POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 23which simultaneously served to integrate the upper classes of the empire and
was a site of subtle resistance to Roman rule, and the Greekpaideiaof the
late empire, which first united and then divided pagans and Christians.^7
In recent decades, interest in the hellenization of the Jews in the high and
later Roman Empire has waned, in part because some of the main issues seem
relatively uncontroversial—the material culture of Roman Palestine appears
quite unambiguously hellenized—but also because the opposing viewpoints
about the extent to which the rabbis participated in the common culture of
the Roman east are frozen in place and no longer in dialogue. In reality, these
issues are far more complex and interesting than they have come to seem,
and I will discuss them in detail in the relevant sections of this book.
By contrast, the question of the hellenization of the Jews in the Second
Temple period is enduringly controversial. Scholars still disagree as to whether
“the Jews” were hellenized or not, as if the answer to such a question could
ever be meaningful. Even those who admit that the real cultural situation was
complex often regard Hellenism as a defining issue in Jewish society after 332
B.C.E. Differing attitudes to Hellenism are thought to have generated social
fissures and even conflict. In what follows, I will briefly explain how and why
I disagree.^8
The process of hellenization in Jewish Palestine in the Second Temple
period seems on the whole to have been relatively unproblematic. As else-
where in the Gree keast, the practice of adopting the trappings of Gree kcul-
ture functioned to sharpen the divisions between rich and poor and city and
country, which existed in any case. But hellenization rarelyproduceddivisions
or catalyzed conflicts. Furthermore, it is misleading to crowd all the effects of
Macedonian rule under the rubric of hellenization. The latter may have been
an important consequence of Alexander’s conquests and their aftermath, but
scholars have too often tended to thin kthat all Jewish cultural production of
the Hellenistic period is best viewed as a set of artifacts either of hellenization
or of opposition to it. In what follows, therefore, I will first of all introduce
some terminological precision, by distinguishing several types of helleniza-
tion, and then pay special attention to those novel aspects of Jewish culture
in the Hellenistic period that would be unilluminating to understand in rela-
tion to Gree kculture.
Let us begin by separating hellenization in the sense of “acting Greek”
while maintaining one’s own cultural identity from hellenization in the sense
of “becoming Greek” and so necessarily abandoning one’s previous cultural
(^7) Such distinctions are taken for granted in the work of an ancient historian who has recently
begun to write about Judaism: E. Gruen,Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish
Tradition(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. xvii.
(^8) Cf. L. Levine,Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence?(Seattle: Univer-
sity of Washington Press, 1998), pp. 3–32.