Neusner on Judaism

JACOB NEUSNER Bard College, USA

Contents: Preface; Introduction; Introducing the scholar: From history to religion. History in formative Judaism: Organizing the past; The conception of history in formative Judaism; History and purity in first century Judaism. Problems of historical method: New problems, new solutions: current events in Rabbinic studies; Jews and Judaism under Iranian rule: bibliographical reflections; The Rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees in modern historiography; The history of earlier Rabbinic Judaism: some new approaches; Evaluating the attributions of sayings to named sages in the Rabbinic literature; The documentary history of Judaism and the problem of dating sayings; Beyond historicism, after structuralism: story as history in Ancient Judaism; Max Weber revisited: religion and society in ancient Judaism with special reference to the late first and second centuries; When intellectual paradigms shift: does the end of the old mark the beginning of the new?; The Jerusalem School and western, academic scholarship on the history of Judaism: the uneven conflict of competing contemporary paradigms of learning and the recent results. Historical studies: Jewry in the Land of Israel: Pre-70 C.E. Pharisaism: the record of the Rabbis; Two pictures of the Pharisees: philosophical circle or eating club; Judaism in a time of crisis: four responses to the destruction of the Second Temple; 'Pharisaic-Rabbinic' Judaism: a clarification; From enemy to sibling: Rome and Israel in the first century of western civilization. Historical studies: Jewry in Iranian Babylonia: Politics and theology in Talmudic Babylonia; Babylonian Jewry and Shapur II's persecution of Christianity from 339 to 379 A.D.; Archaeology and Babylonian Jewry; How much Iranian in Jewish Babylonia?. Index.