Hebraism and Hellenism: The Case of Byzantine Jewry Nicholas de Lange Divinity School,Cambridge Abstract From ancient Hellenism to modern Hellenism: It would be easy to imag- ine that a straight line joins the one to the other. In reality the line is far from straight. In late antiquity the very term Hellene virtually disappeared from general Greek usage for several centuries, which is not to say, however, that Greek lan- guage and culture disappeared in the intervening period. They were maintained, in various ways, by Christians and to a more limited extent by Jews, in unbroken continuity, although thoroughly transformed by the admixture of a determinative "Hebraic" (by which I mean essentially Biblical) element, which on the Christian side often threatened and on the Jewish side actually managed to overwhelm the Hellenic tradition. It is a very complex story, the skeins of which have not yet been thoroughly disentangled. On the majority Christian culture, a good deal has been written (see particularlyMango 1965, Browning 1983, Garzma 1985), but very little attempt has been made so far to elucidate the Jewish experience. I have discussed elsewhere the continuity of the use of the Greek language by Jews (de Lange 199oc). In the present essay I consider the relationship between language and self-definition for Jews in the Byzantine Empire. In investigating the relationship of Hebraism and Hellenism it is inter- esting to consider the real-life case of the Jews of Byzantium. Byzantine Jewry, too long neglected and almost ignored by modern scholarship, is now emerging into the light of day, as it were, and it is becoming clearer that, however marginalized, they were very much a part of the Greek milieu in which they lived. At the same time, the Jews of Byzantium Poetics Today 19:1 (Spring 1998). Copyright ? 1998 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.