Izio Rosenman (I.R.). There have been all sorts of translations from Hebrew into other languages — translations in the time of Rashi, the translation of Onkelos, and so on — just as there were many translations in the Arabic period, not to mention the translation of the Bible from the Greek. As an Alexandrian, what do you make of the Septuagint1 — both of the Septuagint translation itself and of the myth of the Septuagint, for there were, for example, all sorts of midrashim2 on the Septuagint. Did the Septuagint translation play an important role among Jews and among Christians?
Jacques Hassoun (J.H.): It played a central role among Christians. Let me perhaps start from what the Septuagint represented for me, in my childhood. As an Alexandrian, it is in the very translation of the Septuagint that the matter is decided; that is to say, among pious Alexandrian Jews, the Septuagint was practically never spoken of. It was the great silence.
Right up to the years 1940–45 — I still have books from that period here — the Jews of Egypt called Alexandria No Amon, that is, the city of Amon. Because the relationship to Alexander and to Alexandria was very complicated. There were the Amonians, and then there were the Alexandrians; Amon, I would remind you, is the Egyptian god. The Alexandrians claimed an Egyptian god as their own. They had taken his name to found their city. It was an anti-Greek scandal. No one ever spoke of it.
I. R. Was it a reaction against Hellenism?
J. H. Yes. One would have to know at what period this No Amon appeared.
I. R. How did the Jews, and especially the religious ones, react over time to Philo?
J. H. Philo — it was Egyptian intellectuals of the nineteenth or twentieth century who acknowledged Philo; to my knowledge, he was cited with great reticence.
The whole of Egyptian Jewish literature, which was important, had solid foundations, like Maimonides.
I. R. Precisely — there are perhaps similarities between Maimonides, in his central position of contact with Arab civilization, and Philo, in his position within Hellenistic civilization.
J. H. Maimonides mentions Philo, but he is not regarded as a prince of the exile. He is regarded as an eminent Jew. He cites him, but there are people who do not speak of him at all, who consider him not exactly a heretic, but dangerous, to be avoided.
I. R. Precisely — is not this whole Hellenistic period itself seen as an assimilationist period?
J. H. Absolutely. That is the whole problem.
We know very well that the writing of the Septuagint, in its various versions, lasted nearly four centuries. The story of the seventy — no one believes in it any more, except for another tendency among the Jews, the tendency for whom the Septuagint is fully recognized by Jews as a great moment of Judaism.
I. R. In the Talmud, they are recognized as those who saved something.
J. H. Yes. As those who rehabilitated something. It is from there that we find two categories of texts…
There was a whole part of the Jewish school that was in favour of contact with foreigners, that converted Greeks in great numbers, while at the same time claiming the Septuagint as its own.
I. R. The periods of conversion existed only in certain periods of Jewish history — for example, in the time of Solomon, and no doubt in the time of the Septuagint.
J. H. In the time of the Septuagint, there was a faction that detested the converts and that, at the time of Saint Paul’s arrival at Ephesus, never sought contact. So much so that Saint Paul was never able to deliver the slightest discourse when he was at Ephesus — he was jeered.
I. R. If we look at the Talmud, we find that at a certain moment the struggle against the Minim, the sects, was extremely fierce.
J. H. One finds the truth of this story among the Greeks themselves. Traces of it remain, for the Jews were very powerful in that part — the Turkish part of Greece.
I. R. There were Jewish colonies.
J. H. I wonder whether there are not remains of them in Ephesus itself. There was therefore this double presence, this permanent tension. The fact is that Egyptian Judaism was very powerful.
I. R. It is even said that a Temple had been built.
J. H. It is written, in the Talmud, that whoever has not seen the splendour of the synagogue of Alexandria has not seen the glory of Israel. It was an absolutely enormous population3, but one that, according to tradition, spoke only Greek. Even the prayer was in Greek, except for certain extracts of the liturgy.
I. R. And the Septuagint itself — from when is it dated?
J. H. From one hundred and eighty to one hundred and forty before the Christian era, according to tradition.
I. R. Were the names of the Septuagint given?
J. H. No, it was simply said: seventy-two.
I. R. That is what strikes me and suggests that it is a myth, for in the Talmud one does after all like to give names.
J. H. It is said: seventy-two Jews. Nor did they want to give the names. Perhaps because it was either too foreign to them, or because the Greeks did not trouble themselves to name them. Ptolemy VI Philometor fully recognized the Septuagint as a Jewish affair.
I. R. The situation of the Jews in the Hellenistic period is somewhat reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s translation: they entered fully into Greek culture, with the names they took on; there were, for instance, High Priests in Palestine who took Greek names. This brings to my mind a Midrash that has always fascinated me, which says that God was able to bring the Jews out of Egypt because they had not changed their names. I find this midrash extremely powerful as to the idea of what the name means.
