Hanukah may be a children’s festival, but it has another side too
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Version 0 of 1. Unlike Passover or Yom Kippur, Hanukah is not and never has been a major Jewish festival. In Israel, no shops are closed for it. And the story that it references is nowhere in the Hebrew Bible – surprisingly, it originates in the Catholic and Orthodox version of the Bible and is briefly mentioned in the Talmud. As Emma Green argues in the Atlantic, Hanukah became a big thing largely as Jewish immigrants to the US sought to make cultural and religious space for themselves amid the omnipresent cultural hegemony of Christmas. In the Warsaw pogrom of 1881, Jewish shops were attacked for two days over Christmas. This is what Christmas meant to many of those coming off the boats at Ellis Island. Little wonder there was felt to be a need to “defang Christmas and assuage any concerns that pogrom was at their doorstep”, as history professor Jenna Weissman Joselit has put it. So what is the story of Hanukah? That seems such a simple question, but even the most superficial answer immediately enters an ideological minefield. The traditional story of Hanukah is a celebration of the persistence of Judaism, saved from its enemies. In 167BC, the invading Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes outlawed Judaism, banned circumcision and erected an altar to Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple – where he also slaughtered pigs for maximum offence. In response, Mattathias, a Jewish priest from the village of Modi’in (a few miles south of today’s Ben Gurion airport), and his son Judah, led a successful guerrilla war against the Greeks and recaptured and rededicated the temple. Hanukah celebrates this rededication and tells the story of a light that was lit in the temple that miraculously lasted eight days. Though widely seen as a holiday for children, with small presents and jelly doughnuts, the preservation of the Hanukah light has become a symbol of the miraculous continuity of Judaism amid those forces that would extinguish it. It’s also become a way to celebrate the persistence of Judaism in the form of the continued existence of the state of Israel. But to most, it’s just a sweet little holiday and celebration of the survival of faith in a hostile environment. What makes this account more problematic is that Mattathias and his son didn’t just fight foreign invaders, they also fought against fellow Jews whom they thought had been too influenced by the cultural forces of Hellenism. Mattathias’ first act of violent resistance was to slay another Jew who was preparing to sacrifice to the Greek gods. And, as some historians describe it, the war for the liberation of the temple was as much a civil war between Hellenised Jews and those who thought external cultural influences counted as a betrayal. Which is why some have compared the Jew-on-Jew violence of the Maccabean revolt to the assassination of the former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a fellow Jew, Yigal Amir, who believed that Rabin’s Oslo peace negotiations were also a sell-out to foreign influence. None of which is what Jews actually celebrate on Hanukah. Many have little idea about this contested history – the nice miracle story about the light occluding the more complicated story of the religious war that preceded it. Yet bravely reflecting on the darker side of Hanukah, Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of The Shalom Hartman Institute, has insisted that the story behind this minor festival exists in many rabbinic traditions as a cautionary tale about religious violence; about those who “murder because they think they are obeying divine will”. Some will see this as gratuitously messing with the innocence of what is largely a children’s festival. But I see it as a supreme act of loyalty to the peace-loving side of Judaism, one that prizes self-critical vigilance and recognises that the call for holy violence can nestle in the most unlikely of places. @giles_fraser |