This episode traces the full arc of the Greece-Israel relationship across 2,300 years, from the Septuagint translation in Ptolemaic Alexandria to the modern EuroAsia Interconnector submarine power cable. The ancient period saw profound intellectual exchange—Jewish scholars translating Hebrew scripture into Greek for the Ptolemaic court, producing the text that became the early Christian Church's Bible. Philo of Alexandria synthesized Jewish theology with Greek philosophy, developing the Logos concept that directly shaped the Gospel of John. Yet this period also included the Maccabean Revolt against forced Hellenization, revealing a Jewish society negotiating how much Greek influence was too much. The Romaniote Jewish community in Greece predated Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities by centuries, maintaining Greek-speaking Jewish life until the Holocaust destroyed 87% of Greece's Jewish population—96% in Thessaloniki alone. Diplomatic relations between Greece and Israel were frozen until 1990 due to Cold War alignments and Palestinian solidarity. The relationship transformed in the 2010s with offshore gas discoveries, leading to the East Mediterranean Gas Forum and the 1,208-kilometer EuroAsia Interconnector linking Israel's isolated grid to Europe. Greece has become Israel's second-most popular tourist destination, with over 1.5 million Israeli visitors between 2018 and 2023. Yet the 2023 ADL Global 100 survey found 69% of Greeks hold anti-Semitic attitudes—the highest rate in Europe—while 89% of Greek Jews report experiencing anti-Semitism in daily life. The episode asks whether a strategic partnership can survive when one society holds such deeply prejudiced views about the other.
#4863: Greece and Israel: From Ancient Scrolls to Submarine Cables
How two ancient civilizations became energy partners while 69% of Greeks hold anti-Semitic views.
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New to the show? Start here#4863: Greece and Israel: From Ancient Scrolls to Submarine Cables
Daniel sent in a prompt that asks us to trace a single thread across two thousand three hundred years. Two civilizations born on opposite shores of the same sea — the Jewish people and the Ancient Greeks — whose intellectual exchange gave us the Septuagint and Philo's Logos, and whose modern states are now linked by a twelve hundred kilometer submarine power cable. He wants to know what that ancient cultural interaction actually looked like, how it evolved into the modern bilateral relationship, what the Greece-Israel-Cyprus alliance is doing right now, why Greece is a top Israeli tourist destination, and what the concerning anti-Semitism statistics actually say. That is a lot of ground.
It is, and it's ground that most coverage flattens into either "ancient friendship" or "modern tension," when the reality is much stranger. You have a relationship where the intellectual foundations of Western thought were laid partly through Jewish-Greek exchange, then a near-total rupture in the twentieth century, then a strategic realignment built on gas fields and power cables, and simultaneously — simultaneously — polling that shows Greece has the highest rate of anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe. Those things don't fit together neatly.
They don't. And I think that's the thing worth sitting with. How does a country become Israel's energy partner and its citizens' favorite beach destination while nearly seven in ten of its people hold anti-Semitic views? That's not a contradiction that resolves itself with a nice paragraph.
Right. So let's trace the arc properly. We'll start with the ancient world — the Septuagint, Philo, the Hasmonean tension — then move through the Ottoman centuries and the Holocaust rupture, then the modern rapprochement, the tripartite alliance, the tourism boom, and land on the anti-Semitism data. And the question running through all of it is whether a strategic partnership can survive when one society holds deeply prejudiced views about the other.
So the ancient stuff first. The Septuagint. This is not just a translation project — it's arguably the most consequential act of cultural transmission in the ancient Mediterranean, and it happened because a Greek-speaking Ptolemaic king in Egypt wanted Jewish scripture in his library.
Alexandria, third century BCE. Ptolemy II Philadelphus commissions a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The Letter of Aristeas — which is a partly legendary account, but it captures the spirit of the thing — says seventy-two Jewish scholars, six from each tribe, were brought to Alexandria and worked for seventy-two days to produce the text. The number seventy-two gets rounded down to seventy in the name: Septuagint, from the Latin for seventy. Hence the abbreviation LXX.
And the Ptolemaic court wasn't doing this out of disinterested scholarship. They ruled a massive Greek-speaking empire with a huge Jewish population, especially in Alexandria. They needed to understand the legal and religious framework these people lived by. It was practical governance dressed as intellectual patronage.
