“Neusnerian Turn” in Method and the End of the Wissenschaft As We Knew It

The “Neusnerian Turn” in Method and the End of the Wissenschaft as We Knew It

Peter J. Haas

Over the course of a career marked by extraordinary productivity and the training of virtually a generation of Judaic studies scholars, Jacob Neusner has almost singlehandedly altered the entire methodological orientation of the field of Jewish Studies. I take this occasion to look at this extraordinary Neusnerian turn in method for the field of Jewish Studies. Prior to Jacob Neusner’s work, the greatest paradigm shift in Jewish Studies since the emergence of the talmuds was probably the coalescence of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. In a broad way, the Wissenschaft brought the methods of German philology into Jewish Studies, or, to put matters the other way around, brought Jewish Studies into conversation with the German “scientific” university discourse of the time. In a similar vein we can say that the second major shift, which took place over a hundred years later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s was when the methods of the North American academic world were brought to bear on classical rabbinic materials, or, again to restate matters, when Judaic Studies was brought into conversation with modern American higher education. This is what I referred to above as the “Neusnerian turn.” Before turning to the critical methodological shift in Neusner’s early scholarship, it will be helpful to review the older paradigm to which it was responding and which it ultimately overturned. The Wissenschaft des Judenthums had its roots in the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Judenthums that was established in 1819 by Leopold Zunz, Eduard Gans, and Isaac Marcus Jost, among others. The goal of this association was to elevate the level of discussion about Jewish history, culture, and religion in Berlin, and Germany more generally, from its traditional mode to a more modern, socially acceptable and academi- cally sophisticated level. It was hoped that a modern academic consideration of Jewish culture would bring along with it the modernization of Judaism and more particularly Germany-speaking Jewry. This hope was based on the fact that by the early nineteenth century, the Jews in German-speaking lands were well along the path toward “emancipation,” integration, and assimilation. The path was proving far from smooth, however. In fact, Jewish leaders were faced with opposition to Jewish emancipation from the outside as well as with the inside corrosion of the community as Jews dropped out, often with conversion

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004284289_010 the “neusnerian turn” in method 163 to Christianity (whether out of faith or out of convenience). There was thus an urgent need to reformulate Jewish religion and culture to answer concerns of outsiders as well as to remain compelling to Jews inside. Ultimately, of course, these efforts were to lead to the reform of Judaism itself along the lines that coalesced in the German Reform and Hungarian Neolog movements. But for the Verein the focus was on Jewish scholarship and culture. Although in the end it had only limited success in achieving its goals, the Verein did lay the founda- tion for the academic movement known as the Wissenschaft des Judenthums. This nineteenth century approach to the study of Jewish texts (and it was largely an academic movement based on texts), would inform modern Jewish scholarship up into the post World War ii period. The Wissenschaft des Judenthums represented a major shift in how traditional Jewish scholarship took place. Traditional Jewish scholarship was based on the study of sacred texts, essentially the study of the Talmud and its con- comitant literature, including the commentary literature that had developed over centuries to explain the text, adduce the meaning of unusually elliptical sections, and reconcile differences or tensions across the Talmud. These texts themselves became part of the study of the Talmud, so that classical rabbinic education, housed in the Yeshiva, evolved into a complex conversation of eru- dite, casuistic and intricate intertextual analysis. One feature of this traditional form of Jewish education was its focus on the exegesis of specific, usually technical words or phrases. This was accomplished by staying entirely within the confines of the details of the rabbinic textual world. Torah was to be studied in its purity, without admixture of outside “pagan” ideas. Thus there was little to no reference, or for that matter no need for reference, to the situation of Jews in the larger, outside world. This narrow focus both reflected and helped sustain the social semi-autonomous isolation of the Jewish community, which remained in Europe and the Islamic world a largely self-governing community. Judaism lived not in history so much as above history, in a divinely transcendent realm of thought and deed. While this sociology may have made a certain amount of sense in the Middle Ages, it naturally lost utility, and credibility, in the nineteenth century. It was precisely to open up Jewish intellectual life to the larger academic and cultural develop- ments of the time, and to make Judaism comprehensible to that world, that the Verein was established and that the subsequent Wissenschaft movement to some extent accomplished. Although the Wissenschaft des Judenthums did move Jewish intellectual life to a different type of discourse, it was hardly without its own problems and limitations. One problem was that the Wissenschaft was largely an outgrowth of nineteenth century philology, which studied the language of classical