As The Cambridge History of Judaism crawls ponderously towards the end of its huge task of charting the history of Judaism from 539 BC to circa AD 250, it continues to raise many questions. On a practical level the reader is left wondering about the wisdom of embarking on ambitious projects of this kind, in which the open-mindedness of the editors, commendable in other contexts, leaves unresolved such dramatic divergences between the different chapters that even the most intelligent neophyte will be left flummoxed. At a deeper level the Cambridge History brings to the surface interesting dilemmas about the best way to tackle the history of Judaism and the Jews.

‘The Hellenistic Age’, when isolated from what came before and after, is not a historical period which can be readily perceived in the texts written by Jews at the time or subsequently. These were the centuries between the conquest of the East by Alexander the Great (332-323 BC) and the victory at Actium in 31 BC over Cleopatra, the Greco-Macedonian Queen of Egypt, by the Roman adventurer Octavian, whom bloodthirsty ambition raised to imperial power under the name Augustus. In Jewish terms these years constituted a sizeable part of the era of the Second Temple, which had been built by the exiles who returned from Babylon in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Neither the first nor the final date covered by this volume held any great significance for Jews – in recognition of which some of the contributions have been permitted to transgress these artificial limits.

What justification is there, then, for writing about Judaism in terms of political events in which Jews had a part only as onlookers? Is this simply a projection back onto the past of the close relationship of Jewish fortunes in the Medieval and modern diaspora to those of the non-Jewish world in which they lived and live? If so, is it not singularly inappropriate to rely on such Gentile parameters in the treatment of a period which witnessed the rule of the Hasmonaeans, who controlled the last Jewish state in Palestine (until 1948) to endure for more than a few years?

The categorisations of a Cambridge History do not come about by accident or subconscious prejudice about the marginal role of Jews in history. One contributor after another assumes, following the standard view in treatments of the period, that Alexander the Great’s conquests were more than just a political fact. It is taken for granted that Alexander brought with him a new culture which changed the face of local civilisations and in the process transformed Judaism. Such a view is traditional among scholars, who have generally seen the best explanation of the changes to Judaism over these centuries as manifestations of either an acceptance or a rejection of Hellenism. In this respect, despite the claim to ‘question some established dichotomies’, the Cambridge History is thoroughly conservative.