La lettre d’Aristée), and above all in the writings of Philo of Alexandria or of Flavius Josephus — the first a representative of Alexandrian Judaism, the second of Judaean Judaism. The legend of a common origin of the Jews and the Spartans, the comparison between the “laws” of Moses and those of Lycurgus, the reflection on the duties of the “good king,” bear witness to this, as does, on the part of these kings, the adoption of a policy of urbanization borrowed from the Greek model.
Assuredly, this Hellenization touched the people of the city more than those of the countryside, and the various religious movements that affected Judaism during this period — and still more in the first decades of our era — have been explained by the opposition between city and countryside. But it is precisely there, too, that the limits of this Hellenization become manifest. For it never called into question fidelity to the Law. And though there was indeed for a time, if not a schism, at least an attempt to create a second Temple at Leontopolis, in Egypt, the centrality of Judaism and of Jerusalem was never truly threatened within the diaspora (dispersion, in Greek). Hence, unlike the other peoples of the East, integrated first into the Hellenistic kingdoms, then into the Roman empire, the Jews preserved their specificity. This is well marked by the work of Flavius Josephus — a Hellenized Jew, since he composed his works in Greek as well as in Aramaic, and a Roman citizen, but also a pious Jew who writes to glorify the history of his people and the Law to which he remained faithful. It is attested still more by the extraordinary intellectual ferment that developed from the first century before our era and found expression in the various messianic and apocalyptic currents that divided Judaean Judaism. This is not the place to evoke them in their extreme complexity. But they were to contribute to the elaboration of what two contemporary historians have called “a Jewish cultural homogeneity capable of resisting the attraction of Hellenism” (Orieux and Will, on the subject of the Pharisees) — capable also, after the fall of the second Temple (70 of our era), of maintaining the cohesion of diasporic Judaism, and thereby the perpetuity of Judaism.
Bibliography
J. Mélèze-Modrzejewski: Les Juifs d’Égypte (The Jews of Egypt), Paris, 1991 A. Momigliano: Sagesses barbares. Les limites de l’hellénisation (Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization), Paris, 1979 Cl. Orieux, Ed. Will: Ioudaismos-Hellenismos, Nancy, 1986 P. Vidal-Naquet: Du bon usage de la trahison (The Good Use of Betrayal) (Preface to Flavius Josephus, La guerre des Juifs [The Jewish War]), Paris, 1977.