Jacob Neusner, a leading figure in the American academic study of religion, has achieved this prominence and influence in three ways. He revolutionized the study of Judaism and brought it into the field of religion; he built intellectual bridges between Judaism and other religions and thereby laid the groundwork for durable understanding and respect among religions; and, through his teaching and his publication programs, he advanced the academic careers of younger scholars and teachers, both within and outside the study of Judaism. Neusner¹s influence on the study of Judaism and religion is broad, powerful, distinctive, and enduring.
Educated at Harvard, Jewish Theological Seminary, Oxford, and Columbia, Neusner began his career in the early 1960s, when religion was a minor field in American universities, largely limited to biblical studies and Christian (mostly Protestant) theology. Judaism was studied parochially, confined primarily to Jewish institutions. Neusner changed all that. He understood that the power of the study of religion is its capacity to generalize, to discern common structures across religions, and, through them, to understand the similarities and differences among diverse traditions. Neusner also knew, as did no other scholar of Judaism, that scholars cannot generalize about religions that are closed to them.
Neusner addressed these problems by establishing a career agenda to bring critical questions to the study of Judaism. His success transformed not only the study of Judaism; it also affected the study of religion. Neusner was the first to see that the sources of classical Judaism were not constructed to answer standard historical questions. He invented the documentary study of Judaism, through which he showed, relentlessly and incontrovertibly, that each document of the rabbinic canon has a discrete focus and agenda, and that the history of ancient Judaism has to be told in terms of texts rather than personalities or events. His Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago 1981; translated into Hebrew and Italian) is the classic statement of his work and the first of many comparable volumes on the other documents of the rabbinic canon.
Neusner¹s discovery of the centrality of documents led him to an even more decisive perception of Judaism as a system: an integrated network of beliefs, practices, and values that yields a coherent worldview and picture of reality for its adherents. This approach led to a series of very important studies on the way Judaism creates categories of understanding and how those categories relate to one another, even as they emerge diversely in discrete rabbinic documents. Neusner¹s work shows, for instance, how deeply Judaism is integrated with the system of the Pentateuch, how such categories as “merit” and “purity” work in Judaism, and how classical Judaism absorbed and transcended the destruction of the Jerusalem in 70 C.E. His work depicts rabbinic Judaism as the result of human labor responding to what its adherents believe is God¹s call and demonstrates its persistent vitality and imagination.
In the process of producing his scholarship, Neusner translated, analyzed, and explained virtually the entire rabbinic canon‹a massive compendium of texts‹into English. The Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Palestinian Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud, and nearly every work of rabbinic Bible interpretation are available to scholars of all backgrounds because of Neusner¹s scholarship. In the study of Judaism, no one in history can match Neusner¹s work.
In all of this, Neusner made Judaism and its study available to scholars and laypeople of every background and persuasion. That Judaism is now a mainstream component of the American study of religion is due almost entirely to Jacob Neusner¹s scholarship.
Neusner¹s work did not stop with his exposition‹in translation, description, and interpretation‹of Judaism alone. To the contrary, unlike any other scholar of his generation, Neusner deliberately built outward from Judaism to other religions. He sponsored a number of very important conferences and collaborative projects that drew different religions into conversation on common themes and problems. Neusner¹s efforts have produced conferences and books on, among other topics, the problem of difference in religion, religion and society, religion and material culture, religion and economics, religion and altruism, and religion and tolerance. These collaborations build on Neusner¹s intellectual vision, his notion of a religion as a system, and would not have been possible otherwise. By working toward general questions from the perspective of a discrete religion, Neusner produced results of durable consequence for understanding other religions as well.
In addition to these efforts, Neusner has written a number of works exploring the relationship of Judaism to other religions around difficult issues of understanding and misunderstanding. For instance, his A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (Philadelphia 1993; translated into German, Italian, and Swedish, establishes a religiously sound framework for Judaic-Christian interchange and earned the praise of Pope Benedict XVI. He also has collaborated with other scholars to produce comparisons of Judaism and Christianity, as in The Bible and Us: A Priest and A Rabbi Read Scripture Together (New York 1990; translated into Spanish and Portuguese). He has collaborated with scholars of Islam, conceiving World Religions in America: An Introduction (third edition, Nashville 2004), which explores how diverse religions have developed in the distinctive American context. He also has composed numerous textbooks and general trade books on Judaism. The two best-known examples are The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism (Belmont 2003); and Judaism: An Introduction (London and New York 2002; translated into Portuguese and Japanese).
Throughout his career, Neusner has established publication programs and series with various academic publishers. Through these series, through reference works that he conceived and edited, and through the conferences he has sponsored, Neusner has advanced the careers of dozens of younger scholars from across the globe. Few others in the American study of religion have had this kind of impact on students of so many approaches and interests.
Jacob Neusner is often celebrated as one of the most published scholar in history. He has written or edited more than 900 books. He has taught at Columbia University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Brandeis University, Dartmouth College, Brown University, University of South Florida, and Bard College. He is a member of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He is the only scholar to serve on both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. He also has received scores of academic awards, honorific and otherwise.
The real measure of Jacob Neusner¹s contribution to the study of religion emerges from the originality, excellence, and scope of his learning. He founded a field of scholarship: the academic study of Judaism. He has profoundly influenced the academic study of religion. He has created durable networks of interreligious communication and understanding. And he cares for the careers of others. Ever generous with his intellectual gifts, Neusner is one of America¹ s greatest humanists. In all he has done, Jacob Neusner fulfills the distinctive promise of the academic study of religion in an open and pluralistic society that values religion as a fundamental expression of freedom.*
In additional to his positions as Research Professor of Religion and Theology and Bard Center Fellow, Neusner is Senior Fellow of Bard¹s Institute of Advanced Theology. He has taught at Bard College since 1994.
* excerpted from the entry on Jacob Neusner in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edition, rev., by William Scott Green, University of Rochester.
