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[Moses] wills that no king or despot swollen with arrogance and contempt should despise an insignificant private person but should study in the school of the divine laws and abate his supercilious airs (Philo, Dec. 20).

From [Jacob's] household, increased in the course of time to a great multitude, were founded flourishing and orderly cities, schools of wisdom, justice and religion, where also the rest of virtue and how to acquire it is the sublime subject of their research (Philo, Praem. 66).

Philo's brilliant mind and hunger for knowledge help explain why he frequently referred to the synagogues as "schools" (didaskaleia). The fact that he uses this term only to refer to the synagogues (5x total) suggests that, in Alexandria and elsewhere throughout the empire, these structures served as Jewish counterparts to the Greek philosophical schools, which commonly met in the stoas within the agoras or public squares.