Writing about the history of Hanukkah has become something of an annual tradition for me and the story remains much the same, with an embellishment or two here and there. This year, I want to begin by emphasizing that Hanukkah is my favorite Jewish holiday. How could it not be? As a child of 4 or 5 years, one of my oldest memories is reciting the blessings over the Hanukkah lamp as taught to me by my Bubby, my grandmother, in the Jewish language of Yiddish. I didn’t recite those blessings in Hebrew until I turned 6 and started my Hebrew education.

Hanukkah was always a time for eating oily food, especially the potato pancakes we called latkes. The newer custom of jelly doughnuts played no role in my childhood, but that Israeli version of the holiday did begin making inroads when I got to college and started participating in celebrations at our University of Wisconsin Hillel Foundation, a program for Jewish students.

In 1972 I started reading about the history of Second Temple Judaism in earnest. That December, I wrote a column for the Jewish student newspaper explaining some of my findings, namely, that Hanukkah began not as some sort of war for religious freedom, but rather as a civil war between competing factions of Judeans. One of those factions appealed to the regional power of Syria (at that time ruled by Antiochus IV), and it was truly remarkable that despite receiving that support, it was the other side that won the day. What most folks miss in all this is that the winning side was hardly some group of religious Jews as we think of them today, but rather every bit as much in favor of Greek (and later Roman culture) as anyone else. The rulers who emerged as the dynasty of Hasmoneans and later Herodians largely spoke Greek, adopted many aspects of Greek culture, and brutally suppressed anyone who dared oppose them–up to and including crucifying them. I explained all this in my article for the student newspaper.

I arrived at the Hillel building just a little late, people were already gathered to light the menorah (a word which means “lamp,”) these days Israelis prefer the modern Hebrew word hanukkiah which is specific to the 9-branched candelabra used on Hanukkah. Our Hillel rabbi, Alan Lettofsky, had already left on winter break, but he arranged for our brand-new Chabad rabbi (one of the first Chabad rabbis dispatched by the Lubavitcher Rebbe to college campuses) to lead us for the holiday. His name was Rabbi Shmodkin (maybe Shmudkin). I entered the hall and stood towards the rear. Rabbi Shmodkin saw me and exclaimed with wink in his eye, “I see that Jack Love has joined us, but perhaps he would like to excuse himself until after we honor the Maccabees.” The most amazing thing to me about this is that I had no idea he knew who I was or could recognize me!

I’ve revisited the Hanukkah story every year since, and posted my conclusions many times and in many places. What Rabbi Shmodkin failed to understand, and what I have tried to make clear these many years, is that I love Hanukkah precisely because it is the first and most original holiday of a religion that differs enormously from the religion of the Maccabees and Hasmoneans. It is a religion I think should be termed “Rabbinic Judaism” because it is the religion which was created by the earliest rabbis in the wake of the disastrous conclusion of the Hasmonean era.

The Maccabees and Hasmoneans subscribed to a religion which promoted government by kings and led by priests. They accepted the idea that some people were endowed by God with religious authority and vision, and deemed these prophets. They acknowledged that there was a role in some aspects for “elders” whose age endowed them with wisdom. But nowhere do we find any sense that religious authority could be wielded by dint of education, that people could study, learn, and earn authority through that education. That was path of the rabbis, and the historical record for documenting them begins more than a century after the fall of the Second Temple.

When we finally do see rabbis, beginning around 200 CE, not only do they claim that their studies endow them with authority, but they even claim that their authority supersedes all others. Priests and even kings can only exercise their authority after consulting with a rabbi. As for prophets, the rabbis simply declared that prophesy was dead, there could no longer be new, legitimate prophets.

The rabbis who gave us the Talmud and the classic interpretation of the Bible had no interest in promoting the Hasmoneans. When they created the canon of Jewish Scripture, they did not include the two books of the Maccabees which had been written to justify the kingdom established by the Maccabees and which continued through the Hasomoneans and Herodians. The reason we know about the books of the Maccabees is that Christians included those books in their version of Scripture. And the preservation of the works of the historian Josephus was also accomplished by Christians.

The rabbis obviously knew that they could not prevent the general population from celebrating a solstice holiday, a holiday centered on light during darkness. It is in that context that we suddenly find a story about a miracle–a supply of oil which should only have lasted one day which lasted eight. No mention was made in the story that this coincided with the eight day festival proclaimed by the Hasmoneans to celebrate their royal accession. For the first thousand years of rabbinic Judaism, this story of the oil was the only rationale provided for the celebration of the Hanukkah holiday.

You might wonder how it is that contemporary Jewish sources celebrate the Maccabees and their holiday. More than a thousand years after the Maccabean revolt, some rabbinic Jews realized that stories of ancient courage and military prowess might be useful in inspiring their communities to protect themselves against increasingly hostile environments. They knew of the books of the Maccabees and Josephus from Christian sources. One remarkable Jewish author living in southern Italy around 1000 CE translated large parts of this material and wove it together with various legendary stories creating a work which he attributed to “Joseph ben Gorion,” apparently intending this to be Josephus, although that would have been an error since Josephus tells us that his father was named Mattathias. In any case, these days the book is referred to as either Josippon or Yosippon.

And so it was that the various stories we now have of Maccabean courage, the fight of the few against the many, and the victory of the faithful against the faithless, could find their way into our prayer books and songs.