Hellenistic Judaism
Until the early Muslim conquests of the eastern Mediterranean, the main centers of Hellenistic Judaism were Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria (modern-day Turkey), the two main Greek urban settlements of the Middle East and North Africa, both founded in the end of the 4th century BCE in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great.
Indeed, there was firm economic integration of Judea with the Ptolemaic Kingdom that ruled from Alexandria, while there were friendly relations between the royal court and the leaders of the Jewish community.
They plainly did not reckon such activities as undermining their priestly duties.Later historians would sometimes depict Hellenism and Judaism uniquely incompatible, likely the result of the persecution of Antiochus IV.
[11] For their aid against his Ptolemaic enemies, Antiochus III the Great promised his Jewish subjects a reduction in taxes and funds to repair the city of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.
[11] Relations deteriorated under Antiochus's successor Seleucus IV Philopator, and then, for reasons not fully understood, his successor Antiochus IV Epiphanes drastically overturned the previous policy of respect and protection, banning key Jewish religious rites and traditions in Judea (although not among the diaspora) and sparking a traditionalist revolt against Greek rule.
The Hellenic influence pervaded everything, and even in the very strongholds of Judaism it modified the organization of the state, the laws, and public affairs, art, science, and industry, affecting even the ordinary things of life and the common associations of the people [...] The inscription forbidding strangers to advance beyond a certain point in the Temple was in Greek; and was probably made necessary by the presence of numerous Jews from Greek-speaking countries at the time of the festivals (comp.
[23] Initially centered in Judaea/Palaestina, where it became dominant by the third century CE, Rabbinic Judaism expanded its influence to the Jewish diaspora in Babylonia through the efforts of scholars migrating from Palaestina.
The Pauline epistles and the Acts of the Apostles report that—after his initial focus on the conversion of Hellenized Jews across Anatolia, Macedonia, Thrace and northern Syria without criticizing their laws and traditions—[24][25] Paul the Apostle eventually preferred to evangelize communities of Greek and Macedonian proselytes and God-fearers, or Greek circles sympathetic to Judaism: the Apostolic Decree allowing converts to forego circumcision made Christianity a more attractive option for interested pagans than Rabbinic Judaism, which required ritual circumcision for converts.
[28] The attractiveness of Christianity may have also suffered a setback with its being explicitly outlawed in the 80s CE by Domitian as a "Jewish superstition", while Judaism retained its privileges as long as members paid the fiscus Judaicus.
The opening verse of Acts 6 points to the problematic cultural divisions between Hellenized Jews and Aramaic-speaking Israelites in Jerusalem, a disunion that reverberated within the emerging Christian community: it speaks of "Hellenists" and "Hebrews."
[30]Both early Christianity and early Rabbinical Judaism were far less doctrinal and less theologically homogeneous than they are today, and both were significantly influenced by Hellenistic religion and borrowed allegories and concepts from classical Hellenistic philosophy and the works of Greek-speaking Jewish authors of the end of the Second Temple period before the two schools of thought eventually affirmed their respective norms and doctrines, notably by diverging increasingly on key issues such as the status of purity laws, the validity of Christian messianic beliefs, and the use of Koiné Greek and Latin as liturgical languages replacing Biblical Hebrew.
[31] The word synagogue comes from Jewish Koine Greek, a language spoken by Hellenized Jews across southeastern Europe (Macedonia, Thrace, northern Greece), North Africa, and the Middle East after the 3rd century BCE.
Many synagogues were built by the Hellenistai or adherents of Hellenistic Judaism in the Greek Isles, Cilicia, Northwestern and Eastern Syria, and Northern Israel as early as the first century BCE—notably in Delos, Antioch, Alexandretta, Galilee and Dura-Europos.
The collection of the loanwords in the Mishna to be found in Schürer shows the areas in which Hellenistic influence first became visible- military matters, state administration and legislature, trade and commerce, clothing and household utensils, and not least in building.
When towards the end of the first century BCE, Hillel in practice repealed the regulation of the remission of debts in the sabbath year (Deut.
15.1-11) by the possibility of a special reservation on the part of the creditor, this reservation was given a Greek name introduced into Palestinian legal language- perōzebbōl = προσβολή, a sign that even at that time legal language was shot through with Greek.The unique combination of ethnocultural traits inhered from the fusion of a Greek-Macedonian cultural base, Hellenistic Judaism and Roman civilization gave birth to the distinctly Antiochian "Middle Eastern-Roman" Christian traditions of Cilicia (Southeastern Turkey) and Syria/Lebanon: "The mixture of Roman, Greek, and Jewish elements admirably adapted Antioch for the great part it played in the early history of Christianity.
Many of the surviving liturgical traditions of these communities rooted in Hellenistic Judaism and, more generally, Second Temple Judaism, were expunged progressively in the late medieval and modern eras by both Phanariot European-Greek (Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople) and Vatican (Roman Catholic) Gentile theologians who sought to “bring back” Levantine Greek Orthodox and Greek-Catholic communities into the European Christian fold: some ancient Judeo-Greek traditions were thus deliberately abolished or reduced in the process.
In that context, the term Rûm is preferred over Yāvāni or Ionani (literally "Ionian"), also referring to Greeks in Ancient Hebrew, Sanskrit and Classical Arabic.
