The Hellenized Jews, Civilized or Apostate?: Jewish Attitudes Toward the Nudity and Circumcision in the Gymnasium and Their Socio-Cultural Interaction with Hellenistic Culture

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국서양고대역사문화학회
· 수록지 정보 : 서양고대사연구 / 56호 / 129 ~ 176페이지
· 저자명 : 안창선

초록

The gymnasium was a cultural center for Hellenism designed for education, physical exercise, religious performance, popular entertainment and social gatherings in the Greco-Roman period. The land of Judea under the Hellenistic dynasty was exposed to the spread of the gymnasium and the athletic culture it conveyed. This paper examines the influx of Hellenistic culture into Judea by analyzing the construction of the gymnasium at Jerusalem and displays the Jewish response to this outside cultural influence.
While illustrating the Jewish cultural encounters, I will argue that athletic nudity was a cardinal rule of the Greek gymnasium, which encountered Jewish culture during and after the construction of the gymnasium at Jerusalem during the Second Temple period. Because one’s activities at the gymnasium demonstrated one’s physical ability without the aid of any possessions, athletic nudity not only displayed the demotic equality, but also one’s physical strength and distinguishment. In the Jewish tradition of antiquity, however, public nudity was understood as shameful and dishonorable. When Jews encountered the influx of the gymnasium culture into their society they conducted varying degrees of cultural negotiation including participation, hesitation or rejection.
Presenting a preliminary examination of athletic nudity in the Hellenistic world, the paper investigates the literary witnesses of Jewish writers relating to matters of public nudity that reveal the issue of circumcision. I will then scrutinize the descriptions of these phenomena by Jewish literary specialists as informants of Jewish culture in Jerusalem. This scrutiny will include 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees and Josephus. By engaging in close a reading of the literature, I will demonstrate that the gymnasium at Jerusalem and the Jewish interaction with it displays the power dynamics between Jewish and Greek culture, as well as those between different strands of the Jewish community in light of varied socio-political contexts. Their receiving, rejecting, assimilating, and hesitating attitudes toward nudity and the concealing of their circumcision shows complicated and dynamic processes of reshaping Jewish identities under the Hellenistic culture.

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