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114 the Method of Transmission Must Accompany Every Literary 114 REVIEW OF BOOKS the method of transmission must accompany every literary and historical investigation to insure a picture which is not slanted. NEUSNERdedicates this important work in form-critical and form-histor- ical study of the sources to Professor Saul LIEBERMAN,easily the greatest scholar of our day in the Talmudic-rabbinic field. It is to NEUSNER'Sgreat credit that he knows the importance of thorough and intense study of the sources. This in our final judgment makes this study of worth). Abraham GOLDBERG J. NEUSNER, The Modern Study of the Mishnah (Studia Post-Biblica XXIII), E. J. Brill, Leiden 1973, XXVII and 283 pp., cloth 72,_ (This volume on modern contributions to the study of the Mishnah forms a com- panion to the earlier study, The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud. Studies in the Achievements of Late Nineteenth and Twentienth Century Historical and Literary-Critical Research (Studia, Post-Biblica XVII), E. J. Brill, Leiden 1970. Like the earlier volume, this book consists of papers by students of Professor NEUSNERoriginally written for his seminar in Talmudic Judaism at Brown University and revised for publication. The attention of the earlier work was given to the literary-historical problem of the editing of the Talmud. In this volume, attention is turned to the way in which modern scholars have dealt with a major rabbinic docu- ment as a whole. The lead article treats the traditional study of the Mishnah. Modern contributions follow and are divided into five major parts: "The Achievement of Jacob N. EPSTEIN" (two chapters treating his study of the text and formation of the Mishnah), "The Beginning of Critical Study" (with chapters on Zecharias FRANKEL, Jacob BRÜLL, and Hirsch Mendel PINELES), "The Historians and the Mishnah" (a single chapter devoted to N. KROCHMAL,H. GRAETZ,I. H. WEISSand Z. JAW1TZfollowed by chapters on David HOFFMANN,Y. I. HALEVYand Joachim OPPENHEIM), "Literary Critics" (chapters on J. S. ZURI, David WEISSHALIVNI and Abraham WEISS), "Recent Israel Contributions" (chapters on Hanokh ALBECK, Abraham GOLDBERGand Benjamin DE VRIES). The book includes a useful bibliog- raphy which briefly annotates other modern contributions to the study of the Mishnah which dit not warrant more extensive treatment. In the Forword, Professor NEUSNERsets forth his view of the major prob- lem in most modern study of the Mishnah. With a few notable exceptions, nineteenth and twentieth century contributions to the study of the Mishnah remain bound to the traditional questions and presuppositions concerning the nature and formation of the Mishnah which found their most influential ex- pression in the letter of the ninth century Talmudic historian SHERIRAGAON. His [SHERIRA'S]questions take for granted that the Mishnah is a unitary document, with a one-dimensional history; that it is wholly the work, of a single line of masters, who, one after the other, carefully preserved what had gone before; that it has a history recovered in the pertinent stories contained in Talmudic literature. His answers therefore are reached by collecting the Talmudic stories and putting them into a simple chronological order (p. XIII). 115 In contrast, the sine qua non of historical-critical research is the painstaking examination of internal evidence free of presuppositions and the recognition that traditional stories that purport to give a history themselves have a his- tory and cannot be accepted at face value. From this perspective, The bulk of the work of nineteenth and twentieth century historians of the Mishnah must be regarded as pseudo-critical, critical in rhetoric but wholly traditional in all its presuppositions and, in the main, primi- tive and puerile.... (p. XVI). ... Time and again our sole criticism of the theories of the several historians is simply, "There is no evidence," or "The evidence adduced is inadequate." Now that may not seem a particularly weighty criticism, especially in the face of elaborate theories and theologically well- grounded notions. But so far as historical, and not theological, problems are at hand, one's only significant criticism must focus on the nature and the use of historical evidence, and wisdom consists in mature skepticism. Why then did we take the trouble to criticize the works before us and call attention to their inadequacy as history? ... The larger number of books at hand, ... , have been reprinted and are widely read to this day, not for the history of modern .rcholar.rhipon the Mishnah but for the history of the Mishnah itself.... While seeking permanently valid results, therefore, we found it necessary to point out the major flaws in concept and method in the several works before us, so that obsolete works might be honorably laid to rest, and new inquires might begin (pp. XX-XXI). The two major exceptions to this general evaluation are the works of J. N. EPSTEIN and Saul LIEBERMAN.The latter's work on the Tosefta, however, is not included since it is not complete and as yet presents no intro- duction to Mishnah-Tosefta. It undoubtedly is no accident that Part I of the book is devoted to EPSTEIN.Although chronologically he is one of the more recent contributors, his work does not appear to be a culmination of previous modern research, but currently stands alone in its critical and compre- hensive analysis of both the text and the sources of the Mishnah. The evalu- ation of his work concludes, "He thus laid the foundation for the modern study of the Mishnah. The task of the present study of the Mishnah there- fore is to realize the fullest dimensions what [.ric] EPSTEIN started" (p. 55). Some of the questions which NEUSNERposes in the Forword can stand as a summary of the significance of the investigation for the editor and contributors : First, is the Mishnah a unitary document, or is it a collection of many documents, not all of them of the same sort, but deriving from different sources? Second, can we rightly speak of a single editor who stands behind the compilation as a whole? Third, do we actually have a single, original Mishnah-text, which we may recover among the various, often conflicting textual testimonies? Or is "The Mishnah" an artificial con- .
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