Introduction

Summary

'WHAT THEN HAS ATHENS TO DO WITH JERUSALEM?'

The aim of this book is to try to answer Tertullian's rhetorical question and to deal with the dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem from a new point of view, namely: did Athens (classical antiquity and Hellenism) have any impact on the shaping of modern Jewish culture? Athens and Jerusalem, Greeks and Jews, represent two distinct and different human entities. Here are but a few examples.

In his lost book On Sleep, Clearchus of Soli in Cyprus, a pupil of Aristode, referred to the Jews as a ‘philosophical race’ and described aJew from Judaea who had met Aristode during the years he was teaching in Asia Minor as a perfect Greek ‘not only in his language but also in his soul’ (Josephus, Against Apion, i. 181). By that, writes Werner Jaeger, he meant:

Not what modern historical or philological scholarship tries to grasp in Homer, Pindar, or in Periclean Athens, of course; a Greek soul is for him the intellectualized human mind in whose crystal-clear world even a highly gifted and intelligent foreigner could participate and move with perfect ease and grace.

Clearchus’ definition of a ‘Greek soul’ was different from what Heinrich Heine had in mind many generations later when he wrote about the ‘Hellenic soul’, in contrast to the ‘Jewish soul’. The Greeks in Heine's perception were far from being gifted philosophers with ‘intellectualized human minds’. For him, they represented an entirely different human type. In contrast to Clearchus’ view, an excess of intellectuality and abstraction was considered a negative trait by Heine as well as by those Jewish thinkers who adhered to the doctrine of vitalism. A ‘Greek soul’, that is, a pagan soul, was a symbol of a vibrant, robust entity, possessed of youth, spontaneity, and energy.

In a similar vein, M. J. Berdyczewski (1865-1921), the Hebrew radical writer and thinker,s wrote in his personal diary in May 1905: ‘When the Jews return to the Land of Canaan and setde there as a people, they must again grasp hold of the thread that the prophets had already broken by their overzealous morality.