Jacob Neusner
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Jacob Neusner

An American Jewish Iconoclast

Aaron W. Hughes

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Jacob Neusner

An American Jewish Iconoclast

Aaron W. Hughes

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Biography: Neusner is a social commentator, a post-Holocaust theologian, and an outspoken political figure. Jacob Neusner (born 1932) is one of the most important figures in the shaping of modern American Judaism. He was pivotal in transforming the study of Judaism from an insular project only conducted by—and of interest to—religious adherents to one which now flourishes in the secular setting of the university. He is also one of the most colorful, creative, and difficult figures in the American academy. But even those who disagree with Neusner’s academic approach to ancient rabbinic texts have to engage with his pioneering methods.
In this comprehensive biography, Aaron Hughes shows Neusner to be much more than a scholar of rabbinics. He is a social commentator, a post-Holocaust theologian, and was an outspoken political figure during the height of the cultural wars of the 1980s. Neusner’s life reflects the story of what happened as Jews migrated to the suburbs in the late 1940s, daring to imagine new lives for themselves as they successfully integrated into the fabric of American society. It is also the story of how American Jews tried to make sense of the world in the aftermath of the extermination of European Jewry and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and how they sought to define what it meant to be an American Jew. Unlike other great American Jewish thinkers, Neusner was born in the U.S., and his Judaism was informed by an American ethos. His Judaism is open, informed by and informing the world. It is an American Judaism, one that has enabled American Jews—the freest in history—to be fully American and fully Jewish.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2016
ISBN
9781479823451

