Abstract

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