Israel And Hellas

The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.

The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.

The Israelites and the Greeks formed "the first free societies, cultivating rain-watered fields around a fortified citadel, recording their words about the human situation in a widely-accessible alphabetic script." With a keen eye for both comparisons and contrasts, John Pairman Brown investigates relationships between ancient Israel and Greece. In this intriguing and engaging work, he addresses historical, religious, linguistic, and cultural connections between these Mediterranean cultures. With erudition and humility, the author illuminates both Israelite and Greek writings and cultures. He brings a vast knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean and its languages to these studies, which will startle and entice the reader back to the ancient texts.

The triangle described in this book hardly exists in reality. Tripartite relations among Greece, Turkey and Israel, if discernible at all, revolve around the crises which constantly beset the Middle East and the East Mediterranean. Even then, it is not a triangle per se: the three states seldom pursue a common policy. This book describes the various bones of contention among the three in all possible spheres—political, economic, religious, etc.—as well as the areas and periods of understanding among them. What emerges quite clearly is the fact that any show of unanimity among Ankara, Athens and Jerusalem was, in the past, likely to rest more on some temporary community of interest than on any inherent belief in the need for unanimity.

This book offers a detailed account of the recent Israeli-Greek rapprochement. For more than six decades, relations between Greece and Israel were characterized by suspicion, mutual recriminations and hostility. However, in 2009, Greek policy was unexpectedly overturned. This volume examines this new relationship in detail and explores its theoretical and regional consequences. The Introduction provides a general framework of Greek foreign policy within which the rapprochement with Israel was pursued. Chapter I presents the book’s theoretical framework, focusing on balance of power theory and emphasizing the arguments of Morgenthau, Waltz, and Mearsheimer. Chapter II delineates the fraught relations between the Greeks and the Jews, despite their cultural and historical commonalities, and analyzes the reasoning behind decades of antagonistic foreign policy. Chapter III describes how the rise of Turkey during Greece’s economic crisis and the gradual deterioration of the strategic partnership between Israel and Turkey combined to create a climate open to Israeli-Greek cooperation. Chapter IV examines the beginning of the rapprochement between Israel and Greece, highlighting Netanyahu’s historic 2010 visit to Greece. Chapter V explores the intensification of Israeli-Greek cooperation. Chapter VI discusses energy cooperation in the Eastern Mediterranean, another key factor in the deterioration of Israeli-Turkish relations and the strengthening of ties between Greece and Israel. The book concludes with a return to theory, reiterating the Realist approach and using that framework to hypothesize about the future of the relationship between the two nations. This book is appropriate for graduate students and academics studying international relations and foreign policy in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as policymakers, activists and journalists who want to have a clearer understanding of the Israeli-Greek rapprochement and other developments in the region.

The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.

K. E. Fleming's Greece--a Jewish History is the first comprehensive English-language history of Greek Jews, and the only history that includes material on their diaspora in Israel and the United States. The book tells the story of a people who for the most part no longer exist and whose identity is a paradox in that it wasn't fully formed until after most Greek Jews had emigrated or been deported and killed by the Nazis. For centuries, Jews lived in areas that are now part of Greece. But Greek Jews as a nationalized group existed in substantial number only for a few short decades--from the Balkan Wars (1912-13) until the Holocaust, in which more than 80 percent were killed. Greece--a Jewish History describes their diverse histories and the processes that worked to make them emerge as a Greek collective. It also follows Jews as they left Greece--as deportees to Auschwitz or émigrés to Palestine/Israel and New York's Lower East Side. In such foreign settings their Greekness was emphasized as it never was in Greece, where Orthodox Christianity traditionally defines national identity and anti-Semitism remains common.