the usual lot of enslaved countries and lose all originality and vigour
of thought? Not so. From this point, strangely enough, it begins to
have a philosophy of its own. Hitherto it has been importing Greek
thought into Egypt and Syria, even to the furthest boundaries of Persia;
and the whole East has become Greek: but it has received little in
return. The Indian Gymnosophists, or Brahmins, had little or no effect
on Greek philosophy, except in the case of Pyrrho: the Persian Dualism
still less. The Egyptian symbolic nature-worship had been too gross to
be regarded by the cultivated Alexandrian as anything but a barbaric
superstition. One eastern nation had intermingled closely with the
Macedonian race, and from it Alexandrian thought received a new impulse.

I mentioned in my first lecture the conciliatory policy which the
Ptolemies had pursued toward the Jews. Soter had not only allowed but
encouraged them to settle in Alexandria and Egypt, granting them the
same political privileges with the Macedonians and other Greeks. Soon
they built themselves a temple there, in obedience to some supposed
prophecy in their sacred writings, which seems most probably to have
been a wilful interpolation. Whatsoever value we may attach to the
various myths concerning the translation of their Scriptures into Greek,
there can be no doubt that they were translated in the reign of Soter,
and that the exceedingly valuable Septuagint version is the work of that
period. Moreover, their numbers in Alexandria were very great. When
Amrou took Constantinople in A.D. 640, there were 40,000 Jews in it; and
their numbers during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, before their
temporary expulsion by Cyril about 412, were probably greater; and Egypt
altogether is said to have contained 200,000 Jews. They had schools
there, which were so esteemed by their whole nation throughout the East,
that the Alexandrian Rabbis, the Light of Israel, as they were called,
may be fairly considered as the centre of Jewish thought and learning