2

The Greco-Roman and

Judaic Legacies

The legacy of classical antiquity is an obvious place to begin an

account of the origins of the idea of Europe, which has often been
traced back to Greek and Roman antiquity. But the nature of that rela-
tion is far from clear as is the question of the relation of the ancient
civilizations to what later became known as Europe, a notion that was
more or less unknown to the ancients. Any consideration of the legacy
of antiquity needs to take account of the fact that the very notion of a
classical age was a product of a later era and the relation to antiquity
has not been constant. The Christian tradition commenced with a
break with what it regarded as a pagan epoch, while the Renaissance
looked to the recovery of certain elements of the classical age and the
Enlightenment sought to distance the modern age from the ancient
civilizations and their legacy, seeing as it did in Benjamin Constant’s
formulation in 1819, a fundamental discord between the ‘liberty of the
ancient and the moderns’.
In our own time we often hear claims that Europe derives its
common culture from Greek and Roman civilization. It would appear
that the legacy of antiquity has been marked by ruptures as well as
continuities to the extent that the very notion of a ‘Greco-Roman’ civ-
ilization is questionable. A closer look at the civilizations of antiquity
reveals less a picture of unity than one of diversity and of transnational
movements. It is now increasingly recognized that the European her-
itage as it emerged out of these civilizations was formed not in isola-
tion, but out of borrowing, re-appropriating and mixing from different
societies.
This chapter presents the argument that rather than speak of a single
European civilization we should instead see Europe as formed by a civ-
ilizational constellation whose classical roots were shaped by Athens,

50
 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 51

Rome and Jerusalem. The argument is also sceptical of the alternative

view that a clash of civilizations emerged in antiquity or the argument
that these civilizations were inconsequential for modernity. While not
denying the significance of early rivalry between Greece and Persia, to
take the most well-known example, the Mediterranean world was one
in which the different cultures were deeply intermeshed due to trade,
migration and conquest. Conflicts belonged to this, but it is not poss-
ible to postulate a primordial conflict that provided the foundation for
later ones. Ancient conflicts did not predetermine later ones; there was
no path-dependency, but variation based on common origins and sub-
sequent processes of homogenization and integration established struc-
turing forming processes that gave to Europe its cultural and societal
shape.

Greek civilization and hellenism

It has generally been considered that European civilization begins with

classical Greek culture in the fifth century BCE, a century in which
Socrates and Pericles lived. In rejecting sacred kinship at an early stage,
the ancient Greeks made the most important breakthrough. The
Greeks established the political community of the polis in which a
uniquely political domain was institutionalized and which has often
been regarded as the beginning of democracy and the republican tradi-
tion of the self-governing political community. The modern republican
interpretation, as reflected in the writings of Hannah Arendt, saw the
Greek polis based neither on the state nor on the private world of the
household, but on the public domain of citizenship (Arendt 1958).
Although its claims to be a democracy in the modern sense of the term
must be greatly qualified, the Greek polis established the notion of the
individual as a citizen defined as a status based on rights. It can be seen
as having given birth to the conception of political community based
on civic solidarity and opposition to despotism. These characteristics
are probably more significant than a general notion of democracy, for
the ancient Greek city states were highly exclusionary. However, since
history – understood as the unfolding of a structure – is largely the
accumulation of unintended consequences, the Greek political ima-
gination was an important source of democratic ideas and political
innovation (see Arnason et al 2013).
Greek culture and society was not a homogeneous world. The notion
of a classical age was a later invention and while it is possible to speak
of a Greek civilization, this was highly diverse and influenced by
52 Formations of European Modernity

