Neusner on Judaism

Volume 1: History

Jacob Neusner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780815390626
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351152747
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Jacob Neusner has published more than 1000 books and articles, scholarly and academic, popular and journalistic, and is one of the most published humanities scholars in the world. Over a period of fifty years he has made significant, insightful and challenging contributions to the study of Rabbinic Judaism, particularly in the disciplines covered in the three volumes which make up Neusner on Judaism: the study of history (volume 1), literature (volume 2), and religion and theology (volume 3). These unique volumes of selective writings by Jacob Neusner, with new introductions by the author, offer scholars an invaluable resource in the field of Judaic Studies.

IV
HISTORICAL STUDIES
1. JEWRY IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

Introduction to Part Four

Talmudic history began as an instrument of the Reform of Judaism, to treat in a secular, this worldly-framework the sources of the oral part of the Torah. A debunking purpose was best achieved by showing that the stories the sources told did not really happen, or did not happen that way but happened in some other way. The historical inquiry then osmosed into biography, lives of particular rabbis emerging from collections and paraphrases of sayings and stories. General histories of the Jews on the period of the Mishnah and the Talmuds, consisting in the main of these same collection and paraphrases of sources, followed, some of them dull, others vivid, the latter exemplified in the work of G. Alon, even though it too is a mere curiosity now.

Historical studies do not limit themselves to issues of the one-time event, nor do they find satisfaction in finding out what really happened on that particular day of which they speak. Several generations of historians have pursued problems in the history of culture and the history of religion, the history of theology and the history of society and social thought, as the Rabbinic documents deal with those problems. To answer the questions that the Rabbinic classics address, the Rabbinic literature forms a rich and reliable resource indeed. Even the conception of history requires reconsideration in light of their notions of time.¹

The historical studies assembled here focus on topics of considerable contemporary interest, the Pharisees, the crisis precipitated by the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the formation of Rabbinic Judaism in the aftermath, and the Judaic response in the fourth century ce to the adoption of Christianity as state religion of the Roman Empire. That program yields no continuous history of the Jews or of Judaism in the Land of Israel. The extant sources make the provision of such a continuous, narrative nistory exceedingly difficult. But they do sustain study of important special topics, and that is what I have attempted to do on the strength of the Rabbinic literature correlated with topical counterparts among the writings of Christianity.

I first characterize the Rabbinic traditions - preserved in the Mishnah through the Bavli - that speak of persons assumed to have lived prior to 70 CE, inclusive of the Houses of Shammai and Hillel. These traditions yield no history of pre-70 Pharisaism, only topics and opinions attributed to sages associated with that Judaic religious system and community. In 'Two Pictures of the Pharisees' I pursue the same exercise in the characterization of sources, now encompassing Josephus and the Gospels as they deal with the same group. This same effort at comparing and contrasting diverse bodies of ancient writings as they address a single topic defines the problem of 'Judaism in a Time af Crisis'. These are represented by Apocalyptic writings, the Dead Sea scrolls, the Christian canon, the pre-70 Pharisees, the Rabbinic writings that refer to the period after 70, and the outcome. The sequence of papers on the first century concludes with the discussion of the types of Judaic systems that merged after 70 to form Rabbinic Judaism, with special reference to the traditions that concern Eliezer b. Hyrcanus: what was Pharisaic, what not, in the traditions attributed to him. Here once more I characterize the traditions assigned to a particular authority and build on the premise that the attributions count for something.

A considerable gap separates the first papers of this group from the final one. In the intervening decade I came to realize that in relying on attributions in the formation of historical questions and answers, I had not taken many steps beyond the uncritical positions of those I deemed gullible. A rhetoric of criticism veiled credulity, if not in the contents of what was attributed to a given person and his time, then at least to the topic. As I struggled to criticize my own methods and inquiries, I recognized that I could not justify moving beyond the limits of my documents, into the social world that sustained them. How to transfer from the document to the history of which the framers of the document spoke? The issue is clearly drawn in 'From Enemy to Sibling', where the documentary history of ideas is adumbrated.

¹ See The Presence of the Past, the Pastness of the Present: History, Time, and Paradigm in Rabbinic Judaism (Bethesda: CDL Press, 1996).

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pre-70 C.E. Pharisaism: The Record of the Rabbis

HAVING SHOWN how and why nearly all former efforts to use rabbinic traditions about pre-70 C. E. Pharisaism for historical purposes are primitive (CCAR Journal, April, 1972), I shall now outline positive results produced by critical methods. These results are hardly as satisfying from a literary and theological viewpoint as are those which take for granted the historicity of everything the sources purport to tell us. But they are more reliable, and they accord with the canons of scholarly inquiry into the history of other groups of the same time and place.

Evidence concerning Pharisaic Judaism before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C. E. derives from four sources: Josephus, the Synoptic Gospels, certain Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphical Books attributed to Pharisaism — such as The Psalms of Solomon, IV Ezra, II Baruch — and, finally, Talmudic literature, such as Mishnah-Tosefta (ca. 200), Tannaitic Midrashim (Mekhilta, Sifra, and Sifré, ca. 250), the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds (ca. 450, 600 C. E., respectively), and later compilations of rabbinic traditions. The first three sources were indisputably written and put into circulation in the period before 100 C. E., while the last-named compilations reached final form in a much later period.

