Bringing Down the Temple House – Engendering Tractate Yoma

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.

“Happy families may all be alike, but the priestly family is unhappy in its own ways, shows Marjorie Lehman in her fine-grained readings of Babylonian Talmud Tractate Yoma. Lehman’s story is one of patriarchy and hierarchy, but also of vulnerability and reflection, as the tractate turns towards the practices of self-affliction that, until today, characterize the day of atonement. Tractate Yoma reads, if not quite like a novel or poem, then like a series of meditations on the shifting meanings of home and the anxieties about continuity and control. You will leave Bringing Down the Temple House never thinking the same way again about ‘the house’ as a Jewish cultural topos.”

• IntroductionChapter 1: Unsettling the Temple BayitChapter 2: Violence in the Temple: Father Priests and Their SonsChapter 3: Mothers and Sons: Broken HousesChapter 4: From Inside Out: Kimhit’s HouseChapter 5: Intergenerational Transmission and the Problem of MothersChapter 6: Sexuality Inside and Outside the Temple HouseChapter 7: Sustaining the Rabbinic HouseholdChapter 8: Vulnerable Bodies in Vulnerable HousesChapter 9: Purity and Impurity: From Priest to RabbiAfterwordAcknowledgementsNotesBibliographyIndex