Part 1
The Victorian and Edwardian Background

On the first page of his most substantial work, The House of Seleucus, Bevan evoked the image of a European traveler of his own day, wandering among the barren hills and desolate fields of an unnamed landscape somewhere in “the East.” At first, as he looks around him at the “squalid towns” and dismal “nomads’ huts,” Bevan's European traveler finds himself estranged from the contemporary landscape and its inhabitants, “an alien in the sordid present.”Footnote ⁸ As he looks more closely, however, and begins to make out the “vestiges of imperial splendour” protruding above the ground like “deserted bones,” there is a sudden change. The European becomes conscious of a connection between himself and these “-fragments of antiquity.”Footnote ⁹ The ruins do not seem to be the products of “some strange and enigmatic mind, like those of Egypt or Mexico,” but rather “the familiar classical forms, to which his eye has grown used in his own country, associated in his thought with the civilization from which his own is sprung.”Footnote ¹⁰

This is not the mere recognition of familiar architectural forms or famous ruins by a historically-minded Edwardian, guidebook in hand, on a tour of the East. Although it seems to recall and even to parody Edward Gibbon's melancholy evocation of the Roman Forum in the Renaissance period, “now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes,”Footnote ¹¹ Bevan's traveler has a more vital and a more optimistic connection with the past. The imaginary European intuitively grasps “something of peculiar interest to himself”Footnote ¹² as part of his historical heritage, his tradition, but also, on a deeper level, of his very identity. This sense of “kinship”Footnote ¹³ with the past—or at any rate with certain elements of it—illuminates Bevan's central aim as a historian, which was not only to describe the events and issues of a remote and neglected period, but to show how these actively touched his readers in the present “as students of the world, as Christians and as Englishmen.”Footnote ¹⁴ The past lives on in the present, not merely as a collection of artifacts, but as a vitalizing element in the events, the issues, and even (as we shall see) the people of his own time. It is only this larger context that reveals the continuity of historical events and persons and the underlying principles that both quicken and transcend them. As Bevan pointed out, the Seleucid dynasty's “struggles for aggrandizement and finally for existence”Footnote ¹⁵ are of no special intrinsic interest. Rather, it is the knowledge—looking back from the viewpoint of a European present—that during the Seleucid period “much larger issues were involved”Footnote ¹⁶ that endows the period with its abiding significance and special interest.

Among the very largest of these “larger issues” were the spread, alteration, and preservation of Greek culture. It was the Seleucids who “were called to preside over the process by which Hellenism penetrated an alien world,” and finally, “however feeble and disorganized in its latter days,” it was the Seleucid dynasty that “stood . . . in the breach till Rome was ready to enter on the heritage of Alexander.”Footnote ¹⁷ Within this plotline of cultural transmission, the essential “contributions” of important parties, whole peoples, and “epochs” were assessed and understood in terms of their part in the story of Hellenism—a story both familiar and urgent to nineteenth-century European scholarship—as it penetrated eastwards, “coming into contact with other traditions, modifying them and being modified.”Footnote ¹⁸ This spread and admixture of Hellenism among the peoples of “the Orient” and beyond was for Bevan a drama that was far from concluded. Indeed, from the viewpoint of an imperial power, it touched on matters that were a vital part of Victorian and Edwardian self-definition on a variety of levels—moral, aesthetic, and political. To Bevan, as to many others, it was self-evident that “the civilization which perished with the Greek kings has come back again in the British official.”Footnote ¹⁹

There was also, of course, a religious aspect to this relationship with the past. For Bevan, as for the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen (d. 1884), Hellenism meant “the intermediary and transitional period between classical Greece and Christianity.”Footnote ²⁰ Like many historians of the Hellenistic period, in Britain and on the Continent, Bevan was deeply influenced by the work of Droysen,Footnote ²¹ as we shall see in due course. Unlike Droysen, however, Bevan gave the Jews a central, indeed a unique, place within his narrative.Footnote ²² For if the Western intellectual and political heritage derived from Hellenism, he believed the religious part of that inheritance sprang from a quite different source: “Our religion came to us from Zion.”Footnote ²³ In this regard, Bevan reflected the scholarly attitude of his times in a way that Droysen, even a few decades earlier, had not.Footnote ²⁴ This wider perception of its centrality in the development of Christianity did not necessarily imply a positive attitude towards Judaism. To some scholars it merely underlined the view that Judaism had played its historical part and had been superseded, or it provided an opportunity to contrast the perceived inadequacies of Judaism with the virtues of Christianity. Such views were corroborated by a stereotyped picture of Jewish literalism and legalistic rigor that served as the antithesis to an equally stereotyped version of classical culture. These two principles did not remain rooted in the past, but were incorporated into Europe's sense of its own identity. As Tessa Rajak has pointed out, this idea of “the twin roots of European civilization, the one Hellenic and the other Hebraic,”Footnote ²⁵ had been a familiar conceptual model since the second half of the eighteenth century, arising not only from Christian writers but from Jewish efforts “to construct a Judaism which was part of civil society.”Footnote ²⁶ For both Christians and Jews, the polarities of Hebraism and Hellenism served as cultural signposts by which to navigate the pressing questions of citizenship, emancipation, separatism, and unity.

In England, the most well-known exponent of this polarity was Matthew Arnold, whose Culture and Anarchy (1869) helped popularize the antithesis of “Hellenism” and “Hebraism.” Arnold's most pressing aim was to apply these terms not to their original historical context but to the middle-class British culture of his own time, in which he saw “confusion arising out of the habits of unintelligent routine and one-sided growth.”Footnote ²⁷ What was required, he argued, was a resurgence of Hellenism, that is to say “a free play of thought upon our routine notions, spontaneity of consciousness, sweetness and light.”Footnote ²⁸ On the one hand, Arnold saw Hellenism as the “impulse to find the intelligible law of things,”Footnote ²⁹ while on the other, Hebraism “seizes upon certain plain, capital intimations of universal order, and rivets itself, one may say, with unequalled grandeur of earnestness and intensity on the study and observance of them.”Footnote ³⁰

