Daff Ditty Succah 51: Alexandria diopelostion

A 19th century illustration of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

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MISHNA: One who did not see the Celebration of the Place of the Drawing of the Water never
saw celebration in his days. This was the sequence of events: At the conclusion of the first
Festival day the priests and the Levites descended from the Israelites’ courtyard to the Women’s
Courtyard, where they would introduce a significant repair, as the Gemara will explain. There
were golden candelabra atop poles there in the courtyard. And there were four basins made of
gold at the top of each candelabrum. And there were four ladders for each and every pole and
there were four children from the priesthood trainees, and in their hands were pitchers with
a capacity of 120 log of oil that they would pour into each and every basin. From the worn
trousers of the priests and their belts they would loosen and tear strips to use as wicks, and
with them they would light the candelabra. And the light from the candelabra was so bright that
there was not a courtyard in Jerusalem that was not illuminated from the light of the Place
of the Drawing of the Water.

The pious and the men of action would dance before the people who attended the celebration,

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with flaming torches that they would juggle in their hands, and they would say before them
passages of song and praise to God. And the Levites would play on lyres, harps, cymbals, and
trumpets, and countless other musical instruments. The musicians would stand on the fifteen
stairs that descend from the Israelites’ courtyard to the Women’s Courtyard, corresponding
to the fifteen Songs of the Ascents in Psalms, i.e., chapters 120–134, and upon which the Levites
stand with musical instruments and recite their song.

And this was the ceremony of the Water Libation: Two priests stood at the Upper Gate that
descends from the Israelites’ courtyard to the Women’s Courtyard, with two trumpets in
their hands. When the rooster crowed at dawn, they sounded a tekia, and sounded a terua,
and sounded a tekia. When they who would draw the water reached the tenth stair the
trumpeters sounded a tekia, and sounded a terua, and sounded a tekia, to indicate that the time
to draw water from the Siloam pool had arrived. When they reached the Women’s Courtyard
with the basins of water in their hands, the trumpeters sounded a tekia, and sounded a terua, and
sounded a tekia.

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When they reached the ground of the Women’s Courtyard, the trumpeters sounded a tekia, and
sounded a terua, and sounded a tekia. They continued sounding the trumpets until they
reached the gate through which one exits to the east, from the Women’s Courtyard to the eastern
slope of the Temple Mount. When they reached the gate through which one exits to the east,
they turned from facing east to facing west, toward the Holy of Holies, and said: Our ancestors
who were in this place during the First Temple period who did not conduct themselves
appropriately, stood

‫ ְיהָוה‬-‫ֲחַצר ֵבּית‬-‫ ֶאל‬,‫טז ַוָיֵּבא ֹאִתי‬ 16 And He brought me into the inner court of the LORD'S
‫ֶפַתח ֵהיַכל ְיהָוה ֵבּין‬-‫ ְוִהֵנּה‬,‫ַהְפּ ִניִמית‬ house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the LORD,
‫ ְכֶּﬠְשׂ ִרים ַוֲחִמָשּׁה‬,‫ָהאוָּלם וֵּבין ַהִמְּזֵבַּח‬ between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty
‫ וְּפֵניֶהם‬,‫ֵהיַכל ְיהָוה‬-‫ִאישׁ; ֲאֹחֵריֶהם ֶאל‬ men, with their backs toward the temple of the LORD, and
.‫ ַלָשֶּׁמשׁ‬,‫ ְוֵהָמּה ִמְשַׁתֲּח ִויֶתם ֵקְדָמה‬,‫ֵקְדָמה‬ their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun
toward the east.
Ezek8:16

“with their backs toward the Sanctuary of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and
they worshipped the sun toward the east” and we, our eyes are to God. Rabbi Yehuda says
that they would repeat and say: We are to God, and our eyes are to God.

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GEMARA: The Sages taught: One who did not see the Celebration of the Place of the
Drawing of the Water, never saw celebration in his life. One who did not see Jerusalem in its
glory, never saw a beautiful city. One who did not see the Temple in its constructed state,
never saw a magnificent structure. The Gemara asks: What is the Temple building to which the
Sages refer? Abaye said, and some say that it was Rav Ḥisda who said: This is referring to the
magnificent building of Herod, who renovated the Second Temple.

It is taught in a baraita that Rabbi Yehuda says: One who did not see the great synagogue
[deyofloston] of Alexandria of Egypt never saw the glory of Israel.

They said that its structure was like a large basilica [basileki], with a colonnade within a
colonnade. At times there were six hundred thousand men and another six hundred thousand
men in it, twice the number of those who left Egypt.

In it there were seventy-one golden chairs [katedraot], corresponding to the seventy-one

members of the Great Sanhedrin, each of which consisted of no less than twenty-one thousand
talents of gold. And there was a wooden platform at the center. The sexton of the synagogue
would stand on it, with the scarves in his hand.

And because the synagogue was so large and the people could not hear the communal prayer,
when the prayer leader reached the conclusion of a blessing requiring the people to answer amen,
the sexton waved the scarf and all the people would answer amen.

JASTROW

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Summary
Today we learn more about musical instruments/performance as part of the Temple service.1 The
rabbis want to know who performs this music. Musicians were thought to have high status; so
much so that their daughters could be married to Levites. Thus could the musicians be slaves,

1
https://dafyomibeginner.blogspot.com/2014/03/

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Israelites or Levites? Most rabbis agree that the essence of the song is found through the voice,
and instruments are accompaniment. They debate who might be elevated through this practice.

It is understood that offerings were accompanied by music. An interesting thought; libations

would be beautiful with music accompaniment. Animal sacrifices, however, might not be so
pleasant. The rabbis debate about whether rejoicing overrides Shabbat; whether the song of the
drawing of the water overrides the Festival of Sukkot. The Gemara concurs with Rav Yosef: this
'extra rejoicing' in song does not override the Festival nor does it override Shabbat.

The rabbis look at singing, playing flute, and playing trumpets. We learn in a note that the flute
was played during all Festival days - 12 days each year. Even if those days were to fall on Shabbat,
the flute would be played. Finally, the rabbis find a number of examples of using the instrument
of the voice together as one with other instruments.

A new Mishna walks us through the Drawing of the Water. We are given detailed descriptions of
that day, including a list of instruments played: the lyre, the harp, the cymbals, the trumpet, and
countless other instruments. A note teaches us that dancing lasts into the night. Sukkot is a time
for rejoicing beyond that of any other Festival - the rabbis seem to understand that at its height,
rejoicing involves music.

We learn about what was likely the Temple built by Herod, likely 60 years after the destruction of
the second Temple. It is this Temple that the rabbis describe as they walk us through the Drawing
of the Water. They describe the immense beauty and grandeur of this Temple. though it held
hundreds of thousands of people, the rabbis teach us that Jews would sit in groups based on
profession. A lone person would enter and find his friends, thus ensuring that he would be found
a job in that field. When people could not hear the prayer recited, an officer would wave a flag so
that the people would know to say 'amen'. A note reminds us that we do not say amen to a prayer
when we have not heard the prayer - they resolve this dispute, of course.

Finally, we learn more about separated seating for women and men. We learn that the women and
men would laugh and cavort and mingle from their places in this Temple. After attempting to
rectify this situation, the rabbis separated the sexes completely by putting them on completely
different floors. Until today, when men and women are seated on different floors, the women are
placed on the upper floors.

Today's daf is filled with interesting facts about music and about synagogue traditions.

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Daf Shevui writes:2

The first four mishnayot of the final chapter of Sukkah are about a Sukkot ritual called “Simchat
Bet Hashoevah”, which is usually translated as the “Celebration of the Water-Drawing.” The
water-drawing refers to the drawing of the water from the Shiloah in order to perform the water-
libation, described above in chapter four. At the end of the all-night Simchat Bet Hashoevah
ceremony, early in the morning, they would leave the Temple, go down to the Shiloah and draw
the water.

It seems that the function of the ceremony was twofold. First of all it highlighted the importance
of the water-libation, which as we saw before, was controversial. Secondly, it allowed non-priests
a chance to participate in the Sukkot ritual in the Temple. This seems to be one of the major
differences between the Pharisees and Sadducees—the former encouraged the participation of non-
priests in Temple ritual as much as was possible, whereas the Sadducees seemed to have abhorred
it.

Explanation
The Simchat Bet Hashoevah was supposed to have been the most joyous, celebratory occasion in
the Jewish calendar. Indeed, to this day in our tefillot we call Sukkot “the time of our rejoicing
(z’man simchatenu)”.

Section one: As we learned in yesterday’s mishnah, they did not celebrate the Simchat Bet
Hashoevah on either Shabbat or on the festival. They would not begin until after the first festival
day was completed. The celebration would start with the people going into the “Women’s Court.”
This was a section in the Temple into which both men and women could enter, but it was as far as
women could go in the Temple. Hence it was called the “Women’s Court.” The mishnah says that
they would make their a “great enactment” but does not explain what this was. The Talmud
explains that they separated the men and women, putting the men below and the women up into
the balcony so that they wouldn’t mix. The fear was that in the midst of such a raucous occasion
the mixture of men and women together could lead to transgression. Hence they separated between
the sexes. However, on normal occasions men and women seem to have been together in the
Women’s Court.

Section two: The first thing they would do was light an enormous menorah. On each candlestick
there were four golden bowls—according to tomorrow’s mishnah, there was enough light to light
up all of Jerusalem! Children would climb ladders to light the menorah and they would use 120
logs of oil, which is the equivalent of fifteen liters of oil. This works out to about half a liter of oil
for each bowl.

2
https://www.sefaria.org/Sukkah.51a.16?lang=bi&p2=Daf_Shevui_to_Sukkah.51a.16-51b.9&lang2=bi

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Section one: The wicks that they used to light the candles were not made from any old ordinary
material. They used the worn-out pants and belts the priests, which they wore in their Temple
service. This teaches us that once something has been used for one mitzvah it is fitting that it
should be used in another mitzvah as well.

Section two: The light from the menorah was so great that according to the mishnah it lit up all of
Jerusalem.

Section one: After having lit the menorah, the party kicks off with dancing, singing and the playing
of musical instruments. The first participants mentioned are the “Hasidim” or the men of piety and
men who are known for their good deeds. This group’s participation is unusual and noteworthy for
these were men chosen based on their deeds and not on their lineage. In my opinion this was indeed
one of the functions of the Simchat Bet Hashoevah, to give a greater role to those who are not of
the priestly or Levitical clans. It is these people whose dancing, songs and praise would probably
have stood out the most. This dancing and singing took place in the Court of the Women.
Section two: The second group is the Levites who would arrange themselves on the fifteen steps
leading up from the Court of the Women to the Court of the Israelites. The mishnah notes that
these fifteen steps correlate with the fifteen Psalms which begin “A Song of Ascents (Shir
Hamaalot)” (Psalms 120-134). One can only imagine how beautiful, indeed sublime, their music
must have been.

Section three: The third group involved is the priests. The priests begin the ceremony standing
above everyone else, up in the Court of the Israelites. When the cock crows at the crack of dawn
they begin a process of descending and blowing shofar blasts at set stages. Eventually this leads
them down through the women’s court and out to the eastern gate.
Section four: When they get to the eastern gate they are facing the sun. They turn around so that
their backs are to the sun and use this opportunity to profess their faith in God and their denial of
the worship of the sun. They quote from Ezekiel 8:16 in order to highlight that the sin of sun-
worship is not just something that “others” or Greeks were engaged in, but something that Israelites
themselves were accused of by Ezekiel. It seems to me likely that there is also a polemic here
against other contemporary Jewish groups who had a solar calendar. A calendar based on the sun
and actual worship of the sun could probably have been associated. Certainly it would make sense
that the Pharisees/rabbis would claim that their rivals, the Essenes and perhaps the Sadducees,
were not just basing their calendar on the sun but were worshipping the sun as well. We have
already seen on a number of occasions that Sukkot was a holiday full of strife between the various
sects of ancient Judaism.

The mishnah ends its procession at this point, but it is quite clear that it was not actually over at
this moment but that from the eastern gate they would make their way down to the Shiloah spring
in order to draw water for the water-libation.

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This section notes the beauty and splendor of Jerusalem and the Temple as well.

This section contains a brief description of Herod’s Temple, which according to traditional rabbis
and academic scholars alike, was the most beautiful of all of the various versions of the Temple
that stood in Jerusalem. Herod built the Temple of marble, with stones layered so that the plaster
could be laid down layer by layer. While he wanted to cover it with gold (at least according to this
legend), the blue, yellow and white marble gave it the look of the sea, which was even more
beautiful. It must have truly been quite a sight, especially on a hot day in Jerusalem.

Alexandria served as a major settlement of Jews during the Second Temple period. In this section
we learn of the beauty and glory of a double colonnade where the leaders of the Jewish people
would sit and which also served, as we shall see, as a synagogue. While it seems quite obvious
that some of these numbers are exaggerations, clearly the Talmud describes a large number of
people.

What is most interesting about this section is the description of separate seating in the synagogue.
This was a way of separating people by class as seating was in European synagogues and still is
in some places today. It was a way for people looking for jobs to meet people of their own
profession. In other words, there was a strong socio-economic component to it as well.

In this section, Abaye claims that all of these myriads of people in Alexandria were slain by
Alexander of Macedonia. I wouldn’t grant a significant amount of historical accuracy to this
statement, but it does seem that Abaye senses that Alexandria’s Jewish community was destroyed
at some point. However, there is some interesting theology in this section. As is typical, the rabbis
portray the non-Jewish political leader as if he subjects himself to the Jewish God, reads verses
and makes decisions based upon them.

Second, the people are punished for their sins. In this case, the very decision to return to Egypt
was against the Torah. This is actually quite a complex subject, for despite the prohibition of living
in Egypt, Jews have lived there periodically over the past 2000 years and for a time it was an
important Diaspora community. There also seems to have been some antagonism between the Jews
of Babylonia and those of Egypt. This may be partially the background to these statements of
Abaye, a prominent Babylonian sage.

Rav Avrohom Adler writes:3

The Mishna states one who did not see the joy of the Simchas Bais Hashoeva was never witness
to true joy in his life. On the second night of Sukkos they would enter the courtyard of the Bais
HaMikdash and light candelabra that were very high and the light from the candelabra would
illuminate the entire Jerusalem. They would use the worn out trousers and belts of the Kohanim
for the wicks. The pious and saintly people would dance and juggle torches in the center and sing
songs of praise to HaShem. The Leviim would play with various musical instruments and the

3
http://dafnotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Sukkah_51.pdf

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Kohanim would sound trumpets in various locations throughout the courtyard. The Mishnah states
that the Kohanim would declare that they are not sun worshippers. Rather, they worshipped Kah,
i.e. HaShem.

The Gemara states that one who did not witness the glory of Jerusalem never saw a beautiful city
in his lifetime. If one did not see the Bais HaMikdash when it stood, he never saw a glorious edifice
in his life. This refers to the Bais HaMikdash that was built by King Herod. It was fashioned with
stones of green, blue and white marble and it gave the appearance of the ocean waves. This edifice
was so beautiful that had Herod plated it with gold it would have detracted from its beauty.

The Gemara states that the synagogue in Alexandria was a sight to behold and there was once a
time when the synagogue accommodated one million and two hundred thousand people. The
Gemara relates that ultimately the entire Jewish community was killed by Alexander of Macedon,
and the reason they were punished so harshly is because they violated the biblical prohibition not
to return to Egypt.

The Gemara states that in the magnificent synagogue of Alexandria, a bimah, a wooden platform,
was located in the center of the synagogue and the sexton would stand there and wave a flag to
notify the congregation that they should answer amen.

The Mishnah stated that at the end of the first day of Sukkos they went down to the Women’s
Courtyard and they made a great adjustment. The Gemara explains that originally the Women’s
Courtyard was smooth and at a later date they surrounded it with a balcony. They decreed that the
women should sit above in the balcony and the men below so they should not mingle with each
other. A Baraisa states that originally the women watching the Simchas Bais Hashoeva would be
inside the Women’s Courtyard ant the men observing would be on the outside but this led to
frivolity. They then instituted that the women should be on the outside and the men should be on
the inside but there was still frivolity, so they decreed that the women should be above and the
men below. Although the dimensions of the Bais HaMikdash could not be altered, they found a
verse that was said regarding the future when there will be eulogies delivered for the death of
Moshiach ben Yosef. It is said that even at a time of sorrow the men and women will be separated.
If this could be said regarding the future when it will be a time of sorrow and the evil inclination
no longer wields control over man, then certainly at the Simchas Bais Hashoeva, when they are
engaged in rejoicing and they could become frivolous and the evil inclination still wields power,
certainly men and women should be in separate areas.

Worn out Trousers

Tosfos wonders why they used the worn out trousers and belts of the Kohanim for the wicks. Why
did they not use the worn out Kesones, the shirt worn by the Kohen? Perhaps one could answer
based upon the Gemara in Zevachim which states that the pants worn by the Kohen atoned for the
sin of arayos, immorality, and the belt atoned for improper thoughts of the heart.

When they performed the nissuch hamayim, the drawing of the water, there was a large gathering
of men and women who would mingle together and the Chachamim were concerned about the men
having improper thoughts and there was a general concern about the mingling. It was precisely for

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this reason that they erected a balcony to keep the men and women separate. The Kesones,
however, atoned for the sin of murder which was not relevant at the performance of the nissuch
hamayim.

Lights of Love and Fear

The Mishnah states that pious men and men of good deeds would dance before them with flaming
torches in their hands. The Meor Vashemesh on Sukkos writes that the hands symbolize the love
and fear that one has for HaShem, so the Mishnah alludes to the idea that the pious people had a
tremendous fire burning within them that reflected their love and fear for HaShem, and it was this
fire that they danced with before HaShem.

MAY A JEW LIVE IN EGYPT?

Rav Mordechai Kornfeld writes:4

The Beraisa quotes Rebbi Yehudah who states that one who did not see the Great Synagogue in
Alexandria never saw the glory of the Jewish people. The Beraisa describes the magnificence of the
structure and the vast number of Jews who worshipped there.

Abaye concludes the Beraisa's description with an account of the tragic end of the Jewish community
of Alexandria: every member of the community was killed by a Roman monarch.
(According to the Vilna Ga'on and the Yerushalmi, the monarch was the emperor Trajan. According
to Rav Yakov Emden and the Abarbanel in his introduction to Melachim, it was the Roman monarch
Alexander Latirus (this may also be the view of Rashi here (DH Stav) who refers to "Alexandrus").
According to the Gemara in Gitin (57b), it was the emperor Hadrian. The text of our Gemara, which
says that it was Alexander the Macedon who killed them, does not seem plausible, since he lived much
earlier. See ARUCH LA'NER.)

The Gemara explains that the Jews of Alexandria were punished because they transgressed the
prohibition, "You shall not return on this path [to Egypt] anymore" (Devarim 17:16).

The Mechilta (Shemos 14:13) expounds on this prohibition. The Mechilta points out that in three
different places the Torah warns us not to return to Egypt. The first verse is the one quoted by the
Gemara here, "You shall not return..." (Devarim 17:16). The second verse is, "... for as you have seen
Egypt today, you shall never see them again" (Shemos 14:13). The third verse is written in the
admonition in Parshas Ki Savo, "Hash-m will return you to Egypt in boats, on the path of which I said
to you, 'Never again shall you see it'" (Devarim 28:68).

