Professor Gruen will address the age-old issue of the roots of antisemitism in antiquity and the degree to which it may have arisen in the Jewish experience in the Greek and Hellenistic worlds. The presentation offers a brief resumé of scholarship on the subject over the ages and then it explores the principal events and texts that are regularly taken as evidence of Hellenic hostility toward Jews: the harsh literary depictions of Jews by Greek and Greco-Egyptian writers, the notorious persecution in Jerusalem ordered by the Greco-Syrian king, Antiochus IV, leading to the Maccabean uprising, and the horrific "pogrom" in the Greek city of Alexandria that threatened to wipe out the large Jewish community in that city.
Preregister for the Zoom link here: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctdeuvrTMjGdJ2sJ0MInBOxhK…
Co-sponsored by the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.