Bevan was undoubtedly influenced by some of these categories and assumptions, as we shall see. It would be simple enough to view him as a standard caricature of the Victorian gentleman scholar, a type now largely discredited by its associations with the attitudes, values, and history of an imperial age. Edward W. Said named Bevan's brother, the Arabist and biblical scholar Anthony Ashley Bevan, as one of the figures who helped fashion imperial England's scholarly framework, “such as it was,” which Said viewed as little more than “an elaboration of latent Orientalism.”Footnote ³¹ Martin Bernal, who saw Arnold as a Victorian racist “tormented” by the temporary cultural “affinity” between Victorian bourgeois culture and that of the ancient Jews, would doubtless have seen Bevan in a similar light.Footnote ³² It is surely understandable, then, that to Victor Tcherikover, Bevan appeared to be yet another Christian scholar, like Emil Schürer and Eduard Meyer, whose view of Judaism was formed through the distorting lens of their faith.Footnote ³³

Hellenism

To the modern reader, one of the most striking features of Bevan's approach to Hellenistic Judaism is its stirring narrative form. With its large historical canvas, its clear-cut and influential characters, its touches of color, and its dramatic turning points, Bevan's treatment of the subject often seems akin to that of a historical novelist. This reflects Bevan's view of Hellenistic Judaism as one episode—albeit a vitally important one—within the wider story of Hellenism. This is a story that begins with the death of Alexander, as the Greeks “spread their dominant culture” around the Eastern Mediterranean, and from the outset it is a narrative shaped by conflict and resistance. While others succumbed to the Greek cultural hegemony, there was one tradition—and only one—“which did not go down under the predominance of Greece and Rome,” but rather “met them with equal power and showed a unique stubbornness of resistance.”Footnote ³⁴ This was the tradition of Israel. While it might “enter into various combinations with Hellenism,” and even undergo “notable modification,” Judaism also exercised its own decisive influence and “always gave as well as received.”Footnote ³⁵ Finally, in Bevan's view, “Greek intellectual culture and Roman imperial sagacity had to accept the supremacy of a Hebraic religion.”Footnote ³⁶ In a moment, we shall consider Bevan's understanding of this “Hebraic religion,” but first let us consider what he meant by “Hellenism.”

For Bevan, Hellenism was quintessentially “the product of the Greek city-state,”Footnote ³⁷ epitomized in the concept of a rational and ordered freedom. This freedom was most visible in the self-awareness of the individual Greek, who “had grown up with the consciousness of being the member of a free state, a state in which he had an individual value, a share in the sovereignty.”Footnote ³⁸ This sense of individual value did not separate the Greek citizen from the community and the polis, but on the contrary bound him closer to it: “The state claimed him, body and spirit, and enforced its claims, not so much by external rewards and penalties, as by implanting its ideals in his soul, by fostering a sense of obligation.”Footnote ³⁹ It was this consciousness of the state not as an object of fear, but rather of devotion, that “gave force to the laws and savour to the public debates.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Bevan also attri-buted to the political culture of the city-state the development of the Greek citizen's “critical faculty, his rationalism,”Footnote ⁴¹ which, sharpened in the assembly, also helped shape the Greek sense of the “balance of judgment” in the aesthetic realm, that sense of proportion and economy in art “which eliminates the redundant and keeps each detail in its due subordination to the whole.”Footnote ⁴² This rationalism and balance were even more evident in Greek science, not only in specific discoveries but, perhaps more tellingly, in the outlook that produced them, “the Greek method of enquiry.” At the same time, although the training of the gymnasium implicitly carried the danger of narcissism, this was counterbalanced by an “ascetic element which saved its liberty from rankness.”Footnote ⁴³

This drama of Hellenism, however, also revealed a negative side. Matthew Arnold had already pointed to a “side of moral weakness, and of relaxation or insensibility of the moral fibre,”Footnote ⁴⁴ and Bevan, too, acknowledged that although Hellenism's idealized form made it attractive to the high-minded, “its actual embodiment might show all degrees of degradation.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This was visible in the “debased Hellenism” of Syria, particularly in the aesthetic and moral spheres,Footnote ⁴⁶ but on a political level it could already be seen by the fourth century b.c.e, when the combination of freedom and rationalism “began to work destructively upon the institutions which had generated it.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This had two closely related consequences, in the political and religious spheres. Politically, their fierce spirit of independence prevented the Greeks “from coalescing into a great military power” capable of expansion beyond their known borders, and caused individual city-states to be divided in perpetual factionalism.Footnote ⁴⁸ The effects of this political divisiveness were in turn exacerbated by the fundamental deficiency of Greek religion, which “was so mixed up with baser elements, at any rate with crude and primitive elements, that it could not supply such a guide as the Hebrew had in the Law of Jehovah.”Footnote ⁴⁹ For while the Jews “were left at the fall of their state still in the presence of a living God, who claimed their allegiance,” Greek religion, in contrast, was “so damaged by the play of criticism that at the decay of civic morality the Greeks had no adequate religious tradition to fall back on.”Footnote ⁵⁰

External factors also played a part. The Macedonian conquest of the Near East “marked a great epoch in human history,” exploding the localized loyalties and certainties of the polis. “In the old days the life, political and social, of his native city had given the ordinary man all the interest he required; its traditions and public opinion gave him something of a moral code.”Footnote ⁵¹ With the gradual spread of the Greek cities abroad, however, there were “indiscriminately mixed together, not a stable society with fixed traditions, but a crowd of individuals, each out for his own profit in the great scramble.”Footnote ⁵² The individual Greek citizen found himself “much more of a loose atom,”Footnote ⁵³ and it was within this atmosphere of atomization that the development of the great schools gained impetus. In tying the decline of Greek religion to that of the classical polis, Bevan was closely following the analysis of Murray and others, such as J. B. Bury, who saw the development of Greek religion and culture in clearly defined stages. This particular stage, described by Murray in his book Five Stages of Greek Religion as the “Fourth Stage” (in a chapter significantly entitled “The Failure of Nerve”),Footnote ⁵⁴ encompasses the Hellenistic age, which he saw as a period of decay and crisis. “This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece,” wrote Murray, “might not have mattered so much if the form of Greek social life had remained. If a good Greek had his Polis, he had an adequate substitute in most respects for any mythological gods. But the Polis, too . . . fell with the rise of Macedon.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The consequences of this “fall” were far-reaching for Bevan's view of the Hellenistic period, in general, and of Hellenistic Judaism, in particular. For if, as Murray wrote, the Greek's devotion to the polis “lost its reality when the Polis, with all that it represented of rights and laws and ideals of Life, lay at the mercy of a military despot,”Footnote ⁵⁶ then there was a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Macedonian Hellenism: “In truth . . . there was something radically false and incongruous from the start in the position in which the new rulers now found themselves. They claimed to be the champions of Hellenism; they were determined to be paramount kings. The two characters were absolutely irreconcilable.”Footnote ⁵⁷

