hostility towards the Jews. The chief literary anti-Semites of whom we
have record at this period were Stoics, and it is probably their
"envy" to which Philo refers when he complains of being drawn into the
sea of politics. In writings and in speeches the Stoic leaders Apion
and Chæremon carried on a campaign of misrepresentation, and sought to
give their attacks a fine humanitarian justification by drawing fancy
pictures of the Jewish religion and Jewish laws. The Jews worshipped
the head of an ass,[73] they hated the Gentiles, and would have no
communication with them, they killed Gentile children at the Passover,
and their law allowed them to commit any offences against all but
their own people, and inculcated a low morality. When it was not
morally bad, it was degraded and superstitious. Whereas the modern
anti-Semite usually complains about Jewish success and dangerous
cleverness, Apion accused them of having produced no original ideas
and no great men, and no citizen as worthy of Alexandria as himself!
Against these charges Philo, the most philosophical Jew of the time
and the most distinguished member of the Alexandrian community, was
called upon to defend his people, and that part of his works which
Eusebius calls [Greek: Hypotheticha]; _i.e._ apologetics, was probably
written in reply to the Stoic attacks. The hatred of the Stoics was a
religious hatred, which is the bitterest of all; the Stoics were the
propagators of a rival religious system, which had originally been
founded by Hellenized Semites and borrowed much from Semitic sources.
They had their missionaries everywhere and aspired to found a
universal philosophical religion. In their proselytizing activity they
tried to assimilate to their pantheism the mythological religion of
the masses, and thus they became the philosophical supporters of
idolatry. Their greatest religious opponents were the Jews, who not
only refused to accept their teachings, but preached to the nations a
transcendental monotheism against their impersonal and accommodating