The Teaching of Jewish Civilization: A Global Approach to Higher Education

Judaism, Spring, 1996 by William Nicholls

While it is true that tradition affords no precedent for this way of learning about Judaism, more recent history has much to offer. The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the positive historical school of the nineteenth century had begun to raise these new modern questions, and had already generated useful material. Conservative and Reform scholars, already themselves trained in a historical approach to Judaism, were able to fit easily into the historicism of much of the environment of the modern university. More recently, phenomenological and literary critical approaches have been added. Even a post-modern approach to Judaism is developing among Orthodox as well as less traditionally minded scholars.

These administrators who wondered how to meet the new demand for the study of Judaism within the structure of the liberal university were initially somewhat at sea. Now there is no reason for them to be confused any longer, with the publication of Moshe Davis' extensive symposium on the teaching of Judaism in the modern university. I know how grateful I would have been myself two decades ago as Head of a department of religious studies, planning an appointment in Jewish studies, to have had the chance to study this comprehensive survey of what is being done all over the world in every conceivable area of Jewish studies. Given so much information in a convenient format, an administrator can easily see where his own institution might find a niche for itself. And the scholar will find a handy guide to what his colleagues are doing elsewhere, as a foundation for further investigation.

This is not to say that the academic and intellectual problems have been solved. The new questions that are raised by this still novel way of studying Judaism will be with us as a fruitful stimulus to inquiry for a long time to come. We probably still do not have a suitable first year text book, just as there is no really satisfactory text book yet for the first year course in religious studies, though Huston Smith's Religions of the World comes close. But there are materials of real usefulness being written.

Among them is Jacob Neusner's study of modern Judaism, a significant contribution. Neusner was himself a pioneer in this field. Even in his days at Brown, he was training all his graduate students, including the specialists in Talmud, to work in religious studies departments. From the first he was sensitive to the questions this new environment would raise.

Neusner's new book is a pleasure to read. The reader can enjoy observing a penetrating analytical mind at work on the phenomena of modern Judaism, developing a way of looking at its historical and social problems that will make sense to the beginning student, even if he or she is not Jewish, and still have validity for the seasoned historian of religion and culture.

Neusner speaks of Judaism and especially of Judaisms - varieties of Judaism that form consistent structures based on principles that appear self-evident to their originators and adherents.The new Judaisms that have appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are related in various ways to what Neusner likes to refer to as the Judaism of the dual Torah - what others have called, perhaps less illuminatingly, normative Judaism. That relationship was a close one for all the new Judaisms that appeared in the nineteenth century in response to the challenge of secularism, Reform, Orthodoxy, and Conservatism. Neusner brings out the traditional character (as well as the outstanding success) even of Reform, which especially today may appear to many to have branched out into remarkable novelty. He also surprises us with the reminder that of the three, it is Orthodoxy that presents the greatest variety of forms within shared assumptions.

The relationship with tradition is much less close for those Judaisms that have appeared in the twentieth century, the post-Christian century as Neusner, rightly, I believe, sees it. These are Zionism, Jewish Socialism, and Yiddishism, and the American Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption. All of these are responses to a world in which Christian influence on society had diminished to vanishing point, and Jews faced mortal danger from movements unrestrained by Christian ethics. Thus, they are not "theological" responses and do not necessarily involve belief in the tradition transmitted by the Judaism of the dual Torah. They respond rather to an existential threat. All three can be strongly secular, though Zionism and the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption, in particular, frequently blend with the Judaisms that developed in the nineteenth century (a point, I think, insufficiently emphasized in Neusner's trenchant analysis.)

Neusner proceeds by introducing first his theme and the method by which he proposes to approach it, and then presents each of the six Judaisms he will consider by way of an introduction showing how each responded to the challenge it saw itself as facing, what it regarded as self-evident (or took for granted) and how the system structured itself in response. These brief and closely reasoned introductions are followed in each case by a reading that sometimes expands on and exemplifies Neusner's own account, and sometimes supplements it with a different point of view. The readings are well chosen, effectively complementing and filling out Neusner's own analysis.