encounters with Asia, encounters that became more intensified follow-

ing the conquests of Alexander who brought Greek civilization as far as
India. It has been much documented how Greek culture was
influenced by the Near East.1 A historian of ancient Greece, Walter
Burkert, has outlined how, for instance, Homer was a combination of
Greek and eastern traditions (Burkert 1995). Mesopotamian influences
are much in evidence in Greek poetry and philosophy and there are
also links between Greek thought and Zoroastrianism. But the classical
age of Greek civilization did not see a direct link with the heroic age of
Homer: this was already perceived as archaic, but nonetheless was a
reference point for Greek memory.
To speak of Greek civilization we need to refer more directly to
Hellenism, the spread of Greek culture from the period that followed
the end of the classical fifth century Athenian polis, when the alliance
of Greek states that was the basis of Greek victory against the Persians
collapsed and a new Greek power arose in Macedonia. In the fourth
century BCE the armies of Alexander the Great conquered much of the
Near East and brought Greek civilization as far as India. The encounter
with India, replaced Egypt in importance for later Greek civilization,
but the resulting influence of Buddhism did not have a lasting impact
on Greek consciousness (Arnason 2006). The new Hellenic civilization
was weak in political terms and was eventually defeated by Rome, but
it left an indelible mark on the cultural orientations of the civilizations
it encountered. The Greek language was a global lingua franca; it was
widely spoken for several centuries across a huge region; it was the lan-
guage of trade, culture and diplomacy. In inheriting Greek culture,
Rome was also inheriting a cosmopolitan culture that was as much
Asian as European.
The significant feature of this culture for Europe was the fact that it
was based on writing, as opposed to recitations which had made poss-
ible the transmission of the Homeric tradition. The invention of
writing made possible the creative renewal of the Homeric past and the
construction of cultural memory that is the basis of identity. The Greek
alphabet was one of the first systems of writing to replace the spoken
word (Goody et al 1968; Goody 1986). It was a scribal culture that
incorporated the oral tradition and writing and thus made a break-
through beyond pictorial cultures of writing. According to Jan
Assmann, the Greeks created a scribal culture based on texts which in
turn formed the basis of its cultural memory. The adoption of writing
as the basis of a culture makes possible cultural continuity and coher-
ence. Unlike Judaism, which was an early civilization based on writing,
 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 53

there was no sacred texts and, importantly, it formed part of a ‘free

space that was occupied neither by the commanding voice of a ruler
nor by god. This power vacuum favoured orality’s penetration of
Greece’s scribal culture’ (Assmann 2011: 244). This was because the
world of texts did not occupy an official place and their texts were not
the basis of systems of political control or social organization. Thus
there was no ‘tyranny of the Book’ in the Greek world, as there was in
the Judaeo, Christian and Islamic cultures. The Greeks, moreover to
follow Assmann, had numerous books, all of which were contradictory
and constituted an inter-textual culture in which authority could never
be fixed despite several texts achieving canonical status: ‘Thus a culture
was born whose cohesion and continuity rested entirely on texts and
their interpretation. Institutions of interpretation ensured cultural con-
tinuity, from philologoi to monks to humanists’ (Assmann 2011: 254).
It is possible to see this aspect of Greek culture, known as philosophy,
as constituting a core feature of the European heritage that gave to it a
radical reflectivity and orientation towards critique.
In terms of its contribution to Europe it needs to be reiterated that
Hellenism was not European, but a mix of Aegean, Greek, and Asian
cultures. It did not include the Celts for instance, although the Celtic
culture was greatly influenced by the Greeks. For the Greeks them-
selves, Europa was a name of a princess from Asia Minor, but was
neither the name of a civilization nor of a continent. In the Greek
myths Europa was a name of a Phoenician princess who, having been
seduced by Zeus disguised as a white bull, abandoned her homeland in
present-day Lebanon for Crete where she later married the King of
Crete. Aristotle believed Hellas was somewhere between Europe and
Asia. Etymologically, its origins are unclear; although clearly Greek, it
is thought to have had Semitic roots and was a term for the setting
sun. Arnold Toynbee has suggested that Europe and Asia may have
been nautical terms for a seafaring people.
It is in cartography that the earliest traces are to be found. In Greek
cartography, Europe became a name given to territory beyond the
Greek world and was often taken to be the half-sister of Asia and Libya
(Africa). The idea of Europe as a continental civilization was alien to
the Greeks, who introduced the political distinction between Greeks
and barbarians, Greeks and Persians or Asians. It appears that Europe
and Asia as geographical regions were of little significance to the
Greeks for whom everything non-Greek was simply ‘barbarian’. This
was the view of Aristotle who made a threefold distinction between
Greeks, Europeans and Asians, and held that the latter two were
54 Formations of European Modernity

