Onolatry

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Onolatry is the supposed worship of the donkey during antiquity. In Imperial Rome, the charge of onolatry was used as a polemic against Jews and Jewish Christians. The association of Jews with donkeys was a common feature of Hellenic as well as Latin ethnographic and historical writings, and included accusations of worshipping a golden donkey head and even sacrificing foreigners to it at intervals. The charge was likely first used against Jews in Egypt, where donkeys were at some points associated with Set, the murderer of Osiris who is in turn destroyed by Isis. The Egyptian and Greek Alexandrians would equate the Judahite deity Yahweh as being Set/Typhon, a chaotic god of the deserts, storms and violence. It is first attested in the second century BCE, and was used against Christians extensively in the first and second centuries CE before disappearing almost entirely in the third. The accusation against the Jews is discussed by Josephus in his Against Apion II.7. As well as those targeted...

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