BMCR Review: Bar-Kochva, The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature

BMCR REVIEW:

Bezalel Bar-Kochva, The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature: The Hellenistic Period. Hellenistic Culture and Society 51. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. xiv, 606. ISBN 9780520253360. $95.00.

Reviewed by Jed Wyrick, California State University, Chico (jwyrick@csuchico.edu)

Preview

This volume treats surviving passages about Jews written from 333 B.C.E. - 63 B.C.E. by Gentile Greek authors. It provides remarkable depth to materials that, as a result of the format of previous commentaries and compendia, are often read as discrete, de-contextualized artifacts. It also challenges the prevailing scholarly narrative about these passages, claiming that there was little early admiration of the Jews and no steady increase in its opposite in response to historical events.

One of this work’s virtues, its insistence that “no reference to the Jews in Hellenistic literature should be interpreted in isolation from its context” (p. 146), is closely tied to its principal flaw: its overconfident historical reconstruction of the context of each passage and frequent recourse to an argumentum ex silentio. The work also over-utilizes source criticism as a means to resolve difficulties in each passage rather than making reasonable efforts to consider these difficulties as the result of attempts by ancient historians and ethnographers to reconcile their esteemed sources with new information.

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UPDATE (10 July): More here.