Greeks Vs Jews

A History of Mankind (157)

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During its heyday, Hellenism was the most cosmopolitan set of beliefs and practices ever invented, as it led to trans-continental exchanges and large-scale intellectual enquiry never seen before or since, at least until the Eighteenth Century AD.

In addition, while overwhelmingly Greek in almost every sense, Hellenism wasn’t all that ethnocentric: non-Greeks also benefited from the chance to travel, study and discuss, and to have contact with people and ideas they otherwise would have never interacted with.

Aristobulus of Alexandria, in the Second Century BC, was the first Jewish thinker who tried to reconcile Greek and Jewish notions, even though his claims that Jewish scripture contained everything that Greek philosophy later expounded and that Jewish law had every concept later discussed by Greeks didn’t help him make friends among the Greeks.

A less arrogant Eastern character, Babylon’s Berossos, ended up living in the Greek island of Kos, where he was said to have set up a school of astronomy and astrology; Manetho, the Egyptian priest who wrote the “Aegyptiaca” history of his country in the Third Century BC, couldn’t have completed such an ambitious work (in Greek) without a degree of support by the Hellenistic establishment¹.