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Jacob Neusner (born July 28, 1932, Hartford, Connecticut) is an influential as well as controversial academic scholar of Judaism, and the most prolific. He has written or edited over 924 books about the Torah, Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud, Midrash and other Jewish writings.
Biography
Neusner, a leading figure in the American academic study of religion, has achieved this prominence and influence in three ways. He revolutionized the study of Judaism and brought it into the field of religious studies; he built intellectual bridges between Judaism and other religions and thereby laid the groundwork for durable understanding and respect among religions; and, through his teaching and his publication programs, he advanced the academic careers of younger scholars and teachers that he approved of (and set back the careers of those he did not), both within and outside the study of Judaism. Neusner’s influence on the study of Judaism and religion is broad, powerful, distinctive, and enduring.
Educated at Harvard University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the University of Oxford, and Columbia University, Neusner began his career in the early 1960s, when religion was a minor field in American universities, largely limited to biblical studies and Christian (mostly Protestant) theology. However, the study of Judaism was spreading to colleges and universities during the 1960s, and courses in "Judaism" became essential parts of the curriculum, just as the wider study of non-Christian religions began to be required topics generally in higher education at the time.
Neusner made it his career agenda to bring critical questions to the study of Judaism. He was also interested in the more general study of religion. Neusner was the first to see that the sources of classical Judaism were not constructed to answer standard historical questions. He invented the documentary study of Judaism, through which he showed, relentlessly and incontrovertibly, that each document of the rabbinic canon has a discrete focus and agenda, and that the history of ancient Judaism has to be told in terms of texts rather than personalities or events. His Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago 1981; translated into Hebrew and Italian) is the classic statement of his work and the first of many comparable volumes on the other documents of the rabbinic canon.
Neusner’s discovery of the centrality of documents led him to an even more decisive perception of Judaism as a system: an integrated network of beliefs, practices, and values that yields a coherent worldview and picture of reality for its adherents. This approach led to a series of very important studies on the way Judaism creates categories of understanding and how those categories relate to one another, even as they emerge diversely in discrete rabbinic documents. Neusner’s work shows, for instance, how deeply Judaism is integrated with the system of the Pentateuch, how such categories as "merit" and "purity" work in Judaism, and how classical Judaism absorbed and transcended the destruction of the Jerusalem in 70. His work depicts rabbinic Judaism as the result of human labor responding to what its adherents believe is God’s call and demonstrates its persistent vitality and imagination.
In the process of producing his scholarship, Neusner translated, analyzed, and explained virtually the entire rabbinic canon - a massive compendium of texts - into English. The Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Palestinian Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud, and nearly every work of rabbinic Bible interpretation are available to scholars of all backgrounds because of Neusner’s scholarship. In all of this, Neusner helped to make Judaism and its study available to scholars and laypeople.
Neusner’s work did not stop with his exposition - in translation, description, and interpretation - of Judaism. Neusner deliberately built outward from Judaism to other religions. He sponsored a number of conferences and collaborative projects that drew different religions into conversation on common themes and problems. Neusner’s efforts have produced conferences and books on, among other topics, the problem of difference in religion, religion and society, religion and material culture, religion and economics, religion and altruism, and religion and tolerance. These collaborations build on Neusner’s intellectual vision, his notion of a religion as a system, and would not have happened otherwise. By working toward general questions from the perspective of a discrete religion, Neusner produced results of durable consequence for understanding other religions as well.
In addition to these efforts, Neusner has written a number of works exploring the relationship of Judaism to other religions around difficult issues of understanding and misunderstanding. For instance, his A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (Philadelphia 1993; translated into German, Italian, and Swedish, establishes a religiously sound framework for Judaic-Christian interchange and earned the praise of Pope Benedict XVI. He also has collaborated with other scholars to produce comparisons of Judaism and Christianity, as in The Bible and Us: A Priest and A Rabbi Read Scripture Together (New York 1990; translated into Spanish and Portuguese). He has collaborated with scholars of Islam, conceiving World Religions in America: An Introduction (third edition, Nashville 2004), which explores how diverse religions have developed in the distinctive American context. He also has composed numerous textbooks and general trade books on Judaism. The two best-known examples are The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism (Belmont 2003); and Judaism: An Introduction (London and New York 2002; translated into Portuguese and Japanese).
