The status of the Jewish temple in modern Hebrew literature (1848–1948): a big-data analysis

Abstract

Since its final destruction in antiquity, the memory of the temple in Jerusalem has served as the nexus of Jewish liturgy and messianic worldview. This article has sought to examine the ideological and cultural roles played by the image of the Jewish temple in the Hebrew literature of 1848–1948. Toward this end, I formulated a broad corpus comprised of homogeneous genres and authors, namely those which situate the temple as their main focus. The evidence arising from this corpus suggests that the conceptual role of the temple underwent no dramatic transformations; the temple in this literature, taken as a whole, is mostly indistinguishable from the historical, religious, and nationalistic symbol that featured in the Jewish tradition over nearly 2,000 years. The bulk of the present corpus places the temple in conceptual and historical contexts that are familiar and very similar to those of the historical temple in all its contexts, without removing it from the domains of Jewish nationalism or classical religiosity. These findings contravene my initial presupposition that the discourse of the temple had undergone a metamorphosis in the 19th and 20th centuries, the image of the temple had changed into an abstract symbol for world peace, moral perfection, and intellectual and scientific excellence.