The rabbinical
appreciation of Aquila's work shows that, while the Jews were in
Palestine, many still required a Greek translation of the Bible; but
when in the third century C.E. the centre of the religion was moved to
Babylon, Greek was forgotten, and the rabbis for a period lost sight
of Greek culture. It is another irony of history that our manuscripts
of Philo go back to an archetype in the library of Caesarea in
Palestine, which Eusebius studied in the fourth century. Philo came to
the land of his fathers in the possession of his people's enemies, and
at a time when he could no longer be understood by his people.
Philo's works were not translated into Hebrew, and as Greek ceased to
be the language of the cultured, they could not, in their original
form, have influenced later Jewish philosophers. But the Christians,
in their proselytizing activity, had translated them into Latin and
Armenian before the fifth century, and through one of these means they
may possibly have exercised an influence upon the new school of Jewish
philosophy, which, opening with Saadia in the tenth century, blossomed
forth in the Arabic-Spanish epoch. The light of historical research is
beginning to illumine the obscurity of the Dark Ages, and has revealed
traces of an Alexandrian allegorist in the writings of the Persian Jew
Benjamin al-Nehawendi, himself a distinguished allegorizer of the
Bible, who wrote in the ninth century and taught that God created the
world by means of one ministerial angel.
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