barbarians. However the authors of antiquity in any case rarely if ever

used Europe, which was a less defined term than Asia, and both were at
most vague geographical terms. Herodotus referred to the area north of
the Black Sea, not as Europe, but as Scythia. It is possible that the
conflict between the Greeks and the Persians was more significant and
probably provided terms of reference for later conflict between
Europeans and Asia. However, this should not be exaggerated. The
Persian Wars were not only a conflict between Greeks and Persians and
more Greeks fought with the Persians than against it (Gallant 2006:
124). The Greek and Persian cultures overlapped to a considerable
extent. When the notion of the barbarian was later reinterpreted to
mean the opposite to civilization the term acquired a meaning that
was somewhat different from the Greek notion, for whom it simply
meant speakers of a non-Greek language or a language that could not
be understood. For this reason, any claims of a continuous genealogy
of Europeans versus barbarians must be qualified with a consideration
of changing meanings (Gruen 2011).
According to Hay (1957: 3) in his authoritative study on the early
history of the idea of Europe, Isocrates in the fourth century BCE con-
structed an identification of Europe with Greece and Asia with Persia.
Ptolemy, in the second century AD, used the term Sarmatia and distin-
guished between Sarmatia Europea and Sarmatia Asiatica with the River
Don separating them (Halecki 1950: 85). This was to prove an endur-
ing distinction and still remains as one of the conventional geograph-
ical definitions of Europe. Hippocrates refers to the Sea of Azov as the
boundary of Europe and Asia. At about this time the earlier division
between Persia and Greece gave way to a threefold division between
Europe, Asia and Africa. Africa has earlier been associated with Asia but
later these regions were regarded as separate with the Nile as the main
dividing line.
Such arbitrary distinctions should not disguise the cosmopolitanism
of Greek civilization, especially in its Hellenistic phase when the rela-
tively closed world of the classical polis was undermined by the
Macedonian conquests. This was a time when the Greek world was
looking eastwards, not westwards, and when a global consciousness
began to manifest itself on the Greeks. There is an interesting paradox
in this in that the origins of Europe – essentially Asia Minor – were in
what later was regarded to be outside Europe. Indeed many of these fell
under Byzantine rule. The idea of Europe as a geographical region
began to emerge with the decline of classical Greek civilization. It
should also be noted that the idea of Europe was often in tension with
 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 55

the notion of the Occident and was generally less important than the
latter. The concept of the Occident first referred to the Eastern
Mediterranean and was not identical with the idea of Europe. It was a
Hellenistic Occident, though in another tradition the Occident was
held to be the source of paradise and somewhere in the unknown
western oceans. It is possible that the Greeks were more strongly aware
of the world being structured on a north-south axis than a west and
east polarity. Troy, the mythic cradle of the Occident was after all east
of the Dardanelles. Indeed much of the Greek Occident was in what
later became the Orient. For all these reasons caution must be exercised
in the claim that there was always a fundamental divide between West
and East and that this coincided with a civilizational clash between
Europe and the non-Greek world.
The characteristic distinction between barbarians and Greeks became
less sharp in the era of the Hellenistic Empire. The Greek language
bequeathed a tradition of cultural translation by which the cultures of
the Hellenic civilization communicated through a common culture,
which was decisive not only for the emergence of the ‘Axial Age’, but
for the nascent idea of Europe civilization. The kind of culture this rep-
resented was one that by its very nature was not tied to a particular ter-
ritory. There was a fundamental rupture in Greek civilization with the
transition from Greek to Hellenistic culture, for the latter was not
exclusively Greek, but absorbed elements of the new cultures that
became part of the Hellenistic world, much of which derived from
Persia (Assmann 2011: 252).
It is possible to detect a shift from the polis to the cosmic order of,
what the Greeks called, the oikoumene, that is the wider inhabited
world. This enlarged conception of the world was reflected, for
example, in the first ideas of cosmopolitanism as expressed in the
political thought of the Cynics and Stoics for whom loyalty to the
wider human community was more important than the community
into which one was born. Another expression of this cosmopolitan
worldview was the movement towards ‘Universal History’ as the
attempt to find ways to narrate the whole world rather than just one
aspect of it. The emergence of what Inglis and Robertson (2005) have
termed an ‘ecumenical sensibility’ that came with these developments
bequeathed to later ages a European civilizational imaginary that
cannot be understood as a narrow Eurocentric conception of the world.
At this time the relatively closed world of the republic and the open
horizon of the cosmopolis established two visions of political com-
munity in Greek thought. The tension between these two visions of
56 Formations of European Modernity

