Ulysses Essay 3 (7:12)

Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 3

 “Hellenize it”

For a moment, Malachi Mulligan joins forces with Stephen Dedalus against the rich Englishman Haines and proposes that Stephen try to wheedle some money out of Haines (“a guinea” is his suggestion, the equivalent of one pound and one shilling; I still recall physicians’ and lawyers’ bills in mid-twentieth century Cape Town being priced in snobbish “guineas”). Mulligan goes on to assert that they (Mulligan and Stephen) are so much Haines’s’ intellectual superiors that if they put their minds to it they could even “Hellenize the island” (i.e., bring backward Catholic Ireland into the modern world of esthetism and humanism).

Gifford points out that the verb “to Hellenize” was coined in the mid-nineteenth century by Matthew Arnold, in contradistinction to the verb “to Hebraise”. Whereas “Hebraism” represented the practice of habits, dogma and discipline, Hellenism was founded on knowledge, thought and flexibility. Arnold felt that England was “over-Hebraized” and needed now to undergo a process of Hellenization. Whether Matthew Arnold himself was anti-Semitic still remains moot, but (according to Gifford) by 1900 the Hebraism-Hellenism distinction had been transmuted in Bohemian slang into “Jews” versus “Greeks”  (epithets for those antagonistic to esthetic values in contrast to those who preached sensual-esthetic liberation). One would guess that this simplified nomenclature osmosed easily into the almost universal anti-Semitism of the fin de siècle English upper class.

Be that as it may, I remember as a child in  1950s Sea Point, Cape Town, as a pupil in Mr. Blezovski’s class in our local afternoon Hebrew school, which we called “Cheider” (a Yiddishism adapted from the Hebrew “Cheder” – “a room” – and originally applied in the shtetl culture in Eastern Europe to the one-roomed schools in which young boys received their elementary Jewish education), being taught, as Hanukah approached, about the Maccabean revolt in 167 B.C.E. against the Seleucid-Greek governor Antiochus IV who forbade the Jews living in Judea under his rule to observe Jewish rites and instead to eat pork and to worship the Greek gods, going so far as to put a statue of Zeus in the Second Temple, thus giving rise to the Hebrew idiom “Tzelem ba’Heichal” – “an idol in the Sanctuary” – still a catchphrase in modern Hebrew for any intolerable provocation. The revolt was successful (as attested to by the winter festival of  Hanukah) but it did not undo the fact  that Judea had been under the influence of Greek culture since Alexander’s conquest of the Middle East in 333 B.C.E. and that by Antiochus’s time many urban Jews had adopted Greek customs, language and dress. These Jews, so we were told at Cheider in the 1950s, were the despicable “Mityavnim” (“those who had undergone Hellenization”) – traitors to Jewish ideology because they idolized the beauty of the body as opposed to monotheistic Judaism which, so the story went, was committed to the abstract beauty of the mind. The censorious appellation “Mityavnim” is directly derived from the Hebrew biblical (and modern day) term for Greece (“Yavan”), named after its progenitor who is first mentioned (Genesis 10:2) as a son of Japheth (Hebrew “Yefet” – “beauty”), one of Noah’s three sons. After the deluge, Noah had praised Japheth and his brother Shem (Genesis 9:26-27) for respectfully covering his nakedness when he was drunk, walking backwards so as to avoid seeing their father’s disgrace, in contrast to the behavior of their youngest brother Ham, who had not only unashamedly witnessed Noah’s nakedness but had tattletaled to his brothers about it, and in retribution was cursed by Noah with the prediction that Ham’s son Canaan would be a “servant of servants” to his brothers (Genesis 9:25) – a phrase that Gifford points out was later adopted by the Catholic church as an appellation for none the less than the pope (Servus Servorum Dei – Server of the Servants of God), and also used to describe the server of the priest at Mass, as Stephen Dedalus recalls some moments later as he thinks about how he played this role at Catholic school. But to get back to Japheth: Noah confers on him the blessing “Yaft Elohim le’Yefet”.  Most translations of this phrase read, “May God enlarge Japheth,” but the Hebrew “yaft”, like “Yefet”, again strongly suggests derivation from the root “yafah” (“to be beautiful”) and the Rabbis of the Talmud do in fact express support for the alternative rendition “God will give beauty to Japheth.” Since Japheth is recorded as the father of Yavan (Greece), universally recognized as the personification of aesthetic beauty, we encounter here a surprisingly early Hebraic appreciation of the virtues of Hellenization, millennia before Matthew Arnold.

For myself, in contrast to the despicableness of the “Mityavnim” expounded to me by Mr. Blezovski at afternoon Cheider, Mr. Dickenson in his Ancient History classes at Sea Point Boys Junior School taught me about the glories of Greek and Roman culture in the mornings. Of course this was a whites only school: I was growing up in deeply apartheid 1950s South Africa, led by the recently elected Afrikaner Nationalist Prime Minister, Dr. Daniel François Malan, a highly educated dominie of the Dutch Reformed Church and a scion of a French Huguenot family which in 1659  had found refuge from Catholic persecution by the Sun King by fleeing to the Cape of Good Hope, recently colonized by Dutch Calvinists under Jan van Riebeeck to serve as a halfway house for Dutch East India Company ships making the arduous voyage round Africa. Unfortunately, Dr Malan’s church – and he himself – took literally the curse on Ham and his black descendants, a curse that would only be lifted in 1992 by another Huguenot scion, Frederik Willem de Klerk, in his historic accord with Nelson Mandela.

And when I was a little older I learned that my Hebrew teacher, Mr. Blezovski, was in fact a secular, enlightened and agnostic Jew who, Dedalus-like, taught the party line to keep his job, kowtowing to the Green and Sea Point Hebrew School Board of which my orthodoxly observant father was the chairman.