In my post a few days ago about Seth Schwartz's summary of trends in the field of rabbinics, I talked about Jacob Neusner, and how he was more skeptical than Israeli scholars about the value of rabbinic literature for the reconstruction of history concerning the rabbis. But Jacob Neusner does not believe that rabbinic literature contains no historical value at all, for he does try to sift out what is historical, and what is not. In this post, I want to flesh that out a bit by looking at book reviews that I have read about his works, a book review by him on the work of Shmuel Safrai, and a paper that I wrote about the Pharisees, in which I used Neusner's scholarship.
1. Jakob Petuchowski states in his review of Neusner's Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah:
"Neusner...takes it for granted that, if a matter of law is discussed in an Amoraic stratum of the Talmud (post-200 CE), and if some matter of law is recorded as having been decided already in a segment of literature which claims to be Tannaitic (up to 200 CE), then it would follow that the purported Tannaitic source is, in fact, later than the Amoraic discussion---the assumption here being that the Amoraim would not have discussed something which had already been settled in the Tannaitic period."
When can we be sure that a discussion is from Tannaitic times, and when it is a later Amoraic discussion that is put into the mouths of the Tannaim? Suppose that there is a "Tannaitic" discussion that presents a matter as settled, even though there are later Amoraim who actually debate that matter? In such a case, the "Tannaitic" discussion is probably not "Tannaitic", for why would the Amoraim debate an issue that was already settled? The "Tannaitic" discussion was probably put into the mouths of Tannaim by later sages in order to give certain points a degree of authority.
In Neusner's Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, Peter Haas makes a similar point in his piece on Maaser Sheni ("Second Tithe") in the Mishnah. Haas states that later opinions were put into the mouths of pre-70 sages. For Haas, we can tell that such is the case because later authorities---the ones at Yavneh and Usha in the second century C.E.---debate the same things that were debated before 70 C.E. Haas wonders: Why would Yavneh and Usha re-open debates that were resolved a generation or two earlier? But, for Haas, if there is a post-70 attempt to refine a law that is purported to be early, then that law probably was early.
2. Neusner states the following in his review of Shmuel Safrai's work, as he takes the opportunity to blast Israeli scholarship:
"They...take for granted that if a saying is attached to a sage[']s name, that sage really said it; if a story is told, then the event happened in that way; a statement that so-and-so wrote such and such a book forms a secure fact in any account of that book. A further premise throughout is that we may draw conclusions as to the venue or provenience of a passage in a document from the contents of that passage, read discretely as a document unto itself. Because a saying 'does not know' about such and such an event, it therefore derives from the period prior to that event. That saying is assumed, moreover, without consideration of the saying's present location in a document brought to closure long after the event."
This is the Neusner whom Seth Schwartz presented in his summary of trends in rabbinic scholarship: Neusner considers Israeli scholars to be uncritical in their treatment of rabbinic literature, as they view it as historical. For Neusner, they disregard the fact that the sayings and stories are in a document that was redacted and completed long after the setting that is claimed for them within the literature, meaning that these stories and sayings may reflect a later ideology. At the same time, however, Neusner presents Israeli scholarship as having some critical dimension, for it maintains that, if a saying does not know about an event, then there's a good chance that the saying dates before that event. That sounds to me like a critical methodology.
3. Anthony Saldarini states the following in his review of Neusner's History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities:
"Neusner establishes the reliability of these attributions by establishing that no authority is even assigned a teaching that depends upon or presumes the existence of a law assigned to a later named authority. The consequence of this is that the attributions and the substance of the laws harmonize and the attributions are reliable. One obvious alternative explanation is that a later redactor may have imposed consistency. In answer Neusner cites cases where laws and opinions that show no awareness of each other are nevertheless chronologically consistent...The argument seems likely, but the intervention of a redactor is not disproven. Overall, Neusner has verified the common generalization that halakic attributions are reliable."
