ture. It is another irony of history that our manuscripts
of Philo go back to an archetype in the library of Caesarea in
Palestine, which Eusebius studied in the fourth century. Philo came to
the land of his fathers in the possession of his people's enemies, and
at a time when he could no longer be understood by his people.

Philo's works were not translated into Hebrew, and as Greek ceased to
be the language of the cultured, they could not, in their original
form, have influenced later Jewish philosophers. But the Christians,
in their proselytizing activity, had translated them into Latin and
Armenian before the fifth century, and through one of these means they
may possibly have exercised an influence upon the new school of Jewish
philosophy, which, opening with Saadia in the tenth century, blossomed
forth in the Arabic-Spanish epoch. The light of historical research is
beginning to illumine the obscurity of the Dark Ages, and has revealed
traces of an Alexandrian allegorist in the writings of the Persian Jew
Benjamin al-Nehawendi, himself a distinguished allegorizer of the
Bible, who wrote in the ninth century and taught that God created the
world by means of one ministerial angel.[330] Benjamin relates that
the doctrine was held by a Jewish sect known as the Maghariya, which
probably sprang up in the fourth or the fifth century, when sects grew
like mushrooms. The Karaite al-Kirkisani, who wrote fifty years later,
says that the Maghariya sect used in support of their doctrine the
"prolegomena of an Alexandrian sage" who gave certain remarkable
interpretations of the Bible; and in one of Dr. Schechter's Genizah
fragments, which is probably to be ascribed to Kirkisani, there are
contained examples of the Alexandrian's explanations of the Decalogue,
which occur, and occur only, in Philo's treatise on the "Ten
Commandments."

This connection between Philo and an obscure Jewish sect, or an
obscurer Persian-Jewish writer, may appear far-fetched and not worth
the making. In itself doubtless it is unimportant, but it serves to
keep Philo, however barely, within Jewish tradition. For it shows that
Alexandrian literature, though probably through the medium of a
Mohammedan source, was known to some Jews in the centuries of
transition. It may be that further examination of the great Genizah
collection, which has opened to Jewish scholarship a new world, will
reveal further and stronger ties to unite Philo with his philosophica