HELLENISTS ('Ελληνισταί). - This name designated the Jews of the diaspora (Acts 2:11; 6:1) who lived outside Palestine and spoke Greek. We have evidence of certain groups of these expatriates before 586, when a group of Palestinian Jews settled on the island of Elephantine, less than 10 km north of the first cataract of the Nile. The forced deportations carried out by the Babylonians and the Assyrians spread Israelite elements into Babylonia and among the populations of northern Assyria respectively. In the middle of the 4th century B.C. the deportation of Palestinian Jews to Hyrcania is said to have taken place, carried out by Artaxerxes III Ochus. From Palestine Judaism spread into Egypt and from Egypt elsewhere; it intensified its expansionist movement throughout the whole of the 3rd century B.C.
Many are the places that received the expatriates: Alexandria, Antioch, Apamea, Laodicea, Pergamum, numerous Greek islands and cities of Asia Minor, and Bactria as far as the borders of India. The most important center of the diaspora was Alexandria, where the Jews were attracted by Alexander the Great and later by the Ptolemies, with the granting of the same rights given to the Greeks. In the middle of the 1st century B.C. in Alexandria alone there lived more than 100,000 Jews. Although the Jews of the diaspora welcomed
Hellenic culture and civilization favorably (it was then that the Greek version of the Bible was made, to satisfy the religious needs of the Jews of Alexandria and Egypt who did not understand Hebrew), they nevertheless always remained faithful to the Yahwistic cult. In primitive Christianity they are remembered as the Hellenists (Acts 6:3), the first deacons, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Parmenas, etc.; and they are the ones who try to kill Paul, after the Apostle's flight from Damascus (Acts 9:29); some Hellenists of Cyprus and Cyrene, scattered by the storm that followed the death of Stephen, constituted at Antioch the first Church, which preached Christ also to the Greeks (Acts 11:20).