Hyam Maccoby

William Klassen (Letters, 20 February) complains justly of Professor Kermode’s incomprehension of the important point that the term usually translated as ‘betrayed’ actually means ‘handed over’. I myself pointed out in Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil (1992) that the Greek term paradidomi means not ‘betray’ but ‘hand over’. I also pointed out that the first occurrence of...

Michael Haslam says correctly that a scapegoat is expelled, not sacrificed (Letters, 24 March). He also points out that frequently in myth there is both a victim and a scapegoat, and that the two figures may be closely related as brothers or even twins. Examples are Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Set and Osiris, Mot and Baal, Loki and Balder.Mr Haslam fails to notice that the scapegoat is sent away...

A.D. Nuttall (LRB, 11 June) argues that Greek tragedy was non-religious, by which he appears to mean that the myths that provided its plots had lost all religious efficacy. Here he opposes the view of Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison and others that the tragedies still functioned as enactments of the sacrificial death of Dionysus. Nuttall says that Pentheus in the Bacchae cannot be intended as a Dionysus...

Sheldon Rothblatt, in his interesting article ‘Education and Exclusion’ (LRB, 13 February), reports Suzanne Klingenstein as pointing to a similarity between the two words ‘freedom’ and ‘bondage’ in Hebrew, ‘since both shared the same root’. This statement (whether it arises from Klingenstein or only from Rothblatt’s report of her) is not correct. Perhaps the mistake arose from a misinterpretation...

SIR: Ernst Bammel (Letters, 6 September) makes no attempt to counter the arguments of my review. Instead, he seeks to convict me of false ‘innuendo’ against Ethelbert Stauffer, and questions whether I have read Ernst Bizer’s account of the matter. I made no ‘innuendo’, but stated very plainly that Stauffer was a strong supporter of Nazism. The full facts can be checked in Ernst Bizer’s...