The Greeks stressed beauty; the Jews stressed holy. These views were bound to clash. by Rabbi Ken Spiro

Transcription

1 2008 The Greeks stressed beauty; the Jews stressed holy. These views were bound to clash. by Rabbi Ken Spiro The 4 th century BCE had been eventful for the Jewish people: Exiled to Babylon, they witnessed the fall of a mighty Babylonian Empire before their very eyes as the Persians invaded. Permitted to return to the Land of Israel by the Persian Emperor Cyrus in 370 BCE, they reluctantly took up the offer, with only 42,000 of their number actually returning. The returnees attempts to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem were aborted early as their angry neighbors, the not-so-good Samaritans, complained to the emperor. 1

2 In Persia, Haman, the chief minister to King Ahasuerus, hatched a plot to annihilate the Jews. But Queen Esther (who was secretly Jewish) came to the rescue in 355 BCE. The next Persian monarch, Darius II, Esther s son, allowed the rebuilding of the Temple in 370 BCE. The Jewish people living in the land of Israel were re-energized spiritually thanks to the leadership of Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly. By the year 336 BCE, when the last of the Men of the Great Assembly, Simon HaTzaddik, was High Priest, on the other side of Mediterranean, a new threat was looming. It was called Greece. The Rise of the Greek Empire The origins of Greece are shrouded in mystery and date back to the time of Abraham, 18 th century BCE, or perhaps even earlier. Historians disagree as to where the Greeks came from they could have been people migrating down from Asia through Europe and settling in the Greek Isles, or they could have been seafaring people who settled along the coast. Whoever they were, the earliest inhabitants of mainland Greece (called Mycenaeans after excavations found at Mycenae) developed an advanced culture. But, around 1100 BCE, the Mycenaeans were invaded by barbarians called Dorians and all their civilization disappeared. Greece went into a Dark Age to re-emerge hundreds of years later. The classical Greek period began as early as the 7 th century BCE, though we tend to be more familiar with its history in the 5 th century BCE when Greece consisted of a group of constantly warring city-states, the most famous being Athens and Sparta. The Greek victory at Marathon (490 BCE), 1 the destruction of the Persian fleet at Salamis (480 BCE) and the victory at 1 The modern marathon race of 26 miles commemorates the tradition that a messenger ran that distance from Marathon to Athens with news of the victory and then dropped dead. 2

3 Plataea (479 BCE) brought an end to the Persian Empire s attempts to conquer Greece. During the last three decades of the 5 th century BCE, Athens and Sparta waged a devastating war (the Peloponnesian War which went on from 431 to 404 BCE) and this culminated in the surrender of Athens. More inter- Greek fighting followed in the 4 th century, but later in that century all of Greece succumbed to Phillip II of Macedon, who paved the way for his son, Alexander the Great, to spread the Greek civilization across the world. The late 5 th and the 4 th centuries BCE were as eventful for the Greeks as for the Jews. Despite constant warfare, this was also the golden age of classical Greek culture the birth of democracy, the time of Aristotle, Socrates and Plato. Today, it is easy while admiring the Greek contributions to civilization with its politics, philosophy, art and architecture to forget what Greek society was really like. For example, we ve heard of the Spartan lifestyle, but what did that mean in practice? Well, for starters, at the age of seven, Spartan boys were separated from their parents, they lived in military barracks where they were beaten, and they were not even given minimal food to encourage them to steal. To be Spartan meant to be tough. The Athenians, though not as tough as the Spartans, were not what you d describe as soft either. For example, they thought nothing of killing infants (a common practice in all ancient civilizations even the elevated ones). One of the most influential thinkers in Western intellectual history none other than Aristotle argued in his Politics that killing children was essential to the functioning of society. He wrote: There must be a law that no imperfect or maimed child shall be brought up. And to avoid an excess in population, some children must be exposed [i.e. thrown on the trash heap or left out in the woods to die]. For a limit must be fixed to the population of the state. 2 2 Aristotle, Politics VII.16. 3

4 Note the tone of his statement. Aristotle isn t saying I like killing babies, but he is making a cold, rational calculation: over-population is dangerous; this is the most expedient way to keep it in check. In warfare, the Greeks invented the pitched battle with thousands of foot soldiers colliding with the enemy, slaughtering and being slaughtered as they advanced. (The 80 pounds of armor and weaponry carried by the average Greek hoplite, or infantry man, necessitated a pitched battle since after about minutes the soldiers were all exhausted.) While we tend to think today of the Greeks as cultured and noble, it is shocking to learn how brutal their civilization (like all ancient civilizations) could be. 3 The other great Greek innovation was the phalanx. Instead of the undisciplined free for all, combat common in ancient warfare, the Greeks fought in disciplined battle lines. Infantry advanced with shields locked together and spears pointing straight ahead. A well-disciplined phalanx created a formidable wall of shields and spears which was used with deadly efficiency. 4 But the one who took the Greek conquests to new heights was, of course, Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great Alexander, born in 356 BCE, was the son of Phillip II, the king of the northern Greek province of Macedonia, who was considered a barbarian by the southern Greek city states. Phillip had created a powerful, professional army which forcibly united the fractious Greek city-states into one empire. His son Alexander displayed tremendous military talent from an early age and was appointed as a commander in his father s army at age For a more detailed explanation of the brutality of the ancient world see WorldPerfect: The Jewish Impact on Civilization. 4 For an excellent overview of Greek warfare see: Connolly, Peter, Greece and Rome at War, London: Greenhill Books,

