Hellenistic Judaism

Harvard FAS

The ancient Jewish encounter with Hellenism has been a major nexus for Jewish reflection on identity, assimilation, education, and cultural resistance. This seminar surveys our ancient literary evidence for what modern scholars study as “Hellenistic Judaism”—including Jewish literature from the Hellenistic period and Jewish literature written in Greek then and thereafter. How did ancient Jews respond to the challenges of Greek paideia, on the one hand, and Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Roman…