The shifting intellectual climate of nineteenth-century Britain can be mapped through a string of strident public arguments, which turned certain books into icons to defend with passion or to condemn with vehemence – and which have become viewed, then as now, as notorious turning points in nineteenth-century cultural life. From David Strauss's Das Leben Jesu Footnote ¹ to Essays and reviews Footnote ² or from Chambers's Vestiges of creation to Darwin's Origin of species,Footnote ³ these iconic volumes provoked extensive, heated public debate about the relation between church and state, about the status and authority of the holy scriptures, and the consequences for individual self-positioning afforded by such challenges to the inherited authority of religion – that is, about religion's historical justification of social normativity in an age of rapid and contested change.

So, when Arthur Stanley, dean of Westminster, and a dominant figure in the intellectual establishment of England, writes in the 1870s of the hostile reaction to a book, published in 1829 and republished in 1863, that ‘It may be doubted whether any subsequent tumult or obloquy has been more passionate’, we should listen very carefully indeed.Footnote ⁴ In his eyes, there is another candidate for the most provoking, religiously scandalous volume of the era. Its publisher, John Murray, also recalled that it stimulated a ‘tempest of disapprobation… Sunday after Sunday [it] was denounced from University and other pulpits in most unmeasured language’.Footnote ⁵ The author's son recalled that to his father, an Anglican clergyman, ‘bishops…suddenly became cold, became hostile, averted their faces, raised their hands’.Footnote ⁶

So what was this book? It may come as a surprise to learn that it was Henry Hart Milman's two-volume History of the Jews, a book now hardly read or remembered.

This article has three aims. First, it will recover why Milman's History of the Jews could be thought to be even more challenging than Strauss or Chambers, and to trace the subsequent intellectual debate about Jewish history that stretched over the century, and which involved some of the leading religious historians of the era, including Stanley himself. My focus is on Britain, and here I will look at the five most authoritative and widely read contributions – but this focus inevitably also involves Britain's relation to the religious history written on the continent and especially in German institutions, which was dominant in the field.Footnote ⁷ The debate about the history of the Jews became invested also in national models of historiography, and, even more importantly, with developing ideas of race and nation in which the Jews played a unique role. The history of the Jews, as a question, goes to the heart of the constructed narratives of nations and people that were fundamental to the historical self-consciousness of the era.Footnote ⁸ What's more, this religiously inflected historiography is intimately connected with insistent political debates about Jewish emancipation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the restoration of the Jews, a practical ideal dear to some Protestants from the 1840s at least.Footnote ⁹ The history of the Jews is an arena where religion and politics, as well as literature and theology, heatedly overlap in the nineteenth century. To explore the significance of the historiographical genre that could be labelled the History of the Jews is the first aim of this article. It is a genre which, despite the significance of the questions it raises, has been systematically ignored in burgeoning contemporary discussions of nineteenth-century historiography.

My second aim, however, is to analyse how one particular question with which nineteenth-century writers became concerned reveals in the most telling manner the ideological perspectives that structure this debate. The opposition of Jew and Greek – as contrasting ideals, modes of thought, origins of value for Western culture – is a central trope of nineteenth-century intellectual writing from Moses Mendelssohn, through Hegel, Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, Marx, and Freud.Footnote ¹⁰ Because of this polarizing opposition, Hellenization became a newly critical issue.

Hellenization had been from the beginning a polemical matter for Christianity, which was formulated in conscious opposition to the dominant Greco-Roman culture of the Roman Empire, but which rapidly also appropriated styles of Greek philosophy through neo-Platonism in particular, as well as modes of Roman social thinking. The paradox of Greekness for Christianity is encapsulated in the fact that for Greek-speaking Christians the standard term for ‘pagan’ is Hellên, that is, ‘Greek’: the very language of Christianity became fissured against itself. Tertullian could ask rhetorically ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’, but, to his chagrin, it proved quite impossible to separate the forces of Hellenized culture and the rise of Christian dominance.

But for the nineteenth century, the question took on a different perspective. Romantic Philhellenism, an idealism central to the revolutionary fervour in the early years of the century, by the end of the century had been institutionalized into a more conservative classical education, which set the study of antiquity at the heart of the curriculum across Europe.Footnote ¹¹ Greece and Rome provided the furniture of the mind for the Victorian educated classes. Yet Christianity, with its self-conscious opposition to the values of Greco-Roman culture, remained the dominant source of spiritual value throughout the nineteenth century, and the institutions of church and state formed the privileged network of power in Britain. How did the passion for Christianity and the passion for Greek idealism find accommodation together? What was the privileged source of Western cultural value – the Bible or the classics? How should the history of Christianity understand its own Hellenizing past?

One paradigm of this tension is a short book written by Prime Minister Gladstone which attempted to reconcile Homer and the Bible as signs of God's Providence, a work which in the wake of Schliemann's discovery of Troy sold over 120,000 copies to a clearly engaged public.Footnote ¹² In Britain, between 1840 and 1914, more than 200 novels on early Christianity and its place in antiquity were published, exploring this issue imaginatively for a broad public.Footnote ¹³ In Germany, by contrast, Adolf von Harnack, the leading Protestant theologian, determinedly viewed Hellenization as a ‘foreign substructure’ in Christianity, something that ‘secularized’ its religious simplicity and truth, even already in the Gospel of John.Footnote ¹⁴ This was provocative from such an authoritative theologian, not least because of the genealogical link repeatedly forged between Germany and Greece, where Germans could emerge as ‘the New Dorians’ – a genealogy that made Greece a privileged origin for the values of German culture in nineteenth-century German thinking.Footnote ¹⁵ In multiple, complex negotiations between accommodation and resistance, the question of Hellenization remained integral to and problematic for Christian self-representation, especially as the origins and purity of Christianity became such a vexed issue of religious identity.

This interest in Hellenization took a particular shape with regard to the history of the Jews. There could be no doubt that Jesus and the Christian religion that followed him was intimately bound up with the Jewish society of Palestine in the first century. How, then, was the Judaism of the first century to be understood in relation to the processes of Hellenization? And, in particular, how was the Judaism of Alexandria to be comprehended? There is a great deal at stake for nineteenth-century thinkers here. On the one hand, there is an investment in seeing the Jews as a pure, stubborn, resistant race, whose rejection of Jesus justified centuries of Christian disdain and violence. These Jews were conceived to be without the privilege of Greek culture and untouched by Philhellenic ideals. On the other hand, the Bible that the Gospel writers used was the Septuagint – a Greek translation by Jews from the Greek city of Alexandria. So how Jewish, how Greek were the Jews? This question makes Alexandria a critical question in nineteenth-century histories of the Jews, and to explore how the idea of Alexandria unfurls in nineteenth-century historiography is my second aim.

My third and by far the briefest purpose in this article is to investigate the long legacy of this debate on the history of the Jews – also largely unrecognized in current historiography. The act of cultural forgetting that has made these nineteenth-century histories seem now quite out of date can also reveal a blind spot in the current historical imagination of Hellenistic Judaism.

