Akiba, living at a time when the Jews were fighting for spiritual as well as for physical life against the combined forces of the Greeks and Romans, proposed to ban all the [Hebrew:  sfrim hitsonim],[321] and the Gemara argues that among these were included the Apocryphal works which showed Greek influence.  Again, Elisha ben Abuya, the arch-heretic, is held up to reproach because he read [Hebrew:  sfri minim],[322] under which title Greek Gnostic books are probably implied.

At the time when this spirit shows itself, the appearance of heretical offshoots from Judaism was already pronounced.  Heresy was the aftermath of the combination of Judaism and Hellenism, and if further disintegration was to be avoided, the seductive Greek influence had to be discouraged.  There is always the danger in a mingling of two cultures, that each will lose its particular excellence in a compound which has certain qualities, but not the virtues, of either element.  Compromises may be desirable in political affairs; in affairs of thought they are perilous.  Down to the time of Philo, the fusion of thought at Alexandria had been beneficial, and had broadened the Jewish outlook without impairing its strength, but the dissolving forces of civilization never operated more powerfully than in the early centuries of the common era, when the intellect of the world was jaded and weary, and the great movement in culture was a jumbling together of the ideas of East and West.  More especially in the cosmopolitan towns, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, national life, national culture, and national religion were undermined; and even the Jew, despite the stronghold of his law and tradition, was caught in the general vortex of mingling creeds and theologies.  Out of this confusion (which was in one aspect a continuation of the work of Philo) emerged, first, fantastic Gnostic religious and philosophical sects, and, finally, the Christian Church, which proved the system best fitted to survive in the circumstances, but was in essence as well as in origin a blending of different outlooks, and true to the cardinal points of neither Hebraism nor Hellenism.  The rabbis, with remarkable intuition, saw that the Hellenistic development of Judaism, which had vainly striven to make Judaism universal, had ended in violating its monotheism and abrogating its law; and in that era of disintegration, denationalization, and decomposition they determined to keep their heritage pure and inviolate.  Judaism by their efforts was the only national culture which survived, and some sacrifice had to be made to secure this end.  The literary monuments of the Alexandrian community from the Septuagint translation to the philosophy of the Christian scholarchs were cut out of Jewish tradition, and the Babylonian school was ignorant altogether of the [Hebrew:  hkma yonit] (Greek wisdom).  When Ben Zoma desired to study the [Hebrew:  sfrim hitsonim], and asked of his teacher at what hour of the day it was lawful to do so, he received the reply