The unique wisdom of Judaism comes from the Talmud and the Judaic sages' other ancient writings that preserve the tradition of the originally oral Torah, or Teachings of Moses. Sometimes surprising - "better sincere sin than hypocritical virtue" - and always penetrating and helpful - "who are rich? those who are happy with their lot" - the wisdom of the oral Torah is set forth on more than one hundred subjects, arranged alphabetically, in their sources' own words, here rendered in (...) clear and easily readable English. This is the "how-to" book for people who think deeply about everyday life: facing death of a loved one, the duties and rights of women and men together, busy-ness versus real achievement, deceit, gossip, discretion, virtue, honor, forbearance, forgiveness. (shrink)

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Neusner describes, analyzes, and interprets the transformation of one system of the Israelite social order by a connected but autonomous successor-system. He reviews the initial statements made in The Transformation of Judaism: From Philosophy to Religion. The book summarizes ten years of work, from 1980 to 1990.

The idea of history, with its rigid distinction between past and present and its careful sifting of connections from the one to the other, came quite late onto the scene of intellectual life. Both Judaism and Christianity for most of their histories have read the Hebrew Scriptures from within an other-than-historical framework. They found in Scripture's words paradigms of an enduring present, by which all things must take their measure; they possessed no conception whatsoever of the pastness of the past. (...) Rabbinic Judaism invented an entirely new way to think about times past and to keep all time-past, present, and future-within a single framework. For that purpose, a model was constructed, consisting of selected events held to form a pattern that imposes order and meaning on the chaos of what happens, whether past or present or future. Time measured in the paradigmatic manner is time formulated by a free-standing, atemporal model, not appealing to the course of sun and moon, nor concerned with the metaphor of human life and its cyclicality. Not only so, but the paradigm obliterates distinctions between past, present, and future, between here and now and then and there. The past participates in the present, the present recapitulates the past, and the future finds itself determined, predetermined really, within the same free-standing structure comprised by God's way of telling time. (shrink)

There is neither higher nor other authority than God's will which is the foundation upon which religious authority in Judaism rests, a will which reaches worldly expression in the Torah.

The notion that appeal to the Judaism contemporary with the writing of the New Testament documents will help solve exegetical problems has characteristically taken the form of an appeal to a Judaism that never existed; the practice should be abandoned.

It is only in the recent past that we have begun to recognize that history forms a discourse of contemporary taste and judgment. It is the historical system itself that forms its events, not as a matter of mere consciousness, but as a Diktat of culture. The historian must serve the same role as the archaeologist: examining cultural artifacts as evidence for the working out of an older social order in detail. When relatively ordinary events are examined in Judaism, it (...) becomes evident that they not only have no autonomous standing, but also that events constitute no species even within a genus, or historical order. In davar aher constructions, events are included in the same taxonomic compositions as names, places, and actions. An event becomes simply a component in a culture that combines facts into structures of its own design. "Event" has no meaning at all in Judaism, since Judaism forms culture through other than historical modes of organizing existence. Within the system and structure of Judaism, history forms no taxon, no happening is unique, and no event bears consequence. (shrink)

The development of Talmudic Judaism from the first to the fifth century A.D. is marked by a decline of interest in the knowledge and explanation of historical events. Neither the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. nor the advent of the Sasanians in Babylonia in 226 A.D. provoked refiection on history among the Talmudic rabbis. In Jerusalem in the first century, Yohanan ben Zakkai stressed an interim ethic and policy for survival and redemption; Rav and Samuel, in third century (...) Babylonia, converted messianic speculation and scriptural exegesis into a policy of passive acceptance of political events. But lack of interest in political history masked belief that the covenant of Sinai would win redemption not through the course of historical events but apart from it. (shrink)

In the age of change in the institutional and conceptual setting in which the ancient tradition of Jewish learning would go forward, what we see in the two most important figures of the transitional generation is only the end of the old, not the beginning of the new. Saul Lieberman continued the received tradition that learning means exegesis of texts, but did not fully master the logic of that received tradition and so distorted it. Salo W. Baron undertook a new (...) intellectual tradition, one that pursued historical study in place of the exegesis of texts, but did. not really grasp the requirements of the kind of new history that he proposed to write. Announcing the advent of social history into the academy of Jewish learning, what he wrote as the economic part of that social history was merely the paraphrase of received texts, with glosses that look suspiciously like a kind of free-associative exegesis. While the one scholar demonstrated the decadence of an old tradition of learning, the other succeeded in showing only the difficulty of actually mastering the discourse of an entirely new academic world. (shrink)

Jacob Neusner, a leading scholar of Judaism, offers a provocative statement on methodology in this history of religion. Neusner offers initial generalizations, or 'first principles, ' seen as the histories of four periods of Judaism. Co-published with Studies in Judaism. Co-published with Studies in Judaism.

