The Status of the Jews in Egypt. By W. M.
Flinders Petrie. (G. Allen and Unwin. 2s. net.)—This Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture to the Jewish Historical Society is a masterly sketch of a large subject, with illustrations from the Old Testament and from the Egyptian records which the author knows so well. Abraham and Joseph were welcome in Egypt while the Semitic dynasty of the Hyksos reigned there. The fall of the Hyksos reduced the Jews to a servile condition and caused them to migrate to Palestine. The Persian conquest opened Egypt anew to Jewish settlement. There was a large Jewish temple at the First Cataract. Alexander favoured the Jews, who flocked into the country, occupied a whole quarter of the new city of Alexandria and dominated the Delta. Some thirty miles north of Memphis, these settlers under the Ptolemies erected a copy of the Temple at Jerusalem on artificial hills. Two Jews commanded the army of Ptolemy VII. Caesar again, in return for Jewish support, bestowed special privileges
on the race. Unluckily for the Jews, those Zealots who escaped from Judaea after the fall of Jerusalem went to Egypt and stirred up trouble there as elsewhere, with the result that the Romans had to resort to severe measures. Since then the Jews have played no great part, politically, in Egypt. Professor Flinders Petrie does not fail to touch on the influence exerted by the Buddhist missions on the Greek-speaking Jews of Alex- andria, who transmitted the Eastern ideas to the Western world.
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