So let us begin with the reaction to Milman's History of the Jews. A flavour of the ‘unmeasured language’ which surprised its publisher can be garnered from a frequently repeated anecdote of Christopher Earle who boarded the coach from Oxford to Evesham on a Monday. The coachman asked him if he had been in church on Sunday to hear the sermon of Godfrey Faussett, who was the then Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, and a polemical, and not very bright, High Church ideologueFootnote ¹⁶ – and lamented that he had missed a corker. ‘Dr Faussett was great, sir’, the coachman announced, ‘He did give it to that Mr Milman. He said, sir – and I am sure it is true – that “since the days of Julian the Apostate there has not risen a greater enemy to Christianity than Mr Milman”.’Footnote ¹⁷ Milman had anticipated that ‘wise heads will shake at my views’ of what he called ‘sainted and canonized nonsense’, but everyone was taken aback by the virulence of the opposition.Footnote ¹⁸

So what was all the fuss about? There were two major reasons why Milman provoked the pious so pointedly. Stanley is clear about the first reason. Milman was shocking because this was the ‘first decisive inroad of German theology into England: the first palpable indication that the Bible could be “studied like any other book”’.Footnote ¹⁹ It is worth recalling the intellectual and religious context of 1829 to appreciate the impact of The history of the Jews. The translation of Niebuhr's History of Rome (1828) by Julius Charles Hare and Connop Thirlwall can stand as an icon of the battle-lines that were forming in British intellectual and religious circles in these years.Footnote ²⁰ Niebuhr's account of Livy was a founding text of critical history, in the rhetoric of the day often set parallel to Wolf's analyses of Homer, and Strauss's unpicking of biblical texts.Footnote ²¹ Not only did Niebuhr's critique show the level of myth and legend in Livy's history of early Rome, but also suggested that the beginnings of mankind were complex enough to indicate that creation might have taken place in different places – and polygeneticism was incompatible with biblical narratives and its consequent ideologies. Hare and Thirlwall were liberal luminaries, closely connected to Grote and Baron Bunsen, and, through marriage, Hare was related to F. D. Maurice, teacher of Charles Kingsley and others in the Christian Socialist movement.Footnote ²² Niebuhr's history thus came trailing clouds of Liberal progressivism, and he was in consequence virulently attacked by the conservative and orthodox as a ‘pert, dull scoffer’, whose work was ‘pregnant with crude and dangerous speculations’ which led ‘ungovernable youths [to hold] democratic meetings’.Footnote ²³ Both his supporters and his enemies, however, agreed that Niebuhr's history of Rome spoke to the contemporary politics of church and democracy.Footnote ²⁴ With Niebuhr, Strauss, and Wolf, there was a deeply held sense that the Germans were coming. In particular, the threat of so-called rationalist critiques, not just of ancient history but also especially of the texts of religion from antiquity, was perceived as a major threat to the establishment of church and society alike.

Indeed, Dr Faussett, in the published version of his sermon against Milman, though in print he does not liken him to Julian the Apostate, he does make him a harbinger of ‘the unhallowed speculations of German rationalism’, and thus, in the words of another critic, ‘extremely defective in the moral and religious instruction which the annals of this wayward nation ought undoubtedly to convey’.Footnote ²⁵ Faussett's particular anxiety is that Milman rationalizes away miracles, which is decried as the most damaging aspect of the lamentable attempt to separate history and theology. You cannot tell the story of the Jews without miracles and without God, screams Faussett: ‘Exclude the agency of Heaven, and their whole story is obscure and inconsistent and incredible.’Footnote ²⁶ Interestingly, Milman thought such a charge ridiculous: ‘the often repeated charge of following the Germans is rank nonsense’, he wrote to John Murray, ‘Except in one passage, where I have given different opinions…there is not one explanation of a miracle borrowed from a German divine.’Footnote ²⁷ But this did not stop the High Churchmen railing against Milman's German rationalist tendencies – and the book sold very well on the back of such controversy.

The second reason for the outrage concerns the image Milman provides of the early Israelites. He depicts them as an oriental tribe, and this demystifying turn towards the fantasy of realism proved genuinely upsetting. Here is Stanley again: ‘Those who were but children’ – that includes himself – ‘can remember the horror created in remote rural districts by the rumour that a book had appeared in which Abraham was described as a “sheikh”.’Footnote ²⁸ There is a double concern here. On the one hand, the origins of Western Christianity are located in the East. This was a time when a man could be prosecuted for suggesting that Christianity's sources might be found in Egyptian or other Eastern cultures. Robert Taylor was imprisoned in Oakham gaol for the ideas he later expressed in his book Diegesis, and he defiantly scrawled on the walls of the prison, ‘Everything of Christianity is of Egyptian origin.’Footnote ²⁹ Whether the Jews, and with them, the Hebrew Bible, should be thought of as Eastern, raises an awkward question for the racialized origins of Western values. On the other hand, this East is depicted resolutely as a Bedouin tribe – not the grandeur of palaces or the dignity of lonely hermits. This was all too close to the lower castes: you might as well put Abraham in a green turban, one critic sniffed – although Disraeli's Tancred (1847) demonstrates how such tribal imagery could be used in a more positive way. Milman's depiction threatens to confuse the holy race of the Israelites, origin of Christianity, with the real Jews on the street, poor and despised. The two are not to be mixed up. Londoners called their street urchins ‘Arabs’,Footnote ³⁰ and a minister of the church should not depict the founders of Western religion in a manner which brought them too close to such impoverished humiliation.

One final point on Stanley's description of Milman's shock value. It provided, he said, the ‘first palpable indication that the Bible could be “studied like any other book’’’. Stanley puts inverted commas around ‘studied like any other book’. In his biography of his father, Milman's son quotes this passage, but leaves out the inverted commas.Footnote ³¹ This may not be just a misprint. The phrase ‘studied like any other book’ evokes one of the most provocative phrases in a previous battle over liberalism versus conservatism in British religious life. In Essays and reviews (1860), Benjamin Jowett, avid reader of Baur and Hegel, wrote an article called ‘On the interpretation of scripture’, in which he scandalously suggested that the Bible could be ‘read like any other book’/‘interpreted like any other book’ (Stanley has misremembered the phrasing as ‘studied’). The phrase became a red rag to High Church traditionalists. His challenge to the unique, inspired, holy status of the text of scripture indeed was instrumental in Jowett's professorial salary increase being successfully resisted by the High Church dons of Christchurch for several years.Footnote ³² For Stanley, quoting this outrageous headline is a coded way of linking Milman into the battles of thirty years later, showing how he was ahead of his time, an ancestor of his friend and master of his undergraduate college, Jowett: it creates a liberal genealogy, in which Stanley will claim his own place. By 1900, however, when Milman's son finally published the biography, it is unclear whether the phrase meant anything to the son, his imagined audience, or the editor, and the inverted commas and the marking of the unattributed citation slip off the page.

