William Mehlman

Hellenism didn’t vanish with the Maccabees’ victory over the Seleucids. It was embraced with increasing enthusiasm by several generations of Hasmoneans, the Maccabeean dynasty that ruled Judaea during its brief period of independence and subsequent Roman occupation. It was, after all, Herod the Great, a Hasmonean by marriage, who transformed the Second Temple into a Greek showplace and endowed Judaea with a resplendent Greek theater and amphitheater.

Infatuation with the Hellenic lifestyle wasn’t confined to the Judaean monarchy. The High Priest Jason carried his worship of Athenian culture, if not its polytheism, to the point of declaring Jerusalem a Greek city– “Antioch-at-Jerusalem.”

The ascendance of the Pharisees, forerunners of rabbinic Judaism, as well as the Essenes, was in no small measure a reaction to the general embrace of Greco-Roman culture by the priestly Sadducees and a large swath of Judaea’s wealthy and well-born. Greek speaking, Greek educated, Greek mannered, the Sadducees desperately sought a modus vivendi with the Seleucids, right up to the Maccabeean revolt.

It was Antiochus Epiphanes who threw a spanner into the churning wheels of Hellenization by storming Jerusalem and murdering and enslaving thousands of its Jewish residents on the assumption that they were on the brink of a rebellion against his rule. The “Jewish rebellion” he manufactured (with the invaluable assistance of Jason’s successor, the High Priest Menelaus and a Jewish Hellenized claque) became the Jewish rebellion in fact. All efforts to quell it were doomed by Antiochus’ installation of Zeus Olympius in the Temple, his assault on the Shabbat as an affront to the belief that man (specifically Hellenic man) controlled the world, his ban on circumcision for its alleged desecration of the male body, a Greek icon, and his edict against the sanctification of the New Moon, a Jewish acknowledgement of divinely ordained time that clashed with the Greek concept of man’s control of nature.

With this brutal assault on the very essence of their faith, all Antiochus succeeded in doing was to awaken the quiescent consciousness of a Jewish urban and peasant mass. Its distant admiration of Hellenic culture distilled into hatred, the stage was set for Judah Maccabee and his brothers. Epiphanes’ sobriquet, “Epimane “ – the madman – couldn’t have been more appropriate: those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Antiochus wasn’t the first tyrant to succumb to history’s most enduring siren song – political stability at the expense of a Jewish minority whose ethos is portrayed as a threat to the prevailing culture.

Hellenism’s ghost still haunts us – the idealization of the body divorced from the soul has never been more publicly extolled, the lure of equality with the powers of heaven more ardently pursued, sex, passion, desire more worshipfully glorified--all of what Matthew Arnold memorably described as the “spontaneity of conscience.” It is no longer, however, the Hellenism graced with Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus. Christology might still hold with John’s view of the Word—the Logos–as flesh, but must surely reject, as he would have, science without limits, intellect without a moral compass as the stigmata of the Beast. Athens would have rejected it as the essence of anti-knowledge, a threat to man’s freedom and his dream of touching the stars.

Hellenism didn’t fade away. It morphed into that peculiar philosophy known to us today as post-modernism. The classical scholar Victor Hanson has called this “the marriage of ignorance and arrogance which seems to characterize this generation of…academics, especially in the area of the Humanities… a fashionable mental disorder disguised as pseudo science.”

Post-modernism’s first victim is truth. Since “truth” (always surrounded by inverted commas) is mitigated by language, the post-modernist finds it impossible to determine anything with certitude. In place of truth, he presents us with “narrative.” Where truth, even if it could be defined, is a cold, hierarchical, judgmental exposition of both the beautiful and the ugly, the narrative is warm, communal. sensitive, selective – a tale to be unfolded around the campfire of the vanities with the scary parts artfully excised. In its morphed 21st Century version, Hellenism has reduced us to a “therapeutic “ civilization. Hanson writes: “There doesn’t exist anything real, such as evil. Even death can be mitigated. Perpetual peace is possible. The ‘illegitimate’ sons of the Enlightenment – Marx and Freud – have convinced us that either the State or we, ourselves, can actually change human nature” – given a level of force sufficient to the task.

Ideas have consequences. The 100 million corpses piled up by Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot in their march toward Utopia, Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry in his quest for racial purity all stand witness to those consequences.

What knowledge can we, the anti post-modernist, Zionist camp extract from this disaster that might help us preserve what is still left of Jewish national identity and a dwindling Jewish state? The answer, or a least a clue, might be found in recalling Matthew Arnold’s comparison of Hellenism’s “spontaneity of conscience” with Judaism’s “strictness of conscience.” The Maccabeean revolt was as much a civil conflict between Torah Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism as a defense against Antiochus’ attempt to bleed the life out of Judaism. While there is something to be said for Judaic and Greek culture as joint contributors to Western civilization (the New Testament was a book written in Greek by Jews), Western civilization might have been strangled in its crib without Judaism’s triumphant resistance to Hellenism. Christianity owes its credibility to the stand the Maccabees took 2,200 years ago against a Hellenic tide bent on reducing Judaism’s laws, its traditions, its culture to meaningless parables.

William Mehlman chairs AFSI in Israel