Assessment

Neusner, as we have witnessed, had a lengthy career, one that spanned over fifty years and saw the publication of at least a thousand books, a number that includes neither articles/book chapters nor journalistic pieces. His academic work, as I have tried to show in the previous chapters, incorporated diverse sets of questions that can be classified into four distinct but overlapping phases. Any assessment of his work, however, must necessarily be cautious given the sheer magnitude of his published corpus and the fact that these four stages are anything but watertight. If anything, I have used them only because they provide a convenient set of rubrics that offer a way into the work of one of the most important figures in the history of the academic study of religion in the United States. As I have remarked several times throughout this study, and it is certainly worth repeating, it is essential that we not confuse Neusner’s data with his overarching theoretical concerns. This is another way of saying that we should not simply reduce Neusner’s career and its many accomplishments to the parochial subfield of Jewish or Judaic Studies, a subfield that Neusner criticized as too ethnic and too narrowly focused. Although Neusner theorized a great deal about religion, he did so only out of sources that he knew well. His contribution, then, was not to make grandiose and unsupportable claims about religion in general, but to provide careful and nuanced readings that reveal the creativity of Jewish sages – whom he envisaged as exemplary as opposed to sui generis – in their social construction of reality. A danger in encountering Neusner’s work for the first time is that if one just

reads works from the “historical” or “literary” phase of his career, phases in which he was quite critical of theology, one might be surprised to encounter some of the later work that forms the centerpiece of his “theological” phase. In like manner, if one only reads the later Neusner, one might not realize all of the earlier and critical work that made his theological claims possible. It is important, then, to try and assess each phase on its own merits as opposed to trying to provide a sweeping set of generalizations. In this final chapter, I would now like to move from appraising what

Neusner accomplished in his long career to what his lasting legacy is or

ought to be. It is a legacy, as I tried to make clear in the introduction to this volume, that is at risk given both the sheer quantity of his work and what many consider to be his difficult personality. While most of this little volume has attempted to provide a convenient path into his massive corpus of work, providing an overview of the contents thereof, the other matter, his quarrelsome personality, is less easy to address. I prefer not to, in the belief that his various personal disagreements with other scholars – many of whom are now either retired or dead – ought not to damage the creativity and novelty of either Neusner’s project or his distinguished career. My fear is that, while shortsighted, this may well happen. Rather than be distracted by the personality, however, we need to judge the work produced; for it is this work that reveals the depth of his thought and his insights into the material. When we do this, we encounter one of the most creative minds in the construction of Jewish history and in the analysis of Jewish sources, both of which are used in the service of addressing more universal concerns. Neusner was a very explorative intellectual figure, someone who was never afraid to make mistakes in the pursuit of knowledge. While there are several books wherein Neusner strikes out directly at his opponents (e.g., Neusner 1994, 1995a, 1996), for the most part he preferred to stay above the fray in his intellectual work, and to deal with those whom he disagreed in other ways (e.g., book reviews, personal letters). If one can say anything in this regard, it is that it might have been profitable for the reader if Neusner had engaged more with his interlocutors in his own work as opposed to dismissing them in book reviews. Most of the footnotes in his books, for example, refer primarily to his own works, as opposed to those with whom he was in disagreement. Neusner was very critical. Others, in return, heavily criticized him. Yet none of this should stand in the way of understanding or appreciating his many important accomplishments. Any assessment of Neusner’s career must work in at least three, concentric

fields of study, each representing an increased level of specificity: his work on Religious Studies, that on the study of Judaism, and that on the study of rabbinic texts. In terms of all three, we must – as I trust the previous chapters have done – try to understand what Neusner reacted against. Building upon this, it is now necessary to show what Neusner accomplished, how he changed these fields, and, most importantly, what his subsequent impact was on them. What, framed slightly differently, is the status of all these fields post-Neusner? The paradox for Neusner, as it is for all of us who work on Jewish data, is that despite the fact that Neusner always claimed that he was not a Judaic Studies scholar, but a scholar of religion, others had no problem lumping him into this subfield. This, it seems to me, has the effect of marginalizing his influence. Neusner, to reiterate, was a scholar of religion who addressed universal questions from the particularity of his own data. He always conceived of the particular as indexical of the universal. This should be the model for any scholar of religion. One cannot make up

