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  • Jacob Neusner. An American Iconoclast by Aaron W. Hughes
  • Alan Levenson (bio)
Jacob Neusner. An American Iconoclast. By Aaron W. Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2016. xi + 277 pp.

Aaron Hughes deserves high praise for this intellectual biography. Presciently recognizing an impulse to reassess Jacob Neusner’s accomplishments, Hughes makes a strong case for considering Neusner not only a pathbreaking scholar in rabbinic and religious studies and a consistent enemy of parochialism in Jewish studies, but also an important [End Page 577] American-born Jewish thinker. Hughes ably narrates the many intellectual developments in Neusner’s career: from positivist-historian to methodological religionist; from old-fashioned lecturer to Socratic teacher; from Democrat to Republican. He similarly grasps the contradictions of a builder who attacked many of the institutions with which he was involved; an intellectual interested in colloquy whose relationships often ended with bitterness; a product of elite, private institutions who spent his happiest years at University of South Florida (USF). Neusner presents the paradox of an academician who deemed the secular academy the best place to teach Judaism yet had a generally low opinion of these institutions and the faculty colleagues who populated them.

Hughes’s well-chosen subtitle reflects his subject’s supreme confidence: Neusner rejected the idea that idea the of teaching Judaism belonged in the seminary or yeshiva, to be undertaken by pious Jews for the purpose of forwarding Torah. To the extent that nearly 20% of the membership of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) comprises non-Jews owes much to champions like Neusner and others, although he broke his ties with AJS early on. To the extent that Jewish Studies practitioners employ cutting-edge methodologies in Religious Studies, as in other fields, Neusner’s view has triumphed. Finally, while Neusner and, it must be stressed, many others, have bristled at the role of outside funding in promoting Jewish Studies, these same scholars occupied (or occupy) chairs funded by Jewish philanthropists. Neusner supported a publication series and many students in part with the help of his father-in-law, Max Richter.

Hughes devotes ample space to Neusner’s development at Harvard, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Oxford, and as a young professor at Dartmouth. These chapters constitute an engaging coming of age tale of an ambitious Yankee who started life as a prosaically suburban American Jew. Hughes vividly recounts Neusner’s interactions with Harry Wolf-son, Salo Baron, Morton Smith, and Hans Penner and offers support to Hughes’s stress on Neusner’s American-ness. The only downside of this focus on the formative years is the book’s overall balance. The second edition of Johannan ben Zakkai, a pivotal turn in Neusner’s turn toward a more critical, less positivist approach, and Judaism: Evidence of the Mishnah, one of Neusner’s most important works, do not appear until pages 110 and 151, respectively. If Neusner’s tenures at USF and Bard truly represent the apex of Neusner’s creativity, they deserve more than the single chapter Hughes accords them.

This observation raises another issue. Namely, Hughes takes Neusner seriously, but at times, too much at his word. Did Neusner really hate Brown University as thoroughly as he recalled later in life? Seeing [End Page 578] Neusner stride down the halls flanked by graduate students, it certainly did not seem that way to this undergraduate. That Professors Fraade, Baumgarten, Ulmer, Levitt, and Hammerman have all penned appraisals of Neusner supports my suspicion. Hughes recounts the battle over Jewish students and Shabbat dinners with political scientist Edward Beiser: these were also vocational tussles, as Beiser wanted the best students to be lawyers, and Neusner wanted them to be scholars. While Neusner’s quarrels were legendary, his actions did not bespeak somebody alienated from the enterprise.

The reliance on Neusner’s recollections and viewpoints, with which Hughes usually agrees, is problematic. Of course, Hughes relies on other evidence, and needless to say, Neusner’s paper trail approximates a whole bakery, not crumbs in the forest. Hughes arguably makes too much of his subject’s prefaces and blurbs and ripostes and not enough of the critiques and outcomes where rabbinic work and professional disappointments are...

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