Hellenists, originally Jews who would fain have seen Jewish thought and life more or less transformed in spirit as well as fashion after a Greek pattern; eventually those who by contact with Greek civilisation became Grecianised, and were open to learn as much from the civilisation of the Greeks as was consistent with the maintenance in their integrity of the principles of their own religion.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Helle * Heller, Stephen