Project Gutenberg's Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria, by Norman Bentwich

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Title: Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria

Author: Norman Bentwich

Release Date: January 10, 2005 [EBook #14657]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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PHILO-JUDAEUS

OF ALEXANDRIA,

BY

NORMAN BENTWICH
Sometime Scholar of Trinity College,
Cambridge.

PHILADELPHIA
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
1910

COPYRIGHT, 1910,
BY THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA

TO MY MOTHER [Greek: threpteria]

PREFACE

It is a melancholy reflection upon the history of the Jews that they
have failed to pay due honor to their two greatest philosophers.
Spinoza was rejected by his contemporaries from the congregation of
Israel; Philo-Judaeus was neglected by the generations that followed
him. Maimonides, our third philosopher, was in danger of meeting the
same fate, and his philosophical work was for long viewed with
suspicion by a large part of the community. Philosophers, by the very
excellence of their thought, have in all races towered above the
comprehension of the people, and aroused the suspicion of the
religious teachers. Elsewhere, however, though rejected by the Church,
they have left their influence upon the nation, and taken a commanding
place in its history, because they have founded secular schools of
thought, which perpetuated their work. In Judaism, where religion and
nationality are inextricably combined, that could not be. The history
of Judaism since the extinction of political independence is the
history of a national religious culture; what was national in its
thought alone found favor; and unless a philosopher's work bore this
national religious stamp it dropped out of Jewish history.

Philo certainly had an intensely strong Jewish feeling, but his work
had also another aspect, which was seized upon and made use of by
those who wished to denationalize Judaism and convert it into a
philosophical monotheism. The favor which