Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

162 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
is best attested by Philo Judaeus, the philosopher who was probably the first
to merge skillfully the Stoic-Platonic logos with Judaism, and who wrote the
following in the early decades of the Common Era:
[E]ven to this very day, there is every year a solemn assembly held and a
festival celebrated in the island of Pharos [where the translation was believed
to have been made], to which not only the Jews but a great number of persons
of other nations sail across, reverencing the place in which the first light
of interpretation shone forth, and thanking God for that ancient piece of
beneficence which was always young and fresh ... In this way those admirable,
and incomparable, and most desirable laws were made known to all people,
whether private individuals or kings, and this too at a period when the nation
had not been prosperous for a long time ... I think that in that case every
nation, abandoning all their own individual customs, and utterly disregarding
their national laws, would change and come over to the honour of such a
people only; for their laws shining in connection with, and simultaneously
with, the prosperity of the nation [ethnos], will obscure all others, just as the
rising sun obscures the stars. 69
Philo's use of the word ethnos—like Josephus's use of phylon or phyle—already
designated a growing cult community rather than an isolationist community
of origin, and it certainly does not correspond to the modern term "nation."
The Alexandrian philosopher viewed conversion to Judaism as a reasonable
and positive phenomenon that demographically enlarged his ethnos.
This was a historical phase in which the distinctive nature of the spreading
monotheism began, under the influence of Hellenism, to undermine earlier
identities. In the traditional identities, the pagan cults corresponded more or
less to the cultural-linguistic communities—the "peoples," the "commonalties,"
the cities or tribes. From this time on, the ancient association between religious
boundaries and everyday cultural and language characteristics began to fail. 70
For example, Philo himself, for all his extensive knowledge, knew neither
Hebrew nor Aramaic, yet this did not diminish his devout attachment to the
Mosaic religion, which he, like many of his fellow believers, knew in its famous
translation. Some of his writing was probably also intended to persuade gentiles
to change their ways and abandon "their own individual customs."
The Septuagint was the hesitant start of Jewish religious missionizing in the
form of the works known as the books of the Apocrypha. The Letter of Aristeas
that mentions the translation was written in Greek before 200 BCE by a Jewish
69 Philo, On the Life of Moses 2. 41-4.
70 On this process, as analyzed by a different conceptual method from the present
work, see Cohen, "From Ethnos to Ethno-religion," in The Beginnings of Jewishness, 109-39.