Tonight is the second night of Chanukah, and after lighting the candles, Jews all around the world will sing the song Maoz Tzur, which describes the enemies who sought to oppress the Jewish people through the ages. The fifth stanza declares, "The Greeks gathered against me, in the days of the Hasmoneans. They breached the walls of my towers and they defiled all the oils". There is no question that the Greeks are the bad guys, and at no time in the year is this clearer than at Chanukah.
Similarly the Romans are prominent at the saddest time of the year, the three weeks culminating in Tisha b'Av, when the destruction of the temple is mourned. And who destroyed the second temple? Why the Romans of course!
So, the Greeks and Romans were the enemy. Not only were they the physical adversaries, however; they were also the spiritual enemy of Judaism, against whose enticements and customs rabbinic tradition warned. Judaism was in many ways directly opposed to the Greek way of life. To the Hebrew religion, with its emphasis upon purity and modesty, the Greek gods and stress upon nudity were violently distasteful and immoral. At the same time, the Greek way of life and learning was attractive and assimilation was a problem.
This distrust of Greek culture, when coupled with the fact that the Jewish people had their own legends and stories in the form of the Bible and of other traditional tales, meant that the ancient world was always marginal in Israel. Religious Jews, who felt no need to include the classical tradition in their education systems, emphasised only the Bible, and even secular Zionists, who rejected Rabbinic Judaism, nevertheless regarded the Bible, upon which their ideology was based, as paramount, again to the exclusion of the ancient roots of Western civilisation. There is none of the common heritage identification that is found in the United Kingdom for example, despite the fact that ancient Rome—and Greece in the form of the Hellenistic kingdoms—played perhaps an even more pivotal role in this geographic region than it did in the UK.
Despite all these obstacles, nevertheless, Classical studies, and the worlds of the ancient Greeks and Romans, do appear in the modern state of Israel and in Jewish diaspora. In this blog, we'll be looking at where these elements are, and what they tell us about our own society and that of times past. Happy reading!
