Hellenism

PREFACE

The title of this book should be rather Hellenisticism—if one might coin the word—than Hellenism, since it is concerned not with all the culture which produced the brilliant civilization of classical Hellas, but with its debasement which was spread over the world during the three centuries immediately preceding the Christian era. The Jewish people both in Palestine and the diaspora were constantly in contact with this Hellenistic influence which colored every aspect of their thought. In the first three centuries of the Christian era they were engaged in an incessant struggle with the products of that influence which determined the bent of their future development and the bent of the religious history of the world. The interaction of Judaism and Hellenistic culture is then one of the fundamental struggles in the march of civilization; and Hellenistic Judaism is, after the Bible, the most remarkable contribution of the Jewish genius to the world’s thought.

I have tried to show the relation of this development to the idea of Catholic Judaism, and have considered the Hellenistic Jewish literature and philosophy from a standpoint of rabbinical tradition. In taking up this position I differ from most of those who have treated of this epoch. They have been chiefly interested in the relation to Christianity, and have taken as the criterion of value the approximation of the teaching which finally broke away from Judaism. Even Moritz Friedlaender, who has dealt with the subject in a number of books, professedly from a Jewish point of view, fixes his eyes on the Christian Church as the end of Hellenistic Judaism, and eulogizes the divergences from the rabbinical tradition with an ecstasy of which only a faithful convert is capable. It is a commonplace with this school to contrast the broad universalism of Hellenistic Judaism with the narrow legalism of the Pharisees which eventually prevailed in Palestine. Their view does not commend itself to me. The fusion at which the universalists were aiming was not with the clear Hellenic reason, but with a lower amalgam of Greek and Oriental ideas which tended to debase Jewish monotheism. Nor was it the ethical teaching of Christianity which came from a Hellenistic development, but its dogmatic and gnostic elements. The preservation of historic Judaism was the lodestar of the ancient Rabbis and the sufficient basis of their opposition to the strange doctrines. I have often found a parallel between the Jewish circumstances of the present day and those which existed in the Hellenistic period; and as this book is meant to be rather a popularized than a scholarly presentation, I have not refrained from pointing out the lesson. And I hope that the account of the conflict of Judaism with the culture of the ancient world may have a direct interest for the Jewish life of our own day.

The literature on the subject is abundant, though naturally the greater part of it is written from a Christian point of view. I have set out in the bibliography the chief works to which I have referred, but there are two works to which I am under particular obligation: Schürer’s History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, which, in spite of its title, covers nearly the whole Hellenistic period, and Bacher’s Agada der Tannaiten, and Agada der Palästinensischen Amoräer, which form the best guide to rabbinical philosophy and theology.

I have had to write the book at intervals and in different places, between legal work, and for the greater part of the time I have been away from a good Jewish library. I must ask indulgence therefore for the inaccuracies which I doubt not will be found. Dr. Solomon Schechter, and my brother-in-law, Dr. Israel Friedlaender, made many helpful suggestions, and my debt of gratitude is still fresh for the more indefinite but more precious guidance which they have given me to the whole subject.

LONDON, September, 1915.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In the first of the blessings which Balaam pronounces upon the children of Israel, he exclaims: Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.¹ Philo, expounding the passage, adds: Israel shall be apart not so much by reason of the separation of their homes or the cutting-off of their land, but by reason of the peculiarity of their customs; for they shall not mix with other peoples, so that they may not deviate from their distinctive way of life.² The idea of the separation and selection of Israel is the constant theme of the prophets, as it was the dominant motive of the Mosaic legislation. The Law not only contained a rigid prohibition against the paganism of the surrounding peoples and against intermarriage with idolaters, but enacted a way of life affecting the daily conduct of the individual, which had as its object the isolation of the nation in order to fit it for the moral mission. It has been said epigrammatically by a modern French writer that Judaism is not a religion (a force which binds men together) but an abligion (a force which keeps them separate). And for three thousand years it has resisted the pressure of other creeds.

