With the turning of the seasons, at the festival of Hanukkah, it is the custom in most Jewish communities to hold debates on the conflict between Judaism and Hellenism — only to conclude, predictably, that the former is superior. In historical terms, however, the question of the encounter between these two civilizations must be approached quite differently, from its origins down to that synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem in which European civilization recognizes itself.
First encounters
For a long time the inhabitants of the kingdom of Israel knew only the Greeks of Asia Minor — more precisely, of Ionia (Yawan). Chapter 10 of Genesis assigns them an eponymous ancestor, “Yawan,” said to be a descendant of Japheth, one of Noah’s three sons along with Shem and Ham. It assumes a harmonious coexistence between Shem and Japheth, since the latter receives a blessing from Noah: “May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the tents of Shem” (Genesis 9:27).
It is not until the arrival of Alexander the conqueror in the East that Jews and Greeks discover one another. His conquests gave birth to a new civilization in which Greece influenced the East as a whole: the civilization that, ever since Droysen (1831), has continued to be called “Hellenistic.” From Alexander (332 BCE) down to the Byzantine era, the Jews of Judea and of the diaspora were unquestionably exposed to this “Hellenistic” civilization.
They retained, moreover, a fond memory of Alexander the Great, since, according to a legend attested by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (Antiquities XII) and taken up in the Talmud, the conqueror is said to have come to Jerusalem and paid homage to the Jewish cult.
In fact, it was rather at Alexandria, the new capital of Egypt founded by Alexander, that the first contact between Jews and Greeks took place. A few fragments of Greek writings datable to around 300 BCE present the Jews with a certain sympathy, even as sages or philosophers. At most one finds some unease about their unsociability, for the observance of dietary laws made conviviality impossible.
The Torah in Greek
The territories conquered by Alexander were divided among his generals after his death. Thus arose the Lagid dynasty in Egypt and the Seleucid dynasty in Syria.
Judea remained a dependency of the Lagid empire for more than a century, from 312 to 198 BCE. A Greek text, probably the work of a Jew established at Alexandria — the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates — reports that King Ptolemy II Philadelphus, advised by his librarian, sent a delegation to the high priest Eleazar in Jerusalem to request competent translators, so as to include the sacred text of the Jews in his library. The seventy-two translators, six per tribe, received with every honor, are said to have translated the Torah in seventy-two days. Such would be the origin of the Greek translation of the Bible known as the Septuagint (the Seventy).
This new Torah in Greek was meant to allow the Jews of Egypt to maintain the bond with their sacred texts, as their acculturation advanced. They gathered every seventh day in their synagogue. Epigraphy indeed attests the existence of such buildings, both in the Delta and in the Fayum, as early as the third century before the common era. There survive the dedications, in Greek, to the sovereign of the day and to his consort. The largest synagogue in Egypt must have stood in Alexandria, but of it nothing remains save the memory preserved in the Jerusalem Talmud (Sukkah V, 1, 55a).
The Septuagint translation would become the sacred text of a numerous Greek-speaking diaspora before serving as the basis for the spread of Christianity.
Judaism against Hellenism?
The first and second books of Maccabees, which have come down to us in Greek, evoke a confrontation between Judaism and Hellenism under the reign of the Greek king of Syria, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. At the conclusion of five wars between Egypt and Syria, the Jewish territory had indeed passed under Seleucid control in 198 BCE. King Antiochus III had granted broad protection to the Jewish cult. The persecutions attributed to his son Antiochus IV are all the more difficult to understand, since until then the traditions of the various peoples of his empire had been respected.
Read closely, the books of Maccabees show that these measures were taken only in the wake of a regional political crisis, and that it was not the voluntary Hellenization of certain Jews that caused them. While presenting with indignation the temptation of Hellenism at work even within the priestly aristocracy, the text makes clear that there was no more than a Kulturkampf among the Jews: the privileged, who enjoyed a superior status and were drawn to the Greek way of life, were set against a provincial population, humble, faithful to its traditions, and shocked by the imitation of foreign mores. It was only after many other events that Judas Maccabeus and his brothers took up arms.