This fundamental flaw in the nature of the later Hellenism helped to shape Bevan's approach to the crisis at Jerusalem, in part because it appeared to explain the motives of the historical figure most closely associated with the persecution, the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Like Emil Schürer, whose account he followed closely, Bevan echoed ancient sources, especially Polybius, Diodorus, and Livy,Footnote ⁵⁸ to paint a portrait of Antiochus IV as a flawed but nonetheless genuine embodiment of Hellenism. In seeking, as Bevan believed, both to consolidate and unify his inherently unstable realm, and to extend Hellenism eastwards, Antiochus was following in the tradition of the great prototype of Hellenism, Alexander the Great, albeit “an Alexander run wild.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This sense of continuity, however remote, with the cultural heritage of Athens is reflected in the broadly positive, even heroic, assessments of Antiochus among Bevan's immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Schürer, for example, wrote that Antiochus's endeavor “was to advance everywhere the lustre of Greek culture.”Footnote ⁶⁰ To W. W. Tarn, Antiochus was “one of the most remarkable men of his house” who desired “to make of his empire a united people in culture and religion, which could alike only be Greek.”Footnote ⁶¹ Bertrand Russell saw the monarch as a colorful rationalist, “determined to hellenize all his dominions,” who rudely interrupted the “tranquil existence of comfortable self-righteousness” embodied in the maxims of Ecclesiasticus.Footnote ⁶²

Although Bevan contributed to the formation of such views (both Tarn and Russell cited his works in their treatment of the Hellenistic period and the persecution under Antiochus), he was far more qualified in his praise of the monarch, suggesting a Bohemian “unsubstantialness of mental frame” and referring to the “incurable superficiality of his character.”Footnote ⁶³ This gives a clue to the central role of Antiochus in Bevan's narrative, which is essentially to bring the two “principles”Footnote ⁶⁴ of Hellenism and Judaism into a creative conflict, from which would emerge the cultural synthesis—Droysen's Verschmelzung (fusion)—which was an article of faith for so many nineteenth-century scholars of the Hellenistic period. For this, Antiochus needed to be connected, however tenuously, to the heritage of Alexander. To explain the disturbingly un-Hellenic persecution, conversely, the monarch's volatile and ruthless personality would suffice. Once the ground was prepared for this collision of two cultures, Antiochus would fade out of Bevan's account and the emphasis would shift to the struggle between the Jewish factions in Jerusalem.

Judaism

For Bevan, as for so many Edwardian scholars, Hellenistic Judaism conventionally possessed two distinct but complementary aspects: the Judaism of Palestine and that of the Diaspora. For his understanding of Palestinian Judaism on the eve of its decisive encounter with Hellenism, Bevan did not look to archaeology, to sociocultural studies, or to anthropology, but rather to Jesus Ben Sira (-Ecclesiasticus). While “Greek culture . . . effaced all the old literatures of Syria and Phoenicia,”Footnote ⁶⁵ the literature of the Jews—in keeping with their wider resistance to outside influences—resisted this process. Ecclesiasticus, Bevan believed, allows the historian “to lift the veil from the Jerusalem of 200 B.C.”Footnote ⁶⁶ and to see events from an independent local perspective. Bevan saw Ben Sira as a man of shrewdness and good sense, a reliable indicator of “the mental habit, the circle of ideas, which marked the solid central law-abiding mass of the citizens of Jerusalem” in the immediate pre-Maccabean period.Footnote ⁶⁷ Bevan was careful to distinguish Ben Sira from the later, nt image of the casuistic scribe. On the contrary, Ben Sira interpreted the law in terms of “the broad principles which governed the action of individuals and of society.”Footnote ⁶⁸ At the heart of this outlook is the certainty that death “is the end of everything for the individual man,”Footnote ⁶⁹ and an equally firm faith in God's judgment as it is exercised in this world. The ungodly “shall not go unpunished into their grave” (Sir 9:12); their punishment shall consume them “before they die” (Sir 27:29). In keeping with his focus on the present world, Ben Sira stressed the importance of reputation (Sir 41:13), which is the only form of continuity one can hope for after death. Sometimes Ben Sira's outlook could, perhaps, be unattractively harsh. Bevan acknowledged the “repellent coarseness” of Ben Sira's strictures against women and slaves, but compared these to the outlook of “the standard pater-familias of old Rome” and even of Cato the Elder, and balanced the stern injunctions of Ecclesiasticus with the observation that “Ben-Sira is careful to enjoin . . . that a limit in torturing should be observed.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Its author's outlook, on the whole, reflects not the morbid conservatism of a later age but rather the timeless and more robust type associated with the values of respectability, moderation, and prudence, and Bevan saw Ben Sira as “a worthy and honourable man.”Footnote ⁷¹

Just as Antiochus stood as a kind of cipher for the “principle” of Hellenism, so Bevan's Ben Sira served as a label for that opposing principle of traditional Deuteronomic Judaism with which Hellenism would soon come into violent conflict in Jerusalem. Where the unstable and superficial Antiochus embodied the essential hollowness and superficiality of Syrian Hellenism, Ben Sira personified the complacency of a Judaism that was “too smoothly accommodated to the world” and in which Bevan saw “a want of passion, of conflict.”Footnote ⁷² Ben Sira's failing was not that he was “no great original genius,” but rather that he was “content to go on working on the old traditional lines,” clinging to an outmoded pattern of faith that would not prove adequate for the “fiery trial” of the persecution in Jerusalem.Footnote ⁷³

For Bevan, the climactic moment of encounter between Hellenism and Judaism in Judea was the persecution under Antiochus. The experience of persecution during this period “had an effect on the inner life of the Jewish people far more important than its transitory political consequences.”Footnote ⁷⁴ As such, it represented a defining moment in the development of both Hellenism and Judaism:

In this new “epoch,” the agony of persecution “created new human types, and new forms of literature, which became permanent, were inherited by Christendom.”Footnote ⁷⁶ This new human “type” was that of the martyr, and Bevan tied the experience of martyrdom to the development of apocalyptic speculation and the ascendancy of the Pharisees. “It was . . . probably the experience of martyrdom in the great tribulation under Antiochus Epiphanes which had created the receptivity for belief in a life beyond death and a world to come amongst the ‘Godly,’ and amongst the Pharisees their successors.”Footnote ⁷⁷

