The Jews among the Greeks and Romans

by Max Radin

INTRODUCTION

The civilization of Europe and America is composed of elements of many different kinds and of various origin. Most of the beginnings cannot be recovered within the limits of recorded history. We do not know where and when a great many of our fundamental institutions arose, and about them we are reduced to conjectures that are sometimes frankly improbable. But about a great many elements of our civilization, and precisely those upon which we base our claim to be called civilized—indeed, which give us the word and the concept of civic life—we know relatively a great deal, and we know that they originated on the eastern shores of the large landlocked sea known as the Mediterranean.

We are beginning to be aware that the process of developing these elements was much longer than we had been accustomed to believe. Many races and several millennia seem to have elaborated slowly the institutions that older historians were prepared to regard as the conscious contrivance of a single epoch. But even if increasing archeological research shall render us more familiar than we are with Pelasgians, Myceneans, Minoans, Aegeans, it is not likely that the claims of two historic peoples to have founded European civilization will be seriously impugned. These are the Romans and the Greeks. To these must be added another people, the Jews, whose contribution to civilization was no less real and lasting.

The Greeks and Romans have left descendants only in a qualified sense. There are no doubt thousands of individuals now living who are the actual descendants of the kinsmen and contemporaries of the great names in Greek and Roman history; but these individuals are widely scattered, and are united by national and racial bonds with thousands of individuals not so descended, from whom they have become wholly indistinguishable. We have documentary evidence of great masses of other races, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Semitic, entering into the territory occupied by Greeks and Romans and mingling with them, and to this evidence is added the confirmation of anthropological researches. This fact has made it possible to consider Greek and Roman history objectively. Only rarely can investigators be found who feel more than a very diluted pride in the achievements of peoples so dubiously connected with themselves. It is therefore with increasing clarity of vision that we are ordering the large body of facts we already know about Greeks and Romans, and are gathering them in constantly broadening categories.

That unfortunately is not the case with the Jews. Here, too, racial admixture was present, but it never took place on a large scale at any one time, and may always have remained exceptional. However that may be, common belief both among Jews and non-Jews holds very strongly the view that the Jews of to-day are the lineal descendants of the community reorganized by Ezra, nor is it likely that this belief would be seriously modified by much stronger evidence to the contrary than has yet been adduced.[^[1]] The result has been that the place of the Jews in history has been determined upon the basis of institutions avowedly hostile to them. It may be said that historians have introduced the Jews as a point of departure for Christianity, and have not otherwise concerned themselves with them.

There was a time when Greek and Roman and Jew were in contact. What was the nature of that contact? What were its results? What were the mutual impressions made by all three of them on one another? The usual answer has been largely a transference of modern attitudes to ancient times. Is another answer possible? Do the materials at our disposal permit us to arrive at a firmer and better conclusion?

It is necessary first to know the conditions of our inquiry. The period that we must partially analyze extends from the end of the Babylonian Captivity to the establishment of Christianity—roughly from about 450 B.C.E. to 350 C.E., some seven or eight hundred years.

The time limits are of course arbitrary. The contact with Greeks may have begun before the earlier of the two limits, and the relations of the Jews with both Greeks and Romans certainly did not cease with either Constantine or Theodosius. However, it was during the years that followed the return from the Exile that much of the equipment was prepared with which the Jew actually met the Greek, and, on the other hand, the relations of Christian Rome to the Jews were determined by quite different considerations from those that governed Pagan Rome. It is at this point accordingly that a study of the Jews among the Greeks and Romans may properly end.