Jews and Others
or re-discovered and re-activated—or simply invented. The question of eth-
nicity, of to what group people believe themselves to belong, has emerged as
the fundamental issue of the late twentieth century. The issue is determined
above all by two things: a common language, whether spoken or confined to
written texts, and a common history—or at least a history which is perceived
as real, and felt as a common possession.
In that sense, we ought to acknowledge that the late twentieth-century
world of competing ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups is, for good or ill,
a Jewish invention, and one whose roots lie far back in the ancient world. For
what distinguished the Jews from all the other groups which came within
the orbit of Graeco-Roman civilisation was precisely the fact that they al-
ready possessed a national religious history, the Bible (even if not yet quite
complete in its canonical form), written in a literary language entirely inde-
pendent of Greek or Latin. Existing as a corpus of literary works, the Bible
could be and was translated into Greek in the Hellenistic period.
The significance of this inherited national and religious history was to be
brought out most emphatically by Josephus, whose works were in turn to
be central to the historical outlook of Christianity—and, in a very different
way, to the scholarly concerns of Bickerman, Momigliano, and Stern. For in
contrasting the attitudes to ‘‘their’’ literatures of Jews and Greeks, Josephus
heavily underscores precisely the difference between an inherited literary
culture and an inherited national and religious culture:
Our books, those which are justly accredited, are but two and twenty,
and contain the record of all time.
Of these, five are the books of Moses, comprising the laws and the
traditional history from the birth of man down to the death of the law-
giver. This period falls only a little short of three thousand years. From
the death of Moses until Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king
of Persia, the prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of the
events of their own time in thirteen books. The remaining four books
contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life.
From Artaxerxes to our time the complete history has been writ-
ten, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier
records, because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets.
We have given practical proof of our reverence for our own Scrip-
tures. For, although such long ages have now passed, no one has ven-
tured either to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an
instinct with every Jew, from the day of his birth, to regard them as
the decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, cheerfully to die