22 CHAPTER ONEthat the impression of calm created by the silence of the sources, preceding
the well-attested dynamism and disorder of the two and a half centuries begin-
ning in 170B.C.E., is no mirage.
Hellenization: A Constraint on Group Integration?
According to 1 Maccabees (1:11), some Jews in the early second centuryB.C.E.
believed that their people’s separation from the surrounding nations was the
source of all their woes. The implication, that the Jews were less integrated
into their eastern Mediterranean social environment than many of their neigh-
bors, is probably correct. But enduring integrative pressures forced them to
find ways to circumvent the separatist requirements of Jewish law; this may
explain, for example, how the Tobiad family, regarded as Ammonite in the
boo kof Nehemiah, despite their marriage alliance with an important Jerusa-
lemite priestly family (Nehemiah 13:1–8), were considered Jewish by some-
time in the third centuryB.C.E.^6 The same pressures also encouraged the Jews
to embrace aspects of the common culture of the eastern Mediterranean,
which Jewish law did not unambiguously prohibit.
The most significant cultural development in the eastern Mediterranean
in the fifth centuryB.C.E. and following was the process modern historians
call “hellenization” (there is no precise ancient equivalent for the word). This
term is used to denote a confusing variety of phenomena, ranging from non-
Greek’s use of imported Greek tableware to development of a taste for Greek
and imitation Gree kpainted vases and sculptures to worship of Gree kgods
to adoption of the Gree klanguage and reading of Gree kliterature to, finally,
the acquisition of citizenship in Gree kcities, that is, becoming “Gree k” (citi-
zenship, at least as much as descent, was an essential requirement for
Greekness). To confuse matters still further, Jewish and Christian scholars,
especially, use the term with a marked lack of chronological specificity—this
at a time when ancient historians and classicists are increasingly recognizing
the distinctions between the still rather exclusivistic Hellenism of the Hellenis-
tic period, the characteristic urban culture of the high imperial Roman east,
(^6) The Tobiad family is discussed in more detail below. On the social, economic, and political
importance of elite interethnic marriages in the pre-Roman eastern Mediterranean, see G. Her-
man,Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
S. Cohen,The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties(Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), has repeatedly argued that conversion to Judaism did not exist before
the early second centuryB.C.E., an argument that I accept from a legal and institutional perspec-
tive. But I would suggest that the development of a ritual of conversion is just one episode in the
long history in what was at least in antiquity the fixed systemic tension between separatism, en-
joined by the Torah, and integration, required by the realities of life in the eastern Mediterranean.
So, the Tobiads may not have converted, but they may have done something very like it.