From Hellenistic Judea to American Judaism

We tend to remember Jewish history as a series of encounters between Jews and outsiders: Jews and Greeks, Jews and Romans, Jews and Christians, Jews and the modern nation-states of Europe. But some of the most consequential conflicts in Jewish history were also conflicts among Jews over how Jews should respond to the civilizations around them.

Two medical terms will help us understand this subject, etiology and morphology. Etiology concerns the cause of something: why a particular development occurred. Morphology concerns its form: what that development looks like once it takes shape. Two historical phenomena can have completely different etiologies while sharing a similar morphology.

The Hellenization of Judea and the assimilation of American Jews obviously have radically different etiologies. One occurred in the context of Hellenistic imperialism; the other largely through voluntary integration into a liberal democracy that offered Jews unprecedented security and opportunity. Yet their morphology may contain a recognizable similarity: cultural encounter, selective assimilation, reinterpretation of Jewish identity, competing visions of Jewishness, and eventually intra-Jewish conflict.

The point is not that modern anti-Zionist Jews are simply modern Hellenists. Rather, the Hellenistic crisis provides a historical model for understanding how assimilation can eventually turn a disagreement about how Jews should relate to the surrounding world into a conflict over what Judaism itself means.

The Hanukkah story offers an unusually clear historical example.

Hanukkah Was Not Simply Jews vs. Greeks

The familiar story of Hanukkah is straightforward: Antiochus IV persecuted the Jews, the Maccabees revolted, and the Jews ultimately regained control of Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple.

That story is true, but it can obscure the Jewish conflict that preceded and accompanied the revolt.

The Hellenistic crisis was not simply a matter of Greeks imposing foreign culture on an unwilling Jewish population. Jewish elites themselves participated enthusiastically in Hellenization. Jerusalem acquired Hellenistic institutions. Jewish leaders competed for the high priesthood. Jason and Menelaus represented different versions of a Jewish elite increasingly integrated into the political and cultural world of the Seleucid Empire.

The fundamental question was therefore not merely whether Jews should obey the Greeks. It was something more difficult:

What should Jewish life look like in a Greek world?

For some Jews, Hellenization represented education, political sophistication, economic opportunity, and participation in the wider civilization of the eastern Mediterranean. For others, it represented a threat to the institutions and practices that made Israel distinct.

This is why it is misleading to imagine the Maccabean revolt simply as Jews versus Greeks. There was a Jewish struggle over Hellenization before there was a successful Jewish revolt against Seleucid power.

In that respect, the popular memory of Hanukkah resembles the popular memory of another revolution.

We tend to remember the American Revolution as Americans fighting the British Empire. That is true, but the Revolution was also a civil conflict among Americans themselves. Patriots and Loyalists disagreed over what political community they belonged to and what America ought to become. The external conflict did not eliminate the........

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