Neusner sees in Mishnah Kelim a chronological consistency: Whenever an opinion is attributed to a sage (and the challenge for Neusner is that many opinions in this tractate are anonymous), it does not depend upon or presume a law that is assigned to a later authority. Because there are no anachronisms, Neusner considers Tractate Kelim's attributions to be reliable. But couldn't this chronological consistency have been imposed by a redactor? Neusner's response is that even laws and opinions that appear unaware of each other match the chronology---showing that Kelim is an accurate repository of past opinions.
Another point: Saldarini's review here, and also his review of Neusner's History of the Mishnaic Law of Holy Things, talk about Neusner's belief that, many times in the Mishnah, Usha reflects a development from Yavneh: Usha has more detailed discussions, asks more nuanced questions, tries to work out the implications of its principles, and furthers inquiries. Usha came after Yavneh, and the Mishnah accurately reflects that fact. But Saldarini summarizes Jonathan Z. Smith's critique of that kind of developmental model: "Events and ideas in history often develop illogically, asymmetrically, and incoherently..."
4. Saldarini states regarding Neusner's History of the Mishnaic Law of Women:
"...N also uses scattered data to produce meaningful interpretation. For example, the legal acquisitions of property by a woman named in the Bar Kochba letters show that Mishnaic views of women's property rights were not dominant in the early second century..."
Schwartz's summary said that Neusner was sympathetic to E. Goodenough's view that the rabbis were marginal, since Jewish society did not follow the rabbis' aniconism. At the same time, Neusner also portrays the Mishnah as a normative law-code in Late Antiquity, which was why halakhic midrash came along to ties its rules to the Scriptures: people were wondering what gave the Mishnah's rules authority! Saldarini's quote here tends to confirm the former view---that, for Neusner, Mishnaic law was not followed by all of Jewish society. At the same time, there may be a difference between how Neusner conceptualizes pre-70 and post-70 Jewish societies. Regarding pre-70 Jewish society, Neusner clearly does not believe that the Pharisees were the dominant authorities, but rather an insular eating club that was concerned about purity. But Neusner may think that the rabbis were more dominant after 70---or at least after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the early second century C.E.
5. T. Zahavy reviewed Neusner's History of the Mishnaic Law of Damages. Neusner dates Division Nezikin to the middle of the second century C.E. He thinks that it is the "voice of the Israelite landholding, proprietary class", and that "Its problems are the problems of the landowner, the householder" (Neusner's words). At the same time, Neusner states:
"Sages imagine a government out of the materials of the distant past, formed from Scripture and perhaps also their own dim recollections of what might have been done, but above all, made out of their own vivid hopes of what must be done at some point in an undifferentiated future. This act of imagination is the penultimate gesture of defiance. The ultimate one is forming a locative system in no particular place, speaking nowhere about somewhere, concretely specifying utopia..."
There is a lot in this quote. Neusner is saying that Division Nezikin may be the sages' vague recollections of what society was like in the past---showing that their history is not exactly reliable, but it may be based on some remembrance. Neusner also says that the Division was to be a program for the future, which was Ben Zion Wacholder's argument: Wacholder thought that the Mishnah was a program for the Messianic Age. Neusner also says that the Division is an act of defiance, presumably against the Jews' Roman oppressions, and that it is utopian. While Neusner in places maintains that the Mishnah was a law-code that was used in Jewish courts, he also believes that there was a utopian aspect to it.
6. Zev Gerber states the following in his review of Neusner's Comparative Midrash, as a description of Neusner's argument:
"...the rabbis chose a repertoire of scriptural verses distinctive of its self-understanding and self-realization for the dignity and continuity of Israel against the realia of the Roman Catastrophe and the triumph of a diverse group of believers, early Christianity."
Neusner often makes the point that rabbinic literature should be seen as an ideological response to the environment of the rabbis, not as a straight narration of what actually happened. The above quote gives an example of what Neusner means by this: the rabbis' midrash addresses (at least in part) the Roman catastrophe and Christianity.
