Did the Rabbis Cause the Hasmoneans to be Forgotten? A Reconsideration / ההשכיחו חכמינו את זכר החשמונאים? עיון מחודש בשאלה ישנה

This article offers a fresh perspective on a stormy scholarly debate that has been ongoing for almost two centuries surrounding the rabbinic attitude toward the Hasmonean dynasty. To date, the scholarship has not discriminated between geographically and historically distant sources, combining testimony from the Second Temple period with that from late rabbinic sources. This article takes a different approach, making a clear distinction between traditions that most likely belong to the Second Temple period and their secondary reworking in rabbinic citations. By separating ancient embedded fragments from their deliberate reworking, it is possible to characterize both the attitude toward the Hasmoneans in temple times and the shifts that took place among the redactors and transmitters of rabbinic literature. This reconsideration demonstrates that the rabbis indeed sought to erase the memory of the individual Maccabean brothers, but that they did not display a negative attitude toward the Hasmonean dynasty as an institution. Their outlook on the generations of the Hasmonean leaders — whether positive or negative — was the outcome of their attempt to present history from the 'rabbinic' perspective, in which the Torah and its scholars took center stage.