Biography

Jacob Neusner was born to Samuel and Lee Neusner on July 28, 1932 in West Hartford, Connecticut. His father owned the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, a Jewish weekly that continues to serve the Connecticut region and Western Massachusetts. The young Neusner received his first typewriter at age twelve and, by his junior year in high school, could do all the jobs associated with a newspaper.2 He grew up attending public school as opposed to Jewish day school, and his values largely reflected those of other assimilated and suburban Jews who came of age in 1940s and 1950s America. Despite this, however, Neusner realized, from a young age, that he wanted to be a rabbi; although he admitted later that he had no idea at the time what that meant. He had, for example, no formal education in Judaism and only a rudimentary knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet. All of this, of course, would work to his advantage. Because he was not from the “old world” and because he lacked a traditional yeshiva education, he was neither limited by tradition nor aware of his own shortcomings. Neusner, instead, represented a new paradigm: a suburban Jew, a second generation American, with no formal Jewish education outside of Reform Sunday school, and someone who could barely read a line of Hebrew. Only such an individual, as paradoxical as it may sound, could propose a new model for examining the sacred texts of Judaism. It is worth noting that before Neusner could read a line of the Talmud, he

was a journalist who wrote regularly for his father’s newspaper. By his early teens he had honed his skill to write both well and very quickly, two virtues that would serve him well throughout his life. He thought like a journalist, always looking at the bigger picture and this enabled him to explain even technical issues in a way that was free of jargon. Years later, one of his favorite assignments for his undergraduates was to get them to compose their final essays as op-eds for good newspapers. His early journalistic training never left him, and it laid the foundation for his academic life. By his early teens, he would review for the Ledger every book published on Jewish topics in the English language, in addition to writing frequent opinion pieces on what he considered to be some of the major issues facing

American Jews. Even in his later years, he never turned his back on journalism. After he had established himself as an important scholar, he was writing weekly columns either in Jewish publications or other, often left of center, journals. When the young Neusner eventually went off to Harvard as a young

undergraduate there were, quite simply, no exemplars or prototypes of what it meant to be an American, let alone secular, scholar of Judaism or someone who wanted to work with Jewish data within a discipline that was just beginning to come into its own on American soil, the academic study of religion. Early in the Fall of his Freshman year, Neusner became increasingly aware of the discrepancy between Judaism and the secular academy. His undergraduate advisor, Harry Austryn Wolfson, the important scholar of premodern Jewish philosophy, tried to discourage the young Neusner from pursuing a life in the academic study of Judaism on account of his largely nonexistent Jewish education. Wolfson’s assumption, not unlike today, is that even a secular scholar of Jewish texts ought to have traditional yeshiva training. Neusner graduated from Harvard in three years, and then applied for a

Henry Fellowship. These fellowships permitted students of Harvard and Yale to spend an extra year studying at either Oxford or Cambridge. Fellows were not to get a degree nor undertake formal studies; rather, in Neusner’s words they were encouraged to “read books, travel, talk to people, and, in general, learn and grow” (Neusner and Neusner 1995: 65). His tutor in Jewish history at Oxford was Cecil Roth, a well-respected historian of the Jews. The first week, Roth assigned Neusner an assignment on English Jews in the United States in the nineteenth century. Although Roth had meant it to be Neusner’s topic for the entire eight-week term, Neusner mistakenly thought he was to complete it for the following week. From Oxford, he applied to the rabbinic program of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City for the following Fall.