Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Hellenistic Culture and Society) Review

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(More customer reviews)Gruen's 'Heritage and Hellenism' provided a limited, but informative, overview of Jewish literature from the Hellenistic period, focusing on works with historical intent. He opens with an analysis of I & II Maccabees, to see that the Hasmoneans were not opposed to Hellenism per se, but that they in fact utilized Hellenism to further Jewish ends. Gruen goes on to examine the creative adaptations of Biblical materials by Jews to help place them in the context of Hellenistic society and thought, emphasizing their antiquity and superiority in that world. Other materials discussed are from Josephus, and the Jewish Pseudepigrapha, often little-known fragments of historical lore, Greek additions to Daniel and Esther, and the Third Sybilline Oracle. Gruen looks insightfully at his sources, wonders how they were intended and who they were for. He finds elements of satire, humor, consolation, and exhortation in these remote works. Many of the footnotes are in Greek, but can be looked up in translations by chapter and verse numbers. In a few places Greek is used in the text, but this should not dissuade the general reader. Overall, the book is very readable, fair-minded, and potentially helpful to anyone wishing to understand the Judaism of this period in history.

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The interaction of Jew and Greek in antiquity intrigues the imagination. Both civilizations boasted great traditions, their roots stretching back to legendary ancestors and divine sanction. In the wake of Alexander the Great's triumphant successes, Greeks and Macedonians came as conquerors and settled as ruling classes in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Hellenic culture, the culture of the ascendant classes in many of the cities of the Near East, held widespread attraction and appeal. Jews were certainly not immune. In this thoroughly researched, lucidly written work, Erich Gruen draws on a wide variety of literary and historical texts of the period to explore a central question: How did the Jews accommodate themselves to the larger cultural world of the Mediterranean while at the same time reasserting the character of their own heritage within it? Erich Gruen's work highlights Jewish creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness, as the Jews engaged actively with the traditions of Hellas, adapting genres and transforming legends to articulate their own legacy in modes congenial to a Hellenistic setting. Drawing on a diverse array of texts composed in Greek by Jews over a broad period of time, Gruen explores works by Jewish historians, epic poets, tragic dramatists, writers of romance and novels, exegetes, philosophers, apocalyptic visionaries, and composers of fanciful fables--not to mention pseudonymous forgers and fabricators. In these works, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us the best insights into Jewish self-perception in that era.

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