Linguistic effects of Alexander’s conquests

The defeat of Persia by Alexander the Great and the resulting Greek-speaking empires produced a major change in the sociolinguistic repertoire of the Jewish people living within them, adding Greek to the Hebrew–Aramaic bilingualism that had begun with the Babylonian exile. Aramaic was by this time firmly fixed in the Jewish sociolinguistic profile, although, as I argued in the last chapter, its exact role as a vernacular alongside or replacing Hebrew remains open to question. Hebrew remained the preferred language for religious and literary composition, but it was a combination of Hebrew and Aramaic that was later to be entrenched as the language of the Babylonian Talmud, recognized in combination as loshn koydesh (the sacred tongue, Yiddish) in Ashkenaz. Now, in the latter part of the fourth century BCE, Greek was added as a third component, producing a trilingual pattern that was to be a template among Jews living in Palestine or elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean throughout Roman rule during the later Second Temple period, and more or less until the Islamic conquest.

A complex process of cultural merger produced a version of Jewish Hellenism that survived the Maccabean revolt. For a second time the Jewish sociolinguistic ecology was revolutionized by external pressure, a military success of the Macedonian warrior whose surviving nation is still disputed between Greek and Slavic speakers. Alexander conquered the known world, spreading his power as far as India and establishing a rule over the Middle East that entrenched Greek there for several hundred years. Jews remaining in the tiny state and those who emigrated from it were exposed to the new language and culture, setting off a struggle between Judaism and the dominant non-Jewish culture surrounding it that came to typify Jewish history.