The current crisis in Palestine is only the most recent manifestation of Israel's historical significance to the Jewish people. Jacob Neusner examines the crucial role of the definition of Israel in the history of Judaic thought. He argues that Judaic sages have constructed various metaphoric images of Israel--as family, as chosen people, as a nation--in order to express changing theological concerns as the religion evolved. The history of the definition of Israel is revealed as the reflection of the history of Judaism itself. This is a bold and original interpretation of the way in which...

The essays collected here form a contribution to a half-century of Jewish public life. From the 1950s to the present day, Jacob Neusner has served as one of the public intellectuals of the English-speaking community of Judaism. The essays, beginning a half-century ago and continuing to the present day, claim a hearing for two reasons. First, the issues persist for a new generation to confront. Second, there is the story of a generation now passing that remains to be told. The essays collected here form a contribution to the narrative. These concern both Judaism the religion viewed in its own...

The essays collected here form a contribution to a half-century of Jewish public life. From the 1950s to the present day, Jacob Neusner has served as one of the public intellectuals of the English-speaking community of Judaism. The essays, beginning a half-century ago and continuing to the present day, claim a hearing for two reasons. First, the issues persist for a new generation to confront. Second, there is the story of a generation now passing that remains to be told. The essays collected here form a contribution to the narrative. These concern both Judaism the religion viewed in its own...

This title shows what happens when two prolific religious scholars sit dow and, together, read sacred texts of their different religions?

Classical Judaism imagined the situation of the people of Israel to be unique among the nations of the earth in three aspects. The nations lived in unclean lands, contaminated by corpses and redolent of death. They themselves were destined to die without hope of renewed life after the grave. They were prisoners of secular time, subject to the movement and laws of history in its inexorable logic. Heaven did not pay attention to what they did and did not care about their conduct, so long as they observed the basic decencies mandated by the commandments that applied to the heirs of Noah, seven...

This is the first volume of a set of anthologies that sets forth the statements of the formative canon of influential Rabbinic Judaism on three large topics: the calendar, the life cycle, and theology. Focusing on the seminal period of normative Judaism, the editor Jacob Neusner presents in three parts the teachings of Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, the first six centuries of the Common Era.

This is the third volume of a set of anthologies that sets forth the statements of the formative canon of influential Rabbinic Judaism on three large topics: the calendar, the life cycle, and theology. Focusing on the seminal period of normative Judaism, the editor Jacob Neusner presents in three parts the teachings of Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, the first six centuries of the Common Era.

Persia and Rome in Classical Judaism examines the representation of Rome and Persia (Iran) in the successive groups of documents that comprise the Rabbinic canon of late antiquity. Neusner considers how diverse documents of Rabbinic Judaism represent Rome and Iran and presents the way in which documentary differentiation affords perspective on the history of Judaism. Axial events of the age--the destruction of the second Temple in 70 and the defeat of the effort to restore it in 135, the transformation of the Roman Empire into a Christian state in the fourth century, the failure to rebuild...

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

In his brilliant introduction on the Mishnah, Jacob Neusner asks: How do you read a book that does not identify its author, tell you where it comes from, or explain why it was written - a book without a preface? And how do you identify a book with neither a beginning nor end, lacking table of contents and title? The answer is you just begin and let the author of the book lead you by paying attention to the information that the author does give, to the signals that the writer sets out. As Neusner goes on to explain, the Mishnah portrays the world in a special way, in a kind of code that makes...