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Updated: May 13, 2025
Spirituality lacking knowledge and allegorism in excess led to this result. In Philo they are controlled by affection for the Torah, and by a conviction of the need for national cohesion.
On the other hand, the Jewish interpreters were trying to reach the Greek standpoint when they set themselves to show that the writers of the Bible had anticipated the philosophers of Hellas with systems of theology, psychology, ethics, and cosmology. Allegorism, it may be said, is the instrument by which Greek and Hebrew thought were brought together.
Thus Akiba, who wrote an elaborate allegorical work upon the Song of Songs, held that the book was the most profound in the Bible, and Rabbi Judah similarly regarded the book of Job. Hence, their allegorism was more natural, more real, and truer to the spirit of that which they interpreted.
Their imitation of Philo's allegorism serves to mark the important place that he occupied in the learned world during the seventeenth century; and supports, however slightly, the suggestion that he influenced, directly or indirectly, the supreme Jewish philosopher of the age, Baruch de Spinoza. That he was well known in Holland at the time is shown in divers ways.
Whoever believes in the Torah, it is written, shall be exalted, as it is said, "From the gift of the law man attains the heritage of God, and by that heritage he reaches Heaven." In this passage of Palestinian allegorism, it may be noticed that the Torah is regarded as a spiritual bond between man and God, and as a sort of intermediary power between them.
The Alexandrian Jews, though the form of their writing was influenced by the Greeks, probably brought with them from Palestine primitive traces of allegorism. Allegory and its counterpart, allegorical interpretation, are deeply imbedded in the Oriental mind, and we hear of ancient schools of symbolists in the oldest portions of the Talmud.
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