The Mishnah: Introduction and Reader

by Jacob Neusner

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Neusner was educated at Harvard University, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (where he received rabbinic ordination), the University of Oxford, and Columbia University.

Neusner is often celebrated as one of the most published authors in history (he has written or edited more than 950 books.)Since 1994, he taught at Bard College. He also taught at Columbia University, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Brandeis University, Dartmouth College, Brown University, and the University of South Florida.

Neusner was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He is the only scholar to have served on both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. He also received scores of academic awards, honorific and otherwise.

Reviews

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Modern "rabbinic" Judaism begins with the Mishnah. It is useful to place the Mishnah in the context of another famous compendium of documents from the same period, the "New Testament." The Mishnah is the "equivalent" (and methodological antidote and historical parallel) to the Christian "New Testament." Each were assembled or composed at the same historical period in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. It is the "other" interpretation of the history and meaning of Israel developed in the first and second century Roman Empire, the one that became normative Rabbinic Judaism.

Its unknown authors and editors were embarked on a radical project of reconstruction that came in subsequent centuries to form the kernel of the Talmud, and it sits to this day at the core of Rabbinic Judaism. (That's the kind almost all modern Jews practice, regardless of whether we speak of Orthodoxy, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, or other modern versions, and even those who reject Judaism, are rejecting Rabbinic Judaism.)

The Mishnah is unbelievably arcane, focused on the details of ownership, hierarchy, purity and impurity. It can only be studied, not read. How to grasp something larger from six books that are so relentlessly detail oriented? Neusner does the best job of any scholar of whom I am aware explaining the philosophical claims of the Mishnah. Chapters include "The Mishnah as a Philosophical Statement: The Problem of Classification" which explores the Rabbinic effort to use Neoplatonist conceptual tools to find order amidst the seeming chaos of the world, "The Mishnah as a Philosophical Statement: The Issue of Hierarchization", "The Mishnah's Philosophical Economics: The Household. The Market", and more, concluding with "The Mishnah's Social Vision: Women. Caste Structure." and "The Mishnah's Conception of History: The Messiah in the Mishnah."

There is no pretending that the Mishnah is a comfortable read for modern readers. The society it is written for assumes slavery, male power, the inherently disadvantaged status of women, and the somewhat mysterious sociological ambit of first and second century Roman Palestine. Nor is the Mishnah a book of modern laws, per se, even for modern orthodox Jews, to say nothing of liberal Jews. Its conclusions are disputed and debated endlessly in the Gemara and later commentaries of the Talmud, and then down through the ages after that.

What Neusner manages to salvage from it, for us (at least for those of us who consider ourselves inheritors of the Rabbinic tradition), is a sense of the nobility of the project. Its focus on a neoplatonic method, argues Neusner, could almost be understood as a flight from history. History had dealt cruelly with the Jews of second century Roman Palestine / Aretz Yisrael / The Land of Israel, and to learn from history would be to learn that perhaps they (and we) should not exist at all. Instead the Mishnah builds and creates an eternal Jewish society in a matrix of rules and practices that can exist almost outside of the cruel punishments of historical reality. This temple of the mind, through the Talmud, became the basis for Jewish survival. Even when the Mishnah makes references to known historical facts, its aspirations seem profoundly ahistorical. History provides facts and circumstances but it holds little interest in itself. And in a sense the flight from history really does constitute the beginning of exilic Rabbinic Judaism. The Mishnah is the frame of the structure that made a Jewish diaspora civilization portable. It became a homeland and a civilization that you could take with you - a portable Aretz Yisrael.

Concludes Neusner: "Stated briefly, the question taken up by the Mishnah and answered by Judaism is, What can a person do? And the answer laid down by the Mishnah is: the human being, through will and deed, is master of this world and the measure of all things. But that world of all things of which the human being is the measure is within: in intellect, imagination, sentient reality."

There is a whole book beyond that, but for a brief review, let that stand.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The logic, principles and assumptions that prop up the rabbinical mind. A great primer for those (like me) confused by Talmud.