J. H. That is what the psychoanalysts think, of course.
I. R. I find it extraordinary that the midrash implies that God might not have recognized them had they changed their names. There is, of course, the whole continuity of identification at work here. And the fact that, precisely during the Hellenistic period, they took Greek names, is remarkable.
J. H. For Judaism, the relationship to Hellenism has always been complicated. For example, during the period preceding the destruction of the Temple, in the year 70 of the Christian era, there were Alexandrians who came to pray in Jerusalem, but they had their own Temple.
I. R. This shows that pluralism within Judaism has always been a historical reality that the current tendencies of orthodox Judaism try to mask.
J. H. Exactly. And I wonder why the Jews felt the need to build themselves a Temple, and why the Greeks accepted that Temple. I think that, for the Jews, they already knew the diaspora was definitive.
I. R. I wonder whether it is not the equivalent of what is called in France a Gallican church; that is, a religion that takes root in the country where one lives. And this brings to mind the difficulty of establishing, at present, a French Islam. For today Islam depends on Algeria for the Paris Mosque, and on the principal Arab-Muslim countries for its finances, and consequently it has difficulty taking root in France as a French religion.
J. H. And consequently, those who want to become French break away completely.
I. R. Two thousand years later, we see that the same kind of problem arises. It is the problem of the Muslim diaspora, just as there was the problem of the Jewish diaspora at the time — which was no doubt one of the first diasporas; a diaspora in which collectivities continued to exist, and not only individuals.
J. H. What interests me is how history cut something within Judaism, introduced elements that did not exist before.
I. R. It must have cut the rootedness in the Middle East.
J. H. Absolutely. And then, before, it was the religion of a nation, a small nation of the Near East. And all of a sudden, everyone wants to know what this religion is. And that creates a surprise, and in creating a surprise, it creates a truth, in a certain way.
I. R. Thus Christianity was, in a certain sense, the end of this history.
J. H. And what is interesting is to see how the religion of the Copts — those ancient Christians in Egypt — took up Christianity, of course, but also a part of ancient Judaism. Elements of that Judaism that are still completely present today. And all of a sudden, Judaism in Alexandria burst apart. What is astonishing is that ’Amr Ibn al-’As, the great Arab conqueror of Egypt, writes “in Alexandria there are forty thousand Jews.” And that is the number of Jews there were in Alexandria in 1950. The Jews of Alexandria learned a clandestine Judaism, a Judaism of the diaspora.
It was the union of the Copts and the Jews that drove out the Byzantines. The Copts detested the Byzantines; they have a calendar different from that of the Byzantines — they are in the year 1600 or so.
I. R. So it must have been around the Council of Nicaea that this was decided?
J. H. If we return to the Septuagint, we find that this whole epoch was, for the Jews, an epoch of contact with the surrounding peoples. There was therefore a Jewish continuity in Egypt, probably issuing from a double element: one Greek, Hellenic; and the other that had converted to traditional Judaism.
I. R. What is astonishing, then, is that the Septuagint — which is recognized, I would even say praised, in traditional Judaism — is so neither in Alexandria nor elsewhere, except perhaps in someone like Maimonides.
J. H. Perhaps, but then he must have integrated it in a clandestine manner. There are many Greek names and expressions that entered Judaism.
I. R. As one sees in the Talmud, the word Apikoros, Epicurean, for example. In fact, there was this period of syncretism, which was followed by a period in which everything was rejected.
J. H. And then, in the time of Saadia Gaon, at al-Fayyumi, in middle Egypt. Saadia Gaon left Egypt and went to Babylonia, to Pumbedita. Saadia Gaon was indeed born in Egypt, in the Fayyum, a province of southwestern Egypt, the back of beyond; it was there that he acquired his learning, and created a Minhag4 of Alexandria, which he left to go to the great academies of Sura and Pumbedita.
I. R. Saadia Gaon — that is the ninth century. It means that by the time Maimonides arrived, it had been over for two or three centuries.
J. H. With this difference, if we are to speak of Egyptian Judaism: one must know that at Maimonides’ arrival, the Karaites were more numerous than the Rabbanites. And it was Maimonides who reconquered the ground.
I. R. With respect to contacts, were the Karaites more closed off?
J. H. Absolutely.
J. H. The Karaites spoke only Hebrew. They forbade other languages. I knew some; there were still about ten thousand of them in Egypt. They used only Arabic to speak; but for prayers, they did not use a single word of Aramaic (the language of the Talmud), which was regarded as an absolute heresy.
Karaism is reputed to have been born in the seventh century, after Anan Hanassi. The Karaites say they were born of the quarrel of the Tsedoukim and the Perushim (Sadducees and Pharisees). In fact they are the descendants of the Tsedoukim.
I. R. I was thinking of this back-and-forth toward the language of the other, followed by a return toward the language of origin.
