11 - Homeric Books and Hellenistic Culture in the World of the Sages

Summary

Says Rabban Simeon the son of Rabban Gamaliel the Patriarch: ‘There were a thousand young men in my father's house, five hundred of whom studied the (Jewish] law, while the other five hundred studied Greek wisdom.'

Bava kamma, 83a

Let him teach him Greek at a time when it is neither day nor night, for it is written ‘Thou shalt meditate day and night’ (Josh. I: 8).

jSolah, 9: 24c; jPe'ah, I: 15c

HELLENISM IN THE WORLD OF THE SAGES

IF the Second Temple period reflected a time of struggle in which the political and cultural dimensions were merged, talmudic literature clearly reflects above all the spiritual and cultural dimension of Hellenistic Jewish discourse. Indeed, the modern reading of talmudic literature regarded it as an expression of the entire field of Jewish culture. In it scholars look for evidence that the Sages were not only familiar with Greek philosophy and literature but also borrowed from and drew upon it. Talmudic literature was described as a ‘sea', in whose depths lay deposits of the heritage of Greek literature—open to streams and currents of Greek culture with which one might become familiar without any dogmatic fear.

This image strongly motivated the first generations of the nineteenth century to reread the Talmud. If they found no influence of Greek culture in it, at least it reflected various manifestations of knowledge and familiarity with it, or even the permeation of Hellenistic influences into certain layers of Jewish culture, either through expressions of disapproval or through representation of social and cultural reality. A more modern approach in reading the Sages was not only to seek a diversity of views in their sayings, but also to question their authority: did they really represent the cultural reality, or was Judaism a composite of different types of ‘Judaism’? Was it a historical fact that all the Jews lived under the authority of the rabbis? What was the extent of this authority and its power to control the religious cultural norms? Through the emergence of these new questions, the relationship between the ‘normative values’, the authority of the rabbis and the spiritual and cultural reality became an open historical question of topical significance.