What question did this study set out to answer?

This article investigates how major 19th-century historians portrayed the relationship between Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism.

December 18, 2015

What Has Alexandria to Do With Jerusalem? Writing the History of the Jews in the Nineteenth Century

Key Points

This article investigates how major 19th-century historians portrayed the relationship between Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism.
Analyzed five influential multi-volume histories published in Britain.
Explored the hierarchical opposition between Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism.
Discussed the influence of Greek and Jew dichotomy in historiography.
Historians constructed Alexandrian Judaism as a betrayal of genuine Jewish identity.
The opposition of Greek-Jew was highlighted as crucial in 19th-century intellectual thought.
The perceived hybridity of Alexandrian Jews was linked to their assimilation into Greek culture.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Histories of the Jews are a fundamental and polemical aspect of Christian and especially Protestant historiography in the nineteenth century. This article considers, in their context, the five most popular and influential multi-volume histories published in Britain, namely those of Henry Hart Milman, Heinrich Ewald, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Ernest Renan (the one significant – lapsed – Catholic historian in the tradition), and Emil Schürer. It shows how each of these major historians constructs an opposition between Alexandrian Judaism and Palestinian Judaism, a hierarchical opposition which denigrated Alexandrian Judaism as a betrayal or corruption of true religion because it depended on an assimilation of Jewishness and Greekness. The opposition of Greek and Jew was fundamental to nineteenth-century thought for a high intellectual tradition (most famously embodied in Matthew Arnold's categories of Hebraism and Hellenism). The Alexandrian Jews become for these historians an icon of a dangerous hybridity – despite the fact that the Septuagint, the Alexandrian Greek Bible, was the Bible of early Christianity. The article considers the different strategies adopted by these historians in response to this constructed opposition of Jerusalem and Alexandria, and its continuing implications for the historiography of the Hellenistic world.

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