The conditions of the population of Alexandria have been previously discussed. It was the great market center of the East, and as such of the Mediterranean world, since the commercial and intellectual hegemony was always east of the Aegean Sea. The population had been a mixed one since its foundation. The warped notions that have often been held of the position of the Jews there are due to a failure to realize concretely how such a city would be likely to grow. The Greeks and Macedonians that were originally settled there undoubtedly constituted a real aristocracy, and made that attitude very thoroughly felt. One thing further is clear, that the native Egyptians, who probably formed the mass of the populace, looked upon these Greeks as they did upon all foreigners, with intense dislike. We have a document in which a Greek suitor in court impugns the credibility of Egyptian testimony against him because of the well-known hatred Egyptians bear toward Greeks.[225] Egyptian animosity toward Jews had been of longer standing simply because intercourse in close proximity was much older. Further, the Jewish colonies from early Persian times had always represented the foreign master. It was as natural, therefore, for this animosity to express itself in street-conflicts in Alexandria as for anti-Greek feeling to be manifested there. Those modern investigators who have confidently asserted that Alexandrian “anti-Semitism” was of Greek origin and leadership have permitted the rattle of the _cymbalum mundi_ to confuse their minds. For it is Apion and Apion alone that makes the claim that the Jews are especially embittered against Greeks, and seeks to create a general Greek feeling against them. His motives are too apparent to need comment, and there is no evidence whatever that he was successful. Further, it is the Egyptians Manetho and Apion whose tirades have a fiercely personal coloring. The Greek Alexandrians make their anti-Jewish polemics on the basis of general theories, and particularly lay stress on what was to them the perfectly irrational separatism which the Jews had made a part of their religion. As has been frequently shown, the relatively small fragments of these writers do not enable us to say how far this Jewish characteristic is used to point a moral, much as the modern clergy takes chauvinistic commonplaces to illustrate the evil results of doctrines they are attacking.