BARview: Neusner Joins Ranks of Superman

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In “The Hebrew Origins of Superman,” BAR 05:03, we published an article illustrated with a picture of Superman emerging into the air from an excavation beside the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. On the emblem on his chest we placed, instead of the customary “S,” a tenth-century B.C. Hebrew shin. Shortly thereafter, Superman—or rather his owner, D.C. Comics, Inc.—threatened BAR with a legal suit.

Not since then have we been threatened with a court action for something we published—until we received the following letter from Professor Jacob Neusner of Brown University:

“This is to inform you that my attorney, Mr. Norman Orodenker, of Levy, Goodman, Semenoff and Gorin, in Providence, is studying the article about me in your magazine with a view to determining whether or not to bring suit on grounds of defamation. I shall be guided by his judgment of the matter. Beyond this point, no further communication is possible.”

We hope that Professor Neusner will eventually decide, as Superman did, not to file suit. A court of law is no place to determine whether we have wronged Professor Neusner. The pages of BAR are open. Speech should be countered with speech, not with a suit for money damages. (We say nothing of the fact that what we said is legally protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.)

Professor Neusner’s complaint is that in our March/April 1985 issue,^a we reported a dramatic confrontation at a plenary session of the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, in which Morton Smith, a very prominent scholar and former teacher of Professor Neusner, expressed his concurrence in the judgment of Saul Lieberman, another very prominent scholar, that Professor Neusner’s translation of the Palestinian Talmud should be consigned to the “wastebasket.” We tried to explain fairly why Professor Neusner is a controversial scholar. We referred several times to his brilliance and we pointed to the fact that even Lieberman recognized that the condemned book contained many “brilliant insights.”^b

There is a natural tendency when threatened with a lawsuit to react defensively, to insist that the statements in question were written with unchallengeable fairness and accuracy. There is a natural fear that any lack of an aggressive defense might seem like an admission of guilt or wrongdoing.

We shall resist these natural inclinations. We are quite ready—despite the threat of a lawsuit, not because of it—to entertain the possibility that we treated Professor Neusner unfairly. Perhaps we should have said more about Professor Neusner’s contribution to scholarship. Perhaps we should have quoted some of the approving things that were said that night about his scholarship. Perhaps we should not have reported the incident at all, either because we are so widely read by lay people or because the subject matter is not sufficiently close to Biblical archaeology. If we have wronged Professor Neusner, we apologize.

When we learned that Professor Neusner was incensed at our report, we solicited—before the threat of a lawsuit—a reasoned appreciation of Professor Neusner’s scholarship that appears in this issue in Queries & Comments.

As to whether Professor Neusner’s translation of the Palestinian Talmud is as bad as Lieberman wrote it was and Smith said it was, we have no judgment. We were simply reporters of an incident that electrified what are sometimes stodgy scholarly meetings.^c

On the other hand, we would like to express our admiration for Professor Neusner and for what he is trying to do.^d His approach to understanding rabbinic literature is commendable, important and, happily, influential. He surely asks the right questions, which, in our judgment, is more important than whether he always comes up with the right answers.

We have published a review by Professor Neusner in these pages, and we had already set in type an article by him that we had solicited. It was scheduled for early publication until, in his wrath, he withdrew it.

Perhaps if this episode leads to a serious consideration of Professor Neusner’s work—and it will surely give it wider exposure—we will have redeemed ourselves. We only wish that our adversary was someone whom we liked and admired less.

In “The Hebrew Origins of Superman,” BAR 05:03, we published an article illustrated with a picture of Superman emerging into the air from an excavation beside the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. On the emblem on his chest we placed, instead of the customary “S,” a tenth-century B.C. Hebrew shin. Shortly thereafter, Superman—or rather his owner, D.C. Comics, Inc.—threatened BAR with a legal suit. Not since then have we been threatened with a court action for something we published—until we received the following letter from Professor Jacob Neusner of Brown University: “This is to inform you that my attorney, Mr. […]

Footnotes

“BARview: Annual Meetings Offer Intellectual Bazaar and Moments of High Drama,” BAR 11:02.

Our understanding of Professor Lieberman’s comment was apparently an error in Professor Neusner’s favor. See Morton Smith’s letter in Queries & Comments, in this issue.

In an interview in Publisher’s Weekly, Neusner stated that he wanted to get only about 80% of the text accurately translated in his preliminary translation: “I call it preliminary because I felt that if I could get into English an accurate picture of something like 80% of what I had in front of me, it would be a step forward. Some reviewers are angry because they’ve found errors. I say, ‘You’re right, let’s correct it. At least we have something to work from.’”

Professor Neusner recently sent us the text of a powerful defense to his critics to be published in the June 1985 issue of Midstream. The article is entitled, “The Mishnah and the Smudgepot—Or Why, Where There’s Smoke, There Isn’t Always Fire.”