Hellenization under the Ptolemies and Seleucids

The year 332 BCE began a span of nearly a millennium during which most Jews were ruled by states whose normative culture was, in some sense, Greek. This is arguably true even for Mesopotamia before the arrival of the Sasanians (the last pre-Muslim Middle Eastern empire, founded as an Iranian dynasty) around 224 CE. It has often been claimed that, during the period between Alexander and Muhammad, Greek culture exerted an influence on the Jews, that Jews became Hellenized or, alternatively, resisted Hellenization. More recently, scholars have come to understand that this sort of analysis is something of a blunt instrument. It is all too easy to explain developments in Jewish culture in such terms and all too easy, too, to link such analysis to value judgments. The renowned German Protestant scholar Martin Hengel (1926–2009), for example, admired what he took to be the vibrant hybridity (not his term, of course) of Hellenized Judaism and condemned cultural resisters as champions of a static and ossified religion—although he admired Jewish political opposition to Rome. By contrast, the celebrated talmudist Saul Lieberman (1898–1983), who uncovered Greek and Roman influence in rabbinic texts, condemned the conscious Hellenization of Alexandrian Jewry as inauthentic and the main factor in that community’s demise but praised the barely conscious and relatively superficial Hellenization of the Palestinian rabbis as a successful adaptive strategy. Some Zionist scholars, following the lead of older generations, simply regarded the history of the Jews of Palestine as internal and took for granted their isolation from broader cultural developments.

Although Hengel’s account had a barely concealed Christian supersessionist agenda (Hellenized Judaism became a living Christianity, while rabbinic resistance to it was spiritually dead), he did succeed in demonstrating the importance of Greek culture to Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine and Syria—a fact earlier scholarship had tended to ignore. Palestinian Jews may not have been as “Hellenized” as those in Alexandria or in urban Asia Minor (Turkey), but they still had to come to terms with the omnipresence of Greek culture.

Culture here is not a static abstraction; it was an important part of the political tool kit of Palestine’s rulers. The Macedonian kings were themselves just barely Greek by ethno-cultural background, but they were adamantly Greek in their personal lives and in much of their political behavior. Outside of Egypt, there was no official legal or civic disadvantage to being a non-Greek, but kings—and officials above the level of the village scribe—cared to interact only with people who could speak Greek and comport themselves as Greeks, no matter their descent or status as citizens of a Greek city.

Peasants and small landholders, who probably made up the majority of the population in an agricultural society, might not have experienced any particular political or social pressure to learn Greek or act like Greeks, and scribes at village registry offices and tax-farming subcontractors were presumably Aramaic-speaking locals. But many larger landowners and more prosperous city dwellers, who had more regular and higher-level interactions with the state, could not share their nonchalance. Hellenism had a certain glamour, evident in the self-regard of all who partook of it as well as in the pride of the citizens of new eastern Greek cities, and there were substantial practical advantages to having access to the networks of cultural and material exchange that crisscrossed the Mediterranean basin—and extended into western and even central Asia—not to mention the prestige of enhanced royal patronage. All this favored Greek and Greeks. One of the peculiarities of Hellenistic as opposed to classical (i.e., post- versus pre-Alexandrian) Greekness was that it was relatively easily acquired; one could become Greek, although of course there was a social hierarchy of Greekness, and being an “old” Greek was “better” than being a new one.

Important economic and cultural developments accompanied the rise of Hellenism: the spread of the Greek language, an accelerated trade in and production of Greek and Greek-style artifacts, a growing tendency for non-Greek cities to reconstitute themselves as Greek cities, and, for many individuals, a deeper change, of values and symbolic worlds. All these shifts took time to establish themselves, but their impact was profound and enduring.

What did this mean for Jews? We can give substantive answers for only two locations, Egypt and Judea, although we can be certain that by the middle of the Hellenistic period—around 150 BCE—there were also Jews in Asia Minor (Turkey), Cyrenaica (Libya), Syria, and Mesopotamia (Iraq).

In Judea, too, factors encouraging Hellenization were at work: the resolutely particularistic Greekness of the rulers and the resulting administrative pressures, as well as the more intangible prestige of Greekness. But other, more conservative government policies exerted a countervailing force. After Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, a struggle over who would succeed him ended in two of his generals, Ptolemy and Seleucus, dividing the eastern Mediterranean between themselves. Ptolemy established his dynasty in Egypt, and the Seleucids took control of western Asia, including Asia Minor and Palestine. The Macedonian kings did not generally tamper with institutions already in place—indeed, they often supported them. In Judea, the two central institutions that had been established under Persian rule were the Jerusalem Temple, controlled by a hereditary priesthood, and the Torah as the law of the land. And it is in the Hellenistic period that the evidence for the growing power and influence of these institutions—and for the coalescing of a short-lived opposition to them—begins to mount.