This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Antiochus IV, who ruled the Seleucid empire from 175 to 164 BCE, outlawed the central practices of Jewish religious life in Jerusalem: circumcision, Sabbath observance and possession of the Torah were all forbidden under his policy, a documented suppression distinct from an ordinary tax or tribute dispute between a ruler and a subject population. He went further and installed a foreign cult inside the Second Temple itself, an act the books of the Maccabees describe as the abomination of desolation, a documented desecration distinct from a merely political grievance left unconnected to the sanctuary's own religious use.
That suppression provoked the Maccabean Revolt, led by Judah Maccabee and his brothers, a documented armed uprising distinct from passive resistance or emigration as a response to the same decrees. By 164 BCE the revolt had recaptured Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple that Antiochus's cult had occupied, a documented military and religious reversal distinct from a suppression that simply ran its course unresisted.
That the rededication which followed the Maccabean victory is commemorated every year afterward in the festival of Hanukkah, observed long after Antiochus's own Seleucid empire had passed from the historical stage, marks his suppression of Jewish observance as a documented case where a ruler's attempt to erase a religious practice became instead the origin of a holiday still kept in its place.