Philo himself was unknown, but his religious interpretation
of Platonism had entered into the world's thought, and inspired the
mystics of his own race as well as of the Christian world.
After a thousand years of Latin domination the Renaissance revived the
study of Greek in Western Europe, and to the most cultured of his race
Philo was no longer a sealed book. The first Jewish writer to show an
intimate acquaintance with him and a clear idea of his relation to
Jewish tradition was Azariah dei Rossi, who lived in the sixteenth
century. His "Meor Einayim" dealt largely with the Hellenistic epoch
of Judaism, and its attitude towards it is summed up in the remark
that "all that is good in Philo agrees with our law."[342] He pointed
out many instances of agreement, and some of disagreement, but he
objected in general to the allegorizing of the historical parts of the
Torah and to the absence of the traditional interpretations in Philo's
commentaries. He shared largely the rabbinical attitude and could not
give an independent historical appreciation of Philo's work. That was
not to come for two hundred years more. To Dei Rossi we owe the Jewish
translation of Philo's name, [Hebrew: ydydim 'lksndri].[343] To the outer
world Philo was "the Jew"; to his own people, "the Alexandrian."
As soon as Greek was reintroduced into the scholarly world, Philo
began to reassert an important influence on theology.
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