For, owing to the financial needs of a kingdom that owed tribute to Rome, Antiochus IV deposed the legitimate high priest Onias III (who later perished by assassination) in favor of his brother Jason, who offered a large sum for the office. A certain Menelaus offered a larger sum and obtained the priesthood in his turn. In the meantime Antiochus IV had undertaken two military campaigns in Egypt. Returning from the second after suffering a severe humiliation at the hands of the Romans, he believed Judea to be in revolt, where the partisans of Jason and of Menelaus were at odds. It was only then that he issued, in reprisal, what some call his “edict of de-Judaization,” which provoked the Maccabean revolt.
The death of the king, and then that of Judas, did not put an end to the military operations. The uprising, which might have concluded with the purification of the Temple, continued under the successors of Antiochus IV, but it had changed in aim and in meaning. The revolt for the preservation of Judaism had become the occasion for military exploits and political maneuvers leading to the enlargement of the territory and to national independence. The Hasmonean dynasty that took shape with the brothers of Judas Maccabeus saw the emergence of a Hellenistic monarchy in Judea. The cult was indeed restored, but the pomp and the intrigues of the Hellenistic courts made their way into Jerusalem.
Without any infringement of the practice of Judaism, Greek elements appeared in daily life: architecture; coinage bearing the title Basileus (king), introduced by Alexander Jannaeus; the names of the ruling family — John Hyrcanus, Judah Aristobulus, Salome Alexandra — and even certain rabbis, such as Antigonus of Sokho. Greek civilization had become the model throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Jews of Judea retained from it all that did not run counter to their beliefs, but were far less influenced by it than the Greek-speaking diaspora.
A brilliant diaspora: Alexandria
As early as the third century before the Christian era, there existed numerous Greek-speaking Jewish communities in Asia Minor, above all in the Greek islands and in Ptolemaic Egypt. We are better informed about Egypt than about any other region, thanks to the papyrological and epigraphic literary remains that have come down to us. Synagogue dedications, and lists of “soldier-farmers” including Ioudaioi (Judeans or Jews), attest the Jewish presence on Egyptian soil in the third century.1 A substitute for the Temple was even established at Heliopolis by the son of the high priest Onias III, assassinated in the time of Antiochus IV.
It was above all at Alexandria that the Jewish community flourished. The capital of Egypt had taken over from Athens and become a major cultural center, with its new institutions such as the Museum (a kind of academy) and the famous library. The Alexandrian Jews began to write works in Greek. There thus survive fragments of a play on the Exodus from Egypt and of a biblical history, preserved by the Church Fathers. It was also at Alexandria that a sapiential text was composed, the Wisdom of Solomon,2 along with what is perhaps one of the first Greek novels, Joseph and Aseneth, on the marriage of Joseph to the daughter of an Egyptian priest.
The most famous Jew of Alexandria is Philo (20 BCE – 50 CE?), who lived at the time when the Egypt of Cleopatra had already become a Roman province. Philo’s work shows us to what degree a Greek-speaking Jew, profoundly steeped in Hellenic culture, could nonetheless remain profoundly Jewish. Mastering Greek philosophy perfectly — notably the works of Plato, of the Stoics and of Pythagoras — he placed his philosophical learning at the service of biblical commentary,3 relying essentially on the Septuagint translation, venerated in his day.
Of his immense body of work there survives above all a commentary on Genesis, verse by verse, divided into various treatises to which posterity has grown accustomed to give Latin names. In it Philo strives to demonstrate the universal character of the biblical texts through their allegorical commentary, which for him does not exclude their historical truth. Concerned with rationality, he set about — long before Maimonides — classifying all the laws scattered throughout the Torah on the basis of the Decalogue, which furnishes their great principles. Philo’s work has not come down to us in its entirety, but what remains is already considerable (thirty-five volumes in the bilingual edition published by Éditions du Cerf).
We do not know what impact his writings — perhaps based on oral homilies — had in their own time. Historical circumstances drew Philo out of the orbit of Judaism. Thus Christianity, which had already adopted the Septuagint, made Philo a “Doctor of the Church honoris causa.”
A precarious diaspora
In Philo’s time, however, the Egyptian diaspora had many grounds for anxiety. Its precariousness had become manifest with the arrival of the Romans. Little by little it lost some of its prerogatives, for the Romans were bound to favor the local Greeks, closer to them in their way of life, and, moreover, to spare the indigenous population, which was jealous of the Jews.