So, Milman's History of the Jews is important first of all because of its paraded place in the genealogy of Victorian liberal religious thinking. But, it also opens a fascinating perspective onto the topic of Judaism and Hellenism for contemporary polemics – indeed, it provides a founding portrait of Alexandria and its place in the history of the Jews that sets the intellectual agenda for a century or more of historiographical writing. For, perhaps the most startling paragraph in Milman's History is this:

This paragraph is remarkable first of all because it is one of only a handful of paragraphs in more than a thousand pages to discuss Alexandria and its Greek Judaism.Footnote ³⁴ By contrast, Schürer, with whom we will finish, takes fully 600 pages to cover the same primary sources. There are some short, dismissive passages elsewhere, and there is the set piece of Philo's embassy to Caligula – set in Rome and involving a conflict with Rome, which barely mentions the embedding of Philo in a Greek rather than an imperial cultural context.Footnote ³⁵ But from Milman's writing, a reader would get little idea that Egypt was the second largest Jewish community in all the empire for several hundred years, and Alexandria was the biggest urban population of Jews. This was the community that produced the Septuagint, the Greek Bible that was the Bible for the writers of the Gospels, and a host of religious texts, from Ben Sirah to the Exagoge of Ezekiel, that one might have thought important to a historian. ‘We pass unwillingly’, he writes with supreme disingenuousness, ‘over their controversies with the Egyptians and the Greeks, and the curious union of Grecian philosophy with the Jewish religion, which prevailed in their schools, as these subjects belong rather to the history of Jewish literature than to that of the Jewish people’.Footnote ³⁶ Milman wants Alexandria to be a restricted area, it seems, for the historian of the Jews: therefore Jewish ‘literature’ is to play no role in the history of the Jewish people – an idea doubly bizarre for a historian whose account is so based on the Bible. He does not even mention these Hellenistic texts – except for a brief mention in the history's final chapter that the Septuagint was the Bible of early Christianity. ‘Literature’ as a term works here to separate the truly religious and historical text of the Bible from the texts of the Apocrypha, the Greek translations or non-canonical works which are neither genuine religion nor history, but mere ‘fiction’.

The paragraph I have cited also gives clear and telling reasons for the ideological stance that produces Milman's pointed silence. First of all, Alexandria is seen as a religious rival to Jerusalem. This proposes two models of Judaism in conflict with one another. In Palestine itself, the nation was wrapping itself – as if in a prayer-shawl or phylacteries – with ‘hard, impenetrable Judaism’. Judaism in nineteenth-century discourse is repeatedly described as ‘obstinate’, ‘hard’, ‘stubborn’ because of its rejection of Jesus as the true messiah. This founding and incomprehensible act of refusal creates the essential and essentialized other to the self-definition of the Christian, as one who has accepted, taken into their hearts, the gentle Jesus. Rabbinical Judaism – with the added slur of obsession with law, intricacies of observance, triviality of argument – is for Milman starting here well before the destruction of the Temple, in a mirror of the foundational myths of rabbinical Judaism itself. The opposition between Alexandria and Jerusalem, however, is also undoubtedly hierarchical. The nation in Jerusalem – and this is a nineteenth-century comprehension of the nation, for sure – is the proper nation, the great body of the nation, and Alexandria is thus marginalized as a side-channel, a mistaken route.

The cause is also clear. Alexandrians ‘dally’ with Greek influences; they speak and write in Greek; they translate and allegorize in an attempt to harmonize with Greek philosophy. They mix, corrupt the pure stream of religious identity with another culture. Or, as Milman puts it in a wonderfully telling phrase, they ‘entered into a treacherous alliance’. Hellenism is a betrayal, a treachery, an alliance to be ashamed of. On the one hand, this might be thought to rehearse the familiar arguments of the Book of the Maccabees, alluded to in Milman's final phrases, that Judaism must resist Hellenism to survive. Thus, the Maccabean revolt can be seen as the nation's triumph: ‘Among those lofty spirits who have asserted the liberty of their native land … none ever united more generous valour with a better cause.’Footnote ³⁷ As the Jews of Palestine resisted Greekness, so the Jews of Alexandria embraced it. The Maccabean ideology has been rewritten into the nineteenth-century ideal of the nation, as the now proper framework to understand the history of the Jews, as religion, racial, and national narratives overlap. Alexandrian Jews are resident aliens, who speak a foreign tongue and ape foreign social and literary forms. On the other hand, this opposition between Alexandria and Jerusalem also helps establish a broader historical narrative. Because the Hasmoneans in Palestine resisted Greekness and because the Jews of the first and second rebellion resisted Rome, there is established a pattern, whereby the Jews of Palestine are constructed as a nation whose role it is to resist the enemy – but to be destroyed by Rome because of their obstinate resistance to Christianity. Thus, the history of Judaism in Milman's perspective is also a teleological narrative. So here already, some two centuries before the Gospels, the opposition between Alexandria and Jerusalem is overlaid by a further opposition, between those few who will accept Jesus – the interjection ‘alas! but a few!’, with its double exclamation marks, tells you how to read the story – and the many who will use their hard and impenetrable wrappings of religion to perform the obstinate rejection of Christianity.

Milman had told the crucial juncture of this story before in his long dramatic poem, The fall of Jerusalem, published with some success in 1820. The plot line is one that a string of second-rate novels would also use later in the century.Footnote ³⁸ While Titus's troops muster for the final murderous assault, a Christian – in this case a Jewish convert, Javan; in later novels often a Roman – falls in love with a Jewish girl, whose family are zealots, in this case Miriam, daughter of Simon the Assassin. Javan is a significant name: although it has biblical authority – a son of Japhet (Genesis 10:2) – it is also the usual biblical and Talmudic Hebrew term for ‘Greek’. We should be unsurprised that the Jew who has become Christian was already called Greek. Inevitably, the Jewish girl too in these plots discovers the truth of Christianity and converts against the wishes of her family, destined for destruction for their rejection of the Messiah and opposition to Rome. In Milman's case, Miriam and Javan survive because (vi) ‘the constant tradition of the Church has been, that no one professing that faith perished during all the havoc which attended on this most awful visitation’. The Roman general Titus admires the city and its Temple, but is moved by a strong sense of fate which rehearses some of the more brutal rhetoric of Christian denigration of the Jews:

Titus is made unwittingly to anticipate the supercessionist narrative that makes the destruction of Jerusalem necessary to bear witness to the obstinate failure of Judaism. Jerusalem is ‘consecrate to ruin’ – it is a sacral story of impending fall. The arguments about the emancipation of the Jews turned back to religious history for justification.