4
https://www.dafyomi.co.il/sukah/insites/su-dt-051.htm

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The RAMBAM (Hilchos Melachim 5:7, and Sefer ha'Mitzvos, Lo Ta'aseh 46) quotes the Mechilta and
adds that the prohibition to live in Egypt applies to the entire area of 400 by 400 Parsa'os in the north-
eastern corner of the African continent, which includes Sudan, Ethiopia, and part of the Sahara Desert.

The Gemara here, the Mechilta, and the ruling of the Rambam clearly indicate that a Jew is forbidden
to return to Egypt. However, it is known that a prominent Jewish community thrived in Egypt until
recent times (see the book, "Tuv Mitzrayim," by Rabbi Yosef Nafussi). Many of the greatest Jewish
leaders, such as Rav Sa'adyah Ga'on (who was born in Egypt), the Rambam himself, and the Radvaz
(one of the foremost commentators on Mishneh Torah) lived in Egypt. The KAFTOR
VA'FERACH (ch. 5) writes that he met one of the Rambam's grandsons in Egypt who told him that
his grandfather would sign his letters, "Moshe ben Maimon, who transgresses three prohibitions each
day."

Why did Jews, among them great sages, live in Egypt if the Torah prohibits it? Why were they not
concerned with the Gemara's account of the tragic fate of the Jews of Alexandria?

(a) The SEMAG (Lo Ta'aseh 227) writes that the prohibition against living in Egypt applies only to
living among native Egyptians, descended directly from those who lived in Egypt at the time that the
Torah was given. The Torah did not want the Jews to learn from that nation's evil ways, as the Rambam
(ibid.) and Sefer ha'Chinuch (#500) write. From the time that Sancheriv dispersed the nations of the
world, the Torah's prohibition no longer applies, because the people there are not the original Egyptians
of yore. This also seems to be the view of RABEINU BACHYE (Devarim 17:16).

However, the Semag himself rejects this explanation because of the Gemara here, which refers to the
Jews of Alexandria who lived in Egypt after Sancheriv dispersed the nations, and yet it still says that
they were punished for living in Egypt.

The RITVA in Yoma (38a) revises the Semag's explanation in order to answer this question. He writes
that the prohibition applies only to living in the cities that were founded by the original Egyptians. (The
Ritva may have understood that Alexandria was originally an ancient Egyptian city that was developed
and renamed by Alexander. Historical records, however, show that Alexander founded and built the
city.) The prohibition applies to such cities presumably because the customs of cities are based on the
customs of their original settlers. The Torah's prohibition against living in Egypt does not apply to the
new cities that were established and settled after the original cities were abandoned.

(b) The SEFER YERE'IM (#309) writes that the Torah forbids only going from Eretz Yisrael to
Egypt, as implied by the verse that the Gemara here quotes. The logic behind this limitation may be
that one who returns to Egypt specifically from Eretz Yisrael shows a lack of gratitude to Hash-m. He
shows that he does not appreciate the great miracle that Hash-m did for him when He redeemed the
Jewish people from Egypt and brought them to Eretz Yisrael.

The RITVA and the KAFTOR VA'FERACH add that one is forbidden to go to Egypt from Eretz
Yisrael only through the desert, along the path that the Jews traveled when they left Egypt. However,
the BRIS MOSHE (on the Semag) points out that the verse in Devarim (28:68) seems to contradict
this when it says that "Hash-m will return you to Egypt in boats, on the path of which I said to you,
'Never again shall you see it'." The verse implies that one is forbidden to go from Eretz Yisrael to Egypt
even by boat.

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The RADVAZ asks that although the verse quoted by the Gemara here might support the Yere'im's
assertion, the other two verses cited by the Mechilta mention only that one may not go to Egypt; they
make no mention of how, or from where, one may not go there.

(c) The RITVA (ibid.) concludes that the prohibition applies only when the Jewish people are an
independent nation, settled in their homeland. When the Jews are in a state of Galus, all areas of the
world are considered the same, and one may live in Egypt as in any other country. The only restriction
on where a Jew may live is the prohibition which prohibits one who lives in Eretz Yisrael from leaving
Eretz Yisrael to live somewhere else.

This might be Rashi's intention here when he writes (DH Stav) that the Jews of Alexandria settled there
at the time of the Churban of the first Beis ha'Mikdash. Rashi means that the Jews of Alexandria
transgressed the prohibition when they went directly from the Jewish kingdom in Eretz Yisrael to
Egypt. Had they not traveled directly to Alexandria from Eretz Yisrael, they would have been allowed
to settle in Egypt.

The logic behind this approach seems to be that going to Egypt when Eretz Yisrael is settled by Jews
shows a lack of trust in Hash-m. The Jews should live in Eretz Yisrael and trust in Hash-m to protect
them, rather than go to neighboring Egypt for protection. In times of Galus, however, when the Jews
need to find a suitable place to live, they may live wherever they want.

(d) The RADVAZ (Hilchos Melachim 5:7) writes that the prohibition is to go to Egypt, not
to live there. A person who is already in Egypt, who arrived there in a permitted way (such as for
business, which the Yerushalmi (Sanhedrin 10:9) permits), does not transgress the Isur d'Oraisa (but
only an Isur d'Rabanan) if he chooses to stay there. The Rabanan were lenient and did not apply their
prohibition once a person is already settled in the place, because it is difficult to travel and find a
livelihood elsewhere once a person is settled (although he should leave when the opportunity arises).

(e) None of these explanations are consistent with the words of the RAMBAM and SEFER
HA'CHINUCH, who rule that the prohibition applies today unconditionally, regardless of where a
person comes from or what path he takes to get to Egypt. They write that living there is forbidden, and
not merely the act of going there.

Why, then, did the Rambam live in Egypt? The RADVAZ and the KAFTOR VA'FERACH write
that perhaps he had no choice, since he was the physician of the Sultan and it was not possible for him
to leave.

Perhaps the Radvaz means that one is permitted to travel to Egypt for business or for any other
temporary purpose, as long as he intends to leave when he can. One is permitted even to settle there
for an extended period if he plans to leave. The Rambam always intended to leave, and to remind
himself of his intentions he adopted the practice of signing his letters as "[he] who transgresses three
prohibitions each day."

This understanding is consistent with the words of the Radvaz (in Hilchos Melachim 5:7, and in
Teshuvos 4:1145) when he relates that for many years he lived in Egypt, where he founded a Yeshiva
and taught Torah until he eventually left and came to Eretz Yisrael. He writes that he certainly acted
in a permitted manner, because he did not settle there for the sake of living in Egypt, but in order to
teach Torah to those who were already there, and he planned to leave when the opportunity arose.

15
Steinzaltz (OBM) writes:5

The Mishnah on our daf states: Anyone who has not seen the simhat bet ha-sho’evah – the
joyousness of the water libation ceremony – has not seen true joy in their lifetime. The Mishnah
describes how the Sages would sing songs and juggle torches, accompanied by an orchestra
of levi’im, all to the light of large candelabra, which were large bowls of oil lit by the
young kohanim who climbed ladders to do so.

Another impressive sight described by the baraita was the great synagogue in Alexandria, Egypt,
which held double 600,000 people (the number 600,000 is significant because it was the number
of people who left Egypt to come to Israel). The synagogue was so large that someone was
appointed by the congregants to stand on a wooden platform in the middle and wave a flag so that
everyone would know when it was time to respond “Amen” to the chazzan. Furthermore, every
guild had its own section in the synagogue so that when a stranger would come, he could find his
fellow tradesmen who would help support him and his family.

With this grand introduction, the Gemara concludes by quoting Abayye, who says that this entire
community was destroyed by Alexander Mokdon because of their disregard for the passage
forbidding Jews to return to Egypt (see Devarim 17:16).

In the Jerusalem Talmud, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is quoted as saying that the prohibition against
returning to Egypt appears three times in the Torah, and when Jews returned for the third time,
their fate was sealed. The Maharsha connects this with the story at the end of Sefer Yirmiyahu,
where the prophet not only forbids the people from leaving Israel and going to Egypt, but also tells
them that if they choose to return they will be killed by sword, starvation and
disease (Yirmiyahu 42:17).

It should be noted that Alexander Mokdon cannot possibly be the general who wiped out the Jewish
community in Alexandria, something already pointed out by the rishonim. The story apparently
refers to the Roman Caesar Turranius, who put down a Jewish rebellion against Rome about 60
years after the destruction of the second Temple.

5
https://www.ou.org/life/torah/masechet_sukkah4854/

16
The description the magnificent edifice of the Beis Kenesses at Alexandria in Egypt includes a
mention of the ‫ בימה‬at the center.6

Chasam Sofer (‫) ח”כ’ סי ח”או‬cites several proofs to his ruling that a ‫ בימה‬should always be placed
in the middle of a shul, and that its location should not be moved to near the front or the back of
the shul. Among the sources he quotes in supporting his view is that of Rambam (Hilchos Tefillah
11:3) who writes that the ‫ בימה‬should be in the center of the shul in order to ensure that everyone
will be able to hear the reading of the Torah which takes place there. Also among the sources
which Chasam Sofer brings is our Gemara, where the attendant in the shul in Alexandria used flags
to signal when the congregants should answer to the chazzan. Apparently the chazzan could have
moved closer to the back of the room, where the crowd of those assembled was concentrated, and
he would have been heard more easily. Nevertheless, we see that no changes are allowed to the
layout of how a shul is designed, and the ‫ בימה‬had to remain in the middle of the building. In
addition, Chasam Sofer adds that the ‫ בימה‬is compared to the ‫ הפנימי מזבח‬in the Sanctuary in the
Mikdash, which was situated in the center of the ‫ היכל‬chamber (from north to south).

Shimon Sholom Kalish

6
https://www.dafdigest.org/masechtos/Sukkah%20051.pdf

17
Rav Shimon Shalom, the Rebbe of Amshinov, zt”l, found refuge in Shanghai together with a large
group of talmidei chachomim and yeshiva students during World War II. During the Simchas Beis
HaSho’eiva they conducted in this remote corner of the world, he explained a statement from
today’s daf. “The Mishnah states that the pious and worthy people would dance with torches of
light in their hands. This means that these virtuous people wanted the light, the spiritual
illumination, to come through their own efforts— their hands—and not as a gift from above. As
we see from the Yerushalmi, the festivities were called the Simchas Beis HaSho’eiva because the
deserving would attain Ruach HaKodesh through the joy in the mitzvah. The praiseworthy people
mentioned in the Mishnah wanted to earn their portion of Ruach HaKodesh through their own
efforts.”

We find that this was true of many great tzaddikim who didn’t want gifts from heaven. They chose
instead to toil for those distinctions, since this is what gives the Creator the most pleasure. The
Vilna Gaon, zt”l, once explained to Rav Chaim of Volozhin, zt”l, that he had refused to receive
the angelic guidance of maggidim (as experienced by the Beis Yosef, zt”l) since they were only
reward for the good one has done in this world and cannot actually spur one to rise to a higher
level in Torah or avodah.

During the last year of his life, the Ksav Sofer, zt”l, was granted a remarkable clarity of insight
which allowed him to grasp any Torah concept deeply with hardly any effort at all, yet the K’sav
Sofer did not enjoy this gift. He would say instead, “It is not good that Hashem has removed all
the toil from my learning. Everything is so easy. This is not a good sign.” The Chazon Ish, zt”l,
once said: “If an angel would reveal the entire Torah to a person in his sleep, he would wake up
unchanged. We only grow through effort!”

Heather Miller writes:7

The mishnah on today’s page states:

One who did not see the celebration of the place of the drawing water never saw celebration in
his days.

That’s right, you haven’t partied until you’ve partied in the Temple on Sukkot. The mishnah then
describes the bash in lengthy detail:

At the conclusion of the first festival day the priests and the Levites descended to the women’s
courtyard (a lower courtyard open to the Israelite public) … There were golden candelabras

7
Myjewishlearning.com

18
atop poles there in the courtyard. And there were four basins made of gold at the top of each
candelabrum. And there were four ladders for each and every pole and there were four children
from the priesthood trainees, and in their hands were pitchers with a capacity of 120 log (about
15 gallons) of oil that they would pour into each and every basin ... And the light from the
candelabras was so bright that there was not a courtyard in Jerusalem that was not illuminated.

The pious and the men of action would dance with flaming torches that they would juggle in
their hands, and they would recite passages of song and praise to God. And the Levites would
play on lyres, harps, cymbals, and trumpets, and countless other musical instruments. The
musicians would stand on the fifteen stairs that descend from the Israelites’ courtyard to the
women’s courtyard, corresponding to the fifteen Songs of the Ascents (Psalms 120–134) and
upon which the Levites stand with musical instruments and recite their song.

Candelabras (the Gemara says they were 50 cubits — about 75 feet high) on poles to illuminate
not just the courtyard but the whole city! Pyrotechnics! Dancing! Juggling! Instruments! Chanting!
Can you even imagine?

The mishnah’s claim that one who never saw this Sukkot blowout at the Temple had never really
experienced a celebration at all turns into a game of “you’ve never lived until…” in the Gemara.
Here are a few other superlatives to be found on today’s page:

One who did not see Jerusalem in its glory, never saw a beautiful city. One who did not see the
Temple in its constructed state, never saw a magnificent structure.

The Gemara specifically describes the Second Temple which, we are told, Herod built out of
differently colored marble intentionally offset to resemble the appearance of waves of the sea.
Stunning!

Jerusalem doesn't get all of the praise here. Listen to Rabbi Yehuda’s thoughts about the great
synagogue in Alexandria, Egypt:

Rabbi Yehuda says: One who did not see the great synagogue of Alexandria in Egypt never saw
the glory of Israel. They said that its structure was like a large basilica with a colonnade within
a colonnade. At times there were six hundred thousand men and another six hundred thousand
men in it, twice the number of those who left Egypt. In it there were 71 golden chairs,
corresponding to the 71 members of the Great Sanhedrin, each of which consisted of no less
than twenty-one thousand talents of gold. And there was a wooden platform at the center. The
sexton of the synagogue would stand on it, with the scarves in his hand. And (because the
synagogue was so large and the people could not hear the communal prayer) when the prayer
leader reached the conclusion of a blessing requiring the people to answer amen, the sexton
waved the scarf and all the people would answer amen.

Can you even imagine such beauty and extravagance? A synagogue so large and crowded one
cannot hear the service and must rely on signals from colored scarves to know when to say amen?
It seems that the synagogue was so large and bustling it was not just a place to praise God, but also
a good place to network:

19
And the members of the various crafts would not sit mingled. Rather, the goldsmiths would sit
among themselves, and the silversmiths among themselves, and the blacksmiths among
themselves, and the coppersmiths among themselves, and the weavers among themselves. And
when a poor stranger entered there, he would recognize people who plied his craft, and he would
turn to join them there. And from there he would secure his livelihood as well as the livelihood
of the members of his household.

The ancient world held many marvels, but so does our own. What would you say is on your
contemporary list of “you haven’t lived until you’ve…”?

Rabbi Johnny Solomon writes:8

On first glance, much of our daf (Sukkah 51b) focusses on the external beauty and splendour of
the most exquisite sacred spaces that have been built in Jewish history – beginning, of course, with
the Beit HaMikdash. In fact, we are told ‘whoever did not see the Beit HaMikdash when it stood
never saw a magnificent structure in their life’, and ‘whoever did not see the great synagogue
of Alexandria of Egypt never saw the glory of Israel’.

Clearly the stunning structural features of these two great buildings were world class. It is here
where we are told of the marble used in the Beit HaMikdash that appeared like waves of the sea,
and it is here where we are informed of the vast size of the great synagogue of Alexandria which
included a feature of seventy-one gold chairs - corresponding to the seventy-one members of the
great Sanhedrin.

Yet while the Gemara begins its description with a focus on external beauty and splendour, this is
not how it concludes. Instead, we are told that the great synagogue of Alexandria was so large that
each type of craftsman – goldsmith, coppersmith, weaver - sat separately, such that ‘when a poor
man came in there, he would recognize the section of his fellow craftsman and would go there,
and from [the conversations he would have with those in that section] that he would obtain a
livelihood for himself and his family.’

Similarly, Rabbi Avrohom Chaim Feuer explains (‘Shemoneh Esrei’9), that while ‘Jerusalem in
her glory was a model of architectural brilliance and aesthetic perfection…the real beauty of
Jerusalem.. was that she beautified her inhabitants and visitors and afforded [physical and]
spiritual revitalization.’

Of course, there are certainly those who find themselves uplifted by the beauty and splendour of
particular buildings and structures. Yet what I believe we learn from our daf is that while sacred
spaces should be pleasant and dignified, true beauty is found in the physical and spiritual
revitalization that we experience from the opportunity to worship God, and in the physical and
spiritual chizuk that we are able to give to those in their hour of need.

8
www.rabbijohnnysolomon.com
9
Mesorah Publication 1995 p 202-203

20
 The Greatest Joy
Rabbi Jay Kelman writes:10

“Whoever did not see the celebration of the drawing of the water (simchat beit
hashoeva) has never witnessed joy in their life” (Sukkah 51a). The Mishnah goes on
to describe the dancing, the juggling, the music, and more of these most festive days.
In an astonishing display of dexterity, the Gemara records how Rabban Shimon ben
Gamliel would juggle eight torches of fire, “and they did not touch one another, and
there was no living being who could do this” (ibid 53a). The “parties” went on through
the night, so “that we did not see sleep on our eyes” (ibid).
Times of joy are wonderful—yet potentially dangerous. With the mood relaxed, the
atmosphere festive, it is an easy step to letting our guard down. It should be no surprise
that, in the midst of the description of the simchat beit hashoeva, the Gemara has a
discussion relating to the power of the yetzer hara, the evil inclination.
In a most insightful comment, Rav Yehuda teaches that, “In the future, G-d will bring
the yetzer hara and slaughter it before the righteous and before the wicked. To the
righteous, it will have the appearance of a towering hill; and to the wicked, it will
have the appearance of a strand of hair. Both the former and the latter will weep; the
righteous will weep, saying, ‘How were we able to overcome such a towering hill?’
The wicked also will weep, saying, ‘How is it that we were unable to conquer this strand
of hair?’ And the Holy One, blessed be He, will also marvel together with them” (ibid
52a).
We are faced with challenges to our moral fibre every day—“Rav Yitzchak said: every
day, the [evil] inclination of a person grows stronger and stronger”. Some manage to
overcome the evil inclination. There may be struggle and uncertainty as one battles to
overcome the desires of the heart. Sinning really can be fun and offer much benefit in
the short term (which can last a long time). Yet the righteous manage to overcome
the yetzer hara, focusing on what is right, not what is convenient. Years later, they look
back and realize that one slip here or there and they may have fallen off the cliff—and
they cry, trembling, about what may have been, and cry with joy for what was.
Tragically, the reverse process happens with the wicked. They are unable to overcome
their desires, succumbing to the temptations surrounding them. And the more
accustomed to sin they become, the more their values invert. “Rav Huna said: When a
person sins and repeats, it becomes to him as if it is allowed” (Sotah 22a). It is much

10
https://torahinmotion.org/discussions-and-blogs/sukkah-52-the-greatest-joy

21
easier to remake the sin than to remake the sinner. If they are “lucky” then at some
point, long after the temporal pleasures of sin have passed, when they come face to face
with the moral impact of their choices, they, too, will cry; a cry of sadness for what
could have been—yet wasn’t.
Ironically, the Gemara’s next teaching is how difficult it is to escape the yetzer
hara, which “at first appears like the thread of a spider, but ultimately becomes like cart
ropes”. The yetzer hara is easy to defeat—initially. But we are, for better or worse,
creatures of habit, and once accustomed to act in a certain way, it can take heroic efforts
to change; in the words of our sages, aveira gorreret aveira, one sin begets
another (Avot 4:2). But it can be done—good can defeat evil. And it can start with one
mitzvah, as mitzvah gorerret mitzvah, one mitzvah begets another (ibid).
“The school of Rabbi Yishmael taught, if this revolting one [evil inclination] comes
upon you, drag him to the Beit Hamidrash, the house of study. If he is of stone, he will
dissolve; if of iron, he will shiver into fragments” (ibid 52b). The yetzer hara uses
varying—and at times, opposing—approaches to entice man to sin. At times, it argues
that Torah like a stone is cold and dry, inflexible and unyielding. Torah, the yetzer
hara argues, is boring. Other times, it acts like metal, easily manipulated into various
shapes and sizes. The fire of Torah burns within, but the excitement to embrace Torah
may, like as it did with Nadav and Avihu, lead to foreign fires.
We must drag the yetzer hara to the Beit Midrash. Let it see the excitement that comes
with proper study of Torah, and let it learn how Torah is applied to the “real “ world.
While study is the first step, it is not enough—“study leads to action” (Kiddushin 40b).
It is the observance of mitzvoth and the embracing of the values that underlie the
mitzvoth that are the strongest weapon against the yetzer hara. And, if we can
neutralize the yetzer hara, we can truly rejoice on Sukkot and throughout the year.