political community has been an enduring feature of modern political

thought and in many ways reflects the two aspects of the idea of
Europe that collide with each other in the present day: an open vision
of Europe versus a closed one. The republican tradition of the Greek
polis and the Hellenistic vision of a global order were to have a lasting
impact on the European political heritage, which can be seen as a tra-
dition that has continuously reconstructed and reinvented this tension
between these two conceptions of political community, which were
intertwined but provided a basic set of orientations for the republican
and the cosmopolitan traditions.
The Greek sources of European civilization were characterized by
both loss and recovery. The papyrus roll used by the Greeks for the
written text was less durable than the culture they recorded.
Consequently as a result of the decay of the papyrus rolls, many of the
great works of classical Greek culture were lost by the sixth century,
until Arab scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries recovered
and translated them using new methods of paper production. Greek
civilization survived during the long period of Roman civilization not
directly, but only through translations, appropriations and traces. The
implication of this is that much of the ancient sources of the European
heritage are known only indirectly. Yet, much of the later Hellenic civ-
ilization did survive well into Roman times and was especially present
in the Byzantine tradition (see Chapter 4).
All societies and civilizations have a myth of their origins, which has
generally been linked to an act of emancipation or a revolutionary
event that had a foundational status. The Roman myth of its origins
was to become a foundational myth for Europe: the city of Rome was
believed to have been founded in 753 BCE by Romulus, a descendent
of Aeneas, who fled from Troy after its sack in the twelfth century BCE
and eventually reached Latium where a Greek colony was founded.
According to this myth, the Trojans fled to other parts of Europe to
found a series of imperial dynasties. This myth of Aeneas was later
appropriated by European monarchies for it was held that the exiled
Trojans founded a series of cities in the West and many of the western
monarchies claimed to derive their genealogy from the exiles of Troy
(Tanner 1993). The Tudor, Habsburg and Ottoman historical myths of
legitimation all proclaimed the Trojans to be their ancestors.
There is little if any archaeological basis to this myth, which tells a
story of how the civilization that arose in Rome was a Greco-Roman
civilization. As with all narratives it tells us more about the conception
of history of contemporaries than about historiographical knowledge.
 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 57

Roman civilization emerged out of a long process by which Greek

culture was reshaped into a new form. The civilizational continuity
that Europe has with the Greeks has often been seen as very much a
Roman creation. However, it should not be forgotten that much of the
Greek culture survived independently and was not entirely absorbed
into the nascent Roman civilization. Some of this remained outside
mainstream Roman culture and can be seen as constituting a counter-
narrative to the dominant tradition associated with the patrician
Roman legacy.
In one of the most important interpretations of Greek thought for
the idea Europe, the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (2002) in Plato and
Europe, first published in 1973, sought to redefine the spiritual essence
of Europe as a philosophical quest. The foundations of Europe are in
the mind, rather than in political reality. Europe was born out of the
ruins of the polis, but destroyed itself in the twentieth century; its
most important idea is to be found in the philosophy of Plato and in
particular the notion of the ‘care of the soul’: ‘The history of Europe is
in large part, up until, let us say, the fifteenth century, the history of
the attempt to realize the care of the soul’ (Patocka 2002: 37). This later
was in danger of disappearing ‘under the weight of something, some-
thing that might be deemed a concern, or care about dominating the
world’ (2002: 88). Patocka identified the basic idea of the inner life of
the individual as the core of the European tradition and which
influenced the Christian tradition. He stressed as the Greek philosoph-
ical achievement to be the belief in the fundamental uncertainty of
human existence, that the individual is not a slave to the state or to
history and that everything is open to scrutiny. This conception of the
individual, he believed, was in danger of getting lost in later periods of
European history. He may have been overly pessimistic about this, but
the basic idea of the conception of the autonomy of the self was clearly
one of the significant legacies of ancient Greece and constituted the
basis of a tradition of anti-despotism that was an important influence
in European history.
In stark contrast to Patocka, Carl Schmitt (2006), writing in Berlin in
the 1940s, saw the source of the unity of Europe neither in the polis
not in the soul, but in the Greek notion of the Nomos, which the
spatial and juridical basis of civilization in that it gives both ‘order and
an orientation’. What he called the Nomos of the earth was in essence a
juridical model for ‘land-appropriation’, which for Schmitt was a more
important legacy than that of the polis for it laid the basis of what he
called the Jus Publicum Europaeum – the legal order that governed
58 Formations of European Modernity

Europe since the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The enigmatic

suggestion in this work is that this world order is now finally coming
to an end and a new and global one is coming and will herald the
decline of Europe.