Throughout his career, Neusner has established publication programs and series with various academic publishers. Through these series, through reference works that he conceived and edited, and through the conferences he has sponsored, Neusner has advanced the careers of dozens of younger scholars from across the globe. Few others in the American study of religion have had this kind of impact on students of so many approaches and interests.
Neusner is often celebrated as one of the most published scholar in history. He has written or edited more than 900 books. He has taught at Columbia University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Brandeis University, Dartmouth College, Brown University, University of South Florida, and Bard College. He is a member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He is the only scholar to serve on both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. He also has received scores of academic awards, honorific and otherwise.
Neusner’s solidified a field of scholarship: the academic study of Judaism. He has profoundly influenced the academic study of religion. He has created durable networks of interreligious communication and understanding. Neusner. In additional to his positions as Research Professor of Religion and Theology and Bard Center Fellow, Neusner is Senior Fellow of Bard’s Institute of Advanced Theology. He has taught at Bard College since 1994.
Contributions to scholarship
Neusner is most well known for applying critical-historical scholarship to the documents of classical Rabbinic literature. One of his innovations has been his form-analytical presentation of Rabbinic texts, in which documents are presented in a Harvard outline format, which allow the reader to easily follow the flow of the argument.
Neusner has aimed to make Rabbinic literature useful to specialists in a variety of fields within the academic study of religion, as well as in ancient history, culture and Near and Middle Eastern Studies. His work has concerned the classic texts of Judaism and how they form a cogent statement of a religious system. These classical writings form the canon of a particular statement of Judaism. That canon defined the paramount Judaism in both Christendom and Islam from the seventh century to the present. Neusner addresses the circumstances of its formation, in the beginnings of Western civilization, the issues important to its framers, the kind of writings they produced, the modes of mediating change and responding to crises.
Neusner has translated and reread for historical purposes the classic documents of Judaism as they took shape in the first through sixth centuries C.E., through interaction between the written Torah and the oral law.)
These documents—the Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrash-compilations, and the two Talmuds—represent the collective statement and consensus of authorships (none is credibly assigned to a single author and all are preserved because they are deemed canonical and authoritative) and show us how those authorships proposed to make a statement to their political and social situation—and, Neusner argues, also a judgment upon the human condition. What Neusner does in this reading of the canonical literature of Judaism is divided into stages.
Systematic analysis of documents
Neusner's work proceeds in a systematic way, document by document. First, Neusner places a document on display in its own terms, examining the text in particular and in its full particularity and immediacy. Here Neusner describes the text from three perspectives: rhetoric, logic, and topic (that is to say, the received program of literary criticism in the age at hand).
Reading documents critically
Reading documents one by one represents a new approach in this field, though it is commonplace in all other humanistic fields. Ordinarily, in studying ancient Judaism, people composed studies by citing sayings attributed to diverse authorities without regard to the place where these sayings occur. They assumed that the sayings really were said by those to whom they are attributed, and, in consequence, the generative category is not the document but the named authority. But if the documentary lines are not assumed to be irrelevant and that the attributions are everywhere to be taken at face value, then the point of origin—the document—defines the categorical imperative, the starting point of all study.
Neusner considers the text in terms of rhetoric, logic, and topic shared between documents, and asking how these recurrent points of emphasis draw attention from the limits of the text to the social world that the text's author(s) proposed to address. Here, too, the notion that a document exhibits traits particular to itself is new with his work, although overall he has episodically noted traits of rhetoric distinctive to a given document, and, on the surface, differences as to topic—observed but not explained—have been noted. Hence the movement from text to context and how it is affected represents an initiative on Neusner's part.