But the consequences went far beyond Ptolemaic administration. The Septuagint became the Bible of the early Christian Church. When Paul quotes scripture in his letters, he's quoting the Septuagint, not the Hebrew text. When the Church Fathers debated theology, they worked from Greek translations. That means the entire conceptual vocabulary of early Christianity — grace, sin, salvation, logos — was shaped by the interface between Hebrew thought and Greek language. That's not an exaggeration. That's the foundation.
So you have Jewish scholars, working for a Greek king, producing a text that then becomes the scriptural basis for a religion that would later be used to persecute Jews. That's... quite an arc.
It's almost too tidy as historical irony. But the intellectual exchange wasn't just textual — it was philosophical. And the figure who embodies that best is Philo of Alexandria.
Philo. Twenty BCE to about fifty CE. He's trying to do something that nobody had really attempted before: synthesize Jewish theology with Greek philosophy. Plato, the Stoics — he reads them as fellow travelers, not opponents.
His big move is the Logos. In Greek philosophy, the Logos is the rational principle that orders the cosmos — reason itself, made manifest. Philo takes that concept and reinterprets it as an intermediary between God and creation, a divine reason that's distinct from God but not separate from Him. And this idea — this Jewish-Greek hybrid — becomes the opening line of the Gospel of John. "In the beginning was the Logos." That's Philo's bridge, right there, walking straight into Christian theology.
He also made a claim that shaped Jewish apologetics for centuries: that the Greek philosophers got their best ideas from Moses. Plato read the Torah, essentially. Historically dubious, but it was a powerful argument in a world where Greek culture was dominant — it said Jewish wisdom was the source, not the derivative.
And that gets at the tension that runs through the whole ancient period. Because alongside this intellectual exchange, you have the Hasmonean period — the Maccabean Revolt in the second century BCE — which was in large part a violent reaction against forced Hellenization. Antiochus IV Epiphanes tried to suppress Jewish practice, installed a statue of Zeus in the Temple, banned circumcision and Torah study. The revolt was a rejection of Greek cultural imperialism.
But here's what people miss. After the revolt succeeds, Jewish society remains deeply Hellenized. Greek is the language of commerce and education. The Hasmonean kings themselves take Greek names. The coins they mint have Greek inscriptions. The conflict wasn't about rejecting Greek culture wholesale — it was about who controlled the terms of engagement.
Right. It's not "Jews versus Greeks." It's a Jewish society negotiating how much Hellenization is too much, and who gets to decide. That's a much more interesting story, and it's one that repeats in different forms for centuries.
The other piece of the ancient foundation is the Romaniote community. After the Romans destroy the Second Temple in seventy CE, Jewish populations scatter across the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean. These communities — in Ioannina, in Thessaloniki, in Chalkis — become the oldest continuous Jewish presence in Europe. They predate Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities by centuries. They spoke Greek and Hebrew. Not Yiddish, not Ladino — Greek.
And they developed their own liturgical tradition, the Romaniote rite, which is distinct from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic practice. When Sephardic Jews arrived after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, they largely absorbed the Romaniote communities in the major cities. But in places like Ioannina, the Romaniote identity held on. You still had families there in the twentieth century who could trace their presence back two thousand years.
So that's the ancient world. A mix of collaboration and conflict, intellectual fusion alongside violent rejection, and a continuous Jewish presence in Greece that outlasted the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. And then, in the twentieth century, something happened that almost erased that entire history.
The Holocaust. Greece had about sixty-nine thousand Jews before the war. The Nazis killed roughly sixty thousand of them. That's eighty-seven percent. The Romaniote community in particular was devastated — entire families, entire villages, gone. Thessaloniki, which had been a majority-Jewish city under the Ottomans, lost ninety-six percent of its Jewish population. The community never recovered demographically. Today there are maybe a few hundred Romaniote families left, mostly in Ioannina and Athens.
And after the war, you might expect some kind of reckoning or solidarity. Instead, Greece and Israel didn't establish full diplomatic relations until 1990. That's later than most European countries. Later than Spain, which also had its own complicated Jewish history.
The delay had several causes. Cold War alignments — Greece under Andreas Papandreou in the eighties was less firmly in the Western camp, and Papandreou personally was close to the PLO. There was also lingering anti-Zionist sentiment in Greek political culture that sometimes crossed into outright anti-Semitism. And the Palestinian issue gave Greek governments a reason to keep Israel at arm's length. So for forty-five years after the Holocaust, the relationship was frozen.
