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 Cæsar, 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 Cæsar and