7. At this point, I will quote from a paper that I wrote on the Pharisees for a class a few years ago. My source was Jacob Neusner's The Rabbinic Traditions About the Pharisees Before 70:
"Neusner is the main skeptic about the utility of rabbinic material [to understand the pre-70 Pharisees]. He concludes from the Tannaitic corpus that 'none of the masters prior to Gamaliel I was personally known to post-70 authorities,' indicating that 'no one after 70 could claim to have heard precisely what they said.' Moreover, Neusner contends that the 70 C.E. calamity in Jerusalem disrupted the transmission of traditions, since Pharisees died and their political conditions were dramatically altered. Consequently, for Neusner, the rabbis tried to portray pre-70 Judea using the few traditions they had, and they sometimes 'invented what they needed.' Neusner definitely believes that ideology played a role in the rabbinic portrayal, for there is a tendency in Tannaitic literature to elevate Hillel (whose party was dominant after 70) at the expense of Shammai, undercutting Shammai's first century predominance in Pharisaism that the literature sometimes acknowledges. In addition, Neusner views pre-70 Pharisaic beliefs, ideas, and values as 'not easily accessible,' for they have been revised by post-70 rabbinic masters with their own theological agenda: to assert that Israel can serve her creator despite the destruction of the temple. While Neusner holds that rabbinic literature contains very few pre-70 traditions, he treats the disputes between Hillel and Shammai as authentic, and he notes that the legal disputes between them are predominantly balanced rather than pro-Hillel. He states, 'We may well doubt that Shammai would have been represented after 70 as an authority of equivalent importance to Hillel,' so 'these materials are highly credible and may well be authentic traditions of the masters' or of Houses' rulings. In this case, Neusner treats traditions that run counter to post-70 rabbinic ideology as authentic."
I won't comment much about what I say in that quote, but I will say that Neusner's methodology leads him to characterize the Pharisees as people who were concerned about purity within table fellowship. To arrive at his characterization of the Pharisees, he relies on the disputes between Hillel and Shammai in Tannaitic literature. He regards those disputes to be authentic. I'd also like to note that, in Saldarini's review of Neusner's History of the Mishnaic Law on Purities, Saldarini states that Neusner makes the following point: "the Q saying about the inside and outside of a cup and plate (Matt 23:25-26; Luke 11:39) may presume and combat a pre-70 Shammaite teaching...that the inside and outside of a utensil have no relationship to each other as regards ritual impurity."
But back to my paper on the Pharisees! In a footnote, I quote Neusner as follows: "Since the Hillelite told stories both to account for Shammaite predominance in pre-70 Pharisaism ('sword in the school house,' 'Shammaites one day outnumbered Hillelites,' 'mob in the Temple'), and also to explain the later predominance of the Hillelites ('heavenly echo came from Yavneh'), it stands to reason that the Shammaites predominated before 70, the Hillelites shortly afterward. This is further suggested by the one-sided, if limited, evidence that Gamaliel II and Simeon b. Gamaliel followed Shammaite rules."
For Neusner, when rabbinic literature tries to account for a detail that is inconvenient to its overall ideology, then there's a good chance that the detail is historical.
We saw that Neusner argued that the Hillel-Shammai debates are authentic because they are balanced. If they were invented after 70, the Hillelites would have given Hillel the upper hand, since they were predominant after 70. But Neusner isn't consistent on the predominance of the Hillelites after 70. I state in a footnote:
Neusner "argues that the post-70 Yavneh community was responsible for organizing the differing Hillelite and Shammaite opinions into Houses' disputes that would be transmitted and memorized. According to Neusner, the Yavneh period was a time when the Houses were of 'roughly equal strength,' so the 'form used for the transmission of their opinions [would] give parity to both sides.' In other words, the Hillelites were not dominant. He acknowledges that the Hillelites eventually prevailed, however. Perhaps he believes that the Houses' disputes were still authentic because the two groups contributed traditions that they actually had, rather than making them up immediately after 70."
I'll stop here.