We do not know whether the Ἰουδαîοι that had no other classification were more numerous or less numerous than those who had. But it was shortly found advisable to organize the Jewish metics to the extent of superadding upon their own cult-organizations certain royal officers responsible to the king. Of these the chief was the ethnarch, and it is evident that the ethnarch would assume an importance in proportion to the number under his jurisdiction. The right to have an ethnarch seems to have been a prized privilege and was not confined to the Jews. What the relation of the later alabarch[[109]] was to the ethnarch is not clear. The two terms may perhaps designate the same office.
But a complete understanding of the condition of the Jews in Egypt and Alexandria necessitates some account of the synagogue organization.
There is no reason to question the Jewish tradition that the synagogue was Exilic or pre-Exilic in origin. In fact, it is not easily conceivable that it could have been otherwise. Worship was a social act in the ancient world, and properly to be performed in concert. It was inevitable therefore that just as soon as the Jews were removed from those places where the ancestral and traditional ritual was performed without any conscious organization for that purpose, they would combine themselves in groups in order to satisfy the strongly marked religious emotion that characterized them.
Corporate organization, based upon the performance in common of some religious act, characterized the whole ancient world. The state was itself a large corporation of this kind, and the local divisions rapidly assumed, or always possessed, the same form. Obviously members of the same nationality residing in a foreign city would be specially prone to organize themselves into such corporations, and as a rule make the religious bond, which seems to have been a formal requisite, the common worship of one of their own gods. The merchants of Citium at Athens formed a guild for the worship of the Cyprian Aphrodite. It was in this way that Egyptian merchants and artisans made Isis known to the Roman world.[[110]]
It has been said that the state itself was such a corporation, of which the formal basis was the common performance of a certain ritual act. When new states were founded or new men admitted into old states, a great deal was made of the act. It follows therefore that when Jews were admitted into the newly founded civic communities of Asia, as we know they were, some relation would have to be entered upon between themselves and the religious basis of the state. In most cases, special exemption from participation in these religious acts seems to have been sought and obtained.
In Egypt the conflict between the exclusive worship of Jehovah and the less intolerant worship of the Nile-gods had been in existence for centuries before the Greeks. The pre-Greek Jewish immigrants were perhaps not of the sort that sought to accentuate the conflict, though friction was unavoidable. At the Greek conquest, it must be remembered, no great disposition was shown by the first Ptolemies to accept the native institutions or the native gods. The new god of Alexandria, the mighty Sarapis, was not, as has been generally supposed, a composite of Osiris and Apis, but an out and out Greek god, imported from his obscure shrine in direct opposition to the indigenous gods.[[111]] Membership in the civic communities, or residence in the country districts, can have involved no obligation to share the ritual localized there. Every group of foreigners might freely disregard it, and maintain unimpaired their own ancestral forms.
We accordingly find Jewish synagogues—in the sense of cult-organizations, each having its own meeting-house, schola, or proseucha, and organized with magistrates and council, like miniature states—not only in Alexandria but in insignificant little towns of Upper and Lower Egypt.[[112]] Nor was the legal basis of such organization wanting, i.e. the corporate personality, since we find these synagogues enjoying the rights of property and subject to the imposts levied upon it.[[113]] The extent of each synagogue was limited by the physical capacity of the schola. There must have been in Alexandria very many of them.
Who were members of them? The various classes of Jews in the city and country were divided by social and legal lines. In the synagogue social distinctions cannot have disappeared, but there can be no doubt that in many, if not in all, there would be found Jews representing every class of the community. In other parts of the Greek world it was no strange thing to see citizens, metics, foreigners, slaves, claiming membership in the same cult-organization, and jointly worshiping a native or foreign god. The synagogue likewise contained among its members nobles and slaves. The tendency for the wealthier classes to become completely Hellenized, and so completely to abandon the synagogue, did not show itself prominently for some time.
We may readily suppose that the native Egyptians regarded all the foreign invaders with scarcely discriminating hatred. In most cases, when Greeks and Jews dwelt in the nomes, they were both exempt from local dues, and both paid the same special tax. What the attitude of the Egyptians was to their Greek and Macedonian masters, we have no need to conjecture.[[114]] As under Persian rule, they rose in bloody riots; and after a century of Greek domination, they were so far successful that a complete change in the policy of the Ptolemies was effected. The house had very rapidly degenerated—a process perhaps hastened by the Egyptian custom of brother and sister marriage, which they adopted. From the weaker kings of the close of the third century B.C.E., the Egyptian priests received a complete surrender. Continuity with the Pharaohs was consciously sought. The ancient titles in a modified form were adopted in Greek as well as Egyptian for the rulers. The hieroglyphics represented Ptolemy as the living god, sprung from Ra, just as they had done for Amen-hem-et thousands of years before.[[115]]
But a Hellenizing process had gone on as well as an Egyptizing process. The irresistible attractions of Greek culture had converted even the fiercest nationalists into Greeks outwardly, and in the horde of Greek names that the papyri exhibit we have sometimes far to seek, if we wish to discover unmistakably Greek stock. Intermarriage and concubinage must have given Egypt a large mixed-blood population, which no doubt called itself Greek. Evidences of Greek aloofness on the subject of marriage have been sought in the denial of connubium by the city of Ptolemais to foreigners.[[116]] But that applied to foreign Greeks as well, and was a common regulation in most Greek cities.