It has become a familiar critical argument that this narrative of Christian, and, in particular, evangelical Protestant, self-definition is played out and hardened in many ways through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, with a full panoply of anti-Semitic stereotypes, matched by a full glorification of Hellenist idealisms.Footnote ³⁹ But my specific concern here is how the idea of Hellenistic Judaism in Alexandria becomes a crucial problem in this story. For if the purity, stubbornness, and resistance of the Jewish people is an integral element of the historical and theological portrayal of the development and triumph of Christianity, Alexandrian Jews, speaking Greek, engaging with philosophy and allegory, changing their names and ways, are a confusing and awkward element in the story. They are betrayers of the narrative, in their treacherous alliance.

Milman's answer therefore is first ‘to pass over’ these Egyptian Jews, by barely discussing them; and second, to construct them as treacherous and thus dismissible outliers to the proper nation, the great body of Israel, even if it means bizarrely declaring that the history of a people's literature is separable from the history of a people – when almost the entire set of sources he consults are textual. For Milman, Hellenistic Judaism is at best an embarrassment, at worst the betrayal of an ideal.

Milman's work was widely read and continued to remain influential into the twentieth century, in particular through the new edition of 1863, reprinted into the 1940s. For Stanley, its influence was because of its place in a genealogy of liberal religious history, central to the shifting cultural and political values of Britain across the nineteenth century. Its influence was most profound, however, in defining the terms in which the image of Alexandria and first-century Judaism was constructed and debated. It is this tradition I will now trace.

Milman's work was never regarded as a masterpiece of scholarship. The great mid-century work, which did receive the plaudits of the profession, was, perhaps inevitably, German.Footnote ⁴⁰ The outstanding orientalist Heinrich Ewald's eight-volume Geschichte des Volkes Israel appeared between 1843 and 1859, with a third edition completed in 1868. It was translated as the History of Israel from 1867 onwards. We should highlight immediately the significance of Ewald's title. Milman wrote of the Jews, Ewald of ‘the people or nation of Israel’ – das Volk is a charged term in this era, fully utilized, as we will see, in Ewald's narrative. Focusing on Israel allows him to tell a story not of different Jewish communities, but of the idealized religious antecedents to Christianity in a hugely detailed narrative based on the texts of the Hebrew Bible that ends teleologically in volume vi with Jesus, followed in volume vii with the Apostolic Age, and, in something of a rush, the remaining history of the Jewish people is included in volume viii as the Post-Apostolic Age. There is no place for a Jewish history outside the Christian narrative.

Ewald was deeply interconnected with the intellectual elite of his country, and also deeply involved in polemical liberal politics and theological controversy. He was taught by Eichorn amongst others, and taught Wellhausen and Robertson Smith amongst others. Despite a ‘high squeaky voice and jerky delivery’, and a fierce professorial, inquisitional manner, he was a revered and loved teacher, at least in memoriam.Footnote ⁴¹ He was one of the seven professors at Göttingen who signed a letter of protest against the abrogation of the liberal constitution by the king of Hanover, and he lost his job as a result. He engaged in public political polemics throughout his life, with a fierceness and even rashness that led on one occasion to a court case, and this contentiousness stood against what his pupils described as a generous and pious character.

Ewald is also intricately intertwined with our developing story. He was a friend of Thomas Arnold, Stanley's teacher and mediator of German historiography to Britain; and of Baron Bunsen, the diplomat and scholar who brought German thinking into the centre of British society, not least when his work was reviewed by Rowland Williams in Essays and reviews; Ewald visited Rowland Williams in Wales in 1862 at the heart of the Essays and reviews crisis. Dean Stanley, when he was a student on his first German tour, button-holed him in an inn in Dresden, and found him the most impressive of all the luminaries he came to meet – to the extent that when Ewald died, Stanley both preached the only memorial sermon the great scholar received, and also arranged to have a bronze medallion, with the profile of Ewald in relief, set into his tombstone – and Wellhausen had a copy of this medallion in a prominent place in his study.Footnote ⁴² Renan was typical of the glowing evaluations of Ewald when he wrote extravagantly ‘After [him] nothing more remains to be said in the specialist field of Hebrew literature’; Kamphausen called him ‘distinctly the greatest Old Testament scholar and investigator of the century’.Footnote ⁴³ Milman himself in the preface to his 1863 edition singled out ‘the great work of Ewald’ as ‘the most important, no doubt, as the most comprehensive’ of the many books on Jewish history published since his own first appeared. Few today would place Ewald in such an exalted position in the field of biblical or Jewish studies. Already by the end of the century he was seen as ‘too liberal for the orthodox, and too uncritical in his textual analysis for the liberals’.Footnote ⁴⁴ But in mid-century Germany he was a central figure as a liberal polemicist, and thus as a German authority to be celebrated – used – by the liberal elite in England. Consequently, his many contacts in Britain aided the widespread and very positive reception of his work, and his history was much admired and broadly circulated in England as the authoritative academic account of the history of the Jews for its generation.

Ewald was opposed to the rationalism of Baur and Strauss, which he saw as damaging to religion and destructive of providential history, but he was equally opposed to orthodox and traditional theology with its failure to look at textual history adequately. His polemical liberalism, which was crucial to his ready reception by Milman and Stanley and others of like mind in Britain, was precisely poised: he rejected the conservative orthodoxy of the German establishment which continued to avoid or dismiss modern critical thinking, but also rejected the high theory of Baur and Strauss which worried even liberal Christians because of its apparently dangerous implications for a religious faith. Ewald was the German Stanley and his friends needed.

Ewald used the texts of scripture critically to tell the history of Israel as an ancient nation. ‘Ancient nations are generally distinguished’, he wrote, ‘by a greater restriction as to space and place…One consequence of this excessive self-enclosure of each nation … was that each more easily took up some characteristic aim or activity of its own.’Footnote ⁴⁵ So what is the characteristic aim or activity of ancient Israel? Nothing less than ‘Perfect Religion’.Footnote ⁴⁶ He distinguishes tellingly between Hebrews, Israelites, Jews – ‘the people itself being a different one in each of these periods’Footnote ⁴⁷ – but what is at stake in the narrative first and foremost is the journey towards ‘the ultimate attainment of perfect true religion’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The hint in the word ‘true’ indicates the teleology: the search for perfect religion may be hard, but ‘this one people alone, at the end of a two-thousand year’ struggle, actually attained it’. ‘This history… comes to its close with Christ.’Footnote ⁴⁹ The importance of the history of the nation of Israel is in its Christian fulfilment. That each nation has a Sonderweg, a unique path to its fulfilment, is paradigmatic of much German thinking of this era.Footnote ⁵⁰ The history of the Jews plays a foundational role in the Christian and German history of the nation.

