Jacob Neusner and the Rabbinic Treatment of the “Other”

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JACOB NEUSNER AND THE RABBINIC TREATMENT OF THE “OTHER”

Evan M. Zuesse

J N, The Halakhah: An Encyclopaedia of the Law of Judaism, 5 vols. (Leiden, Boston, Köln: E.J. Brill, 2000), and related works, including Recovering Judaism: The Universal Dimension of Judaism (Min- neapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).

About a year ago, Jacob Neusner generously shared with me an unfinished draft of his Making God’s Word Work, which then had the subtitle: The Mishnah as a Key to Living the Life of Torah.1 I responded with a letter expressing puzzlement at some parts of that work. To my surprise, he encouraged me to expand my thoughts into a review article. I want to express my heartfelt appreciation for his charac- teristically magnanimous encouragement. My questions concerned a number of key issues. The chief one was his statement that, according to the Talmudic sages, gentiles are condemned to death and damnation, while Jews will enjoy eternal life. A similar saved/damned distinction is asserted even in Neusner’s most general summaries of Judaism.2 This contradicts the well-known consensus teaching of the sages that “the righteous of all peoples have a place in the World-to-Come” (T. San. 13:2, not cited in the above-mentioned works), a ruling repeated without dissent by codifiers and others down through the ages and taken for granted by Jews today. This view markedly differentiates Judaism from the exclusivism of Christianity and is biblical in origin: Job, a pagan Arab, was a

1 Making God’s Word Work: A Guide to the Mishnah (New York, 2004). 2 For example, in Neusner’s Judaism: An Introduction (London, 2002), we read that “to be ‘an Israelite’ means to be one of those destined to rise from the dead and enjoy the World-to-Come,” while “Gentiles, by contrast, are not going to be res- urrected when the dead are raised, but those among them who are innocent will not be eternally damned” (pp. 43-44). What this means is left unexplained. Even why “innocent” is chosen rather than “righteous” or “good” is not speciﬁed. There is no further discussion of the salvation of gentiles in the book.

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paragon of righteousness and especially beloved of God; Melchizedek presided as priest at Abraham’s sacrifices, and, according to midrash, even tutored him. The Noahide laws as defined by the Tannaim developed such ideas further, indicating the potentiality for all gentiles to be like Job or Melchizedek. However, Neusner either does not mention the Noahide laws or only briefly refers to them in the above works. One might deduce from this that the Noahide category is marginal in Jewish tradition or is only applicable to a very few gentiles; but this is not so. On the contrary, their explicit application to all gentiles, and gentiles’ responsibility and full potential to attain divine approval (as will be shown below), has arguably made possible the quiet accommodation of exilic Jewish communities to a wide range of dominant non-Jewish societies over the millennia, thus greatly aid- ing Jewish survival. They were a major factor in Jewish endorsement of the Enlightenment and modernity. These ideas have had enormous historical importance. I was also very puzzled by Neusner’s treatment of criminal law: the well-known effective abolition of capital punishment by the Talmudic sages seemed to have been ignored in his depiction of tractates Sanhedrin and Makkot—something so salient in them one would have thought it impossible to ignore. In order to understand more fully and fairly the reasoning behind these omissions, and in light of the fact that Making God’s Word Work was clearly a semi-popularization of other more extensive writings, I suggested that perhaps Professor Neusner might recommend to me a more in-depth, fully argued account. Thus he directed me to his five-volume work, The Halakhah: An Encyclopaedia of the Law of Judaism (hereinafter, “the Encyclopaedia,” in conformity with Neusner’s own usage). In the comments below, I turn to that magnum opus. However, my comments apply equally to such recent studies as Making God’s Word Work, which summarizes the Encyclopaedia, The Theology of the Oral Torah and its semi-popularization Rabbinic Judaism: The Theological System, and Recovering Judaism: The Universal Dimension of Judaism, since, in one way or another, these works repeat many of the same crucial arguments.3 It becomes evident from these works that the treatment of gentile salvation ties into and arises from many other aspects of Neusner’s analysis of halakhah

3 Cf. Making God’s Word Work, The Theology of the Oral Torah (Montreal and Ithaca, 1999), Rabbinic Judaism: The Theological System (Leiden, 2002), and Recovering Judaism: The Universal Dimension of Judaism (Minneapolis, 2001).