Theophrastus’s Jewish Philosophers

Abstract

In the late fourth century BCE, Hellenistic historians and ethnographers began to notice the Jews. Megasthenes, Clearchus and Theophrastus all identify Jews with philosophers; while Megasthenes and Clearchus mention these Jewish philosophers in the context of Indians, it is Theophrastus who provides the most extensive (albeit still brief) witness. This paper argues that Megasthenes, Clearchus and Theophrastus confused Jews with their priests, whom they identified—like other eastern (e.g. Indian) sages—as ‘philosophers’. At the same time, one of the most striking features of the Jewish practices known at least to Theophrastus (and his contemporary, Hecataeus of Abdera) was its aniconism. This reinforced the inference that Jews engaged in the kind of heavenly worship that permeates the discussions of Greek philosophical religion. The Jews were thus doubly philosophical, once by (mistaken) class, and once by this similarity to Greek philosophical aniconism.