So what place does Alexandria and the writing of its Jews play for Ewald? Ezekiel's Exagoge, the fragments of Artapanus, and Lysimachus appear first of all – bizarrely enough – in volume i, briefly and dismissively discussed under the general heading ‘Egyptian views of the Exodus’.Footnote ⁵¹ His image of life in Egypt, however, may seem at first more ameliorative than Milman's: ‘Wherever the Judaeans went, they carried with them their ancestral faith, and the particularly tenacious and inflexible pride which was so closely knit with it.’Footnote ⁵² Indeed, for Ewald, the lines of influence may even be reversed: ‘the ancient community of Israel had also much to offer the better and wiser Greeks’.Footnote ⁵³ But Ewald too adopts the striking double strategy of both passing over the Jews of Alexandria, and dismissing them as worth passing over in the name of a bigger and clearer opposition elsewhere. So his brief discussion of Hellenistic Jewish writings and society outside Palestine concludes: ‘the position and general life of the numerous Judaeans scattered among the heathen still attract, however, little attention in comparison with the question whether the new spiritual elevation…in the centre of the Holy Land’ would triumph.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is quite clear that ‘genuine religion’ is ‘Judaeanism’ and has its place in the centre of the Holy Land. Jahvenism, as he calls the religion of the Second Temple period, is opposed to heathenism – the polytheism and culture of Greece or the Greco-Roman Empire – in ‘hostility and mutual desire of destruction’, in the journey towards ‘the great new era towards which the whole age was aspiring’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Consequently, the Hasmoneans again appear as the icons, locked in conflict with a heathen Hellenism, as ‘the pure elevation of [the nation's] noblest days’. He sums up the Maccabean revolt with these ringing and telling words: ‘The Judaeans of the Holy Land, under the guidance of valiant and sagacious leaders, seemed now to be winning lasting reverence and fame among the peoples of the earth.’

Ewald's laudatory readers were aware that his ‘whole being quivered with sympathetic emotion as he described the men and movements of ancient Israel… He saw the fate of his beloved Hanover adumbrated in Israel, the elect people, despised, rejected and oppressed by the Gentiles (=Prussia)’.Footnote ⁵⁶ So in a rare moment of explicitation he writes in the preface to volume iii of the History, ‘Will the people of Berlin and of other parts of Germany learn what good government is? What is the good of history if it teaches not?’ The English translator, in turn, explains that he has quietly removed all references to local politics, since they will be of little interest to the English reader. As with Niehbuhr or Grote, ancient history is for the nineteenth century a fundamental platform from which to preach a political narrative of modernity.Footnote ⁵⁷

Ewlad thus mirrors Milman: Alexandria's Jewish community is opposed to the Palestinian community and spiritually and politically marginalized by the Hasmonean revolt, separated from the journey towards true religion, which the Christian teleology demands, and from the purity and despised rigour of incipient rabbinical Judaism. As with Milman, in Ewald's eight volumes of nearly 700 pages each, there are but a handful of pages on Hellenistic Judaism outside Palestine and little on the writings of Jewish Alexandria. Ewald's scholarly apparatus and management of detail was praised for lifting the level of debate, and thus willingly adopted as an authority by Stanley and Milman – but he was celebrated by Stanley and Milman also because his ideologically laden image of Alexandrian Judaism is continuous with the model inaugurated by Milman.

Ewald, however, unlike Milman in England and most German-speaking Protestant theologians, found himself in conflict with Jewish scholars, and, in particular, Abraham Geiger, although they began by admiring each other's scholarship and methodology (Geiger, predictably, is granted no place in the chapter on ‘Controversies’ in the Ewald's Centenary Celebration).Footnote ⁵⁸ Ewald criticized Geiger because he ‘does not want to see the weaknesses in the history of Israel that become revealed through Christianity’,Footnote ⁵⁹ and rejected Geiger's arguments that the Pharisees were not hypocrites. Geiger certainly has his own axe to grind in his increasingly confrontational approach both to Christianity and to orthodox, Rabbinical Judaism, but Ewald's attempt to write the history of the Jews as ‘the history of Christ’Footnote ⁶⁰ could not brook a less than fully teleological reading: ‘It is futile’, he wrote, ‘to try to understand the history of the people of Israel correctly if one disregards Christianity.’Footnote ⁶¹ Geiger retorted by accusing Ewald of portraying the history of Judaism after the rise of Christianity as ‘only a ruin’.Footnote ⁶² The animosity between the two scholars deepened, and in the third edition of his History of the Jewish people, Ewald added a peevish and malicious footnote: ‘The views of Jewish writers of the present day (heutigen Juden), Geiger and Grätz (and also Jost), on the origin and value of the Pharisees and Sadducees are wholly unhistorical and baseless because they are themselves nothing but Pharisees and do not intend to be anything else.’Footnote ⁶³ What is at stake in the history of the Jewish people is always the religious and political here and now, and thus the historian's place in modernity. Ewald's accusation is not only that these Jewish writers are in a direct, genealogical, ideologically biased line with the tradition of the Pharisees and consequently in opposition to the Gospels, but that in their unwillingness ‘to be anything else’, they are re-playing the race's rejection of Jesus – as well as criticizing himself, equally unforgivably. Ewald's Alexandria is an integral part of his polemical position as a modern, Protestant theologian.

My third great historian of the Jewish people is Dean Stanley himself. Stanley wrote one of the most popular tour-books of Sinai and Palestine, and was, in this guise, trusted by Queen Victoria to guide the prince of Wales on his tour of the Holy Land. He published the sermons he had delivered on the trip to show how a prince's education is to be directed by a deeply English, broad church, liberal Anglicanism, surefooted in the literal and metaphorical journey between England and Jerusalem.Footnote ⁶⁴ He was a liberal in politics too. He even slyly allowed a Unitarian to take communion at a service for the translators who were producing the Revised Version, much to orthodox shock.Footnote ⁶⁵ Stanley was as embedded in the establishment of Britain as it was possible to be.Footnote ⁶⁶

His Lectures on the Jewish church was published in three volumes from 1863, with a third edition as late as 1883. It too prompted virulent criticism from evangelicals: ‘Broad-churchism is only the jackal of infidelity.’Footnote ⁶⁷ His subject, we may note, is ‘the Jewish church’ and not the people of Israel, nor the Jews. ‘The Jewish church’ as a title does two jobs of work, at least. First, as a phrase it is utilized specifically to link, compare, and contrast Christianity and Judaism in a supersessionist narrative, performing its supersessionism by using a term, ‘church’, that Jews do not use of their own institutions or history, to enforce the appropriative embedding of Judaism within a Christian history. Renan is explicit, ‘By founding the Church’ – his term for Alexandrian Judaism, separate from the Temple of Jerusalem – ‘Judaism was preparing its own revolution’ – Christianity.Footnote ⁶⁸ Second, and this may be particular to Stanley, it encourages him to offer something akin to the sort of ecclesiastical history, and the range of expectations of such an institutional history, with which Stanley, of all people, is most comfortable. He speaks as a churchman.

