9 - The Nature of the Hellenistic Mirror

Summary

The Jews have not merely a tendency to imitation, but a genius for it. Whatever they imitate, they imitate well.

AHAD HA’ AM, ‘Imitation and Assimilation'

AND WHAT HAD ALEXANDRIA TO DO WITH JERUSALEM?

On the historical level the answer is simple: with Alexandria, Jerusalem had a real encounter. Indeed, at one time, in the third century BC, it was under the rule of the Ptolemaic dynasty, but one cannot compare the cultural influences of this occupation on the Jews in Palestine with the influences of Hellenistic rule on the Jewish community in Alexandria. However, ‘Alexandria’ serves here as a symbol for Hellenistic culture as a whole. And this culture is our second mirror—the Hellenistic mirror. One facet of this mirror is the similarity and disparity between Judaism and Hellenistic civilization; the other is the reflection of the encounter between these two in the modern historical consCiousness; or perhaps it would be more correct to say the depiction of the way that Judaism adapted. to life within the Hellenistic civilization, was influenced by it, and changed while preserving its uniqueness. The Greek mirror did not have to yield its central position when the Hellenistic mirror made its appearance. The latter only added a new dimension in examining the place of Judaism in the modern world.

The following chapters are intended primarily to describe some of the images of the encounter (or discourse) between Judaism and Hellenism from the time of Alexander the Great until late antiquity. These images served as paradigms for the modern discourse between Western culture and the Jews. The modern Europe that was born after the French Revolution was a totally different historical entity from the ancient East refashioned by Alexander (even though one can find a echo of the ideals of homonoia and concordia in the abstractly universal ideas of the French Revolution). However, in both historical epochs, Jews had to respond to the new world with its new laws, values, structures, opportunities, temptations, and demands. It is not the ways in which they responded that make the two periods similar, but the mere fact that Jews (and Judaism) had to respond, and that they were well aware that they had to.