The mass of the people, indeed, did not always remain loyal to the principles of their teachers and lawgiver. Many a time they mingled themselves with the heathen, and learned their works;³ and most of the kings of Israel and Judah, indulging the more material ambitions for territorial aggrandizement, made alliances with their heathen neighbours, and imitated their ways, and were faithless to the ideal of a chosen people. But the prophets never allowed that ideal to die or to become obscured. While they denounced the idolatry of the backsliders, and foretold the destruction of the political power of the kingdom as a punishment therefor, they declared that, after the people had been chastened in exile, a remnant would return to Palestine to form there the centre of a spiritual supremacy over mankind. And it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that is written unto life in Jerusalem.⁴

At the same time the prophets preached this idea of a universal Judaism, and already in those days the sons of the stranger were joining themselves to the Lord. Foreseeing the captivity of the nation, they declared that Israel was to be a light to the nations, and, taught by him, all the families of the earth should come up to do worship upon the mountain of the Lord in Jerusalem. My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.⁵

The destruction of the political kingdom came about as the prophets had foretold, and Israel and Judah were carried away captive to Assyria and Babylon. With other peoples the loss of political independence and their enforced exile from the national territory have regularly marked the decline, and often the death, of their culture; but with the Jewish people the reverse happened. Aroused to a consciousness of their transgressions by the national disaster, and to a consciousness of their peculiar spiritual heritage by closer contact with the idolatries and superstitions of their Chaldean masters, the exiles were more receptive to the exhortations of the teachers who sought to inspire them. True, a section in Babylon thought that exile meant national extinction and that assimilation was the only course open to them, and exclaimed: We will be like the heathen, like the families of the countries.⁶ Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.⁷ And the majority, though they remained loyal to the religion, preferred their exile-homes, amid the brilliant material civilization of Babylon, to the return to their ruined land. But a sturdy remnant, cherishing the conviction of a national restoration, resisted the blandishments of their environment, and, when the opportunity came, returned to Palestine to re-establish the cult of their fathers. So, too, of the large body of exiles, who, on the fall of Jerusalem, had gone down to Egypt with the prophet Jeremiah, a number remained loyal, or rather returned to loyalty, to the Mosaic law, and preserved their national way of life. The Aramaic papyri, recently found in Assouan, establish the existence of Judean communities in Upper Egypt from the sixth century, living their own life separate from the rest of the population, worshipping at their own shrine, speaking their own language, observing the Passover, and in close touch with the national centre.⁸ Some amount of syncretism colored their beliefs, for they seem occasionally to have paid homage to other deities besides the God of their fathers; but these strange ideas probably disappeared when the whole nationality yielded to Ezra’s great reformation.

Without committing oneself to the dogmatic speculations of the higher critics who are pleased to assign the composition of the Mosaic code to the period following the Restoration, it is clear from the historical narrative of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah that the religious organization of the Jewish people was much more thoroughly carried out after the return to Palestine than before the captivity. At Babylon, where the exiles had contrived to keep the religion alive without the temple worship and its ritual, the foundation had been laid for two new institutions, the house of prayer and the house of study, the Bet ha-Keneset and the Bet ha-Midrash. When the faithful remnant returned, indeed, they first set about the work of rebuilding the temple, but they brought with them the habit of meeting for prayer and study, without ritual and without sacrifices, in local gatherings. Every village in Judea where a Jewish community was settled and every place in the dispersion where Jewish life flourished had its religious meeting-place and its teacher.⁹ While the priests and the Levites were the hereditary leaders of the cult at the sanctuary, in the country scribes, distinguished for their knowledge of the law and the traditions, were the leaders of the religious life.

The dedication of the temple, the foundation of the central authority, known as the Men of the Great Synagogue, the definite ordering of the religious life, and the restatement of the whole Law are alike ascribed to Ezra who came to Judea from Persia in the reign of Artaxerxes I (about 450 B. C. E.). Most famous of the scribes, who were the popular teachers, and himself a member of the high-priestly family, Ezra stands out as the supreme influence in the foundation of a Jewish religious democracy. As it is said by the rabbis: Ezra was worthy to be the bearer of the Law to Israel, had not Moses preceded him.¹⁰ By his work, and the work of the organization which he called into being, the religious ideas and ideals of the prophets and the Mosaic law of holiness were woven into the life of the people, so that it became in very deed a nation one on the earth, unique in its intense religious earnestness and its high moral standard. Now more than ever the Jews were a theocracy, a people devoted to the single idea of God. Knowledge of God was their conception of wisdom; service of God their conception of virtue; their poetry was the expression of the yearning of the soul for God; history was a religious drama in which God was the protagonist, judging the nations with righteousness; the conception of God was their philosophy—they did not require any other: their faith in God and their religion were strong enough to satisfy their desire for knowledge. They felt the more deeply for the very limitation of their outlook.

