adm kdmon], or "primal man," who is known
in the ancient allegorizing of the Song of Songs. His number-mysticism
and his speech-idealism reappear more crudely, but not obscurely, in
their ideas of creative letters, of which the cosmogony by the
twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in the Sefer Yezirah is
typical. Finally, his teachings of ecstasy and Divine possession are
repeated in divers ways in their descriptions of the pious life
([Hebrew: hnanot]).

Philo, indeed, viewed from the Jewish standpoint, is the Hellenizer
not only of the law but also of the Cabbalah, the philosophical
adapter of the secret traditional wisdom of his ancestors. He brings
it into close relation with Platonism and purifies it; he clears away
its anthropomorphisms and superstitious fantasies, or rather he raises
them into idealistic conceptions and sublime exaltations of the soul.
By his deep knowledge of the intellectual ideas of Greece he refined
the strange compound of lofty imagination and popular fancy, and
raised it to a higher value. Plato and the Cabbalah represent the same
mystic spirit in different degrees of intellectual sublimity and
religious aspiration; Philo endeavored to unite the two
manifestations. He lived in a markedly non-rational age given over to
mystical speculation; and Alexandria especially, by her cosmopolitan
character, "furnished the soil and seed which formed the mystic
philosophy that knew how to blend the wisdom and folly of the
ages."[341] Through the mass of apocalyptic literature that was poured
forth in the first centuries of the common era, through the later
books of the Apocrypha, through the Sefer Yezirah of the ninth and the
Zohar of the thirteenth century, and through the vast literature
inspired by these books, run the ideas that composed Philo's mystic
theology. Philo himself was unknown, but his religious interpretation
of Platonism had entered into the world's thought, and inspired the
mystics of his own race as well as of the Christian world.

After a thousand years of Latin domination the Renaissance revived the
study of Greek in Western Europe, and to the most cultured of his race
Philo was no longer a sealed book. The first Jewish writer to show an
intimate acquaintance with him and a clear idea of his relation to
Jewish tradition was Azariah dei Rossi, who lived in the sixteenth
century. His "Meor Einayim" dealt largely with the Hellenistic epoch
of Judaism, and its attitude towards i