Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE INVENTION OF THE EXILE 155
tocracies, the established towns and the new poleis felt the new winds bearing
new communications, beliefs, governing technologies, and institutions. The
Greek spirit manifested itself in architecture, burial customs, and linguistic
change, blending with local practices to form combinations that marked a new
cultural age. The fusions that took place in such centers as Alexandria and
Antioch radiated outward and eventually reached Judea.
At this time, Judaism was already undergoing cautious expansion,
and absorbed many new features from Hellenism. Rich and varied cultural
elements, conceptual and material—from the rhetorical and philosophical
ideas of Athens to the wine-jar forms of Rhodes—took root in Jerusalem.
That city took on some quality of a cosmopolitan polis, but it was chiefly the
Judean coastal cities that became Hellenized. The priestly and landed aristocracies
became Hellenized and adopted prestigious Greek names. The temple
that Herod was to build would be in a typical Greek architectural style; after
its fall, even the Passover meal, the Seder, would take on the character of a
symposium—i.e., a Greek feast. 54
The Zionist tradition of professional historiography, especially its popular,
pedagogical sector, presented Judaism as opposed to Hellenism, and described
the Hellenization of the urban elites as treason against the national character
of the Jewish people. At the same time, the religious festival of Hanukkah,
originally a pagan event, was recast as a purely national holiday. The expulsion
and elimination of Jerusalem's Hellenized priests were depicted as marking
the rise of a national kingdom that proudly restored the ancient kingdom of
David. But more substantial historical facts cheekily contradict these nationalized
stories and present a completely different picture of the period.
The Maccabees and their followers did in fact rebel against "unclean" religious
practices and were antagonistic toward idolatrous tendencies. Moreover,
it is possible to assume, cautiously, that Mattathias's devout priestly family
that left Jerusalem was still a Hebrew one, as the sons' names indicate. But the
Hasmonean rule that followed the successful religious uprising was no more
national than was that of Josiah, four hundred years earlier. A political structure
in which the peasantry speaks a different language from that of city people, and
in which these two populations do not use the same language in their dealings
with government bureaucrats, cannot be described as a national entity. In the
second century BCE the rural population still spoke either Hebrew or Aramaic,
most merchants communicated in Greek, and the governing and intellec-
54 See Lee I. Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence?,
Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998, 119-24.