Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

Judaism. In theLetter of Aristeas,the Ptolemy and his counselors are

greatly impressed by the wisdom of the Jewish sages.Aristeasaffirms that

these people worship the same God that the Greeks know as Zeus, and the

roughly contemporary Jewish philosopher Aristobulus affirms that the

Greek poets refer to the true God by the same name. The Sibyl praises the

Jews alone among the peoples of the earth. Philo, and later Josephus, is at

pains to show that Jews exhibit the Greek virtue ofphilanthrZpia.

To some degree, Hellenistic Jewish authors wrote to counteract per-

ceptions of Jews that circulated in the Hellenistic world (Berthelot 2003).

Already at the beginning of the Hellenistic era, Hecataeus of Abdera wrote

that Moses had introduced “a somewhat unsocial and inhospitable mode

of life.” He told a garbled story of Jewish origins which conflated the Jews

with the Hyksos, the Syrian invaders of the second millenniumb.c.e.

whose memory in Egypt was accursed. The story was elaborated by the

Egyptian historian Manetho. It is unlikely that either Manetho or

Hecataeus knew the exodus story in its biblical form, or that either had

more than an incidental interest in the Jews. The association of the Jews

with this tradition was highly negative. Many of the negative stereotypes

and calumnies of the Jews were collected by the Alexandrian grammarian

Apion in the first centuryc.e.We owe their preservation, ironically, to the

refutation by Josephus, in his tractAgainst Apion.

There has been a tendency in modern scholarship to find in this mate-

rial the roots of anti-Semitism (Gager 1983; Schäfer 1997). But the por-

trayal of Jews was not uniformly negative (Feldman 1993: 177-287). Moses

was often praised as a lawgiver, even already by Hecataeus. Moreover, we

should bear in mind that the Jews were by no means the only ethnic group

in the Hellenistic world who were subjected to ridicule (Isaac 2004). In the

first centuryc.e., however, antagonism moved beyond ridicule to violence,

in the form of a virtual pogrom in 38c.e.Violent conflict would eventually

consume the Jewish Egyptian community in the revolt under Trajan

(Pucci ben Zeev 2005). The alleged anti-Semitism in Alexandria must be

seen in the concrete historical and social circumstances of this conflict

Jews had prospered in Egypt in the Ptolemaic period, despite occa-

sional tensions. Some had served as generals in Ptolemaic armies. Philo’s

family became wealthy bankers. In the Roman era, however, their fortunes

declined, and there were pogroms in Alexandria in the time of Caligula

and again in 66c.e.The classic explanation of this conflict was offered by

Tcherikover, who made good use of papyrological evidence (1959: 296-332;

Tcherikover and Fuks 1957-1964; cf. Modrzejewski 1995). For purposes of

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john j. collins

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:49 PM