Rav Yoel Bin Nun writes:11

11
https://etzion.org.il/en/holidays/pesach/meaning-prohibition-against-returning-egypt

22
 "It happened that when Pharaoh sent the nation forth, God (E-lokim) did not guide

them along the way of the land of the Philistines, which is close; because God said, 'Lest

the nation have a change of heart when they see war and return to Egypt.' So God led

the nation roundabout, along the way of the desert by the Red Sea; and the Israelites

left Egypt armed." (Shemot 13:17-18)

Despite the many interpretations that have been offered, the meaning of these verses is very

problematic and they seem as baffling as ever. There are three basic questions:

1) What is the meaning of "which is close" (Ki karov hu)?

2) Which war is being referred to in the phrase "if they see war"?

3) Why is the phrase, "the Israelites left Egypt armed," included in this context?

There are three further difficulties we must raise:

1) Why do these verses refer to God as E-LOKIM, the only such instance in the exodus

narrative, rather than God's "personal" or "historical" name Y-K-V-K, the only Name which

appears from the burning bush story onward?

2) The goal of the exodus has been repeatedly defined in relation to Sinai, which lies on the

"way of the desert" and not the "way of the Philistines." For example:

"When you bring the nation out of Egypt, you will worship the Lord on this

mountain." (Shemot 3:18)

23
 Indeed, Pharaoh's permission to worship at Sinai is the expressed goal of all Moshe's

negotiations, threats, and wonders, and it is with this understanding that Pharaoh finally gives

his permission:

"Get up and leave my nation - you and the Israelites; go and worship the Lord as you

say." (Shemot 12:31)

But this directive of Pharaoh is diametrically opposed to our verses, which imply that the

Revelation at Sinai was virtually accidental, merely an outcome of God's concern that "the

nation would have a change of heart" if they encountered war on the shorter, more direct coastal

road.

3) The basic assumption in all the traditional interpretations is that God wanted at all costs to

avoid confronting Israel with war, at least at the outset, since He was concerned that this would

inspire them to abandon their cause and physically turn around and return to Egypt.

The difficulty in this assumption is that, in actuality, the alternate route through the desert led

them INTO war with Egypt almost immediately, causing an instant public outcry to return

to Egypt. God's action seems to have achieved the opposite of its intention. Furthermore, why

could God not have saved them from disaster on the desert route in exactly the same miraculous

manner that He saved them at the Sea? After all, the reaction of the Jews when the Egyptian

army caught up with them - "for it is better for us to serve Egypt than to die in the desert" -

was exactly the reaction that God feared "should they see war," and God nevertheless dealt

with it - "God will fight for you and you shall be still." This repeated itself several times during

the journey to the land of Israel, so that it is clear that changing the route did not solve the

problem. The longer route did not, in fact, lead them away from war.

24
 The classical commentators, noting the third difficulty, proposed solutions which seem

somewhat contrived. For example:

"If the circuitous route resulted in their saying: 'Let us ... return to Egypt,' how much

worse would the direct route have been!" (Rashi, based on the Mekhilta)

According to Rashi, the phrase "which was close" means "close to Egypt," making it easier

to return there. Taking the nation to Canaan along the more distant desert road would deter the

people from returning.

The Rashbam reads "close" - to Eretz Yisrael; the shorter route would have brought the

war for the Land of Israel earlier. By delaying the Canaanite wars, the people were less

psychologically connected to Egypt when the crisis struck.

The Rambam is of a similar opinion:

"It is contrary to human nature that a person be raised in slavery, doing the most menial

of tasks, and promptly wash the filth off his hands and go wage war with the gigantic Sons

of Anak ... God's wisdom led them roundabout, through the desert, until they learnt to be

brave. It is well-known that traveling in the desert without luxuries such as washing and

the like gives rise to bravery, while the opposite gives rise to cowardice. Furthermore, men

not habituated to subservience and slavery were born in the desert."

(Guide 3:32; see also chap. 24)

The Ramban, on the other hand, interprets "which was close" as referring to the path

traversing the land of the Philistines. Even though this route was shorter, God wished to avoid

war with the Philistines. However, the Ramban is confronted with the difficulty that on the longer

route they met Amalek instead of the Philistines.

25
 All of these interpretations contain important points but do not address the cardinal

problem: the war at the Red Sea with Egypt, the superpower to whom they had been enslaved for

centuries and with whom they had struggled for independence. This war was potentially far more

deadly than any war with the Amalekites, Canaanites or Philistines could have been. This war

came immediately, and at a time when Israel was weak and confused.

Modern scholars offer a different solution to our problem, which resembles the Ramban's

interpretation. Bas reliefs on the walls of the temple at Karnak, dating to the rule of Pharaoh Seti

I (toward the end of the thirteenth century BCE), show that the entire northern Sinai coastal region

was under direct Egyptian sovereignty, with Egyptian military outposts all along the way. Israel,

fearing a trap, avoided the coastal road from the outset. Plausible though this theory may sound,

the reason it proposes for the change of route is not that mentioned in the Torah. God did not fear

an Egyptian trap but rather the desire of the Jews to return to Egypt.

Various early commentators hinted that there is a hidden reason for the change of routes -

God's plan to drown the Egyptians. For Abarbanel, God's motive was not concern for Israel's fear,

but rather His will to give the Torah at Sinai (see Abarbanel, the second question; Mekhilta, ad

loc.).

I would like to propose a different interpretation for these verses:

"which is close" - and therefore should have been the route of travel (following the

Ramban),

"God said, 'Lest the nation have a change of heart if they see war'" - any war, whether

for the Land or at any point in history,

"and return to Egypt" - to request aid and patronage from Pharaoh;

26
"so God led the nation roundabout, along the Way of the desert by the Red Sea" - SO

THAT Pharaoh would pursue them, guaranteeing that war would take place,

"and the Israelites left Egypt armed."

Contrary to the accepted opinion, God's intention was not to avoid war and

save Israel undue fear, but precisely the opposite - to drag them straight into a confrontation, and

achieve final, total independence at the Red Sea. The Jews needed to be liberated not only

politically and economically, but also mentally, as is evident from their demand:

"Leave us be and we will serve Egypt, because we prefer serving Egypt to dying in the

wilderness." (Shemot 14:12)

Their complete liberation would result from the experience of war ("the Lord will fight for you")

and the rejoicing and singing of victory.

The expression "to return to Egypt" refers to seeking support from Egypt, as is clear from

the repeated words of the prophet Yeshayahu:

"Woe to those who descend to Egypt for aid, who rely on their multitude of chariots, and

on the immense power of their horsemen, but did not desire Israel's Holy (God) and did

not consult the Lord." (31:1)

"They who go and descend to Egypt and did not consult Me, to be powerful in Pharaoh's

power, and be safe in Egypt's shadow." (30:2)

"Egypt is human, not divine; her horses are flesh, not spirit; God will spread out His arm;

helper will fail, and helped will fall - all will be destroyed together." (31:3)

This last quotation contains more than one allusion to the Parting of the Sea.

27
 The prophet Hoshea also condemned reliance on Egypt, probably referring to King

Hoshea's request for the protection of So, king of Egypt (II Melakhim 17:3):

"Ephraim is like a silly dove without a heart; they call to Egypt; they go

to Assyria." (Hoshea 7:11)

"Now their sin will be remembered and their error recalled; they will return to Egypt.

(8:13)

Yirmiyahu offers a similar condemnation:

"You will be shamed by Egypt as you were shamed by Assyria. From this one too you will

depart with your hands on your head, for the Lord has rejected those you trust; you will

not prosper with them." (2:36-37)

These prophecies do not see returning, or "going down," to Egypt as the physical

emigration of all or part of the nation to Egypt. Suffice it that an Israelite king send messengers

to Pharaoh saying, "I am your servant and son" (I Melakhim 16:7), and the prohibition against

"returning" has been violated.

The Torah itself, in describing the duties of the king, commands that he "not return the

nation to Egypt in order to acquire many horses" (Devarim 7:16). It is clear that this refers to

seeking military support from Egypt. King Shlomo, for example, disobeyed the commandment

not by sending his entire royal house to Pharaoh, but rather by dispatching to him a handful of

merchants (I Melakhim 10:28,29).

"Returning to Egypt" not to dwell there but rather to gain support and patronage is the

spiritual opposite of the independence gained via the exodus.

The tokhecha (rebuke) of Sefer Devarim ends with the same theme:

28
 "The Lord will return you to Egypt in ships, on a route I told you that you would never

see again; there you will be offered to your enemies for sale as slaves, but no one will buy

you." (26:68)

But did Israel leave Egypt in ships, that God is threatening them with return along the same

route? The Torah is not describing the route of return to Egypt, but rather the implication of return

to Egypt - renewed bondage. The common denominator of a request for Egyptian protection,

physical return to Egypt of one's own free will, and sale into Egyptian captivity, is forfeiture of

independence. The route God said Israel should never see again is the route of slavery.

The Rabbis understood this point as being the crux of the commandment to pierce the ear

of the voluntary slave:

"An ear which heard (at Sinai), 'I am the Lord your God,' and went and bought itself a

master - should be pierced." (Rashi to Shemot 21:6, based on Yerushalmi Kiddushin

1:2; Sifra Vayikra ad loc.)

At this point, we can take a new look at the prohibition against returning to Egypt and

serving her:

"…and the Lord said you would never return this way again" (Devarim 17:16);

"…on the road I told you that you would never see again." (28:26)

Where and when did God previously tell Moshe that they would not return this way? The

recurring theme of "never seeing Egypt again" leads us to Moshe's words to Israel before the

parting of the Sea, as they cried out, in their panic, that they preferred slavery:

"The Lord will fight for you ... for as you have seen Egypt today, you will never see them

again." (Shemot 14:13)

In my opinion, the verse reads thus:

29
 "as you have seen Egypt today" - in the MANNER that slaves look up to their masters -

"you will never see them again."

That the Halakha understood patronage to be the true meaning of "returning to Egypt" is

clear from the following midrash:

"The Torah warned Israel three times against returning to Egypt [here the Talmud quotes

the three verses we saw above]... but Israel returned to Egypt three times, and as is written,

'Woe to those who descend to Egypt for aid;' three times they failed. The first was in the

time of Sancheriv; the second was in the time of Yochanan ben Kere'ach; and the third

was in the time of Torginos." (Mekhilta Beshalach, mas. 2, par. 2; Yerushalmi Sukka

5:1; Bavli Sukka 51)

Three prohibitions and three "returns" mean three different kinds of submission. The first

is asking for Egyptian patronage, as Chizkiyahu did when he was threatened by Sancheriv

(according to the prophecies quoted earlier). The second is actual physical emigration to Egypt,

as did the Judeans, led by Yochanan ben Kere'ach (Yirmiyahu 40-43). The third kind of "return"

is that of the Jewish community of Alexandria, which lived under Egyptian patronage from the

time of Alexander the Great (c. 333 BCE) until the period of the Roman emperors Trajan (evidently

the Torginos of our text) and Hadrian. The defeat spoken of is the decimation of the Alexandrian

community after they revolted in response to hatred and persecution, forty-five years after the

destruction of the Temple.

It is submission that the Rabbis see as the true meaning of "return," as is evidenced by the

conclusion of the Yerushalmi:

"One may not return to Egypt to live there, but one may return there for trade, for business,

and for conquest." (Sanhedrin, end of ch. 10)

30
Financial dealings do not imply submission, and are therefore permitted.

We can now return to the story of the exodus.

In the episode of the Egyptian pursuit of the Israelites at the Red Sea, God is called E-

LOKIM, the "general" or "international" name known to all nations. This name is used, as a rule,

when the Torah presents dialogue with gentiles (see Bereishit 20, 31:40-41; Shemot 5:1-4; see

also Ibn Ezra to Shemot 3:15; Kuzari, IV). The reason for its use here is precisely because the

Jews finally left Egypt with Pharaoh's permission. This account of the exodus describes a

political-historical event, which takes place along natural, political lines; its goal is not revelation

at Sinai.

Only when the Torah returns to describe the "other" exodus, the journey towards complete

freedom, with no foreign protection whatsoever, and where the goal is the Torah, does it speak of

Divine Revelation and Lawgiving. Here God reveals Himself through His transcendental,

historical attribute: "Y-K-V-K went before them by day..." (13:21).

The "Way of the Land of the Philistines" was an official route under Egyptian jurisdiction,

as were considerable portions of Canaan. Had Israel taken Pharaoh's road, they would have

displayed good faith to him, and de facto recognition of his protection. At every checkpoint along

the road, they would have shown Pharaoh's letter of safe passage; the sentries would have passed

them through, and entered in their logs that Pharaoh's SUBJECTS passed through according to his

instructions. Israel would have sent Pharaoh a letter of thanks. Whenever they found themselves

in danger, especially in situations of war, they would have sent Pharaoh letters similar to the

petition for aid sent to Pharaoh by Biridia, king of Shekhem:

31
"To my king, my lord and my sun: So speaks Biridia, the King's faithful servant. Beneath

the feet of my king, my lord and my sun, I grovel on my belly and on my back." (from the

Tel El-'Amarna letters)

Had Israel left Israel in this fashion, Pharaoh would never have pursued them at all. He

could have granted them the mountain region and even made them his representatives there. In

times of war, the people would have returned to Egypt to seek protection. Needless to say, this

exodus would not have been conducive to Revelation. A slave-nation which progressed from slave

status in Egypt to vassal status in Canaan would not have achieved true freedom, even if it would

have been freed from hard labor. A nation which is not free could not have received the

Torah. God's sovereignty is possible only after all other sovereignties have been renounced: "I

am the Lord your God ... you will not have other gods beside Me."

Moshe's prophecy and leadership - including God's revelation at Sinai and giving of the

Torah - stem from a state of complete independence from Pharaoh. For this reason, God led them

on the desert route, into confrontation, into war, into salvation and singing, and into complete

freedom -

"You will never see them [through the eyes of slaves] again." (14:13)

32
 Alexandria and the lighthouse on Pharos. Print by Philips Galle, 1572,
via Rijksmuseum.

The Great Synagogue of Alexandria

Alex Macdonald writes:12

You haven’t seen the glory of Israel until you’ve seen the synagogue in Alexandria. So said the

Rabbi Yehuda, according to later sources. Allowing for some hyperbole, it’s still a striking notion:

12
https://medium.com/adm-academic/the-great-synagogue-of-alexandria-f22adefbbea3

33
one of the great and glorious sites of Jewish worship is not in the land of promise. It’s in Egypt:

not only a foreign place, but a realm with which Israel has some history.

Here’s how the tradition starts in the Tosefta, at Sukkot 4.4

has never seen the great glory of Israel. It is something like a large colonnade, with porches

within porches, and accommodating sometimes double the number of those that followed

Moses from Egypt. There were seventy-one golden chairs there, corresponding to the seventy-
one elders, and each of the chairs was worth twenty-five myriad talents of gold. In the center

was a wooden dais, and the sexton stood upon it with a scarf (as a flag) in his hand. At the

close of each benediction he waved the scarf, and all the people answered “Amen”.

It proceeds to describe seating arrangements, explain the elements and symbolism of liturgy and

offerings, and so on.

It’s hard to know how accurate these details are. We know from Philo (Flaccus 132) and from

inscriptions (CIJ 1432 & 1433) that there were synagogues or prayer houses spread around

Alexandria. The great synagogue, however, is described only in the Rabbinic sources — and it’s
notoriously difficult to know which aspects of Rabbinic tradition are early, and which are later

developments. It’s certainly possible that there was a particularly grand synagogue in the

Egyptian city, and that the Rabbinic material preserves some accurate memory of it.

On the other hand, some versions of this tradition have some obvious problems. The Babylonian

Talmud preserves much the same tradition as the Tosefta, but then includes the following

(b.Sukkah 51b:8,

34
After depicting the glory of the synagogue, the Gemara relates that Abaye said: All of the

people who congregated in that synagogue were killed by Alexander the Great of Macedonia.

The Gemara asks: What is the reason that they were punished and killed? It is due to the fact

that they violated the prohibition with regard to Egypt in this verse: “You shall henceforth

return no more that way” (Deuteronomy 17:16), and they returned. Since they established their

permanent place of residence in Egypt, they were punished.

Historically, this is out of the question. Alexander founded Alexandria less than decade before he
died, and he never returned to see it. (After his death his body was taken to Alexandria by

Ptolemy I). Sources vary, but there’s a good chance he did not stay long enough to see the city

built to any substantial degree. Despite the later claims of Josephus, it’s unlikely that the Jewish

population of Alexandria was well-established within Alexander’s lifetime. The grand synagogue

and extravagant ceremonies (if indeed they were real) came later. Put simply: Alexander the Great

did not destroy the great synagogue of Alexandria.

This Talmudic passage lacks historical credibility regarding the events it describes, but it remains

historically very useful. It reveals something about how the Jews of Alexandria could be

perceived by later interpreters. In short, some later readers considered the Jews in Alexandria to
be violating the law:

they violated the prohibition with regard to Egypt in this verse: “You shall henceforth return no

more that way” (Deuteronomy 17:16), and they returned.

Such an attitude is not entirely surprising, given the significance of the exodus story in Jewish

self-understanding. Israel could be defined as the nation which God brought out from Egypt. If

they were characterized by their departure from Egypt, and commanded not to return to Egypt,

how could they justify living there again?