Roman civilization

Greek civilization as it emerged during the Hellenic era did not have the
enduring significance of the Roman civilization, which was a civiliza-
tion underpinned by an empire that established a lasting institutional
framework for European civilization. Although the Greeks were partly
colonized by the nascent Roman civilization, Greek culture has largely
come to us today through the Roman tradition and the later Christian
tradition which was formed out of the confluence of Greek and Jewish
thought. Due to the overlapping nature of the two civilizations, it is
only with some qualifications that we can speak of Greco-Roman civi-
lization. However, this must be qualified for there was never entirely a
fusion of Greek and Roman culture, for Rome never fully absorbed
Greek culture and consequentially Greek culture was never entirely
Romanized. This may call into question the notion of a Greco-Roman
civilization when what existed were simply two interacting civilizations.
The Roman Empire emerged out of the Roman Republic, but was
more than an empire; it was a civilization. It was formed out of a
geopolitical territory that emerged out of the conquests of the Roman
Republic and by the time of Augustus was declared emperor in 31 BCE,
when the Roman Republic finally became an empire, it included much
of what we today call Europe, but more as well in that much of it lay
outside the later historical territories of Europe. This empire was as
much eastern as European or western; it included a great diversity of
cultures, Celts, Germans, Romans, Iberians, Berbers, Illyrians, and
Libyans. The Chinese once believed Antioch was the capital rather
than its third largest city (Dudley 1995: 243). It created an enduring
institutional framework based on the rule of law, which served as an
integrative framework for Europe, and a system of writing that pro-
vided a framework in which non-Romans, such as the Germanic tribes,
used to construct their own history. Such ideological power was one
way in which the identity of Europe was shaped. In this sense civiliza-
tion comes with the power that writing brings with it since it is writing
that made possible historical memories. The worldview of the Roman
Empire embodied both a civilizational worldview and various cultural
orientations that were decisive for the course of European civilization.
 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 59

The civilizational worldview did not fully crystallize until the adoption
of Christianity as the official state religion of the empire, but the cul-
tural orientations were present from an early period and could be
described as a nascent global culture, which like the European culture
that was to follow in its wake was not based on a single native culture,
but a plurality of competing ones.
As a geopolitical entity, the Roman Empire was itself a civilizational
constellation embodying a vast array of cultures connected by trans-
port networks of roads and seaways. The Roman Empire shifted the
eastwardly Hellenic civilization westwards, though much of present-
day Northern Europe lay outside it. The Roman Empire was above all a
Mediterranean civilization. Its diversity reflected the multi-ethnic
world of the Mediterranean as well as the wider European continent
including much of Germany and England. The fault-lines in these two
countries that shaped so much of their history can be related to the
lines that marked the final advance of Romanization. Although we
often see Europe divided between an East and a West, this distinction
made no sense in Roman times when a conception of Europe did not
exist. The empire was Asian, African and as much as it was European. It
was culturally cosmopolitan in the sense of being mixed, but was polit-
ically centralized and the imperial centre dominated the periphery.
The pre-Christian Roman religion adopted many pagan traditions from
all over the Mediterranean world with which it came into contact in its
continuous expansion. The Roman Empire, while expanding in many
directions from Rome after the Punic Wars against Carthage and the
conquest of the Hellenic territories, was in its time a world empire. In
his studies of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel portrayed the interac-
tion of a plurality of civilizations within the unity of the Mediterranean:
Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Orthodox civilizations interacted and the
cross-fertilization of their cultures produced the world of the
Mediterranean, which he associates with the multi-ethnic Roman
Empire. Braudel (1994) never developed his concept of civilization,
which remained a vague, suggestive notion entailing both unity and
pluralism within it and at the same time included an intra-civilizational
dynamic that was creative and transformative. Cultural trade, diasporas,
translations, cultural diffusions and cross-fertilizations, produced the
world of the Mediterranean and its civilizations.
It is possible to see the Roman Empire as consolidating a vast web of
cultures that had already been in contact. It imposed on this already
connected world a central authority which was supported by superior
military power, integrative systems of transport and communication
60 Formations of European Modernity

