German Intellectuals’ Dangerous Choice of Athens over Jerusalem

In a German-language book whose title translates as Moses and Homer: Greeks, Jews, Germans: A Different History of German Culture, the historian Berndt Witte examines the ways great German thinkers from the late 18th century onward idolized ancient Greek civilization. While the subject—what one British writer in 1935 dubbed “the tyranny of Greece over Germany”—is nothing new, Witte’s argument that this Hellenophilism went hand in hand with a rejection of Judaism, and ultimately the Jews, is indeed new. Steven Aschheim writes in his review: