5 - Japheth in the Tents of Shem: The Reception of the Classical Heritage in Modern Hebrew Culture

Summary

Said Rabbi Jonathan of Bet Gubrin: Four languages are appropriately used in the world and these are: Greek, for song; Latin, for war; Sursi [Aramaic], for wailing; Hebrew, for clear speech.

JERUSALEM TALMUD, Megillah, i. 9, 7Ia-b, tr. Neusner, xix. 49

For wisdom sometimes is the key to the holy books, a knowledge of the stars to the proclamation of the months and the language of Greece and Rome to the Mishnah and the Midrashim.

J. L. Go R DON, Shenei Yosef ben Shimon

A CULTURE THAT WENT BEGGING

FROM a traditional Jewish point of view the modern revival of ancient Greece was indeed seen as an effort to waken the dead. ‘A culture that went begging from door to door’: that was the picturesque and mocking phrase with which the religious maskil, writer, and historian, Ze'ev Jawitz (18420–1927) described the culture of nineteenth-century Europe. The culture of Europe, he wrote, is a ‘medley of Hebrew ideas, Indian imagination, Roman culture’; in other words, not an organic and original culture but an eclectic one. This is the reason, in his view, why Europe was going begging: because her mind and soul were made up of rags and tatters, opposites and contradictions, filled with anguish and dissatisfaction. As a result of this distorted mental state, Europe was induced to yearn for her lost wholeness and to search for it in the irretrievable past. This quest led her ‘to visit the graves of cultures lost to the world’, first and foremost among them, of course, the culture of Greece. These wanderings called forth a Hellenic ideal, the portrait of a lost and longed-for golden age, but they ended in disappointment and disillusion. This was not only because such a golden age never really existed, but because attempts to resurrect an ancient longgone past and to infuse it with the lifeblood of the new world, thus to renew its lost vitality and organicity, were doomed to failure. They were but an expression of a culture that had lost its faith and had revealed itself to be an empty vessel. Even if one might appreciate these yearnings in and of themselves, in the final analysis they were a manifestation of futility.