across sea and land, technological innovations, trade networks, and a

political and intellectual elite who were united by a common language.
The Roman concept of empire is closer to a civilizational vision of an
open world endlessly expanding than the Greek polis of the pre-
Hellenic period; it was not confined to a specific territory, for empire
and world were one and the same. While the Roman Empire was won
by military conquest, the civilization that was created out of that
process was a more universalistic one than the earlier Hellenistic civil-
ization for all its cosmopolitanism. Hellenism was ultimately a cultural
world based on the universality of the Greek language; the Roman
Empire was a political and legal order in the first instance. Although
the earlier Greek distinction between Hellas and barbarians, generally
equated with Persians, was less apparent in the later Hellenic period,
nothing like the Roman distinction of citizens and non-citizens
existed. The Roman Empire was based on a principle of universal rule
that had no territorial limits. As a geopolitical configuration as opposed
to a linguistic world, the empire was defined not by territory, but by
the limits of its political system and a vast social, cultural and eco-
nomic world.
The Romans were conscious of peoples living beyond the frontiers of
the empire, which in principle was limitless before it collapsed under
its own weight. It is now recognized that it is not easy to speak of ‘bar-
barians’ beyond the frontiers in a very clear-cut way. Roman frontiers
were porous and not fixed points of closure; many served as points of
communication in what in fact were very often expansive borderland
areas (see Whittaker 1994). The establishment and expansion of such
borderlands was instrumental in creating the foundations of a
European civilization in which inside and outside was not absolutely
fixed. The Roman frontier might be seen as the site of European civil-
ization and not the central imperial core as such. The frontier was
shaped in a constant push and pull in which the imperial territory
expanded in multiple directions. In this sense, then, the frontiers of
the Roman Empire connected as much as divided people. The lines on
a map which we today call borders did not exist in the same way in the
ancient world where the limes were not always linear and fixed, but
zones or borderlands. It was through this expanding system of border-
lands that Europe was created from Roman times onwards.
It must not be forgotten than in a seafaring age the Alps represented
a far greater geographical, and hence a cultural, divide than the
Mediterranean. The sea served to unite people rather than divide them.
The entire trading networks of the ancient world criss-crossed
 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 61

the Mediterranean linking Cadiz, Carthage, Alexandria and

Constantinople. New interpretations of the Mediterranean influenced
by Horden and Purcell’s interactionist analysis have stressed a world of
interconnections established by exchange and commerce made poss-
ible by the sea (Horden and Purcell 2000; Harris 2006; see also Abulafa
2000; Gallant 2006). But the Roman Empire was an empire and
asserted the dominance of the centre over the periphery.
An important part of the Roman contribution to European civiliza-
tion has been commented on by Rémi Brague, namely a specific rela-
tionship to culture as the transmission of what is received (Brague
2002). Roman civilization was based on a culture that was based on the
reworking of those cultures it came into contact with, in particular
Greek, Hebraic, Near Eastern and African. These cosmopolitan currents
were of course often checked by the republican tendencies of the met-
ropolitan centre. This dynamic tension at the heart of the Roman
Empire gave to Europe one of its creative impulses, namely the con-
stant reworking of all cultures, including the heritage of the past. The
implication of this is that Europe is not primarily based on people-
hood, but on a civilizational process that included violence as the
primary means of securing its conditions of existence. The simple
reality of the Roman Empire was its more or less total militarization,
necessitated by the need to keep large standing arms. The armies of the
modern age were far smaller and subject to greater restrictions than
was the case in the age of the Roman Empire where war was a perma-
nent feature of the age.
While the Roman civilization laid the basic structures of a European
civilization, it also created a deep division, which ultimately made
impossible less a common European civilization than an interconnect-
ing constellation of different societies. When the Roman Empire finally
split into an eastern and a western half the unity of its civilization was
undermined but not fragmented. With the relocation of its capital in
Constantinople in 330 AD, the Roman Empire had ceased to be exclu-
sively Roman, although for long the citizens of Byzantium called them-
selves Romans. The consequences of the final political split between
eastern and western empires in 395 has undoubtedly been exaggerated,
at least until the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine capital in 1453
when the definitive break occurred. The early division, which is better
located in the sixth century when a distinct Byzantine civilization crys-
tallized, did not engender the later division between East and West (see
Arnason and Raaflaub 2011). While the eastern half included Egypt,
the western half included Africa, which meant for the Romans the
62 Formations of European Modernity

