THE FIRST CONTACT BETWEEN GREEK AND JEW
Jews came into the occidental horizon as part of a larger whole. That
whole was known as Syria. Unfortunately Syria itself is a very vague
term, and is without real ethnographic or geographic unity. It might
include Mesopotamia and all the intervening region between the Taurus
and Egypt. One might suppose that with such a people as the Phoenicians
Greek dealings had been so extensive and frequent that it was impossible
to call them out of their name, but Tyrians too are considered and
spoken of as branches of the Syrians. The name soon became practically a
descriptive epithet, more or less derogatory in its implication.[70]
The lower part of the region between the Taurus and Sinai was known to
Greeks as Syria Palaestina, a name almost certainly derived from the
Philistine cities whose position on the coast and whose origin made them
familiar to traders. The Greeks knew, of course, that variously
denominated tribes occupied the hinterland, but what little they knew
about them did not until somewhat later get into the literary fragments
that have come down to us. Perhaps they would not even have been
surprised to learn that here, as in Asia Minor, a very large number of
peoples had settled and fought and jumbled one another into what seemed
to superficial outsiders a common group of Syrians.
The particular section later occupied by the Jews had itself been the
scene of a racial babel. The Israelites were, by their tradition,
expressly commanded to dispossess Hittite, Girgashite, Canaanite,
Amorite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite.[71] The recurrence of this
enumeration indicates an historical basis for the tradition. It is very
likely that nations so named were actually subdued by the invading
Hebrews. The fact that the tribes dispossessed are seven in number makes
caution necessary in accepting the statement. Perhaps some of these
“nations” are different names for the same group. Some of them, _e.g._
Hittite or Amorite, may be vague descriptive terms, like Syrian or even
Hebrew.
Then there were the Phoenicians, representing perhaps the first Semitic
invasion of this territory. Below them, the Philistines, “from
Caphthor,” who are very plausibly identified with Cretans or “Minoans,”
the Keftiu of the Egyptians.[72] During Mesopotamian and Egyptian
sovereignty, Mesopotamian and Egyptian infiltration may be safely
assumed. The desert never ceased to contribute its share of tribes.
Permanent results of such nomad invasions were the settlement of the
various Hebrew tribes—Moab and Edom in the southeast and Israel on both
sides of the Jordan.
If the analogy of other times and places is to be followed, no one of
these groups was ever completely and literally exterminated. Jewish
tradition knows of an attempted extermination—that of the
Amalekites—only as a very exceptional thing. The resultant
nationalities, which in Greek times occupied Palestine, were likely
enough to have been of somewhat mixed origin. When the Greeks came to
know them well, however, the Jews had long been a well-defined group,
frowning upon intermarriage, although it is not likely that the
prohibition of connubium had its source in any importance attached to
racial purity, or that all Jews everywhere were equally strict in
enforcing it.[73]
As has been suggested, the first contact was probably military. Since
Jews served in the Persian armies as far south as Elephantine, they
probably were equally present in the battalions of Datis and of
Mardonius.[74] Another early contact was in the slave-mart, no doubt
both as buyers and the bought. Enterprising Tyrian traders had made
themselves comfortable in Jerusalem before Nehemiah (Neh. xiii. 6), and
human commodities formed the chief merchandise of most commerce. Before
him, perhaps before the Exile, Joel reproaches the Phoenicians with the
words, “The children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye
sold unto the Grecians.”[75] “Syrus” had become a common slave-name in
Greece in the fifth century, and Syrus might include anything.[76]
All these scattered and uncertain hints do not tend to present a very
clear picture. However, the time was rapidly coming when Greek contact
with “Syria” was to be vastly more intimate.
In the spring of 334 B.C.E., Alexander crossed the Hellespont to carry
out the cherished vision of Isocrates, a united Hellas drastically
stamping out the Persian peril. From the complete success of his efforts
we are wont to date the so-called Hellenistic epoch, the period in which
Greek influences in art, government, and society were dominant. But
Hellenization had in actual fact begun long ago in the domain of art. It
had penetrated central Asia Minor far back in the seventh century
B.C.E.,[77] and the magnificent “satrap-sarcophagus” at Sidon shows how
thoroughly it was appreciated at the very borders of Judea well in the
middle of the fifth century B.C.E.[78] A generation before Alexander the
king of Sidon bore a Greek name.[79]
So the “king of Yavan,” who received the submission of Jerusalem,
passed, on his way to Egypt, among a people to whom the name of Greek
was quite familiar—who had long known of Greek skill in craftsmanship,
Greek prowess on the field of battle, and Greek shrewdness in
bargaining. The new empire, on the dizzy throne of which Alexander
placed himself, seemed to all the East commensurate with the whole
world, and to the kinsmen of the new king of kings and lord of lords all
men were ready enough to grant the deference formerly owed to Persians.