Jacob Neusner is Research Professor of Religion and Theology at Bard College, Member of the Institute of Advanced Study, and Life Member of Clare Hall, ...

Distinguished historian of Judaism Jacob Neusner here ventures for the first time into constructive theology. Taking the everyday life of contemporary Judaism as his beginning, Neusner asks when in the life of the living faith of the Torah does Israel, the holy community, meet God? Where does the meeting take place? What is the medium of the encounter? In his attempt to answer these questions, Neusner sets forth the character and the form of the Torah as (...) sung theology. Israel, the holy community, meets God in the synagogue, while at prayer, and in the yeshiva, when studying the Torah—at the moment in each setting when the Torah is received. In both circumstances people do not read but sing out its words. With the written part of the Torah sung in the synagogue, and the oral part declaimed in centers of sacred learning, music provides the medium for Judaism's theological voice. Neusner identifies a reciprocal exchange between the holy community Israel and God: Israel sings to God when the Torah is studied, and God sings to Israel when the Torah is declaimed. Through the metaphor of music, Neusner offers an account of how he believes those faithful to the Torah meet God in the Torah, and how they should listen to the melody of God's self-revelation. The result is an original theological reflection that will interest all students of Judaism. (shrink)

A selection of his more important writings.

Through their discussions, the history and diversity of the traditions are also revealed. In this volume, editor Jacob Neusner address the topic from the standpoint of Judaism, Bruce Chilton presents the perspective of Christianity.

"The book is carefully organized and provides a clear, well-structured, and lucid expression of its theses." -- Dr. Marvin Fox, Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University The Mishnah is the first canonical writing of Judaism after the Hebrew Scriptures of ancient Israel (the Old Testament) and the foundation of the two Talmuds and of all Judaism thereafter. According to eminent religion scholar Jacob Neusner, the key to understanding the Mishnah is to read it as philosophy, (...) in accord with the generally accepted understanding of philosophy in its time and place. In Judaism as Philosophy, Neusner studies a large sample of evidence, meticulously translated and carefully explained, and identifies the philosophical side of the Mishnah's system, method, and message alike. The philosophical tradition in which the Mishnah takes its place, Neusner explains, utilizes the Aristotelian method of hierarchical classification to demonstrate the proposition (important to Middle Platonism and profoundly expressed by Plotinus) that many things really form a single thing: many species, a single genus; many genera, an encompassing, well-crafted and cogent whole. Through the systematic and orderly hierarchical classification of the things of nature, the framers of the Mishnah illustrate the ultimate unity of all being emanating from the One on high. Arguing that the document's writers chose a legal form for a philosophical proposition, this book completely changes a centuries-old way of reading the Mishnah. Judaism emerges as a sustained demonstration of the unity of all being under one God. "What is the next phase in this ongoing history of the formation of Judaism in theclassical period[?]... The analysis of the philosophical character of the Mishnah places into perspective what I believe to be the character of the first phase, and therefore points toward the development of the second and third phases, of the Judaism of the Dual Torah. The entire characterization of the first phase of the Judaism of the Dual Torah, that is, the system attested by the Mishnah in particular, rests upon the results of this book and its two companions, on economics and politics respectively."--from the Preface. (shrink)

The Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse is a unique and controversial analysis of the genesis and evolution of Judeo-Christian intellectual thought. Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton argue that the Judaic and Christian heirs of Scripture adopted, and adapted to their own purposes, Greek philosophical modes of thought, argument and science. Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse explores how the earliest intellectuals of Christianity and Judaism shaped a tradition of articulated conflict and reasoned argument in the (...) search for religious truth and focuses especially on methods of discourse in the Judaic and Christian intellectual and literary traditions. (shrink)

"Neusner moves beyond the interpretation of individual texts to grasp as wholes two systems of Judaism, that of the Mishnah and that represented by Rabbinic documents of the fifth century. He thus provides an entirely fresh approach and a new answer to the central question 'What is Judaism?' At the same time, by providing a sound model for the evaluation and comparison of diverse religious systems, this book has an important place within the study of the history of religions (...) in general."--Alan J. Avery-Peck, author of The Talmud of the Land of Israel: Shebiit An eminent scholar of the history of Judaism, Jacob Neusner shows in this work how Judaism changed from a philosophy to a religion between 200 and 400 C.E. The Transformation of Judaism is a work both revolutionary in its method and unprecedented in its results. Comparing earlier and later sets of Judaic writings, Neusner sets forth how philosophy--abstract, elegant, orderly, and intellectual--turned into religion--tangible, down-to-earth, chaotic, and concrete. In the process, he offers an account of the birth of Judaism that has become normative. Moreover, Neusner's methodology can be applied to the study of religions other than Judaism because it examines the underpinnings of how a society sees the world (philosophy), orders itself (politics), and sustains itself (economics). "This prolific author provides in this book yet another of his clear and scholarly explorations into the nature of Judaism... Scholarly detail does not preclude clarity of style and more general reflection on the character of religion in relation to other modes of thought."--Peter Byrne, Religious Studies. (shrink)

