led them to piety.”  The Alexandrian-Jewish writers, without exception, are silent about the work of Onias; Philo does not give a single hint of it, and on the other hand speaks[10] several times of the great national centre at Jerusalem as “the most beautiful and renowned temple which is honored by the whole East and West.”  The Egyptian Jews, according to Josephus, claimed that the prophecy of Isaiah had been accomplished, “that there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt” (Is. xix. 19).  But the altar, it has recently been suggested,[11] was rather a “Bamah” (a high place) than a temple.  It served as a temporary sanctuary while the Jerusalem temple was defiled, and afterwards it was a place where the priestly ritual was carried out day by day, and offerings were brought by those who could not make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  Though the synagogue was the main seat of religious life in the Diaspora, there was still a desire for the sacrificial worship, and for a long time the rabbis looked with favor upon the establishment of Onias.  But when the tendency to found a new ritual there showed itself, they denied its holiness.[12] The religious importance of the temple, however, was never great, and its chief interest is that it shows the survival of the affection for the priestly service among the Hellenized community, and helps therefore to disprove the myth that the Alexandrians allegorized away the Levitical laws.

During the checkered history of Egypt in the first century B.C.E., when it was in turn the plaything of the corrupt Roman Senate, who supported the claims of a series of feeble puppet-Ptolemies, the prize of the warriors, who successively aspired to be masters of the world, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian, and finally a province of the Roman Empire, the political and material prosperity of the Alexandrian Jews remained for the most part undisturbed.  Julius Caesar and Augustus, who everywhere showed special favor to their Jewish subjects, confirmed the privileges of full citizenship and limited self-government which the early Ptolemies had bestowed.[13] Josephus records a letter of Augustus to the Jewish community at Cyrene, in which he ordains:  “Since the nation of the Jews hath been found grateful to the Roman people, it seemed good to me and my counsellors that the Jews have liberty to make use of their own customs, and that their sacred money be not touched, but sent to Jerusalem, and that they be not obliged to go before the judge on the Sabbath day nor on the day of preparation for it after the ninth hour,” i.e., after the early evening.[14] This decree is typical of the emperor’s attitude to his Jewish subjects; and Egypt became more and more a favored home of the race, so that the Jewish population in the land, from the Libyan desert to the border of Ethiopia, was estimated in Philo’s time at not less than one million.[15]