By the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the 2nd century BCE, Greek rule over Jews had crossed the threshold from cultural pressure to open persecution. According to traditional accounts, circumcision was banned, and any mothers who circumcised their sons were executed, their babies murdered along with them. Torah study and Shabbat observance were outlawed. Torah scrolls were burned, and the Temple in Jerusalem was desecrated, its sanctuary grounds said to have been repurposed as a worship site for Zeus. The Jews were said to have been legally obligated to participate in Greek civic rituals and festivals. The state in which Jewish life could exist became deliberately hostile and dangerous.
Under conditions this oppressive, one might expect Jewish unity during this time to be unshakable, and indeed, we Jews tend to imagine the Hanukkah story this way as we successfully fought the Greeks’ foreign oppression and restored our Temple. But this year, when I reread the story closely, I realized that was not the case.
Within Hanukkah’s story is a frightening Jewish culture war, because as Jewish life was being systematically oppressed, there were a number of Hellenized Jews who supported the violence and humiliations. These Hellenized Jews were said to have aligned themselves with Greek authority, promoted Greek values – like building a gymnasium in Jerusalem and “reversing” their circumcisions – and eagerly participated in social and political litmus tests designed to separate “acceptable” Jews from the rest. They treated Jewish particularism as backwards and primitive. They informed on traditional Jews.
Yet Hellenized Jews still did not stop calling themselves Jews; they “filtered” Judaism until it no longer demanded anything of them that conflicted with social norms around them. For Hellenized Jews, Jewish practice mattered only insofar as it resonated with the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of the dominant society; whatever could not be universalized within Greek culture was simply aestheticized or discarded.
The modern Hellenists: Anti-Zionist Jews
All of this was ruminating in the back of my mind when I recently came across an online flyer advertising an “anti-Zionist Hanukkah pop-up event.” The event was supposedly centered on Palestinian-Jewish “solidarity,” sliding-scale tickets (free for Palestinians), SWANA and Jewish vendors, drag performances, tattoos, political art, and fundraising for Gazan families. To these anti-Zionist Jews, Hannukkah – Judaism, in general – was not a holiday rooted in covenant or law or ancestral memory. It was simply a cultural aesthetic and political stage, emptied of Jewish particularism, and repurposed to virtue signal moral alignment with ideological movements that are openly hostile to Jewish existence.
These Jews, like their Hellenized predecessors, still call themselves Jews! They “celebrate” Hanukkah and other Jewish festivals, so long as those holidays are stripped of spiritual substance and reduced to a pathetic collection of inherited “symbols” that can be kept, adapted, or discarded according to their contemporary tastes. This cohort is proud to ridicule the norms of traditional Judaism, or any connection to the land of Israel. These “progressive” Jews – enlightened Jews! – designate themselves as the antidote to Judaism's sins. For all this global hostility towards Jews to end, they reason, all Judaism must do is side with its Hellenized form.
On the first night of Hannukah, 15 Jews – ranging from a 10-year-old child to a Holocaust survivor – were slaughtered at a Chabad Hanukkah celebration on Australia’s Bondi Beach by a father and son. In the days since, many mainstream news outlets have been forced to close their comment sections in reports on the event, overwhelmed by a flood of antisemitic hatred, celebration, or justifying the massacre.
The public response has left no doubt about the open hostility Jews currently live through now. And yet, even in the face of such barbaric violence, there remain Jews who do not believe that the answer is to stand with their brothers; they instead offer to sand Judaism down further to make it palatable to those who are, at best, indifferent to Jewish bloodshed. Of course, these Jews are quick to reassure themselves that they are in the right, even as their allies chant for violence (“globalize the intifada!”) and celebrate Jewish death online.
The Greeks failed to erase Judaism by force, but they nearly succeeded through enthusiastic Jewish collaboration and self-negation; perhaps that is the most sinister part of the Hanukkah story. That very same culture war has returned once again today, as anti-Zionist Jews publicly disavow and dismantle authentic Jewish identity in the name of “progressivism.” The Hanukkah story reminds us that even the most barbaric hatred of antiquity has never been enough to destroy Jewish life; but I will argue that the real danger emerges when Jews are willing to flagellate their own identity in exchange for acceptance.
The Maccabees were anti-imperial guerrilla fighters, but they were also leaders who, under unimaginable circumstances, rallied the Jewish people to resist the internal destruction of Jewish life. They insisted that to be a Jew is to be defined by our distinctiveness and traditions, by obligations to one another, to Am Israel, and God. In times like these, we must follow them.
Maia Zelkha is the editor of Yad Mizrah Magazine, the first and only Sephard and Mizrahi literary magazine.