Alexandria was the most ambitious city in the ancient world - and the Jews arrived almost at its founding. Alexander laid out the street grid in 331 BCE; within a generation, Jewish families were settling the Delta quarter on the city's north-east edge, close to the royal palaces and the harbour where the Pharos lighthouse would one day stand. They had not come as refugees. They came as settlers, drawn by the same thing that drew everyone: a new city being built from nothing, under a dynasty willing to offer land grants, civic rights, and the chance to get rich in the busiest port on the Mediterranean.
By the second century BCE the community was one of the largest in the world. By the first century CE it may have numbered around 200,000 souls - roughly two-fifths of the city's population. The Delta quarter had long since overflowed into other districts. Jews held civic offices, served in the Ptolemaic military, traded grain and linen and papyrus, and built synagogues on a scale that the rest of the diaspora could barely imagine. This was not an enclave clinging to the margins of a foreign city. It was a community that had decided Alexandria was home - and acted accordingly.
The record
The Tosefta (Sukkah 4:6), redacted in the 2nd-3rd century CE, preserves a vivid description of the great synagogue of Alexandria - the Diopolis - as a building so vast that worshippers in the rear could not hear the reader, so a beadle had to wave a flag when the congregation should respond Amen. The text says it had a double colonnade and seventy-one golden chairs for the elders, one for each seat of the Sanhedrin. Whether that precise count is exact or legendary, the passage is early evidence of a building on a civic scale that had no parallel in the diaspora. Josephus, writing in the late first century CE (Jewish War 2.488), describes the Jewish quarter as occupying two of Alexandria's five districts - a population distribution consistent with the figures in Philo's own writings.
The community produced an intellectual tradition that still shapes the way the West thinks about religion. Philo of Alexandria - born around 20 BCE into one of the city's most prominent Jewish families, his brother Alexander held the post of Alabarch, the collector of customs on the eastern side of the Nile - spent his life doing something no one had quite done before: reading the Torah through the lens of Greek philosophy and reading Greek philosophy through the lens of the Torah. He took the Platonic Forms and the Stoic Logos and discovered, to his manifest delight, that they pointed towards what his own tradition had always said. He wrote in Greek. He argued in Greek. He remained, without question, a Jew. That combination - full fluency in the surrounding intellectual culture, uncompromised commitment to the tradition - is the Alexandrian Jewish achievement at its finest. Later Jewish philosophers, and later Christian theologians, owe him a debt that neither has always been willing to acknowledge.
The record
In 38 CE, Alexandria was the site of one of the ancient world's worst recorded pogroms. Under the governor Aulus Avilius Flaccus, the Greek population - inflamed by the question of Jewish civic rights under the new emperor Caligula - drove the Jewish community out of four of the city's five districts and into a single overcrowded quarter, destroyed or desecrated synagogues, and killed and tortured Jews through the streets. Philo himself led the Jewish embassy to Rome that followed. He wrote two surviving accounts of these events - In Flaccum (Against Flaccus) and Legatio ad Gaium (Embassy to Gaius) - which are the most detailed eyewitness accounts of a pogrom to survive from the ancient world. Flaccus was subsequently recalled to Rome, tried, and exiled. Philo's account is preserved in manuscript and edited critically by F. H. Colson in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Philo's works (Harvard University Press, 1941).
The events of 38 CE did not break the community. Under the emperor Claudius, who took power two years later, Jewish rights in Alexandria were confirmed and the community recovered. It went on producing scholars and merchants and soldiers for another century. What broke it, in the end, was a sequence of catastrophes: the great Jewish revolt of 115-117 CE - the Kitos War - in which the Jewish communities of Egypt, Cyrene, and Cyprus rose against Rome simultaneously, were defeated with massive Roman force, and were killed or expelled in numbers the ancient sources put in the hundreds of thousands. The Alexandrian Jewish community never recovered its old scale. But it had already done its work. The Septuagint existed. Philo's writings survived. The model of a community that was fully, confidently itself while standing in the middle of a non-Jewish world had been demonstrated, at enormous scale, for four hundred years. That demonstration did not go unnoticed.
The record
The Kitos War of 115-117 CE is documented in the Roman historian Cassius Dio (Roman History 68.32), in Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History (4.2), and in papyri from Egypt that record the disruption to village life and administration during the revolt. Modern archaeological survey confirms a sharp discontinuity in the Jewish material record of Egypt after this period. The papyri are held across several collections, most importantly the papyrus collections of the British Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford; a critical edition of relevant documents is in Victor Tcherikover and Alexander Fuks, Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, vol. 2 (Harvard University Press, 1960), which remains the standard reference for Jewish documentary evidence from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.
Alexandria sits at the beginning of nearly every major thread in diaspora history: the Greek Torah, the philosophical synthesis, the civic ambition, the pogrom and the embassy, the destruction and the survival. The Jews who built it were not trying to create a model. They were trying to live. That their way of living turned out to be a model - of engagement, of creativity, of stubborn continuity - is the kind of thing that only becomes visible from a long way back. We are standing at that distance now. The view is worth the distance.
