Introduction to the Theme: The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual (original) (raw)
The following group of essays emerged out of a seminar held at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in 2015. As section heads of Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity and Rabbinic Literature and Culture, tasked to think about how to address gaps in our fields, we recognized that despite a large amount of scholarship available on the Jerusalem Temple and its priesthood, there was a dearth of cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange, especially between ancient Jewish historians and those of us who engage in literary analysis of rabbinic sources. As a result, our divisions joined together to create “The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual,” taking advantage of the “seminar” format at the conference. Twelve scholars, each working with different source material and employing different methodological approaches, participated.
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of two-or-so centuries is no easier to characterize. tü/e can no longer assume that most of the pre-70 social and religious groupings evaporated in the wake of the destruction so as to allow rvhat remained of Jewish society and religion to coalesce around rabbinìc leadership. The opposite view, that Jewish religious identity largely collapsed (except for rhe small number of socially marginal rabbis) between 135 and 350 CE, is likewise difficult to sustain.2 The available direct evidence, either literar,v or archaeological, for the period immediately after 70 is too scanr to sar.' s-hat it meanr for Jews to identify themselves as such, except in some very general terms.s Second, the evidence that we do have fo¡ both 'before" and "after" is problematic for charting Jewish identity. Most of the extant literarv evidence for the Second Temple period has reached us through rç'o channels of preservation. There are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, plenteous as rhe.r' are, were collected and/ or produced by a relatively small sectarian communir¡'
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