Some thoughts about Hanukkah by a (secular) Jewish medieval historian

This is a short end of the year episode.  It's exactly what the title says, just some thoughts about the role of Hanukkah in contemporary America and the Middle Ages. Happy Holidays from Ellen and me to you and yours!

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

Transcript

Some thoughts by a Jewish medievalist about Hanukkah

Richard: Happy holidays to all of our listeners. 

Ellen: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year to you and yours!

Richard: As our listeners may have already figured out, Ellen and I are secular Jews. Ellen is a convert to Reformed Judaism and I am (at least according to Ancestry.com) 100% Ashkenazi Jewish. Ellen grew up celebrating Christmas and I grew up celebrating Hanukkah. For me, Christmas Day meant dinner at a Chinese restaurant and maybe a movie. As I grew older and began to learn more about the history of religions, I began to have doubts about why we Jews in the U.S. make such a big deal about Hanukkah. For many American Jews, Hanukkah is right up there with the three big Jewish holidays: Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Passover. 

Ellen: But it shouldn’t be. Probably it is closest to Purim, as both holidays celebrate the Jewish people overcoming enemies bent on wiping us out.

Richard:  Hanukkah is the Festival of Lights. It celebrates a miracle that is said to have occurred in 164 B.C.E when Jewish rebels against rule of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire took Jerusalem and re-sanctified the Second Temple. The Temple had been religiously polluted by Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes three years before when he had an altar to Zeus erected within it. This was part of a larger program by Antiochus IV to suppress, or more accurately, revise Jewish religious practices to bring them in line with Hellenistic religion and culture.  Our best source for these matters is the first-century C.E. Jewish historian and general Josephus. Josephus tells us that Antiochus mistook an internal dispute between two claimants to the Jewish High Priesthood—both of whom had bribed him and both of whom were Hellenized Jews—for the beginnings of a Jewish uprising. Already engaged in an unsuccessful war against the rival Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, Antiochus decided to take decisive action to forestall the rebellion. According to Josephus QUOTE

 "And when the King had built an idol altar upon God’s altar he slew swine upon it, and so offered a sacrifice neither according to the law, nor the Jewish religious worship in that country. He also compelled the Jewish people to forsake the worship which they paid their own God, and to adore those whom he took to be Gods; and made them build temples, and raise idol altars in every city and village; and offer swine upon them every day. He also commanded them not to circumcise their sons: and threatened to punish any that should be found to have transgressed his injunction.”

Ellen: I can understand the injunction against circumcision. To judge from statues, Hellenistic Greeks believed the naked male body to be beautiful, and circumcision must have seemed an act of mutilation.

Richard: The Romans tolerated circumcision when they later ruled Judea, but they also considered it a perverse superstition. Okay, continuing with Josephus: QUOTE “the king also appointed overseers, who should compel the Jews to do what he commanded. And indeed many Jews there were who complied with the King’s commands; either voluntarily, or out of fear of the penalty that was denounced. But the best men, and those of the noblest souls did not regard him; but did pay a greater respect to the customs of their country, than concern, as to the punishment which he threatened to the disobedient. On which account they every day underwent great miseries, and bitter torments. For they were whipped with rods; and their bodies were torn to pieces, and were crucified, while they were still alive, and breathed. They also strangled those women and their sons whom they had circumcised, as the King had appointed: hanging their sons about their necks as they were upon the crosses. And if there were any sacred book, or the law found, it was destroyed: and those with whom they were found miserably perished also.”

Ellen: And the result was that Antiochus precipitated the very Jewish uprising that he was seeking to nip in the bud.

Richard: The revolt began when a Jewish priest named Mattathias of the Hasmonean clan killed another Jewish priest as he prepared to sacrifice a pig on an altar dedicated to Zeus. He and his sons fled into the desert and took refuge in caves. Many others followed them and what began as local resistance grew into a national uprising. Mattathias died soon after, but leadership of the revolt was assumed by his son Judah Maccabee, Judah the Hammer.

Ellen: Like Charles Martel!