Stanley engages directly with a range of the recent German scholarship – Jost, Herzfeld, Grätz. He is explicit that Milman was a crucial spur to his study in what we have already described as a liberal genealogy for his own work; but he reserves a special place for Ewald. He distances himself from Ewald to a degree by confessing himself not wholly persuaded by such a documentary approach, but still praises his comprehensive narrative lavishly. Ewald was translated into English between the publication of Stanley's second volume in 1865 and the third in 1876; Grätz was not translated into English until 1891; the others never. It is underemphasized in modern biographies of Stanley how important he was in mediating German scholarship to a broader British public.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is also important that in mediating this scholarship Stanley also avoids the more extreme versions of race and nation that run through the debate on the history of the Jews especially in German-speaking countries. So when Grätz, an orthodox Jew, largely avoided the charged opposition of Palestinian and Alexandrian Jews, he was immediately and viciously attacked by Treitschke on the grounds that he was thus attacking Christianity and Germanness – an argument which underlines what was at stake in the imagination of Alexandria.Footnote ⁷⁰ Stanley learns from German scholarship, but his broad church, liberal position – his Anglican politics – avoids the more violent expressions of racial and nationalist controversy that the combination of German political ambition and theological conservatism fostered.

John Witheridge complains that in Stanley's history, ‘the very different roles of the historian and the preacher become confused, with adverse effects on both Stanley's homiletics and his historiography’.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet this was precisely what Stanley was praised for by Matthew Arnold, in a long article in Macmillan's Magazine of 1863, as he was preparing Culture and anarchy. ‘His book is excellent and salutary’, wrote Arnold, because

However, he points out how they are ‘the only nation in ancient or modern times, which, throwing off the yoke of slavery, claims no merit, no victory of its own: There is no Marathon, no Regillus, no Tours, no Morgarten. All is from above, nothing from themselves.’Footnote ⁷² That is, Stanley guides a careful path between the extreme mathematical literalism of Colenso – as encoded in ‘the difficulty of how the Israelites departed “harnessed’’’ – and the historicism of a Renan, or even a Milman, who for his orthodox critics unacceptably reduced the divine in history. Stanley precisely wants to offer an account that is both historically informed and yet leaves a place for a providential and supersessionist narrative. As F. D. Maurice, liberal theological guru, declared, ‘I know no work which that has appeared in our day … which is so truly historical and so truly devout.’Footnote ⁷³ It is significant that as Arnold is preparing his work which made Hebraism and Hellenism into the defining contours of the map of modern British culture, he is reviewing Stanley's work on the history of the Jews and their place in Hellenistic culture. And for Arnold as for Maurice, it is the precise positioning of Stanley's liberalism, creating an informed historical criticism within a divine narrative, that was distinctive and valuable.

So what happens to the Hellenistic Judaism of Alexandria in Stanley's history? He is, tellingly, more fascinated by the Alexandrian literature which Milman and Ewald pass over. The Apocrypha do have what he calls a ‘debasing effect on the religious systems’, but nonetheless at the very least they have the value of letting you see by comparison how great the texts of the canon are.Footnote ⁷⁴ But unlike Milman or Ewald, he does spend time on Ben Sirah, for example, and sees such texts as fruits of a historical moment: ‘These preludings of a high philosophy and faith, whether two centuries before or close upon the dawn of the new era, are, in any case, the genuine product of Alexandrian Judaism, of the union of Greek and Hebrew thought.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Indeed, he goes on to read these texts in detail, in particular to find in them anticipations of the Christine doctrine of everlasting life that make Alexandrian Judaism an ancestor of the Christianity to come. Hence, these texts are to be valued as a ‘genuine product’ of history. The use of the word ‘genuine’ should be heard as opposed to the language of fiction and falsification prevalent in nineteenth-century depictions of Alexandria. Nonetheless, however ‘genuine’ Stanley finds this literature, for him allegory of the type that Philo practises is an especial mistake: ‘a baneful influence over the theology of nearly two thousand years’,Footnote ⁷⁶ a judgement in which we might hear a gentle resonance with Charles Kingsley's aggressive distaste for ‘effeminate, over-civilised…morbid, self-conscious, physically indolent’ Alexandrian Christianity as the seedbed of corrupt and fanatical Catholicism.Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet for Stanley, too, Alexandrian Judaism is still to be opposed to Palestinian. Stanley, typically, can recognize something positive in Hellenism, ‘the genial and artistic side of Greek polytheism’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Like Bulwer-Lytton, who, at the end of Last days of Pompeii, imagines his elegant and genial Greek hero and heroine combining Hellenic idealism with an unfanatical Christianity, which sounds very much like a contemporary broad church, gentlemanly Anglicanism, Stanley is less worried than Ewald or Milman by the Jews of Alexandria studying and absorbing some Greek values, the sort taught in English schools. As with his resistance to the more extreme national and racial arguments of Germany, Stanley allows a more nuanced accommodation for a cultured Hellenism. Just not in Palestine itself.

This genial love of Hellenism leads to perhaps the most outlandish lecture in the series – and outlandish is not a word often to be applied to Stanley. Lecture 46 is dedicated to Socrates – not an obvious figure, one might have thought, for a history of the Jews. Socrates is included because he ‘belongs to the religious history of all mankind’, and because his example ‘struck directly on the heart and intellect, first of Hebrew Palestine, and then of Christian Europe’.Footnote ⁷⁹ So, claims the dean, ‘the prayer “Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis”, by whomever said, has won a more universal acceptance than that of many a prayer addressed to the dubious saints of the Byzantine or of the Latin Church’.Footnote ⁸⁰ There is a familiar sneer here at the Catholic church from the Protestant cleric, tied precisely to the lives of the saints, a genre which had proved so open to critical history's destructive analysis of the texts of the early church. But the language ‘of all mankind’ and ‘universal’ points to a further element in the portrayal of Hellenistic Judaism. Christianity prided itself on being a universal religion, and opposed such universalism to what F. C. Baur called the Abgeschlossenheit of Judaism, its national, political, and religious isolationism – associated particularly with Palestinian Judaism.Footnote ⁸¹ Here, Socrates's life is analysed by Stanley to show how it anticipates elements of Christianity – dying for principle, cross-examination of life, commitment to virtue. The assimilation of Socrates to Christian ideals had first been argued by the church fathers, but Stanley includes him now in a history of the Jewish church.

Yet this too is part of Stanley's liberal agenda. Stanley disarmingly announces at the outset that his ‘narrative has, wherever it was possible, been taken from Grote's History of Greece’, and indeed whole paragraphs are quoted directly.Footnote ⁸² Grote's liberal history is also a developmental, Whiggish, moral history, which saw Greek culture of the fifth century, including especially Socrates and Sophocles, as part of a raising of human ethical values in the journey towards Jesus.Footnote ⁸³ So Evelyn Abbott, biographer of Jowett and Grotean to the core, writes, ‘[the Greeks’] religious conceptions became ethical at an early period and continued to be so to the last, ever growing higher and higher as the conception of life and duty became more elevated’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Socrates, in this Grotean narrative, can find a place in the history of the Jews, because Greek culture can be drafted as a step in the teleological narrative towards Christianity's dutiful virtue.Footnote ⁸⁵ Stanley, thus, continues the polarized opposition of Alexandrian and Judaean Judaism, but allows a small, newly positive place for some accommodation with the values of Hellenism that we do not see in Milman or Ewald, or in the stricter theological perspective of von Harnack.

