Philo of Alexandria

Abstract

Of all the Jews who have written in Greek, Philo of Alexandria is undoubtedly the greatest on account of the breadth and richness of his ideas, the number of his works and his brilliant literary qualities. No other author in antiquity has attempted with so much boldness the confrontation and symbiosis of Judaism with another philosophy and another culture. This, one would think, would have assured his work and his personality a posthumous life among the generations of Jews which have followed him throughout the Mediterranean. However, in general Judaism knew absolutely nothing about him for fifteen hundred years, until in the sixteenth century Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi, a man of great learning who knew little Greek but who read in the Latin translation all the ancient Greek writers, including the Fathers of the Church, revived his name and his writings. These writings, however, had not disappeared in the course of so many centuries; Christians from the beginning knew of them, made use of them and copied the manuscripts until the printed editions of the Renaissance; in 1552, Adrien Turnebe published the whole of Philo's treatises in Paris for the first time. But it is above all in the nineteenth century that Philo gradually came to have an increasingly important place in the history of religious and philosophical ideas, as also in literary history. For a century, one study has followed another: sometimes detailed monographs as Zeller already attempted when he devoted nearly a hundred pages to Philo in his monumental Philosophie der Griechen (vol. iii .2, Tubingen, 1852; edn 5, Leipzig 1923); sometimes one-sided essays which overlook the complexity of a man who is both a Greek philosopher nurtured by Judaism and also a Jewish thinker moulded by Greek culture, and which claim to sum up the character of this astonishing personality in a word by choosing one of the alternatives Greek or Jew.