My purpose here is to offer a characterization of the whole rabbinic tradition about the Pharisees. All individual pericopae are translated and analyzed in my Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 A. D. (three volumes; Leiden: 1971. E. J. Brill). The analysis there focuses upon form-critical, redactional-critical, and historical-critical problems.

The rabbinic traditions under study are those which refer to men and institutions in the period before the destruction of Jerusalem — specifically, the masters listed in Mishnah Avot 1:1-18, and the Houses of Shammai and Hillel. Those masters were Pharisees, it is generally assumed, even though only two of them, Gamaliel and his son Simeon are called Pharisees in extra-Talmudic literature (Acts 6:34; Josephus, Life). Rabbinic traditions which stand anonymously but may allude to the Pharisaic legal tradition before 70 C. E. are not under discussion. Those which specifically refer to the Pharisees by name but do not contain teachings of, or stories about, individual masters have been collected and admirably discussed by Ellis Rivkin in his "Defining the Pharisees: The Tannaitic Sources," Hebrew Union College Annual 40-41, 1969-1970, pp. 205-249, which I find impeccable in all respects except the historical reasoning and conclusions.

I

THE RABBINIC TRADITIONS about the Pharisees before 70 C. E. consist of approximately 371 separate items — stories or sayings or allusions — which occur in approximately 655 different pericopae. Of these traditions, 280, in 462 pericopae, pertain to the Hillel circle — that is, Menahem, Shammai, Hillel, and the Houses of Hillel and Shammai; these make up approximately seventy-five per cent of all.

A roughly even division of the materials would give twenty-three traditions in forty pericopae to each name or category, so the disparity is enormous. Exact figures cannot be given, for much depends upon how one counts the components of composite pericopae or reckons with other imponderables. The figures on the following page suffice to indicate that the disproportionately greater part of the rabbinic traditions concerning the Pharisees pertains to Hillel and people involved with him (see table on p. 55).

Approximately sixty-seven per cent of all legal pericopae deal with dietary laws: (1) ritual purity for meals, and (2) agricultural rules governing the fitness of food for Pharisaic consumption. Observance of Sabbaths and festivals is a distant third. The named masters normally have legal traditions of the same sort; only Gamaliel greatly diverges from the pattern, Simeon ben Shetah somewhat less so. Of the latter we can say nothing. The wider range of legal topics covered by Gamaliel's legal lemmas and stories goes to confirm the tradition of Acts that he had an important position in the civil government.

The rabbinic traditions of the Pharisees as a whole may be characterized as self-centered: the internal records of a party concerning its own life, its own laws, and its own partisan conflicts. The omission of records of what happened outside of the party is not only puzzling, but nearly inexplicable. Almost nothing in Josephus's picture of the Pharisees seems closely related to much, if anything, in the rabbis' portrait of the Pharisees, except the rather general allegation that the Pharisees had "traditions from the fathers," a point made also by the Synoptic storytellers.

The rabbis' Pharisaic conflict-stories (except those listed by Rivkin on the Pharisaic-Sadducean differences), moreover, do not tell of Pharisees' opposing Essenes, Christians, or Sadducees, but of Hillelites' opposing Shammaites. Pharisaic laws deal not with the governance of the country, but with the party's rules for table-fellowship. The political issues are not whether one should pay taxes to Rome or how one should know the Messiah, but whether in the Temple the rule of Shammai or that of Hillel should be followed in a minor festal sacrifice (as if the Pharisees ran the Temple!).

From the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees we could not have reconstructed a single significant, public event of the period before 70 C. E. — not the rise, success, and fall of the Hasmoneans, nor the Roman conquest of Palestine, nor the rule of Herod, nor the reign of the procurators, nor the growth of opposition to Rome, nor the proliferation of social violence and unrest in the last decades before 66 C. E., nor the outbreak of the war with Rome. We do not gain a picture of the Pharisees' philosophy of history or theology of politics. We should not even know how Palestine was governed, for the Pharisees' traditions according to the rabbis do not refer to how the Pharisees governed the country— the rabbis never claim the Pharisees did run pre-70 C. E. Palestine, at least not in stories told either about named masters or about the Houses — nor do they tell us how the Romans ran it. Furthermore, sectarian issues are barely mentioned, and other sects (apart from the Sadducees) not at all. Jesus and the early Christians are ignored.

The rabbis' Pharisees are mostly figures of the late Herodian and Roman periods. They were a non-political group, whose chief religious concerns were for the proper preservation of ritual purity in connection with eating secular (not Temple) food, and for the observance of the dietary laws of the day, especially those pertaining to the proper nurture and harvest of agricultural crops. Their secondary religious concern was with the proper governance of the party itself.

By contrast, Josephus's Pharisaic materials pertain mostly to the years from the rise of the Hasmoneans to their fall. His Pharisees were a political party which tried to get control of the government of Jewish Palestine, not a little sect drawn apart from the common society by observance of its own laws of table-fellowship. Josephus's Pharisees are important in the reigns of John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, but drop from the picture after Alexandra Solome.

The Synoptics's Pharisees appropriately are much like those of the rabb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Jacob Neusner
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I: Introducing the Scholar
• II: HISTORY IN FORMATIVE JUDAISM
• III: PROBLEMS OF HISTORICAL METHOD
• IV: HISTORICAL STUDIES 1. JEWRY IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL
• V: HISTORICAL STUDIES 2. JEWRY IN IRANIAN BABYLONIA