Reframing the paradigm: From Judaism to "Judaisms"
Neusner calls the encompassing Judaism that the canon presents a "system," when it is composed of three necessary components: an account of a worldview, a prescription of a corresponding way of life, and a definition of the social entity. These components explain the whole of a social order, hence constituting the theoretical account of a system. Systems defined in this way work out a cogent picture, for those who create them, of how things are correctly to be sorted out and fitted together, and of why things are done in one way. When people invoke God as the foundation for their worldview, maintaining that their way of life corresponds to what God wants of them, projecting their social entity in a particular relationship to God, then we have a religious system. When, finally, a religious system looks to the Hebrew Scriptures of ancient Israel or the Old Testament for an important part of its authoritative literature or canon, this could be considered a type of Judaism.
Viewing religions as systems illustrated by cases drawn from Judaism
Neusner describes systems from their end products, the writings. He then works his way back from canon to system, not imagining either that the canon is the system, or that the canon creates the system. He sees the canon as the evidence left by the system as it was at the time. The canonical writings speak in particular to those who can hear, that is, to the members of the community who on account of that perspicacity of hearing, constitute the social entity or systemic community. The community then comprises that social group, the system, of which is recapitulated by the selected canon. The group's exegesis of the canon in terms of the everyday imparts to the system the power to sustain the community in a reciprocal and self-nourishing process. The community through its exegesis then imposes continuity and unity on whatever is in its canon.
Neusner posits that we cannot account for the origin of a successful religious-social system, its power to persist can be explained. Neusner believes social change comes to expression in a symbolic transaction, which takes place in its exegesis of the systemic canon that in literary terms constitutes the social entity's statement of itself. The exegesis of the canon then forms that ongoing social action that sustains the whole. A system does not recapitulate its texts, it selects and orders them. A religious system imputes to them as a whole cogency, one to the next, that their original authorships has not expressed in and through the parts, and through them a religious system expresses its deepest logic, and it also frames that just fit that joins system to circumstance.
When Neusner asks that a religious composition speak to a society with a message of the is and the ought and with a meaning for the everyday, he focuses on the power of that system to hold the whole together: the society the system addresses, the individuals who compose the society, the ordinary lives they lead, in ascending order of consequence. And that system then forms a whole and well-composed structure. Yes, the structure stands somewhere, and, yes, the place where it stands will secure for the system either an extended or an ephemeral span of life. But the system, for however long it lasts, serves. And that focus on the eternal present underpins Neusner's interest in analyzing why a system works (the urgent agenda of issues it successfully solves for those for whom it solves those problems) when it does, and why it ceases to work (loses self-evidence, is bereft of its "Israel," for example) when it no longer works. He explains that the phrase, "the history of a system," presents us with an oxymoron. Systems endure—and their classic texts with them—in the eternal present that they create. They evoke precedent, they do not have a history.
Methodology
Neusner pioneered modern methods to study the history of Judaism in its formative period, the first six centuries C.E. He aimed to find out how to describe a Judaism in a manner consonant with the historical character of the evidence, therefore in the synchronic context of society and politics, and not solely or mainly in the diachronic context of theology which earlier defined matters. The inherited descriptions of the Judaism of the dual Torah (or merely "Judaism") treated as uniform the whole corpus of writing called "the oral Torah." The time and place of the authorship of a document played no role in our use of the allegations, as to fact, of the writers of that document. All documents were ordinarily treated as part of a single coherent whole, so that anything found in any writing held to be canonical might be cited as evidence of views on a given doctrinal, legal or ethical topic. "Judaism" then was described by applying all imperative categories—e.g., beliefs about God, life after death, revelation and the like—to all the canonical writings. Insofar as historical circumstance played a role in that description, it was assumed that everything in any document applied pretty much to all cases, and historical facts derived from sayings and stories pretty much as the former were cited and the latter told.
