Maren Niehoff's intellectual biography of Philo of Alexandria is a powerful, thesis-driven portrait of a philosopher and theologian, who in spite of his large oeuvre so often escapes our understanding. Since Harry Austryn Wolfson's influential and courageous Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, published seventy years ago, few scholars were able (or dared) to bring Philo's thinking into a systematic monographic form. Niehoff's Philo is less revolutionary than Wolfson's, who understood Philo as the founder of medieval philosophy tout court, to eventually be replaced by Spinoza. Niehoff, too, sees in Philo an author who in some respects was ahead of his time: as author of biographies, especially De vita Mosis, Philo “anticipates Plutarch's Lives in its anecdotal style, its overall pedagogical aim, and its paideia, with a Stoic sense of self and some Platonic reminiscences” (129). But Niehoff does not postulate that Philo ushered in a paradigmatic change in intellectual history. In Niehoff's Philo the revolution is limited to Philo himself, that is, to his intellectual development.

According to Niehoff, Philo's journey to Rome as the head (if we can believe Josephus, Ant. 18.259) of a Jewish embassy had an enormous impact on his way of thinking. Virtually nothing in Philo's philosophy, theology, and his understanding of the world was left untouched by his visit to Rome. According to Niehoff, Rome was the eye-opener for Philo, the ferment for a significant intellectual development. As a matter of fact, no “other author [of that period] is known to have undergone such a significant intellectual development as Philo” (242). When after the anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria in the year 38 CE, Philo traveled to Rome to negotiate with Gaius Caligula on behalf of the Alexandrian Jews, he ended up staying much longer in Rome than he might have planned (and longer than many scholars have assumed). According to Niehoff, Philo probably also led the negotiations with Caligula's successor Claudius and may have stayed in Rome to write the so-called “Historical Writings,” the “Philosophical Writings,” and the “Exposition of the Law” (approximately in the years 40–49 CE). I find Niehoff's chronology of Philo's oeuvre quite convincing. That Philo first wrote the “Allegorical Commentary” and that the “Expositio Legis,” including De vita Mosis, was written at this later time seems reasonable (keeping in mind that the categories “Allegorical Commentary” and “Exposition of the Law” are not Philo's).

Niehoff's argument that Philo's journey to Rome became “a crucial experience” (3) is attractive. We know of other intellectual and political figures around the time of Philo whose work was certainly influenced by visits to Rome: Plutarch comes to mind, but also Herod the Great. While Niehoff is right to argue that Philo's visit to Rome left an important impression on him, I think she overstates this point. Can the features in Philo's thinking that according to Niehoff are typically Roman really only be explained with having been in Rome? After all, at the time of Philo, Alexandria was no remote village at the margins (or, as Niehoff puts it, “the periphery,” 242) of Greco-Roman culture, but rather one of the intellectual and economic hubs. Strabo describes how exports by sea from Alexandria exceed the imports (Strabo 17.1.7).

According to Niehoff, Philo's “Exposition” mirrors in many respects specifically Roman trends: thus the three (extant) biographies of the “Exposition of the Law” (Abr., Jos., Mos.) mirror the biographical genre “which had just come in vogue in Rome” (8; cf. 109–30). But does one have to be in Rome to write biographies at the time of Philo? Biography is a rather heterogeneous literary genre and its Hellenistic traces are difficult to follow, but it was certainly present before this time as well as outside of Rome (especially in Peripatetic circles).

In an intriguing chapter entitled “Biblical Ladies in Roman Garb” Niehoff argues that Philo's move to Rome also changed his way of presenting women. She contends that it is only in his later Lives where women become “positive flesh-and-blood figures. They no longer need to erase their femininity and turn into ethereal symbols in order to be appreciated” (131). Thus in De Abrahamo Sarah becomes an exemplary wife (cf. Abr. 93), and Zipporah and Miriam become competent daughters (Mos.). That major change in Philo's presentation of gender roles—including Zipporah's “proto-feminist role”—is, again, “inconceivable without Roman discourses” “which have no parallel in Alexandrian sources” (143–44). Niehoff builds up a powerful argument; some of the differences in the presentation of women between the “Allegorical Commentary” and the “Exposition” are indeed striking. And yet, here too, I wonder to what extent Philo really needed Rome to “integrate” (131) women. The “Allegorical Commentary” is less inclined to leave room for expansive portraits and thus represents a very different literary genre than the later “Exposition” (an aspect underestimated by Niehoff throughout the book). I also wonder whether the companionship imagined by Philo in De Abrahamo could not as easily have been influenced by “Alexandrian discourses.” After all, the ideal of mutual love of husband and wife is very much a topic of the ancient novel, which is strongly linked to Roman Egypt. When Niehoff writes about Abraham and Sarah in De Abrahamo that “Philo imagines Abraham as a Roman prince who is accompanied by his courageous wife on military campaigns” (136), a Jewish Hellenistic, not necessarily a Roman parallel, comes to mind: Aseneth.

Philo's intellectual biography, according to Niehoff, reveals development from an “inward author in Alexandria,” believing in a transcendent God, to “an ambassador and writer in Rome,” now “confident about God's presence in the world” (224). Leaving Alexandria behind and moving to Rome opened up many new possibilities: “The observant Jew,” Niehoff writes on De vita Mosis, “becomes not only a citizen of the world, as Philo promises at the beginning of the Exposition, but also an exemplary citizen of the Roman empire” (161). Once in Rome, the Jews “emerge as an energetic and enterprising people” (67). But were the intellectual conditions really that different in Alexandria and in Rome? Did Philo's orientation become more “worldy” (9) in Rome? Was Alexandria really such a shtetl? At the time of Philo, Alexandria was the capital of the Roman province of Egypt, the second largest city in the Roman Empire, with a wide-ranging and continuing Hellenistic tradition. Roman culture was present in Egypt, and Egyptian culture in Rome (with the Isis cult as the most explicit example). Niehoff is certainly aware of the interconnectivity in the Roman Empire (see her newly edited book Journeys in the Roman East: Imagined and Real [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017]), but she overemphasizes the one (seemingly open-ended) trip to Rome, which in her understanding, had “an immediate effect upon his choice of literary genre, Jewish identity, and philosophical orientation” (3). One aspect of the argument should not be overlooked: if Niehoff is right and Philo stayed at least three years in Rome (38–41 CE) and possibly wrote a large part of his oeuvre there, this would enhance our otherwise fragmentary picture of Roman Judaism of the first half of the first century CE.

Niehoff has written an impressively learned book with a strong thesis. Few scholars have dared to write a monograph on Philo and to try to track down Philo's whole “intellectual” life. And even if not all readers will be convinced by her main thesis, all will be impressed by Niehoff's enormous knowledge and profit from this very first intellectual biography of Philo.