JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

(b) Egyptians, the lowest class, who paid a burdensome
poll tax; and
(c) the middle class metropolitae (i.e., half-Greeks who
lived in the chora), who paid the poll tax at a reduced rate.
Augustus placed the Jew in the lowest class, forced to pay
the tax. This was a blow to Jewish pride, for besides those few
individual Jewish families who had received the distinction of
Greek citizenship, the vast majority of Jews could no longer
register in the gymnasia and had to pay the poll tax.
From that time began a long struggle by the Alexandrian
Jews to confirm their rights. The works of writers such as Josephus
(Contra Apionem) and Philo (Vita Moysis 1:34) contain
a defense of Alexandrian Jews’ rights. The Greeks in turn approached
Augustus suggesting that they would keep all non-
Greeks out of the gymnasia, if he, in turn, would abolish the
privileges of the Jews. Augustus refused and confirmed the
Jewish ancestral rights, to the intense anger of the Greeks.
Augustus abolished the post of ethnarch of Alexandria in
10–12 C.E., replacing it by a gerusia of elders.
The Greeks of Alexandria seized their opportunity with
the rise of the pro-Hellenic emperor, Caius *Caligula in 37
C.E. The following year they stormed the synagogues, polluted
them, and set up statues of the emperor within. The
prefect, Valerius *Flaccus, was embarrassed and dared not remove
the images of Caesar. The Jews were shut up in a ghetto
and their houses plundered. Philo, who wrote In Flaccum
and De Legatione on the affair, headed a Jewish delegation
to Caligula to complain, but was dismissed with derision.
On the assassination of Caligula in 41 C.E. the Jews of
Alexandria took vengeance by instigating a massacre of the
Greeks.
The new emperor, *Claudius, issued an edict in favor
of the Jews in 41 C.E., abolishing the restrictions imposed at
the time of the pogrom of 38 C.E., but he banned the Jews
from entering the gymnasia, and refused them Greek citizenship.
Much antisemitic material was written at this period
in Egypt, e.g., *Apion’s works, and the Acts of the *Alexandrian
Martyrs.
Consequently the Jews closed their ranks and became
more self-conscious of their Jewish heritage. Such works were
written as III *Maccabees and the Wisdom of *Solomon. The
Jews also tended to live closer together, though no ghettos
were imposed.
In 66 C.E. the Alexandrians, in debating about a delegation
to be sent to Nero, presumably to complain about the
Jews, discovered several Jewish spies among themselves. Three
were caught and burnt alive. The Jews rose in revolt and tried
to burn the Greeks in their amphitheater, and Tiberius Julius
Alexander, the prefect, crushed them mercilessly, killing
more than were slain in the pogrom of 38 C.E. After the destruction
of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. Onias’ Temple at
*Leontopolis was destroyed and the *fiscus judaicus imposed.
However, the Egyptian Jews had to pay more than other Jews,
because the Egyptian calendar provided that they pay in the
first year of the fiscus (71 C.E.), two years in arrears instead of
egypt
one year, as other Jews. It is estimated that they paid that year
27 million Egyptian drachmae in taxes.
In 115 the great revolt of the Jews of Egypt, Cyrene, and
Cyprus occurred (see *Trajan). The revolt was immediately
crushed in Alexandria, by Marcus Rutilius Lupus, but it continued
in the chora with the help of the Jews of *Cyrene (in
centers as Thebes, Faiyum, and Athribis). Marcius Turbo was
sent by the emperor to deal with the situation, and crushed
the revolt in 117. Much of Alexandria was destroyed and the
revolt resulted in the virtual annihilation of Egyptian Jewry.
From that time on Jews almost vanish from the chora. In Alexandria
the great synagogue was destroyed, large tracts of
Jewish-owned land in Heracleapolis and Oxyrhynchus were
confiscated, and Jewish courts were suspended. The causes of
the revolt suggested are the antisemitism of the local Greeks,
and the “messianic” movement centered around *Lucuas of
Cyrene. The revolt spelled the end of Jewish life in Egypt for
a long time. From 117 to 300 only a few Jewish names occur
among the peasants in the chora.
From the End of the Second Temple Period to the
Muslim Conquest
The defeat suffered by the Jews, both in Ereẓ Israel under Bar
Kokhba and in the quelling of the rebellion in Egypt during
the years 116–117 C.E. almost crushed the Jewish communities
in Egypt, especially in Alexandria. The evidence from the papyri
of the presence of a large, cohesive community in Egypt,
found rather abundantly before 70 C.E, diminishes, until after
the year 200 C.E. it becomes almost negligible. The territory of
Egypt was still a marked battleground for imperial ambitions
and rebellions during this later period of the Roman Empire.
The revolt of the Βουκολοι (herdsmen) and its aftermath, finally
settled by the emperor Septimus Severus (194 C.E.), left
the country with its agriculture almost ruined and burdened
with heavy taxes. During the latter half of the third century
Egypt was again racked with internal dispute. Finally, Diocletian
brought a period of relative peace to the land, reorganizing
the territory into three, and later four, provinces. The later
history of Egypt under the Byzantine emperors is closely tied
up with the growth and predominance there of hitherto persecuted
Christianity.
Centered as it was in Alexandria, Christianity in Egypt
inherited some of the classical antisemitism of the city. Clement
of Alexandria mentions (Stromata, 3:63; 2:45.5) the fact
that there existed in the primitive church there two “Gospels,”
an “Egyptian Gospel” and a “Hebrew Gospel” – evidence of
the dichotomy in the early church between gentile and Jewish
Christianity, the latter being characterized in Egypt by a
Gnostic tendency. By 150 C.E., however, both Orthodox and
Gnostic Christianity found themselves allied with regard to
the Jews. Basilides, an Alexandrian Gnostic at the end of the
second century, tried to stress in Gnostic terms that Christianity
is to be completely dissociated from its Jewish ancestry.
An early work called the Epistle of Barnabas (c. 135 C.E.)
argued for the abrogation by God of the Old Covenant (Old
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 229