180 A History of Judaism
was as downcast as the other Jewish ambassadors to Caligula when the
emperor responded to their pleas for the Temple in Jerusalem and the
Jews of Alexandria by asking quizzically ‘Why do you refuse to eat
pork?’ Philo wrote that ‘We answered, “Different people have different
customs” .. .’ He did not give the philosophical answer he had offered
to his Jewish readers in the Exposition, that pork was forbidden to Jews
precisely because it is the most delicious of meats, so that abstention
might encourage self- control. Such a philosophical answer might have
sounded plausible enough in Rome in the mid- first century ce, when
many philosophers subscribed to vaguely Cynic notions of abstinence.
But it is probable that Philo was seen by the emperor less as a philos-
opher than as a Jew.^31
No certain trace survives of any continuation of Philo’s Judaism in
the centuries immediately after 70 ce. The biblical scenes on the fres-
coes from the third- century synagogue at Dura- Europos in modern
Syria (see Chapter 12) have been interpreted as references to the mys-
tical allegories of Philo, but the interpretation is dubious. Possible traces
of Philonic influence have been traced in the opening of Bereshit Rab‑
bah, a rabbinic commentary on Genesis from the fourth to sixth century
ce, in which R. Oshaiah Rabbah is said to have stated that the Torah
declares: ‘I was the working tool of the Holy One, blessed be He. In
human practice, when a mortal king builds a palace, he builds it not
with his own skill but with the skill of an architect. The architect more-
over does not build it out of his head, but employs plans and diagrams
to know how to arrange the chambers and the wicket doors. Thus God
consulted the Torah and created the world.’ The formulation looks
rather similar to Philo’s comment in his De Opificio Mundi that:
God, being God, assumed that a beautiful copy would never be produced
apart from a beautiful pattern, and that no object of perception would be
faultless which was not made in the likeness of an original discerned only
by the intellect. So when He willed to create this visible world He first fully
formed the intelligible world, in order that He might have the use of a
pattern wholly God- like and incorporeal in producing the material world,
as a later creation, the very image of an earlier, to embrace in itself
objects of perception of as many kinds as the other contained objects of
intelligence.But if this was influenced by Philo, it was unacknowledged, and for a
millennium and a half Philo’s variety of Judaism became invisible to
Jews, with occasional exceptions such as the individual who wrote