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Volume 74 › Table of Contents › Article Abstract
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The Temple Mount, the Rabbis, and the Poetics of Memory
Yaron Z. Eliav, University of Michigan |
In a good deal of rabbinic literature the sages convey information, both directly and indirectly, about their past as individuals, a group, and a nation. Scholars in the last century and a half have invested tremendous effort in weighing the credibility of these records. This study explores a different angle of the historicity question, that of rabbinic collective memory, the set of conventions and images that organizes narratives and discourses about the past. Portrayals of the Temple Mount in tannaitic literature create the impression that they derive from the milieu of Second Temple Judaism. Rabbinic sages in the post-70 era present a picture of the Temple Mount as an essential part of the preceding Second Temple Jewish experience and an inseparable part of reality in that earlier generation's consciousness. The current study refutes this wide spread notion; it maintains that the authors of rabbinic literature endowed a relatively peripheral biblical appellation, namely the term "Temple Mount," with an aura of holiness and transformed it to represent a concept of sacred space. This innovative development led them to redesign their view of the present and at the same time remake their memory of the past.
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