Richard: Although it was to be a decade before the Jewish revolt was fully successful, within three years Judah’s army was able to enter Jerusalem and recover the Temple for Jewish worship. The ritual of re-sanctification of the Temple took eight days.

Ellen: And now we finally come to the miracle. The story is that when they entered the Temple they discovered only a single container of ritual olive oil still enclosed with the chief rabbi’s seal. This was enough oil for just a single night, but it lasted for a full eight days. Just enough time for the Jewish priests to be able to obtain a whole new batch of sanctified olive oil.

And this miracle is commemorated with the lighting of the menorah, a nine branched candelabrum. As odd as it sounds, one of my most prized family possessions is a hand wrought menorah that my grandmother somehow acquired near Springfield, Massachusetts during the Great Depression.

Richard:I know that it is one of your treasures—and really is unique. The base is clearly machine manufactured, but the branches and the Jewish star at the center are all handwrought. It really is odd that this is a family heirloom from the Irish Catholic side of the family. I grew up lighting menorah candles and receiving gifts for each of the eight days. But even as a kid, the miracle at the center of Hanukkah never struck me as all that impressive. It certainly is not in the same league as parting the Red Sea.  As I grew older, I discovered that the story of the miracle doesn’t even appear in any of the earliest sources for the events, the First and Second Books of the Maccabees, written around 100 B.C.E., and Josephus’ The Antiquities of the Jews, written for a Roman audience around 94 C.E.. The first mention of the miracle occurs in the Megillat Antiochus, the scroll of Antiochus, written perhaps as early as the second century C.E., and appears in the Gemara portion of the Babylonian Talmud, which was written down around 500 C.E.

Ellen: The Talmud, in case some of our listeners don’t know, is the central text of rabbinical Judaism. It comprises the Mishnah, the Oral Religious Law of rabbinical Judaism, committed to writing in the early third century, and the Gemara, rabbinical analysis and debate over the meaning of the Torah, both written and Oral. 

Richard: When I taught Western and World Civ, I would explain to my Christian students that the relationship of the Talmud to the Torah is similar to the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and Constitutional law.  

Ellen:  Over the years you seem to have become less and less enthusiastic about celebrating Hanukkah.

Richard:  That’s true. It’s not because I think that it is a bogus Jewish festival. As a festival it really belongs on the same perch as Sukkot and Purim. My problem is that at least in the U.S. it has become the Jewish Christmas. I can understand why. As a Jewish kid growing up, I think I would have been a lot more resentful about Christmas if I didn’t have a holiday on which I would get eight gifts. Christians may have the Christmas tree and Christmas decorations, but we had a menorah and dreidles to play with. But Hanukkah shouldn’t be the Jewish Christmas. Christmas is one of the major holidays in the Christian religious calendar, second only to Easter. Hanukkah doesn’t have that status. It is, in fact, an emblem of Jewish assimilation.  And that strikes me as highly ironic. Hanukkah celebrates the Maccabean rebellion against not only Hellenistic rule but Jewish assimilation into the Hellenistic culture. The Maccabees regarded Hellenized Jews as great an enemy as pagan Greeks—and I’m the modern American version of a Hellenized Jew.

Ellen: If you remember, years ago when we belonged to a Reform Jewish temple, after a sermon about the Hanukkah spirit by the rabbi, I told his wife that I had trouble getting motivated to celebrate a bunch of people who would have had me put to death. The Rebbetzin just glared at me.

Richard: Like she did after you told her that the tv show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was not really about magic and demons but was a metaphor.

Ellen: The idea that high school was located over the mouth of hell would explain so much!

Richard:  Again, I understand from person experience why Hanukkah is so important to many American Jewish kids and their parents.  But I also can’t help feeling that the decision by the Lubavitch-chabad movement in the 1970s to emphasize the celebration of Hanukkah was cynical. They, if anyone, knew that they were elevating a minor Jewish holiday celebrating resistance to cultural assimilation into the Jewish Christmas. Chabad is as aware of the dangerous attraction of secularism as were the Maccabees. Tsi Freeman wrote an article for Chabad.com the title of which is “Why Couldn’t Jews and Greeks Just Get Along?”  Mr. Freeman credits the Greeks with being universalists, syncretists, and rationalists.  Jews, he also acknowledges, are syncretist, to an extent. “Whatever your grandmother told you,” he writes, “Abraham did not schmear his gefilte fish with chrane.” 

