This lecture explores the enigmatic history of the so-called Jewish Temple of Onias in Egypt.
Founded by the ousted Jerusalemite high priest Onias III somewhere in the Egyptian Heliopolite nome, the Temple of Onias was a phenomenon of ancient Diaspora Judaism and existed for over two centuries, outlasting even the great Temple of Jerusalem. However, the identity and the date of the foundation of the temple, and many other details concerning the temple, are contested.
Piotrkowski dates the foundation of the Temple of Onias to the 160s BCE, in the days of Antiochus IV, and the time of the latter’s defilement of the Temple and religious persecutions. This was a moment of major crisis and panic – perhaps one we underestimate. The building of the Temple of Onias, then, should be viewed as a coping-strategy, or a response to the loss (defilement) of the Jerusalem Temple and not necessarily as an act of rivalry, or schism, as it is oftentimes opined.
Thus, Onias III attempted to save the Jewish religion (elsewhere), in a time when the outcome of the Maccabean revolt was yet unpredictable.
Dr. Meron Piotrkowski is the Associate Professor of Ancient Jewish History at the University of Oxford. The focus of his research is on the Egyptian-Jewish Diaspora. He is the author of Priests in Exile: The History of the Temple of Onias and Its Community in the Hellenistic Period, and part of the team of commentators and contributors to the new Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum.
He is currently working on a monograph on the history of the Jewish community of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt during the Hellenistic-Roman and Byzantine periods based on papyrological evidence.
