The treason of Yosa Meshita (Genesis Rabba 65:27): a rabbinic reflection on the fate of the Temple lampstand.

Abstract

The historicity of rabbinic literature has long fascinated scholars—never more than during the last third of the twentieth century. Approaches ranged from complete credulity of claims made by these complex sources to total disregard of these texts as historical documents. Some have even despaired of historical research itself. In recent decades a broadly ahistorical “literary” or “linguistic” “turn”2 has dominated scholarship. This approach deprives rabbinic culture— and thus ancient Jews—of an actual “history” in favor of what becomes at its most extreme an atemporal literary present. The debate has been heated and polemical, exposing deep fissures that go far beyond scholarship. The most extreme positions were championed in the United States by “historian of reli- gion” Jacob Neusner and more starkly in Israel under the rubric of Hebrew literature by Yonah Fraenkel and his students. (from Introduction)