In How Not to Study Judaism : Examples and Counter-Examples, Jacob Neusner presents a collection of essays and book reviews that identify the wrong way of conducting the academic study of Judaism. Pointing readers toward the right way to pursue the academic study of Judaism, Nuesner's focus is on the study of the literature of Judaism and the culture of the Jewish community.
This book is an exercise in the systematic recourse to anachronism as a theological-exegetical mode of apologetics. Specifically, Neusner demonstrates the capacity of the Rabbinic sages to read ideas attested in their own day as authoritative testaments to — to them — ancient times. Thus, Scripture was read as integral testimony to the contemporary scene. About a millennium — 750 B.C. E. to 350 C. E. — separates Scripture’s prophets from the later sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud. It is quite natural to recognize evidence for differences over a long period of time. Yet Judaism sees itself as a continuum and overcomes difference. The latecomers portray the ancients like themselves. “In our image, after our likeness” captures the current aspiration. The sages accommodated the later documents in their canon by finding the traits of their own time in the record of the remote past. They met the challenges to perfection that the sages brought about. Of what does the process of harmonization consist? To answer that question the author surveys the presentation of the prophets by the rabbis, beginning with Moses. To overcome the gap, Rabbinic sages turn Moses into a sage like themselves. The prophet performs wonders. The sage sets forth reasonable rulings. The conclusion expands on this account of matters to show the categorical solution that the sages adopted for themselves, and that is the happy outcome of the study.
In a career spanning over fifty years, the questions Jacob Neusner has asked and the critical methodologies he has developed have shaped the way scholars have come to approach the rabbinic literature as well as the diverse manifestations of Judaism from rabbinic times until the present. The essays collected here honor that legacy, illustrating an influence that is so pervasive that scholars today who engage in the critical study of Judaism and the history of religions more generally work in a laboratory that Professor Neusner created. Addressing topics in ancient and Rabbinic Judaism, the Judaic context of early Christianity, American Judaism, World Religions, and the academic study of the humanities, these essays demarcate the current state of Judaic and religious studies in the academy today.
Rabbinic documents about David, progenitor of the Messiah, relay the scriptural narrative of David the king. But, he is also transformed into a sage by Rabbinic writings of late antiquity: the Mishnah, the Yerushalmi, and the Bavli. Consequently, the Rabbis' Messiah becomes a ...
Narrative and Document in the Rabbinic Canon, Volume I is a study of the inclusion of biographical narratives about sages in components of the unfolding canon of Rabbinic Judaism in the formative age. These documents are of the first six centuries C.E. and are exclusive of the two Talmuds. A sage is defined here as a man who embodies the Rabbinic system. A sage-story, then, is an anecdote about the life and deeds of a Rabbinic sage. In general, a biographical narrative is the record of things done on a concrete and specific past-tense occasion by named individuals. The stories are not told as part of a sustained biographical account of those individuals' lives, birth to death. In this way, one is able to correlate the unfolding of the sage-story in the Rabbinic canonical sequence with the unfolding of the authorized biography in the counterpart-Christian one. The documentary hypothesis yields the correlation between the advent of the Christian authorized biography and the advent of the sage-story in the later documents of the Rabbinic canon. The sage-stories of the Mishnah, Tosefta, Tannaite Halakhic Midrash-compilations, and Rabbah-Midrash collections are subject to examination. The Yerushalmi and the Bavli come next, in volume II. Here, we ask what is to be learned from a documentary reading of the sage-stories as they unfolded in the canonical setting. Book jacket.
This book shows how the Rabbis of late antiquity took over writings from what they recognized as ancient times and of divine origin and they re-presented selections of those writings in accord with their own project's requirements, glossing clauses of the prophetic Scriptures but not whole, propositional discourses.