One nonetheless finds, still at the beginning of the first century, cases of social success among the Jews: thus Philo’s brother was “alabarch,” that is, director of customs at Alexandria, a very active port city. In the year 41 he had married his son Marcus to Berenice, daughter of the king of Judea, Agrippa I.4 He was on terms of friendship and business with a great Roman lady, Antonia Minor, daughter of Mark Antony. He was a wealthy and respected Jew, always faithful to his origins, who had contributed to adorning the gates of the Temple of Jerusalem with gold and silver.
Yet, as the historian Flavius Josephus attests, “his son Tiberius Julius Alexander abandoned the ancestral customs.” Having become a Roman officer, he was appointed by Rome to the highest posts — procurator of Judea, then prefect of Egypt. In a troubled era, he did not hesitate to turn against his former coreligionists, and in the year 70 it was he who accompanied Titus at the siege of Jerusalem. But Philo did not live long enough to see this.
What Philo did witness in his own time was what some historians have called “the pogrom of Alexandria” in the year 38. To flatter the mad emperor Caligula, a newly arrived governor of Egypt, Flaccus, sought to impose the cult of the emperor in the synagogues, knowing that he would have the support of the Egyptian populace. The Jews were declared outlaws, herded into a quarter where famine took hold under unbearable sanitary conditions. Their notables were publicly humiliated or massacred. The nightmare was interrupted only by the disgrace of Flaccus, on one of Caligula’s whims.
The alarm had been a serious one, but the situation was far from resolved. Philo, as he himself relates, was designated to lead a delegation to Rome to ask the emperor for the restoration of the rights of the Jews. They were received belatedly, with derision. The assassination of Caligula brought the crisis to a temporary end.
In the year 66, when the uprising of the city broke out, the new prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Julius Alexander — Philo’s own nephew — did not hesitate to suppress the Jewish demonstrators at Alexandria, at the cost of thousands of dead.
In 132, under the reign of Trajan, a Jewish revolt broke out in Egypt, in Cyrenaica and in Cyprus. It lasted more than three years and was cruelly suppressed. The three communities vanished from the map for several centuries.
And Greek once more
In the first century the population of Judea was surrounded by largely Hellenized populations, even if their everyday language was Aramaic. In Asia Minor the Jews spoke Greek and had also, it seems, admitted the Greek version of the Torah for their religious services. It was in their synagogues that the apostle Paul came not so much to preach a new religion as to announce salvation through the coming of the Messiah — in Greek, Christos. The use of the Septuagint in the first Christian communities led the rabbis of the second century to sponsor a new Greek translation of the Torah, that of the proselyte Aquila, for, as Rabban Simeon son of Gamaliel II said, the only language into which the holy books could be translated was Greek (Megillah I, 8).
The “patriarchs” descended from Hillel, who were the representatives of their people before the Roman power, were obliged to know Greek, the administrative language of the empire in the East. A tradition reports that Rabban Gamaliel II instructed five hundred young men who studied the Torah and five hundred who studied “Greek wisdom” (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 49b). At the end of the second century Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi, called “Rabbi,” exclaimed: “What use have you for Syrian (i.e., Aramaic)? Speak either Greek or Hebrew.”
The discovery, in the 1950s, of letters from the leader of the second revolt (132–135), Bar Kokhba, proves that three languages were in use: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek.
Greek penetrated even into rabbinic literature: the Talmud, Midrash and Targum together contain nearly 2,500 Greek words. In the Talmud alone, one finds 1,100 of them. Borrowing from Greek concerns not only the domains of Hellenic civilization (the stadium, philosophy, geometry, the theater); it sometimes extends even to specifically Jewish spheres: Sanhedrin, pargod (the veil of the Temple), cohen hediot (an ordinary priest).
In Rome itself, it is Greek that predominates among the Jewish populations who immigrated from the East. In six Jewish catacombs rediscovered in the seventeenth century, 75 percent of the funerary inscriptions are in Greek. Greek continues to dominate in the catacombs of Venosa, in southern Italy, in the sixth century; then a return to Hebrew begins, completed in the ninth century.
It is hard to imagine that there was a time when the Jews who spoke Greek were more numerous than those who spoke Hebrew or even Aramaic. Greek played, in the Mediterranean world, the same role that English plays in our own day. It had created a space of encounter that the religious antagonisms accompanying the appearance of Christianity (and the East–West schism), and then of Islam, would shake.
Judaism took from Hellenism what it could keep of it. In the opposite direction, it was by adopting the Bible through Christianity that the Greek world became Judaized without knowing it. Two examples that show us no civilization can ever be watertight.