Religion

After Neusner had finished his descriptive and contextual work, he began to experiment with how he could rewrite the history of formative Judaism using its documents. His method of rewriting would not focus on personalities or events, as was traditionally the case, but on texts, each of which possessed its own unique structure, system, and ideology. Only by examining the parts, he surmised, would it be possible to understand the whole, which, taken as more than just the sum of its parts, forms an integrated network of beliefs, practices, and values. This integrated network is what created for its adherents a coherent religious and social worldview. The “religion” phase of his career now sees him focus on how rabbinic Judaism – that which superseded all the other Judaisms, with the obvious exception of Christianity – formulates categories of understanding and how these categories, in turn, relate to one another despite the fact that they emerge from discrete documents. Neusner now examines, framed somewhat differently, how ideas move across the various documents. He takes, for example, specific topics – such as purity or emotions – and traces their often-changing expression throughout the diverse corpus of rabbinic Judaism, from the rudimentary philosophical presentation in the Mishnah through to the mature theological presentation found in the Bavli. Again, it is worth underscoring in this context, that Neusner was not a

grand theoretician of religion. He read texts closely and in counterpoint with one another. Like his friend and colleague, Jonathan Z. Smith, he was interested in difference and incongruity, and how these two features enabled various social groups – in Neusner’s case, the ancient sages or rabbis – to make sense of the social worlds that they inhabited. Neusner focused on the social construction of religion without making appeals to divine causation or some essence that various religious expressions are believed to manifest. In this respect, he was not interested in the origins of religion or even the origins of Judaism, but he was interested in how the chaotic social situation created by the destruction of the Second Temple in CE 70 led to a series of conditions that ultimately produced a set of documents that tried to make sense of life in the absence of that Temple. Nor was Neusner a comparative

religionist who was interested in making a set of superficial comparisons between religions that he did not know particularly well. He was, however, interested in how certain questions generated by other scholars of religion illumined Jewish data and how his Jewish data, when understood in a particular way, could expand our understanding of these larger questions. Neusner, then, knew one tradition very well, and all of his generalizations about religion come out of a very specific body of literature. Neusner, like any good religionist, was interested in showing how his data exemplified larger questions. If we were to encapsulate Neusner’s theory of religion it would be how rabbinic Judaism provides us with an example of human ingenuity and creativity in the midst of social change. It is within this context that Neusner shows us how rabbinic Judaism was able to create a social world that sought stability in the past as it simultaneously faced an uncertain future. In making Judaism exemplary of larger issues, Neusner transformed this

religious tradition into the mainstream of Religious Studies in this country. He created connections between the academic study of Judaism and the academic study of other religions and, in the process, showed how Judaism could shed light on intellectual and analytical problems raised within the academic study of religion. Neusner’s main contribution here was his focus on religions as “systems.” This meant that analysis between religions, or even within a religion, could not take place on the level of ad hoc comparisons. Such comparisons lead to analyses where “x” in one religion is like “y” in another. Instead, Neusner argued that work on religion – and, by extension, comparisons between religions – had to be comprehensive, taking into consideration the interrelationships between worldview, way of life, and the view of the social order. The study of religion was, for him, a secular and this-worldly study. This is why its goal was not to ascertain eternal and timeless truths, but to understand the social worlds that communities create for themselves and attempt to explain the relationship between such worlds and the ideas that they hold.