Hebrew and Revolutionary Jewish Education

Abstract

Unable to expand outward, the Jews were forced inward to expand their spiritual territory, including Hebrew. For some time prior to the revolt in 66 CE, Hebrew had apparently been in decline. It was largely superseded by Aramaic in rural Palestine and Greek in the Hellenistic or Hellenized cities. After the war, Greek continued to be used by most Jews in the Roman empire. In the school in Yavneh (Jamnia) of Gamaliel the Second, grandfather of Judah Hanasi, half the students reportedly studied Greek wisdom (Bava Kamma 83a). Yet, many survivors of the revolt were suspicious of Greek culture (all the more as the Judaean ruling class had embraced it) and, to an extent, the Greek language. The early second century CE rabbi, Elisha ben Avuya, was stigmatized as a heretic, among other reasons ‘because he kept singing Greek songs’ (Hagigah 15b). ‘During the war with Quietus [of 115–17 CE],’ according to Mishna Sotah (IX 14), ‘the rabbis decreed that a man should not teach his son Greek.’ By the time the Mishna was edited nearly a century later, there was some relaxation in this attitude: the word for ‘war’ here is not the Hebrew milhama but the Greek polemos. In fact, rabbinic literature is full of Greek (and, to a far lesser extent, Latin) words.