theories if they do not fit the data. This latter was the approach of most classical theorists of religion (e.g., Freud, Marx, Eliade), and situating Neusner against this backdrop, we can say that his work provides a necessary corrective to it. If his data did not support the larger question, he nuanced the question and not the data. Yet, no matter how universal one’s criteria or methodology, if one works on Jewish data one is usually ghettoized into “Jewish Studies,” whether one wants to be or not. So, despite the fact that Neusner did not see himself as a Judaic Studies scholar, we must ultimately situate at least a large part of his work within that field, given the dataset upon which he worked. Read on the simplest level, we could say that Neusner changed the course

of all three of the fields in which he worked. Although I think it would be a mistake to claim that Neusner single-handedly changed the discipline of Religious Studies, he certainly came on the scene at a time of momentous change brought on by the Abington School District, Pennsylvania v. Schempp Supreme Court decision. He could not buy into the status quo, because his data (i.e., rabbinic texts) was largely ignored by it. Neusner, thus, sought to change the field by expanding not only its data pool, but also the types of questions asked. Before Neusner arrived on the scene, Judaism was barely treated in the mainstream academic curriculum. Instead it was largely ghettoized as “Jewish Semitics” and situated within departments of Semitics in select private universities, such as Johns Hopkins and Columbia where it was funded by local Jewish benefactors (see Ritterband and Wechsler 1994: 95-97; Hughes 2013: 77-95). Early in his career all this was to change. Once he graduated, Neusner’s first job was in such a department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where the local Jewish community that funded his position expected him to help Jewish students there learn Hebrew and hoped that he would not draw too much attention to Judaism. Neusner, as we saw, lasted a year in such a position. Two features were really significant about Neusner’s next position at Dartmouth: it was not funded by the local community and it was in a department of Religious Studies. This effectively provided Neusner with one of the first, if not the first, normalized positions in Judaism in the country. He was now a scholar of religion who specialized in Judaism. Such a position would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. A lot followed from this. Within a couple of years, Neusner – in conversation with Penner and Smith – was integrating the study of Judaism into the academic curriculum of Religious Studies. Within this context, it is worth noting that he did not have to do this. He could have, if he so desired, simply carried on with the “pre-critical” phase of his career and ignored the theoretical sophistication of his colleagues. This is what many who study Judaism would subsequently do, and many continue to do so today. In not doing this, however, he actively created a permanent subfield for the study of Jewish texts within the disciplinary context of the modern university in general and Religious Studies in particular. His subsequent acceptance by

the more universally inclined American Academy of Religion and his concomitant rejection by the more parochial Association for Jewish Studies reveals, now as then, some of the fault lines inherent in the academic study of Judaism within the modern university. This development is also witnessed in his work on the texts of formative

Judaism. Prior to Neusner, as we saw, these texts were studied primarily in yeshivas by Jewish men and according to time-honored “methods.” Neusner destroyed this paradigm, at least for those uninterested in this traditional approach. In so doing, he emphasized the universal applicability of these highly particularistic texts and thereby opened them up to women and nonJews to read and to study. Within this context, Neusner further illumined the perennial insider/outsider debate in the academic study of religion. This debate is certainly one of the major issues in the Humanities and is by no means confined to the academic study of religion. Russell McCutcheon defines the magnitude of the problem in the following terms,

whether, and to what extent, someone can study, understand, or explain the beliefs, words, or actions of another. In other words, to what degree, if any, are the motives and meanings of human behaviors and beliefs accessible to the researcher who may not necessarily share these beliefs and who does not necessarily participate in these practices?