35
According to b.Sukkah 51b:8, this cannot be justified. Those who lived in Alexandria were wrong

to do so, and their destruction (supposedly by Alexander) was due punishment. Presumably others

could see the Roman decimation of Alexandrian Jewry in AD 117 through the same lens: due

punishment for those who returned to Egypt.

Yet thousands upon thousands of Jews lived in Alexandria between Alexander and 337, and we

can only assume that these multitudes did not consider themselves to be undoing the exodus and

violating the law. How could they justify living there again? If it’s possible to answer that
question, it’s not possible to do so here.

36
 Nineteenth-century artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria by the
German artist O. Von Corven, based partially on the archaeological evidence
available at that time13

RICHARD OVENDEN writes:14

The opening episode of Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos, first shown in 1980, lamented the
most famous burning of books in history—the conflagration that destroyed the Library of
Alexandria. “If I could travel back into time,” Sagan told his viewers, it would be to the
Library of Alexandria, because “all the knowledge in the ancient world was within those
marble walls.” The destruction of the library was, he said, a warning to us 1,600 years later:
“we must never let it happen again.”

Sagan stood in a line of writers who, for the last two or three hundred years, have made the
word Alexandria conjure up not a place—a city in Egypt—but an image of a burning
library. The term Alexandria has become shorthand for the triumph of ignorance over the
very essence of civilization. From the French Revolution, through the early history of the
United States of America, from the First World War to the conflicts in the Balkans in the
late 20th century, the word Alexandria has been a reference point for the
subsequent destruction of libraries and archives. The greatest library ever assembled by the
great civilizations of the ancient world—containing a vast ocean of knowledge now lost to
us forever—was incinerated on a great pyre of papyrus.

13
Ancient Greece “Everyday Life in the Birthplace of Western Civilization” Robert Garland
14
https://time.com/5912689/library-of-alexandria-burning/

37
The story of Alexandria is a myth—in fact a collection of myths and legends, sometimes
competing with each other—to which the popular imagination continues to cling. The idea
of a truly universal library, a single place where the entire knowledge of the world was
stored, has inspired writers as well as librarians throughout history. Our knowledge of the
real ancient Library of Alexandria is to say the least patchy, the primary sources being few,
and mostly repeating other sources, now lost, or too distant to be able to be sure of. If we
are going to heed Sagan’s warning, however, we must be sure of the true reason for the
library’s demise.

There were in fact two libraries in ancient Alexandria, The Mouseion and the Serapeum,
or the Inner and Outer Libraries. One of our sources about the Alexandrian Library is the
Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who, in his History (written around AD 380-390)
also brings together the two key facts: that there was a massive library, and that it was
destroyed.

But while the fact that the library failed to exist beyond the classical period is unquestioned,
exactly why is less clear.

Ammianus Marcellinus thought that it happened when the city was sacked under Caesar,
and Caesar himself reported the burning of Alexandria as an accidental consequence of his
war against his great rival Pompey, in 48–47 BCE. Ships bringing enemy troops had been
docked in the harbor, close to a series of warehouses, and Caesar’s troops torched them. In
the conflagration that followed, a number of nearby buildings were destroyed. Following
the city’s instructions that all incoming ships should be searched for books, which were
required to be copied for the library, it is feasible that these seized books had been
temporarily stored in the dockside warehouses. In this account, material damage was done
to the collections of the library, but it was not its end. This ties in with the account of the
geographer Strabo who did much of his own research some decades after the events of 48–
47 BCE using sources from the library.

38
The Serapeum seems to have suffered a fire at some point around CE 181 and again in 217
but was rebuilt, although there is no indication whether the fire affected the library or just
the temple complex. In CE 273 the Emperor Aurelian recaptured Alexandria after it had
been occupied by the insurgent rebellion of Palmyra, destroying the palace complex and
almost certainly inflicting damage on the library, but if this is a true record, then it is
possible that the Library of the Serapeum may have outlived the Mouseion.

The writer Edward Gibbon, in his classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire dismissed another theory, that the destruction could be blamed on one of the
Muslim conquerors of Egypt, Caliph Omar. This version of events had been reported by
some early Christian writers, including an evocative story of the scrolls being fuel for the
thousands of hot baths in the city. The Enlightenment skeptic was scathing in his analysis
of that account: it was scarcely logical that the Caliph would burn Jewish and Christian
religious books, which were also considered holy texts in Islam.

For Gibbon, the Library of Alexandria was one of the great achievements of the classical
world and its destruction—which he concludes was due to a long and gradual process of
neglect and growing ignorance—was a symbol of the barbarity that overwhelmed the
Roman Empire, allowing civilization to leach away the ancient knowledge that was being
re-encountered and appreciated in his own day. The fires were major incidents in which
many books were lost, but the institution of the library disappeared more gradually both
through organizational neglect and through the gradual obsolescence of the papyrus scrolls
themselves.

Alexandria is, in that telling, a cautionary tale of the danger of creeping decline, through
the underfunding, low prioritization and general disregard for the institutions that preserve
and share knowledge: libraries and archives. Today, we must remember that war is not the
only way an Alexandria can be destroyed.

39
The long history of attacks on knowledge includes not just deliberate violence—during the
Holocaust or China’s Cultural Revolution, for example—but also the wilful deprioritization
of support for these institutions, which we are witnessing in Western societies today. The
impact that these various acts of destruction of libraries and archives has had on
communities and on society as a whole is profound. Communities in places
like Iraq and Mali have seen Islamic extremists target libraries for attack, and in the U.K.
over the past decade, more than 800 public libraries have closed through lack of support
from local Government. Today, with major technology companies taking control of the
archive as it moves into the digital realm, the complacency of society has meant lack of
regulation, control and privacy surrounding the most powerful bodies of knowledge ever
seen.

“There is no political power without power over the archive,” wrote Jacques Derrida, the
great French critic, in his classic work Archive Fever. The power of the “legend” of
Alexandria prompted the creation of a new Library of Alexandria in the modern Egyptian
city, which was opened in 2002 with a focus on storing and preserving digital information.
That Library is still operating today, together with one of the best Schools of Library and
Information science in the region. The hum of its vast server farm has replaced the quiet
concentration of the scholars who worked in the institution of the classical period. But even
the newest, most advanced libraries need to be treasured and respected if the knowledge
they contain is to survive.

40
 The Life and Death of the Library of Alexandria
One of the Great Centers of Human Knowledge, Ever

James Crawford writes:15

In 1960, four novels by the well-known English writer Lawrence Durrell were brought together in
one volume and published as The Alexandria Quartet. Described by its author as “an investigation
of modern love,” it was set in the Egyptian city of Alexandria before and during the Second World
War, and was largely based on Durrell’s own experiences during his time there as a press attaché.
The Quartet traced the personal lives of a number of key characters—seemingly based on real
individuals, including Durrell’s second wife—from different, competing perspectives. He later
claimed, however, that, out of all of the people portrayed and incidents featured, “only the city is
real.”

Alexandria was the true hero of the book: an exotic, darkly seductive and sensuous city, fragrant
of “offal and drying mud, of carnations and jasmine, of animal sweat and clover.” Durrell painted
a picture of a cosmopolitan, Greco-Arab outpost, where East met West in a delicious collision of
hotels, hashish cafés, colonial villas and squalid slums, all set between the blankness of the desert

15
https://lithub.com/the-life-and-death-of-the-library-of-alexandria/

41
and the blue of the Mediterranean. Yet Durrell’s Alexandria was far from a product of the 20th
century alone. Instead he called it a “capital of memory,” a place that still held on to the “echoes
of an extraordinary history.” It was a remnant and a shadow of a much greater city, one born out
of a dream two-and-a-half thousand years old.

In 331 BC, according to the Greek historian Plutarch, after successfully conquering Egypt,
Alexander the Great received a vision in his sleep. A “grey-haired man of venerable appearance,”
told him of “an island in the much-dashing sea in front of Egypt: Pharos is what men call it.”
Alexander believed that this visitation was the Greek poet Homer, communicating from beyond
the grave. When he travelled to view Pharos, he declared it to be the perfect spot for a city: a city
that would bear his name, and that would become a new capital of the ancient world.

With his architect Dinocrates, the young emperor paced out the plan of “Alexandria,” scattering
barley meal in the sand to mark the locations of palaces, streets and buildings. The city was
rectangular in shape and ordered in a grid system, with its length exactly double its width—a
design said to be modeled on the chlamys, the woolen military cloak worn by Macedonian
warriors. A causeway was built between the mainland and the island of Pharos, spanning the sea
from the vast royal palace complex that had emerged along the shoreline to create two huge, man-
made harbors.
Fresh water was diverted from the mouth of the Nile, running along a twenty-mile-channel into a
series of tunnels and great, vaulted cisterns carved out of the rock beneath the city. At the tip of
the island, marking the entrance to the port, was a colossal white marble tower: the Pharos—or
lighthouse—of Alexandria. At its top, 100 metres above the city, fires were lit and directed with
mirrors of polished metal, creating a beacon visible, some said, over 300 miles out to sea.

Little of this Alexandria remained in the city that so captivated Durrell. Certainly, little that could
be seen and touched. Over the course of a thousand years, between around 300 and 1300 AD, a
series of massive earthquakes, originating in a fault-line that ran from Sicily to Cairo, struck the
Egyptian coast. The harbor front dropped slowly closer and closer to the sea, before its great cluster
of grand, ornate buildings started to topple into the water, eventually sinking beneath the waves.

In the mid-1990s, marine archaeologists rediscovered this ancient city in fragments lying scattered
across the seabed of the modern port. They found hundreds of fallen columns and capitals,
sphinxes sunk into the silt of the harbor floor alongside broken obelisks, and huge stone blocks
covered in hieroglyphs and Greek inscriptions. The ruin of the great lighthouse was there too, still
lying where it had crashed down into the water after an earthquake in the early fourteenth century.

42
Durrell had described it in the Alexandria Quartet, writing of the “Ancient Pharos, whose shattered
fragments still choke the shallows”; and one of his characters “had once wanted to start a curio
trade by selling fragments of the Pharos as paperweights.” The plan was to smash off the pieces
with a hammer “to deliver them to retailers all over the world.” This was no idle whimsy. Nearly
three decades after Durrell wrote his novel, people were doing just that with graffiti-dyed chunks
of the Berlin Wall.

Although it was built on Egyptian soil, Alexandria was at first a determinedly Greek city,
established as the main trading hub of an Empire stretching from the Mediterranean to eastern
India. Over time, however, its atmosphere and its architecture became a blend of classical and
oriental influences, a mishmash of styles reflecting both its diverse population and the individual
tastes of a succession of increasingly self-indulgent—and corpulent—kings. Yet what made the
city truly unique was its role as a center for learning and scholarship. Alexandria was built around
a simple yet staggeringly ambitious idea: that of holding in one place all of the knowledge ever
accumulated by man. A Great Library was established there to become the memory bank of the
ancient world, filled with papyrus and parchment scrolls containing everything from poetry, drama
and literature to advanced treatises on mathematics, anatomy, geography, physics and astronomy.

The library became one of the original and most spectacular hostages to fortune in all of world
history. The tenet “knowledge is power” was its founding creed; yet if knowledge is power, it can
also be threat, temptation, corruption and heresy. It was a sequence of natural disasters that saw
the original city swallowed by the sea, but Alexandria’s library had vanished long before. It was
claimed neither by cataclysm nor by catastrophe, but by man.

The classical Greek playwrights had invented the concept of “hubris,” the fall that comes after
overweening pride and ambition. Looking back across the millennia, there seems a terrible
inevitability about the fate of the library at Alexandria. What other destiny could have awaited this
first, universal archive—the store of all human intellectual achievement—than total destruction?

In 1996, as construction workers cleared a site in downtown Athens for the foundations of a new
Museum of Modern Art, they found traces of a large structure sitting on the bedrock. A building
had occupied this same spot some two-and-a-half thousand years earlier, when it was part of a
wooded sanctuary outside the original city walls, on the banks of the River Ilissos. The excavation
uncovered the remains of a gymnasium, a wrestling arena, changing rooms and baths. This had

43
been a place for athletics and exercise, where the young men of Athens had trained to become
soldiers and citizens. But it was more than just a center for physical improvement. The
archaeologists soon realized that they had found one of the most significant sites in all of western
European intellectual culture, a site referred to continually by history’s greatest philosophers: the
Lyceum of Aristotle. The world’s first university.

As the dig continued, they uncovered the very chamber where Aristotle had lectured his students
on logic, ethics, politics, economics, literature and science. It was only large enough to fit around
ten people, but then Aristotle had never confined his teaching to the classroom. According to
contemporary accounts, he ranged all over the grounds of the Lyceum, walking as he taught. His
followers called his school the “Peripatos,” from the Greek meaning “walkway,” and they in turn
became known as the “Peripatetics.” His lecture notes were written down and incorporated into a
small, private library, taking their place alongside a selection of prized scholarly books collected
from his travels across the ancient world.

Aristotle had established his school at the gymnasium around 335 BC. For the previous eight years
he had worked as personal physician and tutor to the son of Philip II of Macedon: young Prince
Alexander, before he became “Great.” This was Aristotle’s most famous pupil, although he also
worked with two of Alexander’s well-known friends—Ptolemy and Cassander. Eventually
relations between the teacher and his protégé broke down irrevocably. Alexander matured to
manhood and came to the throne of Macedonia. As his power grew, and more and more territories
fell to his army, he began to assume the role not just of a great leader—perhaps the greatest history
had ever known—but also of a god. Aristotle viewed this irrationality with a mixture of amusement
and contempt.

Nevertheless, Aristotle had instilled in Alexander an enduring respect for education and
scholarship. It was the philosopher’s teachings that inspired his student to envision Alexandria as
the high watermark of Greek culture: a custom-built metropolis, designed according to purist
principles. But Alexander died before he could begin work on his great project. In 323 BC, as he
rested in his royal palace in Babylon, he succumbed either to malaria or poisoning. Some rather
far-fetched, ancient gossip even linked Aristotle to an assassination plot. In the end it was Ptolemy,
Alexander’s childhood accomplice, trusted general, and one-time fellow Aristotelian classmate,
who would establish Alexandria as a world center for the Greek arts.

44
 Artistic rendition of the library, Image: Assassin’s creed: Origins

At the heart of the city’s palace complex, which stretched along the harbor front opposite the island
of Pharos, Ptolemy founded two great institutions: a “Shrine to the Muses”—a building known
more commonly today as a museum—and a huge library. To run the library, Ptolemy turned to a
fellow disciple of Aristotle—Theophrastus, the new head of the Athenian Lyceum. Theophrastus
declined the offer, but recommended instead one of his best students, Demetrius of Phalerum. For
Demetrius, the timing could not have been better. In 317 BC, Cassander, the third of the young
Macedonian pupils of Aristotle, had appointed Demetrius as ruler of Athens. For a decade
Demetrius had tried to organize the city according to the high-minded political and philosophical
ideas of his great teachers. The attempt was something of a disaster. By the end of his reign, the
Athenians regarded him as little more than a tyrant whose lecture-hall theories were utterly ill-
equipped to deal with governance in the real world. Overthrown and exiled from the city—on pain
of death if he ever returned—Demetrius had been languishing back under the cloak of Cassander
at his court in the Greek city of Thebes. The opportunity of royal patronage to embark on another
great intellectual endeavor—a safe distance from Athens—was too good to pass up.

One of the earliest surviving accounts to make specific mention of Alexandria’s library comes in
the middle of the second or third century BC (the actual dating is a matter of much debate), written
by Aristeas, a Jewish scholar who had come to live and work in the city. In a letter to his brother
Philocrates, he appears to detail both the extraordinary progress made by Demetrius after being
put in charge of the institution, and the vast scope of the task set by Ptolemy:

45
[Demetrius] was assigned large sums of money with a view to collecting, if possible, all the books
in the world; and by arranging purchases and transcriptions he carried the king’s design to
completion as far as he was able. When he was asked, in my presence, about how many thousands
of books were already collected, he replied: “above two hundred thousand my king; and in a short
while I shall exert every effort for the remainder, to round out the number of half a million.”

Aristeas also recounts his own involvement at the library, along with 71 other Jewish scholars, in
one of the most significant projects of ancient history: translating into Greek the writings that
would later form the Christian Old Testament.

Alexandria’s library was not the first the world had ever known. Attempts had been made to collect
and preserve writing almost from the moment that it had been invented. The Mesopotamians, for
instance, had established a number of royal libraries; Egyptian priests had managed great archives
of diplomatic correspondence written on scrolls or tablets; and the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal
had kept a huge collection of works inscribed in baked clay, which included the Epic of Gilgamesh,
the world’s earliest known work of literature. Yet nothing had come close to the ambition of
Alexandria. Conceived by the students of Aristotle, now among the most influential figures in the
western world, it combined philosophical and intellectual purity with swaggering imperial might.
The modest model of the Athenian Lyceum and its private library was re-imagined on a gargantuan
scale: as if the voracious quest for “more worlds” in Alexander’s reign had been replaced by an
equally urgent search for knowledge. In both cases, however, the objectives were clear: prestige
and power. As humanity’s intellectual capital, Alexandria could stand proud above every other
city on earth.

Like today, most libraries in the ancient world grew through acquisitions, gifts, bequests and
loans—as well as, of course, from the writing and depositing of entirely new texts. In Alexandria,
however, where the goal was to gather and catalogue every book ever written, the collections
strategy was more extreme. The Ptolemy dynasty instituted a law that any book brought into the
city had to be passed immediately to the library’s scribes for copying. More often than not, the
original was kept and the copy returned to its owner. The thousands of ships docking in the city’s
three inter-connected deep-water harbors were searched routinely, and any texts not already
declared and unloaded onto the quay-sides were seized and confiscated.

46
So many books were added to the library through this method, that they received their own
categorization: a label attached to each parchment that read “from the ships.” Agents were
employed to travel to book markets across the Mediterranean in search of rare and original works.
In the third century BC, Ptolemy III sent emissaries to all the kings and leaders in the known world,
asking to borrow their books for copying. When the Athenians lent him the master copies of the
works of the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, the king kept the
originals and sent the fresh copies back across the sea, regarding his forfeited deposit of 15 talents
as a small price to pay for so precious a set of first editions.

The shelves—or theke—of the library filled up at an incredible rate. At the same time, the
Ptolemies worked jealously to establish a monopoly on the practice of collecting and curating
information. When a rival library was established at Pergamum in present-day Turkey, they banned
the export of Egyptian papyrus, an attempt to cut off at source the “oxygen” for the creation and
copying of books. The Pergamum library struggled on, with their scribes forced to work on
parchments made from animal skins. As the reputation of Alexandria grew, its combination of
reference works, scholarship and research began to reach critical mass. Academics flocked to the
city on the promise of free board and lodging in the opulent royal quarter, as well as exemption
from taxes, funding for study, and of course access to the library. It became an irresistible magnet
for the great minds of the ancient world. They could flourish under the patronage of their Greek
kings, and devote their lives to nothing but the pursuit of knowledge. The dream of the Ptolemaic
rulers was crystallizing into an ever more potent reality: as the intelligentsia flooded the city, the
kings came to hold dominion over the Empire of the Mind.

Towards the end of the second century BC, the scholar Athenaeus described the fame the library
had achieved in the ancient world. “What reason is there for me even to speak of the number of
books, the establishment of libraries, and the collection in the Museum,” he wrote, “considering
how they are all the memories of everyone?” Yet in his account Athenaeus also appeared to hint
at the drawbacks of accumulating such a vast repository of data: too much raw, unprocessed
knowledge can be little different to no knowledge at all.

The Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius’s description of the life of Aristophanes of
Byzantium, who was Alexandria’s head librarian at the start of the second century BC, stood as a
similar warning of the dangers of bibliomania: “Every day he did nothing other than read and

47
reread all the books of the Library, for the whole day, examining and reading through the order in
which they were shelved.” If he was not careful, the librarian could be swallowed up by his own
library.

It became clear that the scale of the Alexandrian enterprise presented a new and unique challenge.
Once you had brought all of the works of man under one roof, how could you then go about finding
information on just one specific topic? The answer was to invent an entirely new system for
identifying, registering and locating texts. This monumental task fell to the critic, poet and scholar
Callimachus of Cyrene, who devised a system called the Pinakes—literally, the “Tables”—which
compressed and categorized any given book into an abbreviated shorthand.

The Pinakes divided texts by genre and subsection, ordered authors alphabetically, offered potted
biographies and lists of their other works, included titles and opening words, and provided
estimates of the extent of each individual work by number of lines. It was the creation of an archive
within an archive, the key that unlocked the library’s vast data bank. Callimachus changed forever
how we engage with writing. Massive works were reduced to basic ciphers, signposts inviting a
scholar to read on, or move on. All of a sudden, books were defined by their catalogue entries,
translated into a new grammar of genres, titles and line-counts—the universal language of the
index.

If some were dismayed by the implications—in particular by the subjectivity inherent in the
summarizing process—without the Pinakes, the library would have been unusable. Callimachus’s
innovation transformed Alexandria, and remains the basis for the cataloguing and bibliographic
system we use today. For the first time, scholars could access information on a huge range of
diverse subjects, and consult, process and synthesize data all at once. The results were sensational.
As early as 235 BC, the geographer and mathematician, Eratosthenes of Cyrene was proposing not
only that the earth was round—in an age when almost all believed it was flat, with an edge off
which the unwary could drop—but had also calculated its circumference and diameter (the former
to within 200 miles of its actual size, the latter to within 50 miles). He was also able to conclude
that all the oceans were connected, and was the first man in history to suggest the possibility of
circumnavigating the globe. But scholarship at Alexandria was not confined to exploring the extent
and properties of our own world. Men like Timocharis, Hipparchus, Aristyllus and Claudius
Ptolemaeus created maps of constellations and catalogued thousands of stars. Nearly two millennia
before Copernicus, Aristarchus of Samos put forward the theory that the sun was the center of the

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universe, and that the earth and all the other planets in the solar system revolved around it in a
circle.

In the dissection rooms of the Museum, huge advances were made in medical science, aided by
the Ptolemies’ willingness to offer up dead bodies for study. Chillingly, it was also rumored that
condemned criminals were supplied “out of prison by the Kings,” to be subjected to the horrors of
vivisection. Herophlius’s study of the brain at Alexandria led to the discovery of the central
nervous system and the role of the veins in blood circulation, proposing, for the first time, that the
brain, and not the heart, housed the human mind. His younger colleague Erasistratus, with whom
Herophilos founded a school of anatomy, carried on this groundbreaking work, mapping all of the
body’s arteries, identifying the respiratory function of the lungs, and exploring the digestive system
to conclude, among other things, that the feeling of hunger stemmed from an empty stomach.

In the early third century BC, the mathematical genius Euclid wrote the Elements at Alexandria, a
series of proofs and axioms drawn together in a single, logical treatise. It was the founding work
of mathematics and geometry, the definitive reference book enabling every future scholar to apply
universal theories to myriad practical applications. As a result, engineering and physics flourished
in the city. It was here, for instance, that Archimedes invented his enduring “screw” water-pump,
and experienced his famous “Eureka!” moment to create calculus, his methodology for working
out areas and volumes. But the many great advances were not confined to endless rolls of
parchment and lines of shelving. Over time, this feverish spirit of discovery and invention spilled
out of the halls of learning to transform the city itself.

Alexandria became the setting for awe-inspiring wonders. Operated by running water, mechanical
birds sang and whistled from the tops of trees and fountains. Using compressed air, statues would
blow trumpets, raise wineskins to their lips, or shoot arrows. Temple doors would open and close
automatically, controlled by the lighting and extinguishing of fires. The city’s wide, central avenue
was lit at night by automatic, air-powered street-lamps burning olive oil. These devices came from
the mind of Hero, a native of Alexandria in the first century AD, and one of the most prolific
innovators of the ancient world. The founding father of hydraulics, he explored in his master-
work Pneumatica how “by the union of air, earth, fire and water, and the concurrence of three or
four elementary principles, various combinations are effected, some of which supply the most
pressing wants of human life, others produce amazement and alarm.”

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Hero’s box of tricks also included the coin-operated drink-dispenser—“a sacrificial vessel which
flows only when money is introduced”—and the syringe. In his construction of a short play
performed by automata, controlled by weights winding ropes and strings back and forth around an
axle, he is credited with building the very first programmable robot. Most remarkable of all,
however, was what he named the “Aeolipile,” after Aeolus, the Greek God of the air and winds.
A sphere held above a heated, water-filled cauldron was made to revolve perpetually under the
power of pressurized steam. Hero intended this as a simple amusement, an intriguing toy that
proved a theory. What he had in fact created was the world’s first steam engine and turbine, the
same “motor” for the Industrial Revolution, 16 centuries later.

Looking back now, the imagination is sent reeling by the possibilities. Imagination, of course, is
almost all that we have left. At some point in ancient history, we know that the library and its
priceless contents were destroyed, most likely burned to ashes. A vast tract of the collective
memory and accomplishments of classical human civilization and culture was wiped out. What we
do not know, at least for certain, is who was responsible.

Historians ever since have told and retold the story as a persistent, haunting and unprecedented
narrative of loss. At the same time, they have pored over the fragmentary evidence in their search
for a culprit, embarking on a politically charged manhunt to find and prosecute whoever consigned
the library to its terrible fate.

In the autumn of 48 BC, the Roman General—and soon to be dictator—Julius Caesar looked out
from the palace quarter of Alexandria over the vast, sweeping harbor to the Mediterranean Sea,
and reflected on how quickly man’s fortunes could turn. When he had arrived in the city several
weeks earlier, he had been presented by the local authorities with the signet ring and severed head
of his great rival, Pompey. Caesar wept at the sight of the ring, and was too distraught even to look
at the head. Pompey and Caesar, the two great Titans of Rome, had fought out a vast and sprawling
civil war that would ultimately see their Republic transformed into an Empire. Pompey’s demise,
as victim of a crude assassination plot after he landed in Alexandria three days ahead of a pursuing
Caesar, had been a tawdry end to such an epic conflict.

The murder, it seemed, was an attempt by the Alexandrians to demonstrate their allegiance to
Caesar. Battle-weary and exhausted, and with sailing impossible due to the prevailing winds,
Caesar decided to land his troops in the harbor and take up temporary residence in the royal palace.
He marched with his legionnaires through the streets, carrying at the head of their procession
a fasces—a bundle of rods containing an axe—signifying the military might and authority of

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Rome. The gesture backfired, quite spectacularly. Roman soldiers were attacked and killed in the
streets by angry mobs, and soon Caesar and his men found themselves holed up in the palace, their
small fleet blockaded in the harbor, and the city besieged by an army of 20,000 men belonging to
the teenage King Ptolemy XIII. Egypt, it transpired, was undergoing a civil war of its own. Caesar
had inadvertently found himself at the center of an ongoing and bloody battle for succession. And
things were about to get even more complicated. One evening, a 20-year-old princess, the older
sister of Ptolemy XIII, landed a small boat near Alexandria’s royal palace. In the gathering dusk,
she was smuggled by her servant Appollodorus into Caesar’s chamber, her body hidden
lengthways in a thick roll of bedding. She had come to plead for Caesar’s support and for his help
to wrest control of Egypt away from her younger brother. Her name was Cleopatra. At around the
same time, Caesar suspected that the eunuch Pothinus—his palace host and Ptolemy XIII’s
obsequious regent—was plotting against him. In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that he
had taken to sitting up whole nights with his soldiers drinking.

Alexandria had become a war zone. Caesar’s men fought pitched battles in the streets as they
struggled to hold out in the palace compound. In one skirmish, Ptolemy’s army attempted to break
through the Roman lines to take complete control of the harbor and all of its warships. As Caesar
later recounted in his book Commentaries on the Civil Wars—writing in the third person—he
knew it would spell catastrophe if he allowed his ships to fall into enemy hands: “If they made
themselves masters of these, Caesar being deprived of his fleet, they would have the command of
the port and whole sea, and could prevent him from procuring provisions and auxiliaries.” In
desperation, he ordered an action at once extreme and tactically masterful. “Caesar gained the
day,” he wrote, “and set fire to all those ships, and to others which were in the docks, because he
could not guard so many places with so small a force.” If he could not hold the harbor, then no one
would. Full of self-admiration for the success of his ploy, Caesar moved briskly on to detail the
next episode in the siege.

Over time, however, other writers and scholars kept coming back to this incident, scrutinizing its
consequences in ever more vivid detail. Around a century later, the great Roman poet Lucan
published an epic verse on the civil wars, called the Pharsalia. According to his account, Caesar,
“so great in his firmness of mind… commands that firebrands dipped in pitchy fat be hurled against
the vessels linked together.” While at first the fire raced across the fleet, till “the topmost yard-
arms caught alight,” Lucan writes that “not on ships alone did fire settle; but the dwellings which

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were near the sea caught fire from its far-reaching heat… and the flame, struck by a whirlwind,
ran through the dwellings as swiftly as a meteor often races with its trail in the ether.” Such, it
seemed, was the extent of the blaze, “that destruction for a little time recalled the people from the
besieged palace to help the city.”

While Lucan did not dwell on which buildings were caught up in the conflagration, his
contemporary, the philosopher Seneca, allegedly basing his story on a mysteriously lost account
of the conflict, written at the time by the great historian Livy, was unequivocal. “40,000 of the
books of Alexandria burned,” he wrote. It was the first time that any explicit link had been made
between Caesar’s fire and the destruction of the library. While the number of books mentioned
seems a small portion of Alexandria’s vast collection, it has been suggested that this figure is a
mistranslation from the original Latin, and should read 400,000. Regardless of the numbers, later
writers seized on the detail and elaborated on the impact. Most influential of all was Plutarch. In
his Life of Caesar, written at the end of the first century AD, he described the moment in the
Alexandrian siege when Caesar’s enemies “tried to intercept his communications by sea and he
was forced to deal with this danger by setting fire to the ships in the docks. This was the fire which,
starting from the dockyards, destroyed the great library.” A century on, and the Roman historian,
Aulus Gellius reported that “an enormous quantity of books, nearly seven hundred thousand
volumes… burned during the sack of the city in our first war in Alexandria.”

Lucan’s insinuating spark had, over the centuries, burst into an inferno of scholarly condemnation.
There was, it seemed, quite literally, no smoke without fire. Julius Caesar stood accused of
perpetrating the greatest act of cultural vandalism in the entire history of the ancient world. As
time passed, however, he would not be alone.

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In March of AD 415, during the celebration of Lent, a young woman called Hypatia was traveling
by chariot through the streets of Alexandria. Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, perhaps the
greatest mathematician of the age, and a keen student of the great works of the now-distant
classical world. At the beginning of the fifth century, she began teaching the philosophy of
Aristotle and Plato to the people of Alexandria, and as the contemporary historian, Socrates
Scholasticus put it, she had “made such attainments in literature and science,” that many students
“came from a distance to receive her instructions.” As her fame and her reputation grew—she was
said to be revered not just for her wisdom, but also for her beauty and virtue—she began to attract
the attention of the city’s religious authorities, and became implicated in a political power struggle
between Orestes, the governor of Alexandria, and Cyril, the Christian Bishop.

For years, religious disputes between the city’s Christians and Jews had been escalating into
increasingly bloody riots, and a group of fanatical monks, eager to fight for their holy cause, had
descended on Alexandria from their sanctuary in the remote mountains of the Nitrian desert.
Orestes had often come to Hypatia to seek council, and a rumour spread that she was responsible
for turning the governor away from the Christian faith. According to Bishop John of Niku, writing
around AD 650, Hypatia was “a pagan… devoted at all times to magic,” who had “beguiled many
people… And the governor of the city honored her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through

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her magic.” For Niku, this woman’s famed knowledge of philosophy and mathematics only
confirmed her “Satanic wiles.”

Artist's impression of the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria at the hands of

followers of Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria.

Drunk on puritanical fury, a group of the Nitrian monks, led, ironically, by a man called Peter “the
reader,” ambushed Hypatia in her chariot, pulled her down from her carriage to strip her naked,
and then dragged her through the streets to the Caesareum, a nearby church. There the mob used
oyster shells and roof tiles to scrape her skin from her body, before they tore her limbs apart, and
carried them outside the city walls to burn them to cinders. For Niku, the brutal murder of Hypatia
marked a triumphant, final end to pagan worship and idolatry in the city. Scholasticus, on the other
hand, despaired that “nothing could be farther from the spirit of Christianity.” What seemed
abundantly clear was that the city’s great tradition of learning and scholarship—it’s very founding
principle—was no more. It was not one great mind that died with Hypatia. It was all intellectual
life in Alexandria.

There had been a horrible inevitability to this. From AD 378 onwards, the Roman Emperor
Theodosius, the last sole ruler of the empire before it split into East and West, announced a series
of decrees ordering the disbanding, dismantling, and ultimately the destruction of all pagan
temples. Christianity became the official religion of the Romans, and there was a zealous desire to

54
sweep away every impious and heretical trace of the old gods. First, the eternal fire in the pagan
Temple of Vesta in the Forum of Rome was extinguished, and as it flickered out, persecution
spread across the empire.

In Alexandria, a man called Theophilus, the city’s Christian patriarch and Bishop, sparked a
religious war as he campaigned to eradicate the ancient faiths. The last stand for the city’s pagan
followers came in AD 391 at the Serapeion, the great temple fortress built to honor the Greco-
Egyptian God Serapi—a deity who had been invented some seven-and-a-half centuries earlier by
Ptolemy to help unify the people of his kingdom. Although the pagans taunted their Christian
adversaries by hoisting crucified prisoners up onto the Serapeion’s walls, they were vastly
outnumbered, and their fleeting resistance served only to further heighten the atmosphere of
destructive fervor. As the temple fell, the great statue of Serapis was smashed down and kicked
through the streets, before being thrown onto one of many great fires set burning in every precinct
of Alexandria. It joined countless other profane objects and artefacts depicting the ancient gods
and goddesses.
Something else may also have been fuelling the flames, however: the hundreds of thousands of
scrolls of the city’s famous library. According to Edward Gibbon, the author of the landmark
work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in the rioting, “the valuable library
of Alexandria was pillaged or destroyed; and, near 20 years afterwards, the appearance of the
empty shelves excited the regret and the indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not totally
darkened by religious prejudice.” Gibbon’s narrative set Roman Christianity against Greek
intellectualism, piety against enlightened thought. Science was tainted as a pagan pursuit, and an
enemy of faith. The library, as with many others throughout the empire, was seen as a living
archive of heresy, and just like the old temples, it had to be destroyed. “The compositions of ancient
genius’ wrote Gibbon, were heaped onto the bonfires, where they ‘irretrievably perished.” Two
centuries later, however, the library had mysteriously and miraculously come back to life—
Gibbon’s empty shelves were once again filled with scrolls and parchments. Unfortunately, this
bibliographical resurrection was less reality, more narrative device: a means of introducing yet
another villain into the mythology of Alexandria. In the early years of the seventh century AD, a
new power had emerged from the deserts of the Middle East: a rapidly swelling group of Arab
nomads following the teachings of Mohammed. This was the beginning of the Muslim Empire.

By AD 640, the armies of Islam had conquered Persia, Syria and Palestine, and had advanced
through Egypt to lay siege to Alexandria. The city was one of the last major footholds of the

55
Byzantine Empire in Africa. Heavily fortified, its subterranean cisterns full of fresh Nile water,
and its grain stores abundant, it was prepared for a war of attrition. It took 14 months for the
Muslim general Amr ibn al-As to break down the will and the spirit of the defenders, much to the
displeasure of the impatient Caliph Omar, Islam’s spiritual leader. Finally, on 29 September AD
641, the city surrendered. As the Arabs rushed through the streets in celebration, they found a city
largely emptied of its inhabitants: many had already fled by boat to Cyprus, Rhodes and the
Byzantine capital, Constantinople.

Writing five centuries after the siege, the Muslim historian Ibn Al-Qifti, described how a victorious
Amr talked with an Alexandrian priest, John the Grammarian, and learned of a priceless collection
of 54,000 books kept within a library in the city. A faithful and conscientious lieutenant, Amr
wrote to his leader Omar to ask him what he should do with the books. The response was a study
in the warped logic of fanaticism. “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God,”
said Omar, “they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and
ought to be destroyed.” According to Al-Qifti, Amr obeyed without question. The vast rolls of
paper and parchments were divided out among the city’s four thousand bathhouses, where they
were burnt to heat the water. There were so many books it was said that they kept the baths of
Alexandria warm for over six months.

And so Alexandria’s library, and its disappearance, remains one of the greatest enigmas of ancient
history. It could have contained everything. And, just as conceivably, it could have contained
nothing. Its books were collateral damage in the civil war that turned the Roman Republic into an
Empire. They were the victims of a Christian crusade against pagan learning. They fell afoul of
the absolutist policies of early Islamic fundamentalism. Each theory is put forward by one group
of historians, only to be demolished by another.

Some say, for instance, that Caesar’s fire merely destroyed a warehouse filled with scrolls and
parchments recently unloaded from the harbor. The story of fourth-century Christian vandalism is
attacked as a misinterpretation or a deliberate manipulation of the sources to serve an anti-religious
agenda on the part of enlightenment scholars like Edward Gibbon. And Ibn Al-Qifti’s account is
exposed as a myth written out of political expediency: as libraries across the 12th-century Muslim
world were dispersed and auctioned off to pay debts, Al-Qifti created the legend of the bathhouse
fires to stress that it was less of a crime to sell books than to burn them. In the end, no one was
responsible for the library’s destruction. That always happened sometime else, at the hands of
someone else. Perhaps, suggest the whispers, it had never really existed in the first place.

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57
 16

Alexandria and its Jews

Ancient Period

Avigdor (Victor) Tcherikover writes:17

Jews settled in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century B.C.E. (according to Josephus,
already in the time of Alexander the Great). At first, they dwelt in the eastern sector of the city,
near the sea; but during the Roman era, two of its five quarters (particularly the fourth (= “Delta”)
quarter) were inhabited by Jews, and synagogues existed in every part of the city. The Jews of
Alexandria engaged in various crafts and in commerce. They included some who were extremely
wealthy (moneylenders, merchants, alabarchs), but the majority were artisans. From the legal
aspect, the Jews formed an autonomous community at whose head stood at first its respected
leaders, afterward – the ethnarchs, and from the days of Augustus, a council of 71 elders.
According to Strabo, the ethnarch was responsible for the general conduct of Jewish affairs in the
city, particularly in legal matters and the drawing up of documents. Among the communal
institutions worthy of mention were the bet din and the “archion” (i.e., the office for drawing up

16
https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/classical-studies/classical-literature/jewish-exegesis-and-homeric-
scholarship-alexandria?format=HB&isbn=9781107000728#contentsTabAnchor
17
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/alexandria

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documents). The central synagogue, famous for its size and splendor, may have been the “double
colonnade” (diopelostion) of Alexandria mentioned in the Talmud (Suk. 51b; Tosef. 4:6), though
some think it was merely a large meeting place for artisans. During the Ptolemaic period relations
between the Jews and the government were, in general, good. Only twice, in 145 and in 88 B.C.E.,
did insignificant clashes occur, seemingly with a political background. Many of the Jews even
acquired citizenship in the city.

