In the mother country, however, the germ of reaction was always very
strong. A constant opposition was directed against the influx of
foreign modes of life and thought, which effaced and obliterated the
intellectual movement. It was different, however, in the other countries
of Macedonian dominion, and especially in Egypt. Alexander the Great,
who seems to have been favourably inclined towards the Jews, settled a
number of them in Alexandria. His policy was kept up by the descendants
of Lagos, that great general of Alexander, who made himself king of the
province which was entrusted to the care of his administration. Egypt
became the resort of many refugees from Judæa, who gradually came under
the influence of the dazzling Greek thought and culture, so new and
therefore so attractive to the Semitic mind. Hellenism and Hebraism had
known each other for some time, for Phoenician merchants and seafarers
had carried the seed of Oriental wisdom to the distant west. The
acquaintance, however, was a slight one. At the court of the Ptolemies,
on the threshold of Europe and Asia, they met at last. On the shores
of the Mediterranean, on the soil where lay the traces of the ancient
Egyptian civilisation, in the silent avenues of mysterious sphinxes,
amongst hieroglyphic-covered obelisks, Greek and Hebrew thought stood
face to face. The two civilisations embodied the principles of the
Beautiful and the Sublime, of Morality and Æstheticism, of religious
and philosophic speculation. The result of this meeting marks a glorious
page in the annals of human thought. Among the monuments of a great
historic past, the speculative spirit of the East made love to the
plastic beauty of the West, until, at last, they were united in happy
union. Hellenic taste and sense of beauty and Semitic speculation not
only evolved side by side in Egypt but mixed and commingled; their
thoughts were intertwined and interwoven, giving rise to a new
intellectual movement, a new philosophy of thought: the Judæo-Hellenic.