must remain particularist for centuries in the hope of a final universalism.  Meantime it must hold fast to the law and, in default of a national home, strengthen the national religious life in each Jewish household.  They regarded Greek as not only a strange but a hostile tongue, and the allegorical exegesis of the Bible, which had led to the whittling away of the law, as a godless wisdom.  The Septuagint translation, which had offered a starting point for philosophical speculation, was replaced by a new Greek version of the Old Testament made by Aquila, a proselyte, in the first century.  It gave a baldly literal translation of the Hebrew text, sacrificing form and even lucidity to a faithful transcript.  With unconscious irony the rabbis, who rejoiced in its truth to the Hebrew, said of Aquila, “Thou art fairer than the children of men, grace is poured into thy lips"[329] (Ps. xlv).  In truth the work was utterly innocent of literary grace.  A translation of the Bible marked the end, as it had marked the beginning, of Jewish-Hellenistic literature, but if the first had suggested the admission, so the other suggested the rejection of Greek philosophy from the interpretation of Judaism and a return to the exclusive national standpoint.  The rabbinical appreciation of Aquila’s work shows that, while the Jews were in Palestine, many still required a Greek translation of the Bible; but when in the third century C.E. the centre of the religion was moved to Babylon, Greek was forgotten, and the rabbis for a period lost sight of Greek culture.  It is another irony of history that our manuscripts of Philo go back to an archetype in the library of Caesarea in Palestine, which Eusebius studied in the fourth century.  Philo came to the land of his fathers in the possession of his people’s enemies, and at a time when he could no longer be understood by his people.

Philo’s works were not translated into Hebrew, and as Greek ceased to be the language of the cultured, they could not, in their original form, have influenced later Jewish philosophers.  But the Christians, in their proselytizing activity, had translated them into Latin and Armenian before the fifth century, and through one of these means they may possibly have exercised an influence upon the new school of Jewish philosophy, which, opening with Saadia in the tenth century, blossomed forth in the Arabic-Spanish epoch.  The light of historical research is beginning to illumine the obscurity of the Dark Ages, and has revealed traces of an Alexandrian allegorist in the writings of the Persian Jew Benjamin al-Nehawendi, himself a distinguished allegorizer of the Bible, who wrote in the ninth century and taught that God created the world by means of one ministerial angel.[330] Benjamin relates that the doctrine was held by a Jewish sect known as the Maghariya, which probably sprang up in the fourth or the fifth century, when sects grew like mushrooms.  The Karaite al-Kirkisani, who wrote fifty years later,