The position of the Jews deteriorated at the beginning of the Roman era. Rome sought to
distinguish between the Greeks, the citizens of the city to whom all rights were granted, and the
Egyptians, upon whom a poll tax was imposed and who were considered a subject people. The
Jews energetically began to seek citizenship rights, for only thus could they attain the status of the
privileged Greeks. Meanwhile, however, *antisemitism had taken deep root. The Alexandrians
vehemently opposed the entry of Jews into the ranks of the citizens.

In 38 C.E., during the reign of Caligula, serious riots broke out against the Jews. Although anti-
Semitic propaganda had paved the way for them, the riots themselves became possible as a result
of the attitude of the Roman governor, Flaccus. Many Jews were murdered, their notables were
publicly scourged, synagogues were defiled and closed, and all the Jews were confined to one
quarter of the city.

On Caligula’s death, the Jews armed themselves and after receiving support from their fellow Jews
in Egypt and Ereẓ Israel fell upon the Greeks. The revolt was suppressed by the Romans. The
emperor Claudius restored to the Jews of Alexandria the religious and national rights of which
they had been deprived at the time of the riots but forbade them to claim any extension of their
citizenship rights. In 66 C.E., influenced by the outbreak of the war in Ereẓ Israel, the Jews of
Alexandria rebelled against Rome. The revolt was crushed by Tiberius Julius Alexander and
50,000 Jews were killed (Jos., Wars, 2:497).

During the widespread rebellion of Jews in the Roman Empire in 115–117 C.E. the Jews of
Alexandria again suffered, the great synagogue going up in flames. As a consequence of these
revolts, the economic situation of the community was undermined, and its population diminished.
See also Diaspora.

Alexandrians in Jerusalem

Isaiah Gafni writes:

During the period of the Second Temple the Jews of Alexandria were represented in Jerusalem by
a sizable community. References to this community, while not numerous, can be divided into two
distinct categories: (1) The Alexandrian community as a separate congregation. According to Acts
6:9, the apostles in Jerusalem were opposed by certain of the synagogue, which is called the
synagogue of the Libertines and Cyrenians and Alexandrians, and of them of Cilicia and of
Asia. The Alexandrian synagogue and congregation are mentioned in talmudic sources as

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well: Eleazar b. Zadok bought a synagogue of the Alexandrians in Jerusalem (Tosef. Meg.
3:6; cf. TJ Meg. 3:1, 73d). (2) References to particular Alexandrians.

Alexandria in early Christian times.

During Herod’s reign several prominent Alexandrian Jewish families lived in Jerusalem. One was
that of the priest Boethus whose son Simeon was appointed high priest by Herod. Another family
of high priests, the “House of Phabi,” was likewise of Jewish-Egyptian origin, although it is not
certain whether they came from Alexandria. According to Parah 3:5, Ḥanamel the high priest,
who had been appointed by Herod in place of Aristobulus the Hasmonean, was an Egyptian, also
probably from Alexandria. “Nicanor’s Gate” in the Temple was named after another famous
Alexandrian Jew. Rabbinic sources describe at length the miracles surrounding him and the gates
he brought from Alexandria (Mid. 1:4; 2:3; Yoma 3:10; Yoma 38a). In 1902, the family tomb of
Nicanor was discovered in a cave just north of Jerusalem. The inscription found there reads: “The
bones of the sons of Nicanor the Alexandrian who built the gates. Nicanor Alexa.”

Jewish Culture

Eliyahu Ashtor writes:

The Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria were familiar with the works of the ancient Greek poets
and philosophers and acknowledged their universal appeal. They would not, however, give up their
own religion, nor could they accept the prevailing Hellenistic culture with its polytheistic
foundations and pagan practice. Thus they came to create their own version of Hellenistic culture.
They contended that Greek philosophy had derived its concepts from Jewish sources and that there
was no contradiction between the two systems of thought. On the other hand, they also

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gave Judaism an interpretation of their own, turning the Jewish concept of God into an abstraction
and His relationship to the world into a subject of metaphysical speculation. Alexandrine Jewish
philosophers stressed the universal aspects of Jewish law and the prophets, de-emphasized the
national Jewish aspects of Jewish religion, and sought to provide rational motives for Jewish
religious practice. In this manner they sought not only to defend themselves against the onslaught
of the prevailing pagan culture, but also to spread monotheism and respect for the high moral and
ethical values of Judaism.

The basis of Jewish-Hellenistic literature was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible,
which was to become the cornerstone of a new world culture (see *Bible: Greek translations). The
apologetic tendency of Jewish-Hellenistic culture is clearly discernible in the Septuagint.
Alexandrine Jewish literature sought to express the concepts of the Jewish-Hellenistic culture and
to propagate these concepts among Jews and Gentiles. Among these Jewish writers there were
poets, playwrights, and historians; but it was the philosophers who made a lasting
contribution. Philo of Alexandria was the greatest among them, but also the last of any
significance. After him, Alexandrine Jewish culture declined. See also Hellenism.

Byzantine Period

By the beginning of the Byzantine era, the Jewish population had again increased, but suffered
from the persecutions of the Christian Church. In 414, in the days of the patriarch Cyril, the Jews
were expelled from the city but appear to have returned after some time since it contained an
appreciable Jewish population when it was conquered by the Muslims.

Arab Period

According to Arabic sources, there were about 400,000 Jews in Alexandria at the time of its
conquest by the Arabs (642), but 70,000 had left during the siege. These figures are greatly
exaggerated, but they indicate that in the seventh century there was still a large Jewish community.
Under the rule of the caliphs the community declined, both demographically and culturally. J.
Mann concluded from a genizah document of the 11th century that there were 300 Jewish families
in Alexandria, but this seems improbable. The same is true for the statement of Benjamin of
Tudela, who visited the town in about 1170 and speaks of 3,000 Jews living there.

In any case, throughout the Middle Ages there was a well-organized Jewish community there with
rabbis and scholars. Various documents of the Cairo Genizah mention the name of Mauhub ha-
Ḥazzan b. Aaron ha-Ḥazzan, a dayyan of the community in about 1070–80. In the middle of the
12th century, Aaron He-Ḥaver Ben Yeshuʿah Alamani, physician and composer of piyyutim, was
the spiritual head of the Alexandrian Jews. Contemporary with Maimonides (late 12th century)
were the dayyanim Phinehas b. Meshullam, originally from Byzantium, and Anatoli b. Joseph
from southern France, and contemporary with Abraham the son of Maimonides was
the dayyan Joseph b. Gershom, also a French Jew.

In this period the community of Alexandria maintained close relations with the Jews of Cairo and
other cities of Egypt, to whom they applied frequently for help in ransoming Jews captured by
pirates. A letter of 1028 mentions this situation; it also praises Nethanel b. Eleazar ha-Kohen, who

61
had been helpful in the building of a synagogue, apparently the synagogue of the congregation of
Palestinians that may have been destroyed during the persecution of the non-Muslims by
the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim (c. 996–1021). In addition to this synagogue there was a smaller one,
attested to in various medieval sources that mention two synagogues of Alexandria, one of them
called “small.” The Jews of Alexandria were engaged in the international trade centered in their
city, and some of them held government posts.

Mamluk and Ottoman Periods

Under the rule of the Mamluk sultans (1250–1517), the Jewish population of Alexandria declined
further, as did the general population. Meshullam of Volterra, who visited it in 1481, found 60
Jewish families, but reported that the old men remembered the time when the community
numbered 4,000. Although this figure is doubtless an exaggeration, it nevertheless testifies to the
numerical decrease of the community in the later Middle Ages.

In 1488, Obadiah of Bertinoro found 25 Jewish families in Alexandria. Many Spanish exiles,
including merchants, scholars, and rabbis settled there in the 14th–15th centuries. The historian
Sambari (17th century) mentions among the rabbis of Alexandria at the end of the
16th century Moses b. Sason, Joseph Sagish, and Baruch b. Ḥabib. With the spread of the plague
in 1602 most of the Jews left and did not return.

After the Cossack persecutions of 1648–49 (see Chmielnicki) some refugees from Ukraine settled
in Alexandria. During the 1660s, the rabbi of the city was Joshua of Mantua, who became an ardent
follower of Shabbetai Zvi.

In 1700, Jewish fishermen from Rosetta (Rashīd) moved to Alexandria and formed a Jewish
quarter near the seashore, and in the second half of the 18th century more groups of fishermen from
Rosetta, Damietta, and Cairo joined them; this Jewish quarter was destroyed by an earthquake.

At the end of the 18th century the community was very small and it suffered greatly during the
French conquest. Napoleon imposed heavy fines on the Jews and ordered the ancient synagogue,
associated with the prophet Elijah, to be destroyed.

In the first half of the 19th century under the rule of Muhammad ʿAli there was a new period of
prosperity. The development of commerce brought great wealth to the Jews, as to the other
merchants in the town; the community was reorganized and established schools, hospitals, and
various associations.

From 1871 to 1878, the Jewry of Alexandria was divided and existed as two separate communities.
Among the rabbis of Alexandria in modern times were the descendants of the Israel family
from Rhodes: Elijah, Moses, and Jedidiah Israel (served 1802–30), and Solomon Ḥazzan (1830–
56), Moses Israel Ḥazzan (1856–63), and Bekhor Elijah Ḥazzan (1888–1908).

As a result of immigration from Italy, particularly from Leghorn, the upper class of the community
became to some extent Italianized. Rabbis from Italy included Raphael della Pergola (1910–23),
formerly of Gorizia, and David Prato (1926–37). Later rabbis were M. Ventura and Aharon Angel.

62
During World War I many Jews from Palestine who were not Ottoman citizens were exiled to
Alexandria. In 1915, their leaders decided, under the influence of Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor, to
form Jewish battalions to fight on the side of the Allies; the Zion Mule Corps was also organized
in Alexandria.

Hebrew Press

Avraham Yaari writes:

The first Hebrew press of Alexandria was founded in 1862 by Solomon Ottolenghi from Leghorn.
In its first year, it printed three books. A second attempt to find a Hebrew press in Alexandria was
made in 1865. Nathan Amram, chief rabbi of Alexandria, brought two printers from Jerusalem,
Michael Cohen and Joel Moses Salomon, to print his own works. However, these printers only
produced two books, returning to Jerusalem when the second was only half finished.

A more successful Hebrew press was established in 1873 by Faraj Ḥayyim Mizraḥi, who came
from Persia; his press continued to operate until his death in 1913, and his sons maintained it until
1916. Altogether, over 40 books were printed.

In 1907 Jacob b. Attar from Meknés, Morocco, founded another press, which produced several
dozen books. Apart from these main printing houses, from 1920 on the city had several small
presses, each producing one or two books. A total of over 100 books for Jews were printed in
Alexandria, most of them in Hebrew, the others in Judeo-Arabic and Ladino. Most of them were
works by eminent Egyptian rabbis, prayer books, and textbooks.

Modern Times

63
Haim J. Cohen writes:

In 1937, 24,690 Jews were living in Alexandria and in 1947, 21,128. The latter figure included
243 Karaites, who, unlike those of Cairo, were members of the Jewish community
council. Ashkenazi Jews were also members of the council.

According to the 1947 census, 59.1% of Alexandrian Jews were merchants, and 18.5% were
artisans. Upon the outbreak of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, several Jews were placed
in detention camps, such as that at Abukir. Most of the detainees were released before 1950.

There were several assaults on the Jewish community by the local population, including the
throwing of a bomb into a synagogue in July 1951. With Nasser’s accession to power in February
1954, many Jews were arrested on charges of Zionism, communism, and currency smuggling.
After the Sinai Campaign (1956), thousands of Jews were banished from the city, while others left
voluntarily when the Alexandrian stock exchange ceased to function.

The 1960 census showed that only 2,760 Jews remained. After the Six-Day War of June 1967,
about 350 Jews, including Chief Rabbi Nafusi, were interned in the Abu Za’bal detention camp,
known for its severe conditions. Some of them were released before the end of 1967. The numbers
dwindled rapidly; by 1970 very few remained and, in 2017, only 12 were left.

Jews of Egyptian origin came from around the world to celebrate Shabbat at the Eliyahu
Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria in February 2020. The synagogue, the only one remaining in
Alexandria, was originally built in 1354. A new structure was built there in the 1800s and a three-
year renovation project was completed in January. The synagogue is one of the largest in the
Middle East, seating more than 700 people.

Today the Jewish population of Egypt is approximately 16, with 10 in Alexadria.

In February 2020, 180 Jews from Europe, Israel and the United States arrived in Alexandria to
attend religious ceremonies at the historic Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue, which was renovated by the
Egyptian government as part of a program to protect Jewish heritage sites such as synagogues and
cemeteries. This was the largest gathering of Jews in Egypt since they the 1950s and 1960s when
most were forced to leave the country.

Despite the peace treaty with Israel, the Egyptian public remains mostly hostile toward Israel,
which prompted the Egyptians to ban media coverage and blanket the area with security.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANCIENT TIMES: V.A. Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (1959), index; idem, Corpus papyrorum…
judaicarum, 1 (1957), index; Klausner, Bayit Sheni, 4 (19502), 267–86; A. Bludau, Juden und Judenverfolgungen im alten
Alexandrien (1906); H.I. Bell, Jews and Christians in Egypt (1924); idem, Juden und Griechen im roemischen Alexandreia (1926).

64
ALEXANDRIANS IN JERUSALEM: PEFQS (1903), 125–31, 326–32; E.L. Sukenik, in: Sefer Zikkaron… Gulak ve-Klein (1942),
134–7; Schuerer, Gesch, 2 (19074), 87 n. 247, 502, 524 n. 77; S. Lieberman, Tosefta ki-Feshutah, 5 (1962), 1162; Stern, in: Tarbiz,
25 (1965/66), 246. ARAB PERIOD: Mann, Egypt, 1 (1920), 88; Ashtor, Toledot, 1 (1944), 247–8; 2 (1950), 111–2; 3 (1970);
idem, in: JJS, 19 (1968), 8 ff.; B. Taragan, Les communautés israélites d'Alexandrie (1932).

OTTOMAN PERIOD: J.M. Landau (ed.), Toledot ha-Yedudim be Miẓrayim ha-Otmanit (1988), index; idem, Jews in Nineteenth-
Century Egypt (1969), index; Tcherikover, Corpus, index; idem, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (1959), 541–9
(bibliography), and index; Toledano, in: HUCA, 12–13 (1937–38), 701–14.

HEBREW PRINTING: A. Yaari, Ha-Defus ha-Ivri be-Arẓot ha-Mizraḥ, 1 (1937), 53–56, 67–85; idem, in: KS, 24 (1947/48), 69–
70.

Sources

Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved;

Marcy Oster, “Only 5 Jews Left In Cairo Following Death Of Jewish Community President,” JTA, (July 9, 2019);
Marcy Oster, “Dozens of Jews of Egyptian origin return for ‘very, very emotional’ service at historic synagogue,” JTA,
(February 18, 2020);
Declan Walsh and Ronen Bergman, “A Bittersweet Homecoming for Egypt’s Jews,” New York Times, (February 23, 2020).

Map Showing Plan of the Ancient City—Jewish Quarter Shaded.

65
 Alexandria, ‫ اﻹﺳﻜﻨﺪرﯾﺔ‬- Al Iskandariyah, in Arabic

Jews settled in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century b.c.e. (according to Josephus,
already in the time of Alexander the great). Synagogues existed in every part of the city. The Jews
of Alexandria engaged in various crafts and in commerce. They included some who were
extremely wealthy (moneylenders, merchants, alabarchs), but the majority were artisans. From the
legal aspect, the Jews formed an autonomous community at whose head stood at first its respected
leaders, afterward - the Ethnarchs, and from the days of Augustus, a council of 71 elders. The Jews
energetically began to seek citizenship rights, for only thus could they attain to the status of the
privileged Greeks. The Alexandrians vehemently opposed the entry of the Jews into the ranks of
the citizens. In 38 c.e., during the reign of Caligula, serious riots broke out against the Jews; anti-
Semitic propaganda had paved the way for them. In 66 c.e., influenced by the outbreak of the war
in Eretz Israel, the Jews of Alexandria rebelled against Rome. The revolt was crushed by Tiberius
Julius Alexander and 50,000 rebellion of Jews in the Roman empire in 115-117 c.e. the Jews of
Alexandria again suffered, the great synagogue going up in flames.

The Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria were familiar with the works of the ancient Greek poets
and philosophers and acknowledged their universal appeal. They gave Judaism an interpretation
of their own, turning the Jewish concept of God into an abstraction and his relationship to the
world into a subject of metaphysical speculation. Alexandrian Jewish philosophers stressed the
universal aspects of Jewish law and the prophets, de-emphasized the national Jewish aspects of
Jewish religion, and sought to provide rational motives for Jewish religious practice. The basis of
Jewish-Hellenistic literature was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the bible, which was to
become a cornerstone of a new world culture. The apologetic tendency of Jewish-Hellenism is
clearly discernible in the Septuagint. Alexandrian Jewish literature sought to express the concepts
of the Jewish-Hellenistic culture and to propagate these concepts among Jews and gentiles. Among
these Jewish writers there were poets, playwrights, and historians; but it was the philosophers who
made a lasting contribution. Philo of Alexandria was the greatest among them.

By the beginning of the Byzantine era, the Jewish population had again increased, but suffered
from the persecutions of the Christian church. In 414 in the days of the patriarch Cyril, the Jews
were expelled from the city but appear to have returned after some time since it contained an
appreciable Jewish population when it was conquered by the Muslims.

According to Arabic sources, there were about 40,000 Jews in Alexandria at the time of its
conquest by the Arabs (642), but 70,000 had left during the siege. These figures are certainly
exaggerated, but they indicate that in the seventh century there was still a large Jewish community.

66
In this period the community of Alexandria maintained close relations with the Jews of Cairo and
other cities of Egypt, to whom they applied frequently for help in ransoming Jews captured by
pirates.

Under the rule of the Mamluk sultans (1250-1517), the Jewish population of Alexandria declined
further, as did the general population. Meshullam of Volterra, who visited it in 1481, found 60
Jewish families, but reported that the old men remembered the time when the community
numbered 4,000. Although this figure is doubtless an exaggeration, it nevertheless testifies to the
numerical decrease of the community in the later middle ages. In 1488 Obadiah of Bertinoro found
25 Jewish families in Alexandria. Many Spanish exiles, including merchants, scholars, and rabbis
settled there in the 14th-15th centuries. The historian Sambari (17th century) mentions among the
rabbis of Alexandria at the end of the 16th century Moses Ben Sason, Joseph Sagish, and Baruch
Ben Chabib. With the spread of the plague in 1602 most of the Jews left and did not return. In
1700 Jewish fishermen from Rosetta (Rashid), moved to Alexandria and formed a Jewish quarter
near the seashore.

