Woodcut of Judah Maccabee at the gates of Jerusalem

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794–1872)The Bible in Pictures

The rabbis of the Talmud asked the question, Mai Hanukkah? What’s this Hanukkah business? I was equally confused when I was a kid. In fact, when I first heard of it, I told my mom, “a girl in my kindergarten class says she’s getting a harmonica. Can I have one, too?”

Mom felt so guilty about my lack of Jewish knowledge that she junked the Christmas tree and enrolled me in Hebrew school the next fall. But I was still confused. Were we fighting the Syrians or the Greeks? Who were the meanies? It turns out that is a complicated question.

Alexander the Great was a Macedonian, but in love with Greek culture. His tutor had been Aristotle. When Alexander  conquered the Mediterranean world, he planted Greek-speaking Macedonian colonies and Greek (Hellenistic) culture everywhere he went. By the time of the Maccabees, everybody who was anybody in the Mediterranean world had become Hellenized, adopting Greek dress, Greek language, Greek customs.

DECIRCUMCISION and other acts of self-betrayal

High Priests of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem took Greek names (Jason in 175 BCE and Menelaus in 172). They built a Greek city (the Acra) next to the Jewish Holy Temple, complete with a gymnasium where Jewish priests and nobles exercised in the nude, a la Grecque. Some even went through the painful cosmetic surgery of de-circumcision — creating an artificial foreskin out of the flesh of the penis. Menelaus declared the pig an approved sacrificial animal and celebrated the festival of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine.

Mattathias and his sons the Maccabees fought a guerrilla war against the Syrian-Hellenist king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had forbidden Jewish worship in the province of Judea. But the Maccabees also targeted the Jewish priests and nobles who were trying to Greekify the Jewish religion.

Hanukkah celebrates the cleansing and re-dedication of the Temple. But the Judean civil war did not end when Judah and his soldiers re-conquered Jerusalem in 164 BCE. Now came a power struggle. As soon as their right to practice their religion had been restored, the pious Hasidim, who had backed Judah, wanted to end the war. Judah kept fighting, to drive out the Syrians and the collaborators among his own people and to consolidate his power. His former allies became his enemies. Jews massacred Jews. Judah was killed by the Syrians when many of his troops deserted. His brother Jonathan took over leadership of the remaining rebels.

After a period of living in hiding and obscurity, Jonathan saw his opportunity during a struggle between rival claimants to the Syrian throne.  He became general of a brigade of tough seasoned Jewish soldiers. He sold their services to the highest Syrian bidder, changing sides more than once. This army enabled him to re-conquer Jerusalem. He had himself named High Priest and governor of Judea by one of the Syrian contenders for the throne.

When Jonathan was killed, his brother Simon took over and was able to secure a measure of independence. Judea no longer paid tribute to Syria. The Jewish elders and leaders, by acclamation, appointed Simon High Priest and prince.

Here’s the paradox: Though the Maccabees restored religious freedom and political independence for the Jews, as leaders Jonathan, Simon, and later Simon’s son, John Hyrcanus, took on the trappings of Hellenistic rulers: cloaks of purple, golden ornaments. Each generation adopted more of the luxuries of the dominant world culture – Hellenism. Sound familiar? Just substitute American culture for Hellenism.

The tension between rulership of the Jewish people and preservation of the Jewish religion persisted when the sons of John Hyrcanus — Aristobolus and then Alexander Janneus — came to power. Shalom-Zion was married first to one of those sons and then to the other. That tension between power and faith defined her life and her rule.

SEX and MONEY were top priorities in Hellenistic culture, with entertainment close  behind. Fidelity was not a big deal in the Hellenistic world. Top courtesans, hetairai, were celebrities, like rock stars. While the lesser hetairai made appointments with their johns by writing with eyebrow pencil on tombstones outside the city, the top hetairai made appointments at society parties. Wives stayed home from these events.