The Judaism of the Mosaic books, as organized by Ezra, was the first example in the history of humanity of a religion which was independent of a cult, and which was the basis of both national and personal morality. The Torah became a law of life to the individual, and the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob was handed down and amplified from generation to generation, and almost the whole intellectual activity was centered upon it. The scribes determined in its main lines the selection of the holy writings which formed the nation’s special possession. By the constant teaching and interpretation of these writings in the houses of study the Jews became, in a real sense, the People of the Book. But the scribes were not merely the guardians of the tradition, they were active teachers who continually sought new themes to inspire the people with love for their faith and for the Law. As Ben Sira writes at a rather later period:

He that giveth his mind to the Law of the Most High,

And is occupied in the meditation thereof,

Will seek out the wisdom of the ancients and be occupied in prophecies;

He will keep the sayings of the renowned men,

And where subtil parables are, he will be there also.¹¹

The Wisdom of Ben Sira itself, though dating from the Hellenistic period, is typical of the literary activity of the scribes. The Greek translator recommends it in the prologue because it contained wise sayings, dark sentences and parables, and certain particular ancient godly stories of men that pleased God. Describing the origin of the book, he relates how his grandfather, Jesus ben Sira, when he had much given himself to the reading of the Law and the Prophets and other books of our fathers, and had gotten therein good judgment, was drawn on also himself to write something pertaining to learning and wisdom, to the intent that those who are desirous to learn and are addicted to these things might profit much more in living according to the Law.

Among the Jews, as among no other people, did the thought of its greatest teachers become a living influence upon the mass. The words attributed to the Men of the Great Synagogue at the beginning of the Sayings of the Fathers: Make a fence around the Torah, and raise up many disciples, illustrate the spirit which was working during the two centuries of Persian rule. The observance and study of the Law were the dominant interests. The outward conditions of Palestine conduced to the steady strengthening of the religious consciousness. For two hundred years the country was free alike from political complications and from religious intolerance. Simultaneously with the preaching of the great prophets of Israel, Zarathustra had denounced the paganism of the Persians, and inculcated the principles of a higher religious belief. Hence the Persians had an inherent sympathy with Jewish monotheism, and from the time of Cyrus till the fall of the empire they made no attempt to interfere with the religious observances and beliefs of their Jewish subjects

The Jews of Babylon and Egypt were under the same tolerant sway as those in Palestine. In the book of Esther, it is true, we read of attempted persecution in Persia itself, based on the charge that the people scattered through the dominions of Ahasuerus had laws diverse from those of every people; neither keep they the king’s laws; but the issue shows that the attempt was not successful. It was the outcome of a personal political intrigue and not of permanent popular feeling. On the other hand, the Jews were under no temptation to assimilate the ideas and manners of the Persians, who were mainly concentrated in the eastern parts of the empire, and who did not develop a dominant intellectual culture. The other subjects of the Persian dominions were a mixed multitude, lacking a strong national feeling; but the Jews retained and deepened their individuality, regarding their religious culture as the planks and timbers of which the nation was constructed. While the tolerant sway of the Persian empire preserved Judea from exterior disturbance, the circumstances of the people continued to isolate them from the influence of external culture. The anti-Semites of the first century used to make it a reproach to the Jews that the Greek writers made no mention of them, which proved that they were a mushroom people. Josephus, in refuting the attack, explains the absence of communication with Hellas, in the period that preceded Alexander’s conquests, by the self-contained character of the land. As for ourselves, therefore, we neither inhabit a maritime country, nor do we delight in commerce, nor in such communication with other men as arises from it; but the places we dwell in are remote from the sea, and having a fruitful country for our habitation, we devote ourselves to its cultivation. Our principal care is this, to educate our children well, and we think it to be the most necessary business of our whole life to observe the laws that have been given us, and to keep those rules of piety which have been handed down to us. Since, therefore, we have had a peculiar way of living, we had no occasion in ancient times for mixing with the Greeks, as they had for mixing with the Egyptians by their intercourse of exporting and importing commodities; or as they mixed with the Phoenicians who lived on the sea-coast, by reason of their desire for gain in commerce.¹²

