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Notes
I deal with event in the study ofJudaism, not events inJewish history — the histories of Jews in various times and places — as the later footnotes will underline. No judgment is proposed here on the value of “Jewish history” as an academic discipline. This matter will be clarified below.
Admittedly, in this paper I deal with only a single document, and, in it, only one episode. The more sustained work of analysis is under way and covers the entire documentation of the canon of Judaism in late antiquity. See mySymbolic Discourse in Judaism (Minneapolis, 1990).
I realize that in circulation are conceptions of a single, unitary, linear, and harmonious “Judaism,” beginning to end, and, within those conceptions, this sentence is incomprehensible. To anyone who recognizes that, over the long history of Jews, various Judaisms — cogent systems, encompassing a world view, way of life, theory of who or what is the social entity “Israel” — have come to expression, and that these Judaisms have little connection with one another, though all of them appeal to passages in a single authoritative document, the Hebrew Scriptures, this conception will prove self-evident. The construct of a single, linear, unitary Judaism that transcends, or supercedes, or infuses all these diverse Judaisms ordinarily proves of mere theological or ideological character, not emerging from the disciplines of description, analysis, and interpretation. In mySelf-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of Judaism (Boston, 1986) andDeath and Birth of Judaism: The Impact of Christianity, Secularism, and the Holocaust on Jewish Faith (New York, 1987) I have offered a field theory of the history of Judaism (not only Judaisms). The former will soon be published in Hebrew by Sifriat Poalim.
The religious texts of Judaism in late antiquity rarely serve to tell us what happened as a matter of fact. What they tell us — in a rich and reliable way — is how people saw and interpreted things that may or may not have been happening. These texts do not produce political history, let alone economic or social history, but they do portray attitudes —mentalités — and an account of the imaginative world of the sages of Judaism lies fully accessible in these writings. For example, we do not know the facts of the social order in which sages lived. But we do know in great deal the theory of social order — economics, philosophy, politics — that sages formed. In myEconomics of the Mishnah (Chicago, 1990),Rabbinic Political Theory: Religion and Politics in the Mishnah (Chicago, 1991), andThe Mishnah as Philosophy (Baltimore, 1991), I spell out the religious system of hierarchical classification that sages produced in the Land of Israel in the second century. This account tells us not how things “really” were, but the way in which an important body of intellectuals set forth how they wished to frame the social order. That, too, is a historical fact of considerable weight, so I argue, and describing, analyzing, and interpreting that kind of history — history of religion, history of ideas, or history ofmentalités, depending on one's agenda and preference — accords to the sources that are studied a seriousness and respect that ignoring their principal messages and interests does not. In other words, my case is for a set of questions, also of a historical order, that is different from the questions that derive from the positivist and historicist legacy of the nineteenth-century German Jewish “talmudic history” (“history of the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud”) that has prevailed until now. As to the history of religion — in my case, the history of Judaism — myTransformation of Judaism. From Philosophy to Religion (in press) is a result that seems to me to show progress of more than a negligible order.
In the chapter “Anthropology of History” in his landmark workIslands of History (Chicago, 1985).
Ibid., vii.
Ibid., 34.
cf. Sahlin, 72.
On the problem of the systematization of what I call “lists,” or the theory ofListenwissenschaft in the documents at hand, I have not yet come to a solution, but, along with a student, Mr. Eli Ungar, of Brown University, I am working on the problem. Ungar's work on thedavar aher formula, broadened to a study of its rhetorical, logical, and topical traits and program, is now moving beyond the limits of my discussion in this paper. The paper will be published in J. Neusner and E. S. Frerichs, eds.,Approaches to Ancient Judaism 7 (Atlanta, 1990). It seems to me that when we know how lists are made up — why this, not that? — we will have a key to decoding a variety of large-scale constructions within the documents and the systems that they attest or adumbrate.
In Jacob Neusner with William Scott Green,Writing with Scripture. The Authority and Uses of the Hebrew Bible in the Torah of Formative Judaism (Minneapolis, 1989), 19.
“Sacred Persistence: Towards a Redescription of Canon,” in William Scott Green, ed.,Approaches to Ancient Judaism 1 (Chicago, 1978): 11–28. Quotation: p. 15.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid.
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Neusner, J. What, exactly, do we mean by “an event” in Judaism?. Jew History 4, 13–30 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01669754
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01669754