Civilisation's alternative roots

In asking the question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”, the third-century theologian, Tertullian, dismissed the entire corpus of ancient Greek literature. So effective was the question that, within a couple of centuries, Plato’s Academy was shut and familiarity with Greek language and literature lost to Europe for more than a millennium. Not until the Renaissance was it recovered, whereupon admiration for the achievement of ancient Greece and Rome steadily grew among educated Europeans.

This encounter with the literature of classical antiquity in time issued in that great effervescence of 18th-century secular thought known as the Enlightenment. Tertullian’s rhetorical question was now posed in reverse: What of any import or truth could there possibly be in religion grounded in “revelation” rather than reason, the hallmark of ancient Greek philosophy? Christianity was now in the firing-line, along with Judaism, which, for the previous two millennia, had been deemed not only misguided, but pernicious.

In a spectacularly erudite tour de force, Miriam Leonard, Professor of Greek Literature at University College, London, traces the vicissitudes of opinion on Tertullian’s question during the past two centuries among Europe’s leading intellects. She exposes how many of them harboured nothing better than crude antisemitic prejudice on the subject, dressed up in metaphysical and philological garb.

They include Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Renan, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Small wonder this coterie is held in such high esteem today by Israel’s most inveterate critics on the left. Leonard shows how void of any rational basis were their various “demonstrations” of the intellectual or moral inferiority of the Jews or, worse still, their malign influence or intent.