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 led them to
piety." The Alexandrian-Jewish writers, without exception, are silent
about the work of Onias; Philo does not give a single hint of it, and
on the other hand speaks[10] several times of the great national
centre at Jerusalem as "the most beautiful and renowned temple which
is honored by the whole East and West." The Egyptian Jews, according
to Josephus, claimed that the prophecy of Isaiah had been
accomplished, "that there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst
of the land of Egypt" (Is. xix. 19). But the altar, it has recently
been suggested,[11] was rather a "Bamah" (a high place) than a temple.
It served as a temporary sanctuary while the Jerusalem temple was
defiled, and afterwards it was a p