Forgetting Ancient Judaism: The Second Temple Past and Its Jewish Receptions

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has vastly expanded our knowledge of ancient Judaism. But this recovery comes with a stark reminder of just how much became lost to later Jews—not just in Greek but also in Hebrew and Aramaic. How did so much of the history and literature of Second Temple Judaism (586 BCE–70 CE) drop out of the Jewish tradition? How could a people of memory forget so much? In this book, Annette Yoshiko Reed explores these questions by engaging multiple moments of rediscovery, while reconsidering the cultural creativity of loss and forgetting. 

The topic of forgetting has been neglected in both Jewish studies and memory studies. Putting the two in conversation, Reed rethinks forgetting as more than the failure of remembrance. By inverting the conventional frames of academic engagement with the Jewish past, this book makes the case that attending to silences and erasures enables more rigorous historical inquiries and a fuller understanding of Jewish pasts.