Oh, That Christopher Hitchens

On Friday we spotlighted Ariela M’s apt deconstruction of Christopher Hitchens’s Slate piece Bah, Hanukkah, but I wanted to briefly discuss what about that piece I think is worthy of attention.

Mostly, I think Hitchens is full of crap, but when he points out that the Hasmoneans were imperialistic, and brutal, it’s not something to be ignored. We tend to tell the stories surrounding our holidays as if they had clear beginnings and endings the way fairy tales do, but that’s just not the case. The miracle of the oil is not the end of the story of the Hasmoneans. The warriors still had a great deal of work to do to protect the Jewish people from Greek influence, and if that meant killing Jews who had assimilated—so be it. I do understand that was pretty much the war aesthetic of the day. People killed other people for disagreeing with them all the time. That doesn’t make it okay, though, and I am frustrated by how much we glorify the Maccabbees and generally side with the Hasmoneans when the Hasmoneans really were tyrants. Chanukkah is a holiday that simply does not acknowledge any kind of middle ground between religion and secular life, and that the problem with it, and with the time period it glorifies. Hitchens may be a gasbag, but when he condemns the Maccabbees for slaughtering the Greeks and the ideas about reason that they brought with them he’s not just whistling Dixie.