The Impact of Greek Culture on Normative Judaism from
the Hellenistic Period through the Middle Ages c. 330 BCE- 1250 CE
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1.0 Jewish
Cultural-Religious History
1.1 Palestinian Judaism During the Ascendancy of
Hellenistic Culture (332 BCE-640 CE )
1.3 Outside Influences on Jewish
Culture
2.0 Greek Cultural-Religious
History
2.1 Classical Greek Culture
(Sixth to Fourth Centuries BCE)
2.2 Pagan Hellenism in Palestine (332 BCE-mid fourth century
CE)
2.3 The End of Ancient Greek Culture – and its Revival Under
Islam
3.0 Jewish
Response to Pagan Hellenism
3.1 Under the Hellenistic Monarchies (332-167 BCE)
Table 2 - Being Rational in Context: Four Rational Responses to Drought
Table 3 - Variables making for Rapid Hellenization
Table 4 - Phases of Impact of Greek Culture
on Normative Judaism
1.0 Jewish Cultural-Religious History
1.1 Palestinian Judaism During the Ascendancy of
Hellenistic Culture (332 BCE-640
CE )
For
the early history of Judaism see my Israelite Religion to Judaism: the Evolution of the
Religion of Israel
It
is likely that the Judaism of the fourth century BCE of the Persian
“Jewish religious life underwent a dramatic metamorphosis in the
thousand years between the conquest of Alexander and the ascendancy of the
Arabs (332 BCE-640 CE). Judaism in late
antiquity, with all its varieties and nuances, was a far cry from that known
and practiced in the First Temple, Persian, or even early Hellenistic
period. Beliefs and practices hitherto
marginal or unknown had now assumed center stage; new forms of religious
leadership and new types of institutions had crystallized; the number and kinds
of books considered sacred had expanded greatly; new holidays were added to the
Jewish calendar, and older ones were recast and given new meanings in light of
the evolving tradition and cataclysmic historical events.[1]”
1.2 Normative Judaism
Normative refers to what subsequent
Jewish tradition considered legitimate and normative (See Avot chapter 1 and subsequent tradition - Mishnah, Babylonian Talmud, Geonim etc[2].) It implies no value judgment on the
historical legitimacy, sincerity, piety or morality of the likely majority of
Jews of every period who lived outside of the retrospectively blessed
“normative” tradition. Thus the
Sadducees, Essenes, Apocalyptic Jews, Pharisees, Zealots and others were all
developments of earlier Jewish tradition.
However, all of these, except the Pharisees, were retrospectively
rendered “non-normative” by later rabbinic tradition which was the only Jewish
tradition to survive. This is not at all dissimilar to the
approach of the Deuteronomistic History in the late First Temple of Exilic
period. Put another way, normative refers to the Rabbinic literary
tradition which remained normative in Rabbinic circles until the beginning
of the 19th century, and in traditional circles, until the present.
It is
interesting to note that:
·
Josephus, a Pharisee, described the Pharisees as being few
in number but with a strong following among the people;
·
There are only a few hundred rabbis mentioned in the Mishnah
and Talmuds;
·
Roman-Byzantine period synagogue mosaics in Galilee,
synagogue art in Dura-Europos, Jewish magic bowls from southern Mesopotamia and
Hellenistic Jewish literature indicate that the majority of Jews had, at most,
only one foot in the “normative” tradition
Of course, to say a tradition is normative is not to say it does not
change over time.
1.3
Outside Influences on Jewish Culture
Outside influences on Jews throughout history have been stronger than
their impact on the normative tradition and much stronger than their impact on
normative literature. Foreign influences
that have been successfully integrated into the normative tradition in
pre-modern times, include all, or elements of:
·
The
Canaanite literary tradition (see)
·
Greek
logic, science and philosophy (see table)
·
Sufism
(Islamic mysticism) through the works of Maimonides son Abraham and Bahya ibn
Paquda;
However, whereas in the normative tradition foreign influences have been
integrated into a Jewish framework, for most Jews of the time, the situation
was messier. They, in reality, were
often cultural Canaanites, Babylonians, Hellenistic Greeks etc. with greater or
lesser influence of Israelite-Jewish values.
