Jews propounded to him, three of them dealing with "the Wisdom."
The Talmud has frequent reference to Alexandrian Jews, and that it
makes little direct mention of the Alexandrian exegesis is explained
by the distrust of the whole Hellenistic movement, which the rise of
Christianity and the growth of Gnosticism induced in the rabbis of the
second and third centuries. They lived at a time when it had been
proved that that movement led away from Judaism, and its main tenets
had been adopted or perverted by an antagonistic creed. It was a
tragic necessity which compelled the severance between the Eastern and
Western developments of the religion. In Philo's day the breach was
already threatened, through the anti-legal tendencies of the extreme
allegorists. His own aim was to maintain the catholic tradition of
Judaism, while at the same time expounding the Torah according to the
conceptions of ancient philosophy. Unfortunately, the balance was not
preserved by those who followed him, and the branch of Judaism that
had blossomed forth so fruitfully fell off from the parent tree. But
till the middle of the first century of the common era the Alexandrian
and the Palestinian developments of Jewish culture were complementary:
on the one side there was legal, on the other, philosophical
expansion. Moreover, the Judaeo-Alexandrian school, though, through its
abandonment of the Hebrew tongue, it lies outside the main stream of
Judaism, was an immense force in the religious history of the world,
and Philo, its greatest figure, stands out in our annals as the
embodiment of the Jewish religious mission, which is to preach to the
nations the knowledge of the one God, and the law of righteousness.

* * * * *

II

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PHILO

"The hero," says Carlyle, "can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what
you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born
into."[39] The Jews have not been a great political people, but their
excellence has been a peculiar spiritual development: and therefore
most of their heroes have been men of thought rather than action,
writers rather than statesmen, men whose influence has been greater on
posterity than upon their own generation. Of Philo's life we know one
incident in very full detail, the rest we can only reconstruct from
stray hints in his writings, and a few short notices of the
commentators. From that incident also, which we know to hav