Note 172 — Chapter XI · JUDAEA AND THE JEWS.

The special hatred of Gaius against the Jews (Philo, Leg. 20) was not the cause, but the consequence, of the Alexandrian Jew-hunt. Since therefore the understanding of the leaders of the Jew-hunt with the governor (Philo, in Flacc. 4) cannot have subsisted on the footing that the Jews imagined, because the governor could not reasonably believe that he would recommend himself to the new emperor by abandoning the Jews, the question certainly arises, why the leaders of those hostile to the Jews chose this very moment for the Jew-hunt, and above all, why the governor, whose excellence Philo so emphatically acknowledges, allowed it, and, at least in its further course, took personal part in it. Probably things occurred as they are narrated above: hatred and envy towards the Jews had long been fermenting in Alexandria (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 9; Philo, Leg. 18); the abeyance of the old stern government, and the evident disfavour in which the prefect stood with Gaius, gave room for the tumult; the arrival of Agrippa furnished the occasion; the adroit conversion of the synagogues into temples of Gaius stamped the Jews as enemies of the emperor, and, after this was done, Flaccus must certainly have seized on the persecution to rehabilitate himself thereby with the emperor.