1

Afloat in a Sea of Words

The religious study of sacred texts has a long and ancient history in Judaism.1 The secular study of such texts, however, is a much more recent affair that dates to nineteenth-century Germany.2 There, young Jews, many alienated from the faith of their ancestors, began to apply the critical historical methods that they had learned at university to texts previously encountered only in the synagogue. This application provided an important impetus for the rise of the various denominations of Judaism that were only then beginning to take shape. Those associated with the more liberal denominations, such as Reform, used scholarship to show how changes could be made within Judaism, which included jettisoning aspects of the halakhah believed to conflict with modernity. Many critical of this enterprise sought to keep what they perceived to be Judaism’s essence far removed from history.3
For those who began to apply historical methods to Judaism, the results were revolutionary. Judaism now entered history, and vice versa. Things would never again be the same. Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), one of the leading architects of this transformation, summarizes as follows: “when all science and all of man’s doings have been illumined in brilliant rays, when the remote corners of the earth have been reached, the most obscure languages studied and nothing seems too insignificant to assist in the construction of wisdom, how is it possible that our science [namely, the study of postbiblical Jewish texts] alone lies neglected?”4 This project of illumining the texts of Judaism using history and philology was an apologetic enterprise, to be sure. In many ways it had to be. It was the attempt to remap Judaism as the foundation of Western civilization as opposed to the embarrassing law-based tradition of a pariah people.5
Whereas the traditional approach to Jewish texts took place in a vacuum and was largely mistrustful of secular learning, the young German scholars stressed context, sometimes even at the expense of the texts themselves. Scholarship was used in the service of inclusion.6 If Jews could be shown to have a history, people like Zunz reasoned, then surely they were worthy of political and legal emancipation. Even better: if Judaism could be shown to be the “midwife” of later monotheisms, both Christianity and Islam, then their own religion resided at the epicenter of the civilized world. This new type of scholarship had two objectives. One was to show non-Jews that Judaism was a religion in light of critics like Immanuel Kant who had argued that it was not; and the second was to show Jews that their tradition was, when properly understood, a spiritually and aesthetically edifying religion, just as they imagined Protestant Christianity, their lodestar, to be.7 Their project proved untenable. The German academy, not surprisingly, was uninterested. When Zunz petitioned the state for a chair in Jewish history and literature at the University of Berlin, the disingenuous reply came back that neither the university nor the state was in the business of training clerics.8 To be a professor in a German university at this time meant that one had to be a Christian. The only options for a Jew were either to convert to Christianity, and many did, or to teach in the parochial seminaries associated with the new denominations. The latter option, for all intents and purposes, created a shadow or pariah academy.
It was an initial attempt to normalize the academic study of Judaism, to be sure. But it was one that would have to wait for another time and another place to be realized.
* * *
Fast-forward to West Hartford, Connecticut, and July 28, 1932, the birthplace and date of Jacob Neusner. America was not Germany. The case no longer needed to be made that Jews could be productive and loyal citizens. The unpleasant odor of anti-Semitism still filled the air, but its acridity was slowly diminishing as America would soon emerge from the Great Depression and rise to prominence.9 However, if one wanted to study Judaism’s traditional texts in 1932, the primary place to do this was within the context of the yeshiva world. There were, as we have seen, several other options: seminaries associated with the various Jewish denominations in the United States, such as the Reform Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, and the Orthodox Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary associated with Yeshiva University, also located in New York; or private nondenominational institutions, such as Dropsie College in Philadelphia and the Baltimore Hebrew College and Teachers Training School. The one place where it was virtually impossible to study Jewish postbiblical texts was in the secular context of the university. It was most certainly impossible to do so in departments of religious studies, today the primary place to study Jews and Judaism in a secular setting. To study rabbinic texts, even academically, it was assumed that one would have to receive years of technical training at a yeshiva. One certainly would be neither a woman nor a non-Jew.
Neusner was to change all of this. His story is uniquely the product of America. Only a suburban Jew and a second-generation American with no formal Jewish education outside of Reform Sunday school could have taken Jewish texts out of the yeshiva and into the mainstream academy where they could be studied and appreciated by Jew and non-Jew alike. Neusner’s background enabled him to ignore the status quo and its regnant approach to Jewish texts. Compared to someone like his future undergraduate advisor at Harvard, the great Harry Wolfson (1887–1974), the quintessential outsider, Neusner never had to acclimatize to American culture. He was a consummate insider, one who knew how to work the system to his own advantage. As his wife, Suzanne, once remarked, “he feels lucky to have been born in his particular time and circumstances.”10
* * *
Although Neusner was born on the cusp of the Great Depression, his formative years would be on the other side of the Second World War. He spent his early years during a time that witnessed the rapid expansion of the middle class, which demanded, and received, unprecedented access to higher education, all of which was precipitated by the G.I. Bill. Politics tended to be moderate; unions were strong; and Americans, who were increasingly enjoying the fruits of prosperity, moved out to the suburbs in the search of bigger houses and yards, a symbol of the better lives that they hoped to enjoy. Jews, of course, were no different. Experiencing unheralded freedom, they sought access to all that had been denied to them in Europe. The search for the illusive American Dream motivated many to make the great migration from cityscape to suburban landscape.11
At the time of Neusner’s birth, West Hartford was a small, incorporated town, slowly becoming one of several growing suburbs for the much larger city of Hartford, one of the oldest cities in the United States. West Hartford, roughly 100 miles (160 km) southwest of Boston and 120 miles (190 km) northeast of New York City, had a population of around 25,000 inhabitants in the 1930s. The town, on the verge of being the epicenter of Greater Hartford’s Jewish community, was soon to have the largest per capita Jewish population of any other in the state, including places such as Stamford and New Haven. Although prior to the 1930s the majority of Hartford’s Jews had lived in the city’s North End, the 1930s witnessed a shift in demographics, not unlike Jewish populations in other large urban environments, from city to suburb. It was a major time in the development of American Jewry as many began to enter middle-class professions and increasingly to identify as “Jewish Americans,” that is, as equally Jewish and American. West Hartford became a convenient place for those Jews who desired to leave the “tight Jewish atmosphere of the city” in search of cheaper and what was considered to be more middle-class housing.12 This “westward migration” to the suburbs also witnessed the movement of Jewish businesses out of Hartford and into their new places of residence. This small town became increasingly larger and larger, and Jewish Americans increasingly interacted with other Americans in schools, in the marketplace, and in other places.