This Jewish quarter was destroyed by an earthquake. At the end of the 18th century the community
was very small and it suffered greatly during the French conquest. Napoleon imposed heavy fines
on the Jews and ordered the ancient synagogue, associated with the prophet Elijah, to be destroyed.
In the first half of the 19th century under the rule of Muhammad Ali there was a new period of

67
prosperity.

The development of commerce brought great wealth to the Jews, as to the other merchants in the
town. The community was reorganized and established schools, hospitals, and various
associations. During World War I many Jews from Palestine who were not Ottoman citizens were
exiled to Alexandria. In 1915 their leaders decided, under the influence of Jabotinsky and
Trumpeldor, to form Jewish battalions to fight on the side of the allies; the Zion Mule Corps was
also organized in Alexandria.

In 1937, 24,690 Jews were living in Alexandria and in 1947, 21,128. The latter figure included
243 Karaites, who, unlike those of Cairo, were members of the Jewish community council.
According to the 1947 census, 59.1% of Alexandrian Jews were merchants, and 18.5% were
artisans. Upon the outbreak of the Israel war of independence in 1948, several Jews were placed
in detention camps, such as that at Abukir. Most of the detainees were released before 1950. There
were several assaults on the Jewish community by the local population, including the throwing of
a bomb into a synagogue in July 1951. With Nasser's accession to power in February 1954, many
Jews were arrested on charges of Zionism, communism, and currency smuggling. After the Sinai
campaign (1956), thousands of Jews were banished from the city, while others left voluntarily
when the Alexandrian stock exchange ceased to function. The 1960 census showed that only 2,760
Jews remained. After the Six-Day War of 1967, about 350 Jews, including chief Rabbi Nafusi,
were interned in the Abu Za'bal detention camp, known for its severe conditions. Some of them
were released before the end of 1967. The numbers dwindled rapidly and by 1970 very few
remained.

The historic, newly-renovated synagogue in Alexandria, Egypt 2020

68
The first Hebrew press of Alexandria was founded in 1862 by Solomon Ottolenghi from Leghorn.
In its first year it printed three books. A second attempt to found a Hebrew press in Alexandria
was made in 1865. Nathan Amram, chief Rabbi of Alexandria, brought two printers from
Jerusalem, Michael Cohen and Joel Moses Salomon, to print his own works. However, these
printers only produced two books, returning to Jerusalem when the second was only half finished.
A more successful Hebrew press was established in 1873 by Faraj Chayyim Mizrachi, who came
from Persia; his press continued to operate until his death in 1913. A total of over 100 books for
Jews were printed in Alexandria, most of them in Hebrew, the others in Judaic-Arabic and Ladino.
Most of them were works by eminent Egyptian rabbis, prayer books, and textbooks.

Hellenistic Egypt was the setting for perhaps the first Jewish Golden Age, a time “golden” in
Jewish memory as an era of vibrant cultural interaction between the Jews and their gentile
hosts. This is the story of the adventures and misadventures of the people of Israel in the land

69
of Egypt the years shrouded in the mists of biblical history under the Pharaohs; the strange
intermezzo of the Jewish mercenary detachment on the island of Elephantine on the upper Nile;
the apogee of Jewish culture under Ptolemies; and finally, the Jewish community’s rapid
decline and catastrophic disappearance under Roman rule. Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski uses
scientific analysis to illuminate the reality underlying our image of the past. The biblical
accounts and Jewish and pagan literary texts are juxtaposed with discoveries of a century of
archaeological and papyrological research that has unearthed the edicts of emperors as well as
the humble correspondence of common people. In a tantalizing epilogue, Modrzejewski probes
a turning point in Western civilization: the brief but crucial episode when budding Christianity
and the Alexandrian Jews parted company.18

Emil Shurer writes:19

Historic city situated on the Mediterranean sea; fourteen miles west of the Canopic mouth of the
Nile.
The history of the Jews of Alexandria dates from the foundation of the city by Alexander the Great,
332 B.C., at which they were present (Josephus, "Contra Ap." ii. 4; "Ant." xix. 5, § 2). From the
very beginning their numbers seem to have been considerable; at all events, they formed a very
large portion of the population under the successors of Alexander. A separate section of the city
was assigned to them by the first Ptolemies, so that they might not be hindered in the observance
of their laws by continual contact with the pagan population ("B. J." ii. 18, § 7). The site of this
ancient Jewish quarter—theexistence of which is testified to also by Strabo ("Ant." xiv. 7, § 2)—
can be fixed with tolerable accuracy; for Apion derisively refers to the Jews as a people living on
a harborless shore; whereupon Josephus rejoins that this is a very excellent situation; for, as a
consequence, they resided in the vicinity of the Royal Palace("Contra Ap." ii. 4). The palace was
built on the spit of land called Lochias, and the harbor was in proximity to it, west of Lochias.
Therefore the Jews must have inhabited that part of the city that extended eastward from the palace.
Moreover, the whole city was divided into five districts, which were named after the first five
letters of the Greek alphabet. Of these five districts two were denominated Jewish districts, because
the majority of their inhabitants were Jews (Philo, "In Flaccum," § 8; ed. Mangey, ii. 525). From
this quite a clear conception of the strength of the Jewish population may be formed.

The Jewish Quarter.

According to Josephus, the fourth or "delta" district was populated by the Jews ("B. J." ii. 18, § 8);
which fact warrants the inference that this isolation already existed in the time of Josephus
(compare also "Contra Ap." ii. 4). At that time, however, the isolation was not strictly enforced;
for, according to Philo, there were many Jewish dwellings scattered throughout the city. There
were even synagogues distributed all over the city (Philo, "De Legatione ad Cajum," § 20; ed.
Mangey, ii. 565). As regards number and position, the Jews in Alexandria enjoyed a greater degree
of political independence there than elsewhere. While the Jewish inhabitants of other cities of the
Roman empire, without any political separation, formed private societies for religious purposes,

18
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691015750/the-jews-of-egypt
19
https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1171-alexandria-egypt-ancient/

70
or else became a corporation of foreigners like the Egyptian and Phenician merchants in the large
commercial centers, those of Alexandria constituted an independent political community, side by
side with that of the heathen population. Strabo thus describes their constitution ("Ant." xiv. 7, §
2): "At their head stands an ethnarch, who rules and judges the people; and, like the archon of an
independent city, gives special attention to the proper fulfilment of the duties and to the compliance
with the various regulations."

Government.

At the time of Augustus, a gerusia (council of elders) seems to have stepped into the place of this
individual ruler. It appears indeed from a decree of the emperor Claudius that upon the death of
the Jewish ethnarch, during the governorship of Aquila, Augustus permitted the appointment of an
ethnarch ("Ant." xix. 5, § 2); but Philo distinctly states that at the time of Augustus the gerusia
assumed the position of the genarch—this is the word he uses for ethnarch ("In Flaccum," § 10;
ed. Mangey, ii. 527 et seq.). Since Philo mentions another governor than the one referred to by
Claudius, it might be supposed that Augustus promulgated two different decrees upon this subject,
and that during Aquila's tenure of office—the ethnarch having died—the emperor consented to a
new election; but later, during the term of Magnus Maximus, the office of ethnarch again becoming
vacant through death, he replaced it by the gerusia. But in this decree of Claudius, which gives a
retrospect of the constitutional rights of the Alexandrian Jews, some mention of such a second
decree would have been made. It is evident that Claudius refers to an ordinance which was still in
force. Nor do the different names of the governors prove that there were different ordinances.
Soon after the death of the ethnarch, under the governorship of Aquila, a change took place in the
governors, and the decree of Claudius was sent to Magnus Maximus, the successor of Aquila. As
this occurred before his installation, it must refer to the same decree. Claudius intends only to make
it apparent that Augustus permitted the Jews to retain their own government. Philo relates, more
particularly, that the ethnarch was replaced by a gerusia. To the latter he frequently alludes in
another passage of his work. The gerusia was presided over by archons or chief magistrates (Philo,
"In Flaccum," § 10; ed. Mangey, ii. 528 et seq.). It numbered, as in Jerusalem, seventy-one
members (Tosef., Suk. ed. Zuckermandel, iv. 198; Yer. Suk. v. 1). Josephus, also, refers
occasionally to the "chiefs of the gerusia" ("B. J." viii. 10, § 1).
In consequence of their isolation, the Jews of Alexandria were unhampered in the exercise of their
ceremonies, and were also enabled to regulate their civil affairs independently. The only restriction
from which they suffered was due to official supervision delegated to royal, and afterward to
imperial, representatives. The Jews of Alexandria, however, were quite independent of the council
and civil government of the city proper. They formed a smaller political corporation by the side of
the larger one. Moreover, there was no such thing as a council (βōυλέ) during the first two centuries
of the Greek domination; this having been abolished by the Ptolemies, or, at the very latest, by
Augustus, and only revived under Septimius Severus.Dio Cassius, li. 17; Spartianus, in his
biography of Severus, ch. xvii. Concerning the constitution of Alexandria, compare Strabo, xvii.
p. 797; Kuhn, "Die Städtische und Bürgerliche Verfassung des Römischen Reiches," ii. 476 et
seq.; Marquardt, "Römische Staatsverwaltung," 1881, i. 451 et seq.; Lumbroso, "Recherches sur
l'Economie Politique de l'Egypte sous les Lagides," pp.212 et seq., Turin, 1870; Wilcken,
"Observationes ad Historiam Ægypti Provinciæ Romanæ, pp. 7 et seq., Berlin, 1885; Mommsen,

71
"Römische Geschichte," v. 555-558; Jung, "Die Römischen Verwaltungsbeamten in Aegypten"
("Wiener Studien," 1892, xiv. 227-266).

Civil Rights.

In spite of the political isolation of the Jews of Alexandria they did not lose their franchise as
citizens. The doubts that have been expressed in connection with this by a few modern scholars
are not supported by decisive evidence, but are based upon a general mistrust of Josephus, whose
testimony, however, on all material points, is corroborated by Philo as well as by the decree of
Claudius. Josephus says ("Contra Ap." ii. 4); "Alexander gave them a place in which to live, and
they received the same rights as the Macedonians [Greeks], and up to the present their race has
retained the appellation Macedonians." In another place ("B. J." ii. 18, § 7) he declares: "Alexander
permitted them the same rights as the Greeks. This privilege they preserved under the successors
of Alexander, who permitted them to call themselves Macedonians. Nay, when the Romans took
possession of Egypt neither the first Cæsar nor his successors suffered the rights, which had been
bestowed upon the Jews by Alexander, to be diminished." The decree by which Augustus
confirmed the rights of the Jews, especially the civil rights of those in Alexandria, was engraved
upon a tablet of brass which still existed at the time of Josephus ("Contra Ap." ii. 4; "Ant." xiv. 10,
§ 1). Philo also gives prominence to the fact that the Jews enjoyed the civil rights of the
Alexandrians (that is, of the Alexandrian citizens) and not those of the Egyptians ("In Flaccum,"
§ 10; ed. Mangey, ii. 528).
In the persecutions that occurred during the reign of Caligula, Flaccus, governor of Alexandria,
issued an edict in which he called the Jews "aliens and residents" ("In Flaccum," § 8; ed. Mangey,
ii. 528).But Claudius, the successor of Caligula, soon after his accession took pains to restore to
them their old rights. In this last decree, especial reference is made to the rescripts and ordinances
of the preceding emperors, from which it may be seen that the Jews had equal rights with the other
citizens of Alexandria ("Ant." xix. 5, § 2). Finally, even Vespasian had occasion to interfere on
behalf of the Jews when he denied the petition of the Alexandrians to deprive them of their civil
rights in the city ("Ant." xii. 3, § 1). The Jews not only enjoyed civil rights in Alexandria, but in
public life occupied a more influential position than anywhere else in the ancient world. There
they did not form the lower classes, as in many other towns; but by their riches and education
constituted a large and influential portion of society; possessing the confidence of the ruling
powers, they attained also to public offices and posts of honor. The conduct of the Ptolemies
toward them certainly varied, but that of the first members of that dynasty was uniformly favorable
("Contra Ap." ii. 4).
In connection with the alleged modern disinclination of the Jews to military service in foreign
countries, it is curious to notice that they were often employed as soldiers in Egypt, and even
attained to high military positions. Ptolemy I., Lagi, is said to have distributed 30,000 Jewish
soldiers over the land as garrisons (Pseudo-Aristeas, ed. Wendland, 1900, § 13). Jewish camps
have been found in several places in Egypt, which were without doubt the barracks of those Jewish
troops; such a castra Judœorum was on the eastern side of the Delta ("Notitia Dignitatum
Orientis," chap. xxv.), and a 'Іōυδαίων στρατόπεδōν on the western side of the Delta ("Ant." xiv.
8, § 2; "B. J." i. 9, § 4; compare Schürer, "Gesch." 3d ed., iii. 98). In an inscription found at Athribis
in the southern part of the Delta, the first name on the list of those who built the synagogue is that
of a "captain of the police" ("Rev. Ét. Juives," xvii. 235). Ptolemy VI., Philometor, and his consort,

72
Cleopatra, "entrusted their whole kingdom to Jews, and the generals-in-chief of the army were the
two Jews Onias and Dositheus ("Contra Ap." ii. 5). Another Cleopatra, their daughter, in a war
that she waged against her son Ptolemy Lathyrus, also appointed two Jews as generals in her army,
Helkias and Ananias sons of the high priest Onias, who built the temple at Leontopolis ("Ant."
xiii. 10, § 4; 13, § 1).

Jews as Public Officials.

Under the Romans, rich Jews occasionally held the office of alabarch, as for example Alexander,
the brother of the philosopher Philo, and later a certain Demetrius (see for Alexander, "Ant." xviii.
6, § 3; 8, § 1; xix. 5, § 1; xx. 5, § 2; Demetrius, ib. xx. 7, § 3). This office must not be confounded
with that of the Jewish ethnarch; it was a civic trust, and probably identical with the arabarch, the
chief tax-collector on the Arabian or eastern shore of the Nile (Schürer, "Gesch." 3d ed., iii. 88 et
seq.). Such an office could only be filled by one who controlled a large capital, but it also provided
a source from which great profit might be drawn.Josephus' remark ("Contra Ap." ii. 5, end) that
the Roman emperors continued the Jews of Alexandria "in the positions of trust bestowed upon
them by the former kings—namely, 'the control of the river'"—refers probably to the frequent
employment of the Jews as alabarchs. By "control of the river" must be understood the collection
of taxes from the commerce thereon.
From these facts it may be concluded that the Ptolemies, as well as the Roman emperors, upon the
whole, treated the Jews of Alexandria with consideration. Of the Ptolemies, according to Josephus,
Ptolemy VII., Physcon, formed the only exception in his hostility toward them; and his conduct
was not influenced by any dislike of the Jewish religion, but was due to their attitude in party
politics. When Ptolemy VII. strove to wrest the throne of Egypt from Cleopatra—the mother of
Ptolemy VI. —the Jews, led by the general Onias, fought on the side of Cleopatra. It is said that
Ptolemy VII., angered by their opposition, ordered those Jews that remained in Alexandria to be
put in chains and cast before elephants. Contrary to expectations, the animals turned upon the
enemies of the Jews, and Ptolemy VII. was persuaded by one of his concubines to undertake no
further repressive measures against them ("Contra Ap." ii. 5). The same story is told of Ptolemy
IV. in the third book of Maccabees, which, however, can not be considered a trustworthy source.
Josephus (l.c.), as well as the third book of the Maccabees (vi. 36), makes note of a thanksgiving
festival, annually celebrated in Alexandria in commemoration of this miraculous preservation of
the Jews. That the latter enjoyed perfect religious freedom under the Ptolemies is not gain-said.
Some of their synagogues even seem to have exercised the right of asylum on an equality with the
heathen temples. There is in the Egyptian Museum at Berlin a Greek inscription of the later Roman
period ("Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum," t. iii. supplem. n. 6583) found in lower Egypt, which
says that the queen and the king (supposed by Mommsen to be Zenobia and Vabalathus)
commanded the renewal of an old inscription, the main contents of which were that King Ptolemy
Euergetes declared the synagogue inviolable—that is, granted it the right of an asylum. Both
Ptolemy III. and Ptolemy VII., Physcon, bore the cognomen Euergetes; but a pronounced friendly
attitude toward the Jews is to be expected from the former rather than the latter. Moreover, it is in
consonance with the custom prevalent during the reign of Ptolemy VII., that the queen should be
mentioned together with himself.

73
Under the Roman Empire.

Ptolemy VI. also permitted the building of the Jewish temple in Leontopolis. The rights of the
Jews were not altered under the Roman emperors. The persecution under Caligula was only a
passing episode. The Jews had express permission to discard the practise of the Cæsarean cult,
which was so contrary to their religion. Nevertheless, repeated and sanguinary conflicts occurred;
but the Roman emperors, Caligula excepted, were not responsible for these unfortunate events,
which had their cause largely in the deep-seated antipathy toward each other of the pagan and the
Jewish populations. In Roman times this feeling became more intense, and often culminated in
bloody strife. This mutual aversion was due to the religious peculiarities of Jews and Egyptians,
and was equally strong on both sides. The flame of popular passion burst forth, sometimes on one
side and sometimes on the other. These strained relations between the two races existed also in
other cities, especially where the Jews enjoyed civil or political rights. In Alexandria, however,
the situation was particularly dangerous, because the Jews formed a powerful element in the city.
The fundamental causes of the persecutions under Caligula may be traced to this circumstance;
though the emperor himself contributed to it in no small degree, by demanding of the Jews that
divine veneration which agreed with an ancient custom prevailing since the rule of the Ptolemies,
and which the heathen population therefore were quite willing to accord him.

Riot in Alexandria.

The actual conflict was begun by the heathen rabble of Alexandria; in the refusal of the Jews to
obey the imperial decree, they saw an excuse for opening up hostilities against them. The
persecution broke out in the autumn of the year 38, at the time when the Jewish king Agrippa was
on a visit to Alexandria. The king was first made the subject of ridicule in a pantomime, in which
an imbecile, named Karabas, was arrayed in imitation royal insignia, and scoffingly hailed as king,
with the Syrian title Maran (Lord). Once aroused, the populace was not easily satisfied, and
demanded that statues of the emperor be erected in the synagogues. Flaccus, the Roman governor,
from his knowledge of the emperor's peculiarities, did not dare to oppose them; he acceded to all
the demands of the Jew-baiters, who became more importunate with every concession made by
the governor. In quick succession, Flaccus ordered the placing of statues in the synagogues;
deprived the Jews of civil franchise by an edict; and finally permitted a general persecution of
them. The enraged heathens now fell upon the Jewish inhabitants of Alexandria; their dwellings
and shops were plundered; the Jews themselves were cruelly maltreated and killed, and their dead
bodies mutilated. Some were publicly burned, and others dragged alive through the streets. Some
of the synagogues were destroyed, and some desecrated with an image of Caligula. Flaccus not
only made no attempt to restrain the violence of the mobs, but of his own initiative instituted
barbarous regulations against the Jews. He caused thirty-eight members of the gerusia to be
manacled and hurried to the theater, where, before the eyes of their enemies, they were publicly
scourged, some of them to death.

