Search this Site

For, although Antiochus surnamed Epiphanes sacked Jerusalem and plundered the temple [naos], his successors on the throne restored to the Jews of Antioch all such votive offerings as were made of brass, to be laid up in their synagogue, and, moreover, granted them citizen rights on an equality with the Greeks. Continuing to receive similar treatment from later monarchs, the Jewish colony grew in numbers, and their richly designed and costly offerings formed a splendid ornament to the temple [hieron] (Josephus, BJ 7.44–45).

They collected great bodies of men to attack the synagogues, of which there are many in each section of [Alexandria]. Some they ravaged, others they demolished with the foundations as well, others they set fire to and burnt regardless in their frenzy and insane fury of the fate of the neighbouring houses, for nothing runs faster than fire when it gets hold of something to feed it. I say nothing of the tributes to the emperors which were pulled down or burnt at the same time, the shields and gilded crowns and the slabs and inscriptions, consideration for which should have made them spare the rest . . . The synagogues which they could not raze or burn out of existence, because so many Jews live massed together in the neighbourhood, they outraged in another way, thereby overthrowing our laws and customs. For they set up images of Gaius in them all and in the largest and most notable a bronze statue of a man mounted on a chariot and four . . . no doubt they had extravagant hopes of getting praise and reaping greater and more splendid benefits for turning our synagogues  into new and additional precincts consecrated to him, though their motive was not to honour him but to take their fill in every way of the miseries of our nation. In three hundred years there was a succession of some ten or more [kings of Egypt], and none of them had any images or statues set up for them in our synagogues by the Alexandrians, although they were of the same race and kin as the people and were acknowledged, written and spoken of by them as gods. It was only natural that they who at any rate were men should be so regarded by those who deified dogs and wolves and lions and crocodiles and many other wild animals on the land, in the water and the air, for whom altars and temples and shrines and sacred precincts have been established through the whole of Egypt (Philo, Legat. 132–139).

Note also that it took merely the insertion of idols into the synagogues to transform them into sacred precincts of the imperial cult.