THE MOMENTOUS RECEPTION in 1990 for the exhibition ‘Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home, 1880–1950’ at the Jewish Museum in New York signalled that, for Jews looking back on their arrival and assimilation, home is the site of a creative process that results in, or at least proposes, the formation of ethnic cultural identity (Braunstein and Joselit 1990). The director of the museum, Joan Rosenbaum, noted in her comments on the exhibition that this process entails a ‘dialogue with the larger society about social, religious, and economic values’. Indeed, it was the continuous redefinition of the way one lived at home that became, according to Rosenbaum, ‘the basis for Jewish life as we know it today’ (1990: 7). One of the curators of the exhibition, Jenna Weissman Joselit, argued that the home ‘play[s] host to changing notions of Jewish domestic culture’ and functions to transmit a civilization as well as a cultural inheritance (1990: 3).

What is significant about this analysis of the American Jewish home is its ability to prompt those of us who work with rabbinic literature to think about home as a site for the exploration of Jewish self-perception. The rabbis of the Talmud, in particular, who lived as part of, as well as apart from, a dominant Graeco-Roman/Persian society, used home as a site of an ongoing encounter not only with domestic norms, but also with much of what we associate with the world outside the home. People's livelihoods, their ritual lives, as well as their commitment to study were all central components of the rabbinic household. In other words, the home was a microcosm of the rabbinic world that housed much of what came to define rabbinic culture—observance, study, family, and occupation. Therefore it is around the trope of home that the rabbis grapple with the extent of their power and their sense of authority both within their own group and outside it.

In talmudic literature, the rabbis think about home by ‘thinking with’ the structure that most closely resembles it, the sukkah (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 61).