Jewish Texts and History • Numenius of Apamea was Jewish?

The invitation suggested in the formula that one is a Hellene not by birth but by education was eagerly taken up by the more responsive among the sons of the conquered East. Already in the generation after Aristotle we find them active in the very sanctuaries of Greek wisdom. Zeno, son of Mnaseas (i.e., Manasseh), founder of the Stoic school, was of Phoenician-Cypriote origin: he learned Greek as an adopted language, and throughout his long teaching career at Athens his accent always remained noticeable. From then {330 BC},until the end of antiquity the Hellenistic East produced a continual stream of men, often of Semitic origin, who under Greek names and in the Greek language and spirit contributed to the dominant civilization. The old centers of the Aegaean area remained in existence, but the center of gravity of Greek culture, now the universal culture, had shifted to the new regions. The Hellenistic cities of the Near East were its fertile seedbeds: among them Alexandria in Egypt was pre-eminent. With names generally Hellenized, we can mostly no longer determine whether an author from Apameia or Byblos in Syria, or from Gadara in Trans-Jordan, is of Greek or Semitic race; but in these melting-pots of Hellenism the question finally becomes irrelevant—a third entity had come into being.