At Alexander’s untimely death it could scarcely have seemed to men that
great changes were impending. On the contrary, the prestige of his
literally miraculous successes, the impress of his powerful and
fascinating personality, continued for a long time. It might be
doubtful—in fact, it must have immediately become uncertain—whether the
persons to whom the actual administration of affairs would fall, would
be of Alexander’s blood. The satraps of the old régime had to some
extent been displaced by the great king’s generals. Every one of these
was convinced that the coveted prize would fall to the strongest or
cleverest or quickest; but for a while a short and troubled truce was
maintained under the shadow of regal authority embodied in the poor fool
Arrhidaeus and the unborn child of Roxane. When the young Alexander was
born, the conditions at Babylon challenged the intriguing of every
court-parasite. Ptolemy, son of Lagos, satrap of Egypt, was the first to
disregard the confused and divided authority of the zany king and his
baby colleague. A general débâcle followed. Palestine suffered more than
others, because it was unfortunately situated on the road to Egypt. But
by about 300 B.C.E. the country was definitely settled as a province of
Egypt, and it entered upon a century of extraordinary and varied growth.
It is just about this time that unmistakable knowledge of the Jews
themselves, as a separate nationality of Syrians, is evidenced in extant
Greek writers. Histories of the nearer and of the remote East,
impressions of travel and concatenation of irresponsible gossip of all
sorts had long been written by Greeks. Some of these may well have
contained reference to the Jews. In the fifth century, Herodotus speaks
of the “Syrians of Palestine” in connection with the rite of
circumcision, which, he claims to know from the testimony of the Syrians
themselves, was derived from Egypt.[80] However, he obviously writes at
second hand, so that we have no means of knowing whether or not he
refers to Jews. That he knew the name Ἰουδαῖοι is not
likely, but the fact that his source was probably a literary one makes
it possible to date the acquaintance of Greeks with the practice of
circumcision in this region, and therefore perhaps with Jews, at least
to the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E.
The peculiar natural phenomena of the Dead Sea attracted the attention
of travelers from very early times. Aristotle discusses it, and after
him—no doubt before him, as well—the collectors of wonder-tales, of
which we have so many later specimens. Interest in the Dead Sea,
however, by no means implied interest in those who dwelt on its borders,
and the story of the bituminous formation on the water and the curious
manner in which it was collected could be and was told without so much
as a mention of the name of Jews.[81]
But they are mentioned, and for the first time in extant Greek writers,
by the famous pupil and successor of Aristotle, Theophrastus of Lesbos.
The passage does not occur in any one of the works of Theophrastus which
we have in bulk, such as the Characters or the Natural History. It is a
quotation made by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyrius, who wrote
somewhere about 275 C. E. The quotation may, in accordance with ancient
custom, be of substance rather than verbatim. Faulty memory may have
further diminished its value for our purposes. When we add to these
facts possible uncertainties in the transmission of the text of
Porphyrius, we are in a fair way of realizing from what dubious material
we must piece our knowledge together.
The passage is in itself, except perhaps for one casual phrase,
strangely unimportant, but as the earliest plain reference to Jews in a
Greek writer it deserves citation in full:
As a matter of fact, if the Jews, those Syrians who still maintain
the ancient form of animal sacrifice, were to urge us to adopt their
method, we should probably find the practice repellent. Their system
is the following: they do not eat of the sacrificial flesh, but burn
all of it at night, after they have poured a great deal of honey and
wine upon it. The sacrifice they seek to complete rather rapidly, so
that the All-Seer may not become a witness of pollution. Throughout
the entire time, inasmuch as they are philosophers by race, they
discuss the nature of the Deity among themselves, and spend the
night in observing the stars, looking up at them and invoking them
as divine in their prayers.
As Reinach points out,[82] there is scarcely a correct word in this
description considered as an account of actual Jewish sacrificial rites.
If we have a correct, or even approximately correct, version of
Theophrastus’ report, he or his informant was curiously misinformed.
This informant obviously could not have been a Jew. No Jew could have
been so ignorant of the customs of his people. Nor did his statement
come directly from any one who had actually witnessed, from the Court of
the Gentiles, even a small part of a Jewish sacrifice. It may well be
that we have before us an inextricable confusion between Jewish and
other Syrian rites. We are left to wholly uncontrolled speculation, if
we are bent on knowing whence Theophrastus derived the assertions he
makes here.
