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Jewish Aesthetics and the Birth of Humanism

Heritage and Hellenism marks the shift in Eirch Gruen’s career from prominent classicist to public intellectual in the tradition of Steiner, Wieseltier, and Trilling. At the time of its publication, one could have thought it was the latest project of an intellectual preparing for retirement: he had done everything he wanted to do in Classics and now was turning to a pet interest that was marginal to, if not outside of, his specialized field. In fact, as Lawrence Wills comments in his AJS review, ‘‘Positioning himself as the gadfly in his adopted field,’’ Gruen ‘‘describes certain consensus positions of scholars in Jewish Studies and proceeds seriatim to question or deconstruct them’’ (354). Wills notes that Gruen appears to be crossing disciplinary boundaries to discuss a field of which he’s not a part. However, Gruen has since published two more volumes, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2010), which pose not only the key question– how did minorities fare in the cradle of western humanism?–but also asks if such minorities had the means to negotiate assimilation as active agents. Thus his work must now be understood as a critical project in its own right. In 2002, when Heritage and Hellenism came out, it had few important antecedents. Gruen had embarked on a new current of thought or approach, which together with the works of Martin Goodman (1987; 1994) and Robert Doran (1981), has expanded into the vibrant field that it is now. Heritage and Hellenism begins by contextualizing this new approach in relation to Gruen’s previous publications, which almost exclusively dealt with Roman and Greek social relationships (1992; 1995; 1996). His new book was prompted by his earlier exploration of a ‘‘range of modes through which Rome appropriated Hellenism in order to reconstitute its own cultural identity’’ (ix). Thus Rome’s appropriation led ‘‘naturally to a parallel question about the role of Hellenism in the reshaping of Jewish identity in the same era.’’ This opening gambit refocuses the discussion of Jewish identity around the notion that diasporic Jews under Hellenism were accustomed to a subaltern status and therefore ‘‘simply exchanged the suzerainty of the Persian empire for that of Alexander’s successors’’ (xiii). Gruen’s aim is to demonstrate that ‘‘‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’ were neither competing systems nor incompatible concepts. It would be erroneous to assume that Hellenization entailed encroachment upon Jewish traditions and erosion of Jewish beliefs,’’ that ‘‘the notion of a zero-sum contest in which every gain for Hellenism was a loss for Judaism or vice-versa’’; consequently ‘‘adaptation to it [Hellenism] need not require compromise of Jewish precepts or practices’’ (xiv). Gruen applies this question, then, to the task at hand: ‘‘how did Jews accommodate themselves to the larger cultural world of the Mediterranean while at the same time reasserting the character of their own heritage within it?’’ In the introduction, Gruen maps the trajectory of cultural appropriations of the