A statue in the Temple: the Alexandria pogrom and the embassy to Gaius

In the year 38, in Alexandria, the governor Flaccus gave the Jews over to the mob: synagogues were wrecked, the community was herded into a single quarter, people were killed. The community sent an embassy to Rome, and Philo stood at its head. The emperor Gaius, whom men call Caligula, received them in passing, strolling through his gardens and giving orders about the building work, and asked one thing: why they did not sacrifice to him as to a god.

The order. Out of the same conviction came the order to set the emperor's statue in the Temple in Jerusalem. For us this is not one humiliation among many—it is a direct repetition of what Antiochus did, which is why there is Hanukkah. And it was understood so at the time.

How it passed. Not by a single miracle but by a chain of human delays. Petronius, governor of Syria, who was ordered to carry it out, dragged his feet: crowds came out, lay down before the troops and said they would die sooner than see it; he wrote to Rome that time was needed. Agrippa I, the emperor's friend from childhood, interceded at Rome. And then Gaius was killed by his own men—at the beginning of the year 41—and the order died with him.

The memory. In Megillat Taanit the twenty-second of Shevat is marked as the day when "the work was annulled that the enemy had said he would set up in the Temple." Commentators refer that line to this. The day ceased to be kept along with the whole of Megillat Taanit after the destruction—but the line remained.