Alexandrian Judaism

Jews settled in Alexandria as soon as it was Alexandria, that is, in 332 BC.  In the first century AD, they were a powerful and sizable minority of the city.  Between 66 and 117 AD, however, they suffered a massive reversal.  Robert Louis Wilken ( Judaism and the Early Christian Mind: A Study of Cyril of Alexandria’s Exegesis and Theology ) writes:

“many Jews were cruelly murdered, their homes destroyed, synagogues demolished, and their leaders tortured.  During this period the extent and influence of Judaism rapidly diminished . . . . The fact that so few literary sources remain from this period is itself a testimony to the devastation of Jewish life.  Apparently the great synagogue of Alexandria was also destroyed and the activity of the Jewish court in Alexandria suspended.”

This reversal was caused by wars between Jews and Greeks (and Romans) in Alexandria.

Peder Borgen notes that already in 30 BC, Egyptian-Jewish relations were deteriorating, due to three uprisings: “the armed uprising at the death of the emperor Gaius Caligular in A.D. 41, the impact of the Jewish war in Palestine on the tensions in Egypt, A.d. 66 and 70-73, and the suicidal Messianic revolution of Jews in Cyrene and Egypt in the years A.D. 115-117.”

Regarding the conflict of the 60s, Borgen writes: “In A.D. 66 the Alexandrian Greek polis wanted the emperor Nero to cancel the Jews’ rights in the city . . . . According to Josephus a number of Jews entered the amphitheater in Alexandria where the members of the polis were deliberating on the subject of an embassy to be sent to Nero.  The Greeks tried to capture the Jews, got hold of three of them, and took them away to be burned alive.  This caused the whole Jewish community to rise and attempt to set fire to the aphitheater.  The Roman Prefect, Philo’s nephew Tiberius Alexander, crushed the Jewish revolt.  The soldiers killed the Jews, burned and plundered their houses.  The Jews tried to oppose the Roman troops with arms, but they were totally routed.  According to Josephus 50,000 Jews were killed.”

Seven years later, Borgen continues, “the sicarii fled from Palestine to Egypt, and instigated the Egyptian Jews to revolt under the  slovan, ‘No lord but God.’  After they had killed some of the moderate Jews of rank, the leaders of the council of elders in Alexandria called a general assembly and charged the sicarii for causing dangerous trouble.  The assembly seized 600 sicarii on the spot.”  The ones that escaped were captured and brought back to be executed by the Romans.  But the militants made the Romans suspicious of all the Jews: “the Romans, fearing the Jews might again join together in revolutionary actions, demolished Onias’ temple.”

Sources on the conflict of 115-117 are sketchy.  Apparently, Jews supposed a messianic king named Lucuas, Cyrenaian Jews marched on Egypt along with many Egyptians, perhaps in the hope that they would eventually be able to take Palestine.   Jews had the upper hand until Trajan deployed Roman troops to stop them.    Christopher Haas writes that despite the brevity of the fighting the effect was devastating: “it would be difficult to exaggerate the effects this violence had on the Alexandrian Jewish community.  While it is safe to discount the talmudic claim that ‘sixty myriads upon sixty myriads’ were slaughtered in the city, the loss of Jewish life must have been high during the course of fighting against both Roman troops  and Alexandrian Greeks.  Compounding this decrease in Jewish population was the subsequent emigration of many Jews, including prominent Alexandrian rabbis, to Palestine.  Those Jews who remained were forcibly relocated to a new settlement just outside the walls and to the east of the city . . . . It would be many years before the Alexandrian Jewish community would again play an important role in the city’s life.”