Jewish Poets, Greek Poetry

In the Hellenistic world, Greek was the lingua franca in the ancient world. In this period, from the third century BCE until at least the first century CE, Jews in the ancient Mediterranean also used Greek, and composed literature in Greek, including a diverse body of poetry. They created, for example, epic poetry, tragedy, and oracular poetry. This project will provide the first systematic analysis of this fascinating corpus of texts and contribute to a renewed understanding ancient Jewish literary creativity. In the study of Greek literature, Jewish poets have often been neglected because they are not seen as canonical compared to Hellenistic contemporaries such as Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus. These Jewish poets have often been overlooked and their poetic talents have not always been appreciated. Yet, Jews were in fact part of the cultural diversity of the Hellenistic world. Meanwhile, in the study of Jewish identity in the ancient world, the scholarly focus has often been on Judaism as represented through Semitic and Jewish-biblical sources, such as the evidence found at Qumran. Because of a modern scholarly construction of Hellenism and Judaism as monolithic cultural entities in opposition, where more Greek has often been interpreted as meaning less Jewish, Greek- speaking Judaism is not yet fully integrated into our understanding of Second Temple Judaism. This project will restore the status of Jewish-Greek poetry as literary works and their authors as legitimate voices of a Jewish identity. It will contribute to a greater appreciation of Greek-speaking Judaism, alongside Hebrew and Aramaic, as part and parcel of the variegated, multilingual nature of Judaism in the ancient world. It will the same time also provide a better understanding of how a minority culture in the ancient world adopted and adapted the language and literary traditions of the cultural majority in order to express their own identity.