Prior to Neusner, ignoring the limits of documents and therefore the definitive power of historical context and social circumstance, all books on "Judaism" or "classical," "Rabbinic," "Talmudic" Judaism, promiscuously cited all writings deemed canonical in constructing pictures of the theology or law of that Judaism, severally and jointly, so telling us about Judaism all at once and in the aggregate. That approach lost all standing in the study of Christianity of the same time and place, for all scholars of the history of Christianity understand the diversity and contextual differentiation exhibited by the classical Christian writers. Of course, in the Christian case, the various documents genuinely did emerge from a variety of sharply sectarian and opposed groups, so they were self-evidently expressions of a variety of "Christianities." But, by contrast, reflecting the fact that the Pharisaic/Rabbinic movement of late Second Commonwealth and Talmudic periods was a single religious movement (consciously and explicitly rejecting sectarianism and seeking to be as inclusive of the entire society as possible), the received pictures of Rabbinic Judaism prior to Neusner naturally presented the various documents as expressing various aspects of a commonly shared theological, ethical and legal framework within Rabbinic Judaism. Thus they presented themselves as simply mainstream Judaism, the one Judaism characterised by the "Oral Torah," and encouraged a diversity of views within that mainstream as all legitimating a shared non-sectarian religious practice and outlook. Neusner corrected that error in the sources, as he saw it, by insisting that each of those documents be read in its own terms, as a statement—if it constituted such a statement—of a Judaism, or, at least, for and in behalf of a Judaism. Neusner maintained that each theological and legal fact was to be interpreted, to begin with, in relationship to the other theological and legal facts among which it found its original location, that is, separately from all other documents.
The result of that reading of documents as whole but discrete statements, as Neusner believes we can readily demonstrate defined their original character, is demonstrated in such works as Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, Judaism and Society: The Evidence of the Yerushalmi, Judaism and Scripture: The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah, as well as Judaism and Story: The Evidence of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan. At the conclusion of that work, for reasons spelled out in its own logic, Neusner stated that the documentary approach had carried him as far as it could. Neusner had reached an impasse for a simple reason. Through the documentary approach Neusner did not have the means of reading the whole all together and all at once. The description, analysis, and interpretation of a religious system, however, require us to see the whole in its entirety, and Neusner had not gained such an encompassing perception. That is why Neusner recognized that he had come to the end of the line, although further exercises in documentary description, analysis, and interpretation and systemic reading of documents assuredly will enrich and expand, as well as correct, the picture Neusner has achieved in the incipient phase of the work.
Neusner worked on describing each in its own terms and context the principal documents of the Judaism of the dual Torah. He further undertook a set of comparative studies of two or more documents, showing the points in common as well as the contrasts between and among them. This protracted work is represented by systematic accounts of the Mishnah, tractate Avot, the Tosefta, Sifra, Sifré to Numbers, the Yerushalmi, Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, Pesiqta deRab Kahana, The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, the Bavli, Pesiqta Rabbati, and various other writings. In all of this work Neusner proposed to examine one by one and then in groups of affines the main components of the dual Torah. Neusner wished to place each into its own setting and so attempt to trace the unfolding of the dual Torah in its historical manifestation. In the later stages of the work, he attempted to address the question of how some, or even all, of the particular documents formed a general statement. Neusner wanted to know where and how documents combined to constitute one Torah of the dual Torah of Sinai.
Time and again Neusner concluded that while two or more documents did intersect, the literature as a whole is made up of distinct sets of documents, and these sets over the bulk of their surfaces do not as a matter of fact intersect at all. The upshot was that while Neusner could show inter-relationships among, for example, Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, Pesiqta deRab Kahana, and Pesiqta Rabbati, or among Sifra and the two Sifrés, he could not demonstrate that all of these writings pursued in common one plan, defining literary, redactional, and logical traits of cogent discourse, or even one program, comprising a single theological or legal inquiry. Quite to the contrary, each set of writings demonstrably limited itself to its distinctive plan and program and was found not to cohere with any other set. He concludes that the entirety of the literature most certainly cannot be demonstrated to form that one whole Torah, part of the still larger Torah of Sinai, that constitutes the Judaism of the dual Torah.
Two theological categories occupied Neusner's further attention. The Judaic category, God "in our image" corresponds to the theoretical component of the worldview, and the Judaic category of the human being "after our likeness" corresponds—though not so self-evidently—to the theoretical component of the way of life. The correspondence will strike the reader as a simple one, when we recall that, in any Judaism, "we" are what "we" do. To all Judaic systems, one's everyday way of life forms a definitive element in the system, and if we wish to know how a Judaic system at its foundations defines its way of life, we do well to translate the details of the here and the now into the portrait of humanity "after our likeness." Neusner spells out both matters in "Israel:" Judaism and its Social Metaphors and in The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism.
