220 CHAPTER EIGHTGreco-Egyptian common law, not Jewish law. Modrzejewski was so intent on
finding evidence of the Jewishpolitikoi nomoiin the papyri because he had
argued that the Torah was translated into Greek, at royal initiative, to serve as
such. He had in mind the parallel case of the translation into Greek in the
third century of the Egyptian laws compiled originally at the command of
DariusI.Buttheparallelisimprecise:Egyptianswerecompelledtopatronize
Egyptian courts and submit to judgment in accordance with Egyptian law,
whereas Jews had the right, but were not compelled, to use their own laws.
(TheJewishpoliteuma,atotalizingcorporatestructuresimilartothemedieval
community, is now generally regarded as an invention of modern scholarship
based on elementary misinterpretation of the evidence.)^14
Nevertheless, despite the mainly negative evidence of the papyri, all from
the Egyptian countryside, Modrzejewski’s ingenious thesis should not be dis-
missed out of hand. There may well have been Jewish courts in Alexandria,
wherethetextureofJewishlifewasinevitablydifferentfromthatinthecoun-
tryside because of the density of the Jewish population, the constant flow of
immigration from Palestine, and so on. But even there, Jews were never for-
mally obliged to patronize their own courts, and it is unclear how many of
themeverfeltunderanypressuretodoso.Philo,writingtowardthebeginning
oftheperiodofRomanruleinEgypt,informsusthattheJewsofhisnativecity
had attitudes toward Jewish law ranging fro mcareful adherence to co mplete
apathy, and yet all of the mwere Jews, at least as far as Philo was concerned,
andnone aresaid tohavesuffered anypenalties fortheirdisbelief orpractical
neglect.^15
In sum, in several places in Ptolemaic Egypt, Jews constituted voluntary
ethnic corporations, one of whose activities was the construction and mainte-
nance of buildings devoted to the worship of their ancestral God through
prayer. Whether or how they observed Jewish law in other ways is unknown,
buttheethniccorporationsseemnottohavehadcontrolovermostoftheJews’
legal activities. The corporations were voluntary, compartmental institutions,
concerned primarily with cultic activities. It is overwhelmingly likely that not
all Jews in rural Egypt formed corporations or patronized prayer houses; in
some places the Jews may have been too few, in others, too diffident, and in
stillotherstheymayhavehadwaysofexpressingtheirJudaismthatwecannot
recognize. In all these respects, the Jews were no different fro mother groups
of immigrants in Hellenistic Egypt.
(^14) TheessentialcriticismisprovidedbyC.Zuckerman,“HellenisticPoliteumataandtheJews:
A Reconsideration,”SCI8–9 (1985–1988): 171–85.
(^15) For discussion, see A. Mendelson,Philo’s Jewish Identity(Atlanta: Scholars, 1988), pp. 51–
62; G. E. Sterling, “ ‘Thus Are Israel’: Jewish Self-Definition in Alexandria,”Studia Philonica
Annual7 (1995): 1–18.