Naftali Cohn

When the rabbis composed the Mishnah in the late second or early third century C.E., the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed for more then a century. Why, then, do the Temple and its ritual feature so prominently in the Mishnah? Against the view that the rabbis were reacting directly to the destruction and asserting that nothing had changed, Naftali S. Cohn argues that the memory of the Temple served a political function for the rabbis in their own time. They described the Temple and its ritual in a unique way that helped to establish their authority within the context of Roman dominance.

At the time the Mishnah was created, the rabbis were not the only ones talking extensively about the Temple: other Judaeans (including followers of Jesus), Christians, and even Roman emperors produced texts and other cultural artifacts centered on the Jerusalem Temple. Looking back at the procedures of Temple ritual, the rabbis created in the Mishnah a past and a Temple in their own image, which lent legitimacy to their claim to be the only authentic purveyors of Jewish tradition and the traditional Jewish way of life. Seizing on the Temple, they sought to establish and consolidate their own position of importance within the complex social and religious landscape of Jewish society in Roman Palestine.

During the reigns of Antoninus Pius (138-161 CE) and Caracalla (211-217 CE), the city of Sepphoris minted coins labeling itself with the old title of "hieras," holy. At roughly the same time, the rabbinic Mishnah put forth the idea that the cities of the land of Israel and their central squares were holy places. This article investigates what made cities sacred in the early rabbinic understanding, and what it meant for them to be sacred. Drawing on the more explicit paradigms of the Temple and the Synagogue, the author argues that the spaces of cities were made sacred in multiple ways by human activity-by ritual activity, the construction of boundaries and spatial interiority, the parallel relationship established to the Temple, the presence of Torah scrolls, and by the presence of a large crowd of the people of Israel. For the rabbis, this was necessarily a rabbinic type of sacredness of space, affirming a rabbinic idea of ethnic "Israeliteness," while at the same time affording the powerful experience of the sacred, with the attendant effects of creating feelings of social connectedness, of purpose, and of safety and security.