Yeshivat Frisch freshmen in Eitan Kastner’s ninth grade world history class started a new unit this week: Hellenism and the Jews. The unit, which began in perfect time for Chanukah, explores three ways that Jews in ancient Judea interacted with Greek culture following Alexander the Great of Macedon’s conquest of Eretz Israel: coexistence (culturally separate, but peaceful, interaction), syncretism (the fusion of Greek and Jewish culture, otherwise known as Hellenism) and conflict (such as the Maccabean Revolt).

Kastner introduced students to the topic of Ancient Greece and the Jews, noting that Alexander’s conquest involves a “black hole” of 200 years (from approximately 332 to 167 BCE), for which we have scant contemporaneous sources. “We have no sources from that time period, but we do have sources from a little bit later—hundreds of years later,” Kastner explained. “And the sources we have don’t agree with each other.” Students then had the task of comparing two of these later sources, the first from the apocryphal book of I Maccabees and the second from Josephus Flavius’s Antiquities of the Jews.

Later in the week, students read an excerpt from and answered questions about “The Exagoge of Ezekiel,” a play written by an Alexandrian (Greek) Jew in the second century BCE that is considered an ancient literary commentary on the Book of Shemot and the figure of the prophet Yechezkel.