Luke Ford

Every afternoon after school, five days a week, a boy ran errands at his father’s newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut. He got his first typewriter at twelve. Stringers from the Hartford Times taught him to write a news story, cut a headline, lay out a page. By thirteen he reviewed books in the paper. By his junior year in high school he could do every job at the Connecticut Jewish Ledger except sell advertising, and when the editor traveled, the boy wrote the editorials.

His father, Sam Neusner (d. 1960), had a heart attack in October 1945 from overwork. The paper came out on time.

Jacob Neusner (1932-2016) is remembered as the man who wrote a thousand books, which is treated as a freak of nature, a joke told at conferences, an embarrassment to be managed by his admirers. Aaron W. Hughes (b. 1968), in the authorized biography Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast, spends his preface trying to get past the joke. He accounts for the productivity in work habits: up early, a study at home, a swim before lunch, a chapter a day, a letter of recommendation typed clean in under a minute while a student waited for the seminar to start.

The volume was a strategy, and Neusner learned it in a newspaper office before he could read a line of Hebrew.

A discipline is a set of ideas plus the plant that prints them. It needs presses, series, journals, conferences, graduate programs, reviewers, jobs, and enough published work that a dean can be shown a shelf. Sam Neusner ran a weekly because a scattered Jewish population in Connecticut needed a medium through which to see itself, to be informed about itself, to argue with itself, and to present itself to the neighbors as respectable. His son did the same thing for a scholarly population that did not yet exist. He printed it into existence.

Read the career that way and the parts that look like pathology start to look like method.

Write everything down. Turn the lecture into an article and the article into a book. Answer every attack, because an unanswered attack becomes the record. Never let a silence stand. If the existing outlets will not publish the work, build an outlet. If you lose control of the outlet, build another. Titles function as headlines. Deadlines are moral facts. Publication, and not private contemplation, is where thought is supposed to end up.

That is a newspaperman’s creed. It is also, line by line, Jacob Neusner’s professional life.

The numbers follow. Brown Judaic Studies, founded with Scholars Press, ran at roughly a book a week during its strongest years and produced more than 250 volumes under his editorship. Thomas Tisch, a former student who went into the family business instead of graduate school, put in as much as fifty thousand dollars a year. Neusner had also set up the Max Richter Foundation in 1969 as a birthday present to his father-in-law, and it paid for conferences, language training, travel, students. The arrangement with the press gave him half the net proceeds, and the returns on the backlist funded the frontlist. James Tabor, who now teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has written that Brown Judaic Studies published his first book in 1986 and gave him the leg up that got him to Notre Dame, William and Mary, and finally Charlotte. Multiply Tabor by a few hundred and you have a discipline.

Neusner solved a problem that everyone with an idea and no institution eventually faces. He raised private money, took the printing costs onto his own books, published his students, sold the backlist, and reinvested. A generation of scholars who disliked him owe their tenure files to his imprint.

He came to Judaism from outside and wanted in. His family was Reform, the house was cold by the account his brother Fred (1924-2014) gave in letters they exchanged as old men, and his Hebrew as a child was nothing. When his parents asked what he wanted for his sixteenth birthday, he asked for Hebrew lessons, and for two years a young woman recently out of Boston Hebrew College taught him. He entered Harvard in 1950 and took his degree in history in 1953, having written a senior thesis on the Jews of Boston between 1880 and 1914. Harry Austryn Wolfson (1887-1974), who had every reason to know, told him he lacked the training a scholar of Jewish texts required.

The class that stayed with him at Harvard was not about Jews. Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) and Leonard Nash taught the history of laboratory science, and the course became the foundation of Kuhn’s book on scientific revolutions. Neusner took from it a question he never put down: how does knowledge get made, and who gets to make it. Decades later Kuhn remembered him arguing at the lectern after class. Neusner had no memory of the argument. He remembered the idea.

A year at Oxford followed, where Cecil Roth (1899-1970) told him that if he wanted serious learning he should go to the Jewish Theological Seminary rather than Hebrew Union College, and where he read Gerald Reitlinger on the destruction of European Jewry and understood for the first time what had happened. He arrived at JTS in 1954 badly underprepared and read his way in at speed. By his third year he had the Mishnah, several tractates, and midrash in the original.

At JTS he sat among Saul Lieberman (1898-1983), Mordecai Kaplan (1881-1983), and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972). He worked as Heschel’s research assistant and typed the manuscript of God in Search of Man. When the seminary considered getting rid of him, Heschel helped save him. Heschel remained the one senior Jewish intellectual he spoke of with something close to simple admiration, and the reason is visible: Heschel wrote past the guild, to Jews and to Americans, about what Judaism meant now. That was the vocation Neusner recognized, because it was his father’s.

He took ordination and a Columbia doctorate in the same year, 1960, under Salo Baron (1895-1989) on paper and Morton Smith (1915-1991) in fact. His dissertation took up Yohanan ben Zakkai, the sage of the aftermath, the man who has to build something after the Temple burns. Neusner later tied his interest to the Cold War and the fear that the whole thing might go up. The question stayed with him for sixty years: what forms of Jewish life remain possible when a Jewish world has ended.

In December of that same year his father died of Parkinson’s disease.

The first book on Yohanan used exactly the method the older Neusner would spend decades destroying. He gathered traditions attributed to the man across centuries of later compilations and reconstructed a life from them. When he came back to the subject he called his younger self gullible and wrote the book again.

The capacity to repudiate his own work in public is among the best things about him, and it taught him a habit that later did damage. If the older Neusner could show that the younger Neusner had been fundamentally wrong, then an entire establishment could be fundamentally wrong, and he would be the one to show it.

The turn came at Dartmouth, where he went in 1964, and it came from a scholar of religion rather than a Talmudist. At a departmental colloquium in his first year, with Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017) and Wayne Meeks in the room, Hans Penner (1934-2012) asked him why he was in a religion department and called him a historian. Neusner thought professional jealousy sharpened the question. He also took it seriously enough to change what he did. He called it the turning point of his career and split his own bibliography into a precritical and a critical phase along that line.

The critical phase produced the argument that made him. Do not treat rabbinic literature as one reservoir called the rabbis. Start with documents. The Mishnah is a document with its own rules, forms, silences, and preferred questions. The Tosefta is another. The Yerushalmi and the Bavli are others. A saying attributed to a first-century sage in a sixth-century compilation is evidence about the compilation before it is evidence about the sage. The interpreter first explains the tradition, then asks what history can be recovered from it. What we cannot show, we do not know.

Anyone who has watched a preacher quote the Talmud on what the Pharisees believed in the time of Jesus knows why this mattered. Whole libraries of scholarship had assembled a timeless rabbinic mind out of texts written centuries apart and hundreds of miles away from one another. Neusner made that expensive. He raised the price of an easy inference, and the price has stayed up.

The translations came from the same ambition. He put the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Yerushalmi, and much of the rest into English so that a scholar of religion, a classicist, a historian of late antiquity, or an undergraduate could open a rabbinic text without a yeshiva behind him. He understood translation as a political act, and it was.

Then Lieberman reviewed him.

The review of the Yerushalmi translation, published in 1984 after Lieberman’s death, went at his Hebrew, his Aramaic, and his command of the subject, cataloged mistranslations, and treated some renderings as inventions. Neusner spent the rest of his life construing the fight as one between old European erudition and American method, and there was some of that in it. But the broad framing let him avoid the narrow question, which was whether the corrections were right. Many of them were. Later assessments have kept the two things apart: Pavel Sládek, writing after Neusner’s death, judges the philological practice cavalier enough to make particular translations and the arguments resting on them unreliable, while crediting the attack on circular history with opening an era of research.

Neusner was strongest when he asked what kind of evidence rabbinic literature is. He was weakest when his own answer hardened into another total system.

You can watch the hardening in Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, where the Mishnah becomes an integrated philosophical structure disclosing a conception of reality. Shaye J. D. Cohen called the book a brilliant failure and meant both words. Hyam Maccoby (1924-2004) granted the scale of the proposed revolution and rejected the results, calling the theology Neusner found there an invention assisted by fashionable structuralism. Yaakov Elman (1943-2018) thought no one in a hundred and fifty years had made a stronger case for taking the development of the Mishnah seriously.

