Philo of Alexandria פילון האלכסנדרוני

Alexandria held the largest community of the diaspora, and Hebrew was barely read there any more: the Torah was known through the Septuagint. Philo came from the first family of that community; his brother Alexander was alabarch, that is, head of customs in Egypt, and his nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander went over to the Romans and ended as prefect of Egypt—one generation of one family shows everything that can happen to a community living inside a foreign empire.

What he did. He read the Torah in Greek and expounded it allegorically: behind the story of a man he looked for the story of a soul, behind the Tabernacle for the order of the world. He held that Greek wisdom does not contradict Moses but came out of him, and that Moses is the summit of philosophy. This is not the method of midrash, though midrash too has allegory; it is a Greek device applied to the Torah.

How he ended in Jewish memory. He did not. Neither the Mishnah nor the Talmud nor a single rishon quotes him; his name is not in our books. His works were copied by Christians—Eusebius of Caesarea took the Therapeutae whom Philo described for monks, and after that Philo was kept as one of their own. He came back to the Jews only in modern times, in translation from the Greek. So he cannot be called a link in the chain of transmission: he was not one. But he is a witness—to how a vast community lived, to what happened in Alexandria in the year 38, and to the embassy to the emperor that he led himself.