Comments on: Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi and Hanukkah http://menachemmendel.net/blog/2009/12/11/yosef-hayyim-yerushalmi-and-hanukkah/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=yosef-hayyim-yerushalmi-and-hanukkah Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:07:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Jeffrey R Woolf http://menachemmendel.net/blog/2009/12/11/yosef-hayyim-yerushalmi-and-hanukkah/comment-page-1/#comment-2385 Jeffrey R Woolf Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:55:52 +0000 http://menachemmendel.net/blog/?p=2081#comment-2385 I don't understand. Doron Mendels is yet another 'buster of myths' whose so-called 'discovery' is not very impressive. Banning the most central of Jewish rituals is highly unusual for polytheist leaders, and could have led nowhere by to assimilation. It is also a clear causus belli. Furthermore, makes absolutely no sense (especially forty years after anthropological insights began to enrich historiography) that an entire literature or martyrology would be made up of whole cloth. This smack of yet another instance of historians searching for a headline (vide, Ariel Toaff). I don’t understand. Doron Mendels is yet another ‘buster of myths’ whose so-called ‘discovery’ is not very impressive. Banning the most central of Jewish rituals is highly unusual for polytheist leaders, and could have led nowhere by to assimilation. It is also a clear causus belli. Furthermore, makes absolutely no sense (especially forty years after anthropological insights began to enrich historiography) that an entire literature or martyrology would be made up of whole cloth.

This smack of yet another instance of historians searching for a headline (vide, Ariel Toaff).

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