Jerusalem and Athens: The Congruity of Talmudic and Classical Philosophy (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 360 Reviews "traditional" and deeply innovative, constantly rewriting older traditions to respond to new circumstances. Dvora E. Weisberg University ofPittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 weisbergt@pitt.edu JERUSALEM AND ATHENS: THE CONGRUITY OF TALMUDIC AND CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY. By Jacob Neusner. pp. xvi + 116. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997. Cloth $92.50. Philo admired the Bible and forced Moses to speak in the mold of Plato. Josephus respected the Pharisees and forced them to be stoic philosophers. And Neusner loves Talmud.... He has written poetic odes to his beloved and invited us to meet his treasured one. Even as long back as the early 1970s, he was having lovers' quarrels over who loved Talmud first and foremost: the academic or the traditional camp. This quarrel continues into the work under review here, even if only in extended footnotes. Although not described as such, the work before us is another of Neusner's poetic images of his faithful love. Had he said his beloved was a rose, we would not expect an intellectual correspondence but rather an emotional outpouring. After all, if Neusner wants to establish serious congruence in his celebration of the Sages of blessed memory, he would have allowed that philosophers are as much Rabbis as Rabbis are philosophers. But his main agenda is not in his title or preface. It is in what he has really provided, and what he gives us here is an attempt to express his appreciation of the intellectual majesty of the Talmud by calling the Talmud philosophic inquiry after the manner of Plato and Aristotle. He really does not want us to think, and he is quite clear about this, that he is wrestling with some characterization of the Talmud as a work comparable to philosophic treatises or dialogues. Neusner does not wrestle at all. He simply tells us that the levels of analytic investigation in the Talmud are no less incisive than the scientific and philosophic investigations of the classical philosophers. He hopes to express his esteem and admiration of talmudic debates (arguing alternative hypotheses of an abstract nature to explain absolute givens) by conjuring the buzzwords of logical demonstration universally revered in the Western world. In fact, all he really wants us to see is that the Rabbis had keen minds and debated orally in such a compelling fashion that these debates still endure. He shows us his high regard for those who produced and studied Talmud, and he does this by invoking the image of the founding fathers of Western philosophy. Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 361 Reviews In truth, like anyone else who loves Talmud, Neusner himself does, or follows, the very things he criticizes in the method of others. That is to say, Neusner provides for us an array of talmudic arguments which would be familiar to anyone who opened a page of Talmud and read it seriously. Behind his translations, and embedded in the dictionaries and other translations he has consulted, lie the work of many generations who clarified cogent readings of corrupt texts and filled in the Talmud's veiled references to implicit subjects, as well as other features of scholarly commentary from which Neusner distances himself. He need not have condemned those who search for superior readings or involve themselves in the magisterial commentary tradition of the Talmud. These are the legitimate pursuits of all talmudic scholars. His rancor is the substance of some petty lover's quarrel and not to be taken to heart. Neusner's presentation does not involve itself in explaining the complicated technical materials which are prevalent in every line of his examples. He claims that every passage of Talmud glistens with pristine beauty and perfection. Any attempt to unravel the Talmudic passages he presents would mar the economic beauty of the talmudic sentence. Nor does he get bogged down in trying to elucidate the fundamental rules of talmudic proof and the seemingly far-fetched retorts that are meant to dislodge such proof. Likewise, he ignores spelling out what aspects of forced interpretation the Talmud's editors can sustain and what aspects they cannot tolerate. Neusner wants to impress us with grace and startling beauty. The problem with this is...