As a matter of fact, if the Jews, those Syrians who still maintain the ancient form of animal sacrifice, were to urge us to adopt their method, we should probably find the practice repellent. Their system is the following: they do not eat of the sacrificial flesh, but burn all of it at night, after they have poured a great deal of honey and wine upon it. The sacrifice they seek to complete rather rapidly, so that the All-Seer may not become a witness of pollution. Throughout the entire time, inasmuch as they are philosophers by race, they discuss the nature of the Deity among themselves, and spend the night in observing the stars, looking up at them and invoking them as divine in their prayers.
As Reinach points out,[[82]] there is scarcely a correct word in this description considered as an account of actual Jewish sacrificial rites. If we have a correct, or even approximately correct, version of Theophrastus’ report, he or his informant was curiously misinformed. This informant obviously could not have been a Jew. No Jew could have been so ignorant of the customs of his people. Nor did his statement come directly from any one who had actually witnessed, from the Court of the Gentiles, even a small part of a Jewish sacrifice. It may well be that we have before us an inextricable confusion between Jewish and other Syrian rites. We are left to wholly uncontrolled speculation, if we are bent on knowing whence Theophrastus derived the assertions he makes here.
The important words of the passage are found in the casual phrase ἅτε φιλόσοφοι τὸ γένος ὄντες, “inasmuch as they are philosophers by race.” The phrasing indicates that this aspect of the Jews is not wholly new. Word had come to Theophrastus, and to others before him, of a Syrian people not far from the coast, whose ritual in some respects—though the transmission is confused as to what respects—differed from that of their neighbors, but whose customs were strikingly different in one particular, that part of their divine observance was some form of theologic discussion. That, as we know, was a fact, since “houses of prayer”—we may call them synagogues—already existed. This reference to them is the one kernel of observed fact in this whole description, however indirectly obtained.
Now the Greeks of the fourth century knew of esoteric religious communities, and they knew of nations that professed to be especially attached to religious practices. But groups of mystae engaged in rapt spiritual converse were never coextensive with entire nations. And “religious” nations might be simply those among whom an elaborate state cult was punctiliously performed. Even theocracies were no unheard-of thing. Sidon was such a theocracy; i.e. theoretically ruled by the god and administered by his priest.[[83]] But that too was largely formal, not strikingly different from the patronage of Athena over Athens. The Jewish theocracy was a more intensely real matter than this, but that fact could not have been apparent to either merchant or traveler, from whom in the last analysis the information about Jews before 300 B.C.E. must have come. If, therefore, Greeks found something in the religious customs of the Jews that aroused immediate attention, it was the very general interest and participation of the masses in the theological discussion as it was carried on in the synagogues.
This fact alone would justify the use of the term φιλόσοφοι, “philosophers.” Theology, the knowledge of the high gods, was an accredited branch of wisdom which the Platonic Socrates strove with a little too palpable irony to elicit from Euthyphro.[[84]] Those who busied themselves with it were properly termed philosophers, whatever may have been the conclusions they reached. If we venture to assume that the conclusions which the Jews had long reached were actually known, Theophrastus’ phrase could only have been confirmed. An exclusive monotheism was in every sense a philosophic and not a popular concept.
A contemporary of Theophrastus was Clearchus of Soli in Cyprus. Of his writings none whatever has survived, except quotations in other books. Among other works he wrote dialogues more or less after the Platonic manner, in which his master Aristotle is interlocutor in place of Socrates. One of these dialogues was marked, no doubt as a subtitle, περὶ ὕπνου, “On Sleep,” and in this dialogue an encounter of Aristotle with a Hellenized Jew is described.
We need not seriously consider the question whether such an encounter actually occurred. It is not in the least likely that it did. The only inferences that may be drawn from this passage are those that concern Clearchus.
Aristotle is the narrator, and tells his story, as he takes pains to say, according to the rules formulated in Rhetoric.[[85]] He had met a man in Asia, a Jew of Coele-Syria by birth, but Grecized in speech and in soul. This Greek or Jew voluntarily sought out Aristotle and his associates, πειρώμενος αὐτῶν τῆς σοφίας, “to find out whether they were really as wise as their reputation.” On the whole, however, he had given rather than received edification.[[86]]
What it was in this man’s conversation that so strongly aroused the approval of Clearchus we are not told. Josephus, in whose Contra Apionem we find the passage, ends here, to tell us briefly that the rest of Aristotle’s story described the man’s great strength of character and the admirable self-control of his habits of life. It may be suspected that Clearchus’ Jew is little more than a mouthpiece for his own ethical doctrines, a sort of fourth century Ingénu, or Candide.[[87]] But what he does actually say is of great interest.
We have here the first mention of the capital in the form Jerusalēmē, introduced, it may be noted, for its outlandish sound. And we have the statement, curious enough to our ears, that the Jews are descendants of Hindu philosophers, who bear the name of Jews in Syria and Calani in India. Elsewhere Clearchus asserts an exactly similar connection between the Persian magi and the Hindu gymnosophists.[[88]] It is obvious that Clearchus has the caste organization of the magi in mind, and that his knowledge of Jews is as mediate and remote as that of Theophrastus.