western parts of North Africa, Greece and the Aegean and most of the
south of the Balkans went to the eastern empire. The Italian peninsula
remained a dividing line between the two halves of the empire (Herrin
1987: 22–3). Yet despite these shifts and divisions, the notion of the
Roman tradition as such was not bound to Rome, and like Europe, it
was transferrable to the parts of the world that it came into contact
with. In this sense it constituted what Stephen Greenblatt (2010) has
called a ‘mobile culture’.
The Byzantine Empire provided continuity with the Greco-Roman
tradition which continued links between West and East after the divi-
sion of the empire. It was founded as the ‘New Rome’, or the ‘Second
Rome’ and its citizens called themselves Romans. But the decline of the
Roman Empire was irreversible and complete in the sixth century
when the eastern empire failed to recover the western half. What sur-
vived was the empire’s main creation, a civilizational heritage, to a
large degree now based on Christianity and which was to provide a
framework for the homogenization of Europe in the Medieval era. Of
the many architects of this homogenization were the Normans whose
conquests established unity that later laid the foundation of the idea of
Europe. The institutional framework of feudalism they created was
decisive in laying the structural foundations of a societal order in
Europe. Significant, too, in particular in transmitting the Greek and
Roman legacy, was the Irish monastic movement from the late sixth to
early eight century. The Irish monks – such as Columbanus, John
Scotus Eriugena – founded monasteries across Europe and were critical
in the transcription and translation of the texts of antiquity, thus pro-
viding civilizational continuity in an era of major change following the
break-up of the Roman Empire and the re-configuration of core and
peripheries.
While the word ‘Europe’ did exist, albeit without much meaning, the
term ‘Europeans’ was rarely used in Ancient times. The word Franks
was more commonly used by those who encountered Europeans well
into modern times. This was simply because there was no other word
to describe the invading Franks from Normandy who arrived from the
West in the twelfth century. The notion of Europeans was absent and
Europe did not signify a cultural or political reality other than a
vaguely defined geographical domain that only roughly coincided with
the notion of the Occident.
The decline of the Roman Empire in the West may have been para-
doxically the source of the eventual rise of the North Western region of
Europe, where continuity with Rome was more an ideology of the
 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 63

Franks than a reality; for the fragmentation of the empire led to the
emergence of new and very different societal structures, associated
with feudalism and the Latin western Church. In the East, the greater
continuity of the Roman tradition under the Byzantines reached a
point of major rupture in 1453 with the final end of the Eastern
Empire (see Chapter 4).

Jewish civilization

Along with Athens and Rome, Jerusalem is an important reference

point in the European civilizational constellation. Together these tradi-
tions have shaped the European heritage. The Greek, Roman,
Christian, Islamic and Judaeo traditions gave a lasting orientation to
European civilization, which was never based on one single source. It
would not be inaccurate to say European civilization derived from a
multiplicity of cultures. More to the point however it was formed
through the fusion, interaction and transformation of cultures, since
the cultures did not always remain separate. The tensions that have
been a characteristic feature of Europe have reflected this process of
continuous creation. The logic of this process can be described as the
process of civilization to which belongs an integral cosmopolitanism
and a questioning of the authority of political rule, which derives from
an anti-despotic current in ancient thought.
As a civilization, Judaism is a complicated case since the Jews unlike
the Romans are specifically a people in an ethnic or religious sense and
cannot be defined in terms of an imperial territory or state. The ethnic
definition is of course contested as is relation to a territory. The reli-
gious unity of the Jews distinguishes them from groups that are
defined by membership of a political community, territory or a shared
language. It is closer to a culture than to a civilization, but embodies
some of the features of a civilization. However, one can speak of Jewish
civilization as distinct from the notion of a Jewish people, religion, or
national groups.
Jewish civilization exists in two senses, as a diasporic culture –
Eisenstadt’s (1992) argument – consisting of the entire historical expe-
rience of the Jews and, secondly, as the religious culture out of which
the Jewish civilization was formed. It is difficult to separate these
dimensions, but the distinction is an important one, since the Jewish
contribution to Europe has been twofold; first, as a diasporic people
whose historical experience has included an important European
dimension since the medieval era when Jews migrated to various parts
64 Formations of European Modernity

