האתנוגרפיה היהודית של הקטאיוס איש אבדירה (דיודורוס מ, 3)

The first Greek author to leave us a relatively extensive description of the Jewish people is Hecataeus of Abdera. This description, included in an excursus worked into his monumental ethnographic work on Egypt, constituted a miniature ethnography of the Jewish people, and is one of the most detailed surviving accounts in Greek and Roman literature of Jews and Judaism. Its being the first Jewish ethnography, coupled with the fame of the Egyptian ethnography of which it was a part, and the reputation of Hecataeus as a trail blazer in the ethnographic genre, all contributed to its status, a sort of vulgate on which later authors drew for information on the Jews. Even later authors whose approach to Judaism differed - whether for better or worse - depended to a certain extent, directly or indirectly, on Hecataeus, despite the availability in their times of more detailed, up-to-date and reliable information. For these reasons - and especially its being the first of its kind - Hecataeus' excursus has also been the subject of much modern research, attracting far more attention than the writings on the Jews of any other Greek-Roman author (apart from Tacitus). Nevertheless, there still remain a good number of topics requiring examination or reconsideration: recent challenges to the authenticity of the excursus; the transmission history of the text; the composition of the excursus, namely, how, and from what sources Hecataeus collected his material, and how he worked up his information; the exact location of the Jewish excursus in Hecataeus' work; and its purpose. To these central topics may be added further issues concerning details such as the absence of a reference to circumcision in the list of customs characterizing the Jews; the unique character of Jewish sacrifice, according to Hecataeus; his strange assertion that the Jews never had a king; and the meaning of his reference to Jewish apanthropy and hatred of strangers. The discussion of all these subjects in this paper enables us to answer the main question: What was, after all, Hecataeus' attitude to Jews and Judaism?