My memory might be wrong about this but when I first read first Maccabees it seemed to me like a group of Israelites deliberately practiced foreign religious rituals and then the Israelites that claimed they did not want to practice these rituals attacked the foreigners for trying to get them to perform these rituals after the other group deliberately invited them in to do so, they next proclaimed to be related to the Spartans by ancestry and tried to persuade the Spartans to be military allies