The specter of nuclear annihilation loomed on the horizon for a generation of men and women who had been too young to fight in the Second World War and who were increasingly aware of the military threat from the so-called Iron Curtain. Although Neusner would, in 1960, write his doctoral dissertation on Yohanan ben Zakkai, the first-century rabbinic sage, it is perhaps no coincidence that he gave it the subtitle “The Day after Doomsday: Jewish Palestine after the Destruction of the Temple in 70.”13 Writing in the preface to the second edition of the published version of the dissertation, A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai, Ca. 1–80 CE, Neusner made this explicit:
Perhaps a personal word may not be out of order. Many years ago, when I began my studies of Yohanan ben Zakkai, I was drawn to him out of the deepening gloom of the Cold War. Day by day one looked to the skies, fearful of sighting that single plane bearing a single bomb to end the life of the city. What struck me then was the challenge of “the next day,” the 10th of Av in Yavneh, or who knew what date the stars then would designate. He who passed through that awful time would bear witness that life could go on, in new forms to be sure, and that men confidently might look beyond disaster.14
Against the backdrop of the Cold War, Neusner would spend his formative years. The Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry seemed like a distant event since it had not touched the Neusner family personally, whereas the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed much more tangible. Although anti-Semitism certainly existed, the Neusner family chose not to see it.15 Despite its omnipresence, the Neusners, like many Jews in the 1940s, enjoyed the unprecedented possibilities associated with access to American institutions that had been denied to previous generations of Jews—these formed the cornerstones upon which Neusner would build his career.
At the time of his entry into Harvard as an undergraduate, there was, for all intents and purposes, no such thing as Jewish studies within the American academy. Certainly the sacred texts of Judaism had been studied and were still studied in the context of the yeshiva world. Therein, texts such as the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud were read according to the rhythms of Jewish life with very little, if any, concern for integration into the higher criticism associated with the university. Although the Mishnah and the Talmud would increasingly find their way into the curricula of American institutions of learning, they still tended to be examined using traditional methods. This approach would prove anathema to the young Neusner, who sought to integrate Jewish texts with the themes and issues that were of concern to others working in the humanities in general and the academic study of religion in particular. If Jacob Neusner could be both proudly Jewish and proudly American, why, he wondered, could there not be a Jewish American way of examining these texts?
Prior to the 1970s the major place in the United States where Judaica was taught from a nondenominational perspective was in departments of Semitics. The texts studied, however, were in the Old Testament, rarely if ever the Mishnah or the Talmud. Those who taught courses in such departments were often Jews funded by local Jewish communities. They were more like scholar-rabbis than scholars. They enjoyed the largesse of American Jews, many of whom perceived university recognition as the pathway to attain social and cultural inclusion. University campuses and the academic study of Jewish topics, they hoped, would become one of the primary institutional spaces for Jewish normalization. The teaching of Jewish subjects within American universities would help to establish, in the words of sociologists Paul Ritterband and Harold Wechsler, “university-based Jewish learning that could serve both a parent discipline and the Jewish community.”16 This was a delicate balance to be sure. How can academic study be critical while simultaneously serving the local Jewish community?17
An example is illustrative.18 Felix Adler (1851–1933) was the son of one of the leading figures of Reform Judaism in America, Samuel Adler, rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York City. In 1874, after it had become clear that the young Felix would not follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the rabbinate, members of his father’s congregation funded a professorship in Hebrew and Oriental literature at Cornell University, and nominated the younger Adler for the position. Writing of the appointment in the same year, the Jewish Messenger, a weekly periodical that was published out of New York City, proclaimed,
It is significant of the progress of culture in this country, when a thriving educational institution—such as Cornell University—adds to its faculty a young and talented Israelite to fill the professorship of Hebrew and Oriental Literature. . . . We hail the appointment of a Hebrew professor as a grand concession to the liberality of the age, and congratulate the faculty of Cornell University in having thus demonstrated their freedom from prejudice. . . . [Adler’s supporters who financed the position] have the satisfaction of having not only placed their friend-protĂ©gĂ© in an honorable position, but elevate the Jewish name and Jewish interests in the opinion of the world, again demonstrating that the Jew has higher ideas that mere moneymaking.19
In this passage we see how Adler’s religious and ethnic identity means as much to the editors of the Jewish Messenger as his scholarly potential or capabilities. Although Adler’s position would eventually not be renewed, and his vision of Judaism alienated many of his initial supporters, this quotation reveals just how important it was that these positions in Jewish subjects be held by individuals who embodied what was generally perceived to be a positive Jewish identity.
Although Neusner, from a very young age, knew that he wanted to spend his life dealing with Jewish texts, he thought at the time that this meant life as a rabbi. It was not until graduate school, however, that he began to realize what rabbinic texts were, since he had never encountered them until he arrived at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In his desire to integrate Jewish texts with non-Jewish contexts, he had to blaze a trail that many of us today take for granted. Indeed, before he encountered rabbinics, he was well on his way to becoming a rabbi and a public commenter on contemporary American Jewry through his work with his father’s paper. In this respect he was a journalist quite literally before he was a scholar. This journalistic impulse never left him, however, as he would frequently turn the theses of books into op-eds or articles for both Jewish and non-Jewish papers.
The towering figures of Jewish studies in the mid-twentieth century—for example, Gershom Scholem at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harry Austryn Wolfson at Harvard, Salo Wittmayer Baron at Columbia, and Alexander Altmann at Brandeis—were products of the Old World. None of them were particularly interested in the academic study of religion or the place of Judaism within this fledgling field. They instead represented a different ideological world, epitomized perhaps by the adjective “European,” in which Jews were discriminated against, and that meant that Jewish topics were insular and, for the most part, “ghettoized” in the non-Jewish academic world. The natural reaction was to engage in apologetics or to show, as Wolfson and Altmann did, the filiations between Hebraic and other Western-inflected rationalisms.
Harry Wolfson, who would eventually be Neusner’s undergraduate advisor at Harvard, wrote in 1921, prior to his appointment to the Harvard faculty, about the importance of rabbinic texts. He also noted, however, that they tended to be studied in ways that removed Jews from others. Writing in the Menorah Journal...

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