The particularity of Milman's, Ewald's, and Stanley's image of Alexandrian Judaism is thrown into sharp highlight by my fourth scholar of major influence, Ernest Renan, another lionized intellectual of the religious liberals. The huge sales of his Life of Jesus meant that Renan's image of Galilee – based on his own Breton landscape, one suspects – had a long cultural impact on the conception of Judaean Judaism – as an especially non-Eastern notion of the soon-to-be-Christian Middle East. But his five-volume History of the people of Israel was also broadly read, trailing on the coattails of his fame. On the one hand, Renan articulates lavishly the oppositions we have seen between Alexandria and Jerusalem, although he does add Antioch to the picture, as another Hellenized lure for Jews. ‘There were besides Jerusalem, two powerful magnetic attractions, as it were, Alexandria and Antioch.’Footnote ⁸⁶ Greece, which ‘invented beauty as she had invented reason’, and which was ‘weak as to her religion’,Footnote ⁸⁷ suborned the Jews away from their ancestral religion: ‘Hellenism and Hebraism stood face to face and the battle was a sharp one.’Footnote ⁸⁸ The oppositions are indeed starkly drawn: ‘the Jew in Palestine knew nothing about Greece, or else despised her. The Egyptian Jew knew and admired her’Footnote ⁸⁹ – and, with more than a touch of Renan's lapsed Catholicism, ‘Jerusalem [was] a purely priestly city’, while ‘the dispersed Jews, especially those of Egypt, gave up the observance of ritual’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Renan's opposition of Alexandria and Jerusalem here seems to act as a culmination of what we have already seen as a tradition of representation.

Renan's valorization of the opposition, however, is reversed with characteristic élan. Like other historians, he dismisses the self-representations of Hellenistic Judaism as ‘charlatan fantasies’ and the use of allegory as ‘downright monstrous falsehood’,Footnote ⁹¹ but nonetheless he is emphatic about the importance of the Septuagint. The translators may have changed the text of the Hebrew Bible ‘out of consideration of the delicate taste of the Greeks’, but this translation should be regarded as ‘one of the most important events in history’.Footnote ⁹² This was, after all, the Bible of Christianity: ‘The Hebrew genius would conquer the whole earth through the Greek tongue, and in close alliance with Hellenism.’Footnote ⁹³ So – putting together his antipathy and historical sense – ‘This school of Hellenizing Jews, so puerile in argument, so irritating to us by its historic falsehoods, thus proved itself great, fruitful providential.’Footnote ⁹⁴ This is a paradigmatic gesture. As de Lange laments, the Septuagint until very recently has been treated as a text in Christian history only, and thus escapes the denigration of Alexandrian Judaism (except when the translation is criticized for giving in to Greek tastes).Footnote ⁹⁵ But Renan uses the providential fruitfulness of the Septuagint not only to denigrate Palestinian Judaism, but also challengingly to see Hellenistic Judaism in Alexandria as the very foundation of Christianity: ‘The book of Daniel is, in truth, the egg containing Christianity, the yolk by which it was first nourished.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Where Stanley coaxed some pre-echoes of the idea of the immortal soul from Ben Sira, Renan finds in Hellenistic Judaism of Alexandria the very concepts out of which Christianity will be formed.

The polarized model of Hellenistic and Palestinian Judaism was thus integral to Christian scholarship in the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the leading academic account was the five-volume work of Emil Schürer. Schürer, friend and colleague of von Harnack, also trod a careful liberal line, in opposition to the evangelical orthodox, but equally in scholarly resistance to Tübingen – and his work provides a fitting culmination to this series, as indeed it was immediately regarded as the capstone to nineteenth-century scholarly histories of the Jews. Schürer does not translate Greek or Latin, and gives Hebrew and Aramaic also untranslated and usually without vowels; he includes lengthy multi-lingual bibliographies and notes in the text; it lacks the vivid narratives of Milman or Stanley. The history is undoubtedly aimed at a highly educated audience, and it was widely recognized as an outstanding piece of German scholarship. Schürer states that Jews ‘in Alexandria…follow a direction essentially different from that of Palestine’,Footnote ⁹⁷ and volume v is divided into two sections, ‘Hellenistic literature’ and ‘Palestinian literature’. Nonetheless, he also writes that ‘It must be distinctly borne in mind that the line of demarcation between those two groups is of a fluctuating and indefinite character, and that the designations applied to them are to be taken very much cum grano salis…There was Palestinian Judaism outside of Palestine just as conversely there was Hellenistic Judaism within it.’Footnote ⁹⁸ So despite the structure of his book and its undoubted supersessionism, Schürer also offers a recognition that the opposition he nonetheless repeats needs serious qualification. Schürer offers the fullest account of Jewish Hellenistic writing – 600 pages in comparison to Milman's 1 – and can see how interlinked Jewish Mediterranean culture is, but even so, following the expectations of the era, he structures his book and his rhetoric around the necessary opposition of Alexandria and Palestine, hybrid Greek-Jews and pure Jew-Jews.

Hellenistic Judaism takes a very particular shape, then, in nineteenth-century Britain, as British intellectual and religious life absorbed and engaged with German scholarship, the threat of German-led critical history – which put a huge emphasis on the early church – and the political emancipation of the Jews – which encouraged engaged political and historical thinking about the place of Jews. The very idea of the Hellenistic era as an era was invented by the historian Droysen in the 1830s – though it took a long time before it became a term of art for the increasingly professionalized discipline of classics. Droysen, as Momigliano showed, constructed an ‘evolution of paganism which led from Classical Greece to Christianity – not via Judaism but via other oriental religions’ – a silence, Momigliano suggests, prompted and supported by Droysen's close contact with Lutheran converts from Judaism.Footnote ⁹⁹ Droysen's providential history ended with the ‘Church of Christ’, but ‘Judaism was left out’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ – a genealogy the ideology of which is clear. In the histories of the Jews that I have analysed here – the five most widely read contributions of Milman, Ewald, Stanley, Renan, and Schürer – each puts Judaism back into the story of Christianity and Hellenism by constructing a stark opposition between Palestinian Judaism and Alexandrian Judaism – even though for the crucial 200 years, the region was for at least a century a single Ptolemaic regime. This is a history constructed within a Protestant Christian teleological and providential history, designed always to ‘close with Christ’, even when, as with Milman, the history comes up to the present day. The Hasmonean revolt became an icon of resistance and purity – in line with the self-representation of the Maccabean texts – which allowed scholars to construct an opposition between Alexandria where Jews treacherously allied with and absorbed Greek values, and Palestine where Jews were fixed in a hard, pure proto-rabbinical religiosity – a hardness which produced the obstinacy and pride that led to the rejection of Jesus and the justified destruction of the Jewish polity by Rome. Even Stanley could read the texts of Alexandrian Judaism only for their anticipations of a Christianity to come. The opposition of Alexandrian Judaism – the treacherous alliance of Greek and Jew – to the genuine religion of Palestine, proud and obstinate and destined for destruction, is a narrative formed within a Protestant framework of supersessionism and providential history. Only Renan, lapsed French Catholic, self-consciously renegade, is prepared fully to articulate the challenging counterview that the Judaism of Hellenistic Alexandria was the direct genealogical ancestor of Christianity through the catalyst of the Septuagint – a view, however, also fully dependent on the opposition of Alexandria and Jerusalem.

