t is summed up in the remark
that "all that is good in Philo agrees with our law."[342] He pointed
out many instances of agreement, and some of disagreement, but he
objected in general to the allegorizing of the historical parts of the
Torah and to the absence of the traditional interpretations in Philo's
commentaries. He shared largely the rabbinical attitude and could not
give an independent historical appreciation of Philo's work. That was
not to come for two hundred years more. To Dei Rossi we owe the Jewish
translation of Philo's name, [Hebrew: ydydim 'lksndri].[343] To the outer
world Philo was "the Jew"; to his own people, "the Alexandrian."

As soon as Greek was reintroduced into the scholarly world, Philo
began to reassert an important influence on theology. One remarkable
school of English mystics and religious philosophers, the Cambridge
Platonists, who wrote during the seventeenth century, founded upon him
their method and also their general attitude to philosophy.[344] They
were Christian neo-Platonists, who looked for spiritual allegories in
the Old and New Testaments, and combined the teachings of Jesus with
the emotional idealism of the Alexandrian interpreters of Plato. They
affirmed enthusiastically God's revelation to the universe and to
individual man through the Logos. Their imitation of Philo's
allegorism serves to mark the important place that he occupied in the
learned world during the seventeenth century; and supports, however
slightly, the suggestion that he influenced, directly or indirectly,
the supreme Jewish philosopher of the age, Baruch de Spinoza. That he
was well known in Holland at the time is shown in divers ways. He is
quoted by the famous jurist Grotius in his book which founded the
science of international law; he is quoted and criticised, as we have
seen, by Scaliger; and curiously enough, his name, "Philo-Judaeus," is
applied by Rembrandt to the portrait of his own father, now in the
Ferdinandeum at Innsbruck. It is tempting to conjecture that there was
a direct connection between the Jewish philosophers of the ancient and
the modern world. Whether it existed or not, there is certainly
kinship in their ideas. Spinoza does actually refer in one place, in
his "Theologico-Political Tractate" (ch. x), to the opinion of
Philo-Judaeus upon the date of Psalm lxxxviii, and there are other
places in the same book, where he almost echoes the words of the
Jewish Platonist; as where he speak