Being essentially engaged in agriculture and devoted to their own traditions, the Jewish people in Palestine were not affected in the fifth and fourth centuries by the Hellenic civilization which, during that period, was spreading over the maritime provinces of Asia Minor. A few stray references to the Jewish practice of circumcision occur in Herodotus¹³ and Aristophanes.¹⁴ The Bible, on the other hand, contains references to Javan (the Hebrew for Ionia) in Ezekiel (27. 13) where it is mentioned as a mart of the Phoenicians, and in Isaiah (66. 19) where the prophet speaks of Tubal and Javan, and the isles afar off that have not heard of the fame of God; and in Zechariah (9. 13) who speaks of God stirring up the sons of Zion against the sons of Javan. Some communication, then, between Hellas and Palestine existed even in biblical times. As early as Joel,¹⁵ the merchants of Tyre and Sidon are denounced for having sold the children of Judah and Jerusalem unto the Greeks. Jewish slaves must have been brought to Greece, or at least to the greater Greece established on the Asiatic coast, in the heyday of Greek life.

Nor is it impossible that the monotheistic utterances of the Ionian philosophers Xenophanes and Heraclitus in the fifth century B. C. E. were in some indirect fashion influenced by reports of the Jewish teaching about God. But if a few philosophers picked up some Jewish lore, there was no general intercourse or exchange of culture which had any permanent effect on thought. As Josephus again points out in his refutations of Apion, who charged the Jews with aloofness, the Greek city-states in their prime were equally aloof, and their culture was exclusively national. Plato ordained for his ideal Republic that it should not admit foreigners to intermix with its population, but should keep itself pure and consist only of such as persevered in their own laws. And this was the standpoint of the Hellenes of the classical age who regarded all foreigners as barbarians. A modern writer, contrasting the work of Israel and Hellas, has said: Both peoples felt themselves a peculiar people marked off from the surrounding races by distinctions more ineffaceable than those of blood—by its possession of intellectual or religious truths which determined the bent and meaning of history. For centuries their work went forward at the same time, but in disparate spheres, each nation unconscious of the other’s existence.¹⁶ Between Greeks and Barbarians, between Israel and the heathen, there could be no intimacy, no union. Yet this very spirit of exclusiveness was one of the conditions which enabled each to nurture and bring to maturity the life-giving germ which it bore within it. While the Jews had developed their sublime idea of God, the Greeks were moved by an impulse for a many-sided culture. They were achieving in their little city-states, each with its intense national life, the art, the literature, the science, and the philosophy which have ever since been the inspiration of the civilized world.

It was not until the semi-Hellenized Macedonian prince Philip had destroyed the independence of these city-states, and his son Alexander, who succeeded him to the sovereignty of Hellas, had conquered the Persian empire, that the period of national creation and national exclusiveness gave way to a period of international communication and cosmopolitan culture. Palestine fell into Alexander’s possession in 332 B. C. E., Egypt a year later; and from that time the position of the Jewish people was changed. The aim as well as the effect of Alexander’s conquests was to link up the East and the West not only politically, but also intellectually. National feeling hardly existed among the eastern peoples, save the Persians and the Jews: it was decaying among the Greeks. Alexander sought to bring about a great fusion of ideas in a cosmopolitan empire, which, by a combination of racial excellences and national cultures in some larger expression of political life than the Greek city-state, should advance the work of humanity and give expansion to the Hellenic spirit. Hellenism was to be dominant, but it was to be brought into contact with Oriental systems. The fusion of cultures was prepared by the physical intermingling of the various elements who were to build up together the new civilization. To this end the conqueror established cities and colonies at the most vital points of his empire, and planted in them groups of his diverse subjects and, among others, of the Jews.

The Talmud¹⁷ and Josephus¹⁸ contain several stories of the special regard which Alexander conceived for the Jewish people, but one and all are probably apocryphal. Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that the great conqueror realized the value for his imperial edifice of the one subject people in the Persian empire who had preserved in its purity a national culture; or that the pupil of Aristotle, who possessed a desire for knowledge equal to his master’s, had some vague notion of the peculiar philosophic character of the Jewish belief. Plutarch records as one of Alexander’s maxims that God was the father of all men, and especially of all the best men; and he held his mission to be the pacification of the whole world. If Josephus may be believed, Aristotle had been brought into touch with a Jew, and had acquired from him some knowledge of his religion. Clearchus, one of his disciples, relates a conversation which the master had with a man who was a Jew by birth, and came from Coele-Syria (the Greek name for Palestine). These Jews, he continues, reporting Aristotle, "are sprung from the Indian philosophers: they are named by the Indians Kαλανοí and by the