ABSTRACT

In 1994 Neusner began to teach at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, as Professor of Religion. It is around this time that we begin to see the mature expression of Neusner’s thought as he began to reflect upon a lifetime of working with rabbinic texts. Having redefined the academic study of Judaism in general and rabbinic texts in particular, he now begins to examine these texts on a more philosophical level. In terms of his own self-described typology, something that I have reproduced as my own guiding frame of reference to his massive oeuvre, this represents the so-called “theological” phase. His interests have moved, as we have seen, from (1) historical and (2) literary reconstruction to (3) how all these texts fit together and now, finally, to (4) the coherent structure that this totality of texts represents. As symbolic of these changes we may note that in 2006 Neusner was appointed as “Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism” at Bard, the last academic position that he was to hold.1 This interest in theology, commencing in the 1990s, albeit with much earlier adumbrations, would play an important role in the remainder of his career. What perhaps sets this period apart from the others is that Neusner

increasingly began to work closer with colleagues in different religious traditions. These included both other scholars and various religious leaders, most notably Pope Benedict XVI. This aspect of his work – and this should come as little surprise given what we have seen so far – was not meant to engage in a mealy-mouthed interfaith dialogue based on “cherry-picking” from select sources, but to attend to a common and systematically defined problem that could be looked at from a variety of different perspectives. Each perspective would illume not only the larger problem but, in so doing, shed additional light on each other perspective. The model for this, it will be recalled, was not unlike what Neusner had tried to do years earlier when, as President of the American Academy of Religion, he took a topic and asked colleagues working in different traditions to address it from comparative perspectives. Such collaborative projects produced a number of important edited collections on, among other topics, Religion and Economics: New Perspectives (Neusner and Chilton 2000), Religious Texts and Material Contexts (Neusner and

Strange 2001), Altruism in World Religions (Neusner and Chilton 2005), Religious Toleration in World Religions (Neusner and Chilton 2008), and Just War in Religion and Politics (Neusner, Chilton, and Tully 2013). If Neusner had spent the last thirty years working out the relationship of canonical texts of Judaism to their immediate contexts and to one another, we now see him work in conversation with other religions.