Part I

It’s September in Sparta, and the merciless Mediterranean sun beats down on the assembled crowd. The observer picks up a mingling of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases. Pleasantries are exchanged, with promises to keep in touch and strengthen cooperation and friendship and the like. This conference, titled “Sparta-Israel Conference 2018: Renewing an Ancient Friendship,” took place this previous September, and was organized by the Greek branch of the fraternal B’nai Brith Organization.

The advertisers of this conference drew on history and current geopolitical realities to encourage an alliance between modern-day Jews and Greeks. The choice of Sparta as the location for this conference may have been deliberate. The brochure reads:

“At about 300 BC, a wise and long-reigning leader, King Areus of Sparta, sent a letter to the high priests of Jerusalem addressing them as brothers, and proposing a friendly alliance between the two peoples. The Areus initiative and ensuing consistent events are recorded in the book of the Maccabees and the history of the Jewish people by the historian, Flavius Josephus. Following the strong and long-standing symbolism of the above, the Sparta-Israel forum aims to further promote Hellenic-Israeli cooperation, within a worldwide horizon and toward the mutual benefit of the two historical peoples.”

What are these letters mentioned all about?

In the ancient second book of Maccabees, chapter 12, verse 20-23, there is an interesting passage:

“Arius, king of the Spartans, sends greetings to Onias (Chonyo), the chief priest. It has been found in a writing concerning the Spartans and Jews that they are a kinsmen, and that they are descended from Abraham. Now since we have learned this, please write to us about your welfare. We, for our part, will write to you that your cattle and property are ours, and ours are yours. So, we command them to report to you to this effect.”

Josephus also quotes this letter, and also records correspondence between the Spartans and both Simon the Hasmonean and his brother, Jonathan.

The current geopolitical realities that are seeing warming ties between the Jewish state and its non-Arab neighbors in the Mediterranean — particularly Greece and Cyprus — is not without its detractors. Some Greeks are still nursing a grudge against the Jews, it would seem.

In 2014, the Greek political party, Syriza, bumped one of its candidates, Theodoros Karypidis, after the latter alleged that “Nerit,” the acronym of Greece’s new public broadcaster, was derived from the Hebrew word for candle, which he linked to the Jewish festival of Chanukah, which commemorates the struggle of the Maccabees against the Greeks. He then lashed out against the Greek government. “Samaras (the then Greek prime minister) is lighting the candles in the seven-branched candelabra of the Jews,” Karypidis wrote on his Facebook page, adding that Samaras was organizing a new Chanukah against the Greeks.

One of the delicious ironies about Chanukah is that the aforementioned books of Maccabees form part of the Greek Orthodox canon (as well as that of other Christian denominations). This is astounding, when one recalls that the Jews did not preserve those books at all (in fact, all current editions are re-translations from Koine Greek. However, it is also important to note that some rabbis — such as the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu — strongly encouraged the reading of the books of Maccabees on Chanukah).

The Greek Orthodox Church also celebrates a Chanukah of sorts of their own; the commemoration of the “Maccabean Martyrs” takes place on August 1. The church also considers “Antiochus Epiphanes” to have been an impious pagan.

As Jon Douglas Levenson wrote — several years ago — in an article in the Wall Street Journal:

“And so we encounter another oddity of Hanukkah: Jews know the fuller history of the holiday, because Christians preserved the books that the Jews themselves lost. In a further twist, Jews in the Middle Ages encountered the story of the martyred mother and her seven sons anew in Christian literature and, once again, placed it in the time of the Maccabees.”

It is important to note that paganism and worship of Greek gods did survive in Greece up until modern times. In fact, these modern-day Zeus-worshiping Greeks — calling themselves “Supreme Council of Ethnic Hellenes” — have experienced a renaissance as of late. They are not looked at with sympathy by most Greeks to be sure; in 2017, the BBC quoted officials of the Orthodox Church who condemned the neo-pagan movement as “a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion.”

The relationship between Jews and Greece and Greek culture is complicated and nuanced.

In 1999, a book was published titled “Documents on the History of the Greek Jews: Records From the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” In the introduction to this decidedly pro-Jewish and pro-Israel work, its authors, Photini Constantinoplou and Professor Thanos Veremis, give a short overview of the history of Jewish encounters with Greece and Greek culture. They write, “Jewish scholars such as Aristobulus, Jason from Kyrenia, Josephus (who wrote a history of the Jews in Greek) and Philo from Alexandria represented the Jewish spirit in Greek garb. There was, however, a strong resistance to Hellenizing influences from conservative quarters. A break in the interaction of the two cultures occurred in 168 BC, when Hellenized and conservative Jews clashed in Jerusalem. The Seleucids entered the conflict against the conservatives, because the latter challenged the authority of the state.”

Joel Davidi Weisberger is an independent researcher and translator. He runs “Channeling Jewish History” and can be reached at [email protected].