Abroad their lot was equally enviable. Some modern critics had doubted the settlement of Jews in Egypt until the third century. But recent discoveries (notably Mr. R. Mond’s _Aramaic Papyri_) prove that a Jewish community existed in Egypt even in the centuries preceding Alexander. Now persuasion and the hope of profit drew many thousands of them to Alexandria, Cyrene, and other centres of Hellenistic culture. In all these places they lived on terms of perfect equality with the Greek colonists. The newly-built city on the mouth of the Nile soon became a seat of Jewish influence and a school of learning for the Jewish nation. Under the benign rule of the Ptolemies the Jews prospered, multiplied, and attained success in every walk of life, public no less than private. Of the five divisions of Alexandria they occupied nearly two. Egypt was then the granary of Europe, and the corn trade lay largely in Jewish hands. Refinement came in the train of riches, and freedom begot tolerance. The Jews cultivated Greek letters, and some of them became deeply imbued with the spirit of Greek philosophy and even of art. This friendly understanding between the Jewish and the Greek mind gave to the world the mystic union of Moses and Plato in the works of Philo and the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which was to prepare the way for the advent of Christianity. And yet the bulk of the Alexandrian Jews remained a peculiar people. Greeks and Egyptians had fused their religions into a common form of worship. But the Jews were still separated from both races by the invincible barriers of belief, law, and custom. They still looked upon Jerusalem as their metropolis, and upon Alexandria as a mere place of exile. In the midst of paganism they formed a monotheistic colony. Their houses of prayer were also schools of Levitical learning, where the Torah was assiduously studied and expounded. Their one link with the State was their own Ethnarch, who acted as supreme sovereign and judge of his people, and represented it at Court.