Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 85

Perhaps the greatest loss of this war was of the Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt—it was wiped out by Trajan’s army and never recovered. Jews had lived in Alexandria almost since the city’s founding by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE and it became a place of Jewish cultural flourishing. Jews were in nearly all professions and walks of life and occupied two of the city’s five geographical sectors. Pious Jewish intellectuals from this community had the five books of the Torah translated into Greek (the Septuagint; 3rd–2nd c. BCE), and created institutions that are among the earliest evidence we have of synagogues—communal organizations which served a range of functions, among them the teaching and dissemination of Torah.³³ While Alexandrian Jews sent money to support the Jerusalem Temple, it is clear from texts such as the Letter of Aristeas, that at least the highly-educated among this community felt fully at home in Egypt—diaspora was not experienced as »exile.« Aristeas and later Philo tells us that the Greek Torah was itself divinely inspired.

In the Roman period, we may point to the career and output of philosopher, exegete, and statesman Philo of Alexandria. He was prominent in the Jewish community and a prolific author of more than thirty preserved works. He depicted Judaism as a religion in harmony with philosophical wisdom, and as a faith that wrestled with the same metaphysical questions, and held the same ethical ideals as their Greek neighbors: virtue, moderation, the good.³⁴

In 38 CE, violence broke out in Alexandria between the local Greeks and the Jews. Philo was part of an embassy that in 40 CE reached out to Emperor Gaius Caligula (37–41 CE) to intervene with the Egyptian governor Flaccus on behalf of the Jews. Philo’s historical works offer insight into the Jewish place in the city and empire. They show an ethnic community with unique history, privileges, and challenges, even as they remind us that Jews were like any other subject peoples working to adapt and thrive within empire.