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→The Dialogue of Judaism and Hellenism
The later Roman action stamping out two Jewish revolts in AD 70 and 135 sobered the Jewish people but did little to damage them insofar as their religious or intellectual vigor. One finds a lively Jewish community in most cities with synagogues that were richly adorned if not also impressive in their architecture. Right on through to the end of the history of this investigation one finds a rich literature that addresses similar problems of current philosophy.
So by the time of the AD first century, Jewish literature in Greek was hardly uncommon. That the majority of Jewish inscriptions in the Roman catacombs were Greek, that Judean synagogues had names in Greek, that Jewish persons in the later works of the Talmud had Greek names; none of this is a surprise. The example of Philo of Alexandria, though perhaps sometimes thought to be an extreme one, portrays a Jewish thinker who was both observant in his Judaism as well as conversant with Hellenistic philosophical idioms. Besides the well known Philo or Josephus, tracking down the Jewish literature of this time on the theme of Moses alone yields the following Jewish authors who wrote in Greek or with Hellenistic attitudes: Aristobolus, Artapanus, Eupolemus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, and Orphica. ThusHence, for the both the Judean and Diaspora Jew, Aramaic was important, Hebrew was the sacred language, but Greek was the ''lingua franca'' for Mediterranean urban intellectual Jews as much as it was for Mediterranean urban intellectual Gentiles. And reading the scripture in Greek, praying in Greek; these were Jewish activities before they were Christian ones.
Language, then, was not an impediment to Jewish understanding of the world through Hellenistic eyes. All the more so does one find Hellenism within religious ritual a similar approach. For instance, gilding the horns of a sacrifical animal may appear to be pagan in its source to the proverbial man from Mars although it was circumvented by noting it as the adornment of a commandment. Further, a question as to whether the ''Amidah'' was a civic prayer for Jerusalem just as the Greeks prayed for their cities is worthy of exploration. But the most fascinating example of Hellenistic custom in Jewish religious ritual is that of the Passover ''seder''.