Hanukkah ... what is it? Typically celebrated as a miracle when Jews fought for their religious freedom against their oppressors, and in that respect, a Christmas competitor.
But like most holidays, its past is much more troubling and complicated. In essence, Hanukkah celebrates the victory of the rural traditional faction of Jews over 'hellenistic' Jews, a civil war that had consumed Judea. The problem was not unlike that of the modern Taliban -- you had a rural fundamentalist populace which was outraged by the success of cosmopolitan, liberal Hellenistic Jews and their political domination of Judea. This population held views not much different than those we would nowaday ascribe to the Taliban -- extremely militant, intolerant of other religions, determined to seize and maintain political power. These two Jewish factions clashed violently, with the traditionalists appealing to the Egyptian Ptolemaic kingdom and the Hellenists appealing to the Seleucids.
When the faction of traditional rural Jews finally won and expelled the Hellenic Jewish faction from power, the new fundamentalist Jewish kingdom (the Hasmoneans) would display a fairly maniacal level of religious brutality. To the North, Samaria, with its glorious traditions of the Samaritan religion, was invaded and pulverized. The Jews burned the Samaritan high temple to the ground, and leveled the Samaritan cities. They further enslaved mass portions of the Samaritan population. To the South, Idumea was invaded by Judah, conquered, and its people forcibly converted to Judaism on pain of death. Per the ancient Jewish historian Josephus:
"Hyrcanus...subdued all the Idumeans; and permitted them to stay in that country, if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews; and they were so desirous of living in the country of their forefathers, that they submitted to the use of circumcision, (25) and of the rest of the Jewish ways of living; at which time therefore this befell them, that they were hereafter no other than Jews."