In his account of the Judaism of the Diaspora, Bevan saw a far deeper and more intimate engagement with Hellenic culture. Although this encounter was also envisaged as one of conflict, its dynamics and its effects were quite different. Bevan shifted emphasis from external events to inner experience, writing of the “inner conflict” of Diaspora Jews, whose struggle with Hellenism was “in a way more difficult than the conflict of the martyrs at Jerusalem.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Whereas the contrast between oppressor and oppressed, good and evil, had been relatively sharp and clear under Antiochus, the Jews of the Diaspora must have found it harder, he believed, “to find the true adjustment between the two traditions of Israel and Greece.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Bevan imagined this conflict within Jewish communities, even within families, as Jews experienced the “pain of conscientious scruples, friction between parents and children, division between friends.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Bevan emphasized the enticements and attractions of Hellenism to the Jews, evoking an image of Judaism under threat through the more subtle absorption and acceptance of Greek culture and language. Bevan contrasted the less hellenized Jews of Palestine, who only possessed “one or two phrases” of Greek, with those who were “dispersed through the cities of the Greek world,” for whom “Greek became their mother-tongue.”Footnote ⁸¹

The focal point of the encounter between Hellenism and Diaspora Judaism was Alexandria, where it had two main manifestations. On the one hand, the aesthetic appearance of Jewish culture exacerbated the perception of Jewish exclusivity, a perception that Bevan blamed for the rise of anti-Semitism. For if many Greek practices seemed abhorrent to Jews, it was no less true that to a Greek “many practices involved in the Jewish religion seemed uncouth, barbarous, ugly—especially circumcision.”Footnote ⁸² In order to defend these practices against increasing hostility, some Alexandrian Jews developed a line of argument that represented them as figurative. Thus circumcision “signified the cutting off of passions and ungodly opinions.”Footnote ⁸³ However, Bevan pointed out that there were logical dangers in such a trend: for if some external practices become merely symbolic, it becomes difficult to maintain that they should be obligatory “for all times and all places.”Footnote ⁸⁴ For this very reason some “Liberal Jews” did indeed—like the hellenizers in Jerusalem—abandon some of those practices that “seemed absurd from the Greek point of view.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The other aspect of Hellenistic Judaism in Alexandria that Bevan emphasized was the Philonic application of Greek gnosis, which he linked to individual moral ascent and inspiration. Whereas Plato, and the Greeks generally, minimized the personal qualities of the “inspired” individual and place the emphasis on the possession by a god, Philo “declare[d] that only a man who has reached the supreme degree of virtue and wisdom can be worthy of becoming an organ for the Divine speech.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Philo's view of inspiration thus mirrored his approach to allegory, seeking to ascend from the letter to the spirit, the material to the spiritual, embodying a moral ascent of the individual toward the ultimate and all-embracing morality of God. Bevan endowed Philo's spiritual ascent with an almost medieval quality of raptus (having been carried off, seized) as “the individual seems to be lifted out of his ordinary life of successive thoughts and feelings,” a mystical experience that, according to Philo, is not “peculiar to any one race or form of religion.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In his approach to individual askēsis (soul-cultivation), Philo drew on Greek psychology to articulate instruction “for the conduct and development of the spiritual life,” and as the “first master” in this line his writings represent “the heritage of Judea and of Greece combined.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Bevan's admiration for Philo was qualified, however, by a sense of the latter's limitations, and these limitations mirrored those of Ben Sira. He pointed to Philo's emphasis (like Ben Sira's) on the present world: his abiding interest “is not directed to the future, but to what God does now in the individual human Soul.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In addition, as with Ben Sira, there is the suggestion of complacency: “In Philo it is all too smooth-flowing, too confidently serene. Had he ever felt, one wonders, the jar of those contradictions which have exercised the greatest thinkers and given to their ultimate convictions a worth which they could not have had, less painfully won?”Footnote ⁹⁰

Part 2
Tcherikover, Bevan, and Bickerman

Victor Tcherikover made several references to Bevan in his Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (1959), where he took a fundamentally different view from Bevan of events in Judea, playing down the religious and cultural aspects of the encounter and placing Hellenistic Judaism instead within a wider context of spreading nationalist movements throughout Asia. Although these brought the native populations of the various Hellenistic monarchies into conflict with their rulers, Tcherikover emphasized that this was not—apart from in Egypt—a conflict against Hellenism as such, but rather a struggle for political and national liberty against those with a vested interest in the political and economic structures associated with a hegemonic Greek culture. Tcherikover's approach, which in some ways can be seen as the antithesis of Bevan's, therefore placed the political achievements of the Hasmoneans at the center of the encounter between Hellenism and Judaism in the second century b.c.e., and this shaped his characterization of Hellenistic Judaism itself.

Tcherikover referred to Bevan in the context of the military expansion throughout Palestine under Alexander Jannaeus, in which Tcherikover acknowledged that the Hasmoneans “showed the Greek cities no mercy,”Footnote ⁹¹ expelling, murdering, or forcibly converting these cities’ inhabitants. In addition to the anti-Jewish feeling that this policy provoked in the ancient world, he believed that “echoes of this hostility can still be heard in the harsh censures of some scholars, who look upon the work of the Hasmoneans as an outburst of the forces of barbarism and of religious fanaticism, whose aim was to destroy Greek culture in Palestine.”Footnote ⁹² He named Bevan as one of those scholars who held such hostile views, manifested in their emphasis on the destructiveness and barbarism of the Hasmoneans toward the classical culture of the Greeks, and quoted a “highly colored”Footnote ⁹³ passage from Jerusalem under the High-Priests in which Bevan described the conquests of the Greek cities of Palestine by Alexander Jannaeus:

In Tcherikover's view, Bevan and other Christian classical scholars presented a distorted picture of Jewish history that “evaluates the political achievement of the Hasmoneans by their destructive acts, and ignores their constructive achievements.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In the same context, Tcherikover also numbered Bevan among the “most important historians” who, in analyzing political developments under the Hasmoneans, emphasized the decline and weakness of Seleucid monarchs, especially after Antiochus IV, as a factor in the ascendancy of the Hasmoneans, rather than “the inner strength of the Jews.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Tcherikover widened his criticisms to take in what he called the “theologian's approach to the Jewish people and its function in history,” a perspective that he argued “has been most consistently expressed by E. Bevan in his book Jerusalem under the High-Priests.”Footnote ⁹⁷ While conceding that the work “was published as early as 1904,” Tcherikover believed that “the approach of the theologians to the Hasmonean kingdom [had] not in principle altered since then.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In the extract reproduced by Tcherikover, Bevan questioned whether “it was not at great spiritual cost” that the Jews had allowed themselves to be “launched . . . upon a career of carnal strife” by the Hasmonaeans.Footnote ⁹⁹ Indeed, while the “anguish of persecution had driven thought and aspiration towards another world than this,” Bevan even suggested that in the course of the subsequent national struggle, the spiritual development of the Jews had been “impeded and confused by the clash of arms and terrestrial ambitions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

