Greek education and cultural identity in Greek-speaking Judaism: The Jewish-Greek historiographers

Abstract

The style of the Jewish-Greek historiographers Eupolemus and Demetrius has often been evaluated as “bad Greek.” This is generally seen as evidence of their lack of education. The negative views on the language of Demetrius and Eupolemus are illustrative of a broader issue in the study of Hellenistic Judaism: language usage has been a key element in the discussion on the societal position of Jews in the Hellenistic world. In this article, I assess the style of the historiographers in the context of post-classical Greek, and conclude that their language reflects standard Hellenistic Greek. The linguistic analysis then becomes a starting point to reflect on the level of integration of Jews in the Greek-speaking world as well as to consider the nature of Jewish multilingualism in the late Second Temple period.

Intertext and allusion in Jewish-Greek literature: An introduction

“…First, our scholarly understanding of these authors' proficiency needs to be recalibrated: I have argued for a renewed appreciation of Jewish-Greek authors as postclassical Greek writers elsewhere. 15 Second, one indeed cannot "assume that every Alexandrian Jew wrote Greek as well as Philo did and that everyone in the Land of Israel wrote it as poorly as did the authors of the graffiti." 16 Especially since Greek education is likely to have been more or less similar regardless of location, and because there is ample evidence for Jewish mobility in the ancient world, 17 the issue of the provenance of the writings under consideration is of secondary importance at this point.…”