Place as Fate: Alexandria
I should say at the outset that this essay was not planned so much as stumbled into. I was learning BT Yoma and reading the Alexandria Quartet in parallel, for reasons that had nothing to do with each other, and somewhere in that simultaneity a theme emerged that neither text quite contains on its own. There are probably not too many people who have read these works together, and yet, the fact that the city found its way into both of my readings at once feels, in some way, redolent of what each text has to say about the city.
There is a kind of city that exists as an underdog, or as a place whose glory days are long behind, buried somewhere in historical sediment. The area takes on the character of a “spent force,” a condition that seems to have crept into its very foundation. Lawrence Durrell spent four novels trying to say this about Alexandria, and what he arrived at, finally, was not an explanation but an atmosphere: the city as a closed system in which every form of brilliance, every passionate project of love or empire or mysticism, undergoes a slow conversion into wreckage and ruin. His Alexandria is not a place where things happen to fail, but where failure is a form of significance.
The Talmud, proceeding by entirely different methods and with entirely different concerns, arrives somewhere surprisingly adjacent. In Masechet Yoma, the rabbis discuss the Temple of Onias, built in Leontopolis by the son of Shimon HaTzaddik after he lost the struggle for the high priesthood in Jerusalem and took himself and his ambitions southward into Egypt. Oddly, the rabbis rule that the temple itself is not avodah zarah, though any priest who serves there is disqualified from serving in the Temple in Jerusalem. Essentially, this is a suspended judgment, an acknowledgment that Alexandria could produce something almost right, something like Jerusalem, and that the facsimile—you could say the inauthenticity—is the most Alexandrian thing about it. The structure existed, an exact replica of the Temple in Jerusalem. The sacrifices were offered, by a kohen, son of a kohen gadol. The menorah glittered in the Egyptian sun. But the divine presence was absent, and the building of the edifice itself in Egypt, of all places, provokes a sense of profound disquietude.
The City That Generates Its Own Fate
To speak of place as fate is to make a claim stronger than the obvious one, which is merely that environment shapes character or that history leaves marks. Every city does that much. The claim about Alexandria is different: that the city does not merely host its history but actively produces it, that something in the confluence of desert and delta, of Greek philosophy and Jewish scripture and Roman power, generates a particular destiny for everything that enters it. The destiny is to strive toward a center that is always located elsewhere, whether in Athens or Jerusalem or Rome.
This is why Alexandria's achievements are so paradoxically world-historical and so paradoxically incomplete. The Library of Alexandria aimed to contain all human knowledge and maybe it did, but then it was destroyed, and what remains is the idea of it, the suggestion of the possibility, which has proven both more durable and more haunting than the scrolls themselves could have been. Philo constructed an entire philosophical synthesis between Athens and Jerusalem, one of the great intellectual achievements of the ancient world, and yet the tradition that might have carried it forward never quite cohered, leaving his work to be preserved largely by Christians who needed him for their own doctrinal and historiographical purposes. The Septuagint translated the sacred tongue into the tongue of the empire, an act of both tremendous generosity and irreversible loss, and the rabbis never quite forgave it, and the church prefers to forget where it came from. Each of these is a world-making gesture that is somehow indicative of failure, or at least of not-quite-success.
Onias and the Counter-Temple
The Temple of Onias is the most concentrated version of this pattern. Onias IV arrived in Egypt carrying, or claiming to carry, the legitimate succession to the high priesthood of Jerusalem, and he built in Leontopolis something that was, by all accounts, a serious attempt at replication: a temple with proper dimensions, proper vessels, proper ritual procedure, and trained priests. The Talmud records that it functioned for something like three and a half centuries, which is astonishing because that’s longer than the Second Temple itself stood after its Hasmonean reconfiguration, and yet it occupies virtually no space in Jewish memory. Yoma treats it with a kind of careful ambivalence, neither fully legitimating its sacrifices nor fully invalidating them, which is in itself striking given the severe condemnation reserved for unauthorized places of sacrifice.
What the counter-temple reveals is that holiness is not portable, at least not this way. The portability takes on other forms—the scroll, the synagogue, the mikveh, the four cubits of the law. You can carry the forms, the vessels, the lineage, the knowledge of the proper procedures, and reconstruct them faithfully in another place, and what you will have is something that is almost the thing and therefore, in a way that a lesser imitation would not be, a demonstration of what is missing. The almost is more painful than the nothing. Leontopolis is more haunting than a pagan shrine would be precisely because it came so close, because Onias clearly understood what he was doing and did it as well as it could be done outside of the one city where it could be done completely. Alexandria received his project and preserved it and eventually, when the Romans destroyed the temple in the aftermath of 70 CE as a precaution against further Jewish revolt, erased it, and what remains is the Talmudic echo of unresolved legal questions about whether the priests who served there had disqualified themselves for service in Jerusalem.
Durrell’s Method and the Talmud’s Method
What Durrell understood about Alexandria, and what makes the Quartet worth reading, is that the city requires a particular narrative method to represent it honestly. Linear storytelling, with its implicit assumption that events have a settled meaning once they have occurred and been narrated, is inadequate to a place where meaning refuses to settle. His solution was to tell the same story four times from four perspectives, not as a relativist exercise but as a mimesis of what the city actually does to experience: it requires you to hold multiple, incompatible versions simultaneously without resolving them into a single account.
The Talmud does not tell stories in the way Durrell tells stories, but it shares this commitment to irresolution as a form of honesty. The sugya about Onias does not end with a ruling that dispels the ambiguity; it ends with the ambiguity intact, which is a different kind of conclusion, one that acknowledges the situation was genuinely complicated and that pretending otherwise would be a falsification. Both Durrell and the rabbis are circling something that cannot be fully recovered: a city, a temple, a moment of contact between the sacred and the historical that left traces but no clear record. Both treat the circling itself as the appropriate response.
What the Wreckage Produces
There is a temptation to read Alexandria's pattern of loss as simply tragic, as a long sequence of near-misses that add up to nothing, but this misses what is most interesting about the city's legacy. The wreckage is generative. Philo's failed synthesis became the vocabulary for early Christian theology. The Septuagint, however rabbinically suspect, carried Jewish monotheism into the Mediterranean world in a way that shaped everything that followed. The Library's destruction gave Western civilization its central myth of irretrievable knowledge, which has proven more motivating than any actual archive. And the Temple of Onias, suspended in Talmudic amber in its state of unresolved legitimacy, raises questions about diaspora, holiness, and the portability of the sacred that are still await a final resolution.
Durrell's characters enact the same logic. Justine does not simply fail at love; her failure at love produces Darley's understanding of something he could not have reached any other way. Balthazar's corrections to Darley's manuscript do not simply correct; they open up a space of interpretive vertigo that is itself the Quartet's central experience. The city takes what enters it, subjects it to its peculiar pressure, and returns it transformed into something more ambiguous and more interesting than it was. This is not consolation for the loss, but it is a description of what the loss actually does, which is different from mere destruction.
Alexandria is constitutionally unable to be the center, and the center is what both its Jewish inhabitants and its Hellenic inheritors most wanted it to be. Jerusalem held the Temple and Rome held the empire and Alexandria held the idea of surpassing both of them. What Yoma preserves in its careful ambivalence about Onias, and what Durrell preserves in his four-fold, contradictory portrait of a city in its last colonial afternoon, is the record of this striving: not its success, not its simple failure, but the irreducible dignity of the almost, the architectural and spiritual and literary achievement of having come so remarkably close.