Impact
Neusner's enterprise has been aimed at a humanistic and academic reading of classics of Judaism, yet with full regard for their specific statements to their own world. He demonstrates how people wrote these books as a way of asking and answering questions that we can locate and understand. According to Neusner, when we can find those shared and human dimensions of documents, we can relate classic writings to a world we understand and share. That imputes a common rationality to diverse authorships and ages—theirs and ours—and, Neusner believes, expresses the fundamental position of the academic humanities.
Neusner has been drawn from studying text to context. Treating a religion in its social setting, as something a group of people do together, rather than as a set of beliefs and opinions, he says, prepares colleagues to make sense of a real world of ethnicity and political beliefs formed on the foundation of religious origins. He argues that if colleagues do not understand that religion constitutes one of the formative forces in the world today, they will not be able to cope with the future. He shows how to see precisely the ways in which religion forms social worlds. In the case of Judaism, a set of interesting examples is set forth. Here Neusner shows us that diverse Judaic systems responded to pressing social and political questions by setting forth cogent and (to the believers) self-evidently valid answers.
Critical Assessment of Neusner's Work
Critical reviews claim that Neusner's results are actually required by his choice of methodology: i.e., his arguments are circular; further, he must make use of the argument from silence to reach his negative conclusions; thirdly, the actual reading of Rabbinic documents is forced and inaccurate, betraying a hostile bias; and finally this bias guides a tendentious historical account of the actual rise of Pharisaic and early Rabbinic Judaism.
As shown above, Neusner is proud of his attempt to analyze Talmudic and other early Rabbinic documents in isolation from each other, treating each as if it presents its own theology, ethics and worldview, in sum its own "Judaism," despite the fact that all these documents (unlike the various kinds of sectarian Christianity that he wishes to compare them to) were produced within the same religious (non-sectarian mainstream) movement, cite the same authorities to the same effect and participate in a common community and consensus of discourse. But the paradoxical hermetic isolation of documents can only be sustained by asserting that if a given document is silent about a certain topic or norm, this cannot mean that its authors might believe in it or practice it, or even develop the topic in other sayings or works elsewhere in the Talmudic literature available to us: it means that they did not believe in it or practice it at all. Thus, each tractate necessarily produces its own strangely truncated sectarian "Judaism," and we only have "Judaisms" in early Rabbinic literature, not a unified Rabbinic world-view or religion. However, no other result is possible, given the methodological starting point. The starting point, and the result, is that in principle there can be no "Oral Torah" or consensus Talmudic Judaism, which of course is the foundation on which all later Rabbinic Judaism is based. As a result of this "atomization" of the literature, as particularly Shaye J.D. Cohen has argued, Neusner has produced a veritable "counter-Rabbinics" driven by an anti-Orthodox, anti-Rabbinic agenda. Hyam Maccoby also came to much the same conclusion in his several critical reviews of Neusner's studies of the Pharisees and the Mishnah.
However, in recent years, despite his previous sharp dismissal of the sympathetic overviews of Talmudic religion by such scholars as George Foote Moore, Ephraim Urbach, and E.P. Sanders on the grounds that there was no such unified religion, Neusner has gone on to write his own theological overviews of Mishnaic-Talmudic-Midrashic thought and values. Zuesse has reviewed some of these recent major syntheses, and has found that they make very debatable claims (often directly contrary to Moore, et al.), which are nevertheless presented as if they are authoritatively established and incontrovertible. Zuesse objects for example to the portrait of God as a cruel tyrant of "perfect justice" (dismissing or downplaying the greater, more central emphasis on mercy and lovingkindness in the Rabbinic view of God), and the supposed Rabbinic savouring of the painful and humiliating death penalties for capital crimes, Neusner claiming that the Talmudic Rabbis justified the death penalty as actually being morally and spiritually obligatory for all time, required by God as atonements for the criminal's misdeeds (which ignores that the early Mishnaic sages effectively outlawed capital punishment - the only ancient civilization to have done so). Zuesse also expressed astonishment at the claim that the Talmud teaches that all gentiles are damned to hell unless they convert to Judaism (when in fact the Noachide Covenant doctrine made salvation available to all humanity without conversion being necessary), and he found many other major misstatements of fact and interpretation as well, which lead to the conclusion that there is indeed a strong negative bias distorting the overall presentation of Talmudic Judaism.
