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Il tempio giudaico di Leontopoli in Egitto. Identità politica e religiosa dei Giudei di Oni (150 a.C.-73 d.C.)

The book collects and analyses all the extant literary and documentary sources (including historiography, other literary sources, over ninety Greek inscriptions and one papyrus) on the temple of Leontopolis and the Jewish community of Onias in Egypt. The interdisciplinary nature of the project (covering fields such as Jewish History, Biblical Studies, Greek Epigraphy, Papyrology, Graeco-Roman History and Historiography) entailed long preparatory studies over very different and difficult areas. Critical analysis of the contradictory, fragmentary, polemical and enigmatic evidence took considerable time. The final monograph was the result of three years of full-time commitment.

This book surveys the varied literary and documentary sources on the temple founded at Leontopolis in Egypt under Ptolemy VI Philometor (180-145 BC) by Onias, a high priest exiled during the Maccabaean revolt, and destroyed by Vespasian in AD 73. The book argues that the temple was founded ca 150, when the rise of Jonathan Maccabaeus as high priest and political leader inaugurated the Hasmonean kingdom, that it was never ‘schismatic’, but promoted a revival of Judaism amongst Egyptian Jews, and that it was not seen as ‘incompatible’ with the Deuteronomic precept of the unicity of the Jerusalem temple.