g misfortune, to be blotted from
memory. What seemed so ominous to them was that the annihilation of
the nation came at the same time as the cleavage in the religion.
Judaism seemed attacked no less by internal foes than by external
calamity; and was likely to perish altogether or to drift into a lower
conception of God, unless it could find some stalwart defence. Hence
they insisted on the extension of the fence of the law, and abandoned
for centuries the mission of the Jews to the outer world. This was the
true Galut, or exile; not so much the political exclusion from the
land of their fathers, but the enforced exclusion from the mission of
the prophets. Philo is one of the brightest figures of a golden age of
Jewish expansion, which passed away of a sudden, and has never since
returned. In the silver and bronze ages which followed, his place in
Judaism was obscured. But this age of ours, which boasts of its
historical sense, looking back over the centuries and freed from the
bitter dismay of the rabbis, can appraise his true worth and see in
him one who realized for himself all that Judaism and Jewish culture
could and still can be.

Some Jewish teachers have thought that Philo's work was a failure,
others that it provides a warning rather than an example for later
generations of Jews, proving the mischief of expanding Judaism for the
world. As well one might say that Isaiah's prophecy was a calamity,
because the Christian synoptics used his words as evidences of
Christianity. What is universal in Jewish literature is in the fullest
sense Jewish, and we should beware of renouncing our inheritance because
others have abused and perverted it. Other critics, again, say that
Philo is wearisome and prolix, artificial and sophisticated. There is
certainly some truth in this judgment; but Philo has many beautiful
passages which compensate. Part of his message was for his own
generation and the Alexandrian community, and with the passing away of
the Hellenistic culture, it has lost its attraction. But part of it is
of universal import, and is very pertinent and significant for every
generation of Jews which, enjoying social and intellectual emancipation,
lives amid a foreign culture. Doubtless the position of Philo and the
Alexandrian community was to some extent different from that of the Jews
at any time since the greater Diaspora that followed the destruction of
the temple. They had behind them a national culture and a ce