Dr. Jamal Amer, defined by the Hamas-backed Palestine newspaper as an expert on Jerusalem affairs, ahistorically claimed that the Temple is actually a Roman place of worship, built by the "Arab" King Herod, and has no connection to the Jews, historically and religiously. Amer also claimed that Jews falsify history due to greed regarding the holy city.As usual with such things, I do not have access to Dr. Amer's comments directly, so my comments are in reply to the summary in this article.
There are three claims here: (1) the Temple was a Roman place of worship; (2) King Herod was an Arab; and (3) the Temple has no historical or religious connection with the Jews.
I'll start with (2). I have discussed the question of whether Herod was an Arab at length here. The short version is that one can make an argument that he was Arab by genetic background, but he was clearly culturally Jewish. Make of that what you will.
The other two claims go together. Herod's Temple was hardly free of connections with Judaism. It was a renovation of a much older Judean temple (discussion here). Although Herod answered to the Romans for his authority, so presumably they did not oppose the project, it certainly wasn't a "Roman place of worship" in the sense that Romans had any active role in running the worship at the site or that Romans rather than Jews worshipped there (although gentiles were allowed in one court). A Greek inscription was recovered from the Temple Mount in multiple copies which warns that any "foreigner" (ἀλλογενής) was to keep to the Court of the Gentiles and that any attempt to move onto the rest of the site was subject to the death penalty (Greek text here). Josephus knew of and referred to the inscription.
This takes Jewish-Temple denial in a slightly new (to me) direction, which acknowledges the existence of Herod's Temple (which, after all, is pretty difficult to get around), but claims that it had nothing to do with Judaism. This is going even further that Yassar Arafat was willing to go: he at least acknowledged that Herod's Temple was a Jewish Temple.
Ultimately I don't think that claims such as we find here are advanced as serious history. They collapse upon any serious examination and are just aimed at low information readers who will not follow them up. I take the time to respond to them in the hope that some of those readers might find their way here and learn what the evidence actually shows.