As an example of how “deep and contagious” this theological approach was among scholars, Tcherikover pointed to Elias Bickerman, “neither a theologian nor a Christian, but a Jewish historian,” and quoted the final page of The God of the Maccabees (first published in German in 1937): “For the deeds of the Maccabeans are worth remembering forever only because they resulted in the survival of monotheism.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ One senses the sting of this “only” (nur) of Bickerman's, and Tcherikover could not conceal his shock that a “Jewish historian” could have held such views—a fact he could only explain it by attributing it to the “theological influence” of Christian scholars such as Bevan.Footnote ¹⁰²

It is, of course, impossible to know whether Tcherikover was correct about this supposed influence. The putative connection with BickermanFootnote ¹⁰³ does, however, open up another line of approach to Bevan that may enable us to suggest an alternative reason for the similarity between the two scholars in their assessment of the Hasmoneans, as well as revealing important differences. Bickerman was one of the two scholars (the other being Martin Hengel) who arguably did most to reshape modern approaches to Hellenistic Judaism, and specifically to the crisis under Antiochus. Bickerman minimized the importance of Antiochus and argued instead that the religious persecution “originated among the Jews themselves, or, to be more exact, from a party among the Jews who aimed at the reform of the ancestral faith.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The motivation of these reformers, Bickerman argued, was the elimination of that particularism and isolation that the “lawless” Jews, described in 1 Macc 1:11, thought had been so calamitous to their nation. Men like Jason and Menelaus in Jerusalem “wanted to reform Judaism by eliminating the barbaric separatism, which had been introduced only late, and returning to the original form of worship, free of any distortion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although (unlike Bickerman) Bevan still attributed responsibility for the persecution itself to the mercurial Antiochus,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ both Bevan and Bickerman saw the preceding phase of the crisis, the factional struggle in Jerusalem, in the kind of religious and cultural terms rejected by Tcherikover. Once this fundamental similarity is established, there is no need for any “theological influence” to explain their shared attitude to the Hasmoneans, who on this view were not sweeping away a corrupt aristocracy and their bourgeois supporters (as Tcherikover argued),Footnote ¹⁰⁷ but crushing and finally exterminating a Jewish reform movement.

Like the concept of Jewish nationalism, the concept of Jewish reform had irresistible contemporary connotations for twentieth-century scholarship. To Solomon Zeitlin, the Maccabean era “furnished the most glorious pages of Jewish history.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He regarded the Jews who suffered under Antiochus as “the first martyrs in history” and believed that for Jews everywhere their heroism had subsequently been “a symbol of freedom, religious as well as national.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He emphasized the role of Antiochus in the persecution proper, and specifically rejected Bickerman's controversial analogy, in The God of the Maccabees, between the hellenizing party in Jerusalem and the Jewish reformers of the nineteenth century. Bickerman had seen the two movements as strikingly similar:

Where Bickerman saw reformers, however, Zeitlin saw a “Fifth Column” interested only in obtaining the right to mint their own coinage, for which they were ready to relinquish—not merely to reform—Judaism.Footnote ¹¹¹ He therefore found Bickerman's analogy “rather astonishing,” and believed that it “betray[ed] a lack of conception of the spirit of Judaism.”Footnote ¹¹²

In “Hellenistic Judaism” (1927), Bevan had appeared to draw a similar analogy:

What is immediately noticeable about Bevan's comparison, however, is that the long paragraph in which it appears is devoted to Bevan's contemporary world, not to ancient Jerusalem. While Bickerman was looking back to the nineteenth century to illustrate his interpretation of ancient events, Bevan had actually taken the reverse approach, applying the ancient conflict to his contemporary milieu, where he saw not merely a similarity but a striking continuity with the attempts to reform Catholicism and Judaism. It is worth taking a moment to consider these movements.

Catholic Modernism and Liberal Judaism

The Modernist controversy emerged when Catholic scholars such as Alfred Loisy in France and the Jesuit priest George Tyrrell in England sought to apply the principles of higher criticism to both the Bible and to Church dogma. Among those associated with Tyrrell in England was Baron Friedrich von Hügel (d. 1925). Modernists like von Hügel did not wish to sweep dogma away altogether, but rather to “put it through a process of reinterpretation as an expression of the religious life of the centuries through which it was given form.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although they sought to reinvigorate the Catholic Church, the Modernists inevitably appeared to challenge both traditional ecclesiastical hierarchy and Church dogma; in addition, their “respect for science, in their historic criticism, and in their democratic principles”Footnote ¹¹⁵ demonstrated “an altogether untraditional respect for the non-Christian religions.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The papacy reacted robustly, and writings attributed to Loisy and Tyrrell, along with those of von Hügel, were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. In 1908, Loisy was excommunicated, not merely as a toleratus (tolerated individual) but as a vitandus (one to be shunned), while Tyrrell was excommunicated from the Jesuit order in the same year. In September 1910, Pope Pius X imposed the Oath against Modernism for all clergy.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Within Judaism, the question of reform was even more pressing and more complex. In nineteenth-century Germany, the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism) movement and the development of the concept of Bildung Footnote ¹¹⁸ (culture) had, in their different ways, influenced the growth and spread of Reform Judaism throughout Europe and America. In England, however, the pace of change was much slower. Even as late as 1880, “the differences between the Reform and Orthodox services in London were slight.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ A more radical approach emerged in the form of Liberal Judaism, whose co-founder (with Lily Montagu) was Bevan's friend, Claude Montefiore.Footnote ¹²⁰ Montefiore studied at Oxford, where he came under the influence of Benjamin Jowett, who wrote to his student: “Christianity has gone forward; ought not Judaism to make a similar progress from the letter to the spirit, from the national to the historical and ideal?”Footnote ¹²¹

