Berkeley Book List: Classical History
Erich S. Gruen, professor, History and Classics Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization, Arnaldo Momigliano, Cambridge University Press, 1975 The Jews in the Greek Age, Elias J. Bickerman, Harvard University Press, 1988 Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assmann, Harvard University Press, 1997 Greeks, Romans, Foreigners: Ethnic Prejudice and Proto-Racism in Antiquity, Benjamin Isaac, Princeton University Press, 2004 |
My academic area continues to shift and modulate. I have moved from Roman to Greek to Jewish history, and from political to diplomatic to cultural history. Current interests have expanded further to an exploration of cultural borrowings and ethnic appropriations among various peoples of antiquity: Jews, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. Hence, I am drawn to books that cross geographical divides and encompass the interchange and overlap of peoples and nations.
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Arnaldo Momigliano's Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization is a classic discussion of Greek perceptions of a range of peoples who they encountered and with whom they engaged, including Celts, Jews, Romans, and Iranians. Very learned and yet very readable, the book brilliantly shows the complex ways in which Greeks — though they took a keen interest in other cultures — invariably conceived (and distorted) them through their own Hellenic lenses.
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Elias J. Bickerman was the foremost scholar of the Jewish experience in the world of the Greeks. Published posthumously, The Jews in the Greek Age represents his most mature thoughts on the widest front. His discussions range from mutual perceptions of Jews and Greeks to illuminating studies of the manner in which their economies, laws, religions, languages, and literatures impinged upon one another.
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Moses the Egyptian's title does not convey the remarkable scope of this work. Jan Assmann is the most imaginative and widely read Egyptologist of our era. He probes the roots of monotheism in ancient Egypt, then its appropriation by Israelites who invented or embellished achievements ascribed to the malleable figure of Moses, which were in turn reshaped in different forms by later Egyptians. This incisive dissection of traditions moves from antiquity through debates about monotheism in the Enlightenment to Freud's re-appropriation of the legend and its continued resonance for historical memory.
Benjamin Isaac's Greeks, Romans, Foreigners: Ethnic Prejudice and Proto-Racism in Antiquity has not yet been published, but I have read it in manuscript. It is by far the most sweeping and all-encompassing study of stereotypes and hostile portrayals by Greeks and Romans of other peoples that has yet been written. Isaac details the classical world's biased conceptualizations of Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Syrians, Egyptians, Persians, Gauls, Germans, and Jews. As Isaac shows, the diverse images constructed at that time of genetic inferiority, of environmental and geographic influence, of descent and lineage, and propagation of fear of the alien has had an enduring impact on thinkers and public figures in Europe and the United States even up to the present time.
About Erich Gruen
Erich S. Gruen is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and
Classics. He has taught at Berkeley for 37 years. His research
has been in Greek, Roman, and Jewish history. He is a recipient
of the campus Distinguished Teaching Award,
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