If you thought the Hanukkah story represented an epic battle pitting gyro-eating Greek soldiers against their falafel-devouring Israeli nemeses, you’d be wrong. King Antiochus IV was less Aegean than Seleucid which is a fancy way of saying Syrian-Greek. The Seleucid Empire’s capital was not Athens or Thebes but Antioch, located in northwestern Syria.
The misconception about who Judah Maccabeus fought against did not happen by accident. Hanukkah is as much a story about the ideological clash between Hellenization/Assimilation and Traditionalism as it is about pitched tents on actual battlefields across Judea.
The root word for Hellenization, ‘Hellas’, translates into Greece. When Hanukkah’s mythology spread, a desire to simplify the holiday’s story took hold and emphasis was placed on the cultural clash between Jewish and Greek philosophy. Thus, the Syrian component of the Seleucid Empire’s identity slipped out of Hebrew School classrooms and into the suede-elbow-patched-blazer wearing ivory tower crowd.
Given the recent fall of the Assad regime, we would be remiss to neglect Syria’s historic Jewish community which held out (or more accurately was prevented from leaving) longer than any other Arab country. The last inhabitants emigrated only in the mid-1990s. Likely already established by the time of King David, the Jews of Syria were a tragically successful target of Paul’s missionary journeys through Asia Minor.
Possibly as a result, the Syrian community remains extraordinarily insular until today with an approach to conversion that is essentially unheard of and without precedent in Jewish history. The 1935 Proclamation on Converts, reaffirmed as recently as 1984, reads:
… no male or female member of our community has the right to intermarry with non-Jews; this law covers conversions, which we consider to be fictitious and valueless. We further decree that no future rabbinic court of the community should have the right or authority to convert male or female non-Jews who seek to marry into our community.
There was then and remains now tremendous pushback to the Syrian Jewish community’s position. But as anyone who has ever done business with Syrian Jews knows, they rarely give an inch.
The most famous Syrian Jew? You’ll never guess. None other than Jerry Seinfeld whose mother Betty Hosni was born in Aleppo. So much for only Ashkenazim being neurotic.
As we gather round to light Hanukkah candles Wednesday night, asking in our best Seinfeld accent ‘What’s the deal with dreidels?’, pause to remember the once great Syrian, nay Seleucid Jewish community who under a new government may attempt to reclaim communal property only expropriated in the last 30 years. Chabad of Damascus opening 2025.
Shabbat Parshat Vayeshev
Candle Lighting: 4:13pm
Havdala: 5:14pm