Philo's Commission to Rome.

The subsequent events, from the autumn of 38 till the death of Caligula in 41, are not recorded in
detail. Flaccus was suddenly recalled in the year 38, and banished to the island of Andros, where
he was put to death by order of the emperor. It is highly improbable, however, that the condition
of the Jews underwent any favorable change during the reign of Caligula. The commission that

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proceeded to Rome under the leadership of the philosopher Philo was treated with contempt by
the emperor, and seems to have met with utter failure, due, no doubt, to the simultaneous
appearance, before the emperor, of another delegation from Alexandria—headed by Apion, the
well-known opponent of the Jews—which counteracted the endeavors of the Jewish
commissioners. It was only upon the death of Caligula and the accession of Claudius that the Jews
were enabled to regain their former rights; and this was followed by a considerable period of
quiet. On ascending the throne Claudius immediately restored all rights to the Jews ("Ant." xix. 5,
§ 2), and among those liberated was the alabarch Alexander, who had been imprisoned by Caligula
(ib. 5, § 1). The chief authority for the history of this persecution are the two works of Philo, "In
Flaccum" and "De Legatione ad Cajum" (compare "Ant." xviii. 8, § 1). The recently discovered
papyri throw further light on this subject. They show how Claudius punished the instigators of the
persecution. Philo mentions Isidorus and Lampon as the worst two of the agitators ("In Flaccum,"
§§ 4, 15-17.) Both were ordered to Rome by Claudius; and in a solemn council, consisting of
twenty-five senators and sixteen of consular rank, they were tried and condemned to death. This
appears from a papyrus text, the fragments of which have been carefully published by Th. Reinach
("Rev. Ét. Juives," 1895, xxxi. 161-178). From a casual remark in another papyrus relating to
events of a subsequent period, it appears that the sentence was carried into effect ("The
Oxyrhynchus Papyri," ed. by Grenfell and Hunt, part I., 1898, No. 33; Deissmann, "Theologische
Literaturzeitung," 1898, cols. 602-606).

Renewed Persecution.

New conflicts arose under Nero and Vespasian, closely connected with the great Jewish uprising
in Palestine. In Alexandria a very serious struggle broke out, at about the same time as in Palestine,
the cause of which was insignificant, but in which the Jews took such a threatening stand that the
governor, Tiberius Alexander, a Jew by birth and a son of the alabarch Alexander, was obliged to
call out the Roman troops against them. Peace was restored only after much shedding of blood
("B. J." ii. 18, § 7). A few years later, after the close of the war in Palestine, a serious revolt,
instigated by the Sicarii in Alexandria, was suppressed by the more considerate element of the
Jewish population. Nevertheless, the governor, Lupus, thought it advisable, after the destruction
of the Temple of Jerusalem, to close the one at Leontopolis ("B. J." vii. 10). The great revolt of the
Egyptian Jews under Trajan (114-117) was attended by enormous loss of life. At first the Jews had
the advantage over the Greeks, who in a battle outside the gates of Alexandria were beaten and
compelled to retreat into the city; but here they gained the upper hand, and massacred the Jewish
inhabitants.These events are recorded by Eusebius "(Hist. Eccl." iv. 2; "Chronicon," ed. Schoene,
ii. 164 et seq.; "Orosius," vii. 12; the statement also in Yer. Suk. v. i, concerning a massacre caused
by Trajan, must refer to these events. Compare Derenbourg, "Essai sur l'Histoire de la Palestine,"
pp. 410-412). The city itself must have suffered considerably from these contentions, for Hadrian
found it necessary to restore it in great part (Eusebius, "Chronicon").

Hellenism Influences Judaism.

Notwithstanding the marked contrast between the views of life held by the Jews and the pagans,
the influence of Hellenism did not fail to impress a peculiar stamp upon the intellectual
development of the Alexandrian Jews. Indeed, the commingling of the Jewish religious teachings
with the spirit of Hellenism nowhere went so far as in that city; though here, as elsewhere, the
Jews remained true, in all essentials, to the religion of their forefathers. Of this statement there are

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many convincing confirmations. Like their brethren in Palestine, they assembled in the synagogue
every Sabbath to hear the reading of the Law and the Prophets, and for the other religious services.
According to Philo, there were many synagogues (πρōσευχαί) scattered throughout the city of
Alexandria. One of them is mentioned by him as being especially large and magnificent ("De
Legatione ad Cajum," § 20; ed. Mangey, ii. 568). It is, without doubt, the same synagogue which
is described in the rabbinical writings as being constructed in the form of a large basilica. It
contained seventy-one golden chairs corresponding with the number of the elders. In the center
was a wooden platform, upon which stood the ḥazan, who, at the conclusion of each blessing, gave
the signal with a flag for the congregation to respond with the Amen. The worshipers were not
indiscriminately seated, but were separated according to their respective trades (Tosef., Suk. iv.ed.
Zuckermandel, p. 198; Yer. Suk. v. i.). There can be little doubt that the Alexandrian Jews also
observed the new moon and the annual festivities in the same manner as did the other Jews. Two
feasts peculiar to the Alexandrians are casually mentioned; one in commemoration of the
translation of the Bible into Greek (Philo, "Vita Moysis," ii. § 7; ed. Mangey, ii. 140 et seq.), and
a second in celebration of the miraculous deliverance from the elephants. Very little reliable
information is at hand concerning the part taken by the Alexandrians in the cult of the temple at
Leontopolis. It is probable that they offered sacrifices there without in the least neglecting their
duties toward the Temple of Jerusalem. Philo remarks incidentally that he himself proceeded to
the paternal sanctuary (in Jerusalem) as a delegate to pray and to sacrifice ("De Providentia";
Eusebius, "Præparatio Evangelica," VIII. xiv. 64, ed. Gaisford; according to the Armenian
translation in Aucher, "Philonis Judæi Sermones Tres," etc., p. 116).According to the Mishnah
Ḥallah, iv. 10, the Alexandrians also brought their Ḥallah to Jerusalem, which, however, was not
accepted. Some Alexandrian Jews submitted various legal questions to Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah
(Neg. xiv. 13: Niddah, 69b et seq.; compare Bacher, "Ag. Tan." i. 185-187, 1884).

Greek in the Ritual.

Although the religion of their forefathers was so faithfully followed, the Jews of Alexandria
nevertheless imbibed, to a great degree, the culture of the Greeks. Not many generations after the
founding of the community, the Torah was translated into Greek (perhaps under Ptolemy II.; at all
events not much later). It was read in Greek in the synagogues; indeed this was the language chiefly
used in the service (Schürer, "Gesch." 3d ed., iii. 93-95). Greek must, therefore, have been the
vernacular of the lower classes also. The better classes studied Greek literature in the schools, and
read Homer, the tragic poets, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. This intimate acquaintance with
Greek literature naturally exerted a profound influence upon the Alexandrian Jews. They became
Greeks without, however, ceasing to be Jews.
The philosophers whose views were accepted by a few of the highly educated Jews were Plato,
Aristotle, and the Stoics. Under such influences the Jews of Alexandria produced an extensive and
varied literature. They wrote history and philosophy, as well as epic and dramatic poetry.
Apologetics and polemics against the heathen found an important place in their literature, for the
battle between the two camps was fought out also in the literary arena. Distinguished Alexandrian
literati attacked Judaism very bitterly (Manetho [or Manethon], Lysimachus, Chæremon, and
Apion). The Jews, on their side, conducted their defense chiefly in such a manner as to bring out
the sublimity of their faith and the grandeur of its history. They sometimes took the offensive, and
disclosed the inanity of idolatry and the ethical evils of paganism, exhorting and admonishing the
heathen population to conversion. Their favorite method was to attribute such admonitory

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utterances to pagan authorities, particularly the highly venerated Sibyl (see Hellenistic
Literature and also Sibylline Oracles).

Blending of Religious Ideas.

The constant daily contact of the lower class of Jews with the pagans in Alexandria resulted in the
absorption of many superstitions. Among the less intelligent, Jewish and pagan witchcraft joined
hands, as did Jewish faith and Greek philosophy among the more enlightened (Schürer, "Gesch."
3d ed., iii. 294-304). This blending of religious ideas prevailedmore or less wherever Jews and
Gentiles came into direct contact, but was especially strong and marked in Alexandria (Hadrian,
"Letter to Servianus"; in Vopiscus, "Vita Saturnini," chap. viii.; in the "Scriptores Historiæ
Augustæ," ed. Peter, 1865, ii. 209). In spite of all this, Judaism retained its peculiar characteristics
even here. From Philo's intimation that because of the allegorical interpretation, many had failed
to give due value to the literal meaning of the Law, it must not be concluded that large numbers of
Jews habitually broke the Law. Philo himself affords proof that even those who most favored the
allegorical interpretation still kept to the letter of Scripture ("De Migratione Abrahami," § 16; ed.
Mangey, i. 450). A certain laxity may indeed have obtained in some quarters; but in its essential
points, the law was everywhere observed by the Hellenizing Jews as long as they remained within
the pale of the synagogue.

Samaritans.

It may be well to append here whatever is known of the history of the Samaritans in Alexandria
and in Egypt (compare Juynboll, "Commentarii in Historiam Gentis Samaritan§," pp. 38-41, 43-
45, Leyden, 1846). Alexander the Great is said to have settled Samaritans in the Thebaid ("Ant."
xi. 8, § 6, end). At the time Ptolemy I., Lagi, conquered Palestine, he took with him many prisoners,
not from Judea or Jerusalem alone, but also from Samaria and from those living near Mount
Gerizim, and settled them in Egypt ("Ant." xii. 1). In a papyrus belonging to the middle of the third
century B.C., mention is made of a village called Samaria in central Egypt ("The Flinders-Petrie
Papyri," part ii., ed. by Mahaffy, pp. [14] 2, [88] 9, [93] 4, [94] 22, [96] 12, Dublin, 1893). During
the reign of Ptolemy VI., Philometor, the Jews and Samaritans in Egypt are said to have brought
before the king a dispute as to which was the true center of worship, Jerusalem or Gerizim ("Ant."
xiii. 3, § 4; compare xii. 1, end). The existence of the Samaritans in Egypt is also implied in letters
of the emperors Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius to the prœfectus Augustalis ("Codex
Theodosianus," ed. Hænel, xiii. 5, 18). It can further be proved that they lived there during the
Middle Ages, and even till the seventeenth century (see Juynboll, pp. 43-45; Heidenheim,
"Nachrichten über die Samaritaner [in Ægypten] aus einem Handschriftlichen Reisejournale aus
dem 15. Jahrhundert" in "Vierteljahrsschrift für Deutschund Englisch-Theolog. Forschung u.
Kritik," 1867, iii. 354-356; Brüll, "Die Samaritaner in Kairo" in Brüll's "Jahrb." 1885, vii. 43-45).
For further reference to Jews in Alexandria in medieval times, see Egypt.

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 Association Internationale Nebi Daniel

A Bittersweet Love Song to Jewish Alexandria

Lost Egypt comes alive in Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s 1978 Hebrew idyll ‘Alexandrian
Summer,’ in a first English translation

ANDRÉ ACIMAN WRITES:20

On December 21, 1951, Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, aged ten and accompanied by his parents, left
his home on Rue Delta in Alexandria to rejoin his two brothers who had already moved to Israel.
That the whole family decided to leave Egypt as early as 1951 shows that they had the uncanny
prescience to read the writing on the wall long before most Egyptian Jews realized that their days
in the country were numbered.

The military coup that was to overthrow King Farouk in 1952 and, with his ouster, eventually
dissolve all remnants of multi-national life in Egypt, can only confirm the Gormezano Gorens’

20
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/aciman-alexandrian-summer

78
sense that life as they’d known it in Alexandria was fast coming to an end. Surging anti-Western
and anti-Semitic rhetoric on the streets and in radio broadcasts had turned Egypt into a tinderbox
that was to explode with the Suez Canal War of 1956, a war that proved disastrous to Egypt’s
European community. French and British nationals were instantly expelled, their exodus
immediately followed by the expulsion of the majority of Egypt’s 85,000 Jews, most of whose
ancestors had been living along the Nile and its Delta for more than a millennium and long before
the advent of Islam.

Alexandrian Summer is a nostalgic, farewell portrait of a world that was fast expiring but still
refused to see that history had written it off. The outward signs were deceptive enough to placate
everyone’s worst fears: money, beaches, tennis, races, gambling, servants, friends, visits, outings,
sugary delights; the whole fabric of day-to-day life smoothed over by that invigorating source of
nattering called gossip, guile, and more gossip.

This, after all, was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-sexual, multi-everything society where
Coptic, Jew, Muslim, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox lived tolerably well together and where
multilingualism was the order of the day. Everyone was part Levantine, part European, part
Egyptian, and one hundred percent hodgepodge, just as everyone’s sentences were spiced with
words and expressions lifted from French, Italian, Arabic, Ladino, Turkish, Greek, English, and
whatever else came by. Tart-to-toxic bons mots in a mix of six to eight languages could singe you
just enough to shake you up but without causing any damage. Similarly, the mix of populations
was never perfect, and cultures and creeds jostled one another without scruple. There again, the
tussling was amicable enough and never deadly. But no one was fooled for long. The peaceful
coexistence of so many creeds and nationalities may have been asking too much of mankind and
in the end was too good to be true. It never lasts; it never did.

But this is still summer, and as happens every year, hordes of Cairenes would descend upon
Alexandria to summer there. The host family and their guest family go back years together. The
son of one family is a jockey who hopes to win on the racetrack, while the daughter of the other
family asks him to choose between her and horses. She tempts him at the beach with her body, but
the young man resists, only to end up being taken to a brothel by his father. Meanwhile, his younger
brother is a compulsive sex machine who’ll undress for any boy who so much as cuddles up to
him. There are many more characters, each one, in the end, destined to spar with the other, even
when there’s something like love or not quite love between them. Nothing is ever perfect. In the
end nothing could patch up the billowy screen that unbeknownst to everyone was fast being ripped
apart.

Things could get worse. When a Jewish jockey wins the summer’s race against a Muslim, a virulent
fever of anti-Semitism erupts upon the city, and Alexandria is almost ready to burst into flames.
Anti-Semitism is brutal and ugly, but Gormezano Goren is by no means unaware that the
contemptuous treatment of Arabs, particularly of Arab servants in Jewish and European
households, is no less disquieting a harbinger of Muslim unrest and rage. A servant should never
stop to think that a Jewish boy’s toy train could cost seven times what he earns to feed his kids
each month.

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This striking example highlights Gormezano Goren’s light touch whenever seeking to convey the
resentment and bitterness forever brewing beneath the surface in Muslim-Jewish relations. In
another passage, he nimbly demonstrates how combustible were the dealings between both groups
by showing what happens when an Egyptian jockey accuses his Jewish competitor of drugging his
racehorse. Mass hysteria could easily erupt. These are small, incidental observations but they speak
volumes. Ultimately, in a world being scuttled far too quickly for anyone to gauge the extent of
the damaged relations between Arabs and Jews, Gormezano Goren’s words are as prophetic as
they are disturbing: “Times have changed, and Jews have changed.”

Alexandrian Summer is not so much the story of a peculiar culture or of a particular class or even
of a specific moment in history. It is the story of what could only be called a “way of life”—an
altogether unquantifiable and elusive term that conveys only a fraction of what life was like for
the Jews of Egypt. Every day was lived as if it were the last. What came after Egypt was fantasy
and fear.

I knew that way of life well. I was born into it on the very year Yitzhak left Alexandria. That way
of life lasted another fifteen years until my Jewish family too was expelled from Egypt. I knew the
beaches, I knew the taste of special foods, I knew the scent of clothes drying in the sun. And I
knew Rue Delta since I too lived on that street. It is on Rue Delta that I spent my last night in
Alexandria. Our house, like the Gormezano Gorens,’ was located midway between the beach and
the racetrack. I too have watched the races and walked from the races to the beach and from the
beach to the races.

In my long years away, I have met others who had lived on Rue Delta. I have even met someone
whom I did not know in Alexandria but with whom it came as a total surprise to discover that the
two of us had grown up in the identical building. At first, I found it hard to believe, and in the café
where we met that first time, I asked her to map out the layout of her parents’ apartment on a paper
napkin. Hers seemed totally wrong. It couldn’t possibly have been the same building. But then it
suddenly hit me that she was not wrong at all; her apartment was identical to ours except that hers
had the exact, but reverse layout. What luck, I thought. Everything seemed settled … except for a
round room. I asked her if her apartment had a round room in the back. No, theirs didn’t have such
a room. But then she thought about it, gave out a sudden cry, and had an epiphany. Yes, theirs did
have a round room and she knew its precise spot. It was just that she hadn’t thought of that room
in over sixty years! No one used that room, no one lived in it. In both our cases it had become a
storage, bric-a-brac space. And as we described that room to each other, we could almost make
out the moldy, woody smell of the space, which in her family’s, as in ours, was the last stop for
dead chairs and defunct cabinets and chests of drawers.

Alexandrian Summer is a return to a mythical past, to a lost paradise that was not really a paradise
but that, being lost, has, over the years, acquired all the makings of one. One’s childhood is always
yearned for, and this is young Yitzhak’s—or Robert, as he is called in the book—paradise.

I still remember our last year in Alexandria. By then, our assets had been frozen and my father’s
factory nationalized, and even our cars were no longer ours, though we were allowed to drive them.
Our days were numbered, and we knew it.

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Or did we? My father claimed that he would have remained in Egypt even without an income.
Come to think of it I myself could not even conceive of a life outside Egypt. Our living room and
in the end even the round room in the back were packed with suitcases, and still all of us were
convinced this was all for show, as if by going through the motions of packing and pretending we
were indeed leaving, we were merely placating a hostile deity who would, at the last instant, spare
us the final leave taking and tell us it was all a test, just a test. We were never going away.

Ironically, that final year is the one I remember best, because it was the most tumultuous I
remember my grandmother and her sister, my great aunt, and I remember the bickering with
neighbors and the tussles with my brother and the fights between my parents, and the loud screams
when our servants fought with those of our neighbors; everyone’s temper was volcanic that year,
because it was clear that things were falling apart and that we were on our last legs and still couldn’t
believe that the end was near.

But I remember Saturdays. We weren’t religious, though I recall my great aunt turning on the radio
loud on Saturday mornings to hear songs in both Yiddish and Ladino. She preferred the Ashkenazi
songs and prayers, and to the sound of these songs I remember she would start preparing for
Saturday’s lunch, because there were always guests on Saturdays. And even if we didn’t
exaggerate the Sabbath spirit, still there was a festive air about the household, and our cook Abdou,
who spoke Ladino, would put on his cleanest outfit and utter those few words in Hebrew that he
knew far better than I did. In Gormezano Goren’s own words, “A pleasant breeze blew from the
sea. The tumult of bathers sounded from afar: Muslims, Christians, and Jews desecrating the
Sabbath. On the street, cars honked hysterically. The entire city rumbled and roared, and
nevertheless a Sabbath serenity was felt all around.”

Every Alexandrian remembers this way of life and knows it is forever lost. At the very
least, Alexandrian Summer gives us one final, splendid season in this mythical metropolis.

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