The connection of the Jews with India was evidently a hasty conclusion, arrived at when knowledge came to the Greeks of the existence of castes whose function was principally religious. The statement is repeated by a man who should have known better—Megasthenes, Seleucus’ ambassador to India. “All that has been written on natural science by the old Greek philosophers,” he tells us, “may also be found in philosophers outside of Greece, such as the Hindu Brahmans and the so-called Jews of Syria.”[[89]] He is of course quite wrong as to the facts. But his statement is evidence of the wide currency of the opinion that the Jews possessed a very special and very profound lore. Megasthenes, it may be noted, does not state or imply that the Greeks were borrowers. If he had done so, the writer in whose book we find the citation, Clemens of Alexandria (about 180 C.E.), would have pounced upon it. Clemens was eagerly searching for demonstration of the thesis set up by many Jews and most early Christians, that all Greek science and philosophy were derived from an imagined early communication between Moses and the first Asiatic philosophers.[[90]]

Theophrastus, Clearchus, and Megasthenes, all of them belonging to the generation of or immediately after Alexander, hold largely the same views. Influence of one of them upon the others is practically excluded. We may find in them accordingly such knowledge of the Jews as at about 300 B.C.E. had reached educated Greeks.

If we try to imagine how this information reached them, we are reduced to pure speculation. It does not seem to have been a common literary source, although it is likely enough that in the numerous histories of the East, now lost, casual and inaccurate references were made to the Jews. And again it is not likely that the vastly increased communication that followed Alexander’s campaign, at once brought the Jews much more prominently within the circle of Greek interest. In those days, the land-passage hugged the sea as closely as the sea-passage hugged the land. Judea was a little inland country, somewhat out of the line of direct communication between the Euphrates and the Nile. If then the current views, expressed as they are by Theophrastus and his contemporaries, had neither a literary source nor one of direct report, it can only have spread as an indirect, filtered rumor, perhaps by way of Phoenicians, Syrians, and Egyptians.

As far as Phoenicians and Syrians are concerned, immediate contact with the Jews must have existed. Tyrians and Sidonians and Philistines are frequently mentioned in the post-Exilic books of the Bible.[[91]] This contact was not wholly hostile, though it was often so; but if these nations were the sources of Greek information about the Jews, the hostility is not apparent. Perhaps in the generations between Zechariah and Alexander it had disappeared. At all events, it would appear that the Canaanite neighbors of the Jews really knew very little about them, except that the Jews were the residents of the hills about Jerusalem, and that they had highly characteristic religious rites—characteristic principally in the earnestness with which they were performed.

In Egypt, a country that had never ceased to be in communication with Greece from very early times, and particularly since the founding of a Greek city at Naucratis, in Egypt itself, about the middle of the sixth century B.C.E., there had been communities of Jews from times that antedated the Persian conquest. Into the situation here, newly discovered papyri at Assuan and Elephantine allow us a glimpse, but only a glimpse. Even the little we know includes one case of bitter conflict between Jews and Egyptians.[[92]] No doubt it was not the only case of its kind. Egyptians, we may be sure, knew of the Jews in the communities in which Jews lived, and one might suppose that Greek visitors to Egypt would at some time stumble across Jews there. However, our extant sources, which speak of Egyptians often enough, do not seem to have recognized the presence of foreign elements in the Egyptian population. It was reserved for the papyri to show us Persians, Syrians, Babylonians, and Jews established in the land as individuals and in groups.

The view of the Jews that represented them as a mystical sect did not cease when Judea became an important political factor in the East. One Greek thinker particularly had professed so strange and esoteric a doctrine that his biographers and critics inevitably looked for the source of it in non-Greek tribes and especially in those who had otherwise obtained a reputation for wisdom of various kinds. This was Pythagoras. Some seventy-five years after Theophrastus, Hermippus of Smyrna, in his Life of Pythagoras, ascribed certain definite doctrines of the latter to the Jews and Thracians.[[93]] Pythagoras as a matter of fact had traveled extensively, and had brought to his Italian home little fragments of exotic lore variously derived. That his philosophy was influenced by them, there is no sufficient proof, much less based upon them, and the general belief that he was so influenced had probably no sounder foundation than the indubitable strangeness of the rites he instituted and his personal mannerisms. But in later times Pythagoras was a name to conjure with for those who were bent on establishing a connection between the Jews and the Greeks. Hermippus had numerous imitators among later Jewish and Christian writers.

We shall of course never be able to discover the particular moment that marked the first meeting of Jew and Greek. The contact that is indicated in the words of Theophrastus or Megasthenes is already of some duration. The term Ἰουδαῖος has a definite meaning for educated Greeks. It denoted a Syrian sect, living together about their rock-citadel and akin in doctrine and probably in blood to the Persian Magi and Hindu gymnosophists. More exact information was scarcely available. The two non-Judean sections where Jews were to be found, Babylon and Egypt, were themselves strange and only partially understood regions to Greeks in spite of their long acquaintance with both of them.

CHAPTER VII
EGYPT

In the relations that subsisted between Jews and Greeks after Alexander, Egypt plays an important part, so that particular attention must be directed to that country.