lace 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 Caesar, 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 Caesar and
Augustus, who everywhere showed special favor to their Jewish
subjects, confirmed the privileges of full citizenship and limited
self-government which the early Ptolemies had bestowed.[13] Josephus
records a letter of Augustus to the Jewish community at Cyrene, in
which he ordains: "Since the nation of the Jews hath been found
grateful to the Roman people, it seemed good to me and my counsellors
that the Jews have liberty to make use of their own customs, and that
their sacred money be not touched, but sent to Jerusalem, and that
they be not obliged to go before the judge on the Sabbath day nor on
the day of preparation for it after the ninth hour," _i.e._, after the
early evening.[14] This decree is typical of the emperor's attitude to
his Jewish subjects; and Egypt became more and more a favored home of
the race, so that the Jewish population in the land, from the Libyan
desert to the border of Ethiopia, was estimated in Philo's time at not
less than one million.[15]

The prosperity and privileges of the Jews, combined with their
peculiar customs and their religious separateness, did not fail at
Alexandria, as they have not failed in any country of the Diaspora, to
arouse the mixed envy and dislike of the rude popula