Sometimes it is difficult to know whether a literary work is
fundamentally Jewish, expressed in Greek terms, as are those of Josephus, or fundamentally Greek in values
and outlook. This question has never
been resolved as it pertains to the philosopher Philo.
2.0 Greek Cultural-Religious History
2.1 Classical Greek Culture (Sixth
to Fourth Centuries BCE)
The splendor
of Classical Greek civilization does not need to be recounted here. Greek artistic and literary accomplishments
highly influenced Western culture.
However, the major impact on the Jewish cultural tradition was made by
Greek philosophy and the closely related Greek science and mathematics.
Greek
science was of truly world-shaking importance because without it, it is
possible that the Scientific Revolution, and hence our own culture, would never
have arisen. A couple of quotes -
“On Why it is said
that the Greeks “invented” science.
In short, because they introduced the notions of natural
causality and rational proof; because they tried to eliminate what they
considered to be supernatural elements from their explanations for natural
phenomena, because they made (often unobserved and sometimes unobservable)
connections between phenomena and ordered them into parts and wholes or causes
and effects (rather than just amassed observations), and because they tried to
think their way rationally (which does not mean logically or sensibly to modern
tastes) through the perceived order of observed phenomena. The belief in natural causation with
consequent natural effects was matched by a belief that knowledge precedes by
reasoning from intellectual premise to rational conclusion.”
“… (The) law of
causality…. States that there is conformity with law throughout nature; nothing
is arbitrary, there is a necessity for everything, as we see in the regular
occurrence of all phenomena. Without
this necessity, no accumulation of experience would be possible…. Its success
in the realm of theoretical physics provides the fullest confirmation of the
general law.
The conception of general conformity with law existing in
nature is contained in Greek philosophy from the beginning.”
From Sambursky, Samuel, The
physical world of the Greeks; translated from the Hebrew by Merton Dagut ;
with a new preface by the author, Princeton University Press, 1987, c1956. pp.
16 and 159
2.2 Pagan Hellenism in Palestine
(332 BCE-mid fourth century CE)
In 332-331 BCE Alexander the Great conquered Palestine as part of this
larger conquest of the Persian Empire.
After Alexander’s death, Egypt and Palestine were taken over by Ptolemy
while Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia were taken over by Seleucus. After a 23 year struggle, the Seleucids took
over
v
Philosophy – Philosophy remained centered in Athens. The new schools of Skepticism[3], Cynicism,
Epicurianism[4]
and Stoicism [5] developed. All of these were more concerned with
man’s internal state and ethics than with man as a functioning member of
society or with the larger questions of science, metaphysics and other
theoretical questions. These
developments were probably related to the end of the citizen-controlled city
state and the inability of Hellenistic kingdoms to establish firm order. These factors created the feeling that the
outside world was in chaos and uncontrollable and that, consequently, one had
to seek inside oneself for security.
v
Science and Mathematics – Alexandria became the center for these
disciplines. The royal Museum was a
great center of scientific and literary research. It is interesting to note that astrology was a Hellenistic
creation which they developed as a “science” closely related to the doctrines
of Stoicism (See Koester pp. 156-159; 376-380; Lloyd pp. 29-30). It can be
argued that the Greek belief in Fate or Necessity, to which even the gods are
subject, predisposed them to developing a concept of nature as a system
governed by immutable natural laws. The
extension of this paradigm into human affairs was the ultimate concept behind
astrology[6]. Lloyd wrote – “In the Stoics’ eyes, the
rational basis for the practice of divination, as for science itself, is the
philosophical belief in the unbreakable chain of cause and effect.”
The number of Greek philosopher-scientists who changed world history by
laying the groundwork for the scientific method and a world view[7] was
quite small. Outside of the
Museum-Library at Alexandria, the institutional basis to support research and
the dissemination of results was very poor and haphazard;
v
Greek Higher Culture in the Hellenistic
Age was Limited to the Social Elite - Even within Greek literate society, the common sense was mythic, not philosophical-scientific, as
evidenced by classical Greek drama. The ordinary Hellenistic Greek and Jew of
the period, i.e. the rural and urban
poor, were much more alike than their intellectual elites whose contrasting
views are outlined in Table 1. Their world was one haunted
by magic and the supernatural.