The important words of the passage are found in the casual phrase
ἅτε φιλόσοφοι τὸ γένος ὄντες, “inasmuch as they are
philosophers by race.” The phrasing indicates that this aspect of the
Jews is not wholly new. Word had come to Theophrastus, and to others
before him, of a Syrian people not far from the coast, whose ritual in
some respects—though the transmission is confused as to what
respects—differed from that of their neighbors, but whose customs were
strikingly different in one particular, that part of their divine
observance was some form of theologic discussion. That, as we know, was
a fact, since “houses of prayer”—we may call them synagogues—already
existed. This reference to them is the one kernel of observed fact in
this whole description, however indirectly obtained.
Now the Greeks of the fourth century knew of esoteric religious
communities, and they knew of nations that professed to be especially
attached to religious practices. But groups of mystae engaged in rapt
spiritual converse were never coextensive with entire nations. And
“religious” nations might be simply those among whom an elaborate state
cult was punctiliously performed. Even theocracies were no unheard-of
thing. Sidon was such a theocracy; _i.e._ theoretically ruled by the god
and administered by his priest.[83] But that too was largely formal, not
strikingly different from the patronage of Athena over Athens. The
Jewish theocracy was a more intensely real matter than this, but that
fact could not have been apparent to either merchant or traveler, from
whom in the last analysis the information about Jews before 300 B.C.E.
must have come. If, therefore, Greeks found something in the religious
customs of the Jews that aroused immediate attention, it was the very
general interest and participation of the masses in the theological
discussion as it was carried on in the synagogues.
This fact alone would justify the use of the term
φιλόσοφοι, “philosophers.” Theology, the knowledge of the
high gods, was an accredited branch of wisdom which the Platonic
Socrates strove with a little too palpable irony to elicit from
Euthyphro.[84] Those who busied themselves with it were properly termed
philosophers, whatever may have been the conclusions they reached. If we
venture to assume that the conclusions which the Jews had long reached
were actually known, Theophrastus’ phrase could only have been
confirmed. An exclusive monotheism was in every sense a philosophic and
not a popular concept.
A contemporary of Theophrastus was Clearchus of Soli in Cyprus. Of his
writings none whatever has survived, except quotations in other books.
Among other works he wrote dialogues more or less after the Platonic
manner, in which his master Aristotle is interlocutor in place of
Socrates. One of these dialogues was marked, no doubt as a subtitle,
περὶ ὕπνου, “On Sleep,” and in this dialogue an encounter
of Aristotle with a Hellenized Jew is described.
We need not seriously consider the question whether such an encounter
actually occurred. It is not in the least likely that it did. The only
inferences that may be drawn from this passage are those that concern
Clearchus.
Aristotle is the narrator, and tells his story, as he takes pains to
say, according to the rules formulated in Rhetoric.[85] He had met a man
in Asia, a Jew of Coele-Syria by birth, but Grecized in speech and in
soul. This Greek or Jew voluntarily sought out Aristotle and his
associates, πειρώμενος αὐτῶν τῆς σοφίας, “to find out
whether they were really as wise as their reputation.” On the whole,
however, he had given rather than received edification.[86]
What it was in this man’s conversation that so strongly aroused the
approval of Clearchus we are not told. Josephus, in whose Contra Apionem
we find the passage, ends here, to tell us briefly that the rest of
Aristotle’s story described the man’s great strength of character and
the admirable self-control of his habits of life. It may be suspected
that Clearchus’ Jew is little more than a mouthpiece for his own ethical
doctrines, a sort of fourth century Ingénu, or Candide.[87] But what he
does actually say is of great interest.
We have here the first mention of the capital in the form Jerusalēmē,
introduced, it may be noted, for its outlandish sound. And we have the
statement, curious enough to our ears, that the Jews are descendants of
Hindu philosophers, who bear the name of Jews in Syria and Calani in
India. Elsewhere Clearchus asserts an exactly similar connection between
the Persian magi and the Hindu gymnosophists.[88] It is obvious that
Clearchus has the caste organization of the magi in mind, and that his
knowledge of Jews is as mediate and remote as that of Theophrastus.