Ellen: Chrane? Gefilte fish I know, but chrane?

Richard: Horseradish. So why couldn’t the Hellenistic Greeks and Jews compromise? The Hassidic answer is that the problem is that the Hellenistic Greeks were rationalists.  They could not fathom or accept the Jewish monotheism that rejected the very existence of all other Gods, or the conception of an ineffable God beyond human comprehension.  It’s telling that the practices that Antiochus singled out for suppression were those that struck the Greeks as just plain irrational. Why would you mutilate your male babies? Why can’t you eat something as delicious as pork? Why do you get so upset when I worship my gods? I don’t object to you worshipping yours. Again, I find it ironic and a more than a bit cynical that Chabad has elevated Hanukkah into a major Jewish holiday as a lure to bring secular Jews back into the fold. It’s a recognition of the deadly attraction of assimilation into a dominant culture. Mr. Freeman quotes the venerated late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachim Mendel Schneerson: “The Lubavitcher Rebbe points out that in Hebrew, the name for ancient Greece, Yavan, has another meaning: quicksand (as in Psalms 40:3 and Talmud, Eruvin 19a). Water mixes with sand, dirt and clay. You step in it and you can't get out. The more you try to climb up, the further down you go.” END QUOTE.

I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a book entitled From Maccabees to Wannabees: A History of Jewish Assimilation, which would have a chapter in it on Hanukkah.

Ellen:  Ah, your personal war on Hanukkah! 

Richard: Now if Hanukkah were a pagan festival, like Christmas….

Ellen: Stop!!! I know that you are channeling Cromwell and the Puritans of New England when you say that, but still…. Let’s just say, Happy Holidays, regardless of how and why you celebrate them.  But you did promise a medieval historian’s reflection on Hannukah, so was Hanukkah celebrated in the Middle Ages?

Richard: It was, and it was celebrated as a really festive holiday. I should begin with a confession. I’m not an expert on medieval Jewish life or, for that matter, on festivals. I’m going to be drawing on the researches and expertise of scholars such as Dr. Cait Stevenson and Susan Weingarten.  As I said, Hanukkah was celebrated by the Jewish communities of medieval Western Europe, in fact, to a greater extent than in early Judaism. 

Ellen: But isn’t Hanukkah mentioned in the Talmud?

Richard: In only a couple of places, and the holiday is not sanctioned by Scripture.  The two books of the Maccabees are Jewish apocrypha. They are not part of the canonical Hebrew Bible. They are, however, found in the Septuagint, the second century B.C.E. Greek Old Testament, which held far greater authority among the early gentile Christian communities than among Jews, whose scribes compiled between the seventh and tenth centuries the canonical Masoretic Old Testament based upon Hebrew texts.

Ellen: Okay, so why did it become more popular and how was it celebrated?

Richard: It’s easier to explain the how than the why. Hanukkah, like Purim, was a festival rather than a somber holy day. Both were celebrated by public drinking and feasting. Two Jewish texts from late thirteenth or early fourteenth Provence tells us about the food dishes that were prepared for the Hanukkah celebration. One is a satiric poem called Even Bohan, by a rabbi from Arles that includes a list of foods consumed on each of the Jewish festivals. The other is a medieval rendition of the Book of Judith called the Megillat Yehudit. What both festivals also shared was a permissive attitude toward female participation.

Ellen: Okay. I can understand why that would be true of Purim. After all, it celebrates Queen Esther, wife of the Persian Great King Ahasuerus, for foiling the evil machinations of the royal vizier Haman to kill all the Jews.

Richard: And medieval Hanukkah celebrated similarly, the salvation of the Jewish people by another heroine, the beautiful widow Judith, which is why the medieval Megillat Yehudit, the scroll of Judith, is a treasure trove of information about medieval Hannukah.

Ellen: Wait a minute. Hanukkah celebrates the Hasmonean triumph over the Seleucid King Antiochus, and the last time I checked the Maccabees were all male. And didn’t Judith save the Jews by seducing an ASSYRIAN general, Holofernes, getting him dead drunk, and then cutting off the head?

Richard: Yes, that’s how it appears in the Book of Judith, a deuterocanonical text written probably in the second century B.C.E. in Greek. 

Ellen: Deuterocanonical?

Richard: Fancy word meaning a book of Jewish Apocrypha accepted as Scriptural by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Churches but not by Protestants—or, for that matter, Jews.  And, yes, in the Book of Judith, Holofernes is an Assyrian. But by the Middle Ages, Judith had been transferred in time to the era of the Maccabees and Holofernes had become a Hellenistic general. 

Ellen: Oddly appropriate, if the Book of Judith was written in the time of the Maccabees as you seem to suggest.

Richard: Hanukkah became a sort of bookend to Purim. Both celebrated women who saved the Jewish people—and, in both cases, by using feminine wiles and charm. And both proved to be femme fatales—at least as far as Haman and Holofernes were concerned. Medieval rabbis explained that it was because Hanukkah celebrated Judith that women were allowed to participate in the religious ritual of lighting the menorah candles.

Ellen: So what kind of food was considered proper for a medieval Hanukkah celebration? I am guessing it wasn’t potato latkes, or gefilte fish.

Richard: We can begin with levivot, fried pancakes, and salted cheese because both were associated with the Judith story. According to the Megillat Yehudit, Judith plied Holofernes with levivot and salted cheese to make him thirsty. He quenched that thirst with cup after cup of wine, finally passing out. The rest is history, or at least legend.

Ellen: And the subject for a lot of Renaissance art.

Richard: Other foods included honied porridge, pan-fried honey cakes, and boiled dough. This accompanied meat dishes. Public drinking was not only permitted but encouraged.

Ellen: Maybe they missed the point of the Holofernes story.

Richard: It was probably to make the holiday more like Purim.  These festivals were communal celebrations. This is underscored by a halakhic opinion, a judgment about Judaic law, made by the thirteenth-century German Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg. Noting that the penalty prescribed for women whose child died in a preventable accident was QUOTE “ to fast for a full year, without eating meat or drinking wine,” Rabbi Meir added, “with the exception of Sabbaths, festivals, the New Moon, Hanukkah and Purim, when [not only] should she refrain from fasting but she should eat meat and drink wine. For those holidays and New Moons and Hanukkah and Purim that she does not fast, she should fast on the same number of additional days until she has completed a 365-day fast.” END QUOTE.

Ellen: I noticed that you didn’t mention gift-giving.

Richard: That wasn’t part of Hanukkah in the Middle Ages. And it wasn’t even part of Hanukkah in America until the late nineteenth century.  Before then, Purim was the holiday on which gifts were exchanged. Gift-giving became part of Hanukkah because of Christmas. In the early nineteenth century Christmas was a minor holiday in both America and Britain. It grew in importance throughout the nineteenth century, and in 1870 was made a national holiday by Congress. It was after this that Purim’s gift-giving was transferred to Hanukkah. But according to Dianne C. Ashton, Director of American Studies at Rowan University and author of Hanukkah in America: A History, explains that the tradition of exchanging Hanukkah gifts really took off in the 1950s. At this time, Jewish child psychologists as well as rabbis started promoting gifts as a way to make post-Holocaust Jewish kids happy to be Jewish, rather than sad about missing out on Christmas.  Which pretty much returns us to the beginning of this episode.

Ellen: I never took you before for the Grinch who ruined Hanukkah.

Richard: No. If you remember we gave Hanukkah gifts to the kids until they grew out of it. It is the American Jewish way!

Ellen: Cynical to the end. Still, I hope that everyone has a wonderful and safe Holiday Season!

Richard: And God Bless us All, Everyone!