Where Miriam Leonard has analysed brilliantly how the opposition of Jew and Greek forms a constant dynamic of an intellectual tradition from Moses Mendelssohn through Matthew Arnold to Freud and beyond, we can now add a crucial further part of this picture. The opposition of Jew and Greek is intertwined with contemporary notions of the nation and the people, with religious and political narratives of purity, and with a Christian supersessionism on the one hand, and a challenge to such religious thinking, on the other – and plays a role, consequently, in the development of nineteenth-century thinking on imperialism and race. Histories of the antiquity of the Jews make up a constitutive narrative of Christian, national, racial self-understanding, and self-representation in the nineteenth century. We can now see that writing the history of the Jews, or the people of Israel or the Jewish church, is a full and polemical part of such a discourse, where Alexandria plays a special and difficult role because of the evidently dangerous thought of the significant and willing blending of Jew and Greek in Alexandrian religion and culture. What we see in Milman, Ewald, Stanley, Renan, and Schürer is a range of historiographical and ideological strategies, designed to nourish and ward off that dangerous thought, central to the formation of the discourse of Hellenism and Judaism in the nineteenth century. The opposition of Jew and Greek, and the need to tell and comprehend the history of the Jews always in relation to the early church, makes Alexandria a searching conundrum, which produced a scholarly and popular portrait of lasting historiographical and ideological impact. For nineteenth-century theologians and historians, it was a profoundly important question to ask ‘What has Alexandria to do with Jerusalem?’

But the story does not end there, and I wish to end this article with a more speculative question. For the response to this opposition in the twentieth century takes us down another, also ideologically laden, route. A further German Protestant theologian proved instrumental in the dismantling of the polarization of Jew and Greek in the comprehension of Hellenistic Judaism and the place of Alexandria in this history. Martin Hengel finished his dissertation in 1967 in a Protestant Theological Faculty, which was published as Judentum und Hellenismus in 1973, and it was immediately translated into English in 1974. The most cited summary sentence of this hugely influential book reads: ‘From about the middle of the third century bc, all Judaism must really be designated “Hellenistic Judaism” in the strict sense.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ That is, not only is the opposition between Jew and Greek to be radically dismantled as a coherent opposition, but it must be dismantled in favour of the necessary and integral imbrication of Judaism and Hellenism. As Shaye Cohen, who also learnt from Elias Bickerman, concludes, ‘All the Jews of antiquity were ‘Hellenized’’’,Footnote ¹⁰² where the inverted commas around the term ‘Hellenized’ indicate the problematic issue of how contact between a dominant Greek cultural value and the various peoples of the Greek East or the Roman Empire is now to be conceptualized. The detailed and nuanced account of Schwartz supports this perspective.Footnote ¹⁰³ This notion of a general cultural Hellenization across the region through this period is now absolutely standard in informed academic circles – and it stands as a bracing rebuttal both of the nineteenth-century histories of the Jews and of the theological anxiety about Hellenization in the work of von Harnack, doyen of German Protestant thinking.

This conceptual turn is repeatedly rehearsed in contemporary historiography, but with a surprising foreshortening of the past debate. So, one critic writes paradigmatically that ‘Research on Judaism has gradually moved away from regarding the traditional distinction between Palestinian (normative) Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism as of basic importance.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ With a characteristic underplaying of the importance of Victorian historiography, the distinction between Palestinian and Alexandrian Judaism has become blandly ‘traditional’ – as if it stretched back for ever and had no roots in a Christian ideological framework. So Lester Grabbe, in his study of Hellenistic Judaism, writes a chapter called ‘The history of the discussion’, and, with a truly remarkable silencing of the past, starts only in 1952 with Tarn and Griffith!Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Even where the historiography's past is noted, it tends to be in the briefest and most embarrassed fashion: Schürer's monumental work was revised and republished between 1973 and 1987 by the leading scholars Géza Vermès and Fergus Millar. They announce laconically that they intend ‘to clear [the text] of the dogmatic prejudices of nineteenth-century theology’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ – and so, without further explanation, they remove all signs of the work's structuring opposition of Alexandria and Jerusalem.

What I find fascinating about this sea-change in the historiography of Jewish Hellenism is that it is conducted almost entirely at the level of detailed historical empiricism. This is not to disparage the outstanding work that has changed the field.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ But it would also be worth asking what the conditions of possibility are for the sea-change. It will not seem too bold, I hope, to suggest that the post-war realignment of German scholarship on Judaism, which made necessary the rejection of Victorian models of imperialism, nationalism, and racism, is at least a relevant frame. To assert the purity, stubbornness, resistance of non-assimilated Jews was not an acceptable rhetorical position to adopt after the Second World War, especially for a German scholar. The connection between the racial and political underpinnings of the Christian supersessionist historiography of the Jews in the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century's racial and political violence towards the Jews demanded such a distancing from the past. After the ghettoes and the camps, to complain of the Abgeschlossenheit of the Jews would be an obscenity.

What is more, when Providential history has become associated primarily with extreme evangelical groups, and when violently distorted, politically motivated nationalist histories of the Middle East are all too noisily on offer, it is easy to appreciate why a historian such as Hengel may have found it attractive to avoid discussing whether a history of Hellenistic Judaism is still a self-implicating question of religious and political identity, not least for a scholar writing within a Protestant theological tradition. Yet, as we began this account with Milman's notable silencing of Alexandrian Judaism and the ideological framework which required it, we might wonder whether such disengagement with the profession's former ideological commitments is, as Momigliano so evocatively suggested for Droysen, a speaking silence. It might at least be worth asking what it means for a German Protestant theologian (writing during the Six Day War and publishing the year of the Yom Kippur War) to produce an image of an integrally Hellenized Jewish world – to write, that is, a history of the Jews as a revisionist model of cultural and political assimilation. Or, in short, while the circumstances that made Alexandria a searching question for nineteenth-century Protestant historians of Judaism have significantly changed, it is far from clear that now, with claims of the purity of religious tradition still motivating violent conflict, the question, ‘What has Alexandria to do with Jerusalem?’, has yet lost its purchase.