After conquering the Mediterranean world from Greece and Egypt in the west to the Himalayas in the east, Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, before his 34th birthday. Three of his strongest generals divided the major part of his empire among themselves: Ptolemy in Egypt, Seleucus in Syria, and Antigonus One-Eye in Macedonia and Thrace. The Ptolemies and Selucids imported their own Greek-speaking elite, worshipped Greek gods (and themselves) and created a Hellenistic culture that never became part of the peoples they ruled. Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemy ruler, was the first to speak Egyptian.

Want to find out more about sex life in Hellenistic society? My source was John Marlowe, The Golden Age of Alexandria, 1971, available in university libraries. To find out more about MONEY and ENTERTAINMENT in Hellenistic society, check out my next two blogs.

]]> https://thequeenofthejews.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/after-alexander-the-temptations-of-hellenism/feed/ 0 thequeenofthejews Joshua_Reynoldsre_thais https://thequeenofthejews.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/josephus-not-your-ordinary-joe/ https://thequeenofthejews.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/josephus-not-your-ordinary-joe/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:43:24 +0000 thequeenofthejews http://thequeenofthejews.wordpress.com/?p=34 ]]>

The Queen who ruled Judea in the first century BCE was called, in Hebrew, Shulamit. She was married to descendants of the Maccabees. Her Greek name was Salome Alexandra. (At the time of her reign, in the ancient Hellenistic world, all of the elites spoke Greek.) But the people of Judea, who loved her, called her Shalom-Zion HaMalka, the Queen of the Peace of Zion.

(I’ve included a portrait of Shalom-Zion from 1553 CE. But there were no portraits from her time. As a pious Jew, she would not have permitted a “graven image” to be made. The coins of Judea had no human or animal images.)

The only record that Shalom-Zion lived and reigned are the few pages written by the first-century C.E. historian Josephus.

Josephus himself was rather an odd duck. He was a Jewish commander in first-century Galilee during the Jewish revolt against Rome. When the Romans over-ran the citadel he commanded in 67 CE, he hid in a cave with forty of his men, and persuaded them that since Judaism forbids suicide and they did not want to surrender, they should kill one another. He did his calculations well. He was the sole survivor. He did not kill himself.

Captured by the Romans, Josephus ended up marching with Roman general Titus against Jerusalem in 70 CE. His wife and parents died during the siege while Josephus served as a negotiator for the Romans. Afterwards, he became a Roman citizen, added Roman names to his own, and was given a pension. He recounts these actions in four books in Greek, his autobiography (Life of Flavius Josephus), The War of the Jews, Jewish Antiquities (the history of the Jews from Creation to his own day) and Against Apion.
Whatever his personal faults may have been, Josephus was a great and painstaking historian. Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer followed Josephus’ description and was able to locate and unearth Herod’s tomb. Yet the books of Josephus reveal him as caught in the middle — defending the worth of Jewish religion and culture to anti-Semitic Romans and his own worth to Jews who considered him a traitor. He described the pursuit of peace as the motive of all his actions. He bragged about being loved by the Galileans, while describing the many plots against him. He boasted of descent from the highest rank of Temple priests on his father’s side. On his mother’s side he claimed to be related to the Hasmonean dynasty – the very dynasty that brought Shalom-Zion to power.

The comments Josephus made about Shalom-Zion are so contradictory that I’ve had to work hard to piece them into a coherent whole. Perhaps Josephus was ambivalent about women. His first wife died in a siege while he worked for the besiegers. His second marriage ended in divorce after four years (though his third marriage was happy).

Josephus described Shalom-Zion as pious but ruthless. He accused her of framing her brother-in-law, General Mattathias Antigonus, causing him to be killed. She was imperious, Josephus said, and “had no regard to what was good or right.”

On the other hand, Josephus accused Shalom-Zion of being a mere pawn of the Pharisees.  “She governed other people,” said Josephus, “and the Pharisees governed her.”

Yet he also comments that she “showed no signs of the weakness of her sex.” She increased the army by half, hiring many mercenaries, “till her own nation became not only very powerful at home, but terrible also to foreign potentates.”

