Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew (review)

Book Reviews Book Reviews 137 Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew, by Yaacov Shavit. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997. 560 pp. $59.50. The very title of this work is revealing: not Athens vs. Jerusalem or Athens and Jerusalem, but Athens in Jerusalem. The author's goal is to trace the development of the secular Jewish identity of today by noting how secular Jewish intellectuals have come to view classical Greek values not as the antithesis of Jewish values but rather as the values that traditional Judaism lacked and, in fact, as the necessary ingredients for the shaping ofa new Judaism, namely secular Judaism. His conclusion is that these values have been absorbed to such a degree that Athens is now an integral part of Jerusalem for the secular Jew. The book itselforiginally appeared in Hebrew in 1992, but it has been considerably expanded and modified. It is truly a fascinating and challenging study in Jewish intellectual history, particularly from the end of the eighteenth century to the present, with emphasis on such major figures as Wessely, Levinsohn, Zunz, S. D. Luzzatto, Hess, Graetz, Schulman, Smolenskin, Lilienblum,Jawitz, Ahad Ha'am, Berdyczewski, and Klausner. The author has covered a spectrum of a dazzling array of writers and thinkers, and we are most grateful to him for seeking to do so sine ira et studio. The work is written in.an extremely lively and readable style. The danger in such a work, valuable as it is, is that it will, like Matthew Arnold or Heinrich Heine, talk ofAthens as if it were. a monolith and of Jerusalem as if it were a monolith, whereas each is itself a spectrum, even in any given period. Shavit is well aware ofthis danger, as he makes clear(p. 36); and yet almost all the numerous thinkers whom he cites generalize about Hellenism as if there were little or no difference between Homer and Plato; and they generalize about Judaism as ifthere were little or no difference between the Torah and the Mishnaic tractate Avoth. Even within the archaic period, though both write in dactylic hexameters, there is a vast difference in mood between the moralistic Hesiod and the generally amoral Homer. Similarly, there is a vast gulf within the Hellenistic period between the coarseness of Herodas' mimes and the moralism of Zeno. When the rabbis speak of the prohibition of chochmah yevanit, what do they mean by "Greek wisdom"? Do they mean Aristotle, whose name appears not even once in the huge expanse of rabbinic literature and whose influence in antiquity was small? Or do they mean Socrates, who, as Shavit insightfully notes, became a modem Jewish hero during the Haskalah but who again is mentioned not even 138 SHOFAR Fa111998 Vol. 17, No.1 once in the yam ha-Talmud? To be sure, it is tempting to think that the dialectical method associated with the name of Plato may have influenced the method of discussion found in the Talmud, which is so different in style from any of the books of the Bible; but how far beyond the external style did this influence go? True, the Hasmonean kings themselves, ironically, after their initial victory over the Hellenizers, became so Hellenized that Aristobulus I (104-103 RC.E.) actually assumed the name of Philhellene (Josephus, Antiquities 13.318); but even Josephus, not known for his modesty, asserts (Ant. 20.263) that the habitual use of his native tongue prevented his attaining precision in the pronunciation ofGreek. And we may well ask why if learned rabbis such as Mairnonides wrote in Arabic in the Middle Ages, not a single Talmudic rabbi, not even Elisha ben Abuyah, so far as we know, wrote any work in Greek. On the other hand, for the modem period Shavit states (p. 3) that he does not accept the Orthodox view that the modem secular Jew is a Hellenizing Jew like those in the time of the Hasmonean revolt. But this is not the Orthodox view; it is an Orthodox view. Again, the most famous modem literary treatment ofthe contrast between Judaism and Hellenism, Tchernichowsky's "Before the Statue...