Volume 19 of The Jewish Law Annual is a festschrift in honor of Professor Neil S. Hecht. It contains thirteen articles, ten in English and three in Hebrew. Several articles are jurisprudential in nature, focusing on analysis of halakhic institutions and concepts. Elisha Ancselovits discusses the concept of the prosbul, asking whether it is correct to construe it as a legal fiction, as several scholars have asserted. He takes issue with this characterization of the prosbul, and with other scholarly readings of Tannaitic law in general. The concepts of dignity and shame are addressed in two very different articles, one by Nahum Rakover, and the other by Hanina Ben-Menahem. The former discusses halakhic sources pertaining to the dignity inherent in human existence, and the importance of nurturing it. The latter presents a fascinating survey of actual legal practices that contravened this haklakhic norm. Attestations of these practices are adduced not only from halakhic and semi-halakhic documents, but also from literary, historical, and ethnographic sources. Three articles tackle topical issues of considerable contemporary interest. Bernard S. Jackson comments on legal issues relating to the concept of conversion arising from the story of the biblical heroine Ruth, and compares that concept to the notion of conversion invoked by a recent English court decision on eligibility for admission to denominational schools. An article by Dov I. Frimer explores the much agonized-over question of halakhic remedies for the wife whose husband refuses to grant her a get (bill of divorce), precluding her remarriage. Frimer’s focus is the feasibility of inducing the husband to grant the get through monetary pressure, specifically, by awarding the chained wife compensatory tort damages. Tort remedies are also discussed in the third topical article, by Ronnie Warburg, on negligent misrepresentation by investment advisors. Two papers focus on theory of law. Shai Wozner explores the decision rules–conduct rules dichotomy in the Jewish law context, clarifying how analysis of which category a given law falls under enhances our understanding of the law’s intent. Daniel Sinclair explores the doctrine of normative transparency in the writings of Maimonides, the Hatam Sofer, and R. Abraham Isaac Kook, demonstrating that although transparency was universally endorsed as an ideal, some rabbinical authorities were willing to forego transparency where maintenance of the halakhic system itself was imperiled. An article by Alfredo M. Rabello reviews the primary and secondary literature on end-of-life issues, and contextualizes the much-discussed talmudic passage bAvoda Zara 18a. And an article by Chaim Saiman offers a critical survey of the main approaches to conceptualizing and teaching Jewish law in American universities; it also makes suggestions for new, and perhaps more illuminating pedagogic direction. In the Hebrew section, an intriguing article by Berachyahu Lifshitz presents a comparison of Persian and talmudic law on the status of promises and the role of the divine in their enforcement. Yuval Sinai discusses the halakhic law of evidence, particularly the well-known "two witnesses" requirement and departures from it. The volume closes with a historical article by Elimelech Westreich on the official rabbinical court in nineteenth century Jerusalem. It focuses on the rabbinical figures who served on the court, the communities for whom it adjudicated, and its role in the broader geopolitical and sociocultural context.
The canonical documents of Rabbinic Judaism impose upon most of their components fixed patterns of rhetoric, recurrent logic of coherent discourse, and a well-defined topic or program, for example, a commentary on a biblical book or on a legal topic. But some few compositions and composites of the Rabbinic canon of late antiquity diverge from the formal norms of the compilations in which they occur. In these pages, Neusner assembles anomalous compositions that occur in the Mishnah, Tosefta, four Tannaite Midrashim, and Genesis Rabbah, and he further tests the uniformity of the forms that govern in a familiar chapter of the Bavli. Neusner's surveys show for the documents probed here that some small segment of the composites and compositions of the surveyed documents does not conform to the indicative rules of rhetoric, topic, and logic. Consequently, we face the challenge of constructing models of lost documents of the Rabbinic canon, conforming to the models governing anomalous compositions. These follow other topical and rhetorical norms and therefore belong in other, different types of documents from those in which they now are located. These anomalous writings in topic, logic, or rhetoric (or all three) in theory reveal indicative characteristics other than the ones defining the compositions and composites of the documents in which they are now located.
While in contemporary culture we tend to resort to a single, if broadly defined, range of discourse for the results of systematic thought about public matters of the social order, this is not the case in Rabbinic Judaism. Judaism's authoritative documents set forth the entire structure of belief and system of behavior in two distinct modes of discourse, Halakhic and Aggadic, or broadly construed, statements of law and lore. Theology in Action shows how the Talmud of Babylonia (a.k.a., the Bavli) account of normative action sets forth in a dual discourse the single, coherent theology of Rabbinic Judaism.
The result for the history of Judaism of a documentary reading of the Rabbinic canonical sources illustrates the working of that hypothesis. It is the first major outcome of that hypothesis, but there are other implications, and a variety of new problems emerge from time to time as the work proceeds. In the recent past, Neusner has continued to explore special problems of the documentary hypothesis of the Rabbinic canon. At the same time, Neusner notes, others join in the discussion that have produced important and ambitious analyses of the thesis and its implications. Here, Neuser has collected some of the more ambitious ventures into the hypothesis and its current recapitulations. Neusner begins with the article written by Professor William Scott Green for the Encyclopaedia Judaica second edition, as Green places the documentary hypothesis into the context of Neusner's entire oeuvre. Neuser then reproduces what he regards as the single most successful venture of the documentary hypothesis, contrasting between the Mishnah's and the Talmuds' programs for the social order of Israel, the doctrines of economics, politics, and philosophy set forth in those documents, respectively. Then come the two foci of discourse: Halakhah or normative law and Aggadah or normative theology. Professors Bernard Jackson of the University of Manchester, England and Mayer Gruber of Ben Gurion University of the Negev treat the Halakhic program that Neusner has devised, and Kevin Edgecomb of the University of California, Berkeley, has produced a remarkable summary of the theological system Neusner discerns in the Aggadic documents. Neusner concludes with a review of a book by a critic of the documentary hypothesis.