v
Greek Cities (most of these would be considered small towns today
on the basis of their populations) –
These were widely founded by Alexander the Great and by the Seleucid Empire. With their Greek traditions of
self-government and the related institutions these entities were quite
different from the oriental towns that they displaced. At times, older cities were partly
depopulated (e.g. Babylon[8]) in
order to round up inhabitants for the new Greek polis. At other times, existing cities (Jerusalem,
Acre, Beth Shean, Rabbat Ammon, Samaria etc.) were given Greek names and
refounded as Greek cities. At other
times entirely new cities were founded.
v
The Greek cities became centers for the
diffusion of Greek culture - Koester (pp. 356-357) discusses, what he calls, the “philosophical
marketplace” of the second century and preceding centuries -
“The real life of ‘philosophy’… had left the schools and gone into the marketplace and onto the streets of the big cities. Many people called themselves ‘philosophers’; it was difficult to know whether a man offering his wisdom in the street was a god, a magician, the apostle of a new religion, or a true philosopher. In the imperial period the army of wandering missionaries or philosophers had become legion. All of them competed with each other, advertising their art in order to attract disciples, outdid each other in demonstrations of their power, and were by no means disinclined to draw money out of people’s pockets. Such missionaries competed even within the same religious or philosophical school … pagan, Christian and Jewish philosophers of this sort did not address the educated establishment but the common people, that is anybody they could meet in the streets…. Foremost was the art and adroitness of public speech. Even if these preachers and philosophers adhered to quite different schools of thought they agreed in their criticism of existing conditions, in their attack upon the shallowness, vanity, and corruption of the bourgeois urban life, and in their moral summons …. The entire scale of miraculous deeds of power was commonly used, from magical tricks to predictions of the future, from horoscopes to the healing of diseases and maladies, even the raising of dead people…. The ancient and new insights of philosophers and great thinkers were not in demand, but rather whatever could clarify the world and its powers as they affected peoples’ everyday problems…. New deities recommended themselves rather than critically tested philosophic doctrines; demonic forces were better explanations of the world than scientific knowledge. Simple moral rules of human behavior offered better advice than psychological insights into the motivations of human actions.”
v
The Greek and Macedonian settlers who formed the core of non-local citizens of the
many “Greek” cities of the
Hellenistic were mainly poor, single,
uneducated males who promptly married, or formed informal alliances with
local women. Their male children would
have a Greek education[9] but
from their mothers, they would imbibe the traditional folk culture of the
region surrounding their island of Hellenism.
Generally, the Greeks were good at organizing and this, combined with a
total lack of traditional duties and restraints toward the “barbarian” i.e.
non-Greek, natives, enabled them to exploit the peasantry much more effectively
and ruthlessly than was done by Persians working through traditional local
elites.
v
Seleucid attempt to use the Greek
cities to support the integrity of the Empire - The Seleucid authorities hoped
that the network of
Hellenistic cities would form a “cultural glue” which might help to maintain
the empire’s integrity. In part, to bind
these cities to the Seleucid state, the Seleucids followed the practice of
allowing Greek cities special trading privileges within the empire[10]and
empowering them to tax the surrounding peasantry. Squeezing maximum taxes from the non-Greek
peasantry tied in with wide-spread Greek attitude that non-Greeks were
inferior, barbarians. They did not
consider that they had any mission to Hellenize the “barbarians”. In fact, the
privileged position of Greek settlers was dependant on not incorporating
natives into their ranks.
v
Seleucid policies of favoring Greek
cities had the impact of ensuring hostile relations between those cities and
the surrounding country side which, in turn, made the cities look to the
central government for security thus guaranteeing the city’s loyalty to the
empire and giving the royal government secure bases throughout the empire.
2.3 The End of Ancient Greek Culture – and its
Revival Under Islam
After about 120 BCE Greek science started to loose its originality. Little of worth was produced after 200
CE. Much of what was written, especially
by Roman writers[11],
were digests of knowledge. This had the
perverse effect of spreading the often erroneous conclusions of Greek science
while eliminating the really useful part – the scientific mindset.
