Bringing Down the Temple House

Engendering Tractate Yoma

By: Marjorie Lehman

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eBook | 12 April 2022

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A feminist project that privileges the Babylonian Talmudic tractate as culturally significant.

While the use of feminist analysis as a methodological lens is not new to the study of Talmudic literature or to the study of individual tractates, this book demonstrates that such an intervention with the Babylonian Talmud reveals new perspectives on the rabbis’ relationship with the temple and its priesthood. More specifically, through the relationships most commonly associated with home, such as those of husband-wife, father-son, mother-son, and brother-brother, the rabbis destabilize the temple bayit (or temple house). Moving beyond the view that the temple was replaced by the rabbinic home, and that rabbinic rites reappropriate temple practices, a feminist approach highlights the inextricable link between kinship, gender, and the body, calling attention to the ways the rabbis deconstruct the priesthood so as to reconstruct themselves.

About the Author

Marjorie Lehman is professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is the author of The En Yaaqov: Jacob ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award–Nahum Sarna Memorial Award in the scholarship category. Recently she coedited two books, both of which were finalists for the National Jewish Book Award: Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination and Learning to Read Talmud.