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Jacob Neusner and the Jewish Future
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13297 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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10 / 1987 |
2,796 Words |
| Author
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Michael Berenbaum
Michael Berenbaum teaches theology at Georgetown University. |
Jacob Neusner is a phenomenon in contemporary scholarship. At fifty-five, he is the author of more than 150 books and the editor of scores more. His students hold some of the most prestigious appointments in universities throughout the world. And Neusner is in the midst of at least five multiyear, multi-volume projects. Under his leadership all the major texts of classical Judaism will be translated into English in an avalanche of work that would take lesser scholars a lifetime. He is still growing intellectually, still refining his thoughts, still grappling to understand the past and thus to illumine both present and future.
No scholar in any contemporary humanistic discipline is as dominant in his field. Neusner's influence is apparent in the study of religion--both ancient and modern. His specialties are the Talmud and the interaction between Judaism and Christianity. As a scholar, Neusner is not only prolific but wide ranging. He has written works as diverse as a multi-volume history of the Jews in Iran and the first English translation of the long neglected Palestinian Talmud. He has written biographies of rabbinic masters and rewritten them as his thinking became more critical and his assessment of the evidence more tentative.
He came to the study of the Talmud rather late in life. Raised as a Reform Jew in suburban West Hartford, Connecticut, Neusner only concentrated on classical rabbinical texts after he completed his undergraduate education at Harvard and a postgraduate year at Oxford. He began his studies at an age by which most would-be rabbinic scholars had already spent ten or more years studying the Talmud as part of their elementary, high school, and yeshiva education. Because he lacked early training, Neusner was unburdened by tradition and by conventions. Unlike three generations of Jewish scholars who began their rabbinic studies at yeshivot and only later moved into the strange, pluralistic, and secular world of the university, Neusner was well grounded in secular learning before he began his work. His late entry into the world of rabbinic learning also meant that he did not become a disciple of the Jewish Theological Seminary's Talmudic master, Professor Saul Lieberman. He was too young, too inexperienced to be trained by the master.
Neusner's early training as a journalist--his father was the editor and publisher of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger--taught him to write quickly and on deadline and kept him far removed from the ponderous world of rabbinic scholarship where years are spent crafting an article and a lifetime writing a long
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