She “preserved the nation in peace,” said Josephus, but left it on the brink of calamity.

I began to reconcile these contradictions by realizing that in the Hellenistic era, a woman ruler had to embody a lot of contradictory qualities. This was the age of Cleopatras. I’ll tell you more about that next week, in the next installment of my blog.

Just after I’d met my husband Steve, but before we’d started dating seriously,  I made a quick trip to Israel. I wanted to see the Sinai before it was returned to Egypt. It was astonishingly beautiful –ribbons of multicolored rock rising above vast sweeps of desert sand. But I couldn’t go to the Sinai without spending some time in Jerusalem.

I was walking down King Solomon Street toward King David Street, when suddenly I found myself looking at a sign that said, in Hebrew, the street of Queen Shalom-zion. A Jewish queen? Why had I never heard of her?

I married Steve a year after I came back from that trip. We’ve lived together for nearly thirty years. I’ve spent the last thirty years writing two books, raising two kids, and getting ready to write the story of Shalom-zion.

For seven years, I’ve been researching, writing, rewriting, and rewriting. I’ve traveled to Jericho and walked through the scant remains of a palace she built. I stepped on a mosaic floor I’m sure she stepped on. There was a bench where she must have reclined, alongside a swimming pool where she probably swam. The only witnesses were my guide, a goat nosing among the weeds, and the sand sifting across a pattern of pink and blue stones.

I’ve looked for references to Shlomzion in Jewish sources and found almost nothing. So little remains of her reign that I’ve wondered if all traces were deliberately wiped out. When you hear her story, you may agree with my suspicions. Yet the Judaism we know today, the Judaism of the rabbis, might not exist without her intervention.

Next week, in my next blog entry, I’ll tell you how I began to track her down.

JUDY PETSONK REVEALS (ALMOST) ALL

Dear Friends, Fans, Feminists, Lovers of Historical Fiction and of all things Jewish,

Consider this your invitation to a virtual publication party.

For seven years, I’ve been secretly doing detective work. I’ve hinted at it, but I’ve kept the subject of my investigations a secret. Now, all will be revealed.

Before I can reveal, I’ll ask you to participate in a little quiz.

First, did you know that before the Roman conquest Judea was an independent nation?

Second, did you know that for 36 years, that nation was ruled by a charismatic queen?

I’ll be telling her story in my forthcoming novel, Queen of the Jews. It will appear on Kindle shortly and later, in print at Amazon.com. Though you can’t yet hold her book in your hands, I want to introduce you to my queen so that you will give her a royal welcome when she appears. On her Facebook page (Queen of the Jews) and her blog, http://thequeenofthejews.wordpress.com/and (soon to be thequeenoftheJews.com), I’ll tell you how I puzzled out the story of the most influential, and most forgotten, woman in the history of the Jewish people.

Judy Petsonk

Cleopatra I, daughter of the Syrian king Antiochus III, was betrothed as a child to Ptolemy V of Egypt.  Her husband died suddenly at age 27 –poisoned, according to some. Her son Ptolemy VI was only five at the time. For eight years she ruled Egypt as regent.  Following the Egyptian custom of brother-sister marriages, her oldest daughter, Cleopatra II, married  brother Ptolemy VI and ascended to the throne when he was 14 and she was 19.  yoTheir younger brother tried to overthrow their rule. When her husband died, to remain on the throne Cleopatra II had to marry this brother who became Ptolemy VIII. A hugely fat man who preferred boys and prepubescent girls, immediately after the wedding he  seduced and later married Cleopatra II’s pre-pubescent daughter, who became Cleopatra III. CII was then known as the sister-queen, and Cleopatra III as the queen-wife. Cleopatra III’s reign briefly over-lapped the reign of Shalom-Zion. As you’ll see in my next blog, this shrewd and ambitious and ruthless pair were archetypes of everything Shalom Zion detested about the decadent Hellenistic era: hypersexual, lavishly and gaudily self-indulgent, fascinated by the grotesque and bizarre, but — an era, in other words, not so different from our own.