The sharpest objection came from E. P. Sanders (1937-2022), and it turned Neusner’s own austerity against him. If you assume every feature of a text expresses a total worldview, you can manufacture a metaphysics out of stylistic properties better explained by the genre of legal writing. Cohen pressed a different version: the man who forbade everyone else to import outside assumptions had imported catastrophe, reconstruction, and post-Holocaust theology into a second-century law code.

Neusner spent his life policing the border between the text and the interpreter’s present while writing, in every decade, about a Judaism that survives the end of its world.

He organized his life around criticism. He revised in response to reviews, published second editions announcing that the first edition’s method had been wrong, and liked to say he took his critics more seriously than they took themselves. Compared with the ordinary scholarly practice of quietly forgetting one’s errors, this is a virtue.

The trouble is that he could not keep a criticism of a proposition separate from an enemy. Disagreements gathered into camps. Individuals stood in for methods, methods for institutions, institutions for corruption. JTS became the parochial old world. The Israeli academy became philological stagnation, articles about pintelach with no program and no system. The Association for Jewish Studies became a room where Jews told other Jews interesting things about Jews. Brown became the collapse of standards. By 1984 he had convinced himself that Israeli scholars were conducting something like a boycott of his work, and his private letters on the subject are ugly.

Morton Smith, who had read every draft of the dissertation and given the young man the severe criticism he claimed to prize, ended up warning scholars in public against his translations, and Neusner’s lawyer raised the possibility of a suit. Nothing came of it. A better illustration of the problem would be hard to invent: the mentor who taught him that criticism is love became a defendant.

The Christine Hayes affair shows the same habit at the end of its logic. Hayes had written a dissertation on the divergences between parallel passages in the two Talmuds in tractate Avodah Zarah, working case by case, asking whether a given difference came from a manuscript problem, an ambiguity in the Mishnah, a hermeneutical assumption, a redactional strategy, or a historical circumstance. Neusner reviewed it in 1995 and then published a 166-page book called Are the Talmuds Interchangeable? Christine Hayes’s Blunder. Hughes mentions this in about a sentence, as evidence of late polemical excess.

It deserves more, because Neusner’s instinct was not absurd and his conduct was indefensible. He had spent thirty years establishing that the two Talmuds are separate documents with separate programs, and he read her method as licensing the old harmonizing that treats them as one mind. But Hayes was working inside the field he made. She accepted that the differences signify. She refused his explanation of what they signify, and she tested each case before reaching for a system. She answered him in the Journal for the Study of Judaism in 1996 and folded the response into her Oxford book in 1997. She became Sterling Professor at Yale.

A senior man devoting a monograph with a junior woman’s name and the word Blunder in the title to her first book is not an argument. It is an attempt to end a career using the printing capacity he had built. It did not work, and the failure is the most encouraging thing in this story.

The institutional fights ran on one principle he held with unusual severity: Jewish texts do not matter because Jews wrote them. They earn their place by the work they can do in a discipline that owes Jews nothing.

He learned what that principle costs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1961, where the local Jewish community substantially paid for his position. The donors thought they were funding Jewish education. He thought he was building an academic field. Within a year the arrangement was intolerable. The pattern recurred for the rest of his life because the structural problem is permanent. American Jewish studies chairs were often raised from communal money given to strengthen Jewish identity, and the scholar’s professional incentive runs the other way, toward showing his colleagues in other departments that this material illuminates their problems.

Neusner chose the university side and never wavered. He preferred the American Academy of Religion, where he served as president in 1968-69, to the Association for Jewish Studies. He wanted a classroom in which a Jewish student had no special claim on the material and a Christian student needed no excuse for taking it.

He was fighting for something real and he was also fighting for himself. The man with no yeshiva behind him had every reason to prefer a scoreboard on which yeshiva training counted for nothing. That does not make him wrong. It does mean his opponents sometimes had knowledge he lacked, and he was constitutionally unable to hold that possibility together with his conviction that they were defending a racket. Sometimes they were defending a racket. Sometimes they simply knew the Aramaic better.

His politics grew from the same root. He moved from the Democrats to the Republicans, criticized affirmative action and curricular reform, served on the National Council on the Humanities and later the National Council on the Arts under Reagan, and made friends of William Bennett and William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008). People treat this as a late and separate turn. The question underneath it had not changed since Milwaukee: can a university keep its standards once purposes outside scholarship enter academic judgment. He had asked it of Jewish donors first.

The contradiction is equally continuous. A man who wanted scholarship insulated from constituencies took a federal appointment deciding which scholarship the public should fund. The outsider became a gatekeeper and went on describing himself as a man kept outside the gate. Both descriptions had some truth in them, which is why nobody could talk him out of either.

Underneath all of this ran a project that had nothing to do with rabbinics, and it is the part of him most likely to be read in fifty years.

He distrusted a Jewish identity built out of antisemitism, Holocaust memory, and vicarious Zionism. In Stranger at Home he asked whether Judaism can flourish among Jews nobody is persecuting. American Jews were the freest in history and their leaders behaved as though Jewish identity required enemies. He wanted a Judaism made of Torah, learning, practice, argument, and small communities of people who study together, and he wanted America treated as a place where Jews live rather than a waiting room. His little 1963 book on fellowship helped seed the havurah movement, and he was not shy about claiming it.

The academic and the communal projects are one project seen from two sides. In the university, Judaism should claim no privilege for being Jewish. In Jewish life, Judaism should have enough substance that it does not need persecution to make it feel important.

You do not have to share his politics or his denominational preferences to see that this is a serious position, and that it cuts against most of what the organized community was doing then and much of what it does now.

The last act closed several circles. His friendship with the Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley (1928-2013) drew him toward comparison, and with Bruce Chilton at Bard he built an institute for it. He compared Judaism and Christianity, and with Tamara Sonn, Judaism and Islam through their legal systems. His comparison never aimed at the irenic conclusion that religions say the same thing in different accents. He was interested in disagreement, and he thought comparison exists to make disagreement precise.

Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI (1927-2022), took up Neusner’s A Rabbi Talks with Jesus at length in his book on Jesus, and they became friends, and in 2010 the pope gave him a medal. The scholar who had spent his youth pulling rabbinic texts out of confessional hands ended by writing theology, but he came back to it through history, literary criticism, and comparative religion rather than around them. In 2009 he identified himself with Reform Judaism again, the movement of his childhood, arguing that it suited the American condition. He had spent half a century acquiring the learning his home lacked and did not conclude that the yeshiva had been right after all.

In 2003, at seventy-one, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It took his father in 1960. He did not want to discuss it with his biographer. He kept writing. He wanted his books put online free, for anyone.

Think about what that disease does to a man whose instrument was a typewriter, who had typed since he was twelve, faster and more accurately than anyone his students had ever seen, who had told a friend in 1997 to write it down so that people beyond the range of your voice and people not yet born can have the thought. He died at home in Rhinebeck, New York, on October 8, 2016, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, at eighty-four.

Hughes’s book had appeared weeks earlier. It is written in the present tense. That accident gives us the opening.

What happened after the death is evidence Hughes could not have. In December 2016 Laura Levitt published a short piece in Religion Dispatches about the silence. In the weeks after his death, she wrote, the people whose careers he had made and whose books he had published said nothing in public. She named her own debt and her own wound in the same breath: he believed in her, her future opened in his classroom, he helped her find a critical voice, he knew every one of her vulnerabilities and used them against her. He never claimed her as his student and never once responded to her scholarship, and she counts herself lucky, because she came out of it owing nobody anything.

David Blumenthal answered her. He had come to Brown as an assistant professor rather than a student, hired after Jack asked him at the end of his job talk whether he had figured all this out by himself. Blunt, acidic, demanding, bullying, tough and almost always right, and never cruel, Blumenthal wrote, because cruelty takes intention. Joshua Hammerman wrote in the Forward that Neusner had been cruel and maybe abusive, in particular to the students in whom he saw promise, that he had shaped him and shafted him, that he is the reason Hammerman became the kind of rabbi he became, and that he still had not forgiven him.

Three testimonies, one man, no contradiction. His teaching worked by raising the pressure. Some students took the pressure as a statement of confidence in them. Some took it as humiliation. Some took it as both and are still sorting it out twenty years later. What none of them describe is indifference.

The silence Levitt noticed is the finding. A school whose members will not speak at the founder’s death is telling you something about what it cost to belong to it, and also about what it cost to leave.

