4. Dissolving the assumption of a necessary contrast between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’ could enable us better to appreciate the richly embroidered identity woven by many Jews in the Diaspora, who could be as intensely ‘Greek’ as they were intensely ‘Jewish’. A range of literary, historiographical, philosophical, theological and artistic ‘hybridizations’ are evident in the Diaspora, whose object was not to ape Greek culture so much as to re-express Judaism within it, sometimes with a significant polemical