Departmental Lecture - Claude Eilers (McMaster University)

The Spartan–Jewish Kinship Tradition in Context: Degrees of Separation or Degrees of Calvinball?

The tradition that Jews and Spartans were kin is attested in documents quoted in *1 Maccabees* and later preserved by Josephus. In a recent paper I point out some features of these documents that suggest they may be authentic—or at least a better forgery than they are usually given credit for. In this talk I argue that the tradition belongs less to a world of “degrees of separation” than to one of “Calvinball,” in which genealogical invention obeyed few fixed rules. The Spartan–Jewish kinship claim, however implausible, illustrates the flexibility of mythic ancestry as a resource for diplomacy, identity, and negotiation in the Hellenistic world.