Jowett's views on religion and wider matters were adopted by Montefiore, who saw in them a line of possible development for both Christianity and Judaism, or indeed “a more comprehensive religion of the future, which, under whatever name or label, may include an increasing number of seekers after God.”Footnote ¹²² This gives a clue to the inherently ecumenical nature of Montefiore's approach, rooted in Jowett's view that “each religion has its function and truth, and the one may be a complement to the other.”Footnote ¹²³ Thus in Liberal Judaism and Hellenism, Montefiore wrote that “the Christian culture and conception of life . . . contain some things which are supplementary and complementary to the best and highest Jewish ideas.”Footnote ¹²⁴ In the same vein, Montefiore cited Jowett's view that “religions cannot easily be tribal in any objectionable sense nowadays.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Just as to Modernists like von Hügel dogma had “no aspect of finality, but rather the aspect of continuous evolution, reflecting the evolving forms of life itself,”Footnote ¹²⁶ so one of the defining aspects of Liberal Judaism was its attitude towards the Law. Whereas Orthodox Judaism believed “religious perfection was attained when the Law was delivered” and therefore saw “no need and no possibility of progress and development,” Liberal Judaism, Montefiore argued, “is still alive, and it can still learn and absorb and expand. It does not reject enquiry and investigation.”Footnote ¹²⁷ It was this spirit of “enquiry and investigation” that Montefiore saw as the heritage of Hellenism, and it was for this reason that “Liberal Judaism must Hellenise.”Footnote ¹²⁸

The polarities of Orthodox and Liberal Judaism, and traditionalist and Modernist Catholicism, were laden with an urgent and controversial significance for Bevan, not least because he was personally acquainted with the important figures in each movement. In each case, the contrast was less about specific matters of worship or belief (although reform of the ceremonial and prayer did form a part of Montefiore's program) than about the struggle to modernize, to renew and rediscover the living impulse of the religion in a way that recognized the inner experience of individuals and scoured off the deadening accretions of dogma and authority. By comparing the hellenizing party to the Modernist Catholics and Liberal Jews of his own day, and applying these specific terms to the factional struggle in Jerusalem, Bevan clearly showed that he interpreted this ancient struggle in the same terms, not simply as a resistance to the external threat of Hellenism, but rather as a contest within Judaism itself between the forces of innovation and free inquiry, on the one hand, and authoritarian conservatism, on the other.

This sense of a reforming impulse from within Judaism can be seen in Bevan's emphasis on the role of the Jews: “It is a cardinal fact to be grasped in estimating the policy of Antiochus Epiphanes that the initiative in the Hellenizing of Jerusalem was not on the side of the King, but of the Jews themselves.”Footnote ¹²⁹ It can also be seen in the tone and imagery of Bevan's portrait of the antagonists. There is a note of innocent and colorful frivolity, as if he were describing undergraduate Oxford aesthetes of the early 1900s, in Bevan's portrayal of the “younger members of the Jewish aristocracy” who embraced Greek culture, attended the gymnasium, “eagerly formed a body of epheboi [Greek youths], and flaunted about the streets in the ephebic garb.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In stark contrast to these exuberant youths, the staid and disapproving graybeards who stepped aside for them on the pavement acquire an almost comical sobriety. “You can imagine,” Bevan wrote, “the grief and horror, the consuming indignation, with which members of the Hasîdîm [pious traditionalists] watched those young men stroll by.”Footnote ¹³¹ While acknowledging that among the ḥāsîdîm there was “real piety and high earnestness,” Bevan saw their rejection of these external motifs of Hellenism as largely “the intolerant conservatism with which a primitive people resists any foreign innovation, good or bad, simply because it is an innovation and foreign.”Footnote ¹³² Doubtless, he conceded,

The words “indurated” (literally, “hardened”) and “taboo” are revealing here, evoking both a superstitious resistance to progress and a corresponding blindness to the important aspects of the faith. Once again, Bevan stressed the continuity with events of his own day. “The Turkey of today, like the Jewish Hellenizers of 175 B.C., has thrown over all those parts of the Islamic tradition which seem useless conventions, discarding the fez.”Footnote ¹³⁴ The hellenizers, like the Young Turks, represented an emergent zeitgeist, seeking to modify an outdated and authoritarian piety, to renew their political institutions, and to participate in the wider world. In just the same way, by donning the chlamys (Greek cloak) and the broad-brimmed Greek hat, “Jerusalem had renounced its age-long isolation and come into line with the great Hellenic world.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The “orthodox” party, then, was reacting less to the specific threat from Hellenism than to the shock of the new.

Bevan's similarity to Bickerman in this aspect of his approach to the reformers in Jerusalem also reveals a significant difference, however, as we can see from some of the many criticisms directed at this aspect of Bickerman's approach to Hellenistic Judaism, and at its subsequent elaboration in the work of Hengel. Tcherikover, as we have noted, rejected the idea of any significant religious engagement with Greek culture in Jerusalem, and Isaac Heinemann took a similar view, arguing that there was no sign of a “grave, serious struggle between Hellenic knowledge and Jewish piety.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Fergus Millar has pointed to the lack of “any convincing evidence of the theology of the putative ‘reformers,’ ” and has emphasized “how un-Greek Jerusalem had remained up to that moment.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Louis Feldman has argued that while the nineteenth-century reformers Bickerman cited were “serious religious thinkers who were deeply influenced by earlier and contemporary philosophical and religious currents,” there was no evidence that so-called reformers such as Menelaus and Jason were even intellectuals, let alone the type of men interested in “Greek philosophical or theological or other ideas.”Footnote ¹³⁸

These criticisms all bear heavily on Bickerman because they assault, with considerable success, a central aspect of his approach to Hellenistic Judaism at the time of the persecution: the idea of a preexisting and established stratum of Greek culture within the Jewish community. Their counter-approach was to stress the superficiality, pragmatism, or unevenness of this Hellenism, which weakened Bickerman's case.Footnote ¹³⁹ Bevan's analysis of Hellenistic Judaism in Palestine did not, however, turn on the depth, or otherwise, of Jewish acquaintance with Greek culture (any more than Antiochus needed to be deeply Hellenized). In this sense, his work resembles that of Wilhelm Bousset and Schürer, for whom “Hellenization plays only a secondary role.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ He was almost as skeptical as Heinemann or Feldman concerning the personal character and motives of the main “hellenizers”: “As Jason had intrigued against Oniah, so another magnate, whom we know only by his Greek name of Menelaus, was soon intriguing against Jason.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Indeed, Bevan would probably have agreed with Heinemann in seeing Palestine as a cultural backwater with little exposure to the more sophisticated aspects of Greek culture.Footnote ¹⁴² In the context of the factional struggle in Jerusalem, the important point for Bevan (as for a modern Liberal Jewish “hellenizer” like his friend Montefiore) was not that the Jews should have become faux Greeks, but that they should have incorporated a self-renewing culture of free inquiry and criticism in order to participate in that larger movement of moral and social progress that would have enabled Judaism to embrace modernity. It was within this larger moral, political and philosophical movement that Bevan weighed the importance of Hellenistic Judaism.

