At the end of the third and the beginning of the second century Palestine was a shuttlecock tossed between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids; but in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes (c. 150 B.C.E.) it finally passed out of the power of the Ptolemaic house, and from this time the Palestinian Jews had a different political history from the Egyptian.  The compulsory Hellenization by Antiochus aroused the best elements of the Jewish nation, which had seemed likely to lose by a gradual assimilation its adherence to pure monotheism and the Mosaic law.  The struggle of foe as against the Hellenizing party of his own people, which, led by the high priests Jason, Menelaus, and Alcimus, tried to crush both the national and the religious spirit.  The Maccabaean rule brought not only a renaissance of national life and national culture, but also a revival of the national religion.  Before, however, the deliverance of the Jews had been accomplished by the noble band of brothers, many of the faithful Palestinian families had fled for protection from the tyranny of Antiochus to the refuge of his enemy Ptolemy Philometor.  Among the fugitives were Onias and Dositheus, who, according to Josephus,[5] became the trusted leaders of the armies of the Egyptian monarch.  Onias, moreover, was the rightful successor to the high-priesthood, and despairing of obtaining his dignity in Jerusalem, where the office had been given to the worthless Hellenist Alcimus, he conceived the idea of setting up a local centre of the Jewish religion in the country of his exile.  He persuaded Ptolemy to grant him a piece of territory upon which he might build a temple for Jewish worship, assuring him that his action would have the effect of securing forever the loyalty of his Jewish subjects.  Ptolemy “gave him a place one hundred and eighty furlongs distant from Memphis, in the nomos of Heliopolis, where he built a fortress and a temple, not like that at Jerusalem, but such as resembled a tower."[6] Professor Flinders Petrie has recently discovered remains at Tell-el-Yehoudiyeh, the “mound of the Jews,” near the ancient Leontopolis, which tally with the description of Josephus, and may be presumed to be the ruins of the temple.

It is difficult to arrive at an accurate idea of the nature and importance of the Onias temple, because our chief authority, Josephus,[7] gives two inconsistent accounts of it, and the Talmud references[8] are equally involved.  But certain negative facts are clear.  First, the temple did not become, even if it were designed to be, a rival to the temple of Jerusalem:  it did not diminish in any way the tribute which the Egyptian Jews paid to the sacred centre of the religion.  They did not cease to send their tithes for the benefit of the poor in Judaea, or their representatives to the great festivals, and they dispatched messengers each year with contributions of gold and silver, who, says Philo,[9] “travelled over almost impassable roads, which they looked upon as easy, in that they