Hebraism and Hellenism reconsidered

Judaism, Spring, 1994 by Louis H. Feldman

"ARAYNGEFALEN VIA A YOVEN IN A SUKEH!"

This widespread Yiddish saying--"Fallen like a Greek into a sukkah!"--shows how far apart, at least in the popular Jewish mind of yesteryear, are Greek and Jewish cultures. The Latin Church Father Tertullian, in the early third century, had already summarized the incompatibility of Hebraism and Hellenism in his famous phrase, "Quid Athenae cum Hierosolymis?"--"What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" The gap has become the subject of a range of jokes, such as the one about the Jew and the Greek who were boastfully comparing notes. Said the Greek: "They were digging recently in Athens, and do you know what they found? Wires. And do you know what that proves? That two thousand five hundred years ago, in the age of Pericles, the Greeks had telephones." Said the Jew: "They were digging recently in Jerusalem, and do you know what they found? Nothing. And do you know what that proves? That three thousand years ago, when Solomon was king of Judea, the Jews already had the principle of the wireless."

Jews and Greeks have been comparing notes from at least as early as the sixth century B.C.E., when the prophet Zechariah boldly declared, "I will brandish your sons, O Zion, over your sons, O Greece." The comparison, from the Greek point of view and in a most complimentary way to the Jews, continued in the fourth century B.C.E., when, according to Clearchus, a disciple of Aristotle, as quoted by Josephus in his essay Against Apion (1.176-133), a nameless Jew came to see whether Aristotle really deserved the reputation that he had. In the end, admits Aristotle, "It was rather he who imparted to us something of his own." Indeed, so impressed was Aristotle by the endurance and sobriety of this Jew in his manner of life that he paid the Jews the supreme compliment of asserting that the Jews are descended from the Indian philosophers.

In the first century C.E., the anonymous author of the treatise On the Sublime, an essay in literary criticism second in importance in antiquity only to Aristotle's Poetics, cites the opening chapter of Genesis as an example of the most sublime style. And in the following century, the philosopher Numenius, a great admirer of Plato, pays Moses the highest imaginable compliment when he exclaims, in a passage quoted by the Christian Clement of Alexandria, "What is Plato but Moses speaking in Attic?"

From a Jewish point of view, the contrast was stressed by the Maccabees in the second century B.C.E. in their fierce struggle against the Hellenizers in Judea. It continued in the talmudic period with the curse, said to go back to the time of the civil war between Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II in 65 B.C.E., against the study of Greek wisdom (Bava Kamma 82b, Sotah 49b, and Menahot 64b). It was Paul, in particular, who attempted to bridge the gap with his comment (Epistle to the Corinthians 3:11) that in the Gospel that he preached, there was neither Greek nor Jew.

That Jews in antiquity were already conscious of the similarity and contrast with Greek paganism is suggested in the comparison of the Passover Seder with Greek symposia, such as are described in works by Plato, Xenophon, "Aristeas," Plutarch, Athenaeus, Lucian, and Macrobius. In Athenaeus' Deipnosophistai, in particular, we find the practice of asking questions about dietetic problems and riddles, as in the Haggadah of Passover; we find something like haroset; there is a discussion of the usefulness of lettuce (eaten at the Seder as bitter herbs); there are three cups of wine (in contrast to the Seder's four); and the meal concludes (as does the Seder meal) with an afikoman (a good Greek word, which apparently has something to do with the komos ["revelry"] at a banquet).

In his famous essay "Hebraism and Hellenism," published in 1869 in his volume Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold found that Hebraism (which he identified with ascetic Christianity) and Hellenism have been passing each other through the ages like buckets in a well. Thus, we may note, the Hellenism of the pagan world gave way to the Hebraism of early Christianity, only to be revived in the Renaissance (Pope Leo X in the sixteenth century could openly profess a greater admiration for Plato than for Jesus; and his contemporary Machiavelli contrasted the pagan and Christian virtues to the disadvantage of the latter), then to be discarded again for the Hebraism of the Reformation, then to be revived again by the Enlightenment. Indeed, Goethe showed his abhorrence of the representations of the anemic Jesus by reciting his morning prayers before an image of Zeus, and the Victorian Swinburne preferred Aphrodite to Mary, the mater dolorosa. And Heine sharpened the contrast by contending that all men are either Jews or Greeks--either Jews who ascetically question life and nourish their apocalyptic visions, or Greeks who love life with a realism generated by their personal integration.

Arnold, in his essay, contrasts Hebraism, which, he says, stands for conduct and obedience, that is, strictness of conscience and, above all, a consciousness of sin, with Hellenism, whose uppermost thought is to see things as they really are and to think right, that is, spontaneity of consciousness. "Christianity," he says, "changed noticing in this essential bent of Hebraism, to set doing above knowing." "Socrates," he says, quoting a saying attributed to Thomas Carlyle, "is terribly at case in Zion."