The Jews In The Greek Age

"This is a masterly book by one of the supreme scholars. Elias Bickerman was born in St Petersburg and left in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution to go to Germany, where, as a Jew, he eventually came under the threat of persecution. He was obliged to leave for Paris because the Nazis were in power. He ended up destitute on the shores of America. But he had already been trained by some of Europe’s greatest scholars, and he was fluent in the necessary languages. He was taken into a New York seminary and received by his fellow Jews before ending up as a professor at Columbia. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This stunning book of rare clarity was written over a period of 25 years. In the end, he simply tore up the footnotes because they were out of date, and revised the main text just before his death. He is brilliant on the fascinating but less read body of Jewish literature. These books stand in Christian Bibles as the Apocrypha and are still far too little read. Out of them and others he brings this brilliant sketch of the Jewish world down to about 175 BC, in the wake of the shock of Alexander the Great’s conquests and the emergent Greek power all over the Near East. It was an extraordinary episode of history. He stops on the eve of what will be a decisive conflict, the persecution imposed on Jerusalem under the Hellenistic King Antiochus IV. I think this book is so important because so much of Jewish spirituality and sensitivity that is taken for granted by early Christians actually formed in this period. Bickerman has the commanding grasp of a lifelong expert. He is well aware of all the scholarly disputes about how far Greeks were touched by Jewish culture and how far they weren’t. This is his final reflection on the question and it is quite beautifully written. I will give you one example: texts about the patriarchs on their deathbeds. These ‘Old Testament’ figures speak out and confess that they had been guilty of one overriding sin in their lifetime. One fascinating connection seen by Bickerman is that this sort of confession is a forerunner to St Augustine’s own confessions. With brilliant skill, he shows how the authors of these supposed dying words of the great patriarchs have been touched by a Greek sensitivity. A new emotionalism crept into the stories, none of which has been present in the older scriptures. He draws a brilliant contrast between many Jews’ view of a world created by God and still open to his interference and miracle, and the Greeks’ view of a God who set up the world according to laws like a mechanism and then, on the whole, kept out of it. The entire book is full of food for thought."