The connection of the Jews with India was evidently a hasty conclusion,
arrived at when knowledge came to the Greeks of the existence of castes
whose function was principally religious. The statement is repeated by a
man who should have known better—Megasthenes, Seleucus’ ambassador to
India. “All that has been written on natural science by the old Greek
philosophers,” he tells us, “may also be found in philosophers outside
of Greece, such as the Hindu Brahmans and the so-called Jews of
Syria.”[89] He is of course quite wrong as to the facts. But his
statement is evidence of the wide currency of the opinion that the Jews
possessed a very special and very profound lore. Megasthenes, it may be
noted, does not state or imply that the Greeks were borrowers. If he had
done so, the writer in whose book we find the citation, Clemens of
Alexandria (about 180 C.E.), would have pounced upon it. Clemens was
eagerly searching for demonstration of the thesis set up by many Jews
and most early Christians, that all Greek science and philosophy were
derived from an imagined early communication between Moses and the first
Asiatic philosophers.[90]
Theophrastus, Clearchus, and Megasthenes, all of them belonging to the
generation of or immediately after Alexander, hold largely the same
views. Influence of one of them upon the others is practically excluded.
We may find in them accordingly such knowledge of the Jews as at about
300 B.C.E. had reached educated Greeks.
If we try to imagine how this information reached them, we are reduced
to pure speculation. It does not seem to have been a common literary
source, although it is likely enough that in the numerous histories of
the East, now lost, casual and inaccurate references were made to the
Jews. And again it is not likely that the vastly increased communication
that followed Alexander’s campaign, at once brought the Jews much more
prominently within the circle of Greek interest. In those days, the
land-passage hugged the sea as closely as the sea-passage hugged the
land. Judea was a little inland country, somewhat out of the line of
direct communication between the Euphrates and the Nile. If then the
current views, expressed as they are by Theophrastus and his
contemporaries, had neither a literary source nor one of direct report,
it can only have spread as an indirect, filtered rumor, perhaps by way
of Phoenicians, Syrians, and Egyptians.
As far as Phoenicians and Syrians are concerned, immediate contact with
the Jews must have existed. Tyrians and Sidonians and Philistines are
frequently mentioned in the post-Exilic books of the Bible.[91] This
contact was not wholly hostile, though it was often so; but if these
nations were the sources of Greek information about the Jews, the
hostility is not apparent. Perhaps in the generations between Zechariah
and Alexander it had disappeared. At all events, it would appear that
the Canaanite neighbors of the Jews really knew very little about them,
except that the Jews were the residents of the hills about Jerusalem,
and that they had highly characteristic religious rites—characteristic
principally in the earnestness with which they were performed.
In Egypt, a country that had never ceased to be in communication with
Greece from very early times, and particularly since the founding of a
Greek city at Naucratis, in Egypt itself, about the middle of the sixth
century B.C.E., there had been communities of Jews from times that
antedated the Persian conquest. Into the situation here, newly
discovered papyri at Assuan and Elephantine allow us a glimpse, but only
a glimpse. Even the little we know includes one case of bitter conflict
between Jews and Egyptians.[92] No doubt it was not the only case of its
kind. Egyptians, we may be sure, knew of the Jews in the communities in
which Jews lived, and one might suppose that Greek visitors to Egypt
would at some time stumble across Jews there. However, our extant
sources, which speak of Egyptians often enough, do not seem to have
recognized the presence of foreign elements in the Egyptian population.
It was reserved for the papyri to show us Persians, Syrians,
Babylonians, and Jews established in the land as individuals and in
groups.
The view of the Jews that represented them as a mystical sect did not
cease when Judea became an important political factor in the East. One
Greek thinker particularly had professed so strange and esoteric a
doctrine that his biographers and critics inevitably looked for the
source of it in non-Greek tribes and especially in those who had
otherwise obtained a reputation for wisdom of various kinds. This was
Pythagoras. Some seventy-five years after Theophrastus, Hermippus of
Smyrna, in his Life of Pythagoras, ascribed certain definite doctrines
of the latter to the Jews and Thracians.[93] Pythagoras as a matter of
fact had traveled extensively, and had brought to his Italian home
little fragments of exotic lore variously derived. That his philosophy
was influenced by them, there is no sufficient proof, much less based
upon them, and the general belief that he was so influenced had probably
no sounder foundation than the indubitable strangeness of the rites he
instituted and his personal mannerisms. But in later times Pythagoras
was a name to conjure with for those who were bent on establishing a
connection between the Jews and the Greeks. Hermippus had numerous
imitators among later Jewish and Christian writers.
We shall of course never be able to discover the particular moment that
marked the first meeting of Jew and Greek. The contact that is indicated
in the words of Theophrastus or Megasthenes is already of some duration.
The term Ἰουδαῖος has a definite meaning for educated
Greeks. It denoted a Syrian sect, living together about their
rock-citadel and akin in doctrine and probably in blood to the Persian
Magi and Hindu gymnosophists. More exact information was scarcely
available. The two non-Judean sections where Jews were to be found,
Babylon and Egypt, were themselves strange and only partially understood
regions to Greeks in spite of their long acquaintance with both of them.
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