5 Having conquered all of Greece, Phillip was about to embark on a campaign to invade Greece s arch-enemy, the Persian Empire. Before he could invade Persia however, he was assassinated, possibly by Alexander, who then became king in 336 BCE. Two years later, Alexander crossed the Hellspont (in modern-day Turkey) with 45,000 men and invaded the Persians. The backbone of Alexander s army was his infantry. They carried extremely long pikes (spears which may have been as long as 10 feet/3 meters.) These pike-men moved in giant squares called a phalanx, with shields locked together, 16 men across and 16 deep the first five rows of pikes pointed straight ahead creating a lethal wall of spear-heads. In three colossal battles at Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela that took place between 334 and 331, Alexander brilliantly (and often recklessly) led his army to victory against Persian armies that may have outnumbered his own as much as ten to one. His chief tactic was always to be on the offense and always do the unexpected. In battle, he would lead his Campanion Cavalry right at the strongest (rather than the weakest) point of the enemy line. When he fought the Persians, he went for the most heavily protected point of the Persian force surrounding the Persian emperor, aiming to destroy the leadership. When the Persian Emperor Darius III fled from the battle site, the Persian army collapsed. By 331 BCE, the Persian Empire was defeated and Alexander was the undisputed ruler of the Mediterranean. His military campaign lasted 12 years and took him and his army 10,000 miles to the Indus River in India. Only the weariness of his men and his untimely death in 323 BCE at age 32 ended the Greek conquest of the known world. It is said that when Alexander looked at his empire he wept, for there was nothing left to conquer. At its largest, Alexander s empire stretched from Egypt to India. He built six Greek cities in his empire, all named Alexandria. (Today the best known is the city of Alexandria in Egypt on the Nile Delta.) These cities, and the Greeks who settled in them, brought to the oldest civilizations of 5

6 Mesopotamia a new way of being Greek culture which was called Hellenism because Greece was then called Hellas, only later did the Romans dub it Greece. Hellenism The Greeks were not only military imperialists but also cultural imperialists. Greek soldiers and settlers brought their way of life their language, art, architecture, literature and philosophy to the Middle East. When Greek culture merged with the culture of the Middle East, it created a new cultural hybrid-hellenism whose impact would be far greater and last for far longer than the brief period of Alexander s empire. Whether through the idea of the pitched battle, art, architecture or philosophy, Hellenism s influence on the Roman Empire, Christianity and the West was monumental. The Greeks showcased all human talents literature, drama, poetry, music architecture, sculpture, etc. They glorified the beauty of the human body, displaying athletic prowess in their Olympics. Nothing regarding the human body was considered embarrassing, in need of hiding, or private. (Athletic competitions, performed in the nude, were the norm in Greece. Our modern word gymnasium is derived from the Greek word gumnos which means naked. Public toilets often consisted of a bench on a main street with holes in it; people sat there and did their business as others walked by.) Naturally, human passions were venerated, and this meant there were few sexual taboos not even pedophilia and pederasty. Indeed, the sexual initiation of a young boy by an older man was considered the highest form of love and vital part of a boy s education. Plato wrote of this in his Symposium: I, for my part, am at a loss to say what greater blessing a man can have in earliest youth than an honorable [older] lover Plato, Symposium 178c. 6

7 Even Greek gods were described in human terms and were often bested by human beings in Greek mythology; with time, it became the style of intellectual Greeks to denigrate their gods and speak of them with biting cynicism and disrespect. In short, the Greeks introduced into human consciousness an idea which came into play as one of the most powerful intellectual forces in modern history humanism. The human being is the center of all things. The human mind and its ability to understand and observe and comprehend things rationally is the be-all-and-end-all. That s an idea which comes from the Greeks. Above all, the Greeks thought that this was enlightenment, the highest level of civilization. They had a strong sense of destiny and believed that their culture was ordained to become the universal culture of humanity. Of course, the Jews had a different vision. The Jews believed that a world united in the belief in one God and ascribing to one absolute standard of moral values including respect for life, peace, justice, and social responsibility for the weak and poor was the ultimate future of the human race. This Jewish ideology was wedded to an extreme, uncompromising exclusivity of worship (as demanded by the belief in one God) and a complete intolerance of polytheistic religious beliefs or practices. There was only one God and so only one God could be worshipped, end of story. To the Jews, human beings were created in the image of God. To the Greeks, gods were made in the image of human beings. To the Jews, the physical world was something to be perfected and elevated spiritually. To the Greeks the physical world was perfect. In short, to Greeks, what was beautiful was holy; to the Jews what was holy was beautiful. Such disparate views were bound to clash, sooner or later. 7