J. H. What is interesting to note is that Saadia Gaon wrote all his prayer books, and all his literature, in Arabic. I myself prayed in Arabic, while the rabbi read the Torah in Hebrew.
I. R. That is rather astonishing — it is like among the Liberal Jews, where one prays in French. Does it mean that in the time of Saadia Gaon, the Jews had lost Hebrew?
J. H. Yes.
I. R. It means that there were great waves or periods (perhaps of hundreds of years) in which there was the loss of the language, then its recovery by the minority.
J. H. That is what happened with the disappearance of the Greeks, followed by the appearance of the Arabs.
I. R. In what language did Plotinus write?
J. H. In Greek; absolutely not in Hebrew.
I. R. It is a great problem: how to safeguard a culture outside its language?
J. H. One may think so; but the history of Hebrew proves that this is not always the case.
I. R. Hebrew survived, with a more elementary vocabulary, which was the vocabulary of its time. But when one translates, one has another perception of reality, for as the linguists say, language is a certain way of perceiving reality.
J. H. But this is not always true. For it suffices to read, and one must do a double labour, like Saadia Gaon and Maimonides.
By contrast, Hebrew reappeared in Egypt, where people began to translate into that language in the fifteenth century. At a moment when the power of the Jews on the spot was beginning to come apart.
I. R. It was therefore an undertaking caused by the fear that Hebrew would be lost. It is, at bottom, an undertaking comparable to that of the period when the Talmud was set down. For fear of losing the whole, it was decided to put it into writing.
J. H. What is astonishing, moreover, is that the Talmud was never translated into Arabic. Even though there were philosophers who wrote in Arabic, like Saadia Gaon or Maimonides.
I. R. And in Iraq, in those great Jewish communities, in the ninth century, was it already Arabic-speaking?
J. H. Yes. Arabic had already been in existence there for two and a half or three centuries.
Perhaps the Talmud was not translated into Arabic because it was the language of a centralized power. For before — during the Greek period, for example — these were powers that perfectly tolerated differences of culture, provided one did not call their power into question.
I. R. As, later, the Ottoman empire.
J. H. The Muslims perfectly tolerated that this language of power (Arabic) should be shared by the Jews, with this difference: that they could not write it. They did not have the right to use the Arabic language. They could use only the Hebrew language for everything that pertained to the religious.
I. R. But the accounting documents, for example, were drawn up in the Arabic language. It was a protection of Islam with respect to the Jews.
J. H. They could draw up whatever they wanted in Arabic. But all of this nevertheless began with the Greeks; before, there was nothing; it was very closed. Much earlier, before the Greeks, in the time of the Jews of Elephantine, the language was strictly Hebrew. They performed their prayers according to the rite of Jerusalem.
I. R. There was a great Temple at Elephantine. What is interesting is the passage from the Temple to the Synagogue. It was, I think, in the time of the Talmud that the transition was made, and that the meeting place began to function as a place of study, whereas before it had been solely a place of prayer.
J. H. Even at Alexandria, where they wanted to call it a Temple, it was never a Temple, for it was a place of prayer and exchange.
I. R. A place of assembly. That is the Beit Knesset. It was the community centre before the term existed.
J. H. Yes. That is why one could pray there in Greek; whereas the people of Elephantine prayed in Hebrew, even though they did not understand a word of Hebrew. And to decide the date of Rosh Hashanah, they would send someone to Jerusalem, to have the exact calendar. The festivals of Passover and Sukkot lasted only seven days, as in Jerusalem.
I. R. It was therefore a closed situation, but not rooted in the local culture. A ghetto before the term existed.
J. H. And indeed, they ended up leaving; one part of them joining Upper Egypt, while the other went to the north of Egypt.
I. R. There had been a Jewish revolt at Alexandria, at the beginning of the second century of the common era; a revolt that had threatened the local power, which shows that the Jews were very powerful at the time, in Alexandria.
J. H. Yes, in the year 130. They were indeed very powerful; they were one of the three components of the city.
I. R. A New York before the term existed, in a sense.
J. H. Yes. When one looks at the structure of the city, it is truly that of New York. It is a city that sprang from the earth; there was nothing there before.
I. R. Like Saint Petersburg, too.
J. H. Before, there was only a small village. Then the Greeks arrived, they brought in Jewish architects, and Jewish workers. And the city was built with these proportions: one third Jews, two thirds Greeks. The others not existing, in effect.
I. R. One might say it was a city without natives. So this cosmopolitan tradition of Alexandria was born very early, two thousand years ago…
Notes
See the following article on the Septuagint.↩︎
Midrash: a body of rabbinic texts concerning both the aggadot (narratives) and the halakhot (laws), and together constituting a commentary on the Bible.↩︎
It is estimated at a hundred thousand inhabitants out of the five hundred thousand that Alexandria numbered. (See Enc. Universalis.)↩︎
A local custom for certain religious practices.↩︎