CHAPTER VI

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.