8 Greeks versus Jews During his military campaign against Persia, Alexander took a detour to the south, conquering Tyre (in today s Lebanon) and then Egypt, via what is today Israel. Alexander was planning to destroy the Temple, egged on by the Samaritans who hated the Jews. But he didn t. There is a fascinating story about Alexander s first encounter with the Jews of Israel, who were until his time the subjects of the Persian Empire. The narrative concerning Alexander s first interaction with the Jews is recorded in both the Talmud and by the ancient historian Josephus. 6 In both accounts, the High Priest of the Temple (in the Talmudic narrative he is identified as Simon HaTzaddik, the last surviving member of the Men of the Great Assembly), fearing that Alexander would destroy the city of Jerusalem, went out to meet him before he arrived at the city gates. The narratives then describe how Alexander, upon seeing the High Priest, dismounted and bowed to him. (Alexander rarely, if ever, bowed to anyone!) In Josephus s account, when asked by his general, Parmenio, to explain his actions, he answered: I did not bow before him but before that God who has honored him with the High Priesthood, for I saw this very man in a dream, in this very apparel... he exhorted me to make no delay, but boldly to pass over the sea there, for that he would conduct my army and would give me the dominion over the Persians. Because of this dream, Alexander spared Jerusalem and did not destroy the Temple as he had planned, and he listened when Simon HaTzaddik told him that the Jews were not enemies of the Greeks but the Samaritans were. The Talmud relates the interaction between Alexander and the Jewish delegation: 6 Talmud, Tractate Yoma 69a; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 11: (The New Complete Works of Josephus, pp ) 8

9 They [the Jews led by Simon HaTzaddik] asked, Is it possible that these idol worshippers should fool you into destroying the House [of God] where prayers are offered for you and your kingdom that it should never be destroyed? Alexander said to them, What idol worshippers do you mean? They replied, We are referring to the Samaritans who are standing before you now. Said Alexander, I am handing them over to you to do with them as you please. 7 As a result, the Jews were given free rein to trash the Samaritans, which they promptly set out to do. And Israel and Jerusalem were peacefully absorbed into the Greek Empire. As tribute to his benign conquest the rabbis decreed that the Jewish firstborn of that time be named Alexander (which is a Jewish name until today), and the date of the meeting (25 th of Tevet) was declared a minor holiday. At first, everything was honky-dory. The Greek authorities preserved the rights of the local Jewish population and did not attempt to interfere with Jewish religious practice. The Jews continued to flourish as a separate and distinct entity for 165 years a rare phenomenon in the Hellenistic world, because the vast majority of the peoples conquered by Alexander the Great had willingly allowed themselves to be Hellenized. The fact that the Jews (with the exception of a small minority) rejected Hellenism was a strong testament to that ever-present Jewish drive and sense of mission. The famed classical historian Michael Grant, in From Alexander to Cleopatra, explains: The Jews proved not only unassimilated, but unassimilable, and... the demonstration that this was so proved one of the most significant turning-points in Greek history, owing to the gigantic influence exerted throughout subsequent ages by their religion... 8 But with time, Judaism, with its intractable beliefs and bizarre practices, began to stand out as an open challenge to the concept of Hellenistic world supremacy. For the generally tolerant Greeks, this challenge became more 7 Talmud, Tractate Yoma 69a. 8 Grant, Michael, From Alexander to Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World, New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1982, p

10 and more intolerable. It was only a matter of time before open conflict would arise. It did not help matters that Alexander s vast empire did not survive his death in 323 BCE, but fragmented into three large chunks centered in Greece, Egypt and Syria, each controlled by his former generals. These smaller empires were known as: 1) Seleucid or Assyrian Greece (which also included Persia); 2) Ptolemian or Egyptian Greece; and 3) Macedonian or Greece proper (which included the independent city-states of Athens, Sparta, etc.) Initially, Israel fell under the Ptolemies of Egypt. They were generally liberal and open-minded in keeping with the spirit of their capital city of Alexandria which was the world s cultural center. But this changed in 198 BCE after the Battle of Panias (or Banyas) in northern Israel which took place between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, and which the Seleucids won. After their victory at Panias, the Seleucids of Assyria, led by the King Antiochus III, took over Israel, but they were insecure about their control over the region. The next Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, Epiphanes, found himself under a lot of pressure, holding back the Ptolemies and worrying about the rising might of Rome. He decided that the weak link in his defenses was Israel. Why? Because Israel was bordered by Ptolemic Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea (from whence the Romans could come), and, worst of all, the majority of Jews were not into Greek culture. 9 This situation he promptly moved to remedy. 9 Schiffman, Lawrence H., Text and Tradition: A Source Reader for the Study of the Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1998, p