Teleology and Historiography

It would be a mistake, in my view, to see this simply as the kind of narrowly Christian teleology that George Foot Moore condemned, as early as 1921, in Schürer, Bousset (both important sources for Bevan), and other nt scholars who viewed Judaism not in its own terms but “as the background environment, source, and foil of nascent Christianity.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Bevan's interest in Hellenistic Judaism clearly did not end with the advent of Christianity but also took its place within a wider dialectic of political and social progress. For Bevan, no less than for Droysen, it was the historical development of successive moral and social forms (“moral partnerships,” in Droysen's understanding) that endowed human history with its periodization and its purpose. As Droysen argued:

Historiography does not stand outside this continuing process but participates in it, as a medium for the intellectual and moral criticism that is essential to humanity's “restless progress upward.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ As “epochs” and “moral partnerships” succeed each other, the purpose of “History” is to render this underlying movement intelligible to each successive age, and in doing so, to continue the process of development. The possibility of such a historical understanding “arises from the kinship of our nature with that of the utterances lying before us as historical material.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For with these “human utterances and creations,” Droysen believed, “we have and feel that we have an essential kinship and reciprocity of nature.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷

A similar hermeneutic shaped Bevan's own “Theodicy of History,” but with an important difference. Droysen never managed to integrate the Jews fully into his historiography, and never came to terms with them as a component in that aspect of Hellenism that related to his own very Prussian, very Christian present; as one scholar has put it, “The emphasis [in Droysen] is invariably on the encounter of Greeks and non-Jewish Orientals: Jews are left out.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Bevan, on the other hand, identified an underlying affinity, or “kinship,” between the Greeks and the Jews, and this informed his understanding of the successive phases of the encounter between them. Citing Hecataeus of Abdera, Bevan emphasized how the Greeks would have seen the Jews’ interest in astronomy as an evocation of pre-Socratic science; their discussion of “divine matters” reminded Bevan—as it would, he claimed, have reminded a Greek—of “the talk in a philosophic school,”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ while the Jews’ physical and military training mirrored classical Greek, particularly Spartan, attitudes toward both the human body and war. Bevan, who was himself a pupil of Aristotle in so many ways, also cited one of Aristotle's pupils, Clearchus of Soli, who wrote of the Jew who “not only spoke Greek, but had the soul of a Greek.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

This Greek-Jewish affinity could be seen in negative forms, too. Bevan's Jerusalem, riven by factions and with ambitious brothers “at daggers drawn,”Footnote ¹⁵¹ mirrored the condition of Athens when the free play of criticism had resulted in such internal strife. The Hasmonean “chieftains” were in many ways simply the antithesis of the Seleucids, cynically posing as the protectors of a debased religious culture in order to promote their own very “worldly” interests, and even resorting, like Antiochus IV, to forcible religious conversion.Footnote ¹⁵² Once again, there is an almost Gibbonian loftiness in Bevan's dismissal of the Hasmoneans:

This was not, however, the result of any anti-Jewish feeling, as Tcherikover thought, but rather stemmed from Bevan's sense of their moral and political bankruptcy, and their association with an outmoded form of “moral partnership.” The investment of absolute political power in the person of an individual monarch, whether Seleucid or Hasmonean, was for Bevan the classic manifestation of failure to escape the perennial limitations of the polis; indeed, the monarchic principle as such was “unfavourable to the development of Greek culture.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Moreover, this was not seen merely in terms of Hasmonean hostility to Greek culture, but equally in their aggression toward Jews themselves. Their political atavism was paralleled in the violent break, under Jannaeus (for whom Bevan seems to have had a particular distaste), with the Pharisees:

The Hasmonean political achievements, then, were ultimately as hollow as those of the Seleucids. The epochal contribution of Hellenistic Judaism in Palestine lay not in external and individual manifestations of power, but in the reshaping effect that the communal experience of martyrdom wrought upon the inner life of Jews. By fusing their unique power of religious devotion, on the one hand, with the related ideas of a life beyond the present world and a pattern of “ends” embedded in human history, on the other, the Jews (and subsequently the Christians) acquired something new: the fused ideas of a divine community and a divine plan, worked out within time, and ultimately leading to a “great consummation.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶

These were ideas that, Bevan believed, were lacking in the Greek outlook, where (like Droysen's meaningless “mountain of infusoria shells”) “the world-process was a vain eternal recurrence, a circular movement, leading nowhere.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ On the other hand, with its stress on voluntary self-negation within a pattern of higher principles, this view of Hellenistic Judaism evokes that sense of ordered interdependence that defined both the polis and its individual citizens, and without which, as Aristotle wrote, one must be “either a lower animal or a god.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In the persecution under Antiochus, this voluntary act of communitarian self-negation took the form of martyrdom; at Athens, in a different epoch, it was articulated in a different form: “The citizens of the old Greek free states . . . found their happiness not in detachment, but in the cause of their civic community, by losing themselves as individuals in the great communal passion for promoting the glory and power of Athens or Sparta or Rome.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ To that ancient “moral partnership,” Hellenistic Judaism had brought the idea of individual and communal progress in history, and to scholars like Bevan and Montefiore it seemed that human civilization had then, in the twentieth century, been presented with a second chance:

This same optimism, with its faith in science and political liberalism, can be seen in Montefiore, for whom the future of a hellenized Liberal Judaism seemed universal and supranational: “Judaism means something super-national, something larger than race, uniting men rather than dividing them.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

The advent of Hellenistic Judaism in Alexandria and Jerusalem, then, seemed to Bevan to mark the evolution of a new form of Hellenism, no longer hollow at the center but endowed with “the abiding Hebrew core”Footnote ¹⁶² of religious devotion. This was the Hellenism that, in its Christianized form, had helped to shape the development of European culture up to Bevan's day. It had not, as yet, solved the original problems and internal contradictions of the polis. In the modern world, however, Bevan believed that with the application of Greek scientific reasoning, the development of modern technology and improved communications, but also with the Jewish “uncompromising fidelity to an ideal,”Footnote ¹⁶³ it was at last possible to combine a supranational civilization, on the one hand, with political freedom, on the other.