of Europe; secondly, as the cultural origin of the Roman and Christian

civilization. In this latter sense what is important is the religious and
cultural dimension, rather than the specific contributions of Jews, due
to its formative influence on other civilizational currents.
Regarding the diasporic dimension of the Jewish contribution to
Europe, once they migrated to Europe Jews played an important role in
the translations of ancient texts into Latin, often through Arabic trans-
lations. However, the Jews are a diasporic people who moved to Europe
relatively late and were not unified into an organized unit. Unlike
Christianity, there was not a political order unifying the different
Jewish traditions and there was not a territorial basis for Jewish civiliza-
tion other than a myth of an original homeland. Of course, too, the
Jews were excluded from much of the economic and political life of
Europe until their political emancipation.
The role of Judaism in the making of European civilization is closer
to the example of Ancient Greece in that Judaism lay at the origin of
the Roman and Christian tradition. Both Christianity and Judaism are
based on the idea of a personal redeemer God. It is possible to see
European civilization as a synthesis of the civilizational traditions that
stemmed from Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. Unlike the Greco-Roman
tradition, Judaism was monotheistic and it was this that provided a
cultural orientation for Christian Europe. Jan Assmann has argued that
Jewish civilization was in part shaped by the rejection of Egyptian
sacred kinship (Assmann 1987). Max Weber (1952[1911–20]) in his
Ancient Judaism also stressed the rejection of magic in Judaism, which
he saw as not having developed the rationalizing tendencies of
Christianity. But unlike the Greeks, who also rejected sacred kinship,
the notion of divine authority that the Jews created instead led to a
civilizational form that was based on monotheism, which in turn was
conducive to a spirit of individuality born of the struggle to gain salva-
tion through redemption by a personal God. A particularly powerful
influence emanating from Judaism was the experience of exile and
with it the critique of domination. As Brunkhorst (2005: 28–30) has
suggested in his reconstruction of European solidarity, the mythic
story of the Exodus of the slaves from Egypt and the confrontation
with foreign domination in the name of a higher law provided the
sources for a European tradition of resistance to domination.
The Old Testament has exerted a lasting influence on Europe. Many
of the basic cultural orientations of Christianity were expressed in it,
most importantly the idea of a personal God and the notion of a
higher order of justice. It established the belief in the incomprehens-
 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 65

ibility and utter otherness of the divine. With Christianity, human

history and divine history were conceived in non-cyclical terms. The
emphasis shifted to the contingency of providence, in which human
beings play a role in bringing about the conditions of their salvation.
Christianity itself began as a Jewish sect and the schism of the sect and
the religion was one of the major events in the making of Europe,
since the new religion became the official religion of the Roman
Empire and later of Europe itself. Thus to speak of the ‘Judaeo-
Christian’ tradition is to refer both to a common origin and a history
of the rejection of that origin and its crystallization in new forms. It is
possible to venture the claim that this contradiction has been at the
core of the European consciousness, which has had to confront the
reality of a civilization that has been formed from diverse cultures all
of which had to be refashioned by a church that itself saw itself based
on a higher order truth as opposed to worldly wisdom.
The history of the Jewish diaspora in Europe draws attention to an
aspect of the European heritage that is best exemplified by the Jewish
historical experience. The Jews were the most transnationalized group
in Europe since they were forced to take on economic functions such
as itinerant trade, money-lending and other pursuits that depended on
networks of international contacts that could cross a variety of borders.
These networks developed into a myriad of economic, personal and
communal connections that often bound Jews across early modern
Europe (Miller and Urry 2012). The Jewish experience is too a reminder
of the spirit of rootlessness that has pervaded Europe from the earliest
of times.
Since the destruction of the European Jews in the Holocaust, the
relation of Europe to the Jews has been subject of considerable debate
and one in which the line between civilization and barbarism has had
to be reconsidered in light of the deep currents of anti-Semitism that
have been a part of European civilization and which were endemic to
Christianity at a number of points in its history. But from a civiliza-
tional perspective the Greek, Judaeo and Christian traditions were
interlinked in the making of the European civilizational heritage,
which cannot be reduced to one of these traditions. The Christian tra-
dition was itself the result of the intersection of the Greek and Judaic
traditions. Despite this confluence of traditions within the Christian
tradition, the notion of a ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition should be treated
with caution, since the two religions went their separate ways and the
fact of a shared origin does not guarantee commonality. The very term
‘Judaeo-Christian’ was not in currency until the early twentieth
66 Formations of European Modernity

century when it emerged along with the idea of a singular western civ-
ilization in opposition to the communist atheistic one in the East. This
construction was at the cost of the neglect of the much more plural
nature of the civilizational heritage of antiquity.