WE might have gone on travelling in this Jewish and Greek Hellenistic land of mirrors and inverted mirrors, which could reflect additional aspects of modern Jewish history. Would it not have been appropriate, for example, to discuss the continuity between Hellenistic antisemitism and modern secular antisemitism? And ought we not to compare the Jewish and Greek attitudes towards women, or towards love and sex? Should we not find a similarity in the relationship that exists between the Greek and Jewish diasporas and their homelands? Or in the relation between religion and state in Judaism and the State of Israel, and in Greece? Do the Jewish and Greek cultures both belong to the realm of Mediterranean culture, with its shared contents and traits? And what of the parallel between the development of the modern Greek and modern Hebrew languages? We could, indeed, go further in this vast realm of analogies, but it seems that at this point it is time to reach some conclusions.

More than fifty years ago, Gershom Scholem stated that Maimonides' Judaism was closer to the Christianity or Islam of his own time than it was to the Judaism of today. What he probably had in mind was the Judaism of a secular Jew. Maimonides, according to this observation, would have felt more at home in contemporary Cairo and Rome than in modern-day Jerusalem. Scholem was, to a great extent, exaggerating, but he caustically pointed to the revolutionary historical change the Jewish people had undergone since the twilight of the eighteenth century. And this observation leads us back to the two mirrors-the Greek and the Hellenistic-and to the way Judaism is reflected in them.

The fact that Athens is an integral and essential part of the modern Jerusalem has, I hope, been well established in this study. If this is so, and if, as proposed by the model of antimony, Athens and Jerusalem are two antipodal entities, how can these hostile and contradicting spiritual and cultural entities exist together? If we look in the Greek mirror, or better said, in the mirror of the ideal Greece, the answer is that modern Judaism, namely secular Judaism, inspired by Athens and shaped by the heritage of classical antiquity (and Western values), is a different type of Judaism from the Judaism of previous generations; therefore, the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem in Jerusalem was and is inevitable.