Milestone: Jacob Neusner (1932-2016)

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Soon after his death on October 8, 2016, at age 84, obituaries of Jacob Neusner appeared in the international press, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Tablet, Tikkun and the Times of Israel. These obituaries outline his life, highlighting the scholarly productivity that made him the most published author in any language (with more than a thousand books), his devotion to his accomplished wife, children and their families, and—of course—his profound impact on the study of Judaism.

All of that is on the mark and yet does not address the substance of his contribution; still less does it explain why adjectives such as “controversial,” “irascible” and “pugnacious” appear in the usually anodyne genre of obituary.

Inquirers have asked me in the past, “Which one of Jacob Neusner’s books should I read to understand him?” My reply has depended on the interests of the colleague who asks. But if the question is posed to me now, I will have to answer by referring to three books. Other works might be equally appropriate, but by keeping the range of his research in mind, the substance of Neusner’s work comes into focus.¹ Some of the passions he has provoked appear less a matter of temperament and more a function of provocative scholarship.

Jacob Neusner shows his devotion to both texts and history in Eliezer ben Hyrcanus: The Tradition and the Man.² His perspective departs from traditionalist interpretation, and Neusner found himself accused of using methods that had been deployed during the Third Reich. He remarked that this was an “argument from Hitler’s dog.” His reasoning was that such criticisms “would prohibit all of us from eating sauerkraut and loving our dogs because Hitler ate the one and loved the other. Well, I do not like sauerkraut. But that does not make me a better Jew. And, also, I love my dog, and I am not a Nazi on that account.”³ Controversy in this case, as in others, only seemed to galvanize Neusner.

He embarked on the campaign of translation with colleagues and students so as to render the Mishnah, Tosefta and Talmud in a way that opened the literature to analytic work. If these works are to be appreciated, Neusner insisted, they must be rendered into direct forms of English in a way that permits their relationship to one another and their sources to be laid bare. The massive project required experimentation and a programmatic refusal to harmonize one document with another. The result of that was more controversy, and to this day his translations are a topic of dispute—even among those who have not mastered the relevant languages. The cause of that, more than anything else, was his refusal of traditional harmonization in favor of analytic comparison. That comparison brought him to write Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah,⁴ his step beyond the history of the text. Here he interests himself in the issue of how Judaism is a religion, rather than simply a textual repository. Intellectual and emotional engagement, ethical norms and ritual practices are all involved in the Mishnah, as in the case of any religious literature.

Finally, in The Theology of the Oral Torah: Revealing the Justice of God,⁵ he sets out the principles embodied within rabbinic literature: that God shapes creation along the Torah’s plan, that paradigms of human relations and Israel’s condition are reflected in the Torah and that restoration to a perfect embodiment of God’s plan remains a promise. Discussion continues over whether this approach represents a departure in Neusner’s thought or the articulation of an orientation inherit in his career from the outset.

As he framed this intellectual itinerary, Jacob Neusner actively engaged students and colleagues, and he pursued the connections of his discipline into other scholarly areas—into both academic politics and the public arena. Through all those pursuits, he maintained seemingly boundless energy, generosity and critical acumen—all with this taste for controversy. Sometimes it might have seemed to BAR readers that he was out of sympathy with archaeological approaches, but in fact he appreciated scholarship in the field (e.g., the discussion demonstrating that Bethlehem in Galilee, as distinct from the place of the same name in Judea, was a Jewish settlement during the first century). He was wary and sometimes acerbic when archaeology was used to give the impression that Biblical or rabbinic documents are direct historical reports, a fault he excoriated in the work of any scholar.

In this and other debates, Neusner maintained a focused appreciation that rabbinic literature is a literature (rather than a unitary body of doctrine or history), that Judaism is a religion (rather than ethnic folklore) and that theology is a critical discipline (rather than pious opinion). In every project that he and I undertook, for example, whether in the classroom or on the page, we regularly disagreed over whether the tradition prior to our documents was better seen as atoms (his view) or as strings, over whether religion is independent of history (his view) or embedded in history 015and over whether theology is a collective (his view) or individual concern. These are profound differences, and we often mused whether they were related to the fact that one of us was principally a scholar of Judaism and the other of Christianity. Such differences were too important to be demeaned with controversy. They still demand serious investigation—in the confidence that attending to divergences in terms of history, religious pattern and theology will result in insight. That remains a living program.

Soon after his death on October 8, 2016, at age 84, obituaries of Jacob Neusner appeared in the international press, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Tablet, Tikkun and the Times of Israel. These obituaries outline his life, highlighting the scholarly productivity that made him the most published author in any language (with more than a thousand books), his devotion to his accomplished wife, children and their families, and—of course—his profound impact on the study of Judaism. All of that is on the mark and yet does not address the substance of his contribution; still less does […]