 From the end of the second century BCE, however, many philosophers were active propagandists for  antisemitism.[1]  One might have expected that Stoicism, with its cosmopolitism and rational humanism, would have avoided this kind of attitude. In fact, as we can see in Posidonius, Seneca, or Chaeremon, Stoic antisemitism was a product not of racism, but of an erroneous understanding of rationalism and universalism. For these men, the Jews were a very superstitious nation, blemished by strange habits and strong animosity towards foreigners. Except for the case of Varro, the Roman scholar of the first century BCE who appreciated Jews for their refusal of images (Lehmann 1997), it would be impossible to give an example of a Greek or Latin text of this period showing sympathy or even interest toward the Jews. This was a condition of which Philo could not have been ignorant. In the background of his life and of his work lay an antisemitism growing more and more violent. In contrast to Flavius, who decades later wrote the Against Apion in order to refute Greek antisemitism, Philo seems to have preferred to extol the virtues of Judaism than to fight against the adversaries of Jews, as we can see in the extant fragments of his Hypotetica.