What changed?
A few things. The end of the Cold War shifted alignments. Papandreou left office. And then, in the twenty-tens, the Eastern Mediterranean turned out to be sitting on significant offshore natural gas deposits. Suddenly Greece, Cyprus, and Israel had a shared economic interest that none of them could develop alone.
Mutual assured dependence, but with pipelines.
The East Mediterranean Gas Forum was established in 2020, bringing together Israel, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority — though Turkey was conspicuously excluded, which is its own geopolitical story. And the physical infrastructure of this alliance is the EuroAsia Interconnector. Twelve hundred and eight kilometers of submarine power cable linking Israel's grid to Europe via Cyprus and Crete. Expected operational by 2028.
That's a big cable.
It's enormous. And it's not just about exporting Israeli gas or importing European electricity. It's about energy security. Israel's grid is an island — it's not connected to any neighboring grid. If something goes wrong, there's no backup. The interconnector changes that. And for Greece and Cyprus, it positions them as energy hubs for the Eastern Mediterranean. So the strategic logic is clear.
And then there's the tourism piece. Greece is now the second most popular tourist destination for Israelis after the US. Over one and a half million Israeli tourists visited between 2018 and 2023. Direct flights from Tel Aviv to Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete, Rhodes, and a dozen islands in season. It's a two-hour flight. It's cheaper than most European destinations. And the Mediterranean lifestyle — the food, the pace, the beaches — resonates with Israeli travelers in a way that, say, Berlin or London doesn't.
There's also a cultural familiarity that's hard to quantify but real. Israelis and Greeks share a certain... expressiveness. Loud family dinners, arguing about politics at the table, hospitality that involves feeding you until you can't move. It's not the same culture, but there's a resonance. Israeli tourists don't feel like they've landed on another planet.
And yet. While Israelis are flocking to Greek beaches, the data on Greek attitudes toward Jews tells a very different story.
The 2023 ADL Global 100 survey found that sixty-nine percent of Greeks hold anti-Semitic attitudes. That's the highest rate in Europe, tied with Poland. By comparison, the Netherlands is at nine percent, the UK at twelve percent, Germany at fifteen percent. Sixty-nine percent is not a fringe. That's the mainstream.
And the 2024 EU Fundamental Rights Agency survey found that eighty-nine percent of Greek Jews report experiencing anti-Semitism in daily life. Not historical awareness of anti-Semitism — daily life. Comments, jokes, hostility, exclusion.
The content of those attitudes matters too. The ADL survey measures agreement with a set of stereotypes — Jews have too much power, Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own country, Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. In Greece, these aren't confined to far-right parties like Golden Dawn, though Golden Dawn certainly amplified them. They're widespread across the political spectrum, and they're often tied to anti-Zionism in a way that makes it hard to separate anti-Israel political positions from anti-Jewish prejudice.
And this is the paradox at the heart of the modern relationship. At the state level, the Greek government condemns anti-Semitism, has passed laws banning Holocaust denial, and participates actively in the tripartite alliance with Israel and Cyprus. At the societal level, nearly seven in ten Greeks hold anti-Semitic views, and nearly nine in ten Greek Jews say they experience it regularly. Those two realities coexist. They don't cancel each other out.
Israeli tourists mostly report feeling safe in tourist areas. The hostility tends to surface in everyday interactions — a comment from a taxi driver, a landlord who finds out you're Israeli, a conversation that turns to politics. It's not that Israelis are getting attacked on the street. It's that the ambient attitude is hostile in a way that's hard to miss once you're paying attention.
And that creates a strange dynamic where the relationship is pragmatic at the state level but strained at the societal level. The governments are building a submarine power cable. The people are... not.
There's a question about whether the partnership itself can gradually shift those attitudes. Increased contact between Israelis and Greeks — through tourism, through business, through the energy sector — could, in theory, reduce prejudice. That's the contact hypothesis. But the contact hypothesis requires equal status contact, common goals, institutional support. A week at a resort in Crete doesn't necessarily meet those conditions.
No. And there's a darker possibility, which is that increased Israeli presence in Greece actually hardens existing prejudices. If you already believe Jews have too much power and control too much, seeing Israeli investment and Israeli tourists everywhere doesn't challenge that belief — it confirms it.
