Rethinking Chanukah: How Jews Claimed Greek Ideals While Preserving Their Own

This lecture challenges the common Orthodox portrayal of Chanukah as a stark ideological battle between Judaism and Hellenism, arguing instead that ancient Jewish sources depict a far more complex relationship, one marked by deep integration, mutual admiration, and strategic boundary-drawing. While political persecution under Antiochus was real, it was not driven by Greek religious ideology, and contemporaneous Jewish and Greco-Roman texts, as well as archaeological evidence, reveal Jews adopting, adapting, and even excelling within Greek cultural forms. There is abundant evidence for suspicion of and hostility toward Jewish practices on the part of Greek and Latin authors, provoking Hellenistic Jewish writers to present the Torah as a philosophical system worthy of Greek respect. The result is a picture of ancient Greek-speaking Jews who confronted hostility not by rejecting Hellenism but by asserting Judaism as a superior or purer expression of the very virtues Greeks prized, turning the Torah into a bridge that both engaged and transformed the Hellenistic world.