It was in the year 332 B. C. E. that Judaism and Hellenism, the two greatest forces the world has ever known, first encountered each other. The meeting of Alexander the Great and the High Priest of Israel was characterized by high courtesy, and the expression of mutual admiration. According to the accounts of the Rabbis and Josephus, Alexander made public confession of his reverence for the God of Israel, while the Priest and people paid ready homage to the enlightened and humane conqueror. However prophetic the nature of the encounter may be of the ultimate harmony and adjustment between Hellenism and Judaism, it appears now in the light of the past, only as the preliminary courtesies of gladiators about to engage in a mortal struggle—complex in its phases, varied in its results, and fraught with the gravest consequences to all humanity. Our sages declare that the Spirit of the Night with which Jacob wrestled, was continually changing its form—now appearing unto the Patriarch as an armed hero in all the panoply of warfare—now, as a simple shepherd, fresh from the heart of nature, unspoiled and unsophisticated—and again, as a learned sage, full of wisdom and knowledge. Such a Proteus, in full truth, was the Hellenism that Jewry was compelled to encounter. Nor was the Judaism that fought in the different encounters ever quite the same. The three great completed moments in this long struggle are to be found in the National, the Alexandrine and the Scholastic Periods.
It is an interesting, though idle specu-
* Synopsis of a Lecture delivered before the Mikveh Israel Association, Philadelphia.
lation, to consider what might have happened had Aristotle delayed his departure to Athens two years, and had accompanied Alexander on this expedition. There is to be found in the lore of the mystics, reference to two types of moral genius that are occasionally exemplified by the great men of the race; the one, apparently creative, and the other passive and retentive; and these are poetically referred to as “The Greater Light” and “The Lesser Light”— Hamaor Hagadol and Hamaor Haqatan. Should these lights meet each other and complete each other in this life, then the Messiah would immediately come. It is, therefore, the peculiar business of Satan to prevent their meeting. Certainly it appears an adverse stroke of fate, and one which has materially retarded the progress of the race, that Aristotle should never have met the “Men of the Great Synagogue,” and should have remained ignorant of the spiritual and ethical treasures of Judea. The constant refrain of Maimonides is profound regret that Aristotle was ignorant of the Jewish tradition. Certainly the Stagvrite Sage would have penetrated into the Holy of Holies from which the Macedonian warrior was debarred. The actual developments made the encounter of Hellas and Judea more that of “Night and Day” than of “the two lights.” Events placed the Syro-Greeks in control of Judea, and encircled Judea with a belt of Hellenic settlements. Jewry was forced into closest contact with Greek life—with the religious, moral and social institutions of the Greek people as assimilated by the mongrel Syro-Greeks. The influence of Greek philosophy was of the slightest compass. There is no ity to refer the asceticism of the Es-