Now the ledger, ten years on.

Against him: the translations cannot be used without checking. The habit of deriving a total theology from a single document looks schematic. The talk of many Judaisms clarified diversity and exaggerated the independence of texts and communities from one another. The polemics wasted years of his life and some of other people’s. He built a reputation for combat that his admirers now have to apologize for before they can get a hearing for his ideas.

For him: rabbinic texts are read as composed and edited literature rather than as transcripts. Differences among the corpora are taken seriously. Scholars are expected to justify the step from a text to a society. The two Talmuds are not interchangeable witnesses to one timeless mind. Judaism is taught in departments of religion to students of any religion or none, by people with doctorates, without communal supervision. Historians of late antiquity and of early Christianity cannot pretend postbiblical Judaism is somebody else’s business. He did not do all that alone, and some of his claims to have done it alone were self-serving. He was the catalyst.

The pattern that holds the two columns together is this. He won institutionally where he lost textually. He forced the field to accept his questions, and the field then became sophisticated enough to reject his answers. Hayes could ask a finer question than Neusner asked because Neusner had already made her question askable. That is a deeper kind of influence than discipleship, and it is why judging him by the survival rate of his propositions understates him. Founders who matter create the conditions under which their successors can prove them wrong.

It also explains why his reputation swings so wildly. If you come to him wanting a reliable English rendering of a hard passage, his standing looks inexplicable. If you come to him asking how rabbinic Judaism became an ordinary subject in the American humanities, he is unavoidable.

Hughes has been criticized for the shape of his book, most carefully by Albert Baumgarten, who noted that reliance on the subject, his family, his friends, and his own archive tends to produce a portrait too congenial to its subject, and that Hughes says outright that Neusner authorized the biography. That is fair, and it is not a reason to dismiss a book that will remain the necessary starting point. It is a reason to say what the next one can do.

The next one can be written from the other end of the correspondence. The Jacob Neusner Papers at the American Jewish Archives run from 1950 to 2016 and are restricted until 2029, but letters have two ends, and the files of Lieberman, Morton Smith, Cohen, Sanders, Schorsch, his deans, his editors, his students, and his political patrons are scattered across a dozen collections and mostly open. The next one can anatomize the corpus instead of repeating the number, sorting the thousand titles into original monographs, revisions, translations, collections, textbooks, and polemics, so that we finally know how many books there were. The next one can write the school as a collective life: twenty-odd doctorates at Brown, where they landed, whom they trained, what they kept, what they threw away, and which of them were still afraid of him in 2016. The next one can reconstruct the Hayes affair week by week, and ask the question that opens onto everything else, which is why a man of his gifts thought that was scholarship.

I would answer that last question with the newspaper. He grew up where an argument is public by definition, where you print your answer the same week, where silence is defeat, and where the reply lives forever in the bound volumes next to the original charge. Then he found the Talmud, which is a literature of objection, distinction, and reply, and he must have felt he had come home. The op-ed page and the sugya taught the same lesson to a boy already inclined to believe it. For Jacob Neusner, disagreement was not a hazard of intellectual life. It was the form intellectual life takes.

That conviction built a field and wrecked a good many relationships inside it, and he could never see the two as one bill.

He left no orthodoxy. Nobody today calls himself a Neusnerian, and the closest thing to a monument is a professorship at Bard and a series of imprints whose founder’s name has come off the spine. He would have hated the professorship less than he would have hated the forgetting.

But the boy who ran errands at his father’s paper understood something about permanence that the professors around him did not. A lecture disappears. A book stays on the shelf, and the shelf outlives the man who filled it, and other people’s children take things down from it without knowing who put them there.

The field reads him less every year.

Notes

Everything about the childhood, the training, the institutions, and the private correspondence comes from Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York: NYU Press, 2016). Page numbers below are the printed pages of that book.

The newspaper apprenticeship is on pp. 23-25: errands at the paper every afternoon after school five days a week, first typewriter at twelve, Hartford Times stringers teaching him news writing, headlines, editing and layout, book reviews at thirteen, the main editorial writer when the editor was away, able to do every job except sell advertising by his junior year.

Sam Neusner and the paper are on pp. 19-21. The heart attack in October 1945 caused by overwork, and the paper still appearing on time, is p. 20. So is his death from complications of Parkinson’s disease in 1960 and the Hartford Times obituary of December 16, 1960. Lee Green Neusner, born June 12, 1901 in New York City, died 1997, p. 21.

Fred Neusner (1924-2014) and Sandra Neusner Friedman (1929-1986) are on p. 22, along with the brothers’ later correspondence about a cold house. The third-grade report card (“He prefers not to do as the others are doing which causes many difficulties”) is p. 23. Fred’s 2007 letter about the enemies is pp. 23-24.

Hebrew lessons for his sixteenth birthday, and the two years of study with a young woman recently out of Boston Hebrew College, p. 22.

Harvard: the senior thesis on the Jews of Boston 1880-1914 and Wolfson’s discouragement, pp. 28-29. The Kuhn and Nash course on the history of laboratory science, and Kuhn remembering the young Neusner arguing at the lectern when Neusner had no memory of it, pp. 29-30. Neusner’s own later use of Kuhn against Israeli scholarship, “articles about pintelach . . . no critical program, no method and no system,” is quoted there from an interview with William Novak.

Oxford, Cecil Roth’s advice to go to JTS rather than HUC, and reading Reitlinger’s The Final Solution, pp. 33-35 and again at p. 67.

JTS: underpreparation and the speed of the catch-up, Lieberman, Kaplan, Heschel, typing God in Search of Man, Heschel intervening when the seminary considered dismissing him, pp. 44-48. The 1972 letter in which Lieberman gave him the acknowledgment, and Neusner later removing the thank-you from the preface, pp. 46-47 and p. 108.

Columbia, ordination and doctorate both in 1960, Baron on paper and Morton Smith in fact, Yohanan ben Zakkai and the Cold War, pp. 50-55.

Milwaukee and the communal money, pp. 79-84.

The Lown Institute at Brandeis, 1962-1964, and the start of A History of the Jews in Babylonia, pp. 86-88. Marriage to Suzanne Richter, March 15, 1964, p. 90.

The Max Richter Foundation, founded 1969 out of book royalties as a birthday present to his father-in-law, p. 96.

Work habits: the passage from the preface to Part 20 of A History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities, written on his forty-fourth birthday, July 28, 1976 (“There have been no Sabbaths or festivals, no days or nights”), p. 100. The swim before lunch, the nine o’clock bedtime, and Avery-Peck’s account of the recommendation letter typed clean in under a minute while he waited for the seminar, p. 100. The letter to Larry Tisch about writing a chapter a day and finding it routine, pp. 100-101.

Dartmouth: Penner’s question at the departmental colloquium with Jonathan Z. Smith and Wayne Meeks present, Neusner calling it the turning point, and the split between his precritical and critical phases, pp. 105-107.

Brown Judaic Studies: founding with Scholars Press, Thomas Tisch’s role and the idea’s origin, pp. 149-150. The financial arrangement, Neusner and Tisch paying up-front production costs, the press managing printing, Neusner taking fifty percent of net proceeds, Tisch’s support running as high as fifty thousand dollars a year, and the backlist reinvested, p. 150.

Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah and the reviews: Shaye Cohen’s “brilliant failure,” Maccoby’s Copernican revolution and his charge of a weird theology invented with structuralist help, Elman on a hundred and fifty years, pp. 156-158. Sanders on philosophy versus legal code and on Neusner inferring what the text does not say, pp. 157-159. Neusner’s 1995 title The Documentary Foundation of Rabbinic Culture: Mopping Up after Debates with . . . listing ten opponents, p. 159.

Lieberman’s review, pp. 189-191. Details worth having exactly: the review is titled “A Tragedy or a Comedy?” and appeared in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1984. Lieberman died of a heart attack in flight from New York to Tel Aviv on March 23, 1983, and had mailed a handwritten manuscript to Jerusalem before he died. Jack Sasson’s editorial note said Neusner had declined to respond. Neusner wrote the editors saying he wanted to respond and got no reply.

The polemical 1990s, the grievances aired with deans and provosts, and the one-sentence mention of Are the Talmuds Interchangeable? Christine Hayes’s Blunder, p. 162.

Brown Judaic Studies passing to Ernest Frerichs in June 1990, the month Neusner took early retirement, his letter of June 13, 1990, and his look at legal options, pp. 232-233.

Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2003 at seventy-one, his unwillingness to discuss it, and the interview at Rhinebeck, p. 262.

The conclusion, including Neusner’s own modest summary (“I was able to tear down some walls”), Noam’s answer about the students, the Bard professorship and lecture, and Hughes’s case for the pantheon, pp. 265-273.

What I used from outside Hughes

Laura Levitt, “The Awkward Silence in the Wake of Jacob Neusner’s Passing,” Religion Dispatches, December 7, 2016. https://religiondispatches.org/2016/12/07/awkward-silence-wake-jacob-neusners-passing — reprinted on the NYU Press blog: https://www.fromthesquare.org/awkward-silence-wake-jacob-nuesners-passing/ — this is the source for the silence, for “he believed in me,” and for his knowing and using her vulnerabilities. The related passage about his never claiming her as his own and never responding to her scholarship is quoted at https://jewishphilosophyplace.com/2016/12/07/laura-levitt-on-not-being-jacob-neusners-student/ and her publication list is at https://lauralevitt.org/publications/

David Blumenthal, “Filling the Awkward Silence: A Response to Laura Levitt on the Passing of Jacob Neusner,” Religion Dispatches, December 2016. https://religiondispatches.org/filling-the-awkward-silence-a-response-to-laura-levitt-on-the-passing-of-jacob-neusner — blunt, acidic, bullying, tough and almost always right, never cruel because cruelty takes intention; also the job talk (“Did you figure all this out by yourself?”) and Jack teaching him the business.

Joshua Hammerman, “Looking Back at Jacob Neusner’s Complicated Legacy,” Forward, December 2016. https://forward.com/news/358291/looking-back-at-jacob-neusners-complicated-legacy/ — famously cruel, one might even say abusive, in particular to students in whom he saw promise; shaped me and shafted me; still haven’t forgiven him.

James Tabor, “Jacob Neusner: Teacher, Scholar, and Friend.” https://jamestabor.com/jacob-neusner-teacher-scholar-and-friend/ — Brown Judaic Studies published his first book in 1986 and gave him the leg up to Notre Dame, William and Mary, and Charlotte. This is the concrete instance behind the argument about the press building careers.

Albert I. Baumgarten, review of Hughes, Reviews of the Enoch Seminar 2017.03.04. https://enochseminar.org/jacob-neusner-an-american-jewish-iconoclast/ — the authorized-biography problem stated carefully by a senior scholar: reliance on the subject, his family, his friends, and his own archive tends toward a portrait too congenial to its subject.

Pavel Sládek, “Jacob Neusner a studium rabínské literatury formativního období” (2017), Charles University. Abstract in English on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pavel-Sladek-3 and the Czech record at Charles Explorer. Cavalier philology making particular translations unreliable, set against the credit for ending circular history.

Shaul Magid, “Is It Time to Take the Most Published Man in Human History Seriously?”, Tablet, August 23, 2016. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/take-jacob-neusner-seriously — useful for the fourth-century Judaism and Christianity argument and for the Iranian context of the Bavli decades before that became fashionable.

Unsigned review of Hughes in Reading Religion: https://readingreligion.org/9781138949393/jacob-neusner/ — notes that Hughes reports Lieberman’s charges and leaves them unevaluated.

The Hayes chain: her Berkeley dissertation (M.A. 1988, Ph.D. 1993); Neusner’s review in the Journal for the Study of Judaism 26:2 (1995); Are the Talmuds Interchangeable? Christine Hayes’s Blunder, South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism 122 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), xxix + 166 pp., reviewed in the Journal of Law and Religion 17 (2002); her “Response to Jacob Neusner” printed as the appendix to Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds: Accounting for Halakhic Difference in Selected Sugyot from Tractate Avodah Zarah (Oxford, 1997), doi 10.1093/oso/9780195098846. Her birth year, 1960, comes from the RelBib authority record.

The AAR presidency has a contemporary source: “Prof. Jacob Neusner is Named President of American Academy of Religion,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 22, 1968. https://www.jta.org — worth pulling the original bulletin rather than citing the encyclopedia entries.

Death: October 8, 2016, at Rhinebeck, aged 84. JTA, October 8, 2016; Boston Globe, October 9, 2016; Bruce Chilton’s memorial notice in Biblical Archaeology Review, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org; Hughes’s own notice on the NYU Press blog, October 17, 2016.

Barry Wimpfheimer reviewed Hughes under the title “A Biography or a Hagiography?” in Religious Studies Review 44:1 (March 2018), 71-77, doi 10.1111/rsr.13412. That is a rabbinics insider making the argument I make about authorization.

The correspondence exists at both ends. Neusner letters turn up in other people’s collections that are already open. The Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver papers at the AJA have a folder of Neusner correspondence and articles, 1967-1981, at 28/9/367. Brown‘s library has a named Neusner collection. Files of Lieberman, Morton Smith, Schorsch, Frerichs, his editors, and his political patrons are scattered and mostly unrestricted.

His journalism is the underused primary source. Two easy pulls: “Firmly Held Beliefs Often Require Judgments,” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1996, on the Southern Baptist resolution to convert Jews, with the letters that answered him on August 2; and “Trends to Come,” Chronicles, September 1993, where he proposes renaming the American Academy of Religion the American Unacademy of Religion.

My Jacob Neusner

Early on in my Jewish journey, circa 1992, my dad gave me a catalogue of books on early Judaism and they were almost all by Jacob Neusner. That didn’t make any sense. I was repulsed and immediately associated “Jacob Neusner” with scam.

When I asked around about Jacob Neusner, I heard horrible things about him from rabbis and scholars whose lives he had damaged.

Circa 1994, I tried reading books by Jacob Neusner and found the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Are any of his books worth reading today? If I had a choice, I’d read anyone but him. I don’t trust him. And I don’t like him.

Claude says:

Stranger at Home, from 1981, is the one to start with. It argues that American Jews had substituted the Holocaust and Israel for a Judaism of their own, and it asks whether Jewish life can hold together among people nobody is persecuting. It is short, argumentative, written in his journalist’s voice, and it is the book of his that has aged into relevance rather than out of it. Hughes thinks it belongs with Soloveitchik and Heschel on a syllabus. That is generous, and the book is still the one I would put in your hands.

Invitation to the Talmud shows what he could do when he slowed down. He takes a single sugya and walks it back through Mishnah, Tosefta, Yerushalmi, and Bavli so a reader watches the layers stack. Whatever you think of his conclusions, the pedagogy is real and you will understand the documentary argument from the inside in an afternoon.

A Rabbi Talks with Jesus is worth an evening because it is the book that made him legible to Christians, and because Ratzinger answered it at length as pope. It is Neusner arguing with the Sermon on the Mount as a Jew who takes both sides seriously, and it is the least defended, least fortified thing he wrote.

The Academic Study of Judaism collects the essays on what it means to teach Judaism in a secular university. Dated in its examples and unnervingly current in its diagnosis.

Skip Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah unless you want to referee the fight. Read Sanders and Shaye Cohen on it instead and you will have the argument without the six hundred pages.

For early Judaism, read other people, and you lose nothing. Shaye Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Seth Schwartz on Jews under Roman rule. Günter Stemberger’s introduction to Talmud and midrash as the reference shelf. Barry Wimpfheimer’s short biography of the Talmud. Moulie Vidas for where the field went after the documentary argument. Catherine Hezser on the social world of the rabbis. Every one of them is a better writer than he was, and every one of them works in a space he cleared.

‘A Biography of a Hagiography?‘

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer writes:

* In Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast, Hughes celebrates an earlier scholar who fought against the ghettoization of Jewish Studies. In this biography, Neusner is the prescient figure who implemented interdisciplinarity well before its heyday and was educationally progressive enough to recognize that Jewish historiography was being held back by its commitment to a set of textual skills and methodological assumptions that deserved an American revision. Hughes outlines a fourfold trajectory to Neusner’s scholarship (History, Literature, Religion, Theology) that culminates in work that places Neusner at the forefront of Jewish thought. The book argues for adding Neusner’s later works of theology to the canon of modern Jewish thought.

Any biography of Neusner must contend with the number of works Neusner produced. The Library of Congress counts 655 works in Neusner’s name. The catalogue of the JTS library has 677. I have seen claims that there are over 1,000 published works. Even assuming the lowest number (655), over a 45-year career this computes to a publication rate of 14.5 books a year.

Much of Neusner’s work is difficult to read, and not because it has a high linguistic register or aspires to a certain literary style. The work often reads like a first draft because it went directly from typewriter to press.

* Many of the books in the Brown Judaic Studies series were edited volumes with contributions from Neusner’s graduate students. Some of them read like the graduate school assignments that they were. Neusner’s control of the press and his funneling of student work into publications with the press are both ethically and legally problematic. Neusner took his students’ intellectual property without remuneration. Much is made in the biography of the royalty income, but the book makes no mention that Neusner did not share this book royalty income with the students or colleagues who had often produced the translations of individual tractates or had contributed essays and articles as sections of his edited volumes.

* Jacob Neusner had graphomania. In 2005, when I was completing a dissertation that was strongly interested in the dichotomy of halakhah (law) and aggadah (nonlaw/literature/law), I received a postcard from University Press of America inviting me to purchase hundreds of Neusner’s titles; the card included a note that made it clear that this was not the complete works. Among the titles listed on the card were over 10 titles on halakhah and aggadah produced in 2001 alone. As a researcher, I attempted to procure and consult these titles. The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary had nearly all of them and I was able to lay them out next to each other on a large table. Very quickly I could establish that these books were similar to one another in content and even in front matter like acknowledgments and other personal notes. The order of presentation of materials sometimes differed, particularly in the front matter. Examples used to illustrate the arguments might not be the same from book to book. It was clear that these books had been assembled by copying and pasting digital text on a word processor.

The Neusner catalog is rife with this problem. While he was a gifted typist and a quick writer, much of the volume of Neusner’s catalogue comes from habits that could turn a single book into several. A translation would be followed by an outlined translation which could be followed by an analysis of the underlying text that was dwarfed by the paragraphs from the translations used as examples. Hughes’s biography allows Neusner’s claim that the South Florida period was his most prolific to stand uncriticized. Many of the USF publications are explicit copies of earlier Brown volumes and even the ones that are presented as new are largely derivative of the earlier work. Ashgate has published a three-volume set entitled Neusner on Judaism and divided into History, Religion and Literature volumes (Neusner 2004, 2004, 2006). They represent most of Neusner’s original contributions to the field and provide a sense of what his reputation might have been if he had not committed to produce books as quickly as he did. Hughes is not a specialist in Rabbinic Literature, and the biography makes several mistakes in characterizing the field of rabbinic literature and Neusner’s place in the field.

* Some of the biography’s most flawed sections are found in its treatment of Neusner’s feud with Saul Lieberman. Lieberman was not, as the book claims, an Orthodox individual still reading rabbinic texts as he had been trained in yeshiva. Here Hughes relies too heavily on Marc Shapiro’s work on Lieberman which is itself trying to sort through a set of extremely narrow Orthodox political concerns to determine whether Lieberman is or should be kosher-certified (Shapiro 2006).

Saul Lieberman was a text-critical exegete with a conservative approach to scholarly production. His passion for, and commitment to, the Palestinian Talmud help to frame both Lieberman’s own scholarly achievements and his uncharacteristically hostile review of Neusner’s translation of that work. In 1929, Lieberman penned a methodological essay outlining the hermeneutic challenges that critics face when trying to recover the historically original meaning of the Palestinian Talmud (PT) (Lieberman 1929). These include a unique set of lower critical challenges (there is only one very flawed manuscript for some sections and there is evidence of various large-scale scribal errors). At some point Lieberman realized that the Tosefta was crucial to understanding the original meaning of PT so he shifted to mine the references to the Tosefta found in medieval commentaries (Lieberman 1937-1939). From there Lieberman went on to a long-term project writing a definitive text-critical commentary to Tosefta (Lieberman 1955-1982). Along the way, Lieberman cautiously produced some important initial studies of the PT, but he never finished his preliminary work on the Tosefta.

Every page of Lieberman’s magnum opus, Tosefta Kifshutah, is replete with readings of passages of rabbinic literature that explore a host of nontraditional interpretations of these passages; Lieberman was not bound by tradition and could creatively read the text for an original meaning that often diverged from its later traditional interpretation. The most obvious nontraditional feature of Lieberman’s commentary is the regular references to Greek and Latin classical literature. Lieberman’s breadth in classical and early Christian literature puts to rest any assertion that he read like a yeshiva bochur. Greek in Jewish Palestine and Hellenism in Jewish Palestine testify to Lieberman’s fundamental role in expanding the study of rabbinic literature into non-Jewish terrain in a productive way (Lieberman 1942, 1950).

In 1984, Saul Lieberman published a critical review of a volume of Neusner’s translation of the Palestinian Talmud (Lieberman 1984). The review’s title “A Tragedy or a Comedy?” telegraphs a sharply critical intention. The bulk of the review consists of corrections to errors in the critical handling of a rabbinic text. On the final page Lieberman concludes, “The right place for our English translation is a waste paper basket.” Amidst his harsh critique, Lieberman manages a few words of praise: “In fairness to the translator I must add that his various essays on Jewish topics are meritorious. They abound in brilliant insights and intelligent questions.” An astute reader will note, though, that this praise only sets up a final rhetorical scolding of student by teacher. The review was magnified by its posthumous publication—Lieberman had passed away in 1983 and this piece was one of the final ones he authored. To further dramatize matters, Morton Smith, Neusner’s Columbia University mentor, distributed boxes of the review at a plenary discussion of Neusner’s work at a large conference in December 1984.

Neusner was out of his element in producing editions of rabbinic literature, particularly with respect to a work as challenging as the PT. In failing to interrogate the substance of the review, Hughes allows the reader to conclude that the matter was a political issue fueled by personal animosities and grievances. Lieberman was a lifelong student of the PT who spent considerable scholarly energy attempting to educate the field about the historical meaning of this important work. Is it inconceivable that he was motivated at least in part by the scholarly limitations of Neusner’s translation?

* In my opinion, many of Neusner’s specific claims about the philosophy of the Mishnah are not compelling. There is a point at which his abstractions of the Mishnah no longer resemble the Mishnah as read closely. But the field has productively followed Neusner’s example. A new generation of Mishnah scholars (Rosen-Zvi, Berkowitz, Balberg, Cohn, Simon-Shoshan, Halberstam, and others) has followed Neusner’s instinct by looking for deeper meaning in the Mishnah even if they find that meaning through hermeneutic techniques that begin with close analysis of the Mishnah’s text. Today’s avant garde Mishnah work does not build on Neusner’s earlier readings by relying on his readings, but it builds on his instinct of seeking something more conceptual from this work. Neusner was relatively disinterested in the skills and hermeneutic exercises that were constitutive for his literary colleagues in the academic study of rabbinics.

* In the interests of popularization, Neusner bypassed philological questions and produced a translation based on a mediocre set of modern commentaries. While it is not uncommon for rabbinic literary readers (particularly philologists) to find fault with mistaken readings assumed by rabbinic historiographers who generally argue on the basis of a larger quantity of texts, here was Neusner attempting to own the literary canon by producing a translation of every work, including the works whose philological juries were still out. Neusner signaled his awareness of the challenges of PT by labeling the PT translation a “preliminary” translation. This did not satisfy Lieberman, who had emerged from a traditional non-philological form of reading in the yeshiva of his youth and was unwilling to return to that mode of scholarship.

* By playing ancient Judaism in a Protestant key, Neusner made rabbinics necessary to the study of ancient Christianity and a staple of every major Religious Studies program in the country. Since he trained his students to work in universities in this field, he could place his students in these newly created positions. Aaron Hughes’s biography of Jacob Neusner is a first attempt to come to terms with a complicated man and his legacy. Perhaps Neusner’s passing will open up the space for subsequent projects that will be more critical in assessing Neusner’s scholarly corpus and his political behavior.

The Man Who Made the Method Travel

Three things get said about Jacob Neusner. He published more than anyone in the history of the academy. He changed the way rabbinic literature is studied in America. A large share of his conclusions, and all of his translations are regarded by specialists as unreliable.

If the scholarship keeps getting overturned, why does the man matter? If the revolution was his, why can you find its components in Jerusalem and in New Testament studies before he arrived? And if his durable estate amounts to a few dozen books, as his biographer Aaron W. Hughes half concedes, what do we do with the mountain around them?

One answer covers all three. He did not invent the method. He made it travel.

Start with the part of the legend that has to go.

Critical suspicion of rabbinic sources was not born at Brown in 1970. J. N. Epstein (1878-1952) had already made the manuscript history of the Mishnah a discipline. Abraham Weiss (1895-1970) was analyzing the literary units of the Babylonian Talmud and the work of its editors. David Weiss Halivni (1927-2022) published the first volume of Meqorot u-Mesorot in 1968 and built the argument that the anonymous voice of the Bavli belongs to a later stratum than the attributed sayings it surrounds. Shamma Friedman‘s 1977 study of the tenth chapter of Yevamot laid out criteria for separating those layers and announced the method in its title. None of that came from Neusner.

The second lineage runs through Christian scholarship, and his own biographer documents it. Form criticism and redaction criticism were mature tools in Gospel studies a generation before Neusner applied their logic to rabbinic attributions. He learned them from Morton Smith (1915-1991), who read every draft of his dissertation, and then from Wayne Meeks and Brevard Childs (1923-2007) at Dartmouth. He had first met Childs at the JTS summer program in 1958 and 1959, when Childs was an assistant professor at Yale Divinity School, and after the first book on Yohanan ben Zakkai came out Childs asked him whether he was doing history too soon and asking the wrong questions.

That question took Neusner ten years to answer, and when he answered it he answered it by demolishing the book. The tools he used to do the demolition came from a Protestant Old Testament scholar and a New Testament scholar, applied to material neither of them worked on.

So the claim that Jacob Neusner invented the critical study of rabbinic literature should be retired. He was never adept at either form or redaction criticism.

He knew about the rival lineage. He built a wall against it, and then he built the door in the wall, and he kept the key.

The wall first. When his Brown students needed Hebrew, he sent them to Israel for a year or two, paid for out of the Max Richter Foundation before they had even enrolled. And he told them, in Hughes’s account, not to let the Israelis teach them anything about history. The traffic ran both ways. Professors at the Hebrew University, Abraham Goldberg among them, grew reluctant to work with American students once they learned the students were going back to Providence to work with Neusner.

In 1970 Brill published The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, a volume of studies on what nineteenth and twentieth century historical and literary criticism had achieved with the Bavli. Its chapters include Abraham Weiss on source criticism and on literary forms, and Halivni’s Meqorot u-Mesorot. The editor was Jacob Neusner.

So the man telling his students to keep Jerusalem out of their history was, in the same years, the man who put the Jerusalem source critics in front of an English-reading audience. Those two facts look like hypocrisy and are something else. He wanted the rival tradition available, and he wanted to be the one who made it available. He would carry anything, including his competitors, provided he owned the vehicle.

That is a publisher’s relationship to a rival. A scholar sends his students to the best teacher of a subject. A publisher acquires the rights.

That is also why the citation record today looks the way it does. Scholars working on the composition of the Bavli name Halivni and Friedman, because that is where their operation comes from. Scholars working on Sasanian Babylonia name Neusner, because his five volumes are the account they have to overturn. Monika Amsler’s 2023 book on the Bavli and late antique book culture credits Halivni and Friedman with the stratification and Neusner with the insistence that the composition be looked at as a designed whole, then keeps a piece of each. That is not a field that has forgotten anybody. That is a field taking different tools from different toolboxes and knowing whose is whose.

What Neusner supplied was never the philology. It was everything that turns a technique into a profession.

Look at what he built at Brown. When he set up the graduate program, there were two other places in America to do doctoral work in rabbinics, with Isadore Twersky (1930-1997) at Harvard and Morton Smith at Columbia. He differentiated his from both by refusing to train Talmudists. He was training scholars of religion who happened to work on rabbinic texts. That let him admit gentiles, which the seminaries would not do and which Twersky had no reason to do, so long as they were willing to learn Hebrew and do the work.

Then the regimen. He gave students their dissertation topics in the first week or two on campus, and the topics came out of whatever he was working on at the time. Everyone took a seminar with him that met all twelve months of the year, summer and winter, and everyone arrived each week with twenty pages of translation and commentary. The pages got torn up. If they were bad enough the student came back the next day rather than the next week. Four years, maximum, to finish. Everyone also took a course reading Neusner’s own work in detail, and he encouraged them to read his critics. Everyone took a second religious tradition so that comparison would be possible. And everyone, Jew or gentile, had to attend an Orthodox service every week for a year until they had heard the whole Torah chanted, because a scholar who has never heard the text sung will not understand that it is alive.

With rare exceptions, all of them finished, and all of them got jobs.

Most of them found it humiliating. Several told Hughes it was humiliation aimed at making them better. What nobody disputes is the throughput. That is a factory for manufacturing people who can perform an operation, and it was running at full capacity while the older centers of Jewish learning were still deciding whether the operation was permissible.

Circulation was the other half. Reviewing a book on Maimonidean controversy in 1965, he noted that the author had been forced to publish abroad, which showed America had no satisfactory domestic publisher, or audience, for serious Jewish scholarship. He added that it would come.

He then made it come. Brown Judaic Studies had editors appointed across ancient Judaism, medieval Judaism, Jewish philosophy, Judaism and Islam, and Philo. Brown gave the series its name. Neusner and his backers supplied the organization and the money, the press handled printing, the backlist paid for the frontlist. More than 250 volumes appeared under his editorship, at a pace that at its peak approached a book a week. When he left Brown in 1990 and the series stayed behind under new leadership, he treated it as theft, looked into whether he had legal standing, and then did the only thing that would have satisfied him. He built another one in Florida.

The private economy of the man’s day matched the public economy of the press. He rose between half past four and five, was at the desk half an hour later, and used the hours before sunrise for original composition because the rest of the day would do for essays and reading. He fell asleep by nine without trying. If a problem was on his mind at bedtime it occupied his sleep, and by the hour before waking the chapter was written and he had only to transcribe it. Students could call at eight, precisely, and got fifteen minutes. He taught in the afternoon because that was when he was tired. He told them that you do not get much done on any one day, but if you work three hundred and sixty-five days a year you get an awful lot done.

Not everyone thought this was healthy. S. D. Goitein (1900-1985), the great scholar of the Cairo Geniza, once wrote to Suzanne Neusner rather than to her husband, asking her to restrain the overflow of energy. He had watched too many young friends do this in their late thirties and break down in their forties and fifties. Jack, he wrote, had already done a lifetime’s work.

He had, and he kept going. He advised a colleague in 1997 to write things down so that the thought could reach people who had not been in the room and people who were not yet born. He turned his lectures into books because a lecture is a local event while a book is a portable one. Someone raised in a newspaper office knows the difference in his hands.

His unit of publication was not the book. It was the intellectual operation, and he printed every transformation of it. A text gets translated. The translation generates a commentary. The commentary becomes a documentary study. Several studies become a synthesis. The synthesis gets condensed into a handbook for a wider audience. A dispute produces a polemic. A conference produces an edited volume. A twenty-two volume project on purity law gets reworked, later, into a shorter book that says what the twenty-two volumes found.

Once you see that, the famous number stops being a scandal and starts being a description. Note also that the number itself is soft. His publishers said author or editor of more than nine hundred books, which is not the same as wrote. Multivolume projects were counted volume by volume. Some titles are explicitly described in his own bibliography as reprises, reworkings, condensations, or epitomes of earlier books. Nobody has yet built the ledger that would separate publication events from distinct intellectual projects, and until somebody does, the honest sentence is that we do not know how many books Jacob Neusner wrote, and that the figure everyone repeats measures the throughput of a publishing system rather than the frequency of original acts.

A dozen or so works carry nearly the whole estate. Nobody asks whether all of Max Weber’s journalism remains canonical.

Three different Neusners are alive in current scholarship.

There is the ancestor. When a monograph explains why it will not treat a story recorded centuries later as testimony about the event it narrates, his name still turns up in the genealogy, at least in English.

There is the important wrong answer. He asked in 1975 how much Iranian there was in Jewish Babylonia and concluded not much. Shai Secunda and the Talmudo-Iranica scholars reopened that question with far better Persian material and answered it the other way, and the man who now holds the Jacob Neusner chair at Bard is Secunda. Simcha Gross’s 2024 book has to spend its opening pages dismantling the picture of an insulated Babylonian Jewry that Neusner’s five volumes established, and his bibliography carries ten Neusner items. A forgotten scholar does not get dismantled at Cambridge eight years after his death.

And there is the translator whom people route around. Azzan Yadin-Israel tells his readers that Neusner translated Sifra and that the results are unreliable, and points them elsewhere. That verdict is now ordinary.

He often won the question and lost the answer. He repudiated his own first book on Yohanan ben Zakkai, and the problem that book had failed to solve, what late traditions permit us to know about early rabbis, is still on the table. His documentary boundaries proved too hard, and the demand that a scholar say what a document is doing before mining it for facts survived. His Babylonia went down, and the rule against converting the Bavli into social history without argument stayed up.

That is what happens to a founder who succeeds. His answers get replaced. His questions become the ordinary furniture of the field, and furniture does not get cited.

We keep asking whether he belongs among the great interpreters of the Mishnah or the great philologists of rabbinic literature. Asked that way the answer is no. His nearest analogue is the editor and founder, the man who understands that ideas scattered across separate worlds can be assembled into a program, that a program can be taught, that people who have been taught it need somewhere to publish, that publication makes reputations, that reputations become jobs, that jobs produce students, and that after enough turns of the wheel an insurgency starts to look like the ordinary way educated people think.

Neusner could not let a criticism stand because an unanswered charge becomes the public record. He turned disagreements into books because a controversy is another publication event. He built a second series when the first was taken from him because the machinery mattered as much as the chair. He was generous to young scholars because every new practitioner enlarged the field. And he was controlling past the point of cruelty because he could not distinguish the health of the enterprise from control of its means of reproduction.

Every item on that list comes from one disposition.

His father Sam ran the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, and understood a newspaper as an instrument for making a scattered population into a community that could see itself, argue with itself, educate itself, and present itself to the neighbors. The paper did not invent Connecticut Jewry. It gave it a place to appear, at regular intervals, in front of the same readers.

The son moved that instrument into the university. He did not originate the methods he championed. He gathered them, chose among them, sharpened them, named them, demonstrated them on real texts, taught them to people he selected and paid for, insulated those people from a rival tradition while publishing that tradition himself, put the results into print at a rate no press could have absorbed unless he owned the press, answered everyone who objected, and kept printing until the categories became the water the field swims in.

He kept Jerusalem out of his students’ history and printed Jerusalem for everyone else, and today the two lineages sit together in the same footnotes, each supplying what it does best, in books written by people who never had to choose. The traffic he wanted to meter is now the ordinary business of the field.

Notes

Page numbers are the printed pages of Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast.

The 1965 review of Daniel Jeremy Silver’s Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy, 1180-1240, in which Neusner writes that Silver’s having to publish abroad shows there is as yet no satisfactory domestic publisher, or audience, for serious Jewish scholarship, and adds that it will come, is on p. 88. Hughes draws the connection to Scholars Press in the next sentence. The section is headed “Ever the Reporter,” which is Hughes noticing the journalist and then walking past him.

S. D. Goitein’s letter to Suzanne Neusner asking her to restrain the overflow of energy, warning that too many of their younger friends broke down in their forties and fifties, and saying that Jack had already done a lifetime’s work, is on p. 98.

The letter to Ithamar Gruenwald describing the daily routine, rising between 4:30 and 5, at the desk half an hour later, most original thought before sunrise, asleep by nine, the problem occupying his sleep so that the chapter is written by waking and needs only transcription, is on pp. 98-99. The eight o’clock phone window, the fifteen-minute budget, teaching only in the afternoons because that was when he was tired, Avery-Peck getting called at seven because Neusner suspected he was sleeping in, and the remark that you do not do a lot in any one day but if you work 365 days a year you get an awful lot done, are on p. 100.

Wayne Meeks and Brevard Childs introducing him to historical and form criticism of ancient texts is on pp. 109-110. Childs first met him at the JTS summer program in 1958 and 1959 while an assistant professor at Yale Divinity School, and after A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai appeared, asked him: is it possible that you are doing history too soon, and might you be asking the wrong questions. That quotation is on p. 110 and is the single best piece of evidence in the book for the Christian-scholarship lineage. Use it.

The comparison with the only two other American doctoral programs in rabbinics, Twersky at Harvard and Morton Smith at Columbia, and Neusner’s decision to train scholars of religion rather than Talmudists, which is also why he could admit gentiles, is on p. 139.

The Israel warning is on p. 140. Neusner funded students through Max Richter fellowships before they enrolled so they could spend a year or two in Israel learning Hebrew, and warned them not to let the Israelis teach them anything about history. Hebrew University faculty, Abraham Goldberg named, grew reluctant to work with American students once they learned the students were returning to work with Neusner. Same page: his students came in already able to read rabbinic texts because he had no patience to teach that, and with a couple of exceptions all of them finished and got jobs.

The regimen is on pp. 140-142. Dissertation topics assigned in the first week or two, drawn from whatever he was working on. The seminar meeting all twelve months, twenty pages of translation and commentary weekly, work torn to shreds, come back the next day if it was bad enough. Four years maximum. A separate course reading his own work, with critics encouraged. A second religious tradition required so comparison would be possible. Hebrew Bible required as the foundation of everything. And every student, Jewish or gentile, at an Orthodox service weekly for at least a year to hear the whole Torah chanted, on the theory that a student who has not heard it sung cannot see the text as a living presence. Students describing the seminar as humiliating, and adding that the humiliation was for the sake of getting better, is on p. 141. Students calling him controlling in a positive sense is on p. 140.

Brown Judaic Studies with editors appointed across ancient Judaism, medieval Judaism, Jewish philosophy, Judaism and Islam, and Philo, Brown supplying its name and little else, the Tisch financing and the fifty percent of net proceeds, are on pp. 149-150. The transfer of the series to Ernest Frerichs in June 1990, his letter of June 13, and his look at legal options, are on pp. 232-233.

The rival lineage

J. N. Epstein, Mavo le-Nusah ha-Mishnah (Jerusalem, 1948), the textual criticism of the Mishnah on which everything downstream rests.

Abraham Weiss, Ha-Talmud ha-Bavli be-hithavuto ha-sifrutit (Warsaw, 1937), on the literary formation of the Bavli, and his 1937 article in Revue des études juives on the problem of R. Ashi‘s redaction in the light of the Letter of Sherira. A useful English entry point is Roger Brooks and Joseph M. Davis, “Abraham Weiss as Exegete and Text Critic: The Case of b. Berakhot 35a,” which is on the Connecticut College digital commons.

David Weiss Halivni, Meqorot u-Mesorot, first volume 1968, then the long series, and in English Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara (Harvard, 1986) and The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, translated and edited by Jeffrey Rubenstein (Oxford, 2013). Confirm the 1968 date of the first volume from a library record before printing it, since editions and reprints muddy it.

Shamma Friedman, “Pereq ha-Ishah Rabbah ba-Bavli,” a critical study of Yevamot X with a methodological introduction, in Mehqarim u-Meqorot / Texts and Studies: Analecta Judaica I, ed. H. Z. Dimitrovsky (New York: JTS), pp. 275-441. Some bibliographies date it 1977 and some 1978. Cite the one you inspect. His CV is on Academia and lists it.

Hanan Alexander, “David Halivni and Shamma Friedman: Conflicting Trends in Talmud Criticism,” indexed at RAMBI and on the University of Haifa research portal. That is the short piece that tells you the rival lineage has internal fights of its own.

Current scholarship

Monika Amsler, The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture (Cambridge, 2023). Open access on Cambridge Core, so the introduction can be read and quoted with page numbers without a library trip. This is where Halivni and Friedman get the stratification and Neusner gets the whole-document composition, and where both are kept.

Simcha Gross, Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2024). Jeffrey Rubenstein’s review in the Jewish Review of Books frames the field’s older account as culminating in Neusner’s five volumes: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/16139/imperial-rabbis/ — the Ancient Jew Review forum on the book collects several scholars responding.

Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (Penn, 2014). Interview at https://kavvanah.blog with useful self-description of the field’s genealogy. Secunda now holds the Jacob Neusner chair at Bard.

Azzan Yadin-Israel, Scripture and Tradition (Penn, 2015), for the judgment that the Sifra translation is unreliable.

Peter Haas, “The ‘Neusnerian Turn’ in Method and the End of the Wissenschaft as We Knew It,” in A Legacy of Learning: Essays in Honor of Jacob Neusner, ed. Avery-Peck, Chilton, Green, and Porton (Brill), pp. 162-170. Brill dates the print volume 2014. A full text appears to be posted at docslib.

Neusner’s own slogan, “what we cannot show, we do not know,” is the subtitle of Rabbinic Literature and the New Testament (Wipf and Stock, 2004).

The Merton Test: What It Would Take to Prove Jacob Neusner Won

Aaron W. Hughes opens his biography of Jacob Neusner with a complaint that sounds like a lament and works like an accusation. Everyone in Jewish studies knows the name. Many of us, he writes, use the categories he pioneered, perhaps without attribution. And then he worries that the man has been largely forgotten.

Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) had a name for what Hughes is describing. He thought it was the highest honor a field can pay, and the cruelest.

Merton called it obliteration by incorporation. An idea, a method, or a finding becomes so thoroughly absorbed into what everyone knows that the source drops out of the footnotes. Citing it would be pedantry. Nobody attaches a reference to the proposition that the earth goes around the sun, and no one is stealing from Copernicus. The idea has stopped being a claim inside the field and become one of the conditions under which the field operates. Merton worked the concept out across the 1950s and 1960s, in “Priorities in Scientific Discovery,” in On the Shoulders of Giants, and in the 1968 paper on what he called the Matthew effect. Eugene Garfield (1925-2017), who built the citation index, spent years trying to measure it and never fully succeeded.

What Merton gives us is a conversion. Hughes made a claim about the world and offered no way to test it. Merton turns the same claim into a measurement, and, better, into a measurement that can fail.

Start with the problem that makes the measurement hard.

Obliteration by incorporation and simple oblivion produce identical evidence. Both show up in a citation count as a zero. A scholar whose ideas have become the assumptions of his discipline and a scholar whose ideas were tried and discarded look the same in the index. This is why citation counts cannot settle arguments about influence, and why the people who repeat that Neusner’s stock has fallen and the people who insist he won are pointing at the same data.

An idea that has been obliterated by incorporation leaves fingerprints, and they come in a sequence. In the first phase the proposition is contested, and everyone who states it argues for it and attributes it. In the second phase it is conceded, and people state it with a nod, as X has shown. In the third phase it is assumed, and the nod goes away. What distinguishes obliteration from oblivion is that first phase. If a proposition was fought over, and the people fighting over it named a man, and thirty years later the proposition is stated without argument and without the name, that is obliteration. If a proposition was never contested, or was contested and lost, the absence of the name means what it appears to mean.

That gives you something to build. Take the propositions that were at issue when Neusner arrived. That a saying attributed to a first-century sage in a sixth-century compilation is evidence about the compilation before it is evidence about the sage. That the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the two Talmuds are separate documents with separate programs. That parallel traditions may not be harmonized by default. That a scholar owes an argument before he converts a late source into early social history. Every one of those was a fighting matter in 1975. Track each of them through three windows, say 1985 to 1995, 2000 to 2010, and 2015 to 2025, and record two numbers: how often the proposition appears, and how often it appears with a name attached. The ratio between them is the obliteration index, and nobody has ever calculated it for him.

Now the part where Merton makes the Neusner case harder.

Merton’s other great finding was that independent multiple discovery is the norm in the history of knowledge and the solitary discovery the exception. He collected hundreds of cases and argued that the sociologically interesting question is not who was first, because several people usually were, but which of the multiples gets institutionalized, and why.

Neusner is a multiple. J. N. Epstein had made the textual criticism of the Mishnah a discipline before the war. Abraham Weiss (1895-1970) was taking apart the literary units of the Bavli in Warsaw in 1937. David Weiss Halivni (1927-2022) was separating the anonymous voice of the Bavli from the attributed sayings around it. Shamma Friedman laid out criteria for doing that in 1977. And form criticism and redaction criticism were mature instruments in Gospel scholarship a generation before anyone applied their logic to rabbinic attributions, which is how they reached Neusner, through through Morton Smith and then through Wayne Meeks and Brevard Childs, who asked him after his first book whether he was doing history too soon and asking the wrong questions.

An adumbrationist would stop there and say the case is closed, there was nothing new, the man was a broadcaster of other people’s ideas. Merton named that move too. Adumbrationism is the critical strategy of finding an anticipation for any claim and using it to deny originality, and Merton thought it was usually a weapon rather than a finding, since almost everything can be shown to have been adumbrated by somebody. Neusner’s Israeli critics made that argument about him. He made it about others.

Merton’s own way through is better. In a multiple, the credit goes to the version that got institutionalized, and it goes there for reasons to do with position, visibility, students, and the capacity to broadcast. That is a description of Jacob Neusner. He was the member of the multiple who had a press, a fellowship fund, a doctoral seminar meeting twelve months a year, and a compulsion to print. If his version is the one that became the water in English-language rabbinics, Merton would say that is what the sociology predicts.

There is a counterweight, and it is Merton’s too. The Matthew effect says that credit accrues to the eminent, that the famous name gets cited for work the obscure name did, and that citation flows uphill. Neusner was extravagantly visible. He had the largest bibliography in the field and the most quotable personality in. Everything about his position should have made him over-cited rather than under-cited. So if the propositions are present and the name is not, that finding runs against the strongest current in Merton’s system.

And there is a third possibility that Merton did not anticipate, because his model assumes a reward system where citation is a token allocated by norms.

Citation can also be avoidance.

Merton’s scientists withheld credit out of forgetfulness, absorption, or the scramble for priority. Neusner may be uncited because colleagues would rather not be seen with him. The translations are known to be unreliable, and saying so has become routine. The man damaged careers, and some of the people he damaged are now senior. A footnote is a public act of association. So a zero in the count now has three possible causes, and only one of them is victory: the idea has been absorbed, the idea was rejected, or the man has been quarantined.

Merton lets you separate them anyway.

If the cause is absorption, the decay is gradual and the proposition survives without him. If the cause is rejection, the proposition disappears along with the name. If the cause is quarantine, you will find the strangest signature of the three, which is a proposition that keeps its attribution to somebody while losing it to him. You will find scholars naming Halivni and Friedman for an operation Neusner also performed, or citing his translation in a footnote while crediting the method to another lineage in the preface. You can also test it against the same authors over time, since a scholar who cited him in 1995 and not in 2020 while making the same argument is telling you something about the field’s manners rather than about the argument. And you can test it against a control, a scholar of comparable centrality whom nobody hated, and see whether his curve decays at the same rate.

That is a study that can come out three ways. If the propositions and the name are both gone, he was overrated and Hughes was consoling himself. If both are present, he is an ordinary living ancestor and the talk of forgetting is premature. If the propositions are everywhere and the name is nowhere, Hughes was right in a stronger form than he could demonstrate, and Jacob Neusner has been obliterated by incorporation.

I would bet on the third. In Sasanian Babylonia he is still named, because his five volumes are the account people have to overturn, and an account under demolition keeps its author’s name until the demolition is finished. In the layered analysis of the Bavli the credit runs to Halivni and Friedman, which is where it belongs. In the general suspicion of attributions, in the refusal to harmonize, in the demand that a scholar say what a document is doing before mining it, I expect to find his propositions everywhere and his name almost nowhere.

Merton’s last observation about all this is the one that turns a bibliometric exercise into a biography.

The reward system of scholarship runs on recognition, and recognition is the only property a scholar owns. He cannot patent a finding. He can only be known to have made it. Obliteration by incorporation is therefore the one form of success that consumes the thing success is for. The more completely you win, the less anyone has occasion to say your name, until the victory is total and the man has been paid in a currency that no longer exists.

Set that beside what we know about Jacob Neusner. He kept his correspondence in two archives. He authorized a biography and sat for it. He wanted every book he had written put online free for anyone to read. Asked at the end how he would like to be remembered, he could not answer, and his wife could not answer for him, and his son said the students.

A man who wanted to be remembered that badly spent fifty years manufacturing the conditions under which he would not have to be.

That is the finding, if the numbers hold. And unlike almost everything else written about him, it can be checked.