ABSTRACT
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.
