Jewish Settlement in Hellenistic Egypt

Hellenistic Egypt is the best-known Jewish settlement outside Judea, because people who in the Greek language were called Ioudaioi or who bore distinctively Jewish names are solidly attested in the documentary papyri that have taught historians so much about the administration, daily life, and culture of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Jewish settlements in Egypt are attested as early as the fifth century BCE, in the wake of the Babylonian and Persian conquests of Judah. Egypt had always been, and long remained, the center for immigrants from Syria, Palestine, and eastern Asia Minor, areas dependent mainly on dry farming in a climate prone to drought and crop failure. The flooding- and irrigation-based economy of the Nile Valley was known to be a relatively reliable source of food, a fact familiar to every reader of the book of Genesis. The Hellenistic kings of Egypt (Alexander and his successors, the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt after Alexander’s death in 323 BCE) exploited this and actively encouraged immigration, granting immigrants favorable legal or fiscal status (they were regarded as “Hellenes,” that is, Greeks) and, if they came as soldiers, large grants of land. It is unsurprising that there were many Judeans among the immigrants, which may in turn tell us something about the consequences of the high rate of population growth back home in Judea.

From the papyri, we learn that Judean immigrants, at least the military settlers, who tended to be more prosperous, not only were “Greek” by legal convention but also came to identify with Greek language and culture, instead of native Egyptian language and culture, while still retaining a sense of their Jewishness. We can say little about what this combination meant in practice: on the “Jewish” side, we know that some Jews gave their children distinctively Israelite or biblical names, sometimes mildly adapted to Greek linguistic conventions, thus, Iosepos for Joseph, Simon for Shim‘on, Ioudas for Yehudah, Rachelis for Rachel. When using Greek names, which, like Hebrew names, often contained a religious message, they slightly preferred neutral names like Theodoros (gift of god) over more specific ones like Apollodoros (gift of Apollo) or Isidoros (gift of Isis). But the latter were definitely used as well; we cannot avoid the conclusion that sometimes the religious content was intentional, not an accidental by-product of an effort to fit in. 

Jews in Egypt had the constitutional right to use their own “civic” (i.e., native or traditional) laws. Until quite recently, scholars thought that they usually waived this right, except in the large community of Alexandria, and used instead the standard type of Greek-based law attested in the Hellenistic Egyptian papyri in general. But in 2001, the papyrologists James M. S. Cowey and Klaus Maresch published a small collection of papyri from the village of Herakleopolis, written in Greek in the second century BCE, which appeared to be the records of a kind of Jewish communal court that evidently used the civic laws of the Jews. Strangely, although some of the content of these texts is markedly Jewish—for example a divorce document is called biblion apostasiou, the precise Greek translation of the biblical sefer keritut (“bill of divorcement”: Deuteronomy 24:1; cf. Matthew 5:31; 19:7)—much of it is identical with Greco-Egyptian common law. 

Did Jews in Hellenistic Egypt observe the Sabbath and festivals, keep kosher, avoid marriage with non-Jews, even avoid idolatry? Aside from the spotty evidence from naming practices, which indicates at least a certain tolerance for Greek gods, the papyri, mainly tax receipts, leases, and similar documents, provide little relevant information. 

From inscriptions, we know that in some of the larger villages Jews cooperated in the construction of what they called “prayer (houses),” proseuchai (sg., proseuchē). These buildings were constructed through communal efforts, were usually dedicated to the Most High God, and were places where Jews prayed. Little else is known about them, but the very fact of their existence is significant. Other immigrant groups built temples dedicated to their gods, as did the Jews led by the priest Onias, who built a temple in the Egyptian city of Leontopolis in the mid-second century BCE. But most Jews seem to have eschewed the idea of building a Temple outside of Jerusalem. Somewhere in the background may be the insistence of the book of Deuteronomy that God may be worshiped through sacrifice only at the one central (Jerusalem) Temple.

Paradoxically, we know much more about the small Jewish settlements in Hellenistic rural Egypt than we do about the much larger one in Alexandria. We have had to rely on the evidence of ancient Jewish writing in Greek, much of which has been assumed, possibly incorrectly, to have been composed at Alexandria. 

Like the Jews in rural Egypt, Jews in Alexandria quickly abandoned Hebrew and Aramaic for Greek, although the constant trickle of Judean immigration meant that there would always have been Aramaic-speaking Jews there, as there were still in Philo’s day, in the first century CE. However, Alexandrian Jews mainly used Greek and, as they remained strongly committed to the Torah, translated that book into Greek (the Septuagint) as early as the third century BCE.