University of Heidelberg

Jews as the Best of All Greeks: Cultural Competition in the Literary Works of Alexandrian Jews in Hellenistic times

Sylvie Honigman
(Tel Aviv University)

The literary works written by Jewish authors living in Ptolemaic Egypt have been extensively scrutinized with a view to discovering what they can tell us about the attitude of their authors towards ‘Hellenisation’. The polarized categories of assimilation (Letter of Aristeas) and hostility (3 Maccabees), religious liberalism and orthodoxy, polemics and apologetics, have long dominated this approach. What underpinned it is a definition of culture as a system delineated by clear-cut boundaries. The very notions of ‘assimilation’ and ‘resistance’ assume that the Jews are outsiders exposed to an alien cultural system. The realisation that culture is an open system with fuzzy boundaries, whose values are appropriated in different ways by different social agents, invites us to reconsider the concepts used to categorize the literary output of Alexandrian Jews.
The present paper aims at deconstructing the dichotomized mapping of these works as either open or hostile to Greek culture by using the concept of cultural competition, recently proposed by Karl Galinsky to study the attitude of Christians towards Roman cultural values. The idea of cultural competition allows us to propose that the Jews perceived themselves as insiders, and not outsiders, in their relations with Greek Alexandrian culture. They did not assert their distinct identity in opposition to Greek culture, but from within it, defining themselves as better than, and even the best example of the Greek, using Greek cultural standards.
I will analyze various texts in which Jewish cultural values are either implicitly or explicitly claimed to be the best embodiment of Greek values. Through a synoptic overview it can be shown that this theme, far from being an isolated oddity, reflects a genuine cultural strategy.