The last great Greek philosopher was Plotinus (205-270 CE) whose adult
life virtually coincided with the great crisis of the Roman Empire (235-270 CE)
marked by civil wars, barbarian invasions, terrible inflation and economic
decline. This crisis destroyed the
social base of Greek culture in the Roman Empire[12]. The establishment of Christianity as the
official religion of the Empire, in the early to mid-fourth century marked the
beginning of a new Christian culture whose languages were Greek, Latin,
Aramaic, Egyptian, Armenian, British (i.e.
Old Welsh) etc. depending on place and class.
This is effectively, the beginning of the Middle Ages from a cultural
point of view.
The Roman emperor Julian
the Apostate tried to revive classical Greek religion and culture in the mid
fourth century. He is said to have
consulted the Oracle
of Delphi. The Pythia responded with
the following oracle:
"Tell to the king that the carven hall is fallen in decay;
Apollo has no chapel left, no prophesying bay,
No talking spring. The stream is dry that had so much to say."
During the second to fourth centuries CE, all peoples in the Empire,
pagans and others, were becoming more mystical, more religious and even more
prey to magic which, in any case, had always been strong in the Greek and other
cultures of the Empire. This mystical,
anti-rational trend was probably one of the causes of the decline of Greek
science as well as contributing to the triumph of Christianity and to the
decline of Greek history writing and its eventual replacement as a popular form
by Byzantine hagiography.
After
a period of almost total eclipse, from the fourth century CE, Greek learning
was revived in the Arab-Muslim world through the translation of Greek texts
into Arabic. It should be noted that
what was translated was not a cross-section of Greek literature. The Arabs translated and studied virtually everything they could find
on philosophy, medicine, the exact sciences, astronomy and the occult but were
uninterested in Greek poetry, drama and history.
“The translation of Greek
and Syriac works into Arabic… became serious business under Harun ar-Rashid
(786-809)…. By the year 1000 AD, almost
the entire corpus of Greek medicine, natural philosophy and mathematical
science had been rendered into usable Arabic versions…. The scientific movement
in Islam was both distinguished and durable … by the end of the ninth century
translation activity had crested and serious scholarship was under way. From
the middle of the ninth century until well into the thirteenth, we find
impressive scientific work in all the main branches of Greek science being
carried forward throughout the Islamic world. The period of Muslim preeminence in science
lasted for 500 years – a longer period of time than has intervened between
Copernicus and ourselves.” From Lindberg, David C., The
Beginnings of Western Science, University of Chicago Press, 1992 p. 168-180
3.0 Jewish Response to Pagan Hellenism
All Jews, even those in the Latin speaking west and in Parthian
Mesopotamia, were in direct, or often indirect,
contact with Hellenistic culture from the fourth century BCE until the
rise of Islam. However, the nature of
the challenge this posed, and the nature, degree and rapidity of Hellenization
varied greatly depending on era, class, location and education[13] (see).
3.1 Under the Hellenistic Monarchies (332-167 BCE)
The first major Jewish contact with Greek culture was when
Under Persian rule,
This led to the Hasmonean revolt which
put an end to religious Hellenization in the sense of abandoning the Torah for
a Greek life style. It also led to an
explosion of new varieties of Judaism – Apocalyptic Judaism, Hasidim (not to be
confused with the modern mystical variety), Essenes, Sadducees, Pharisees and
no doubt others.
In the wake of the success of the
Hasmonean revolt cultural and linguistic Hellenization in Eretz Israel continued
apace until, by the third or fourth century CE, Greek was probably the majority
language of the country.
“The motivation of the Hasmonean revolt has
often been misunderstood. It has been contended
that this revolt came in protest to the process of Hellenization in
3.2 Hellenistic Culture as the Rabbis
Experienced it Under the Pagan
The Jerusalem
Talmud, also called Palestinian
Talmud, is an amalgam of the teachings of three important rabbinical
academies all of which were located in major Hellenistic Greek cities i.e.
v
Street
philosophers, with their popularized and simplified philosophy;
v
Greek
literature, both classic and popular Hellenistic, was widely available. On the other hand, science was a rare
specialist taste. Even in the great
Hellenistic cities books on science would have been hard to find;
v
An
active oral culture that allowed the rabbis to learn many Greek proverbs etc.
which may have originated in a literary milieu;
v
Greek
theatre which was universally available.