Like Droysen, Bevan saw this process as precarious, even reversible.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Historiography could not stand aloof from it, but must play its role in pushing forward this moral and political development. Above all, historiography could achieve it by making the past intelligible, by revealing the underlying principles at work in successive epochs, as Bevan tried to do in works like The House of Seleucus, and by showing the equally vital affinity of Greeks and Jews, as he presented it in “Hellenistic Judaism.” Through membership in the London Society for the Study of Religion, too, Bevan reached out to other faiths and, while remaining a convinced Christian, sought to influence the development of a modern and pluralistic religious culture.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ For although it was the Christian church that “succeeded to the great task of combining Hebrew religion with Greek culture,” Bevan believed the inheritance of Hellenistic Judaism was one that had been preserved not only for the Christians, but for both “the Christians and Jews of today.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Part 3
The Twentieth Century

In almost every area, Bevan's approach to Hellenistic Judaism has been rendered obsolete by changing scholarly approaches and categories. To some extent this can be attributed to the natural process by which any scholarly field develops and renders previous scholarship outmoded. Ironically, it is now possible to see that Bickerman's great first book, The God of the Maccabees, marks a major step in the development of a scholarly outlook that would, with surprising speed, render Bevan's perspective on Hellenistic Judaism obsolete. For in stressing the extent to which Jews were “self-hellenizing,” even drawing on Greek forms in their own national literature, Bickerman both undermined the notion of a Judaism defined by resistance and impermeability to “intellectual” culture and prepared the way for scholars, most notably Martin Hengel, who would seek further signs of Hellenism within Judaism, not merely in the form of Greek gnosis in the Judaism of Alexandria, but within that of Judea itself.

With Bevan's work, however, there is an additional dimension. His approach to Hellenistic Judaism can be seen to mirror that of all writers, ancient or medieval, who have attempted to comprehend history, “its unity, its structure, its goal, the future hope which it promises,”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ and whose teleologies have proved vulnerable to the uncooperative events and currents of history itself. This is particularly true in the twentieth century, when teleologies acquired a bad name, less for the “ends” themselves than for the means that totalizing political systems often employed to reach them.

As we noted at the beginning of this essay, Gilbert Murray thanked Bevan for his contribution to the first edition of Four Stages of Greek Religion (1912). When Four Stages was extended and republished as Five Stages of Greek Religion (in the second edition in 1935), Murray this time acknowledged “my old pupil, Professor E. R. Dodds” for his “interesting observations and criticisms,”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ and it is hard to resist reading a certain symbolic significance into this change. Looking back with a perspective altered by the Second World War, Dodds would later draw an analogy between Socrates and the great Sophists, on the one hand, and, on the other, those Victorians who had had “a vision of progress—of the perpetual onward march of civilization—and for the same cause.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Like the Greeks emerging from the Archaic into what would become the Classical age, the Victorians “had themselves in their formative years experienced progress, swift and indisputable, holding, as it seemed, the promise that human life could be lifted by the exercise of reason to always higher levels of material and intellectual achievement.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ Later still, in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), Dodds would describe the optimism, “pathetic in retrospect, but historically intelligible,” of that “first generation of Sophists, in particular Protagoras,” who thought that “by criticizing his traditions, by modernizing the Nomos [law] which his ancestors had created and eliminating from it the last vestiges of ‘barbarian silliness,’ man could acquire a new Art of Living, and human life could be raised to new levels hitherto undreamed of.”Footnote ¹⁷²

In the postwar world, new patterns of thought and new idioms were emerging, so that the irrational—or, as Dodds called it, “the surd element in human experience”—began to exert “a fascination on the philosophers, artists, and men of letters.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Writing in 1945, only two years after Bevan's death, Dodds called this element “the governing impulse of our time,” and cited Sartre, Kafka, and Picasso as embodiments of this new “δαíμων or Zeitgeist.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In this new epoch, the civic “detachment” that Bevan had regarded with such horror now found a culture and a philosophical idiom of its own, most explicitly in existentialism, but also in a wider suspicion of totalizing narratives and universal “ends.” Bevan's friend and associate Montefiore, who had felt certain that the tide of history was running in favor of Liberal Judaism, lived long enough to confess himself “a disillusioned, sad and embittered old man,”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ attributing the failure of his form of hellenized, syncretistic faith to the rise of Zionism and the Nazi persecutions of the Jews.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ As Dodds remarked in The Greeks and the Irrational, “History has, alas, a short way with optimists.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷

In keeping with a suspicion of science and industrialization came a parallel emphasis, pointed to by Dodds and others, on the ambiguities of Plato's “rationalism,” no longer viewed in terms of the “ordered freedom” and sōphrosynē (moderation), which had been its identifying values for nineteenth-century classicism, but rather as it appeared through the troubling prism of recent historical experience, not of progress but of totalitarianism and mass movements. This new outlook emphasized the later Plato of The Laws, with its darker, more pessimistic tone, its own kind of authoritarian “legalism” designed “to save society from contamination by dangerous thoughts,” and its infallible evocation of “those trials of ‘intellectual deviationists’ with which our own generation has become so familiar.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The “Failure of Nerve” that Bury had identified as a historic missed opportunity in the development of the polis was reinterpreted in existentialist terms, no longer as an event or phase within a wider development of ascent and inevitable decline, but as a constituent element—like the irrational—of both individual existence and human society, particularly in the forms and values of “bourgeois” life, where Greek “fear of freedom” was reconfigured in the new existentialist idiom as ontological “anguish.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹

Later this outlook would be manifested in a general rejection of “imperialist,” “racist” or “phallic” narrative approaches. James McGlew has described how the reader of Droysen “is reduced to the role of silent and awed spectator,”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ but such critiques can also be applied to a philosophical historian such as Bevan, whose approach to Hellenism in its modern manifestations was, though less explicitly than Droysen's, equally bound up with a belief in the military, moral, and cultural power of “Western civilization.” For many postwar writers, this was a civilization that had now “begun to doubt its own credentials,”Footnote ¹⁸¹ and Dodds observed: