Jacob Neusner

Neusner was born in Hartford, Connecticut to Reform Jewish parents.[1][3] He graduated from William H. Hall High School in West Hartford.[3] He then attended Harvard University, where he met Harry Austryn Wolfson and first encountered Jewish religious texts. After graduating from Harvard in 1953, Neusner spent a year at the University of Oxford.

Neusner then attended the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he was ordained as a Conservative Jewish rabbi.[3] After spending a year at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he returned to the Jewish Theological Seminary and studied the Talmud under Saul Lieberman, who would later write a famous, and highly negative, critique of Neusner's translation of the Jerusalem Talmud.[4][1][3] He graduated in 1960 with a master's degree.[3] Later that year, he received a doctorate in religion from Columbia University.

Afterward, he briefly taught at Dartmouth College.[1] Neusner also held positions at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Brandeis University, Brown University, and the University of South Florida.

In 1994, Neusner began teaching at Bard College, working there until 2014.[3] After leaving Bard College, he founded the Institute for Advanced Theology with Bruce Chilton.[3]

He was a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He was the only scholar to have served on both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Neusner died on October 8, 2016 at the age of 84.[5]

Neusner called himself a Zionist, but also said "Israel’s flag is not mine. My homeland is America."[3] He was culturally conservative, and opposed feminism and affirmative action.[3]

Neusner was a signer of the conservative Christian Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship,[3] which expresses concern over the "unfounded or undue concerns" of environmentalists such as "fears of destructive manmade global warming, overpopulation, and rampant species loss".[7]

Neusner's original adoption of form criticism to the rabbinic texts proved highly influential both in North American and European studies of early Jewish and Christian texts. His later detailed studies of Mishnaic law lack the densely footnoted historical approach characteristic of his earlier work. As a result, these works, focusing on literary form, tend to ignore contemporary external sources and modern scholarship dealing with these issues. The irony was that his approach adopted the analytic methodology developed by Christian scholars for the New Testament, while denying there was any relationship between the (Judeo-)Christian corpus and rabbinic works, the latter being treated as isolates detached from their broader historical contexts.[8]

A number of scholars in his field of study were critical of this phase in his work .[9][10][4][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]

Some were critical of his methodology, and asserted that many of his arguments were circular or attempts to prove "negative assumptions" from a lack of evidence,[9][10][11][13][14] while others concentrated on Neusner's reading and interpretations of Rabbinic texts, finding that his account was forced and inaccurate.[12][17][18]

Neusner's view that the Second Commonwealth Pharisees were a sectarian group centered on "table fellowship" and ritual food purity practices, and his lack of interest in wider Jewish values or social issues, has been criticized by E. P. Sanders,[14] Solomon Zeitlin[15] and Hyam Maccoby.[11]

Some scholars questioned Neusner's grasp of Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic. The most famous and biting criticism came from one of Neusner's former teachers, Saul Lieberman, about Neusner's translation of the Jerusalem Talmud. Lieberman wrote, in an article circulated before his death and then published posthumously: "...one begins to doubt the credibility of the translator [Neusner]. And indeed after a superficial perusal of the translation, the reader is stunned by the translator's ignorance of rabbinic Hebrew, of Aramaic grammar, and above all of the subject matter with which he deals."[19] Ending his review, Lieberman states "I conclude with a clear conscience: The right place for [Neusner's] English translation is the waste basket" while at the same time qualifying that "[i]n fairness to the translator I must add that his various essays on Jewish topics are meritorious. They abound in brilliant insights and intelligent questions." Lieberman highlights his criticism as being of Neusner's "ignorance of the original languages," which Lieberman claims even Neusner was originally "well aware of" inasmuch as he had previously relied on responsible English renderings of rabbinic sources, e.g., Soncino Press, before later choosing to create his own renderings of rabbinic texts.[20] Lieberman's views were seconded by Morton Smith, another teacher who resented Neusner's criticism of his views that Jesus was a homosexual magician.[21]

Neusner thought Lieberman's approach reflected the closed mentality of a yeshiva-based education that lacked familiarity with modern formal textual-critical techniques, and he eventually got round to replying to Lieberman's charges by writing in turn an equally scathing monograph entitled:Why There Never Was a Talmud of Caesarea: Saul Lieberman’s Mistakes (1994). In it he attributed to Lieberman 'obvious errors of method, blunders in logic' and argued that Lieberman’s work showed a systematic inability to accomplish critical research.[22]

• Hughes, Aaron W. Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast. New York: NYU Press, 2016.

• "Scholar of Judaism, Professional Provocateur," Dinitia Smith, The New York Times, April 13, 2005
• Sh'ma articles by Jacob Neusner
• "Jacob Neusner, Judaic Scholar Who Forged Interfaith Bonds, Dies at 84", William Grimes, The New York Times, October 10, 2016