to trade-guilds, as was also
customary during the Middle Ages; the goldsmiths, silversmiths,
coppersmiths, and weavers had their own places, for the Alexandrian
Jews seem to have partially adopted the Egyptian caste-system. The
Jews enjoyed a large amount of self-government, having their own
governor, the ethnarch, and in Roman times their own council
(Sanhedrin), which administered their own code of laws. Of the
ethnarch Strabo says that he was like an independent ruler, and it was
his function to secure the proper fulfilment of duties by the
community and compliance with their peculiar laws.[4] Thus the people
formed a sort of state within a state, preserving their national life
in the foreign environment. They possessed as much political
independence as the Palestinian community when under Roman rule; and
enjoyed all the advantages without any of the narrowing influences,
physical or intellectual, of a ghetto. They were able to remain an
independent body, and foster a Jewish spirit, a Jewish view of life, a
Jewish culture, while at the same time they assimilated the different
culture of the Greeks around them, and took their part in the general
social and political life.

At the end of the third and the beginning of the second century
Palestine was a shuttlecock tossed between the Ptolemies and the
Seleucids; but in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes (_c._ 150 B.C.E.)
it finally passed out of the power of the Ptolemaic house, and from
this time the Palestinian Jews had a different political history from
the Egyptian. The compulsory Hellenization by Antiochus aroused the
best elements of the Jewish nation, which had seemed likely to lose by
a gradual assimilation its adherence to pure monotheism and the Mosaic
law. The struggle of foe as against the Hellenizing party of his own
people, which, led by the high priests Jason, Menelaus, and Alcimus,
tried to crush both the national and the religious spirit. The
Maccabaean rule brought not only a renaissance of national life and
national culture, but also a revival of the national religion. Before,
however, the deliverance of the Jews had been accomplished by the
noble band of brothers, many of the faithful Palestinian families had
fled for protection from the tyranny of Antiochus to the refuge of his
enemy Ptolemy Philometor. Among the fugitives were Onias and
Dositheus, who, according to Josephus,[5] became the trusted leaders
of the armies of the Egyptian monarch. Onias,