Title: Heritage and hellenism
First published: 1998
Description: In the wake of Alexander the Great's triumphant successes, Greeks and Macedonians came as conquerors and settled as ruling classes in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Jews endured a subordinate status politically and militarily, a minor nation amid the powers of the Hellenistic world.

Erich Gruen's work, however, highlights Jewish creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness, as the Jews engaged actively with the traditions of Hellas, adapting genres and transforming legends to articulate their own legacy in modes congenial to a Hellenistic setting. Drawing on a wide and diverse array of texts composed in Greek by Jews over an extended period of time, Gruen explores works by Jewish historians, epic poets, tragic dramatists, writers of romances and novels, exegetes, philosophers, apocalyptic visionaries, and composers of fanciful fables - not to mention pseudonymous forgers and fabricators.

In these fictive creations, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us vital insights into Jewish self-perception.
Subjects: Judaism and literature, Jewish authors, Jews, Intellectual life, History and criticism, Hellenism, Greek literature, Judaism, History, Apologetic works, Greek World, Knowledge, Auteurs juifs, Jodendom, Greek, Civilization, Culturele invloeden, Literature, Judaïsme, Joden, Littérature grecque hellénistique, Histoire et critique, 15.51 Antiquity, Ouvrages apologétiques, Post-exilic period (Judaism), Hellenisme, Hellénisme, Judaism, history, post-exilic period, 586 b.c.-210 a.d., Greek literature, history and criticism, Judaism, apologetic works, Histoire, Littérature grecque, RELIGION, Philosophy & Religion
Places: Greece
Time periods: Post-exilic period, 586 B.C.-210 A.D.
LC classification: BM176 .G78 1998