Looking at the contacts between Jews and non-Jews in antiquity, we find the same asymmetry which tends to characterize the relations of small elitist groups with their surrounding society. From the Jewish perspective, the idea (so elaborately developed in the Hebrew Bible) that the Jews were God’s chosen people meant that all the “Gentiles” (a Jewish term, borrowed by Christianity and therefore well known to modern readers) were basically the same, and characterized especially by not having any covenantal relations with God, and not even recognizing his supremacy over their “idols.” With such a self-centered perspective so deeply ingrained into the Jewish psyche, it hardly is surprising that ancient Jews showed little interest in the different ethnic or religious groups among whom they lived. They did, of course, develop detailed discourses of what contacts one might or might not have with non-Jews - guidelines which differed greatly from one Jewish group to the next and from one period to another - and they also developed mechanisms for the conversion of non-Jews into Jews, either by force (in the Hasmonaean period) or voluntarily (S. Cohen
1999) . Beyond this, however, they showed little interest in the “Gentile” world, and no penchant for geography, ethnography, or the study of foreign religions (see e. g. S. Stern 1994).
While the Jews were quite convinced of their own uniqueness and importance - the rabbis, for example, had no doubt that the entire world and the whole of humanity were created only so that the Jews could study their Torah - from the Greek and Roman perspectives things looked quite different. Although the Greeks had their own “us”/“not us” dichotomy, they did display quite an interest in “barbarians” (that is, non-Greeks) from a relatively early date in their cultural development, with special emphasis on the highly developed nations to their east. From this perspective, however, it was especially the Persians, the Egyptians, and the Phoenicians who loomed large as ancient nations with numerous cultural achievements and equally numerous vile ethnic characteristics. The Jews came to be noticed by Greek observers only from the mid-fourth century bc onwards, and even then they received relatively little attention (M. Stern 1976-84). Their land was there for all to visit, but Egypt, or the cities of Asia Minor, had far more attractions to offer to the curious tourist. Their sacred writings, and numerous other Jewish texts, were available in Greek for all to read, but few non-Jews bothered to make the effort, and those who did apparently were not impressed by what they found there (only from the late second century AD, and in response to the Christian challenge, did “pagan” intellectuals begin to read the Bible). And while the existence of an extensive Jewish diaspora made the encounter between Jews and non-Jews a daily affair in many parts of the ancient world, it seems that Jews were deemed to have little to offer to the aristocrats and intellectuals who wrote much of Greek and Latin literature. Even what we might see as the Jews’ most conspicuous characteristic - their monotheism - was mostly lost on their non-Jewish observers. From the perspective of the “polytheists” - who did not even know that this is what they were (the word was coined by Philo Judaeus in the first century ad, and was popularized only by the Church Fathers) - the fact that the Jews believed in only one god and refused to worship all the others was, at best, a sign of their obstinate nature; as far as the Greeks could tell, such insistence was not even unique to the Jews (see e. g. Hdt. 4.94). Thus, one could speculate over the identity of the Jewish god, known in Greek as lao, and argue whether this was the Jews’ special name for Zeus, for Ouranos, or maybe even for Dionysos (Bohak
2000) . One could also wonder why the Jews insisted that no images should be made of this god, but even here there was nothing unique, for aniconic cults were far from unusual in antiquity. The Jews’ own convictions notwithstanding, few non-Jews in antiquity found them worthy of special attention, and even when these non-Jews told good or bad things about the Jews, both types of discourse paled in comparison with what they had to say about some of the Jews’ closest, and much more prominent, neighbors (Isaac 2004).
World History