That's the thing about conspiracy thinking. It's self-sealing. Any evidence you present becomes further proof of the conspiracy. So the tourism boom and the energy partnership could be read by someone with anti-Semitic priors not as normal bilateral relations but as evidence of Jewish influence expanding into Greece. That's a grim reading, but it's not implausible.
So where does that leave us? You have an ancient intellectual exchange that shaped Western civilization. A Holocaust that nearly erased the Jewish presence in Greece. A strategic realignment built on gas and cables. A tourism boom that brings millions of Israelis to Greek beaches. And polling data that says most Greeks don't like Jews. That's not a narrative that resolves neatly.
It doesn't. And I think that's what Daniel was getting at with this prompt. He didn't ask for a simple story. He asked for the evolution — the full arc — and the full arc is messy.
One thing I keep coming back to is the Romaniote community. They're the living bridge between the ancient and modern periods. Two thousand years of continuous Jewish life in Greece, speaking Greek, practicing their own rite. And after the Holocaust, there are maybe fifty families left. That's the thread that connects Philo to the EuroAsia Interconnector, and it's almost gone.
Almost gone, but not quite. There are still Romaniote Jews in Ioannina. There's a synagogue there, the Kehila Kedosha Yashan, that dates back centuries. There are Romaniote communities in New York and Israel — descendants of those who emigrated before the war. The tradition survives, but it's fragile in a way that most people don't appreciate. When people think of Greek Jews, they think of Thessaloniki and the Sephardic community. They don't know about the Romaniotes.
That's a loss of historical memory that matters. Because if you don't know that Jews were in Greece before the Ashkenazim existed, before the Sephardim arrived, before Christianity — then the whole story collapses into "Israel and Greece are recent allies." You lose the depth.
Hilbert: 1997. I was a deckhand on a Greek cargo ship running supplies between Haifa and Piraeus. The captain was a Romaniote Jew from Ioannina. Name was Elias. He'd been at sea since he was fifteen.
Hilbert: 1997. I was a deckhand on a Greek cargo ship running supplies between Haifa and Piraeus. The captain was a Romaniote Jew from Ioannina. Name was Elias. He'd been at sea since he was fifteen.
Wait — a Romaniote captain?
Hilbert: One of the few remaining families. His grandmother spoke only Greek and Hebrew. No Yiddish, no Ladino. She refused to call herself Sephardic. He told me she used to say, we were here before the Ashkenazim existed. He said it with a kind of pride that wasn't about bragging. It was about not being erased.
Hilbert: One of the few remaining families. His grandmother spoke only Greek and Hebrew. No Yiddish, no Ladino. She refused to call herself Sephardic. He told me she used to say, we were here before the Ashkenazim existed. He said it with a kind of pride that wasn't about bragging. It was about not being erased.
What was he like?
Hilbert: Quiet. Smoked a pipe. Knew every port in the Eastern Mediterranean by the shape of its harbor. He'd been through the war as a child — his family hid in the mountains above Ioannina. Most of his relatives didn't make it. He never said how many.
Hilbert: Quiet. Smoked a pipe. Knew every port in the Eastern Mediterranean by the shape of its harbor. He'd been through the war as a child — his family hid in the mountains above Ioannina. Most of his relatives didn't make it. He never said how many.
He was still running cargo between Israel and Greece fifty years later.
Hilbert: Said it was the only thing he knew how to do. The ship was called the Agios Nikolaos. Greek-flagged, Greek crew, except for me. I was the only one who could pronounce Chania correctly. They found that amusing.
Hilbert: Said it was the only thing he knew how to do. The ship was called the Agios Nikolaos. Greek-flagged, Greek crew, except for me. I was the only one who could pronounce Chania correctly. They found that amusing.
The Romaniote community is the living thread between ancient and modern, and there are maybe fifty families left. That's what you're saying.
Hilbert: I'm saying you two are talking about the Septuagint and the EuroAsia cable, and that's all real. But the thing that connects them is people like Elias. And most of them are gone. The cable will be finished in 2028. Elias died in 2014. I read his obituary in a Greek maritime newsletter. It didn't mention he was Romaniote. Just said he was a good captain.