However, plays always involved dedications to the pagan gods. Though Philo, and no doubt many other good
Jews, attended the theatre, the rabbis would not;
v
Greek
schooling. The curriculum consisted of:
·
Study
and memorization of Homer and Euripides and, to a lesser extent, of
Demosthenes, Thucydides and Meander;
·
·
Arithmetic;
and,
·
Rhetoric.
Although some Jews in rabbinical circles were given enough of a Greek
education to enable them to deal with Roman officials, it is doubtful if many
rabbis attained a full Greek education.
During the Talmudic period (135-500 CE)
rabbis in
v
spoke Greek on the street;
v
spoke Mishnaic Hebrew, by then a dead
language, in the school room;
v
spoke Aramaic loaded with thousands of
Greek words in informal discourse with their colleagues; and,
v
used the same Aramaic, supplemented by
Greek, for writing.
4.0 The
Impact of Greek Culture on Normative Judaism from the Hellenistic Period through
the Middle Ages c. 330 BCE- 1250 CE
See Table 4 - Phases of Impact of Greek Culture on Normative Judaism
Table 2 - Being Rational in Context: Four Rational Responses to Drought
Table 3 - Variables making for Rapid Hellenization
Table 4 - Phases of Impact of Greek Culture
on Normative Judaism
Table 1
Some Differences between the Hellenistic Philosophical-Scientific World
View and that Reflected in the Torah
Nb. Hellenistic Philosophical-Scientific world view was the property of
very small elite within the larger Greek-speaking community during the
Hellenistic-Roman period. Jewish folk
beliefs probably diverged significantly from those reflected in the Torah in most
periods.
|
Issue |
Hellenistic
Philosophical-Scientific |
Judaism
as Reflected in the Torah |
|
Centrality of Man vs. Centrality of
God |
Man is at the center
and “Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras) |
Theocentric - man’s
task is to serve God. |
|
Religion |
The gods in Greek
traditional polytheistic religion were capricious and not particularly
ethical. The sole requirement was to
believe that the gods existed and to perform ritual and sacrifice, through
which the gods received their due. The very unsatisfactory nature of this
religion[17],
from an ethical viewpoint, opened the way to secular science of ethics[18]. Greek philosophers,
with their demythologized world view (see), could only
fit in the divine if the gods were removed from the material world and man. |
Ethical Monotheism |
|
Law – Divine or Secular? |
Law (nomos) is to suit society. It can be made and changed by the society. |
Law (Torah) is God’s revelation regarding
how God wants people to live. It
cannot be changed by society in theory though it is adaptable in practice. |
|
Secular or Theocratic Rule? |
Democracy, and other
secular forms of government, follow from above. |
Theocracy by
authorized interpreters of God’s law. |
|
Ethics[19]
also called moral philosophy the discipline concerned with what is morally good
and bad, right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of
moral values or principles. |
The Sophists, Plato
and Aristotle[20]
produced the preeminent early ethical thinking in |
“Unlike the ethical
system of Greek philosophy, which seeks to define virtues (who is courageous,
generous or just, etc.), the bible demands of every human being, and behave
virtuously toward his fellow man, and is not concerned with abstract
definitions.”[24]
In the Torah, however, behaving virtuously is equal to obeying God’s Law
regardless of whether we would view specific laws as moral, social or cultic[25]. |
|
Source of Knowledge N.b. The incompatibility of the Greek concept of Nature, as
being governed by immutable natural laws, and the scriptural belief in
miracles[26]
was a major issue for medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophy. |
Science - Reason is the key
to finding the truth about anything – ethics, nature of man, the natural
world. Popular beliefs and
commonly-held opinions to be rejected as sources of knowledge. - Nature is demythologized. Nature is governed by immutable natural
laws. It is to be studied and can be understood using logic and generalized
theory[27]. Though nature could be understood, the
Greeks did not assume, unlike modern Western culture, that understanding
could lead to control of nature and the world around them. The major exception to this fatalistic
approach was astrology[28]. |
The general Torah approach
is: -
The Torah tells you
everything you need to know – the rest should be left to God[29]; -
If the community and
individual are in God’s favor, god will ensure that everything will be fine
with the community and individual; -
Sacred tradition is
binding. Since God created
and maintains everything, natural phenomena,
and everything else, should be admired as testimony to God’s providence and
greatness. It should not be analyzed. |