In effect, as particularly Cohen, Evans, Maccoby, Poirier and Zuesse allege, Neusner has created a Talmudic Judaism that never existed, and that traditional Jews whether in Talmudic times or presently would not recognize.
Neusner's historical portrait of Pharisaic and early Rabbinic Judaism reflects these influences, according to his critics. In his first publications Neusner sought to demonstrate that the Pharisees of the Second Commonwealth period were merely a marginal, highly chauvinistic sect who devoted themselves to a focus on priestly purity taboos and "table fellowship," who were not interested in wider spiritual and moral issues or general Jewish society, and were not accepted as mainstream authorities by the people. The contrary evidences of the Second Commonwealth contemporary Josephus, the New Testament including Paul's own championing of his one-time membership in the Pharisaic mainstream, and the testimony of the Mishnah and Gemara of the Talmud itself, were all rejected. Early on Zeitlin and Maccoby drew attention to some of the difficulties in this account. But the most elaborate and thorough book-length methodological and historical critique of Neusner's Pharisees and Mishnah has been made by E.P. Sanders. Sanders found that many of his interpretations of Pharisaic discussions and rulings are inaccurate and arbitrary, and his findings questionable (e.g., Neusner claims that 67% of the debates between Pharisaic "houses" dealt with ritual food purity; Sanders finds that less than 1% do -- see Sanders, below, p. 177).
The criticisms reviewed here are only of the most substantive issues. There has been lively collegial debate about many other topics covered in Neusner's prolific scholarship.
- Shaye J. D. Cohen,"Jacob Neusner, Mishnah and Counter-Rabbinics," Conservative Judaism, Vol.37(1) Fall 1983 p. 48-63
- Craig A. Evans, "Mishna and Messiah 'In Context'," Journal of Biblical Literature, (JBL), 112/2 1993, p.267-289
- Saul Lieberman, "A Tragedy or a Comedy" Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol.104(2) April/June 1984 p. 315-319
- Hyam Maccoby, "Jacob Neusner's Mishnah," Midstream, 30/5 May 1984 p. 24-32
- Hyam Maccoby, "Neusner and the Red Cow," Journal for the Study of Judaism (JSJ), 21 1990, p. 60-75.
- John C. Poirier, "Jacob Neusner, the Mishnah and Ventriloquism," The Jewish Quarterly Review, LXXXVII Nos.1-2, July-October 1996, p. 61-78
- E.P.Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah. Philadelphia, 1990.
- Solomon Zeitlin, "A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai. A Specimen of Modern Jewish Scholarship," Jewish Quarterly Review, 62, 1972, p. 145-155.
- Solomon Zeitlin, "Spurious Interpretations of Rabbinic Sources in the Studies of the Pharisees and Pharisaim," Jewish Quarterly Review, 62, 1974, p. 122-135.
- Evan M. Zuesse, "The Rabbinic Treatment of 'Others' (Criminals, Gentiles) according to Jacob Neusner," Review of Rabbinic Judaism, Vol. VII, 2004, p. 191-229
- Evan M. Zuesse, "Phenomenology of Judaism," in: Encyclopaedia of Judaism, ed. J. Neusner, A. Avery-Peck, and W.S. Green, 2nd Edition Leiden: Brill, 2005 Vol.III, p. 1968-1986. (Offers an alternative to Neusner's theory of "Judaisms.")
Books by Jacob Neusner
A complete list of books by Professor Jacob Neusner may be found here:
External links
- Prof. Jacob Neusner's homepage
- Scholar of Judaism, Professional Provocateur, Dinitia Smith, The New York Times, April 13, 2005