– August 31, 1981), also spelled as Bickermann or Bikerman, was a leading scholar of Greco-Roman history and the Hellenistic world.
Bickerman was born in Kishinev, then part of the Russian Empire, to a secular Jewish family.
He left Russia during the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian Civil War for Germany, where he received education from German classicists and Hellenists.
[1] Due to the rise of the Nazi Party to power and his Jewish heritage, he fled to France.
He showed that the Hasmonean leadership were not as anti-Hellenist as often portrayed, at least after gaining a measure of autonomy.