The Torah and cosmopolitanism

During the Hellenistic period, which seems so ancient yet so modern, Jewish authors explored ways in which Jewish tradition and Greek thought converged. This was also the period when the history of Jewish philosophy began. For Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC - 50 AD), the Torah, which he saw as the law of Moses, was a philosophical path to a better life. Unlike Spinoza, who rejected philosophical interpretations of the Torah in the 17th^century , the Judeo-Hellenistic authors proposed a deeper, hidden meaning in the Bible. It was a philosophy at the service of theology, but a philosophy nonetheless. According to them, philosophy is "the greatest of goods" that man possesses, and, according to some Judeo-Hellenistic authors, Moses was even its inventor. For Philo, the Torah is the equivalent of the law of nature (a concept of Stoic origin). He who follows the Torah's commandments is therefore in tune with the world. It follows that "the man who submits to the law is thereby a citizen of the world". Moses thus becomes the ideal symbol of the cosmopolitan, a profoundly Hellenistic term that first appears in Greek literature in Philo of Alexandria.