As far back as the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, the place of the Oral Torah, even more than the Bible, in maintaining Jewish cohesion has been recognized. In his revolutionary guide to Talmud study, Prof. Jacob Neusner defines the unique quality of Talmud study and the secret of its attraction to many generations of Jews, and, in our time, to not a few non-Jews. As Neusner himself explains, "The genera of the Talmud of Babylonia conducts (...) a searching analysis of the laws and their principles. It is intellectually ambitious but linguistically economical--a few questions teach throughout. The result is that the Talmud finds it possible to say the same thing about many things and so to demonstrate the coherence of its truth." Neusner illustrates this characteristic of the Talmud with a wealth of interesting examples, dealing with questions of responsibility, intentionality, belief, actions, and philosophy. (shrink)

Neusner proves that the law of normative Judaism, the Halakhah, viewed whole, with its category-formations read in logical sequence, tells a coherent story. He demonstrates that details of the law contribute to making a single statement, one that, moreover, complements and corresponds with that of the Aggadah, the lore and scriptural exegesis of Judaism. He has now portrayed for the first time the way in which Aggadah and Halakhah, attitude and action, belief and behavior, join together to set forth (...) normative Judaism, the vast system for holy Israel's social order of the Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash of late antiquity. (shrink)

This article's main purpose is to verify if, and to what extent, an attitude of religious tolerance stems from the essential pivots of Biblical and Rabbinic theology. After a careful perusal of the sources, Neusner comes to a negative conclusion: while classical Judaism provides open eschatological views, embracing all humanity in the acknowledgement of the One God at the end of days, it does not contain theological foundations for tolerating other religions in the here and now. It is therefore (...) evident that, in later epochs, Christianity and Islam represented a challenge to Jewish traditional patterns of thought. (shrink)

Do ubiquitous modes of thought (types of analysis, types of argumentation) pervade the entire corpus of the Rabbinic writings of late antiquity and impart coherence to those diverse documents? Here are the results of a systematic probe of representative Halakhic and Aggadic documents in search of the answer to that question. The result is limited but one-sided: the answer is yes, they do. The inquiry proves urgent, because the bases for supposing the Rabbinic documents coalesce have diminished, and the differences (...) between and among the respective documents have made their mark. The book asks whether, however diverse, all of the documents conform to a single, determinate program of [1] analysis and [2] argumentation. Do they raise in common a set of questions that are ubiquitous, and do they pursue a uniform inquiry, whatever the data subject to study? Further, does a single protocol of argumentation dictate the means by which analytical propositions are advanced and tested? If they do, then Rabbinic Judaism finds coherence in shared intellectual traits. These, then, would serve to define the foundations for the construction of all components into the Rabbinic system and structure. (shrink)

This unparalleled reference work offers general readers as well as scholars clearly written introductions to over seven hundred of the main religious and philosophical writings of Greco-Roman paganism, early Judaism, and formative Christianity from the period of Alexander the Great to Mohammed.

This unparalleled reference work offers general readers as well as scholars clearly written introductions to over seven hundred of the main religious and philosophical writings of Greco-Roman paganism, early Judaism, and formative Christianity from the period of Alexander the Great to Mohammed.

A single document, the Talmud of Babylonia – that is to say, the Misha, a philosophical law code that reached closure at ca 100 C.E., as read by the Gemara, a commentary to thirty-seven of the sixty-three tractates of that code, compiled in Babylonia, reaching closure by ca 600 C.E. – from ancient times to the present day has served as the medium of instruction for all literate Jews, teaching, by example alone, the craft of clear thinking, compelling argument, correct (...) rhetoric. That craft originated in Athens with Plato’s Socrates for the medium of thought, and with Aristotle for the method of thought, and predominated in the intellectual life of Western civilization thereafter. When we correlate the modes of thought and analysis of the Talmud with the ones of classical philosophy that pertain, we see how the Talmud works, by which I mean, how its framers made connections and drew conclusions, for the Mishnah and Gemara respectively. And when we can explain how the Talmud works, I claim, we may also understand why it exercised the remarkable power that it did for the entire history of Judaism from its closure in the 7th century into our own time. These two questions – how it works, why it won – define the task of this presentation. (shrink)