Hilbert: I'm saying you two are talking about the Septuagint and the EuroAsia cable, and that's all real. But the thing that connects them is people like Elias. And most of them are gone. The cable will be finished in 2028. Elias died in 2014. I read his obituary in a Greek maritime newsletter. It didn't mention he was Romaniote. Just said he was a good captain.
That's... that's the thing about this whole history. The big structures survive — the texts, the cables, the diplomatic agreements. But the human carriers of the tradition get lost, and most people never knew they were there.
Hilbert: He had a photograph in his cabin. Black and white. His grandmother in Ioannina, standing outside the synagogue. She's wearing a dress that looks like it's from another century, which it was. He pointed at it once and said, that's the real Greece. Then he went back to his pipe.
Hilbert: He had a photograph in his cabin. Black and white. His grandmother in Ioannina, standing outside the synagogue. She's wearing a dress that looks like it's from another century, which it was. He pointed at it once and said, that's the real Greece. Then he went back to his pipe.
Did he ever talk about what Greeks thought of Jews?
Hilbert: Once. We were docked in Piraeus and some port official gave him trouble about his papers. Nothing overt, but the way he dragged it out, asked extra questions. Afterward Elias said, they don't mind Jews as long as they don't have to see them. He said it flat, like he was reading a weather report.
Hilbert: Once. We were docked in Piraeus and some port official gave him trouble about his papers. Nothing overt, but the way he dragged it out, asked extra questions. Afterward Elias said, they don't mind Jews as long as they don't have to see them. He said it flat, like he was reading a weather report.
That lines up with the data. The attitudes are there, but they don't always announce themselves loudly. They surface in paperwork, in delays, in the way a conversation shifts when someone finds out who you are.
Hilbert: He also said the Israeli tourists were the best thing that happened to Greece since the drachma. I asked him why. He said, they tip.
Hilbert: He also said the Israeli tourists were the best thing that happened to Greece since the drachma. I asked him why. He said, they tip.
That's a very specific metric.
Hilbert: He was a practical man. He said the Israelis who came through the port were loud but they spent money and they didn't complain about the coffee. The Greeks complained about the coffee constantly. He found that funny.
Hilbert: He was a practical man. He said the Israelis who came through the port were loud but they spent money and they didn't complain about the coffee. The Greeks complained about the coffee constantly. He found that funny.
I keep thinking about the grandmother. Standing outside that synagogue. She'd seen the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan Wars, the Nazi occupation, the civil war. And she was still there, calling herself Romaniote, refusing to be absorbed into someone else's category.
Hilbert: She was still there until 1968. Elias told me she died in the same house she was born in. The synagogue is still standing. I looked it up a few years ago. Kehila Kedosha Yashan. It's a museum now, partly. But they still hold services.
Hilbert: She was still there until 1968. Elias told me she died in the same house she was born in. The synagogue is still standing. I looked it up a few years ago. Kehila Kedosha Yashan. It's a museum now, partly. But they still hold services.
The thread holds. Barely.
Hilbert: Barely. But it holds.
Hilbert: Barely. But it holds.
The question we're left with is whether a strategic partnership can survive when one society holds deeply prejudiced views about the other. Or whether the partnership itself — the cable, the gas, the tourism, the institutional cooperation — slowly erodes those views over time.
I think the honest answer is we don't know yet. The rapprochement is only about fifteen years old in any meaningful sense. The cable hasn't even been laid. The tourism boom is real but it's concentrated in resort areas — it's not transforming Greek civil society from the inside. And the polling numbers are what they are. Sixty-nine percent doesn't shift in a decade.
The EuroAsia Interconnector and the energy cooperation will deepen interdependence, no question. When your grids are physically linked, you have a stake in each other's stability. But state-level alignment doesn't automatically translate to societal change. The cable runs under the sea. It doesn't run through Greek living rooms.
There's a version of this where the partnership thrives at the governmental and business level while the social attitudes remain hostile for another generation. Those things can coexist. They are coexisting right now.
The relationship between Greece and Israel is not a simple story of ancient friendship or modern pragmatism. It's a layered, contradictory history where intellectual exchange, genocide, tourism, and prejudice all coexist. And that's what makes it worth understanding — not because it resolves, but because it doesn't.
The Romaniote grandmother in Ioannina and the submarine cable off Crete are part of the same story. Most people only see one or the other. Daniel's prompt asked us to see both.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at my weird prompts dot com or email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities.