WHITEWASHING THE JEWS' ANCIENT ENEMIES

Douglas Farrow. National Post, 6 December 2007

In his op-ed column attacking the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah ("Bah, Hanukkah," Dec. 5), Christopher Hitchens gave every impression, as he usually does, of a man frightened by the thought that religion might refuse to remain in the grave he keeps trying to dig for it. So frightened, in fact, that yesterday he attempted a hasty burial of history for good measure.

Though we are now, on the Christian calendar, in the first week of Advent, I am not thinking of Mr. Hitchens' reference to "the alleged birth of the supposed Jesus of Nazareth." (Was that a way of reminding himself that ghosts, after all, aren't real?) Nor am I thinking of his claim that "to celebrate Hanukkah is to celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism's bastard child in the shape of Christianity." (It is true that the history of Jesus as a messianic claimant, and so of Christianity, is bound up with the history of the Hasmonaean regime, though not in quite the way that Hitchens imagines.) I am referring rather to his grotesquely distorted representation of the Maccabean contest with the Seleucid Empire.

Listening to Mr. Hitchens tell the story, one might be forgiven for supposing that the Seleucid empire in the time of Judas Maccabeus was the very incarnation of Greek wisdom and culture -- a kindly secularism gently weaning a vulgar people away from the worst manifestations of their "ancient and cruel faith."

This space won't accommodate long history lessons, or accounts of the martyrdoms suffered by faithful Jews who refused to violate their consciences and submit to forced Hellenization, but Mr. Hitchens knows well enough what kind of means were being used to Hellenize Jews, and to what ends.

On the throne at the time was none other than the megalomaniac ruler Antiochus Epiphanes, whose coinage announced him to one and all as "God made visible." No line between church and state here! In private, some riffed on the title Epiphanes by substituting Epimanes, "the madman." But there was a method to this madman's madness. As one historian (N.T. Wright) puts it, he wanted to use Judea as a kind of buffer state against Egypt, and in order to achieve that he needed to redesign the Jews' religious loyalties in a way that would make them more pliable to his own political ends.

Aided by internal strife and by the treachery of Menelaus, Antiochus did not stop short of trying to substitute worship of himself and of Zeus for worship of Israel's God. This policy led to his deliberate desecration of the Temple on Dec. 25, 167 BC, through the infamous sacrificing of pigs upon the altar, and by setting up in its sanctuary images repugnant to the Jews.

The successful Maccabean revolt against this outrage, and the liberation of the Jewish people, was naturally hailed on the Maccabean side as a great victory. The cleansing of the Temple still celebrated at Hanukkah marked for them an affirmation of Psalm 2: The heathen rulers may rage, but "He who sits in the heavens laughs at them."

Christopher Hitchens thinks Hanukkah a "celebration of the original victory of bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason." That is very nearly the opposite of the truth. He also thinks it a "direct negation of the line between church and state," but of course in context the real negation -- rather, obliteration! -- of that line took place with the splattered blood of the pigs offered up in honour of Zeus and his visible incarnation, Antiochus Epiphanes.

Later Hasmonaean developments notwithstanding, our treasured line between church and state is in fact a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as Remi Brague has shown in his book, The Law of God (now available in English from the University of Chicago Press). If someone has a copy handy, perhaps they would be good enough to loan it to Mr. Hitchens.

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